‘If I’d gone up to Oxford,’ I said, ‘I’d be studying the work of Greek pederasts, ordering champagne by the case and damn well looking at fourteen-year-old boys in public baths!’
‘Now look here, you two,’ said my mother, reluctantly tossing her magazine aside, ‘this won’t do. Ranulph, you must try not to get so upset. Venetia, you must stop talking like a divorcée in an attempt to shock him – and you must try to remember that since he watched his own father die of drink and his brother die of – well, we won’t mention what he died of – your father has an absolute horror of the havoc wealth can cause among people who lack the self-discipline to lead worthwhile, productive lives. The truth is that people like us, who are privileged, should never forget that privileges are always accompanied by responsibilities. We have a moral duty to devote our wealth and our time to worthy causes and live what the lower orders can see is a decent upright life.’
‘Hear, hear!’ bellowed my father.
‘I’m sure you think that was a dreadfully old-fashioned speech,’ pursued my mother, encouraged by this roar of approval to sound uncharacteristically forceful, ‘but believe me, it’s neither smart nor clever to be an effete member of the aristocracy. You must be occupied in some acceptable manner, and fortunately for you, since you live today and not yesterday, that means you can train for an interesting job. I do understand, I promise you, why you chose not to go up to Oxford; being a blue-stocking isn’t every woman’s dream of happiness. But since you’ve rejected an academic life you must choose some other career to pursue while you fill in your time before getting married. After all, even Arabella had a job arranging flowers in a hotel! I know she wound up in a muddle with that Italian waiter, but –’
‘I don’t want to arrange flowers in a hotel.’
‘Well, perhaps if you were to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield –’
‘I don’t want to take a nice cordon bleu cookery course at Winkfield.’
‘You don’t want to do anything,’ said my father. ‘It’s an absolute waste of a first-class brain. Awful. Tragic. It makes me want to –’
‘Ranulph,’ said my mother, ‘don’t undo all my good work, there’s a pet. Venetia –’
‘I think I’d like to be a clergyman.’
‘Darling, do be serious!’
‘All right, all right, I’ll take a secretarial course! At least that’ll be better than arranging bloody flowers!’
‘I can’t stand it when women swear,’ said my father. ‘Kindly curb your language this instant.’
‘You may have spent a lot of your life declaring in the name of your liberal idealism that men and woman should be treated equally,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never met a man who was so reluctant to practise what he preached! If you really believed in sexual equality you’d sit back and let me say “bloody” just as often as you do!’
‘I give up,’ said my mother. ‘I’m off to the conservatory.’
‘And I’m off to the Athenaeum,’ said my father. ‘I simply daren’t stay here and risk a stroke any longer.’
‘How typical!’ I scoffed. ‘The champion of equality once again takes refuge in an all-male club!’
‘Bloody impertinence!’ roared my father.
‘Bloody hypocrite!’ I shouted back, and stormed out, slamming the door.
VIII
If I had been living in the ’sixties I might then have left home and shared a flat with cronies; I might have taken to drink or drugs (or both) and chased after pop singers, or I might have opened a boutique or become a feminist or floated off to Nepal to find a guru. But I was living in the ’fifties, that last gasp of the era which had begun in those lost years before the war, and in those days nice young girls ‘just didn’t do that kind of thing’, as the characters in Hedda Gabler say. (Hedda Gabler was one of Aysgarth’s favourite plays; he adored that clever doomed sizzler of a heroine.)
It was also a fact that in between the acrimonious rows my life at home was much too comfortable to abandon in a fit of pique. My parents, exercising a policy of benign neglect, were usually at pains to avoid breathing down my neck, ordering me about and preaching nauseous sermons about setting an example to the lower orders. I was waited on hand and foot, well fed and well housed. In short, I had sufficient incentives to postpone a great rebellion, and besides, like Hedda Gabler, I shied away from any idea of not conforming to convention. If I flounced around being a rebel I knew I would only earn the comment: ‘Poor old Venetia – pathetic as ever!’ and wind up even worse off than I already was.
So after that row with my parents in 1957 I did not rush immediately upstairs to pack my bags. I gritted my teeth and faced what I saw as the cold hard facts of life: no longer could I sit around sipping gin, smoking cigarettes and soaking up the sexy reminiscences of St Augustine. The day of reckoning for my refusal to go up to Oxford was at hand, and just like any other (usually middle-class) girl who considered that the hobbies of flower-arranging and playing with food were far beneath her, I had to embark on a secretarial training.
However as I reflected that night on my capitulation to parental bullying, I thought I could face my reorganised future without too much grief; a secretarial course could well be my passport to what I thought of as Real Life, the world beyond my mother’s gardens and my father’s clubs, a world in which people actually lived – swilling and swearing, fighting and fornicating – instead of merely existing bloodlessly in charity committee meetings or in cloud-cuckoo-lands such as the Athenaeum and the House of Lords.
I decided to go to Mrs Hester’s Secretarial College because Primrose had attended a course there while I had been fighting off death by boredom in Switzerland and Italy. Like me, Primrose had been encouraged by her school to try for a place at Oxford, but she had convinced me that an Oxford education was the one thing we both had to avoid if we were to have any hope of experiencing Real Life in the future.
‘Christian told me frankly it would reduce my chance of marrying to nil,’ she had confided, ‘and there’s no doubt spinsters are always regarded with contempt. Besides, how on earth could I go up to Oxford and leave poor Father all alone with Dido? He’d go mad if he didn’t have me to talk to whenever she was driving him round the bend.’ Primrose had never been away from home. She had attended St Paul’s Girls School in London while I had been incarcerated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and I had always secretly resented the fact that her father had considered her indispensable while mine had been willing to consign me to an institution.
Although Primrose was anxious to marry eventually, just as a successful woman should, she never seemed to mind having no boyfriends. Instead she channelled her gregarious inclinations towards forming a circle of female friends whom her brothers condescendingly referred to as ‘the Gang’. Some of the Gang had been at school with her, some had been débutantes with us in 1955 and some had been her classmates at Mrs Hoster’s. Aysgarth adored us all. Dido used to refer to us as ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ and look indulgent. ‘Name your favourite of the day!’ we would tease him as he sat beaming on the sofa and we lounged on the carpet at his feet, but he would sigh: ‘I can’t decide! It’s as if you were asking a chocolate addict to select from a row of equally luscious peppermint creams!’
When the Aysgarths moved to Starbridge in 1957, it was thought the Gang might drift apart, but Starbridge was an easy journey by train from London and the core of the Gang kept in touch. Abandoning all thought of a secretarial career in London, Primrose landed a job at the diocesan office on Eternity Street, and in order to avoid constant clashes with Dido she had her own flatlet in