Читать книгу Glittering Images - Susan Howatch - Страница 47

Upstairs in the cavernous Victorian bathroom I filled the bath to the halfway mark with cold water and sat in it for a while as I sluiced away both the sweat of my afternoon’s exertions and my very carnal thoughts on the subject of Miss Lyle Christie. Then I returned to my room, pulled on some underclothes and cast an eye over my St Anselm notes, but the glance was a mere formality. I wanted only to give a veneer of truth to my statement that I was missing tea in order to work, and eventually, my conscience assuaged, I began to imagine what I would have said to the Archbishop if he had appeared beside me and demanded a progress report.

I now knew very much more about Jardine than I had known before my arrival and I was certainly well on my way to building up a psychological portrait which would enable Lang to decide whether his enemy was the kind of man who could be disastrously exploited by Fleet Street, but I had still elicited no information about Lang’s chief worries, the journal and the possible existence of indiscreet correspondence. I myself was now convinced that Jardine was far too shrewd to commit epistolary indiscretions, but the journal remained an unknown quantity. No one had mentioned it to me yet, but this silence was hardly surprising if the journal were a long-standing hobby which everyone took for granted.

I meditated on the subject for a while but came to the conclusion that Jardine would have been unlikely to use the journal as a confessional during the lifetime of his stepmother. Why confide in an impersonal notebook when one had a confidante who provided limitless sympathy and understanding? I could imagine him tossing off some lines in a frenzy if his stepmother had been inaccessible, but I was sure that a ruthless censorship would have taken place once the sympathetic understanding had been obtained.

I then asked myself if he might have used the journal as a confessional since his stepmother’s death, but all my witnesses had testified that after the upheaval surrounding old Mrs Jardine’s arrival in Starbridge Jardine’s life had been unpunctuated by crises; possibly no confessional had been required. The chaplain had said Jardine had been getting on better with Lyle; Lady Starmouth had remarked that a spacious palace made it easier for a married couple to live in close proximity to a third party; Mrs Cobden-Smith had implied that by this time Lyle had been at her zenith as a miracle-worker. I suddenly remembered my friend Philip saying that Jardine had seemed distrait during the first year of his episcopate, and this observation from a stranger harmonized with the facts I now knew: the rocky start to the Starbridge career followed by years when Jardine was able to pursue his calling against a background of tranquillity. I decided that the journal was probably as dull as sackcloth and quite unworthy of a reduction to ashes.

At this point I paused in my meditations to light a cigarette but as I shook out the match my thoughts once more turned to the Lovely Ladies. I had already decided that because of the Bishop’s psychological constraint on the subject of class I could tell Lang with confidence that there was no risk of any scandal with an aristocratic Englishwoman, and although the incident with the foreigner Loretta Staviski could certainly be regarded with suspicion, I had believed Lady Starmouth when she had vouched for Jardine’s good behaviour. Jardine was popular with the ladies; that sort of clergyman always risked fatally attracting a parishioner, but in the vast majority of cases the clergyman was innocent of misconduct and I was sure that Jardine, newly married and no doubt burning to make a success of his splendid preferment, had had powerful reasons for treating Loretta with propriety.

I had almost argued myself to the conclusion that Jardine was as pure as driven snow, but I had left the most ominous possibility to the last.

I began to think about Lyle.

I had noticed that although she had admitted she regarded Mrs Jardine as a mother she had not said she regarded the Bishop as a father. Yet she had described her own father as ‘clever’, ‘bright’, ‘quick’ and ‘tough’, all adjectives which could be applied to Jardine. Obviously she was fond of the Bishop; obviously she respected and admired him, but there was no hint in her manner of a schoolgirl’s crush or a spinster’s frustrated passion, and I was driven to suspect that her feelings here too were filial. In fact I now found I shared Mrs Cobden-Smith’s conviction that Lyle stayed with the Jardines not because of a passion for the Bishop but because of a passion for power – and not merely the power of running the palace but the power of keeping that marriage glued together, the power springing from the fact that she made it possible for the Bishop to continue his ministry. What happened to a bishop whose marriage went to the wall? It was a spine-chilling thought, and I thought it was a chill to which Jardine’s spine had become well accustomed.

I did speculate about the possible ill effects on Lyle of a broken engagement, but on this point I could form no more than the tentative conclusion that some adverse romantic experience seemed likely. Her response to my kiss indicated she was sexually normal; her repudiation of it indicated an abnormal fear of romantic involvement. Ignorance prevented me from expanding my theory further, but nevertheless I felt I could say to Lang that Lyle’s aversion to marriage was more likely to spring from a broken engagement than from any inappropriate feelings towards the Bishop.

Having summed up Lyle’s probable attitude to Jardine I turned the relationship around and began to consider Jardine’s probable attitude to Lyle. This was easier because as a clergyman I could mentally put myself in Jardine’s shoes without any undue strain on my imagination: I had married in haste but had almost certainly repented at leisure, and as the result of my rashness I now had a wife who was capable of being a crippling liability. I was an eminent cleric beyond hope of divorce so the most nerve-racking question in such nerve-racking circumstances inevitably became: how did I survive my marriage? Lyle was the heaven-sent answer, and because Lyle was so vital not only for the welfare of my marriage but for the welfare of my increasingly illustrious career, I would take no risks whatsoever and exercise an iron control over any insane but pardonable desire to flirt. I would, of course, find Lyle immensely attractive, and that would make it difficult to adjust to her presence in the household – I would even tell Lady Starmouth I found the presence of a third party an intrusion on my marriage – but with prayer and willpower and plenty of deliciously risqué chats with my safe Lovely Ladies I would control myself, diverting the emotion into harmless channels whenever possible and suppressing the emotion which could not be diverted. I was Adam Alexander Jardine, a mature survivor trained in the hardest of schools, and I was neither weak nor a fool.

That left only one more vital question to be answered before I stepped out of Jardine’s shoes. I was a man of volatile temperament with plenty of physical energy and a strong liking for women; did I or did I not live like a monk? I did not. I slept with my wife, who was still pretty, still adoring, still mildly lovable in her own maddening way and – most important of all – still available. Certainly no one else was and married clergymen, like beggars, can’t be choosers.

I decided this was not merely a plausible interpretation of the Jardine ménage but the only interpretation which made sense. I felt I could now say confidently to Lang: ‘The girl, who probably has strong psychological reasons for not marrying, regards the woman as her mother and regards the man as satisfying her hankering for power. The woman regards the girl as her daughter and regards her husband with adoration. The husband regards his wife as a liability but as a source of sexual satisfaction, and regards the girl as a godsend but as sexually taboo. The marriage is entirely safe so long as this triangle is maintained and I see no sign of any approaching catastrophe.’

But of course this last statement would be untrue. I knew now that I was the approaching catastrophe bent on breaking up the triangle, and once the triangle disintegrated the marital disaster would be poised to unfold.

I was still contemplating this prospect with appalled fascination seconds later when someone rapped loudly on my door.

I jumped, sprang to my feet and pulled on my dressing-gown. ‘Come in!’ I called, assuming I was addressing a servant sent to deliver either a telephone message or perhaps a letter which had arrived by the afternoon post, and turned aside to extinguish my cigarette in the ashtray.

The door banged open and the Bishop blazed across the threshold.

‘Now, Dr Ashworth,’ he said abruptly as I spun round in shock, ‘I think it’s time you told me the truth – and when I say the truth I mean the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Exactly why did you come to Starbridge and what the deuce do you think you’re playing at?’