Читать книгу Scandalous Risks - Susan Howatch - Страница 17

The next evening Aysgarth called at six o’clock with a note of thanks and a bunch of carnations for my mother, but found only me at home. My mother had travelled down to Flaxton Pauncefoot that morning and my father was attending a Lords’ debate on education. Harold and the clothes-horse had not yet returned from a day at the races.

When Pond showed Aysgarth into the drawing-room I was reading Professor Ashworth’s latest book, St Augustine and the Pelagian Heresy: the Origins of His Theology Concerning God’s Grace, which I had borrowed from the library. The Professor wrote in a cool, lucid prose which created an impression of scholarly detachment and yet succeeded in being surprisingly readable – but perhaps that was because he was writing of St Augustine’s fight to master his sex drive, a fight which was to have immense repercussions both for Christianity and for the bluff heretic Pelagius who had said (more or less) that man could jolly well pull himself up by his own bootstraps and conquer sin not by God’s grace but by will-power and a stiff upper lip.

Pelagius, it is hardly necessary to add, had been a Briton.

‘Oh, I’ve read that book,’ said Aysgarth as we settled down for a delectable discussion of the dinner-party. ‘I thought it very bad. Like St Augustine Charles’s twin obsessions are heresy and sex. Apparently up at Cambridge all his divinity undergraduates refer to him as Anti-Sex Ashworth.’

‘How extraordinary! He seemed quite normal.’

‘No, no – rabid against fornication and adultery. Such a mistake! In my opinion there are far worse sins than the sexual errors, and – whoops! Here’s Pond with the drinks.’

Pond deposited the sherry and whisky decanters, the soda-siphon and a suitable selection of glasses on the side-table and waited for orders, but I waved him away.

‘Help yourself, Mr Dean.’

‘Well, perhaps a little soupçon of sherry –’

‘Oh, go on – have a whisky! You don’t want to go down in history as Anti-Alcohol Aysgarth!’

‘That possibility,’ said my Mr Dean, helping himself to a modest measure of scotch, ‘is so remote that I don’t think we need consider it seriously. And I must guard my tongue about Charles, who was certainly more than civil to me last night – even though I nearly shocked him to death with my opening remark –’

‘But only a second before you arrived Mrs Ashworth had been teasing him about vamping young girls! I don’t think you shocked him at all – he was just taken aback because you slunk up behind him and –’

‘– hit him over the head with a double entendre! I must have been mad.’

‘I thought you were sensational. And so was Mrs Ashworth, making that little black dress look like a hundred-guinea model from Harrods just by wearing one piece of jewellery – and choosing rimless spectacles instead of glasses with distracting frames – and dyeing her hair so cunningly that no man would ever dream it had been touched up –’

‘Dyeing her hair? But no clergyman’s wife would ever do that!’

‘Yes, I expect that’s what the Professor thinks too whenever he’s not busy conquering everyone in sight by exuding that synthetic charm of his. But tell me: who is Mrs Ashworth? Where did she come from? And how did the two of them meet?’

‘Ah!’ said Aysgarth, settling down cosily for a gossip. ‘Now that’s quite a story …’