Glittering Images. Susan Howatch

had maintained our friendship by letter and I felt I could express without insincerity the hope that we might meet during my visit. However a meeting was to be impossible; he and his family were about to take their first holiday in five years. Keeping quiet about my spring visit to France I said I was sure Bournemouth would be delightful, but I was still repressing a shudder at the thought of the cheap boarding house which awaited him when he asked why I was visiting Starbridge.

      To reveal that the Bishop had invited me to stay at the instigation of Dr Lang would have seemed, in the circumstances, an unforgivable piece of bragging so I merely mentioned my desire to visit the Cathedral library and said I would be calling at the palace as a courtesy. What’s your opinion of Jardine, Philip?’ I added. ‘Do you find him a good bishop?’

      ‘I find him an embarrassment, quite frankly. That speech in the Lords! I felt sorry for Lang. A bishop’s got no business to attack his archbishop in public.’

      ‘But what’s he like when he’s doing his job instead of chasing every headline in Fleet Street?’

      ‘Why ask me? I usually only see him once a year for confirmations.’

      ‘But don’t confirmations give a good indication of a bishop’s conscientiousness? There’s a world of difference between a bishop who can barely disguise the fact that he’s treading a very well-worn path and a bishop who makes the candidates feel the occasion’s as special for him as it is for them.’

      ‘True,’ said Philip reluctantly. ‘Well, I have to admit Jardine can’t be faulted there – although when he first became bishop five years ago he did seem distrait. However, I put that down to lack of experience. The next year he was quite different, very much in command before the candidates, very relaxed behind the scenes, but all the same … I’ve heard he can be an absolute terror.’

      ‘In what way?’

      ‘Well, he’s supposed to be at his worst when a clergyman wants to get married. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about clergymen being ruined by unsuitable wives, and if he doesn’t think a clerical fiancée’s going to make the grade as a vicar’s wife he has no hesitation in saying so. It makes one wonder about his own marriage – rumour has it that Mrs Jardine’s delightful but incompetent and that the real power at the palace is her companion.’

      ‘Yes, I’ve heard about Miss Christie. Jack Ryder paints her as a femme fatale.’

      ‘What rubbish! She wouldn’t have lasted ten years in a bishop’s household unless she was propriety personified!’

      ‘But she’s attractive, isn’t she? Wouldn’t it have been safer to engage a companion who looked like the back end of a tram?’

      ‘Jardine’s the kind of man who would baulk at confronting the back end of a tram every morning at the breakfast table.’

      ‘Philip,’ I said amused, ‘I’m receiving the clear impression that you don’t like him, but is this solely because he attacks his archbishop in public and demolishes clerical fiancées? Neither of these unfortunate habits can have affected you personally.’

      ‘No, thank God Mary and I tied the knot while Jardine was still Dean of Radbury! I don’t dislike him, Charles – he’s always been charming both to Mary and to me – but I do disapprove of him. I think he’s far too worldly, and he’s got a very flashy nouveau riche streak which should have been ironed out before he was let loose on an income of several thousand a year. I’ll never forget the garden party he gave for the diocesan clergy two years ago – talk about extravagance! I was shocked. I kept thinking what all the catering must have cost and calculating how many poor people in my parish could have benefited from the money.’

      ‘My dear Philip! Aren’t you being a little churlish about your generous bishop?’

      ‘Perhaps. And perhaps you live in an ivory tower, Charles, and don’t know what’s really going on in the world. How long has it been since you visited a house where the husband’s been unemployed since the Slump, the wife’s half-dead with TB and the children have rickets as well as lice?’

      There was a silence.

      At last Philip said rapidly: ‘I’m sorry –’

      I interrupted him. ‘I’m very conscious, believe me,’ I said, ‘that I lack experience at the parish level.’

      ‘Nevertheless I shouldn’t have implied –’

      ‘It doesn’t matter.’ There was another pause before I added: ‘Well, I’m sorry I shan’t be seeing you, Philip. Perhaps next time –’

      ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Next time.’

      But we both knew ‘next time’ was a long way away.

      VIII

      On the following morning the Archbishop telephoned to inform me that I should present myself at the palace early on Wednesday evening; Jardine had professed delight at the prospect of offering me hospitality, a profession which Lang cynically suspected derived from a guilty wish to make amends for the bellicose speech in the House of Lords. ‘… and I’m sure he’ll give you a warm welcome, Charles,’ was the Archbishop’s dry conclusion.

      ‘Did he remember meeting me last year?’

      ‘Of course! When I mentioned your name he said: “Ah yes, the young canon from Cambridge who thinks the world began not with Adam and Eve but with the Council of Nicaea!”’

      So Jardine had at least glanced at the book which had made my name in theological circles. He himself had published no work of historical scholarship, but that never deterred him from writing trenchant reviews of other people’s efforts and I had been surprised as well as relieved when my own book had escaped his characteristic literary butchery. How the escape had been achieved I was uncertain, but possibly he found any discussion of Arianism boring and had decided to rest his pen.

      These thoughts about scholarship reminded me that I had not yet decided why I should need to consult the library of Starbridge Cathedral, and aware how important it was that my need should be convincing I spent some time pondering on the problem before I devised a stratagem which would enable me to tell the truth. I had long been contemplating the revision of my lecture notes on medieval thought. I now decided that my undergraduates were going to learn more about St Anselm, and as a conscientious lecturer I naturally felt obliged to cast a glance over Starbridge’s early manuscript of The Prayers and Meditations.

      I suffered a further moment of uneasiness as I contemplated the duplicity inherent in this decision, but then I pulled myself together with the thought that no harm could come to me even if Jardine were steeped in apostasy. On the contrary, Lang was bound to be grateful for my help with the result that I would inevitably emerge from the affair with my future prospects in the Church enhanced.

      Casting my last doubt aside I began to prepare for my journey.

      IX

      So I came at last to Starbridge, radiant ravishing Starbridge, immortalized by famous artists, photographed by innumerable visitors and lauded by guidebooks as the most beautiful city west of the Avon. I could remember clearly from my previous visit as an undergraduate the medieval streets, the flower-filled parks and the languid river which curved in an are around the mound on which the Cathedral stood. The Cathedral itself dominated not only the city but the valley. Wider than Winchester, longer than Canterbury, set in a walled precinct which was even larger than the close at Salisbury, Starbridge Cathedral was renowned for embodying in pale stone and vivid glass the most glittering of medieval visions.

      The city itself was small, and being encircled on three sides by the river it still gave an impression of compactness despite the recent housing development to the cast. It lay snugly in the middle of its green valley like a jewel displayed on velvet, and the smooth slopes of the surrounding hills added to the impression that the landscape had been designed in