Scandalous Risks
The author’s most famous and well-loved work, the Starbridge series, six self-contained yet interconnected novels that explore the history of the Church of England through the 20th century.In 1963, when traditional values are coming under attack, a young woman in her twenties, Venetia Flaxton, becomes disastrously involved with her best friend's father, the powerful, dynamic but ultimately mysterious Dean of Starbridge Cathedral. Yet, as a married man and a senior Churchman, Aysgarth has nothing to offer her but an admiration which spirals out of control into an obsessive love. As Aysgarth begins to take scandalous risks to further their friendship, pressures rise and the dangers multiply. Venetia finds herself trapped in a desperate web of love and lies from which it seems impossible to escape.Witty, compassionate and compelling, Scandalous Risks explores not only the reality of sin and the fantasy of sexual obsession, but the overpowering human need for redemption, love and lasting happiness.
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Susan Howatch
SCANDALOUS RISKS
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HARPER
A division of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1990, then in paperback by Fontana 1991 and by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Leaftree Ltd 1990
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 978000739642
EBook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007396412 Version: 2016-10-05
CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART TWO
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
PART THREE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
PART FOUR
ONE
TWO
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
‘For the true radical is not the man who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy on these lines to reform the Church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church … to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969 Honest to God
‘We all need, more than anything else, to love and be loved.’
JOHN A. T. ROBINSON
Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969 Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963
I
I never meant to return to the scene of my great disaster. But one day, after yet another wasted weekend among alcoholic adulterers, I took a wrong turn on the motorway and saw the sign to Starbridge. Immediately I tried to escape. I drove up the next slip-road, but as I crossed the bridge to complete the U-turn I made the mistake of glancing south, and there, far away in the gap between the hills, I saw the spire of the Cathedral.
1988 dissolved into 1963. I glimpsed again my Garden of Eden, and as I hesitated at the wheel of my car, the rope of memory yanked me forward into the past. I forgot the U-turn, I forgot the motorway, I forgot my wasted weekend. On I drove to Starbridge along that well-remembered road which snaked between the hills before slithering to the floor of the valley, and ahead, appearing and disappearing with each twist of the road like some hypnotic mirage, the Cathedral grew steadily larger in the limpid summer light.
The city stood in the heart of the valley, but it was the Cathedral, eerie in its extreme beauty, which dominated the landscape, and as I stared at the spire I saw again that vanished world where the Beatles still had short hair, and skirts were yet to rise far above the knee and the senior men of the Church of England still dressed in archaic uniforms. Then as I remembered the Church in those last innocent days before the phrase ‘permissive society’ had been invented, I thought not only of those scandalous risks taken by Bishop John Robinson when he had written his best seller Honest to God, but of the scandalous risks taken by my Mr Dean as he had run his Cathedral and dallied with disaster and indulged in his dangerous dreams.
I reached the outskirts of the city.
It was very old. The Romans had built their city Starovinium on the site formerly occupied by the British tribe the Starobrigantes; the Anglo-Saxons had converted Starovinium into Starbrigga, a landmark in King Alfred’s Wessex; the Normans had recorded the town as Starbrige in Domesday Book, and Starbrige it had remained until the author of an eighteenth-century guidebook had fabricated the legend that the name was derived from the Norman bridge across the River Star. Starbridge then acquired its modern spelling, but the link with its remote origins lingered on in the Bishop’s official designation. In theory married to his diocese, he was entitled to use ‘Staro’ as his surname whenever he wrote his signature. I had no idea who the current bishop of Starbridge was, but I could remember the bishop of twenty-five years ago as clearly as I could remember the Cathedral’s dean.
