Take away the camel, and all is revealed

"'I think, my dear,' she said, 'the Church used once to be an opiate for you, like that Trebizond enchanter's potion, a kind of euphoric drug. You dramatised it and yourself, you felt carried along in something aesthetically exciting and beautiful and romantic; you were a dilettante, escapist Anglican. I know you read Clement of Alexandria; do you remember where he says, 'We may not be taken up and transported to our journey's end, but must travel thither on foot, traversing the whole distance of the narrow way'?

"Round, smooth face and shrewd blue eyes": Dorothy Sayers, in the 1950s

"'One mustn't lose sight of the hard core, which is, do this, do that, love your friends and like your neighbours, be just, be extravagantly generous, be honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don't dramatise and dream of escape. Anyhow, that seems to me to be the pattern, so far as we can make it out here.

"'So come in again with your eyes open, when you feel you can.'"

It so happened that when I reread these words I had just finished editing four volumes of the letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. I was startled by the resemblance to the style and rhythm of many of the letters she wrote about the Christian faith: this could easily have been one of them.

Rose Macaulay: did she owe her eventual return to the Church in part to Dorothy Sayers? Photo Stephan Lorent

Then I recalled something that had puzzled me for years. Dorothy Sayers died on 17 December 1957, and her ashes were placed under the floor of the tower of St Anne's, Soho. That ceremony took place in 1958, and only a few people were invited: Dorothy's son Anthony Fleming and his wife; her two Somerville friends, Muriel St Clare Byrne and Marjorie Barber; her executor Laurence Harbottle; her friend Fr Patrick McLaughlin, the Vicar of St Anne's, who conducted the ceremony; myself, who had recently become her god-daughter - and Dame (as she had then become) Rose Macaulay.

Why Rose Macaulay? During the period when she was writing The Towers of Trebizond she was much involved with the activities of St Anne's House (later called the Society of St Anne), and was by then a member of the Council. Perhaps she was present as its representative?

The origins of this group have been described by James Brabazon in his biography, Dorothy L. Sayers: The life of a courageous woman. "Towards the end of 1942, the Revd Patrick McLaughlin and the Revd Gilbert Shaw had approached the Bishop of London for permission to use [the clergy house of St Anne's] as a sort of mission centre for thinking pagans. Dorothy Sayers was asked to contribute to the first course of lectures organised by St Anne's House.

"The course was run during the summer of 1943 and was called 'Christian Faith and Contemporary Culture'. It featured T. S. Eliot on literature; Dorothy's old ally James Welch of the BBC on broadcasting; her friend Lady Rhondda from Time and Tide on journalism; and the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum on the visual arts. Dorothy's subject was drama."

On 29 July 1951, Rose Macaulay wrote to her friend, the Revd John Hamilton Cowper Johnson, describing a visit she made to St Anne's House:

Seed of an idea? Nicolas Bentley's drawing illustrating E. C. Bentley's clerihew

I met a number of priests the other day at a St Anne's Day gathering to which I was invited at St Anne's House, Dean Street, a kind of centre of discussions, lectures, etc., connected with St Thomas's Church and run by the clergy there. Fr Patrick McLaughlin, the Vicar, is a many-sided kind of priest, whom I like. They get up lectures at St Anne's (I was asked to give one, but refused, I was too busy). I see that during this past year they have had lectures from Dorothy Sayers, Norman Nicholson, Austin Farrer (a Balliol chaplain who produced some interesting Bamptons a few years ago), and others. They produce these religious plays also; on the advisory committee are people like T. S. Eliot, Canon Demant, Fr Groser, an archdeacon, and others."

Rose Macaulay later became a frequent visitor to St Anne's House and did eventually lecture there. Occasionally she attended mass at St Thomas's, Regent Street, where Fr McLaughlin was also Vicar. She found the ritual too high, however, and preferred services at the Grosvenor Chapel in South Audley Street. Nevertheless she enjoyed conversation and discussions with the clergy she met both at St Anne's and St Thomas's. In the same letter to Fr Johnson she writes:

"[It] is profitable and interesting when and if [all these various priests] talk on their own subjects, shedding fresh light on what they hold and what the Church holds, and where they differ from some other church views, and discuss questions of biblical criticism, etc.

"Fr Gerard Irvine was talking the other evening to his brother (a young barrister) and me, at supper in his rooms after a religious play in the church [St Thomas's] to which he had invited a party. I said something about the confusion often made between Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, and the 'woman who was a sinner'; Fr Irvine agreed that it was a pity, and quite baseless, upon which his brother charged him with having made the confusion (anyhow between the Magdalene and the woman of the town) in his sermon on the Feast of St Mary Magdalene. He agreed that he had, because he thought it would be expected by his congregation, which seems, as his brother told him, rather immoral. His business certainly is to correct such confusions, not endorse them."

In The Towers of Trebizond this reprehensible confounding of the Marys is mentioned in connection with Laurie's mother: "she pictured all the Marys, that is, the Blessed Virgin, and Mary of Bethany, and Mary Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene (so unjustly defamed by posterity on no evidence), as well as Martha, and old Anna, and the woman taken in adultery, and the woman with the ointment who was a sinner, and all the other women, walking about in these black velvet coats embroidered with gold thread. . ."

This is not the only passage in the novel which seems to arise out of discussions at St Anne's House or at St Thomas's. There are many more, in fact, so many that I am prompted to put forward the following suggestion: namely, that in The Towers of Trebizond Rose Macaulay transferred these religious debates to her travellers in Turkey. I also think that aunt Dot is an affectionate take-off of Dorothy Sayers, and that Fr Hugh Chantry-Pigg is a composite portrait of Fathers Patrick McLaughlin, Gilbert Shaw and Gerard Irvine.

In 1939, Dorothy Sayers had already been caricatured wearing a topee by Nicolas Bentley in illustration of his father E. C. Bentley's clerihew. There she stands, with the mountains behind her, four-square and unperturbed, confronting a fakir who is accompanied by a goat. The transfiguration by Rose Macaulay is much the same.

I think that she asked herself, "How would the confident, assertive, forthright Dorothy L. Sayers, Christian apologist, High Anglican, champion of women's rights, appear and behave if transferred to a completely different environment?" And the answer? "Exactly as she appears and behaves at St Anne's House."

Of course, some disguise was necessary. We may dismiss the camel, the love of exotic travel, the passion for swimming, the impetuous driving. Remove these props and lo! Dorothy Sayers is revealed.

Aunt Dot is in her early 60s, with a round, smooth face and shrewd, merry blue eyes. Her full name is Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett, which she signs with a confident flourish, as Dorothy L. Sayers signed hers. She is practical, stalwart and forthright, with a brisk eccentricity and joie de vivre. A High Anglican, she advises Laurie to be tolerant of other forms of belief but to remember always that "We are right." Armed with this certainty, she takes heresies and unbelief in her stride.

Her utterances are crisp and to the point: "Have good friends, dears . . . make to yourself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, and you'll be all right everywhere." A champion of female rights, she is intent on liberating Turkish women from their subservience to men. "There is nothing in the Gospels", she asserts to her travelling companion, Fr Chantry-Pigg, "about women behaving differently from men, either in church or out of it. Rather the contrary. So what a comfort for these poor women to learn that they needn't." Readers of Dorothy Sayers's views on women, both in her essays and in her letters, will recognise the tone.

Though practical, aunt Dot is also romantic, even fanatical, in her pursuit of an idea. The Turkish woman doctor, Halide, says to Laurie: "She is a woman of dreams. Mad dreams, dreams of crazy, impossible things. And they aren't all of conversion to the Church, oh no. Nor all of the liberation of women, oh no. Her eyes are on far mountains, always some far peak where she will go. She looks so firm and practical, that nice face, so fair and plump and shrewd, but look in her eyes, you will sometimes catch a strange gleam. Isn't it so?"

And Laurie replies: "Why, yes. Aunt Dot has always had her dreams. . . . She is an adventuress."

Is this perhaps how Rose Macaulay saw Dorothy Sayers, then eagerly pursuing her daring enterprise of translating the Divine Comedy - a far peak, indeed?

Wherever she goes, in Turkey or in Russia, aunt Dot carries her High Anglicanism with her, unperturbed and unaffected by different cultures. This is true equally of Fr Hugh Chantry-Pigg. He is even higher in his churchmanship than aunt Dot. So too was Fr Patrick McLaughlin, whose church, St Thomas's, is mentioned in the novel and in Rose Macaulay's letters to Fr Johnson. Fr Chantry-Pigg greatly scorned Evangelical churches, such as All Souls' in Portland Place (which Rose Macaulay quite liked), the name of whose Vicar, the Revd John Stott, is thinly veiled in the novel as "Scott".

Fr Chantry-Pigg carries in his pocket a collection of sacred relics with which he performs miracles of healing. This trait is borrowed, I believe, from Fr Gilbert Shaw, concerning whom James Brabazon says: "Fr Shaw's interests lay in the deeper regions of the spiritual life - the mysteries of ascetic practice, the life of prayer and meditation, the realms of white and black magic, and the exorcism of evil spirits."

There are several references to Fr Irvine in Rose Macaulay's letters to Fr Johnson, as for instance: "A clever young prophet. . . I like him very much. There is no company that interests me more (just now) than that of the intelligent clergy; and I like to discuss things with them when we meet, and they are interested, I think, to do this, both with one another and with the laity such as me."

All three of these "intelligent clergy" are gathered up in the character of Fr Hugh Chantry-Pigg; and the discussions that interested Rose Macaulay so much are reproduced in the arguments about religion that form a large part of the novel. Readers of The Towers of Trebizond recognise in Laurie (whether a man or a woman) the persona of Rose Macaulay, who likewise for many years was a lapsed communicant.

In the last years of her life she made her peace with the Church, and was joyful to have done so. If the words of aunt Dot, quoted by Laurie towards the end of The Towers of Trebizond, do in fact represent words Dorothy L. Sayers spoke to Rose Macaulay, then the portrait in this work may be seen as an affectionate gesture of gratitude.

Perhaps I am wrong. They may be the words of Fr Johnson or some other spiritual adviser. But if that is so, why did Rose Macaulay attend that very small and intimate gathering at the laying of Dorothy Sayers's ashes in the tower of St Anne? And who, in that case, is aunt Dot?