The Triple Goddess (58 page)

‘There’s another dial, but when the south-facing Saxon walls collapsed the silly Normans—you’re not French originally, are you ma’am?—rebuilt the stone into the north side of the building, where the sun don’t shine. It’s also upside down. Perhaps that was why people stopped coming to...going to...ch...places like this, quite right too. Hrgh. Oh, and another thing, the font inside, not that I’ve seen the inside and I only know what it’s called because my wife told me before she saw the light, the light of day, that is, the fonty thing was buried in the ch...yard during the Civil War so that the Roundheads—I don’t mean to be unParliamentarian—wouldn’t melt it down for bullets. You can see...rather, one can see, the mineral salt line from the soil beneath the rim. Hrgh. No worries.’

There was a long pause, during which the agent gasped for breath.

‘You make me sick,’ said the devil lady. ‘Nonetheless I’m going to buy the whole property, at half the listed price because of the church that you tried to hide from me. It’s not as if anyone else has expressed interest or made an offer. Don’t bother lying to me, man—I wasn’t born yesterday. More’s the pity.’

The agent looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Indeed what she said was true: the country was in economic recession and the rural property market was dead. So the DL was able buy the village, not for a song, for she had a voice like a corncrake, but for not much money, and the agent crept away to sort out the deeds.

The devil lady was pleased with herself. It was clear this was a niche opportunity that she had been lucky to happen across, for soon there would be all sorts of infernal riff-raff nosing around the district, looking for corruptible pastures new at bargain rates. Why, she would commend herself in her diary that evening for her shrewdness and initiative, and puff herself, for who else was going to do it for her? in a memorandum to HQ using those very words, “corruptible pastures new”, and “shrewdness”, and “initiative”, and other terms HQ liked to hear, such as “business-oriented decision”, and “creative forward planning”, and “with an eye to the bottom line”—which was something she normally associated with her practice of wearing a swallow-tail coat in public to cover her bottom, the size of which she was sensitive about, and her tail, when it was behaving.

A new phrase occurred to describe herself, such a ferment of planning she was in, which also warranted diary notation: “tirelessly soul-searching”. A soul was a soul was a soul, and country villagers were no match for a senior devil possessed of the freehold Deed of Ownership, the title of Lady of the Manor, and a Bottomless Pit expense account.

On the train going back up to Town, the devil lady decided that, as soon as she had sold her flat and made the necessary moving arrangements, she would occupy as her residence the Rectory building. The Rectory was a stately Georgian pile, which for some strange reason was located at the opposite end of the village from the church. A nice irony, thought the DL. It was as if the two buildings did not want to have anything to do with each other, and she found this delightfully appropriate to her situation. In addition to which, owing to the dearth of titled folk and gentry in the area, it was the only noteworthy house around. The wealthy clergymen of old, who had multiple livings and preferments, and dozens of children because they had so little to do except drink port and procreate, and collect their tithes, had considered such places to be both befitting of their station and necessary.

As the stopping-train rumbled into Victoria Station, after a long and unexplained delay outside East Croydon, and another at Clapham Junction, the DL wondered at her sudden pioneering spirit after many years of potentially and ultimately inevitably career-ending sloth and apathy. “Accidie” was the mediaeval spiritual term for the condition, and it was as much of a sin in Hell as it was on earth. The devil lady’s confidential diary was full of such transgressional confessions. But notwithstanding, and as much as she was a homebody at heart, hating disruption, she had to make a fresh start and this by Beelzebub was it.

Chapter Two

“Have you seen a ghost, Margaret,

Or has a ghost seen you?

Trailing around the churchyard

In your skirt of linseed blue.

“People are saying, ‘Does she live here?’

And, ‘Haven’t got a clue:

We saw a shadow in the Street,

And said, How do you do?

“‘You must come round, now that we’ve met

¾
So nice there’s someone new
¾

We’ll telephone as soon as poss.

Must fly! Adieu! Adieu!’

“And there you left them, in mid air...”

[Which spirits, passing through,

Know as a vacuum made for them,

With such a lovely view.]

*

The village, or hamlet, that fell within the devil lady’s new domain nestled beneath a range of hills intervening between a plain of fertile land and the sea. The place could hardly be described as having been forgotten, because that would imply the outside world had ever been aware of it. The region was sparsely populated—most natives moved elsewhere as soon as they were able or had the means to do so. The hills meandered in a shifty east-westerly direction, as if they too were looking for somewhere else to go, eating up the miles with a digestive break to allow for the passage of a sluggishly tidal river to the coast, which lay a half dozen miles to the south. The only hint of the sea’s proximity was the seagulls that streamed behind the plough over the earthen waves of fields, as if they were flying in the wake of a fishing trawler.

Nothing ever happened here. The sheep were doing pretty much the same as they always had, in the same fields that they had been doing it for a thousand years. Leaving it to their wives to establish the correct proportions of vinegar and sugar in mint sauce, all the farmers had to do was chivvy them around occasionally to areas of fresh grass, give them a hand at lambing time, wash and shear them when they became so dirty and woolly that they could no longer be sure which end was which, and go to the pub and sing songs that became more ribald as the evening wore on.

Following the DL’s arrival, at first the villagers did not notice that anything significant had taken place, so wrapped up were they in their non-existent affairs. They did not even pay attention when the devil lady moved into the Rectory, which was a matter worthy of passing interest given that the incumbent of the Benefice, the Reverend Nathaniel Posey and his wife Laetitia, had given no thought to retiring and were still very much at home there. Although the vicar had served the parish for as long as most people could remember, one afternoon the DL breezed in, greatly alarming the pair and their parrot, and announced that she was kicking them out without giving them time to pack. Astonished though the couple were at this grievous turn of events, they were in no professional doubt as to the identity of the woman with whom they had the misfortune to be dealing, and realized the futility of arguing.

The devil lady sternly advised the incumbent and his wife that she had pre-empted any idea they might have of bringing their eviction to the attention of the Church authorities. Even as she spoke, she said, lubricious rumours were being circulated regarding their eye-popping sexual activities. The Bishop was unlikely to be sympathetic to their case. That this allegation was a vile calumny did not detract from its effectiveness, for the vicar knew how pointless it was to insist that the most exciting thing he and his wife had ever done after nine o’clock in the evening for the last forty years was to drink a mug of cocoa before tottering to separate beds; in different rooms, because Laetitia snored. In return for their compliance the DL informed them that she had provided them with a comfortable cottage in nearby Rotten Bottom, with proximity to the sea, Sainsbury’s, and several of their children’s families.

When the devil lady added that this offer would remain open for exactly six-point-six-six seconds, they looked at each other, drew a deep breath and accepted. No sooner had the couple beetled off, than the DL had her servant make a bonfire of their meagre possessions and worn furniture on the front lawn. Then, though they were in the middle of a summer heat-wave, she sat in front of a roaring fire in the great fireplace in the drawing-room, twiddled with her tail and smiled a secretive little smile.

Next day the DL summoned an army of builders, and set them to work ripping everything apart, so that the place might be brought up to her exacting modern standards. To her annoyance the workmen sucked their teeth a lot over the complexity of the job, which would have to be on a time-and-materials rather than contract price, and declared the impossibility of giving any undertaking as to when it might be completed. Then they settled in for the open-ended duration with practised ease, ignoring her threats and tail-waving, and made it clear that her presence underfoot was not welcome. They had taken a liking to the place, and saw no reason to depart so long as their well-padded invoices were paid promptly and the kettle was working.

The DL could not argue that the house, like the church, was in a parlous state and needed a tremendous amount of work to render it habitable. Still, she begrudged having to make the commute down from London every few days to check on the workers, on trains that never ran according to schedule for all sorts of imaginative reasons. Over the weeks she worked up a great frustration, which she released by rushing along a deep ravine in the hill behind her new residence, letting off steam-clouds of impatience. Tearing around in such a manner would not have been appreciated in the DL’s urban neighbourhood. There, perambulating in Green Park, she was expected to behave with decorum, nodding to acquaintances and holding stilted conversations with the wives of those who did Something in the City.

But here she had much greater latitude to do as she wished. The devil lady’s good humour might have been restored had she been aware that, even before she had taken to whooshing up and down it, this coomb or combe (as such a feature of the landscape was known in this part of the country), which ran from east to west parallel to the coastline six miles away, was called The Devil’s Breach; and that it was the deepest dry valley in the world. In Edwardian times, a single-track steep-grade railway, since removed, had ferried weekend visitors in a cable car from the well-known landmark down to the village below, where a giant teapot on a roof advertised the availability of refreshment upon the premises. These days, in the early morning and evenings, the Breach was popular with those who drove up to the top of the hill via the narrow road with their dogs, so that the animals might get some exercise and do their business; whilst their owners got no exercise, and did no business, but sat and smoked and contemplated the three-hundred-and-sixty degree vista.

Indulging the luxury of being absent from public scrutiny exhilarated the DL, and made her feel liberated, and bohemian rather than rustic. Meanwhile the modernization of her new residence proceeded: illegally, because as a Grade One listed building permission was required, and there were many restrictions on what could be done—so many, in fact, as to prohibit any alteration at all. The rats and mice that had always infested the old house, disgusted that the law was not disposed to protect them, decided to move on. They were vulnerable as they dashed to freedom, and around the site a dozen or so huge black Angora cats appeared, fierce ones with eyes that glowed even in daylight. The scrawny farmyard felines that had previously frequented the place made themselves scarce. The architect and designer, the builders, painters, carpenters, plumber and electrician, carpet man and curtain lady regarded the hell cats fearfully, and gave them as wide a berth as possible.

Actually the DL, who was a woman of fastidious taste, had herself seriously underestimated the genuine extent of the work that had to be done. What was
de rigueur
in Belgravia had never been a concern at the Rectory, as generations of dirty children in hand-me-down clothing, and uncontrollable dogs, had run riot defacing and destroying to their hearts’ content. Although the shell of the building was more or less sound, on the inside layers of offensively coloured and patterned wallpaper, and paint, were peeling from the walls. When these were stripped away, the rotten plaster came off the laths just as it had in the church.

The roof leaked, the window-panes were warped and mildewed, the heating was dysfunctional, and the beams and floors were infested with damp and woodworm and dry rot and death-watch beetle. The place was an entomologist’s paradise. Outside, the gardens were a jungle and the lawn was uneven and bald, with broken toys strewn amongst discarded household items in stages of rust and decay. Renovating and replacing everything, and landscaping and replanting, was a huge project and no mistake.

But at last everything was done. The workers, reluctant but ultimately accepting that there was nothing left to do, were evicted, the DL’s furniture came out of storage and she moved in, pleased that the process was over and apprehensive only as regarded the monstrous size of her next expense account, which was substantially undocumented owing to the use of cash to avoid VAT, and what her boss would have to say about it and whether it would be approved.