The Triple Goddess (66 page)

The largest platform, made from Church magazines, served as a dining table. The beds and sofas and stools and bookshelves were all custom-built from other Church-donated matter. One could have thrown books and ornaments at even the lesser constructions, and after a bibulous supper the housemates and their guests cleared them off and did so, for fun, without ever removing more than a few corners of angry correspondence. Insects nested in their interstices, going about their business via open windows and doors; and kittens and guinea-pigs were born in the recesses that were designed for the purpose. Cigarettes were stubbed out on them (the surfaces) without incendiary consequence.

However hard she was hounded by the authorities, the youthful Ophelia showed no willingness to reform. Eventually and inevitably her lack of compliance exceeded the maximum level with which eccentricity of any kind, so long as it was confined to an amateur interest in bees and steam locomotives, was tolerated. Ophelia, it was true, was interested in butterflies. She took a collector’s net on her pastoral rounds. She would break off conversations out of doors to chase Lepidoptera. Interspersed in the informal rambling deliveries that served for her sermons, she would sometimes entertain her congregations by drawing, on a block of cartridge paper mounted on an easel, Red Admirals, Peacocks, Tortoiseshells and Cabbage Whites—for the children—and, for the adults, Graylings, Grizzled Skippers, Hairstreaks and Brown Arguses. She once launched into a disquisition on the differences between Common, Holly and Chalkhill Blues and her favourite, the Adonis. On another occasion she illustrated the migration of souls into Heaven by releasing live moths from the pulpit: it was the only time she climbed its haughty steps.

Eventually the powers-that-be began to see method in Ophelia’s madness, and concluded that her heretical refutation of the Church’s belief in timely paperwork, which she had avowed as a condition of her priestly investiture, was evidence of a lack of seriousness, a disingenuous ploy to shirk her duty. A telegram was delivered to the house—the telegraph boy had been instructed to put it in her hands only, and not to leave it if she were not at home—advising her that she had tested the Church’s tolerance to its limit. Having read the communication and told the boy that there would be no answer, Ophelia was thoughtful and used it to roll a cigarette.

One morning shortly thereafter, hearing an imperious knocking at the door reminiscent of the Porter’s Scene in
Macbeth
, accompanied by continuous jangling of the bell, Ophelia got out of the bath and, wrapping herself in a towel and leaning out of the open upstairs window with shampoo in her eyes, saw below a cloaked figure in what she took to be a bishop’s mitre, brandishing a crosier. Convinced that she was about to be subjected not just to a dressing-down but a full defrocking, or even an exorcism, she retreated without acknowledging the visitor; upon which the coalman, who had been trying to collect an unpaid bill before he delivered any more coal, left with his hod still full.

The next morning Ophelia packed a small bag and made her way by ship, rail, boat and camel to the Middle and then the Far East, where for two years she lived in a cave in the mountain mists above a three-hundred-foot waterfall, sustained by rice that the cheerful illiterate peasants who lived in the telephone-, paper-, and post-office-free village below brought up to her in wooden bowls. Here it was there that Ophelia’s fellow-bohemian friend Effie, who was lither and more adventurous in those days, tracked her down after an epic journey involving pack-mules and bandits, who—the ill-tempered mules as much as the murderous bandits—were greatly impressed by her motivational energy (she could kick one of the stubborn beasts into action, before it could kick her, hard enough to make it cry), and enthusiasm in joining their raiding parties. Turning down the offer of membership in their tribe, Effie persuaded Ophelia, who had begun to tire of an exclusive diet of rice and was yearning for apple pie and custard, to return to England and live with her in the Harrumphshire cottage that Effie had just inherited from an aunt. As the asses brayed their relief, the disappointed bandits accepted Effie’s decision, and presented her with an ornate dagger, slightly used, and a gourd filled with her favourite spiced offal to fortify her on her journey.

When the local parish curacy fell vacant the year after the pair had settled into the Harrumpshire village cottage, Effie applied for it on Ophelia’s behalf, assuring her that her reputation was forgotten; which it was not, but Effie worked her usual magic and got her the job after obtaining some photographs of the Archdeacon that he preferred not be circulated. The only concession that Effie was forced to make was that in future she would help Ophelia with her correspondence, of which there would not be much because the position was only that of a curate with licence to preach, which is the lowest ordained office except for deacon.

The unorthodox priestess proved not to have altered one whit in the course of her lengthy sabbatical. Many a time when she was supposed to be somewhere else, such as on Sundays and in church, Effie found her engrossed in cataloguing her butterfly collection, talking to her orchids or drawing, painting or sculpting in the glasshouse. Or she would have taken herself off for an afternoon’s sketching on the hill, or fossil-hunting, or walked far across the downs to do a brass-rubbing in another village, another church.

There was more to Ophelia Blondi-Tremolo than her reputation as an oddball curate. In her teenage days her beauty had turned heads and she had impressed everyone with her poise, early maturity and assurance. She drifted upon the skin of life’s waters like an ephemeron. At Oxford, where she studied botany, she was compared to Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson and caused many an unrequited passion in the hearts of both undergraduates and dons, male and female. These infatuations were only exacerbated by her seeming ignorance of all the houp-la that she was the centre of, and her decision, which she announced in her final year, to apply for theological college.

But physical attributes alone could not account for the worship that Ophelia inspired in people when, decades later, hard-nosed lawyers and captains of industry attested in vivid detail to the
coup de foudre
that they experienced at their first meeting, and how often the sensation of a glance, a touch, a moment in eternity, revisited them still at moments of the day when they were busiest about their lives, and when they were engaged in intimate activities, and before they went to sleep at night, and in their dreams. Unembarrassed and confessional, they recalled with awe and shared with friends and acquaintances and partial strangers how the sight of Ophelia had irradiated their beings and lives with the intensity of an encounter with the embodiment of an Olympian goddess, an earthly or semi-earthly muse.

Both men and women, who had known her as a teenager, indulged more tactile memories by going out of their way to stare at her childhood country home from the road, and hide in the holly hedge so as to avoid detection by the latter-day owners and neighbours, where they were scourged for their sin by prickles, to view the window of the room they knew to have been her bedroom. They meandered the footpaths that they had walked with her so many times too few across the fields and along the stream. They visited the schools and college that she had attended. Whatever place they may have been together, however briefly once upon a cloud, became the icon of a lifelong infatuation.

Ophelia seemed hardly to be aware that she was in contact with the ground as she walked. She seemed to float rather than exercise her limbs mechanically. As tall and slim as she was her frame was delicately boned, and her skin pale to the point of translucence. An effect of tomboyishness was conveyed by the way she dressed and wrapped herself in unfashionable garments, to de-emphasize her figure, and to show her aversion to the uniform of office and her scorn for the preconceptions that public dress conveyed about a person’s character and personality and status. This appearance of willowy fragility was misleading, since she was muscular and fit; as a girl she had played a mean game of hockey, and lacrosse, and tennis. She was possessed of great stamina and an excellent eye for a ball, and a gritty determination to beat any one of her opponents that she encountered on the field in a manner that was not personally glory-seeking but which had nothing to do with team coordination and strategy.

Ophelia’s hair was blacker than a raven’s wing and had remained so naturally over the years, every strand of it distinct and lustrous. Sometimes it hung loosely like a veil and sometimes with integrity of purpose, like Hermes’ helmet. At different times of day and from certain angles it reflected a gun-metal iridescence, or the azure or cerulean blue of a kingfisher, as the light sought her out amid the shadows and hurried after her like an anxious nanny. Her complexion was creamy, her make-up non-existent. As from underneath the fringe of her hair and haze of lashes, with eyes bluer than speedwell and head tilted to listen, she looked down upon the world she seemed to see into the soul of everything, whether it be man or woman, beast, bird, flower, or insect. She did not opinionate, except to Effie, or criticize, but with expression brimming with understanding she had a way of establishing an immediate rapport with people that made them feel as though they had gained the friendship of one who would counsel them, assist them in their struggles with the world, defend them in battle, and, at the last, bring them to an island of repose where they might lay down their weary limbs and breathe a sigh of eternal fulfilment.

Those who were fortunate enough to return a look from Ophelia felt suspended in time, as if they had gained admission to some private secret spot meant only for the pair of them, and to which they might return consciously or unconsciously whenever they had need of refreshment. Men and women whose lives were spent in unremitting competition and concealment of their motives, turned childlike and innocent in her presence. As she grew older, an adumbration of crow’s-feet around her eyes only deepened her mystery and added further to her humanity, by suggesting that life took its toll upon her too; that she was not locked inside a bubble of her own purity, but that she suffered and endured like everyone else, and had need of the support that each was only too glad to give, and would have hastened barefoot from the ends of the earth to offer.

From the moment that she took up her first position, after a mediocre performance at theological college that surprised and disappointed the teachers who would have been only too glad to grant her sainthood, Ophelia came into her own. She mesmerized her sparse Ruritanian congregation with her addresses. Instead of talking down to it, her manner was that of one who had encountered a friend in the supermarket, and was wondering if he or she knew that a fresh consignment of lettuce had arrived on aisle one, or that Tesco had it cheaper, or that batteries were on sale, or that there was a buy-one-get-one-free at Sainsbury’s on packs of skinless boneless chicken breasts with extra points on the Nectar card.

What went unremarked about Ophelia, though it was so obvious, was that she never revealed or confided any personal detail about herself. Whereas like King Midas’s barber everyone she spoke to had a need to whisper at least one secret, she had perfected either naturally or by design a technique of jetting off squid-like behind an inky cloud whenever her own polite inquiries about a person’s health or circumstances were reciprocated. Those who asked her how she was, instead of receiving some trite response were treated to a backhand return of serve with the spin of more detailed inquiries that were more personal than before, which had the effect either of ending the rally or eliciting a one-sided offense of autobiography.

In church Ophelia’s voice, normally low and a little breathy, rang out as clear as the bell that had summoned her parishioners to Service, without a hint of brazenness, before settling into a honeyed intonation that glazed the surface of the occasion and made it special. The audience was wooed and lulled and there was a smile on every face. Even those who objected on principle to women at the altar, unless it be for the purpose of getting married, felt compelled to attend her services, where they listened, hypnotized, as the impurities and poisons within their systems were dissolved and purified; as they were cleansed of the hatred, anger, frustration, jealousy, meanness, annoyance, and pettiness with which they had besmeared others and been besmeared during the week. When the service was over, and they had left after Effie completed the ritual with tea and coffee and cake, it was to that same scene that their minds reverted in their moments of quiet, as in their minds they ran back like children to hear again the words that seemed to envelop them in an immortality of care.

Chapter Eight

Ophelia was not a morning person: like the Green Knight of Middle English literature she grew stronger as the day progressed. It was this that had prompted her insistence that her only service of the week, excluding baptisms, weddings and funerals, be held at eleven o’clock on Sunday mornings. She assumed that the world sat up with her late at night, and it was not uncommon, if one was esteemed to be a supporter in her
corps de l’église
, to be awoken by the telephone in the small hours with an inquiry into one’s health, or as to how one was bearing up under some stress or other; or called at commencement of the cocktail hour when one was mixing a martini or martinis, or uncorking a wine bottle, and looking forward to suspending mental activity for the day.

As if by way of an afterthought she would throw in an oh-by-the-way-I-wonder small request; and only in the morning did it dawn on one that she was possibly not the distracted misfit that some might take her for, and that what one had unthinkingly agreed to was actually going to involve rather a lot of work. There was no getting out of it, for Ophelia could bleat like a lamb when denied or thwarted, in a
faux-naïve
way, and would not hesitate to announce the slight during service as if it were less catty to air her grievances in public—without naming any names, of course, but everyone knew who she was referring to.