The Triple Goddess (80 page)

Unable on the spot to think of anything, except “corner and “sauna”, Ophelia sat making the sort of noises that one might associate with a tapir with a cold, or carp sucking insects off lily-pads.

It was as good an answer as any, and Effie, after assuming the
En garde!
position of a duellist and making a few lunges with a toasting fork at the dresser, resumed her culinary tasks.

Chapter Nineteen

Adjacent to the parish hall, as close to it on the Street as it could be without being its Siamese twin, with a bench outside where blowsy old women waiting for the weekly bus used to sit and, without regard to modesty, “hang out their laundry” on warm days, was a chapel. Although no services were held in it, it was still a consecrated building. Unnecessary as it was, there having always been a church, nobody was quite sure why it was there. It had long been neglected, and side by side the two edifices had sunk into dilapidation; until several years ago a group of concerned locals decided to restore the chapel. Because they regarded it as being more their own than the Church’s, they did this without first seeking permission from the vicar or archdeacon.

At the forefront of the endeavour, of course, was Effie; her idea was to provide Ophelia with a place where she might conduct services in winter when the church was almost too cold to bear, as well as meet privately with those who might not be disposed to confide whatever was burdening them, so that it could be passed on to Effie, in a more public setting. That Ophelia had no interest in the chapel or intention of using it for any purpose was neither here nor there, only a future source of irritation to her house-mate.

Effie was a past-mistress at getting things done without lifting a finger herself. Hinting how their selfless efforts would gild their consciences and reputations, she enlisted a summertime work party of skilled and semi-skilled locals to restore the premises to their dubious former glory. They put in a damp-proof course and rewired it; they replaced the worm-eaten and rotted flooring, and replastered, and painted, and redid the gold lettering over the altar. They embroidered a new altar-cloth and brought in their unwanted items of furniture to scatter about. Someone contributed not one but three hoarse and decrepit harmoniums, which, when the wood was not too swollen from the homesick damp that immediately returned, might be induced to accompany hymns in an asthmatic voice.

The inclusion of the harmoniums was meet and right, for neglected chapels in states of genteel decay were the proper places for them, just as elderly donkeys were consigned to out-of-the-way thistly fields. A harmonium was an instrument of death capable of extinguishing the joy of springtime. Owing to the depressing nature of the job, there were only a few harmonium technicians left travelling the country, listening for emphysema in the lungs of bellows, scanning the nails of keys for the right thickness of dirt and stickiness, and shining a light into innards to check for flourishing colonies of, instead of bacteria, boring insects, before the host could be pronounced healthy and fit for work. Harmonium “doctors” rarely lived to see more than fifty unseasonable winters before they committed suicide; upon which their late patients did their Scottish funereal best in pibroching their passing.

When the chapel’s renovation was complete, the members of the task force congratulated each other on their selfless work, and commenced the even more important job of advertising their good work. Because the chapel itself was to play no part in this, after two modern locks had been installed in the door and a padlock clapped on the outside for good measure to exclude the public and other vandals, it was abandoned to begin again the degenerative process that would call future generations to a similarly glorious effort.

By the time that the first autumnal chills crept into the air, the old musty odour, the natural habitat of which is the still air of churches and chapels, was back. Knowing better than to go far, it had lurked in the narrow space between the chapel and the village hall while refurbishment was under way. Soon the wind was hurling welcoming splinters of rain against the plain glass panes, and everything was as it had been and ever more should be.

The keys to the chapel were in the keeping of a beldame who lived in a cottage across the Street. The woman was referred to as Cerbera, from a distance, by the villagers, and her mythical three-headed brother who guarded Hades was reckoned a lap-dog by comparison. Cerbera, who had played a small role in the place’s renovation, now that she was the only person associated with it became its jealous guardian. The altar-cloth, the gold thread for which she had supplied, she was convinced exerted the allure of the Turin Shroud over anyone who had heard tell of it. Because of this she treated any application for the keys to the chapel, even if it were only for a few minutes solace or to remember a loved one, as if the person was wearing striped pyjamas and had just escaped from maximum-security choky.

The squat and unpretentious village hall next door was where both Parish and Parochial Church Council meetings were held, and as such it was the only location in the parish where religious and temporal influences, if not converged, uneasily co-existed. Because the hall was also Church property, Cerbera was the custodian in charge of granting permission for its use too, entering the reason in a book and demanding the token rent with a rapacity worthy of Shylock.

Since the Church, even in its modern state of enfeeblement, was still capable of inspiring high emotions and deep divisions of opinion, parish councillors tended not to be parochial church councillors as well; or if they were, they were either effective on only one of the committees that they were on, or useless on both. For it was impossible to simultaneously pretend that one was sympathetic with one’s fellow man, as one was required to do on the PCC side of affairs, and evince the homophobic cynicism and suspicion that was expected of a parish councillor.

While PCC membership was conferred with enthusiasm by the other PCC members upon anyone flattered enough to accept the invitation, or foolish enough to volunteer, elections for a four-year term on the parish council were hotly contested. Putting oneself up for a position on the parish council was not for the faint of heart, since elections were popularity contests rather than demonstrations of what people thought of the suitability of any candidate for office. Everyone got to know how many votes were polled by each of those standing, and not to get elected even by the narrowest of margins was a humiliating experience.

Although lobbying was frowned upon rather than forbidden, candidates had to be sure of convincing the necessary number of people that they were credentialled xenophobic fascistoid Romany-averse NIMBY Luddites—translation: persons possessing an ingrained love of the English countryside who were desirous of preserving the environment, behaving Greenly, supporting the community, fighting the District Council, and noise and light pollution, encouraging the Neighbourhood Watch, and doing everything they could to enhance and preserve the village’s few amenities, especially the bus service (for which the driver was one of the church phantoms who in recent life had scored two drunk-driving arrests, a hit-and-run, and had a reputation for treating traffic lights and Stop signs as suggestions.

The phantom had been appointed because, in addition to his requiring no wages because he was a phantom, he had once been fined by Helmston City Council for driving a private vehicle at sixty miles an hour in a bus lane.) Then, if they got onto the Parish Council, they could relax, do nothing and sit silently through the quarterly meetings for four years without anyone expressing the least concern about how useless and lazy and ignorant and careless about local affairs they were.

The hall had at one time been used for a variety of functions. There were bridge and chess clubs, and the Women’s Institute met there; a village choir had practised in it, there was a flower festival, and concerts were put on, and debates held. Amateur theatricals used to be popular, and there was still a proper stage with storage underneath for props, speakers, lighting fixtures, and lines, blocks and counterweights for flying scenery and drawing the curtain. One by one these community activities had been discontinued for lack of support as the men, drained from their competitive exertions in the City after returning in the evenings off crowded delayed trains with refreshment cars, found themselves unable to do anything but eat, watch TV, and go to bed...until the pub reopened, that was, which had a remarkable effect in reviving their desire to be sociable.

Otherwise the gladsome evening gatherings of yore at the village hall dwindled until only yoga night was left, plus the quarterly council and social committee meetings, and operating as the polling station voting for local and district and general elections; and the Christmas party, until that too was relocated to the more congenial and amenity-provided cricket pavilion. Even the yoga class was on its last legs, a depressive affair patronized by a hard-core of village women—who had long ago lost interest in the physical and mental benefits of contorting their frames, which ranged from scrawny to gelatinous, into flexible poses conducive to meditation—and a few males who said that they were interested in hard-core opportunities to discipline their bodies. Yoga night had only survived because the women had been deprived of a place to gossip…the village pump no longer, literally, being a draw…after the shop cum post office had closed for the last time.

This was a situation that they continued to deplore, though for years they had used the superstores almost exclusively, and never bought more at the shop than an occasional newspaper and extra pint of milk, a ten-pack of Woodbine cigarettes and a box of Bryant & May matches, a bottle of cooking sherry, and a bar of stale Cadbury’s chocolate.

Chapter Twenty

One Thursday, highlighted in red pencil in the devil lady’s diary, was to be held the quarterly meeting of the troublous village’s parish council, at eight o’clock in the evening; and since it was an open meeting the DL was inclined to attend. As disgusted as she was by the Reverend Fletcher Dark’s failure to carry the day at the equivalent session of the Parochial Church Council, of which he was chairman, she knew that it would be a mistake to ignore its laical counterpart. But, not having a seat on the committee herself, she resolved to resist any temptation that she might feel to speak from the floor.

Because she was uncomfortable leaving her manservant alone in the house with a fireplace full of demons, after supper the DL detailed him to spend another night engaging the men of the village in social intercourse at the pub. Then, having put on a long fur coat that some long-extinct dark-hued carnivore had reluctantly parted with, she took a torch and set off down the Street.

It was a pleasant evening with the sun falling golden across the fields, and the devil lady felt restored by the fresh air and exercise as, at exactly eight o’clock, she let herself through the white wicket gate on the Street outside the village hall, and walked up the short concrete path and the few irregular mildewed steps to the door. Turning the loose handle and entering, she saw that the room was already full, which left her no choice but to take the last remaining folding chair at the end of the back row; one with a cracked leg that had obviously been spurned as unsafe by everyone else.

The audience was mostly composed of those who, lacking the funds to go the pub, and finding that there was nothing on television, had nothing else to occupy and entertain them that evening. A couple of local grandees, their status declared by tailored jackets and silk cravats, were deigning to grace the proceedings with their presence; as well as, at the opposite end of the social scale, a drunk who had been unable to stand his round
chez
Hob. The man had gone to sleep with his chin sunk on his chest and mouth open, and the councillors were eyeing him and exchanging glances, hoping that he would not wake up and lower the tone of their deliberations. The DL was amused and hoped that he did.

Also in evidence in the front row of the audience was the usual gang of
tricoteuses
—the women who during the French Revolution sat knitting at meetings of the Convention—women who, being privy to the inner workings of the villagers’ confederacies, conspiracies, cartels, clubs, cliques, claques, cabals...and committees…awaited rulings on any contentious agenda item that might result in one or other of the partial parties involved, in default of losing it to Madame la Guillotine, having his or her head handed to him.

Nobody looked around at her, so, keeping her coat on for warmth and to alleviate the discomfort of the hard seat, and raising the collar to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, the DL settled down to listen as the Clerk to the Council—the aforementioned Cerbera—opened the proceedings by reading the minutes of the previous quarter’s meeting, from a table on the stage round which the committee was seated.

As boring as the details were, consisting of storms in a teacup over a disputed footpath right of way across someone’s land, and a case of stolen sheep, the devil lady found the introduction helpful as a recapitulation of the state of affairs. She was already aware, from a shockingly timely fax she had received that afternoon from the HQ Infocentre, in response to her enquiry regarding the workings of parish councils, that the Parish Clerk had tenure until she—it was always a she—got fed up with it and could find someone else to take over. Although those of a clerkish disposition derived pleasure from harassing local authorities and the ability to talk down to parishioners, the issues were pettifogging, and the remuneration could be counted in pennies.