The Triple Goddess (88 page)

After the leader had raised his arms and declaimed the blessing, everyone began scrambling straight down the escarpment, taking the most direct route to the deep bostal track that led to the village. A number of the departing tripped on tussocks and stumbled in rabbit holes, and the fallen were helped up by others who in several instances then also required assistance. One man rolled twenty feet before being arrested by a bush. The hiker, dismayed, gave up hope of reaching his planned destination, the ring of trees that was still ten miles away. Jumping to his feet he set off home to the east at a cracking pace, blown from behind by the gale from the north-west. Within moments of his departure the sky turned black, the first heavy drops of rain intensified into a stinging pall, and the chalky trails worn by sheep in the green turf of the hill began to flash-flood with milky runnels of water.

But even in the midst of the darkness, the summit of the hill was perfused with a violet radiance, such as might presage a manifestation of the Holy Grail. But instead of the Grail, shadowy humanoid forms shimmered within the circular mound that marked the perimeter of an Iron Age fort. In the bailey of the earthen motte formerly surrounded by ditch and palisade, though rain was beating down across the rest of the landscape, everything was calm and dry.

The shapes were the ghost members of Ophelia’s congregation, missing that day from church, and they were very pleased with themselves.

‘Lor’, that fair done the trick, eh? Mission accomplished, everybody. Well done us!’

‘We fair hornswoggled ’em, di’n’ we? The weather was supposed to be as dry as a boan, an’ it’s raining stair-rods. They’ll be unaccountable sattered by the time dey gets ’ome through this spiteful hurley-bulloo.’

‘Clung like drowned rats, sartin sure.’

‘End-on rackon it’ll take ’em best part of an hour.’

‘That’ll teach them to go sucking up to the Bishop.’

‘Meantime our folk are all feet-up at the fire, warm and cosy.’

‘Right now Mus’ Bishop is most unaccountable froughtened and swimmy, howlin’
Abide with me
and
Lead, kindly Light
…’

‘“The darkness deepens...”’

‘“…amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on! The night is dark and I am far from home…” Auoow!’

‘No
Singin’ in the Rain
for ’im.’

‘Did you see gurt Honoria? tripping like a lamb at Mus’ Bishop’s heels, may ’e have short shoes and long corns. She offered him a drink from her hipflask.’

‘And Himself took it. Then, rabbits! she tripped in a bury. I was laughing so hard I nearly died...so to speak.’

‘By now ’e’s snatched with cold, all puckered-up, and ’e’ll be unfitty for ’is conference next week. ’E’s that moiled and willocky an’ dere’s naun to be done about it. Everythin’s spiled for ’im.’

‘Fust ’e’ll cancel ’is meetin’ with Mrs Diemen and Flabby, ’ave Mus’ Archdeacon drive ’im ’ome, take an ’ot bath, goo to bed with a toddy and pray ’e doan’t get pneumonia or sumthin’ wuss.’

‘Leave it to us to deal with this Diemen and Dark malarkey, we’ll sort them out good and proper.’

‘We ghostses should be proud, the way we take care of our own. What was t’ Bishop gooin’ to do anyway, wag his finger at ’er and tell ’er to go back to ’Ell and be a good liddle devil?’

‘She’d just laugh and say, “See you dere!”’

‘There noa Queensberry rules in her world, dat’s for sure.’

‘She’ll drive herself crazy, trying to find out who changed the weather, and prevented her from biting the Bishop in two as she planned, like a sausage in a roll.’

‘Yup, and he’ll never know how lucky he is to get away with ketchin’ no more’n a cold.’

‘We’ll make these Infernals sorry they took on the likes of us. But that’s all for today...come on, let’s go.’

Ophelia’s spectral stalwarts evanesced into the atmosphere. It was another hour before the tempest abated, and when the darkness dispersed it was replaced by a thick grey blanket of cloud and still fog that overlay and obscured everything until they in their turn were swallowed by the eventide and covered by the wings of night.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Downs not whale-backed, per Kipling,

But formed by a fallen god

Stretched out: the body of Pan,

Tumbled to the pagan ground he trod

Until the unsuspecting Thamus reeled

To hear the sound of a great voice proclaim

That the great god Pan was dead!

     Painful news

To those who celebrated his indolence

And penchant for merry-making.

As the only god to die in our time,

Many people still frequent

His chalk altars and wooded shrines,

     and lie

Where slow waves of mortality pass

Over his tomb of lark-infested grass.

*

Ophelia was a dedicated walker, and considered her day to be incomplete if she had not climbed either up one of a number of winding paths or via the woods, to the downs ridgeway and along it to east or west, or cut across the bottoms—a direction much less travelled by others—south towards the coast. Morning-time, as early as an
ante-meridiem
-averse person as she was could manage, and late afternoons until dusk, were her favourite times; the hours between she found too lacking in magic to be mentally refreshing.

Usually she left home with only a general notion of what direction she would take. But she always included in her itineration some point that would afford her a prospect of the village where it lay tucked at the foot of a fold in the hills. There she would pause and wonder at how small and alien the place and the people who inhabited it seemed, how distant from her own sensibility and understanding, once she was far above and removed from them in mind and body.

Except for Effie, of course; and as she shaded her eyes to pick out her own home, she knew that her dear friend would at that moment have an earthenware bowl cradled in her arm, and the telephone gripped between cheek and shoulder. As she stirred and folded the ingredients with a wooden spoon, the slightly panting cadence of her speech became synchronized with rhythmic action.

“So I
told
her she could
take
his...I
mean
, the te
merity
—the
gall!
I said I’m
sick
and
tired
of...and she could
shove
it where...
pfff
... Hold on a sec, the cord’s twisted...that’s better.
She
and her
horse
could...what? Oh yes, she got the message, by golly. I didn’t
beat
about the
bush
.”

Ophelia smiled; she knew the lines word for word.

Going for a walk was not so much an opportunity to think as one during which to empty her mind, so that, like an artist’s blank canvas it might be refilled with fresh shapes and colours and ideas. Though she covered the same criss-crossing paths over and over again along any of a dozen routes, there were many random distinctive things about each outing to pay attention to. There was the going underfoot to be considered; as well as whether or not it might drizzle; how windy it might be at the top; how the trees were dressed and how the woods smelled at different seasons and at bluebell time; which slopes the sheep and cattle might be grazing on; which tiny flowers might be emergent in the greensward, especially the cowslips and orchids; the timing of her descent in case sundown was special.

There were deer to be looked out for amongst the trees; and she never failed to be excited by the sight of a daylight fox as it froze at the sight of her, with one paw raised, before streaking off. There was the possibility of coming across in the scrub a badger sett she had not known about, or finding an arrowhead coughed from a new rabbit hole, or, if she had stayed on the field and woodland and water meadow flats rather than ascending, exposed by a plough. Though she was no ornithologist, there were sightings of partridge and pheasant and falcon, and wheeling buzzards with their eerie one-note cries, and a cuckoo to listen for, and in the gloaming the whisper of a barn owl to be surprised by.

Winter was the season in which it was easiest to be precise in her observations, and she did not consider the time plainer or less salubrious than the others despite the frequent bone-freezing winds. She harked to the shrill of the few remaining leaves that, shrivelled and Tithonus-like, were still attached to branches begging to be released into another world...until the Cromwellian month of March, which governed in the interregnum before spring’s coronation, heeded their cry and gave them their quietus so that they might be buried with the rest of their generation in ancestral humus.

The variety and combinations of visual sensations and smells of air, tree, blossom, flower, and the petrichor of rain on dry ground, were endless and always welcomed.

On her perambulations Ophelia never started out with a destination in mind, or planned to cover a certain distance or do anything particular along the way. She did not go for the exercise, or with the object of looking for rare flowers, or to pick berries, or to beat the bounds of the parish, like those who were more earnest than she in their naturalizations. Whatever happened, happened, arising or occurring serendipitously as she maundered or “doddled”, as the old shepherds had termed it, along.

The only essential was the being out of doors. The moment that the village was behind her she entered a timeless zone, the memory of which, when temporal rectitude—was there such a thing as the “right” time?, she wondered—was restored upon her return, she would be able to summon and draw upon in her mind’s eye as if she had taken a book off a shelf to read.

Every now and then she was accompanied by one of any number of dogs, foisted upon her by a villager who spotted her and knew what she was about, and who would be grateful to be spared the trouble and time of walking it round the cricket pitch or along the Street. She felt sorry for these domestic undomesticated animals who spent their days slumped before an empty grate, or with their noses under garden gates watching for something, anything, to happen, when they could have been rippling off after a scent, or a rabbit, or putting up a pheasant, or starting a hare from its form. She was interested in how the senses of the lower orders of being were so much sharper than human ones.

But, though it sometimes made her feel selfish and guilty, usually Ophelia wanted to travel alone, like Kipling’s cat in the
Just So Stories
that walked by itself...except that all places were absolutely not alike to her. She thought of her walks not as poems but as short stories or novellas: they had beginnings, middles and ends, plots and subplots, and sad and happy endings. There were chapters and dialogue in different languages, and drawings and illustrations in colour and black-and-white, and many, many, speaking characters amongst the animals, birds, growing things, and topographical features.

Traversing the hills Ophelia was happy to be nothing, and to pass like a fleeting shadow cast by the clouds that trafficked the welkin. Up and down the hills and aslant and broadside she would walk, her body held erect or bent or braced as terrain and wind dictated; stopping only to catch her breath and return the stolid gazes of grazing or cudding sheep or cows. When the going was especially steep she crawled upwards on all fours, or slid down feet first on her backside; and sometimes, if the cleats of her boots were clogged with loving mud and could find no purchase, she would slip and fall so hard that she was winded without having time to exclaim or groan.

The easiest part to negotiate was the drovers’ track that ran up the bostal and along the hog’s back ridge, which extended, it seemed, for ever. To the north from the escarpment that dropped sharply to the village, the view from the highest elevation some eight hundred feet high stretched fully fifty miles across the plain of Wealden clay and greensand loam to the dark streak of another similar but lower range of hills; while to the south the land undulated like a saltwater swell until it reached the coast and resolved into the element that it resembled.

Standing on tiptoe and stretching a hazel wand, which she had plucked in the woods to use as a switch, above her head, from her lofty coigns of vantage Ophelia imagined that she held the firmament in abeyance and was drawing the naked souls of others like her, for whom superiority of height had become a living metaphor of withdrawal from the dross and clinker of humanity, aloft to join her in briefly assuming a mantle of eternity. The village, strung out along the Street like illiterate or sesquipedalian prose, when regarded as a whole of sentences looked ugly, even obscene. Within the context of the landscape it seemed to lingually insult it. The downs, on the other hand, wrote and communicated as beautifully as they had no need of mouth and tongue and palate and breath to express themselves, succinctly and to the point.