The Triple Goddess (102 page)

‘Oliver, I just told you that…’

‘No,’ he said pettishly; ‘I won’t take No for an answer, not today. You must think about it a little longer. Please. Speakin’ of lights, d’you mind if I smoke?’

Ophelia shook her head, expecting to see him produce from a leathern case a Cuban cigar like the one he had smoked last night; or pack a meerschaum pipe that had yellowed with use and age to resemble old ivory. Possibly there was a cedar-lined silver box bottomed with green baize on his desk, containing Fribourg & Treyer cigarettes.

But instead, the Archbishop fumbled in his pockets and produced a crumpled soft pack of Gauloises Blondes. Raising the torn-off corner to his mouth, a short filterless cigarette adhered to his lower lip and was drawn out. His Grace tossed the packet onto the table, and a book of matches appeared in his palm as if by prestidigitation. With the fingers of the same hand, he turned the flap backwards, bent a stalk and flicked it against the striker with a horny nail.

Twisting his mouth as the cigarette came to attention in his mouth, he applied the burst of flame and drew it to a glow, extinguishing the match as he exhaled. From half-lidded eyes through the haze he regarded Ophelia; as she breathed the medicinal tang, through the wreath of smoke she was struck by how ungainly he was, with his hairy workman hands, and large feet encased in cracked leather shoes. He had difficulty drawing in his legs when he sat without sprawling them, so that his undercarriage stuck out at angles like a crane-fly’s.

As he smoked he cupped his hand round the tube of the cigarette, crushing it between nicotined fingers. His cheeks hollowed and the dry tobacco crackled. Then the hand pulled the cigarette away, his mouth opened wide upwards, and a pillow of smoke was snatched between his tarred teeth in a Muggeridgean affectation of mature omniscience.

Fascinated, Ophelia counted the seconds until the ghostly exhaust started leaking from nose and mouth; and wondered, surreally, whether it might also issue from his ears and fissured toecaps. When he resumed speech she hardly heard the words, so intent was she on the emissions that accompanied each consonant, in mute ironic comment on what he was drawling.

‘It’s not an easy life, Ophelia, for people like us, upon whom so many are dependent for counsel and succour. Floundering in imponderable waters, they reach out to us as if we were lifeguards rather than divine intermediaries between them and the hereafter. They hang around our necks like millstones as if they would drown us along with them.

‘But we who are the élite, the
ne plus ultra
of the Church; we who are supposed already to have a leg in the next world, and a box at the heavenly Opera reserved for us; we who spend our days on the telephone to the Almighty, capital
A
, without ever knowing whether the other Party is on the line; we who in the public mind have no right to anxieties and troubles of our own—whom are we to turn to for our own comfort and solace?’

‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

‘The answer is: To each other, Ophelia. You turn to me and I turn to you.’

‘Oliver.’

‘Yah?’ Waving his gasper in the direction of the big cut-glass bowl on the table, His Grace flipped his thumb against the end to dislodge the ash...pointlessly, because the cylindrical ember had already disintegrated on his lap.

‘I said No.’

Taking a last drag, His Grace dropped the butt in the coffee that remained in his cup, where it expired with a hiss.

‘Shirley!’ he shouted, looking up, ‘Unlock this bloody door!’ His lungs protested at the sudden recall to aerobic action. There was the scrape of a key and Shirley entered. ‘Thank you
very
much,’ he said through his teeth; ‘I do so hate being made a prisoner in my own home.’

They stood, and Shirley glowered as the Church of England leaned towards Ophelia and whispered, to forestall the gleam of triumph that would appear in his aide’s eyes when she gathered that his visitor had not received his proposal with the enthusiasm that he had hoped for.

‘Please,’ said the Archbishop urgently, ‘if not for me, or even for yourself, find a reason. You need never tell me what it is.’ And then, grandly, standing back and extending a stiff arm to shake hands: ‘My thanks to you for coming; shall we say that we’ll hear from you by the end of the week? We have much to accomplish, Ophelia, much to accomplish.

‘Now then: Shirley will take you downstairs to meet your driver, who will run you by the flat to pick up your baggage…and Effie—let us not forget Effie— and have you to the station in good time for the choo-choo. You’re to catch the twelve twenty-three, I believe. I’m upgrading you to first class, my treat, the driver’ll take care of it at the ticket office. Safe journey back, Ophelia.’

His eyes were not the only part of him that followed her out of the room.

Chapter Thirty-Four

At the flat Effie was cramming into a suitcase, a rather larger one than might be considered necessary for an overnight stay, and three folding shopping bags: coffee filters, a tea caddy, two tins of soup, a box of chocolates, a packet of biscuits, several bars of soap, a monogrammed hand-towel, half a multi-pack of toilet paper, a litre of sherry, a mending kit, and a sheaf of notepaper and envelopes embossed with No 17, Chantry Street.

‘Effie!’ said Ophelia, horrified, as she dashed in to collect her, and her own few things, which she had assembled before going to the meeting. The driver was waiting for them outside in the car. ‘What are you doing? The housekeeper will be in any moment. Put everything back at once!’ Effie stopped and stared at the illicit haul. In exasperation Ophelia pitched into the case herself and ran around returning things to shelves, cupboards, and drawers around the flat.

Her companion trailed after her disconsolately. ‘I’m sure they’re used to it, the clergy are notoriously light-fingered. It’s expected, like the angels’ share
they call the wine or spirits that evaporate in the barrel as they age.
The housekeeper won’t even notice, let alone say anything. I haven’t touched the ornaments and pictures, though there is a rather nice etching of...’

‘Effie! I don’t care, this is stealing.

‘What about a few...’

‘Nothing!’

‘Just the mending kit, then.’

‘No! There. Now, is that all...I mean really all?’ Ophelia arched an apse-like eyebrow. Effie sighed, unzipped a collapsible nylon carry-all, produced an embroidered cushion and tossed it into the living room to rejoin its siblings. Ophelia looked appalled. She put all the folding receptacles inside the mother bag and closed it. ‘Come on, let’s go; you first, I want to keep you where I can see you.’ The couple went downstairs with Ophelia hauling the purged luggage, and bade farewell to the housekeeper, who looked suspiciously at the suitcase as her overnighters departed, as if she had X-ray vision.

On the train, which was a survivor from a former and more comfortable era of rail travel, with a corridor outside the compartment and white linen-covered headrests, they were lucky enough to get an empty First Class carriage to themselves, and sat opposite each other by the window. Ophelia insisted on facing forward on account of being prone to travel sickness.

Effie could hardly possess her soul in patience, so eager was she to hear about the interview; it was as much as Ophelia could do to fend off her insistent enquiries for long enough to buy coffee from the refreshment trolley as it was wheeled past the sliding door. Though she kept her tone as matter-of-fact as possible, what Ophelia had to relate reduced her companion to a state of dumbfounded inarticulacy.

As she listened, she slid slowly down in her seat until she was sprawled on her spine across the banquette. When Ophelia had finished, Effie’s cheeks puffed in and out in fishlike breaths, and she motioned with her fins to indicate that everything should be repeated.

‘Wow,’ she murmured when she had heard the story for the third time. ‘Holy moly.’ And for the remainder of the trip she remained with as glazed an expression, and as frozen in its karma, as a salmon en route from Scotland to Billingsgate fish market.

Ophelia abandoned herself to looking out of the window. The grimy glass was as thick as that of a diving-bell or spaceship. They could have been in a time machine, where a flicker of thought might advance or retire them by days, decades, or centuries to a zone where facts and figures and every decisive and decided thing that had to do with reality and Fate was a movable feast, and could be made and unmade and remade, and mended and amended; a place where childhoods might be altered and modified and life-paths changed; where family and personal relationships, marriages, affairs, feuds and disputes and misunderstandings, careers, might be undone or changed or cancelled or reconciled or revoked before they began or came to pass; and where the history and destinies of star-crossed lovers and separated lovers and would-be lovers could be revised and realigned and altered.

There was no guarantee of how long the journey today would take, or what their destination was—if indeed they were headed to any particular place, for it seemed possible that out of stubbornness or ill humour the mulish carriages would stop in the middle of nowhere and refuse to go on. Or that the points might switch them onto inexorable tracks to other places, or flexible lines that did not lead anywhere at all, or that would only take them back to where they had started from, or the last place on earth they wanted to go.

At times the train only limped forward as if the engine were disabled or ill, or had slowed out of doubt as to its mission or direction, or because it was perplexed by its passengers’ choice of journey, or questioned their judgement, or their reasons for wanting to go where they thought that they were headed; perhaps with the result that instead of delivering them on schedule to Importance Junction, it would drop them at some intermediate halt or Bradshaw’d station long ago closed in Beeching’s cuts, or shunt them into a siding at Disappointment terminus.

The backs of the rows of cottages that they passed divulged the secrets of their occupants, like the chests of patients cracked wide in preparation for heart surgery. In the cavities Ophelia was able to view from the train the pulsating organs and raw flesh of people, instead of seeing from a car or bus street-fronts sewn up with curtains, scarred with blinds, and obscured by Leyland cypress, laurel, and fences.

Along the terraces, written in soot across the red bricks, semaphored by clothing hung on laundry lines, stated by garages and garden sheds, scrawled in alphabet formations of lawnmowers, garden tools, flowerpots, serried vegetables, and children’s toys upon the short or narrow lawns and planting areas and borders and patios, she read and understood the desires of thousands of immobile or immobilized people who yearned for a free ticket to ride on the Joyful Express from Fulfilment to Greatness.

Feeling obliged, by the unsought conferment upon her of privileged status if not a bishopric, Ophelia smiled a blessing upon the children on their pedal bikes and trikes and scooters at the crossing gates, where the deliberate lorries and delivery vans and automobiles of progress, deadlines, appointments, and assignations had been arrested by the train’s assertion of right-of-way and intervention of its brief capsule of timelessness. The pedestrians at the barriers waved, blindly, acknowledging that those aboard were in a higher class than they, one almost of regality...divinity, even...and that those passengers were en route to a better place, by plan or invitation, than they could ever hope to visit.

As much as she respected their belief that such existed on earth, Ophelia knew it was her duty to remind the watchers that all planetary goals were dead ends, as final as the assurance of mortality. In denial of which the engine of their observers’ belief, like the Flying Dutchman ghost ship that was
doomed to sail the seas and oceans forever without making port
, was always reaching for another false horizon.

When the scenery became more rural Ophelia abandoned herself to the landscape and the sights and sensations that streamed through her consciousness. The feeling of disembodiment that this created in her rendered it unclear, as on a film set an illusion of movement is created by a rolling background, which was in motion, the train or its surroundings. Although the names on the platform signs were familiar, each place might as well have been on another continent as twenty, ten, five miles from home.

Only once did the train’s engine reach maximum speed, causing the rolling stock to exclaim, in an exhilarating burst of iamb- anapaestic clatter:

He meant what he said!

He meant what he said!

She mustn’t refuse!

She mustn’t refuse!

Then, just as the journey was about to end, after a long tunnel that erased all memory of town and suburb, came a supreme moment when the train shot into another world like a bullet from a smooth-bore gun, and the ground fell away into nothing, and all sound ceased as the locomotive seemingly launched itself into space and kept going as if it would never lose its momentum.

The invisible viaduct across the river valley was as high as the Devil’s Breach was deep. In fact it was the largest brick-built structure in the world, and its thirty-seven hollow spandrelled arches soared as lightly as spun sugar above the vale.

As far as the eye could see to either side were emerald oak- and elm-dotted meadows and greengage-tinted hedgerows. A gladed forest contained rides and ancient chases where phantom royal hunting parties coursed by moonlight to the sound of winding horns. The sinuous stream, once a river sourced in Paradise but now reduced from its former barge-navigable state to a gentle-flowing banked and shaded brook—Wharf Cottage was the anomalous-sounding name of a lone dwelling by a small road bridge—threaded the vale en route to saltwater evanishment at its tidal Channel haven.