The Triple Goddess (123 page)

‘Because at this time I, Bernard Bulstrode, was still a cocksure youth yet to depart on my sojourn in Dogland, you shall understand that rubbing shoulders with the elite in the company of my father did nothing to teach me the self-control and sense that I only acquired much later after I realized the folly of my existence, and reformed my character. Throughout my earlier life I often drew censure for my strong opinions and outspokenness, and my lack of reluctance to defend words with fists. It was the Yorkshire way.

‘There was one particular time when I let Pop down badly, during a fancy gathering at some storied pile where he had finagled the two of us—my father was between wives at the time, whereas I had not yet contracted my first marriage, the one to...—an invitation. The place would have boasted, had the upper classes not deemed boasting vulgar, thousands of acres that had been occupied, farmed, and shot over by the same family for five hundred years if they had for a day. It was well furnished with Old Masters, suits of armour, wine cellars, dowager aunts, butlers, and ghosts.

‘Although my father was in the habit of trolling for the next Mrs Bulstrode whenever he had an opportunity, he had on this occasion magnanimously subordinated his interests to mine, having formed an opinion that the last remaining unmarried daughter of the house, a Lady in her own right, and I might get along…an association which of course would redound to his own benefit.

‘The woman Dad had designs on for me, whom he had met briefly at a race-meeting—she was vulture-ugly, but he had not told me that—though no longer in the first flush of youth was very flush, or so he presumed, in gilt-edged bonds. My father’s great hope was that I should not only marry a title, but an heiress who came with a dowry large enough to make me financially independent of him; for although he was generous where I was concerned to a fault—he preferred to spend his own money.

‘Also, by rendering me more acceptable to those he wished to associate with, as the ugly bird’s father-in-law Pop would gain unlimited access to the gentrified circles he so yearned to be included in. Killing two birds with one stone—which was a feat that my father was far more likely to achieve metaphorically than were he to spray the brace with gunshot, for when he had a loaded unbroken twelve-bore on his arm he drove beaters faster than they did the pheasants before them—was ever his goal in life as it was in business.

‘While in our Gloucestershire hosts, the Bentnose-Farquarsons, my father saw an opportunity to pull off an alliance with one of the most pedigreed families in the land, the B-Fs had their own agenda. Owing to a decades-long unwillingness to reduce the complement of household servants, a reluctance to curb their wasteful spending habits, and a refusal to resign themselves to a lesser standard of living, the funds in the Bentnose-Farquarson family account at Coutts Bank were now low enough to have these not-so-
nouveaux pauvres
thinking in terms of a matrimonial association with anyone rich enough to keep the B-F banner flying...anyone at all.

‘For Bentnose-Farquarsons were not the sort to entertain ideas of turning over the deeds to their home to the National Trust, or opening the house and grounds to tourists, or making the estate into a safari or theme park, or organic farming, or establishing a motor museum where the garages were, or allowing anyone to film sappy period or costume dramas at it. The B-F’s noses did not unbend or tilt downwards, and they were accustomed to farquing as and when and how and for as long and as much as they pleased, and not having to associate with the sort of people who knew what “weekend” meant, or those who dropped their aitches, unless they worked for them.

‘So when my pater came along, dropping hints with the subtlety of an American televangelist drumming up donations that he was in search of a daughter-in-law, the B-Fs saw a golden opportunity. They were of course fully aware that my father had in their case mistaken privilege for pelf; they recognized instantly his motives in wanting to introduce me to the dusty spinster on the family shelf; and they were generationally expert in playing similar games themselves. And had the Bentnose-Farquarsons’ need for refinancing not been so pressing, there was no way that they would condescend to have down for the weekend a scrofulous upstart like my old man, who was in trade, and his under-other-circumstances totally ineligible son.

‘Given their druthers, the B-Fs would not have hired Bulstrode & Son to cart manure from the Augean stables, had they owned them, the old Yorkshire saying of “Where there’s muck, there’s brass” notwithstanding.

‘On the appointed Friday afternoon I tooled down on my own in the Bentley two-seater—a twenty-first birthday present from Dad—an hour or so later than my father, and only just arrived in time to dress for dinner.

‘It was one of those occasions when dozens of extended family in long dresses and formal evening attire are gathered up and down a long table, on which the array of crystal and silver and white linen is enough to blind one, staring at each other with ill-concealed dislike.

‘I was even later coming downstairs than I should have been, wearing a naff penguin suit, owing to a sudden but intimate acquaintance that I had struck up with a housemaid I’d rung for in my room, and asked to bring me the stiff brandy I needed to fortify me for the coming ordeal. The stiffness of the drink proved to be contagious, and I satisfied one appetite hard upon the other.

‘At the golden trough for the meal proper, I found myself sitting next to the woman on whom my father and the B-Fs had mutually-exclusively advantageous designs on for me: the Hon. Terebinthia Bentnose-Farquarson, known as Binty. Even in the dusk with a light behind her, I doubted whether Binty might pass for forty-three—as the future Judge was assured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta
Trial by Jury
, by the rich attorney whose elderly ugly daughter he decided to fall in love with as a means of advancing his prospects. However much I might have been looking forward to whatever we were about to be given to eat, for I was famished after the exercises my personal trainer had put me through in my bedroom, one look at this gal was like swallowing a bottle of diet pills.

‘It is customary to describe such a female as “rejoicing” in such a name as Terebinthia; but it was as plain as the nose on the plain of Binty’s face, which was very plain, that she’d never rejoiced in anything unless it were the discomfort of the bachelor unfortunate enough to have been seated next to her at dinner...and there had been a good many of them, which meant that she might have been the merriest of women; except that she wasn’t, nor was I prepared to be the one charged with improving her disposition.

‘Opposite the ill-favoured Terebinthia and me was a battleaxe, her aunt Lady Corsett,
neé
Tuffold-Bird and now a widow. Whether Lady Corsett looked like Binty in forty years’ time, or Binty was the spitting image of her aunt when she was forty years less old, I didn’t have time to debate with myself. In addition to an ear-trumpet La Corsett wielded a lorgnette, with which, when she was peering at a person through it, she would have made even the Prince of Wales feel like a speck of fly shit.

‘In fact, those were the very words that His Royal Highness used to describe the experience to his brother, and Best Man, when he himself ended up about to be wedded to Terebinthia Bentnose-Farquarson the following year; and he and the Duke of York were waiting the hour and a half it took Binty to get her arse and train across the county line and up the nave at Westminster Abbey.

‘Seeing the relict Corsett giving him her ocular worst from the front row, for in her opinion not even the heir to the throne was good enough for her niece, HRH confessed to his brother that the thought of having the old woman as a relation made him feel like doing a runner in full view of fifty million people on television. Had the sun illuminated Lady Corsett’s eye-glass at that moment, he said, he was sure to have burst into flame.

‘The Duke, knowing how ill at ease his brother was, and who was himself longing to betake himself upstairs at the Palace during the reception, with one of the bridesmaids who at that moment was giving him a very different, saucy, eye from the west end of the Abbey, replied that he knew how hard it was, but he must bear up, bear up old boy, and think of England. To which Wales countered that the prospect of having to do his royal duty by bivouacking that night upon Mount Binty was enough to make him think of the Central African Republic, where a single room in a Pygmy B&B would seem to him more of a des. res. than any palace.

‘Returning to our dining room in Gloucestershire
chez
the B-Fs, this same
grande dame
, Lady Corsett, who was responsible for the Bentnose-Farquarson plan vis-à-vis Bulstrode
père et fils
, in fact Lady C was in charge of all things Bentnose-Farquarson, could tell instanter that I had no intention of asking for Binty’s sweaty ham of a hand in marriage. This did not increase her disposition to be polite; especially since before the dinner gong sounded she had Googled my father on her laptop, and discovered that he was the descendant of an Irish bog squire who’d moved to the West Riding a century before in haste, after shooting his wife, and the two labourers he’d found in bed with her, simultaneously with a triple-barrelled shotgun.

‘If it had not been for Lady Corsett having come that very afternoon into possession of a butler’s pictures of the Prince of Wales being immoral at Balmoral with one of the junior maids, and being inspired to become his matchmaker, confident that the snaps would be enough to convince the future King to rendez-vous with her niece at the altar, Lady C would probably have come down to dinner in an even worse mood than she did.

‘La Corsett didn’t waste time with small talk. She fixed me with that famous codfish stare, over the Mornayed version of the same that was being served with an acceptably sincere Sancerre, from across the table as I was raising the wrong fork and hand to my mouth. It was the sort of
faux pas
that members of the upper classes habitually pass loud comment upon in the presence of the perpetrator of the offence.

‘“Tell me, young man,” she said; and the braying and neighing around the table ceased. Nobody dared speak during one of Lady Corsett’s annunciations: it was no ordinary woman who could convince a Commander from Scotland Yard that her husband killed himself in bed by strangling himself while she was asleep beside him. “Do you like horses? I hear on the grapevine that you are more interested in the bow-wows,”—Lady C had done her research well, into what at the time was still an incidental amusement of mine involving smallish wagers—“specifically the ones that have prices on their heads. Most of the gentlemen at this table confine their gambling activities to the card table, or a flutter on a thoroughbred. Do enlighten us as to your feelings on the subject.”

‘And Lady Corsett trained the Hubble telescope of her lorgnette on me with one hand, and her ear-trumpet with the other, the better to register the effect of her enquiry and my response to it.

‘Now, indifferent as I was to Lady C or anyone else’s opinion of my character, I was not one to buckle under such treatment; unlike the chambermaid, who’d promised to come again, and again, if I rang as soon as I could get out of the smoking room after dinner, pleading tomorrow’s long day in the saddle—omitting to mention the practice session that awaited me aboard the charming young filly from downstairs, when I mounted the stairs and her.

‘I finished my mouthful of cod, picked a bone out of my teeth, laid it on the side of my plate, and dabbed my lips with an over-starched napkin.

‘“You must like dogs yourself, ma’am,” I said, “since I observed quite a number of them arind and abite the hice.”

‘“Those are working dogs, sir,” said Lady Corsett; “gun dogs and pointers which have been trained to retrieve the duck, pheasant, partridge, ’cock, and snipe that we shoot on our estates. And to sniff out any poachers who may not have found the mantraps. We also keep a pack of foxhounds. The farmers have their sheepdogs. No, the animals that I understand you to be so fascinated by are greyhounds, a fragile if fleet breed useful only for coursing hares.

‘“But I asked you about horses, sir, not dogs; so tell me: how, in your opinion, are well-bred persons supposed to occupy themselves in the country, unless it be on horseback? What would a weekend be without a hunt or a shoot? Or are you suggesting that we spend our time chasing rabbits?”

‘Lady C compressed the edges of her mouth in helpless laughter during the faint murmur of hilarity around the table that this sally caused.

‘“Madam,” I said, when the silent echoes had died down; “I have never been fond of horses. The shape of them alone is enough to put one off. They fart constantly, they are incapable of friendship, and intelligence-wise they’re as dim as a Toc H lamp. Their priapism is enviable, but otherwise the beasts are a perfect match for the people who devote their feckless lives to feeding, shoeing, and polishing them, and urging them to run in circles and jump over artificial obstacles.

‘“Because they have flattish backs, I will concede that horses were once of use as a means of getting from A to B, pending evolution of the human skull into its current shape as housing for a brain capable of inventing the internal combustion engine. But the malodorous steaming piles of dung that horse-riders leave in the middle of the road are offensive. Riders disdain to clean up after themselves, and they leave it to the villagers to scoop the mess up and put it on their flower-beds, thereby depriving my father of considerable income from the delivery and sale of loads and bags of his fertilizer.

‘“It’s not the horses’ fault, of course, for they have no manners. A lady like yourself, Mrs Corsett, would I’m sure at least use a ditch or go behind a bush if you were caught short in public with a full load.”