The Triple Goddess (61 page)

The prestige residences still in the ownership of the original families were crumbling ruins. Though none was of architectural interest and most were downright ugly, much more so than the despised bungalows that carbuncled the area and had the best views, they were communally prized because they could be identified in old photographs and exuded the characteristic timeless façade of the village. They had battered antique furniture in the drawing-rooms, and foxed and unread books in the library. Valuable paintings blackened with age and kitchen-grease and smoke hung in the passageways. They were also home to rangy wolfhounds and lurchers and many other sporting and working canines, who in the evenings stretched on the flagstoned floors of the kitchen and hearths in the company of their owners as they shared and scratched their own fleas and ticks and bites.

The Establishment looked down its nose at the occasional incoming nouveaus who were always looking to outdo each other in ostentation, aspiring to join a memberless club, affiliation with which had to do not with wealth or profession or influence but length of generational tenure. A crusty old curmudgeon who saw trespassers off his land with a blunderbuss was more respected than any distant relative or friend of royalty. Whether one was a Baronet, Judge, Member of Parliament, or rich industrialist or commercial businessman, it made no difference. Here, isolation conferred upon the villagers an aura of independence and status that most would be unlikely to achieve in the city or suburbs. One had to have lived in the area for at least a quarter of a century before one was eligible to be acknowledged as an honorary junior resident...a probationer, for the least offence against the social order was enough to set one back to zero-minus. For newcomers were more often than not sorts who failed to apply for planning permission and gave the finger to the parish council; who were rude to their elders and betters; who raced their vehicles down the Street scaring the horses and their riders; who erected naff gates and conservatories on their properties that were modelled on the Crystal Palace...and who usually moved on in five years or less, as if there could possibly be anywhere else more desirable to live. There was no limit to the effrontery of such Philistines.

As to how the neighbourhood was ruled and regulated, as difficult as it might be for any casual visitor to believe that this thatched and cobbled hamlet could be riven with personal jealousies, and be the domain of spiteful political factions, it was a Sicilian enclave in which the verbal stiletto was the weapon of choice, and where the Cosa Nostra’s
omertà
or “code of silence” was honoured only in the breach thereof. It was a Doone Valley of vengeful parties who sentimentally passed their conflicts down from generation to generation. Insignificant details of village administration were fought over tooth and nail as if they were matters of national importance, and they often remained on local constitutional agendas, scrupulously minuted, for many years. Even those of the men who held real jobs would catch early trains back from their desks in the City and the rowdy Exchanges, and rush home to attend the quarterly parish council meetings, rising to their feet in quivering umbrage—their wives had coached them in this—at anything they had been told to disagree with, flooding the floor with all the vehemence, rhetorical flourish, incoherence, long-windedness, and unparliamentary language of a debate in the House of Commons.

The Village Hall was the laboratory where the amoebae of village biology were scrutinized under the microscope of village political scientists. Every new proposal was suspected of being a revolutionary, liberal, Communist or anarchistic plot to destroy the equilibrium of village life. At Parish Council meetings the least controversial subject on the agenda was treated as if it were a loosely pinned hand-grenade, a radioactive metal, a test-tube containing the Ebola virus, or a suggestion that one emigrate to France. Anything that smacked of innovation, however philanthropic, was Dead on Arrival and consigned to a pauper’s grave.

With the confidence of children who hide from their friends by covering their eyes with their hands, the locals turned a blind eye and deaf ear to national and world events and news, indulged in their arcane affairs and internecine conflicts, and celebrated their bogus traditions. Here, because there was no one to naysay or deny them or otherwise interfere, there was no business except their business. For ten miles away, in the metaphorically soulless town where regional administrative matters were in principle overseen, the District Council knew better than to embroil itself in the Balkan intricacies and acidulous disputes of local governance, and it ignored any villager so ill-versed in parish etiquette or stupid as to appeal to it to reverse some decision that was not to that person’s advantage or liking.

As in the Old Norse sagas, wherein Heaven, Earth and Hell are bound together by the multi-brachial limbs and tendinous roots of Yggdrasil, the mighty ashen Tree of Life, here everything was locked in the villagers’ Scandinavian grip.

Chapter Four

In the Confucian Book of Rites there are seven justifications for abandoning a woman: if she is childless; if she commits adultery; if she does not respect her parents-in-law; if she gossips, or steals, or is given to jealousy; and if she has an incurable disease. The men of the village would each have given a testicle for such a law to have existed in their own time; but historically the women had their spouses’ gonads under lock and key and took great care that it did not. Children who showed signs of being of masculine were neglected and ignored by their mothers. Women who had been unfortunate enough to give birth to a boy severed the umbilical cord with their own teeth and accepted the sympathy of the midwife. Boys were dressed like their sisters until their teens and told to keep their hair long. At the first signs of pimples and promise they were exiled to boarding schools and universities, and encouraged to pursue careers in the Armed Forces or overseas Diplomatic Corps.

They took the advice and never came back.

This was a woman’s world in which every man was an unprized eunuch, present on sufferance, and forbidden to speak on pain of having his remaining appendages of tongue and ears removed and stopped with Super Glue. The role, if one could assign it so active a term, of the men was to make themselves as scarce as possible about the house. From Monday to Friday they were expected to be absent earning money; and they were grateful to have somewhere to go, to get away from the shrews whom they had consented to wed in the folly of youth. At weekends they pottered about the garden, and occupied themselves doing the sort of unnamed tasks that Weekend Man does in his shed. They were allowed to play golf and tennis and bowls with each other, to appease their yearnings for stag company and a modicum of fun, and to allow themselves a sense of self-worth and -importance and an opportunity for feckless complaint amongst themselves (“Just who does she think she is?”, “That witch!”, “The nerve!”; “Not if I have anything to do with it!”; “Her and the horse she rode in on!”; “Over my dead body!”); but under no circumstances were they to get under their spouses’ feet or interpose themselves in deliberations about village policy.

Though they might be allowed to sit on certain do-nothing committees, in matters of domestic and public policy the men had no material say in anything: from the education of their children to the choice, furnishing and decoration of their homes, to the running of the village. Thus oppressed, the males developed saggy jowls, red faces and bulging waistlines, and spent a lot of time walking their disconsolate dogs up and down the Street, since both species were too unfit to climb the hill. They were shadowy adjuncts, powerless against a monopoly, an Amazonian cartel, and in consequence many were into their second and third marriages, a progression that entailed acceptance of even less authority than they had not enjoyed in the preceding union.

The comings and goings of members of these dysfunctional fractured families within such a close community could cause confusion. On Sundays, it was not uncommon for a lone male to be in church at the same time as one or more of his ex-wives, and it was part of the churchwardens’ duties to ensure that, although the women might be the best of friends, the man was seated towards the back near the door.

Amazingly, following the arrival of the DL, life for the men took a turn for the better; or so it seemed. The manager of the village pub, who had turned the place into a wine bar, was literally sent to Coventry in similar fashion as the vicar had been ejected from the Rectory, and the place restored to serving its historical purpose as a hostelry. The old tables and chairs were lugged out of the cellar, as well as the fixtures of the public and saloon bars, and reinstalled. The zinc counter, beer-taps and optics were refitted, and the stuffed animals and fish in glass cases and the horse-brasses were replaced on the walls.

There was not another pub for miles, and the men were greatly cheered, and rallied in support of the initiative. Nobody had been in favour of the wine bar, but the former manager was a bad-tempered rich pig and did not care because he was not interested in serving the community, only attracting outsiders with a fancy menu. Now they had a new and exciting extension to their circumscribed lives and limited range of activities. Eagerly they sought permission from their wives to become regular evening customers. The women conferred with each other and decided to approve such applications—they did not want to see their husbands at night any more than they did during the day (“I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch.”), on condition that they did not come home pissed.

A transformed Hob turned out to be the perfect manager. Possessed of wits he had not been endowed with even in his heyday, as instructed he contracted with the finest brewery in the county, Fuddle’s of Woozeley, to supply the ale, and proudly recorded that every week the number of barrels delivered grew as the number of patrons and per capita consumption increased. This was a growth industry, there was no doubt about it, and the devil lady was delighted. A memo she received from the Corruptions Unit in Hell congratulated her on her play-book ploy; for as was commonly known and taught to Infernal inductees, a man will happily spend half his life in a cramped and smoky taproom, drinking pint after pint of bitter until it runs like a tide through his head and drowns his rational ability and sense of morality—at which point the devil on his shoulder invades his defenceless soul.

At the DL’s instruction the cost per glass of ale was nearly doubled, from threepence ha’penny to sixpence, a tanner, and the domestically disenfranchised customers bore it without a whimper. It was worth it and more. Now that their favourite amber nectar, Hogwash Bitter, was limitlessly available on tap they felt obliged to put away as much of it as possible. Supply was dependent on customer demand, after all, and like the village stream it must run for ever.

The men welcomed the inn like a concubine into their sorry lives. She was a unique female who never shrilled, dictated or remonstrated. In this “parish of rich women”, of W.H. Auden in his elegy
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
, she made them feel larger than life. Like the sailors in Tennyson’s
Song of the Lotos-Eaters
, “propt on beds of amaranth and moly”, the males could not stay away from the easy favours of their shared mistress; and when they were not at the pub she sang and beckoned to them like a Siren until they returned to fall gratefully into her drowning arms.

As the beer invaded their cells, rejuvenating and inspiring them, they developed late-blooming careers in their own minds as forces to be reckoned with. Scandal leaked from the scuttlebutt, and from other sources mysterious and impressive, as from their barstools the omniscient village seers and sages pronounced on matters of global importance to an audience that listened and nodded attentively and politely, as each awaited his individual turn to set the world to rights. Havened in complicity, the men held what passed for conversation day after day with the same other men, men who would no more arrange to meet for a cup of coffee or stop and chat with each other in the post office if they could help it than they would run naked down the Street on a bet. Now every night these very regular regulars exchanged bluff greetings. What a boon such comrades were!

The pub was a rocket that shot the men to the guiltless fringes of the universe, where there were no bills to be paid, no nagging wives and obstreperous bosses, and no feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt. As they escaped from the flat bosoms of their families with a wink on the pretext of walking the wheezing dog, and hastened into the gloaming, the pub shone and beamed like a floodlit palace, an illuminated pleasure-dome, a fiery beacon, a lighthouse. As soon as they entered it, they experienced the most wonderful sensations of welcome, release, and ease. Here, safely ensconced for the next two or three or four hours, every man was free to dream and imagine himself as lord of the manor or sheikh of the harem, whatever was his fantasy, floated his boat, or rang his bell...not the one that heralded chucking-out time. Here each man for the duration was a biblical Solomon: a Solomon stayed with flagons, not comforted with apples...unless the juice was expressed from those apples and fermented and poured as Old Scrumptious Cider...a Solomon who had the leisure to wax expansive upon all that was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. “O friends; drink, yea, and drink abundantly…”!

*

These women who attend church religiously,

Alone or with their children, smartly dressed,

To whom the Sunday Host flies eagerly

And rests upon devout, transparent lips...