The Triple Goddess (97 page)

The summer sequence of outrageous revelations began at a time when even the tit-and-bum papers were hard put to find anything better to put on the front page than boring royal indiscretions and dull exchanges in the European Parliament about fishing quotas, wine lakes and butter mountains.

But as soon as they were alerted to such a major scandal as was to unfold over successive weeks—the joke was that it had plenty of legs on it, with the limbs evenly divided in favour of the male sex—Op-Ed and opinion article writers, journalists, syndicated columnists, private investigators, reporters, muckrakers, and snitches alike were alert for every scrap and nuance of intelligence they might come by irrespective of source and probity thereof and the expense of obtaining it. Often there was nothing to do because the information supplied itself via anonymous tips.

This was manna from heaven, and the gory details of sackings, trials, convictions, allegations, and tattle that the media were able to bring to the nation’s attention held the masses enthralled, as the yet-to-be proven guilty parties closeted themselves with their solicitors.

Newspaper proprietors and their editors watched agog as their print circulation numbers soared to pre-online levels. The press had a field-day pillorying and skewering their helpless victims. A huge sum was paid for an in flagrante delicto photograph of a well-known General Synod member, naked except for his mitre, making an inept lunge with a crosier at a shorn and extravagantly bosomed sheep who, judging from her expression, was far from lost and greatly diverted by the exercise.

For those on holiday abroad, three-day-old English papers flew off the stands at double and treble their usual exorbitant prices. Many who were pretending to enjoy themselves in European hotels that made Fawlty Towers seem like the Ritz Hotel—places where bathing meant going for a swim, where number twos were performed over a hole in the floor, and where having breakfast entailed begging a surly frog, wop, kraut, spic, or dago—wogs began at Calais was the old saying—for the privilege of paying thirty Euros for a thimbleful of warm canned orange juice, a stale roll or croissant, and a cup of mud and micro-container of UHT milk were relieved to have an excuse to come home, where they got up early every morning to read about such titillating items as diocesan-funded love-nests to which priapic prelates would sneak after banquets to “hook up” with their mistresses, and where a man with a bisho-pric, one uninstructed in ball-room routines, might instead be made privy to the choreographic intricacies of a lap dance; about a residentiary canon who was legendary for firing on one very large cylinder; about the not so legendary “Sheriff of Knobbinem” as the Bishop of Nottingham was dubbed by
The Sun
, whose tireless evangelism of the missionary position enabled him to induce a series of Maid Marians to cheat on their Robins of Locksley alias Robin Hoods.

The Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced himself verily gobsmacked by this Old Testament series of disasters, and tried to pour oil upon the waters by asseverating that the Church took these activities very seriously, which was true; and that it would quickly root out the offending minority, which was not true…but it deracinated itself. Even had the pontiff leaked Torrey Canyon supertankerfuls of extra-virgin oil, a commodity that the Church was not plentifully supplied with right now, well stocked though it was with Johnson’s Baby Oil, it would have been insufficient to smooth the immoral waves.

The disclosures continued to circulate like myxomatosis in a colony of rabbits. Nobody was immune to being outed by any number of underlings, pimps, Ganymedes, and sneaks who, lured by lucre and coaxed by flattery and other blandishments, were happy to dish the dirt. Bishops, who had never been accused of anything worse than simony and nepotism, emerged blinking onto the pavement outside the Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall to be confronted by media types in fishing-vests with cameras, sound booms and microphones, and at night lights and flash bulbs, asking them to comment on rumours that like King Lear they cast off their lendings and, unlike King Lear, cavorted buck-naked alongside deans and vergers in equal-opportunity orgies.

The offences were too dire to be brushed under the carpet, too flagrant for pardons and indulgences; and even if they had not been, the cleaning ladies had all been suborned and those qualified to absolve were themselves up on charges.

The court martialling and summary executions of Anglican ranking officers could not have happened faster if
Alice in Wonderland
’s Queen of Hearts or Judge Jeffreys had been in charge or sitting in judgement. Instead of decimation or a minor cull, there was wholesale slaughter.

In the general
sauve qui peut
, many, fearing the low tensile strength of the thread by which the sword of Damocles hung over their heads, took early retirement rather than see their names in banner headlines. Others, similarly desperate to escape discovery and adjudication, decamped to the Continent. Leaving their gaudy vestments and concubines behind, and doing their best to disguise their fruity tones and parsons’ noses and knock-knees as they passed through Customs, they took refuge in two-star hotel rooms, closed the shutters and resolved to apply, when the dust had settled, for membership of a less austere religious faith.

The Church’s chief executive, grim Cantuar, a man who—unlike Reginald Perrin’s boss Charles Jefferson, C.J., who said, “I didn’t get where I am today by having lipstick on my face,” and, “I didn’t get where I am today indulging in hanky panky,”—had not got where he was today through crassness and stupidity, contemplated the carnage and assessed what limited damage control might be possible. There were only a few bishops whose wrinkled hides and long-discarded libidos, wits and teeth meant that they were not in jeopardy: short-sighted deaf old-timers passion only for steam railway locomotives and bee-keeping. Meanwhile, amongst the lesser orders of priesthood, the customarily sluggish pace of career advancement accelerated rapidly.

Those who had alibis or could furnish testaments to their blamelessness—for in the current environment everyone was considered guilty until proved innocent—rubbed their hands, as they found themselves with all sorts of options and opportunities spread before them. Having hastened to the work-basket of libel and slander and made pincushion St Sebastians of their bosses, after the worst of the purge was over cadres of middle- and low-ranking clerics including pustular youths barely out of theological college had been promoted to fill positions they might not have aspired to fill for decades; in many cases ones that they were unqualified and ill suited for.

Notwithstanding the scale of seismic activity amongst the Church’s hierarchy, it was still most unlikely that the shockwaves would reach Ophelia’s catfish level in the sacerdotal aquarium, where she raised not a whisker to attract anyone’s attention on account of her being the only priest in the nation who was not aware of what was going on.

It so happened, however, that the man whom the Primate of All England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, contrived after having a drunken word in the Prime Minister’s drunken ear at a function to have appointed as the new Archbishop of York, his Number Two, was none other than the former suffragan bishop of Ophelia’s diocese—now fully recovered from his ghost-sponsored drenching. This bishop, whose own superior had gone the way of most other senior clerical flesh in the land, was an independently wealthy man and had bought, at least for the time being, the promised silence of his secretary Jodie, his former holiday companion Gail, and their predecessors Jill and Monica and Trixie and Topaz and Jessica and Lily and Emma and Charlotte, with a cocktail of Hawaiian cocktails, credit cards, frequent flier miles, jewellery, and cash.

Not only that, but the present Cantuar, many years ago when he had been a suffragan bishop himself, as much as he privately abhorred the idea of clerical wombs, virgin or not (and while he was on the subject, parthenogenesis, or reproduction from an ovum without fertilization, was one thing, but he was privately agnostic as to the Immaculate Conception itself), had officiated at Ophelia’s ordination.

He had never forgotten her. In fact, so struck had the future archbishop been at the time by her looks and aura that, despite his official espousal of the Christian faith, Ophelia had assumed ever since a graven image goddess-like status in his thoughts and his conscious and unconscious mind. In the course of their one and only conversation, before Service on Ophelia’s ordination day, he had even considered trying to dissuade her from entering the priesthood, in favour of becoming the wife of a prospective Church Primate.

But as besotted as he was he could tell the futility of attempting to divert Ophelia from her calling, and she had instead become his daytime magnificat and his bedtime nunc dimittis.

Many were the times thereafter that, like Ophelia’s go-to wit Sydney Smith, His Most Reverendship sourly asked himself: “How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is ‘I will see you in the vestry after service.’” Enslaved, he had remained a bachelor and dedicated himself to following Ophelia’s career anonymously and from behind the scenes. Her lack of progress made this difficult and for the most part unrewarding, but he was diligent in tracking down articles in the
Harrumphshire Times
in which brief reference was made to her having taken a christening, wedding or funeral; and scrutinizing blurry photographs of her judging exhibits at village fairs and presenting speech-day prizes at local schools.

It was a time-consuming task, for his amateur sleuthing could not be assigned to assistants. The lovelorn prelate did at least gain some satisfaction from gleaning that Ophelia’s domestic arrangements involved sharing a house with a rather blowsy-looking woman; whatever else this might mean, the discovery allowed him to console himself with the knowledge that she had not been snapped up by some wealthy patrician, or some well-connected mover and shaker, or some snooty intellectual—or some snooty intellectual wealthy patrician mover and shaker—nor had she swollen into the matronly mother of five.

As he contended with the Herculean task of bringing order to the chaos of the Church, and conducted exhaustive searches for remnants of trustworthy personnel who might assist him in restoring credibility to the institution, His Grace was smitten with the idea that he now had the perfect opportunity and excuse to move Ophelia close to him, using her spotless spiritual record as a cover for his motives.

Her delinquency in bureaucratic matters, which he was aware of, was in the new reality neither here nor there. Of exceeding importance was that this was not just any woman, but a saint who practised and never preached, a parson who excelled at pastoral work, and who did not have a political bone in her body. Even the most ruthless journalist would be unable to make anything more of the move than that it was a transparent ploy to win popular approval by advancing a woman to the foremost rank of the clergy.

The Archbishop, as he danced that night with gratification and a half-empty, or rather half-full, bottle of brandy from which he had withdrawn the cork with his teeth, in the privacy of his quarters, was confident that the public relations benefit of launching a curate into a top position would help to take the nation’s mind off smut as it cooed with approval.

Ophelia got the call from His Grace’s office at lunchtime, while she was picking at one of Effie’s chicken dishes, for which the béchamel sauce had gone horribly wrong. However it was Effie who answered the telephone.

‘You say you’re from the Archbishop’s office where? Lambeth Palace, London, SE1. Pull the other one. I’d say you dialled the wrong number. Wait: is this you, Marjorie, calling with one of your jokes? You know, Marge, I once heard a cannon being fired, but never a twenty-one gun salute. They must all be deaf by now, arf, arf. Yes, it’s an old joke, I know. Eh? Yes it is. No it isn’t. Really? Well I’m blowed. OK, lady, keep your hair on, I’ll pass you over.’

Effie stretched the receiver across the table to Ophelia, who took it as if it were a lighted stick of dynamite, and announced herself cautiously. Communications from authorities, particularly one as high up as this, could not be good news.

After listening with some difficulty while Effie rattled pans, Ophelia said, ‘Well…if you want me to, of course, I suppose I could come up. So long as it’s not on a Sunday. Effie!, please! Pardon? No, I didn’t say…I didn’t mean...yes, I know he does, or at least I assumed… What? When? I see. Excuse me for asking, but are you’re sure you’ve got the right person? Ah. Yes. Might I be permitted to know what…. No? I see. Wednesday at ten o’clock? Um, well, I don’t know about the trains, I so rarely go anywhere. You have? There is?...

‘And dinner the night before? Oh no, that’s quite out of the…I see. Well, we’d need somewhere to stay, because it would be impossible for us to…. Pardon? Yes we, because my friend Effie must come too, I’d get lost otherwise. No I won’t, not without her. Yes, I am saying that. I’m sorry, but…very well, not the meeting, but she can join us for dinner? You’re sure that’s all right. Thank you very much, I appreciate…I know it is. Right-oh, then, that’s settled. Thank you. Goodbye, and I…hello?’

After staring at the phone for a moment Ophelia held it out to Effie, who was flapping her hands with impatience, to return to the cradle.

‘Well, well,’ breathed Ophelia. ‘In all my born days.’ She stared at her plate where Effie’s sauce had congealed into a shellac-like glaze.

‘What? Well well born days what?’

‘It…it was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s secretary, or personal assistant or something.’

‘I got that bit, it wasn’t Marge after all. What else?’