by Ashly Graham
Effie snorted. ‘Balls to that too. You may consider my visit here today a direct challenge. Choose your weapon, or get thee hence before we make you wish you’d never set hoof on our turf. You’re the very Devil, you are.’
The DL tucked her patent leather shoes under her chair. ‘You flatter me. More than the prospect of hubris obliges to assure you that I am not. And there I go again.’ She looked aslant at her manservant under half-lowered eyelids.
‘A pox on you!’ barked Effie. ‘Evil is what you are! Now you listen to me. Even if you were the Devil himself we’d have your infernal arse in a sling and baked as hard as one of my rock cakes on an off day, in an oven where even you can’t stand the temperature.’ Despite herself, the devil lady winced and a disagreeable chill ran down her spine. ‘Yes, Mrs Lucy-Lady, you’d better look out your asbestos knickers instead of those pink frilly ones you were wearing the other day, because we’re going to blacken your backside to charcoal and show you up for the diabolical disaster you are.’
A rattling sound came from the DL’s throat. This was too close…or was it far?...from Home. Through gritted teeth she said, ‘Alimentary matters seem to be both an occupation and a preoccupation of yours, Effie. The latter is not drawing-room conversation and I would remind you that hospitality only goes so far, especially since I didn’t invite you and you should not have been admitted.’ This time she glared at her manservant, and he shuffled his feet. ‘But as to your rock cakes. On an off day? I can’t imagine there are many “on” ones.’
‘Ha! Never say you weren’t warned. They look good, in fact they are good, usually, being made with what Ophelia calls “Good Synergies”, and she does often take a hand in the mixing. We say that my rock cakes are indigestible by people who don’t have the constitution for them. Nothing to do with my baking ’em too long. It’s true, that lawyer who divorced my friend Marge he ate one soft as the butter that went into it it was I’d heard the timer go off sometimes I don’t when I’m on the phone so I was exhornerated they said he died of acute appendicitis but that’s more than you need to know and in your case I’ve no doubt that one of my certifiantly softest rock cakes’ll rack you with agony until you wish you were dead or in your case deader I’ll let myself out. Like Mrs Piggott says, my rock cakes are to die for.’
Flouncing to the door Effie shoved the serving-man in the chest, so that he staggered and only saved himself from falling over by clutching at the wall. Never before had he been made such a professional fool of.
To Effie’s surprise, outside the black cloud had disappeared and the sun was shining. With some difficulty she regained command of her horse, which had detached its reins from the tulip tree by dint of chewing through them, and was now consuming a herbaceous border while the dogs cast apprehensive glances at the house. Heaving herself into the saddle with as much dignity as she could muster in case she was being watched from the window, which she was by both the devil lady and her manservant, she headed home not unpleased with the way things had gone and looking forward to telling Ophelia—whom she had not apprised of her intention—all about it.
Chapter Seven
The Reverend Ophelia Blondi-Tremolo had once gone AWOL from the priesthood, many years before when she was still quite young in Orders. At the time she was reckoned to be one who might rise in the profession, a potential star in the ascendant, notwithstanding the Establishment’s reluctance to countenance the admission of women to the ranks of the clergy. But Ophelia soon decided, after she had survived her first curatorial assignment and was assigned a small parish of her own in the West Country, that several key requisites of a successful career in the Church, those of diligent attention to paperwork, and observance of protocols, were not to her taste.
While the Church was prepared to tolerate gay, atheist and agnostic priests, and as few women priests as were necessary to quell the fires of discrimination—similar to the number who were reluctantly admitted by membership committees to the male bastions of certain London clubs—it lashed itself into a frenzy over clerics who did not respond to phone calls and messages; who did not answer mail, write memoranda, and keep up a flow between the alpha and omega of their in- and out-trays. It took an even dimmer view of anyone who did not have a desk on which to put the basket receptacles for such items.
The numerous angry telephone calls and follow-ups that Ophelia received from exasperated churchmen who had a proper respect for organization...individuals who had built careers founded upon the timely completion of reports, agendas, questionnaires...never met with any meaningful response, no matter how much they fussed and fumed and rated her for her lack of compliance, and uttered what those in Orders do as a substitute for curses, profanities, and blasphemies.
Tiny parish though hers was, the Church of England had never deemed the volume of paperwork it dumped on its ministers to be proportionate to the size of each living. Whether one was running a diocese or the smallest parish in the country, it made no difference: the bureaucratic burden, which every true professional was supposed to shoulder with joyful ease, was the same.
At the large rented house (the village was too small to have a rectory) that Ophelia shared with a dozen or so—the number varied from day to day—bohemian friends who could not be described as out of work because they had never had jobs or applied for employment, letters and forms and circulars and updates and enquiries and bulletins and reminders and threats from the rural dean’s and archdeacon’s offices rose in columns everywhere, the pages solidified like papier mâché or plaster of Paris by the humidity of summer and damp of winter. Cupboards were filled so full that one could not open a door without being inundated by a cascade of folders. The upstairs remained warm in the coldest of weather, thanks to the filled cardboard boxes that insulated the attic and helped to keep the electricity bills down.
Ophelia’s filing system at her shared accommodation was simple, and it solved the occupants’ quandary as to what to do for furniture, which even as a cooperative they were too poor to afford. It involved the laying of a foundation in a corner, against a wall or anywhere that the resultant edifice might provide a useful ledge, shelf or platform; and building upon it until it had reached the desired height or began to block the light. There was never any shortage of raw material, for nothing was ever thrown away, and when it was complete a new base was started elsewhere. Visitors surmised that the yellowed sheets at the bottom of each pile were made of papyrus, and those in the middle written and printed in archaic characters with fs in the middle of words instead of ss. When negotiating passage about the house one had to slalom around these obstacles, which were often in inconvenient places. So solid and broad were the stacks in the living and kitchen and scullery areas that they were used to put the television and supper trays and coffee mugs and dirty plates and cutlery and cooking pans on.
The largest platform, made from Church magazines, served as a dining table. The beds and sofas and stools and bookshelves were all custom-built from other Church-donated matter. One could have thrown books and ornaments at even the lesser constructions, and after a bibulous supper the housemates and their guests cleared them off and did so, for fun, without ever removing more than a few corners of angry correspondence. Insects nested in their interstices, going about their business via open windows and doors; and kittens and guinea-pigs were born in the recesses that were designed for the purpose. Cigarettes were stubbed out on them (the surfaces) without incendiary consequence.
However hard she was hounded by the authorities, the youthful Ophelia showed no willingness to reform. Eventually and inevitably her lack of compliance exceeded the maximum level with which eccentricity of any kind, so long as it was confined to an amateur interest in bees and steam locomotives, was tolerated. Ophelia, it was true, was interested in butterflies. She took a collector’s net on her pastoral rounds. She would break off conversations out of doors to chase Lepidoptera. Interspersed in the informal rambling deliveries that served for her sermons, she would sometime
s entertain her congregations by drawing, on a block of cartridge paper mounted on an easel, Red Admirals, Peacocks, Tortoiseshells and Cabbage Whites—for the children—and, for the adults, Graylings, Grizzled Skippers, Hairstreaks and Brown Arguses. She once launched into a disquisition on the differences between Common, Holly and Chalkhill Blues and her favourite, the Adonis. On another occasion she illustrated the migration of souls into Heaven by releasing live moths from the pulpit: it was the only time she climbed its haughty steps.
Eventually the powers-that-be began to see method in Ophelia’s madness, and concluded that her heretical refutation of the Church’s belief in timely paperwork, which she had avowed as a condition of her priestly investiture, was evidence of a lack of seriousness, a disingenuous ploy to shirk her duty. A telegram was delivered to the house—the telegraph boy had been instructed to put it in her hands only, and not to leave it if she were not at home—advising her that she had tested the Church’s tolerance to its limit. Having read the communication and told the boy that there would be no answer, Ophelia was thoughtful and used it to roll a cigarette.
One morning shortly thereafter, hearing an imperious knocking at the door reminiscent of the Porter’s Scene in Macbeth, accompanied by continuous jangling of the bell, Ophelia got out of the bath and, wrapping herself in a towel and leaning out of the open upstairs window with shampoo in her eyes, saw below a cloaked figure in what she took to be a bishop’s mitre, brandishing a crosier. Convinced that she was about to be subjected not just to a dressing-down but a full defrocking, or even an exorcism, she retreated without acknowledging the visitor; upon which the coalman, who had been trying to collect an unpaid bill before he delivered any more coal, left with his hod still full.
The next morning Ophelia packed a small bag and made her way by ship, rail, boat and camel to the Middle and then the Far East, where for two years she lived in a cave in the mountain mists above a three-hundred-foot waterfall, sustained by rice that the cheerful illiterate peasants who lived in the telephone-, paper-, and post-office-free village below brought up to her in wooden bowls. Here it was there that Ophelia’s fellow-bohemian friend Effie, who was lither and more adventurous in those days, tracked her down after an epic journey involving pack-mules and bandits, who—the ill-tempered mules as much as the murderous bandits—were greatly impressed by her motivational energy (she could kick one of the stubborn beasts into action, before it could kick her, hard enough to make it cry), and enthusiasm in joining their raiding parties. Turning down the offer of membership in their tribe, Effie persuaded Ophelia, who had begun to tire of an exclusive diet of rice and was yearning for apple pie and custard, to return to England and live with her in the Harrumphshire cottage that Effie had just inherited from an aunt. As the asses brayed their relief, the disappointed bandits accepted Effie’s decision, and presented her with an ornate dagger, slightly used, and a gourd filled with her favourite spiced offal to fortify her on her journey.
When the local parish curacy fell vacant the year after the pair had settled into the Harrumpshire village cottage, Effie applied for it on Ophelia’s behalf, assuring her that her reputation was forgotten; which it was not, but Effie worked her usual magic and got her the job after obtaining some photographs of the Archdeacon that he preferred not be circulated. The only concession that Effie was forced to make was that in future she would help Ophelia with her correspondence, of which there would not be much because the position was only that of a curate with licence to preach, which is the lowest ordained office except for deacon.
The unorthodox priestess proved not to have altered one whit in the course of her lengthy sabbatical. Many a time when she was supposed to be somewhere else, such as on Sundays and in church, Effie found her engrossed in cataloguing her butterfly collection, talking to her orchids or drawing, painting or sculpting in the glasshouse. Or she would have taken herself off for an afternoon’s sketching on the hill, or fossil-hunting, or walked far across the downs to do a brass-rubbing in another village, another church.
There was more to Ophelia Blondi-Tremolo than her reputation as an oddball curate. In her teenage days her beauty had turned heads and she had impressed everyone with her poise, early maturity and assurance. She drifted upon the skin of life’s waters like an ephemeron. At Oxford, where she studied botany, she was compared to Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson and caused many an unrequited passion in the hearts of both undergraduates and dons, male and female. These infatuations were only exacerbated by her seeming ignorance of all the houp-la that she was the centre of, and her decision, which she announced in her final year, to apply for theological college.
But physical attributes alone could not account for the worship that Ophelia inspired in people when, decades later, hard-nosed lawyers and captains of industry attested in vivid detail to the coup de foudre that they experienced at their first meeting, and how often the sensation of a glance, a touch, a moment in eternity, revisited them still at moments of the day when they were busiest about their lives, and when they were engaged in intimate activities, and before they went to sleep at night, and in their dreams. Unembarrassed and confessional, they recalled with awe and shared with friends and acquaintances and partial strangers how the sight of Ophelia had irradiated their beings and lives with the intensity of an encounter with the embodiment of an Olympian goddess, an earthly or semi-earthly muse.
Both men and women, who had known her as a teenager, indulged more tactile memories by going out of their way to stare at her childhood country home from the road, and hide in the holly hedge so as to avoid detection by the latter-day owners and neighbours, where they were scourged for their sin by prickles, to view the window of the room they knew to have been her bedroom. They meandered the footpaths that they had walked with her so many times too few across the fields and along the stream. They visited the schools and college that she had attended. Whatever place they may have been together, however briefly once upon a cloud, became the icon of a lifelong infatuation.
Ophelia seemed hardly to be aware that she was in contact with the ground as she walked. She seemed to float rather than exercise her limbs mechanically. As tall and slim as she was her frame was delicately boned, and her skin pale to the point of translucence. An effect of tomboyishness was conveyed by the way she dressed and wrapped herself in unfashionable garments, to de-emphasize her figure, and to show her aversion to the uniform of office and her scorn for the preconceptions that public dress conveyed about a person’s character and personality and status. This appearance of willowy fragility was misleading, since she was muscular and fit; as a girl she had played a mean game of hockey, and lacrosse, and tennis. She was possessed of great stamina and an excellent eye for a ball, and a gritty determination to beat any one of her opponents that she encountered on the field in a manner that was not personally glory-seeking but which had nothing to do with team coordination and strategy.
Ophelia’s hair was blacker than a raven’s wing and had remained so naturally over the years, every strand of it distinct and lustrous. Sometimes it hung loosely like a veil and sometimes with integrity of purpose, like Hermes’ helmet. At different times of day and from certain angles it reflected a gun-metal iridescence, or the azure or cerulean blue of a kingfisher, as the light sought her out amid the shadows and hurried after her like an anxious nanny. Her complexion was creamy, her make-up non-existent. As from underneath the fringe of her hair and haze of lashes, with eyes bluer than speedwell and head tilted to listen, she looked down upon the world she seemed to see into the soul of everything, whether it be man or woman, beast, bird, flower, or insect. She did not opinionate, except to Effie, or criticize, but with expression brimming with understanding she had a way of establishing an immediate rapport with people that made them feel as though they had gained the friendship of one who would counsel them, assist them in their struggles with the world, defend them in battle, and, at the last, bring them to an island of repose where they might lay down their weary limb
s and breathe a sigh of eternal fulfilment.
Those who were fortunate enough to return a look from Ophelia felt suspended in time, as if they had gained admission to some private secret spot meant only for the pair of them, and to which they might return consciously or unconsciously whenever they had need of refreshment. Men and women whose lives were spent in unremitting competition and concealment of their motives, turned childlike and innocent in her presence. As she grew older, an adumbration of crow’s-feet around her eyes only deepened her mystery and added further to her humanity, by suggesting that life took its toll upon her too; that she was not locked inside a bubble of her own purity, but that she suffered and endured like everyone else, and had need of the support that each was only too glad to give, and would have hastened barefoot from the ends of the earth to offer.
From the moment that she took up her first position, after a mediocre performance at theological college that surprised and disappointed the teachers who would have been only too glad to grant her sainthood, Ophelia came into her own. She mesmerized her sparse Ruritanian congregation with her addresses. Instead of talking down to it, her manner was that of one who had encountered a friend in the supermarket, and was wondering if he or she knew that a fresh consignment of lettuce had arrived on aisle one, or that Tesco had it cheaper, or that batteries were on sale, or that there was a buy-one-get-one-free at Sainsbury’s on packs of skinless boneless chicken breasts with extra points on the Nectar card.
