by Ashly Graham
By contrast, the blackened souls of the damned remained hard-edged entities incapable of reformation or absorption into anything except a greater holding pen of evil, Hell, containing myriad units whose names were legion.
“LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE!”—“ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER!” Dante Alighieri was creatively misinformed on this point, for there was no such sign. The ability to abandon hope would spare the Damned knowledge of what could never now be theirs, namely forgiveness and everlasting love instead of everlasting death, which was their eternal punishment, and blind them to vision of the never-to-be-climbed stairway to Heaven. Despair without hope was not despair. It was the comprehension and constant reminder of the loss of everything that made Hell what it was; and it was the inability to relinquish hope, even when there was no prospect of regaining it, that made the yearning for Heaven so continuously and infinitely excruciating.
Fuelled by frequent recourse to the whisky decanter, the devil lady’s mind wandered. She imagined herself human again and young, impressionable and uncommitted to any way of life except the one that she did not yet understand because she had not experienced it fully enough. She had a family and a home of sorts with a bedroom to herself. Alone of a spring morning without anything to do she walked across grassy fields and along nesting hedgerows, with no particular destination in mind, past Friesian cows with heavy udders, and through woods carpeted as the season advanced with wild flowers: celandines, anemones, bluebells.
She came to a small lake, a hammer or furnace pond. There she pulled herself up by foot and hand holds into the crotch of a large oak tree partially damaged by lightning, and stretched her body along the surviving main horizontal limb on her stomach to observe the gentle nothingness of the place. The pond was surrounded by other thick-boled trees, but none so big as the one she was in, and there were thickets of hazel, alder, and willow along the water’s edge, and hawthorn, blackthorn, blackberry, and gorse bushes interspersed in a scrubby surrounding wood.
Summer thickened the foliage and deepened the shadows. The sun beamed down on the disc of water, which was interrupted by a few stumps of ancient trees that had grown there before the ironworkers came and dammed the stream. There was an electric hum of mating insects in the air, and the rings of fish rising to those that settled to lay their eggs on the surface. Dragonflies zoomed. There were a few mallard ducks and drakes at the edge of the lake, either preening or resting on one leg with their beaks folded into their wings. A foraging coot exclaimed before swimming off with a nodding motion into a reed-bed. She saw squirrels and rabbits, the russet slink of a daytime fox, and the ripple of a stoat. Autumn came, the leaves fell, and then the icy grip descended of winter when the lake froze and the air into a complete stillness and silence of sky and air and ground, except for the occasional slough from a branch overweighted with snow.
The devil lady had no idea where such thoughts were coming from, but they had the ring of truth to them and were disturbing. As hard as she tried to push them aside they would not leave her, only became more intense, as palimpsest memories were revealed beneath less meaningful ones…particularly one of a young and innocent love, which had never been lost because it had never been properly found, but for which expectation of its realization had, at the time, seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Draining her glass, the DL plunked it down on the side-table, hauled herself out of the chair, and went upstairs to bed.
Chapter Eighteen
The many letters of complaint, which the churchwardens and parishioners had written to the Bishop at Effie’s behest, were waiting for him when he returned from holiday. His housekeeper brought them in while he was eating breakfast the day after his return, and dropped them on the floor beside him in three doubled Asda shopping bags.
The Right Reverend had long found it irksome that the woman who did for him should take a sadistic pleasure in bringing business to his attention at the sacred matutinal hour of nine o’clock when he was engrossed in The Times; but he was too afraid of her to say anything. After she left the room he sliced spitefully at the top of a boiled egg, missed and cursed. Usually he was as proficient in the manoeuvre as a Saracen executing a Christian with a scimitar, but today he was not feeling at his best. His flight to Gatwick the previous day had been delayed, and he had been stuck in hundred degree heat at Malaga airport with his Helmston “niece”, Jody, for four hours while the plane, which was late arriving, was further detained by the lack of cleaning staff, then by an engineering problem, then by a confusion over checked luggage, then by the failure to arrive of the in-flight meals, then by the flight personnel going off-shift so that they had to wait for a new crew, then by the plane having lost its take-off slot.
Then, while Jody was escorted to first class by a businessman who paid to have her upgraded to the almost empty front cabin, the Bishop, who was in open seating, found himself squeezed into the middle of the centre row next to a tattooed and foul-mouthed beer-guzzler and his hoyden wife and two noisy children, one of which threw up in his lap while scrambling over him to get to the toilet before they took off.
The only positive aspect of the journey was that, being informally dressed in an open-necked chequered shirt and unidentifiable as a man of the priestly cloth, after the parents had slid into unconsciousness under the influence of too many Bacardi and Cokes consumed in the airport bar, the Bishop had been able to take advantage of some turbulence, when the flight attendants ordered everyone to fasten their seat belts, to lean over, cinch the brats so tightly into their restraints that they could hardly breathe let alone scream, take away the chocolate ices that they had been given to soothe them, and eat them himself.
Breakfast ruined, His Right Reverendship reluctantly turned to reviewing the mail concerning the latest pimple to erupt on the chin of his Diocese. Delving into one of the bags he tore open the first envelope with his teeth, and then the second, and the third.
Amongst the congeries there were letters from the senior churchwarden, Mrs Bawtrey—Mrs Patnode, her junior, true to form was prepared to give the devil his due and abstain from opinionating—plus all the others on the parochial church council, plus various of those on the Electoral Roll including both church- and non-churchgoers, plus a lot of individuals who preferred not to identify themselves because of the un-episcopal language and tone they employed.
Each told the Bishop with great specificity what the writers thought of the Reverend Fletcher Abraham Dark and the woman who had installed him as vicar. Not one of the communications that he read was complimentary, and, after perusing several dozen illiterate and inflammatory screeds, the Bishop put the rest aside.
As soon as the Bishop sat down in his study after breakfast, he made a few phone calls and was apprised that the man Dark, though a genuine priest, was an interloper appointed without his authority; further, he had several times been removed from lowly positions that he had held, if that were not too strong a word to use to describe the flaccidity of his tenure, in the course of an inauspicious career.
This news was made more troubling by information regarding a soi-disante Lady of the Manor who had asserted a feudal right of control over the Bishop’s Benefice.
The prelate understood as well as any civil politician that one was on a hiding to nothing allowing oneself to be drawn into village wars, internecine as they always were. Persons in higher government authority were always careful to ensure that such conflicts should always be devolved upon the local Jacks-in-office to deal with. This sparsely populated hamlet, which only showed up on the largest-scale maps, was unable to contribute anything to the Member of Parliament’s or District Councillors’ prospects for re-election.
It was the sort of place from which the nearest police station was so far away that, by the time a constable arrived on his bicycle to investigate a reported burglary, the trail had gone cold, and the villain had fenced the goods and was sunning himself on the Costa del Sol. For all the Bishop knew the man next
to him on the plane yesterday had been the one he had read about some months back in the Harrumphshire Times, who, after being buzzed into a local antique shop had made it out unassisted with a grandfather clock, which, though he might be said to have had time on his hands, he could not wait to pay for.
The principle was the same in Church matters, and the Bishop knew that he had to protect himself in similar prudent fashion. This was a bore. The Right Reverend had a Diocesan Synod meeting coming up, followed by a Church conference at which he was sitting in for his boss, followed by a seminar at which he was to speak on some exquisite point of theology that he had not yet fully boned up on, and these had much greater claims upon his attention than any of the three hundred and twelve parishes in his pastoral care, even the one in question that distinguished itself by having the largest file.
Especially important was that there were promotions in the air. The Bishop, who was still a second-tier bishop suffragan, could not afford to have a blot on his record, and he was all too familiar with how the rabid supporters and detractors of piss-pot hedge priests relied upon a good knock-down-drag-out fight for their entertainment. The Harrumphshire Times, or The Humpy as the rural Thunderer was known, would be sure to make a big deal out of it, and if his name appeared in its news or letters columns there was a real risk of his professional prospects being jeopardized.
So, as was standard practice in such circumstances, the Bishop summoned his Archdeacon and told him to write back to the senior churchwarden and play for time with a “Forty-Six”, and the undertaking that he would bury…that he would attend to the problem in person as soon as he was able. A Forty-Six, in episcopal parlance, was a form-letter containing a plea for prayer for the resolution of conflict in a Christian spirit of tolerance and compromise. As laughable—hinc illae lacrimae, hence these tears—an idea as that was it would at least allow for a cooling-off period in which the problem might go away or burn itself out…neither of which were likely but one never knew.
When Mrs Bawtrey brought her the Bishop’s letter to read, Effie was neither surprised nor fooled.
In the war between the reverends, to assist her in her role on Ophelia’s behalf, Effie had been immersing herself in the study of famous military campaigns. Having ascertained the location of the local library, she had applied for a reader’s card and taken out a number of books. First thing in the morning she would open a tome and prop it against the teapot. Along with cereal and toast she consumed Marlborough and Nelson; she lunched with Napoleon and Wellington; and when she went to bed she took brandy instead of cocoa upstairs and read Churchill with an unlit torpedo-shaped cigar clamped between her teeth.
Clear in Effie’s mind, from speed-reading a Reader’s Digest potted history of at least forty-six world religions, was that there had never been any such thing as tolerance and compromise among Christians, and that she did not intend her parish to be the first to demonstrate such a lily-livered and meagre-spirited attitude as to attempt to peaceably resolve any conflict that she was personally identified with.
Now more vehemently than ever opposed to appeasement in all its forms in consequence of her research, Effie was inspired to model herself on a more bellicose version of Joan of Arc, or was it Catherine the Great?, following a brandy-fuelled nocturnal vision of herself on horseback chasing an army of Rottweilers with dog-collars round their necks. After a course of riding lessons at the local academy, to improve her equestrian skills, she would be able to rear her borrowed gelding onto its hind legs without fear of falling off.
Then she would raise her sword—it had belonged to her great-great-grandfather, and was at present hanging uselessly over the fireplace in the living room—so that it flashed in the sunlight, and with impassioned speech urge her army of fellow parishioners into battle.
In the kitchen at the cottage, eggshells, butter and sugar flew comme toujours as Effie wielded her ersatz weapons of beater and baster. Flour was thick in the air, and Ophelia’s hair and eyebrows were coated with it as she tried to read an article at the table about cross-pollinating orchids. She could taste its chalky powder, the page was faint before her eyes, and her nose was itching. Effie, whose own nostrils were flared and full of the scent of gunpowder, put down her bowl to throw a dismembered turkey carcass and a ham bone into the appreciative stove; whereupon the temperature instantly rose a couple of degrees.
Effie straightened and addressed Ophelia. ‘Last night,’ she said, ‘I dreamed that Mrs Diemen had turned the church into a night club. All the villagers were there, more than ever come to Service, and she was ladling brimstone punch out of the font with a copper ladle. I think it might have been one of mine, I should check the drawer. Everyone was drunk, even the ghosts.’
Ophelia dismissed orchids from her mind, lowered the magazine and raised the snowy crest of an eyebrow. The hallucinatory side-effect of her friend’s recent literary intake was beginning to concern her.
‘Diemen,’ continued Effie, ‘with her hair greased down to look like a man, and wearing white tie and tails, was doing a sort of Fred Astaire tap-dancing, top hat and walking stick routine. There was a demon cabaret act. Then our Lady of the Manor, looking like a fiend in a Gothic castle, played along on an electric organ with heavy tremolo as in Blondi-Tremolo while Dark sang bawdy songs. There was an odious limerick he said he’d composed it himself, something about a Lesbosian lass, name of Lorna, on the horns of ruminant fauna. What did it all mean, do you think?’
Unable on the spot to think of anything, except “corner and “sauna”, Ophelia sat making the sort of noises that one might associate with a tapir with a cold, or carp sucking insects off lily-pads.
It was as good an answer as any, and Effie, after assuming the En garde! position of a duellist and making a few lunges with a toasting fork at the dresser, resumed her culinary tasks.
Chapter Nineteen
Adjacent to the parish hall, as close to it on the Street as it could be without being its Siamese twin, with a bench outside where blowsy old women waiting for the weekly bus used to sit and, without regard to modesty, “hang out their laundry” on warm days, was a chapel. Although no services were held in it, it was still a consecrated building. Unnecessary as it was, there having always been a church, nobody was quite sure why it was there. It had long been neglected, and side by side the two edifices had sunk into dilapidation; until several years ago a group of concerned locals decided to restore the chapel. Because they regarded it as being more their own than the Church’s, they did this without first seeking permission from the vicar or archdeacon.
At the forefront of the endeavour, of course, was Effie; her idea was to provide Ophelia with a place where she might conduct services in winter when the church was almost too cold to bear, as well as meet privately with those who might not be disposed to confide whatever was burdening them, so that it could be passed on to Effie, in a more public setting. That Ophelia had no interest in the chapel or intention of using it for any purpose was neither here nor there, only a future source of irritation to her house-mate.
Effie was a past-mistress at getting things done without lifting a finger herself. Hinting how their selfless efforts would gild their consciences and reputations, she enlisted a summertime work party of skilled and semi-skilled locals to restore the premises to their dubious former glory. They put in a damp-proof course and rewired it; they replaced the worm-eaten and rotted flooring, and replastered, and painted, and redid the gold lettering over the altar. They embroidered a new altar-cloth and brought in their unwanted items of furniture to scatter about. Someone contributed not one but three hoarse and decrepit harmoniums, which, when the wood was not too swollen from the homesick damp that immediately returned, might be induced to accompany hymns in an asthmatic voice.
The inclusion of the harmoniums was meet and right, for neglected chapels in states of genteel decay were the proper places for them, just as elderly donkeys were consigned to out-of-the-way thistly fields. A harmonium was an instrumen
t of death capable of extinguishing the joy of springtime. Owing to the depressing nature of the job, there were only a few harmonium technicians left travelling the country, listening for emphysema in the lungs of bellows, scanning the nails of keys for the right thickness of dirt and stickiness, and shining a light into innards to check for flourishing colonies of, instead of bacteria, boring insects, before the host could be pronounced healthy and fit for work. Harmonium “doctors” rarely lived to see more than fifty unseasonable winters before they committed suicide; upon which their late patients did their Scottish funereal best in pibroching their passing.
When the chapel’s renovation was complete, the members of the task force congratulated each other on their selfless work, and commenced the even more important job of advertising their good work. Because the chapel itself was to play no part in this, after two modern locks had been installed in the door and a padlock clapped on the outside for good measure to exclude the public and other vandals, it was abandoned to begin again the degenerative process that would call future generations to a similarly glorious effort.
