The Triple Goddess (81 page)

The DL noted that Cerbera, although as Clerk she had no official standing on the committee and could not vote, was in the habit of expressing her views on each item as she introduced it. It was obvious that the clerk got her jollies from berating bumptious bureaucrats—dash it, there was another Darkism. Although being so occupied might make the life of a catfish seem as exciting as that of a one-armed trapeze artist, to Cerbera it supplied the nearest she had ever experienced to a sexual thrill.

It was also clear that the Chairperson, who was a stout woman with a ruddy complexion and an eye full of cheap Rioja, was afraid of her; and that the council members, now that they had satisfied their Village Hampden ambitions by securing seats on the Council, had not bothered to read the papers related to the agenda that had been circulated amongst them in advance of the meeting, and were relying upon the Clerk to inform them and guide their decisions. Nonetheless, whilst the devil lady was grateful to Cerbera for providing a synopsis of what had gone before, the DL had been made aware that all the interesting stuff happened when villagers arrived en masse to vent their feelings regarding some recently committed outrage that the council had no brief to deal with; and for that one had to attend the meetings because they would not be written up in the minutes.

Also thanks to the Infocentre the DL knew that there were three ways of getting anything done in a parish. Method One, the preferred one, was to buttonhole a councillor when a meeting was coming up, in order to have a confidential word about some party whose activities were causing one distress, or matter taking place that was inimical to one’s personal interests. The councillor had to be chosen with care because when committee members were not tittling they were tattling just like everyone else.

The first method had the advantage of concealing the identity of the plaintiff, rendering her—again, in the majority of cases both she and the defendant were female—free to attend the meeting without losing face should the thing not be resolved as she wanted. If she won, she had only to maintain an expression of neutral concern for as long as it took to get home afterwards and close the windows, whereupon she could do a Heimlich on a wine bottle and yodel all she wanted. If the unidentified complainant was lucky, the object of her disaffection would be present, ignorant of the embarrassing details that were about to be made public. She could then watch the object of her disaffection squirm and blush to the exposed roots of her coloured hair as she heard the charges read and, the complainant hoped, a verdict arrived at that was not in the impugned party’s favour. This made for great free theatre for all in the audience who liked their Schadenfreude cocktails stirred then shaken.

If the perpetrator of the alleged offence was not in attendance, and found guilty, she would receive written notification from Cerbera that she had been convicted
in absentia
; and that, although her name would be forever mud in the eyes of the village, here was what she needed to do to begin the lengthy process of expiating her sin. Alternatively she could put her house on the market and relocate to another village, with no guarantee that someone did not have a friend there who would spread word about her before she had settled in, which would necessitate moving again.

Method Two in this game of “Heads I win, tails you lose” entailed a resident going public on an issue by writing an official letter to the Clerk for review by the Council, protesting about another person’s flagrant disregard for the civil code, ignorance of regulations, failure to maintain property, trespassing, or unsociable habits. It was of course important only to send such letters when there was little or no possibility of the case not being decided as one wished it to be.

In the unhappy event that the outcome was inconclusive or unsatisfactory, one had the option to proceed to Method Three, which was appealing to the higher authority of the District Council. But going to the District Council was dangerous: because it was not intimately familiar with the vital issues at stake in each of the parishes it had jurisdiction over, it more often than not made arbitrary and illogical determinations that suited no one because no local person, having used a sledgehammer to crack a nut, could claim an honest victory. Being miles away with many a pissant problem to process, the officers of the District Council did not care because none of the affected parties were around to harass or criticize them.

In the few instances when the District Council surprised everyone by overturning the PC’s decision, the village prosecutrix might only briefly consider herself on top of the world, before the overruled parish councillors made it clear that they greatly resented that person for engineering the reversal. What happened in Sin City was supposed to stay in Sin City. Most likely the other villagers would feel the same way because they were jealous guardians of their own affairs. Of course, if the District Council went against the petitioner by upholding the Parish Council’s decision, the stigma was such that she might as well take the veil and apply to a nunnery.

The District Council, thought the devil lady, was a body with which she could do business. A lot of business, because the only further recourse, which was such a desperate one that it could not be classified as a Method, was to Hail-Mary the Secretary of State. Doing so was akin to filing a motion in Chancery, where, as in Dickens’
Bleak House
case of
Jarndyce and Jarndyce
, generations and a lot of Secretaries of State before anything came of it.

The weapons chosen by contestants in these confrontations, wrapped though they were in a metaphor of official correspondence, ranged from razor to mallet, from innuendo to threat. At the council meeting the accuser would sit back, her features composed into martyr’s mask. She knew that her target would receive a black mark irrespective of rectitude on the latter’s part; and that the size of the audience was irrelevant, for the few who were present would circulate every detail before sundown the following day. Even so, the taste of success at the parochial level could be bitter-sweet, for the bringer of the action knew how easily on another day she might find herself in the vindictive dock; in acknowledgment of which she took the precaution of casting melting glances of sympathy at her enemy, to indicate how she was feeling her pain.

A particularly acerbic dispute might remain on the council’s agenda for many subsequent quarters, continuing to irritate and upset the accused until at last it was concluded, and the winner could, if it had been a Method One anonymous suit, hug the doll of hypocrisy to her bosom as the object of her disaffection was paraded through the streets like a captive in a Roman triumph; or, if it were a Method Two action, bask in the adulation of those who had kept their own counsel pending judgement, which was their cue to affirm their approbation, and assure her that they had believed in her righteousness all along and had never been in any doubt that she would carry the day.

On this night the DL was gratified to find that there was a mature case on the agenda that would afford her the opportunity to savour these textbook intricacies. Helpful in the extreme was that the plot of the story had been summarized in the reading of the minutes from the last session; which, in addition to clueing her in, served to refresh the rest of the audience’s memory and whet its appetite for the next instalment. The case was
in re
a woman who had caused a new porch to be built at the front of her house to replace the old one that had collapsed.

When the rubble from the project, at the Porch Lady’s instruction, was dumped in the field that she owned to the rear of her garden, this had affronted a number of people, on the grounds that it was an eyesore next to a well-used bridle-path. This thoroughfare ran the length of the rear of the village, along the garden walls of the houses that lay to the south side of the Street, and between the Porch Lady’s property and the field. In addition to those on horseback, the path was used by the men as they returned home from the pub, to avoid running the bulls of racing automobiles on the Street, and so that the curtain-twitchers were not able to register their unsteady gait. The women also used it to walk their dogs, encouraging them to make their messes there, while they stood ahead, for other people to step in rather than having them foul their own gardens.

The case demonstrated that, although the residents were passionate about the beauty of their village, they were far-sighted in their appreciation of it. Many had testified that the indecorous pile of bricks from the old porch spoiled the view from the downs, and the consensus in the village was that it was as if Claude Monet had woken up to find that his lily-pond had been turned into a municipal car park. The rubble in the field constituted enough visual pollution to turn a sheep’s stomach, and needed to be removed
sine mora
at the owner’s expense.

One elderly woman said that, although she had never been up the downs to the ridge way along the top—owing to the lamentable condition of her knees—she had it on good authority that the vista had been ruined. This had caused her late husband, who was an avid walker until his fatal heart attack, to turn over in his grave; and her to be prescribed five milligrams three times a day of Valium by her doctor, supplemented by her own specific of half a litre of gin. To add insult to injury, the new porch obscured the prospect out of her kitchen window, from which she was accustomed to enjoying an uninterrupted view of goings-on in the Street, and seeing into the windows of the terrace of cottages that she owned opposite on which she religiously put the rent up every year and irreligiously refused to pay for essential repairs on.

As the Porch Lady sat fuming in Siberia, a woman who was a leader of the rubble-razing-and-dumping complaint movement leaned over the back of her chair and cluck-clucked her sympathy, expressing amazement that people could be crass enough to make a fuss about something so trivial. That this other woman, who was her neighbour, had recently also enraged the village by evicting a flock of exotic sheep that she had allowed a local breeder to graze in her own adjacent field, thereby saving her and all those who owned the coterminous pastures the trouble and expense of having them mowed, in order to clear it for her children’s soccer games (contrary to the field’s designation as being for agricultural use only) was
there
rather than
here
. Villagers were scrupulous about segregating their grievances for cataloguing purposes.

The tension was relieved as the man who had been unable to stand his round at the pub uncurled his spine. Some mention of the bridle-path had dispelled the fog in his brain and triggered a thought that he wanted to share with the assembly.

‘Sh...sly Drinkers’ Alley, dey used to call it, my gran-daddy told me. Mister Purty, ’e always went ’ome that way, dere was an ’and-rail along it then, you see, and he liked ’is liddle drop of ale of a Saturday night, ’e did, an’ ev’ry other night as well, an’ not so liddle neither. ’E were that monog’mous—hee—with the days of de wick, were Mister Purty, if not with ’is missus. Arm in arm ’e’d be with Mister Shteel, ’oo won the race to catch de shlippery pig, up de Devil’s Breach afore de bonfire was lit dat night, eighteen ninety-seven it were, for Queen Victoria’s Dimond Jubilee...in ’is socks, ’cause ’e ran better in the mud without ’is boots on, so ’e said.’

The councillors—who were wearing the stoical expressions of those unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of someone who had broken wind with prejudice—let him ramble on, on the presumption that he would be asleep again shortly and save them having to ask that he be ejected.

The bibulous individual continued. ‘Same year, dey ’ad a contest for Village Eejit. Five winners dere were, all tied for first place, nothin’ to tell between d’lot of ’em; stoopidest village in the county, we was, nowhere else ’ad more than four. An’ dey ’ad to divvy up first prize, didnay? of a dozen pork sausages and a gallon o’ beer...oh, de fight dat broke out, it were grand!’ The character seemed to pass out; then rallied as another thought loomed out of the brume. ‘Den dere were old granny what’s-’er-name, ’oo died just before ’er ’usband. Married sixty year, dey’d bin, and she was carried into ’is room where ’e lay dyin’ too. An’ ’e took a-hold of her nose, very big and veined an’ h-hairy it was, and said, “Goodbye, old gooseberry.” Dead ’isself a day later, sho shad.’ The man’s head drooped and he began snoring.

Interlude over, the DL heard of plans that had been approved, and denied; and of applications for retrospective planning permission, which was how one got to build something for which permission would not have been granted had one been foolish enough to submit the architect’s drawing beforehand, instead of filing the paperwork with the Council
after
the project had been surreptitiously completed, and getting it approved on the grounds that it would cause more disruption to dismantle than had already been suffered in its construction, and double up on the unsightly rubble that had already been removed. Although the retrospective planning permission subterfuge was deprecated in others, it was standard operating procedure when one needed to accomplish something for oneself, and more often than not the trick worked.

Also featuring prominently on the agenda were trees, especially protected ones, and those within the officially designated Conservation Area that the village was in, inside the officially designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that the Conservation Area was in, inside the officially designated National Park that the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty was in. The trees’ only alleged crime was that they were either blocking a view or impeding an approved prospective or undeclared prospective-retrospective construction project. People who had never given a damn about trees except the one that had fallen on their parked car, the car that had been shat on every night by the pigeons that roosted above, when those trees were threatened became instant arborists and tree-huggers and pigeon-fanciers and devotees of all creatures that nested and lived amongst bushy things that grew naturally without permission.