The Triple Goddess (98 page)

‘He, the Archbishop that is, wants to see me at Lambeth Palace on Wednesday morning, the woman wouldn’t say why. A formal meeting. He wants us to come the night before and have dinner with him at Lambeth Palace. They’ll put us up. I don’t understand, what can he possibly want to talk to me about after all these years? We only had the briefest of encounters, and that was aeons ago.’

Her friend was agog. ‘What! You’ve met before?’

‘Yes, I had a short interview with him before Service on the day he ordained me. Not just me, there was a bunch of others too. We each had to have a one-on-one with him beforehand so he could tell us what was expected of us. Routine thing, matter of form. He wasn’t an archbishop then, of course, just a suffragan, but it was obvious to me that he was on his way up the ladder.’

‘Blimey.’

‘It got a bit uncomfortable.’

‘What got uncomfortable?’

‘Our meeting. First he ogled me, and then….’

Already agog, Effie goggled. ‘Ogled?’

‘You know, when a man looks at you with a predatory look in his eye.’

‘If he’d looked at me with a predatory look in his eye I’d black it for him and the other one too for free. Ogled and what? You said “and…”. Ogled and what?’

‘He put his hand on my knee.’

‘No!’

‘Then when I pushed it off he stammered and blushed and spilled his glass of sherry. He had seen all the others before I went in, I was the last, and he poured us both a glass of sherry. I think he’d had a glass with everyone. But he won’t remember anything about that, or me, it’s got to be just coincidence.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure. I smell a rat.’

‘We can’t not go, Effie, I’ve already said we would. They would unfrock me or something, strip me of my…’

‘If you ask me, that’s exactly what he’s got in mind, and he’s planning to do it himself. It’s called hands-on management. All right, we’ll go and see this ogler of ordinands. I’m going to book myself a manny and a peddy; not that he’s going to see my toes, even if he asks me to walk barefoot up and down his spine and give him a massage, which he likely will. Once an ogler always an ogler.’

Effie stabbed at her chicken breast as if it had ogled her, and her fork skidded off the surface like an ice-skater’s boot in a mistimed double Axell or triple salchow. She pounded the table with her fist. ‘Look at that—ruined, and all because of him. I’ll have to soak the plates to get it off.’

Covering her lips with her napkin, Ophelia breathed a small sigh of relief at not having to fight the chicken any longer. She would have a couple of slices of cinnamon toast at teatime to make up.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Tuesday came, none too soon for Father Fletcher, to whom the wait had seemed like a month of Sundays, the bane of his former life; and although Lady Enderby’s driver ffanshawe was not due to pick him up until much later, he was up betimes.

There was some serious grooming to be done. First thing after breakfast, he enlisted one of the Barts to give him a haircut; and as it circled him, snapping the scissors like an agitated lobster, the reverend came as close as he ever did to praying, that the Almighty might spare his ears a cropping.

At last the job was finished, his aural appendages were intact, and the Almighty was dismissed. Dark’s housekeeping unit swept the black and grey tonsorial clippings from the kitchen’s linoleum floor into a dustpan, the while gumming away in Bart pidgin: ‘Fuzzywuzzyh’dnohair, hnhm. Fuzzywuzzyh’dnohair, hnhm. Fuzzywuzzy-wuzn’tfuzzywuzzee? Hmuh, hmm.’

Dark, still sweating from apprehension as to what disfigurement the scissors might cause, and the consequent ruinous effect upon his love life, went upstairs to the bathroom, shut the door, and assessed the all-round effect with the aid of a wall-mirror and small looking-glass. It was not too bad, really, he decided, as he picked at the bits of hair that were sticking to his face and neck: a little lopsided, perhaps, but that could be compensated for if he were to tilt his head to one side when her ladyship’s eyes were gazing into his.

Next, he stripped down to his underwear and opened a box containing a hair-colour kit. After putting on the pair of plastic gloves provided, he poured the dye into the developer, shook the solution vigorously, and squeezed it liberally around his scalp. To dispel the boredom of the next twelve minutes, which he was warned was the maximum amount of time that the mixture of hydrogen peroxide, ammonia, and dye should be left to work its alchemy, he flexed his muscles and contorted himself into various postures adopted by Jack LaLanne body-builders as they posed onstage for the judges.

When there were only a few minutes left, the reverend ran the bath taps, used a face-flannel to wipe up the larger spots of solution that had dripped onto the floor, poured a quantity of pine bath salts into the tub, added some orange- and mango-scented bubble liquid, a gift from his aunt Ethel, tested the temperature with his toe, yelped, decreased the flow of hot water and increased the cold, stirred everything around, took off the rest of his clothes, and got in with his yellow rubber duck. When the temperature had cooled sufficiently, he subsided beneath the surface to wash the dye out of his hair, upon which a quantity of black water surged over the side of the bathtub.

Ignoring it, he grasped a worn cracked bar of green Fairy soap, lathered it up and, alternately standing and sitting, began the laborious process of delving into the gullies and smoothing the rolling plains of his flesh, rubbing his back with a loofah and pumicing his feet. The bubbles disappeared under the influence of the spoil-sporting soap, and were replaced by a layer of scum that lay like Earth upon the Darkness.

Leaning forward to add more hot water and swish it about, he raised his voice through the steam to the ceiling in a bawdy music-hall ballad, then lay back to immerse himself and disperse the suds from his body. When the water was too cold for comfort he leaned forward to pull the plug, got up with a grunt as the Stygian waters began their vortex down the drain, eased himself over the side onto the bathmat, wrapped a frayed bath-sheet about his corpus, which had been rendered umber-coloured by the hair dye—after pausing in surprise it occurred to him that his intended, as she unwrapped him, would admire his unseasonal all-over tan, plus it served to disguise the hairlessness of his chest—secured it round his waist, and went to open the door and bawl for a Bart!.

The gurgle of the emptying tub was soon accompanied by the sound of a foot and a half thumping up the stairs and the gargling of the ascending Bart!.

‘Bring me a cassock,’ bellowed Dark. His servant’s progress, but not the gargle, stopped. ‘Cass-ock. Not sock, cassock. Black priestly garment. The best one, d’you hear?’ He simpered. ‘And while you’re at it, bring me my bow of burning gold and my arrows of desire!’

The bath expired with a strangulated sound.

‘Nng?’

‘Never mind,’ he shouted; ‘just the cassock.’

Since it was going to be a while in arriving, Dark attended to the facial hoeing and weeding part of his toilet. He squeezed blackheads from his nose, and squealed as he tweezed clumps of hair from his nostrils and ears and an archipelago of moles on his chin. When the promontories and ducts of his physiognomy had been cleared as much as possible of brush, and he had shaved with an old cutthroat razor, brushed his teeth and tongue and swished his mouth with Listerine, which he had bought the year before under the impression, until he tried it and read the label at home, that it was cheap whisky, he slathered his chops with an aftershave—a present from his aunt Dora—so virulent that it made his eyes water.

After applying scraps of lavatory paper to the nicks that the age-notched razor blade had made in his face, he went into the bedroom to search for his least unrespectable undergarments. As he ransacked the tallboy and tossed each rejected item onto the floor, he sniggered at the thought that, to assist in the speediest possible divestment, it might be preferable not to wear any. Finally he found a long-sleeved vest, rather yellow in the armpits, a pair of underpants that would pass muster if one did not look at them too closely, and a Malvolian pair of knee-length argyle socks.

When the Bart! hoisted itself up the last step onto the landing with his laundered spare cassock, he went to extricate it from its grasp. Noting the astonished look on the creature’s face, he laid the cassock over the landing rail, grasped the Bart! by both shoulders, turned it smartly about, and shoved it in the small of the back to impel it across the landing to embark upon its perilous descent.

Adjourning to his bedroom, the reverend donned the cassock, fumbled with the studs to his tab collar, ran a glob of Brylcreem through his hair with both hands, took a comb and parted it in the middle with surgical precision, slicked it down on either side with a pair of brushes backed with fake tortoiseshell, and assumed the smile that he kept in the mirror for the purpose of admiring himself.

He looked like the smirking Mr Toad after he had readied himself for the banquet at the conclusion of
The Wind in the Willows
.

Both servants were waiting for their master at the foot of the stairs, and gaped at his shiny pompadour as he glided self-consciously down with his hand running lightly along the banister as the resident spores of damp, and the aroma of boiled cabbage that filtered up from the kitchen, and particles of dust and flakes of dog and human dander and follicles of hair, apprehending a new broom-sweeps-clean presence, quailed before the onslaught of the smells of soap, pine, orange and mango, aftershave, and antiseptic mouthwash.

For the rest of the day Dark read poetry to elevate his mind to the plane on which conversation with Lady Enderby no doubt took place, and so lost himself in it that when the doorbell rang at precisely a quarter to six, he jumped and knocked over a vase, a present from his Aunt Mabel.

Springing up and hastening to the door, he collided with the Barts! in the hall, and as they fought with each other to slide open the stiff bolts, remove the chains, and unlock the several locks he cursed himself for forgetting to have the front entrance readied for the arrival of ffanshawe, Lady Enderby’s chauffeur. Visitors to the Annexe being rare, and there being nothing within worth stealing, when Dark and the Barts! left the house they used the kitchen door, which was secured by a simple catch.

The man who was standing impatiently on the step, his thin lips jagged with contempt, recoiled at the wave of odours that were released from the house, and surprise at the sight of Dark and his gruesome twosome as they stood panting from their exertions.

ffanshawe turned out to a tall lean hatchet-faced individual, with a high brow and long strands of lank grey hair that hung to his shoulders. Suited in a livery of mulberry corduroy with flared trousers, he looked like Franz Liszt in a bad mood.

Dark gripped the Barts on either side of him by the scruff of the neck and flung them backwards. ‘Ah, ffanshawe, isn’t it? A very good evening to you.’

Saying nothing, a haughty ffanshawe swung on his heel and led the way to the car with the reverend tripping along behind him…until, arrested by a magnificent sight, Dark pulled up short.

Before them an enormous jet-black Jaguar motor car, dominant and threatening in demeanour, dwarfed the weed-infested patch of gravel at the front of the house. There it crouched on its haunches ready to pounce with a snarl at the exposed jugular vein of the road.

The sleek and curvaceous vehicle, which had multiple exhausts sprouting like Pan-pipes from its rear, bore a rampant Lamia (the mythical woman familiar to Dark from Lady Enderby’s notepaper crest) bonnet ornament instead of the Jaguar’s usual leaping cat equivalent of the Spirit of Ecstasy female ornament on a Rolls-Royce. The same Lamia emblem done in reddish-gold adorned the car’s front door panels.

The car was so big that Dark wondered how ever it had got between the gateposts. Everything about it spoke of pedigree and style, and even in the fading light of early evening the waxed carriage-work shone, the burnished chrome gleamed, and the windows sparkled.

The chauffeur said nothing as he opened the right rear door, and the reverent reverend, already transported with joy, advanced. Getting inside, he almost swooned at the aroma of leather and the buttery feel of the epidermis of murdered steer. He was further enraptured by the lacquered burl of the walnut, and the thunk of the door as his escort slammed it to. When ffanshawe rounded the front of the great car, slid behind the wheel, pulled on his driver’s gloves and touched the starter on the fluorescent facia, the purr of the engine was almost undetectable.

‘Fritter my fumets, ffanshawe,’ Dark exclaimed, leaning toward the lowered glass partition between the compartments, ‘but this is very fine, isn’t it? How long have you had her?’

In reply, the glass panel between front and back cabin rose and the central locking clunked as the Jaguar, stalking out of the entryway, bounded forward on the narrow winding lane. It seemed impossible that they were not going to collide with something...until Dark registered with a curious detachment that the luxurious limousine had left the road altogether, and, like E.M. Forster’s Celestial Omnibus, was climbing into the air.

It took a moment to confirm that his eyes were not deceiving him; but, when he was convinced that they were not, he relaxed; such a capability was only to be expected of the sort of fully-loaded conveyance that Lady Enderby would have, and the life he was being introduced to. So confident was he of being safe and secure, that instead of being afraid he was fascinated, and looked about him eagerly, not wishing to miss a thing about his experience.