by Ashly Graham
‘“Only a dream!”, yelped Bob. “Thank goodness! Not for real!
Oh, I’ll never chase a cat again, and always come to heel,
I’ll let the rabbits nibble the grass, and ducks and pheasants nest,
I’ll groom myself, and take great care to always look my best.
I won’t run away, and I’ll ask the postman if he’s got a moment to play.”
‘As we came down for breakfast, Bob was wagging his tail,
He licked us on the hand, and went to get the mail.
When Ginger the cat came in he was all solicitude.
He wouldn’t go out without his lead,
He brought us our slippers, and papers to read,
He looked pleased whatever was in his feed. Bad Bob was suddenly Good!
(But we never found out what happened. It still strikes us as strange.
We’d love to know whatever it was that made our Bad Bob change.)’
This time the voices cheered. Dark, wrapped in his cloak of ill humour, thought that his story was just as unpleasantly good, and disgustingly moral, as this one, which had such a saccharine ending it made him want to toss his cookies, and biscuits and cake. Then the mothers and nannies started arriving to collect their children and charges. As the women bore down the nave they greeted Ophelia effusively, and cast venomous glances at her superior. Those children whom nobody had yet appeared to collect, keeping a wary eye on Dark, sat on the steps at the foot of the chancel and played with toys from a crate, which the church kept on hand to occupy them so that they did not squall during services. But they were soon all departed, and when Ophelia looked to where Father Fletcher had been sitting he was gone too.
After collecting up the scattered playthings and returning them to the box, Ophelia walked pensively down the lane that connected the church to the Street, and on to the cottage where Effie, having brewed the mid-morning coffee in anticipation of her companion’s return, was attacking freshly baked flapjack with a toffee hammer.
Chapter Ten
To the Reverend Ophelia Blondi-Tremolo, her church was like a person whom she regretted having let into her life, and either could not dismiss it from it, or had come to rely upon it as indispensable to who she was. Of particular concern was the extent to which she imagined that the building might be considered more of an asset to the village than she was, and held in higher esteem. Often it seemed that she and the church were in competition, and that the parishioners venerated the place more than they did their Maker. Its pastor felt upstaged in the performance of her sacred duty, somehow redundant its discharge.
One could not deny that the building looked attractive, beckoning, when viewed from the downs above on a summer’s day, as the sun caressed its weathered stone and lichened roof, and sparkled on the flints. There was a tower from which the irregular sound of the three bells being rung on a Sunday filled one with a veteran pleasure, as it mingled with the choral voices of sheep in the green amphitheatre of the rounded escarpment. It was a rock of ages, and the countryside draped itself around its well-loved form as if it were a natural outgrowth of the land. As a result, Ophelia worried that those who came to services were drawn, not by the desire to worship, but the church’s scenic location at the foot of the downs; by its alleged foundation by a local saint, St Bertram; by its Saxon and Norman construction; by the historic lead font, one of only several in the county, which, during the Civil War, had been sunk in the churchyard for use as a horses’ drinking trough, to disguise it and save it from being melted down for bullets; by the oak pulpit carved by a disciple of Grinling Gibbons, and the Jacobean altar rails donated by Archbishop Laud.
Everyone adored the place, and there was a roster of volunteers who kept it clean, decorated it with flowers, mowed and weeded the churchyard, and tidied the railed tomb and gravestone plots.
But as much as she was determined to treat the church as prop rather than mainstay, Ophelia knew that she was guilty of depending upon it, as an actor might on costume and make-up to boost a mediocre performance, or compensate for lack of talent. As a result, she could never bring herself to seriously consider using the depressingly unappealing Victorian chapel next to the village hall, for fear that her flock would not follow their shepherdess, even though it was closer to their homes.
She was irked by the way that the church, knowing how much it was valued as a thousand-year-old monument, despite the undoubted gravity of its many infirmities, manifested in its demeanour a deplorable valetudinarianism. The interior dripped, excessively in her opinion, with condensation; the elevations were crumbling more than they should; and the floor had buckled to an unjustifiable extent with damp. The small organ had not long ago asserted an unwarranted gravity of station by disappearing through the wooden portion of the floor that it sat on, when the death-watch beetles, energized and inspired by hundreds of funeral services, finally had their way with the floor joists, now bodgedly replaced and shorn up. The roof leaked, the gutters were broken, and the drainage gullies around the exterior footing were clogged. Inside the beams were riddled with woodworm, and the marriages of plaster and wall, and mortar and stone and flint had seriously deteriorated as the partners became estranged.
In December, when the church was supposed to shrug off its aches and pains and enter into the spirit of the season, only an Advent adornment of candles and carols, crib, Noble fir tree, berried holly and ivy, could render the place appealing to a congregation anaesthetized into Nowel mood by mulled wine and mince pies.
When Christmas joy gave way to pre-Lenten crabbiness, violent blasts of arctic air arrived with the intention of finishing the place off with prejudice. Whirling Dervish winds circled the outer walls in irreligious ecstasy, howling like a pack of starving wolves. They flung sheets of rain and freezing pellets of hail against the windows in a coordinated elemental offensive. They buffeted the bells in the tower through the apertures hard enough to set them swinging. The whipping of air draughted the interior enough to ream cobwebs out of the corners and force the spiders back into their crevices.
Then, after a respite while the force withdrew to regain its strength, it returned as an ogre who battered the walls, bounced on the buttresses, and hammered bare-knuckle on the door, in a mad voice roaring, with the vehemence of its destructive power, “When I get in, and I will, I’ll finish you off faster than you can say Jack Frost!”
By way of proof that this was not a hollow threat, strewn on the cryogenic earth was a chaos of shattered branches and drifts of dank, rotting and spore-laden vegetation. Rainwater gurgled in the gutters and gushed from the drain-spouts, and the withered grass was greasy with black leaves. The tiles on the nail-sick roof rattled in a fit of ague, the pores of the stones sweated death, and the graveyard bones beat upon each other in a grim tattoo.
In the bleak period through March, the interior that was as cool as a compress during the summer months, turned, as Effie put it, colder than a well-digger’s arse. No matter how much the oil-fired heating system laboured, whatever meagre warmth it generated through the wall- and under-seat pipes and floor grilles rose up and dispersed through the uninsulated roof. Ineffective though she knew it to be, Ophelia demanded that the heating be left on all week in winter, at a cost that bit great chunks out of the collection funds. At Sunday service, those living skeletons in attendance beneath their flesh, clothed with as many layers as possible, plus hats and scarves and gloves, still were chilled to the marrow. As more and more people decided to put their religious consciences aside until winter was over, and huddle by their fires, as the size of congregations dwindled so did the Reverend Ophelia Blondi-Tremolo’s patience.
She was infuriated. People marvelled at the sprung strength of the curate’s slender frame as, time and again during her service-long soliloquies, she matched the elements blast for blast in her diatribes against the church’s susceptibility to their inconstancy, lambasting its lack of fortitude in resisting summer’s malignant sibling. She excoriated the Parochial Churc
h Council for its annual failure to prepare for meteorological block patterns from the north. She derided the Fabric Committee that had feebly debated in the dog-days of summer what could, or should, or might, be done to preserve the building’s historic architecture.
Referring to the unholy state of affairs, she stridently quoted her favourite renegade priest: ‘As Sydney Smith said, when he was Residentiary Canon at the capital’s Cathedral Church of Paul the Apostle, “St Paul’s is certain death. My sentences are frozen as they come out of my mouth and are thawed in the course of summer, making strange noises and unexpected assertions in various parts of the church. You might as well try to warm St Paul’s as warm the County of Middlesex.” Fumed Ophelia, ‘Well, Sydney, your problem emigrated to Harrumphshire and took up residence here.’
The heating pipes rattled as if to corroborate her assertion. The Calor gas heaters, which she inadvisedly caused to be brought in to supplement their efforts—the person responsible for refilling the cylinders better not have forgotten to do so—had the effect only of contributing to the condensation in the building. Ophelia cossetted the ones that worked as one might a favourite niece or nephew: she polished them with her sleeve, and gave them pet names, and addressed them in the same tone of voice as she did the children at Sunday school. She was fickle in her charity towards them, however, for any that turned temperamental and either refused to ignite or gave up the struggle, she subjected to black looks and kicks and ad hominem objurgations. Her rich contralto became a peevish whine, her face suffused with petulance, and her expression soured to match that of a woman compelled to scratch a living harvesting beets on the Russian steppes.
But then as suddenly as winter had arrived, it departed. Come the first calm bright day when the ground was sprinkled with the opal bracelets of snowdrops, and purple and gold crocuses flared from the long-dormant soil, Ophelia’s ill will evaporated. Every year she felt humbled by the delicate plants as they broke through the hard earth’s surface, and was moved to repent of her solstitial folly.
Overwhelmed by the resurgent landscape, the return of pre-dawn birdsong and roseate sunrises and a hint of warmth in the sun, her indignation passed and she wept as anger quit her body like an evil spirit. Stalking the downland hills, she would stare at the carpet of violet-studded turf and drop to her knees to marvel at the perfection of the flowers. She paused contemplatively by lemon clumps of primroses, and swathes of daffodils. She gazed at the blackthorn that lined the woodland below, on which blossom lay like a benison; and when it came, regarded the apparition of bluebell haze as if it were a mantle conferred by a divine mother.
Sipping the milky air as she walked through the fields of lambs and heard the newborns’ innocent cries, Ophelia bowed her head to laud Creation and renew her vows as she passed, restored, into the springtime.
Chapter Eleven
The window-panes in the church
And the bottles in the pub are
Varied in colour and shape.
Two men are wearing stained-glass spectacles.
Squarely, one old man faces the altar,
The other in the pub consumes his beer;
Church-man is refreshed too, without the jug.
Their spectacles guide still gazes east,
And both men view glass through glass.
It is impossible to tell whether they
See darkly through it, or face to face.
*
Ophelia’s services were sociable occasions from which nobody was excluded, and for many it was the closest thing to a family gathering in their lives. Come rain or shine, at the bottom of the church lane car- after carload of her supporters parked on the Street, debouched and walked up to the church.
Having checked her hair in a mirror at the back of the church, at a carefully chosen moment when the crowd had circulated in pocket flurries to exchange the most important gossip, and settled on the benches, Ophelia would proceed up the nave and take up position at the foot of the chancel below the rood screen and choir stalls. It was a one-woman show. The transformation from her weekday self into the persona of a witty and charismatic leader was instant, and her eccentricities translated excellently into church theatre, which ensured that her monologues, always devoid of liturgical references, beginnings, middles and ends, were never boring. At the end she reassumed her off-stage character with ease. All traces were gone of the confident and assertive service manner with which she had given the Blessing, replaced by her normal quiet voice and look of attentiveness and concern.
Ready to assume command with all the smoothness of a relay race baton transfer, Effie would be standing at the back of the church with her assistant Church Rats, as they called themselves, waiting to reintroduce the Communicants to modern stimulants and secular sweetmeats from their station at a trestle-table loaded with a steaming electric samovar of hot water, cups for coffee and tea, and home-made cakes. Most popular of the edible refreshments were her golden rock cakes, which she and Ophelia made together. Ophelia did not participate in the mixing process, but she measured and passed the ingredients, and was in charge of monitoring the baking time as she scraped the bowl clean of dough and licked the spatula.
Small as Ophelia’s parish was, it made enough noise for a diocese. This was owing to a unique situation, in which the congregation was augmented by a number of people who were no longer on the Electoral Roll: to wit, the deceased. Immortal, perhaps, but still visible, if a little fuzzier in definition as if their pixel numbers had been reduced, or their likenesses had been faithfully rendered by a pointillist artist. What was even more astonishing was that the Dead were accepted by the Quick as if they were still mortally extant members of the community, and treated by them with the deference due to their seniors.
Ophelia, of course, was responsible for this easy relationship. She adhered to the belief that those who had passed on were still as much a part of the village as they had been during official tenure of their bodies, more indelibly so, and she encouraged them to remain until such time as they were summoned Elsewhere. For Ophelia, past and present were indistinguishable from each other in the continuum of her mind; and, so far as she was concerned, once a parishioner always a parishioner. Consequently the souls of the departed were in no hurry to move on to the afterlife. Fervent admirers of Ophelia, for them she was the source of comfort and feeling of stability in an ever-changing world, and they depended on her for reassurance.
While long-standing worshippers at Ophelia’s church were familiar with the ghosts who shared the bench pews with them, and treated them as if they were still paying council tax and water bills and keeping up their gardens, out-of-parish newcomers had a different take on the situation. Most newcomers became fast-leavers, quitting the premises in a great hurry upon being spooked, to the merriment of those who were utterly accustomed to the non-corporeal presences surrounding them, whom they did not normally see during the week, so there was always a lot to catch up on.
The ghosts, who regarded it as much their bounden duty as it was fun to haze every stranger who walked through the door, used to vie with each other to determine who would attempt the next induction. Now, to avoid dissension, a running list was kept by a phantom secretary of whose turn it was, on which those highest up on it often bartered their positions like commodities, or gave them away as birthday gifts or favours done or returned amongst friends.
Young women not of this Parish who were to be married and had completed an extensive search for the loveliest church in the Home Counties to get married and photographed in, hearing that both parson and premises were highly to be recommended for informality and cuteness, though thereafter having no intention of seeing them again unless they could be bothered with the boredom of a baptism, applied to have their Banns published by Ophelia. The ceremonial day, however, was sometimes marred or ruined by the interventions of still-embodied spirits. They were experts in dramatic effect, and liked to manifest themselves in cameo roles in the video of the event, or at a lo
w setting just after the vows and rings had been exchanged…whereupon the bride usually skedaddled down the gangway to the door with much tripping and tearing of tulle, leaving the register unsigned.
Once, a great-great-grandfather of the groom, anticipating the solemn moment out of eagerness to get to the reception, took a short cut through Ophelia. An hour later the girl was still refusing to come down from the bell-tower, the spiral stairs to which she had ascended, ruining her train, after snatching a bottle of Communion wine from an open store cupboard at the back. Her parents, as aghast as they already were at the expense of the whole affair, only persuaded their daughter to come down from where she was swaying perilously on the parapet swigging Vino Sacro and regretting that she had not opted for a civil ceremony in her local town hall in Bognor Regis, by bawling up to her from the churchyard that Ophelia had evicted the offender and swept the building for ectoplasm.
Since the dead were unembarrassed about their condition, and had a habit of coming straight to the point although time no longer held sway over their essence, Sunday conversations between living and deceased sometimes took a turn for the bizarre. A recent Sunday had featured some typical moments:
‘Hi, Val, how ya doin’?’
‘Eh? Oh, well, thank you, Sam. ’Self?’
‘Can’t complain, doesn’t do any good. You died last week, I unnerstand.’
‘You know I did, you old git, you were at the funeral. Which is more’n I was.’