Chapter 17
It was Friday and as on every other day in the week the little church at Waterswick was empty. And as on every other day of the week the Vicar, the Reverend St John Froude was drunk. The two things went together, the lack of a congregation and the Vicar’s insobriety. It was an old tradition dating back to the days of smuggling, when Brandy for the Parson had been about the only reason the isolated hamlet had a vicar at all. And like so many English traditions it died hard. The Church authorities saw to it that Waterswick got idiosyncratic parsons whose awkward enthusiasms tended to make them unsuitable for more respectable parishes and they, to console themselves for its remoteness and lack of interest in things spiritual, got alcoholic. The Rev St John Froude maintained tradition. He attended to his duties with the same Anglo-Catholic Fundamentalist fervour that had made him so popular in Esher and turned an alcoholic eye on the activities of his few parishioners who, now that brandy was not so much in demand, contented themselves with the occasional boatload of illegal Indian immigrants.
Now as he finished a breakfast of eggnog and Irish coffee and considered the iniquities of his more egregious colleagues as related in the previous Sunday’s paper he was startled see something wobbling above the reeds on Eel Stretch. It looked like balloons, white sausage-shaped balloons that rose briefly and then disappeared. The Rev St John Froude shuddered, shut his eyes, opened them again and thought about the virtues of abstinence. If he was right and he didn’t know whether he wanted to be or not, the morning was being profaned by a cluster of contraceptives, inflated contraceptives wobbling erratically where by the nature of things no contraceptive had ever wobbled before. At least he hoped it was cluster. He was so used to seeing things in twos when they were in fact ones that he couldn’t be sure if what looked like a cluster of inflated contraceptives wasn’t just one or better still none at all.
He reeled off to his study to get his binoculars and stepped out onto the terrace to focus them. By that time the manifestation had disappeared. The Rev St John Froude shook his head mournfully. Things and in particular his liver had reached a pretty pickle for him to have hallucinations so early in the morning. He went back into the house and tried to concentrate his attention on a case involving an Archdeacon in Ongar who had undergone a sex-change operation before eloping with his verger. There was matter there for a sermon if only he could think of a suitable text.
At the bottom of the garden Eva Wilt watched his retreat and wondered what to do. She had no intention of going up to the house and introducing herself in her present condition. She needed clothes, or at least some sort of covering. She looked around for something temporary and finally decided on some ivy climbing up the graveyard fence. With one eye on the Vicarage she emerged from the willow tree and scampered across to the fence and through the gate into the churchyard. There she ripped some ivy off the trunk of a tree and, carrying it in front of her rather awkwardly, made her way surreptitiously up the overgrown path towards the church. For the most part her progress was masked from the house by the trees but once or twice she had to crouch low and scamper from tombstone to tombstone in full view of the Vicarage. By the time she reached the church porch she was panting and her sense of impropriety had been increased tenfold. If the prospect of presenting herself at the house in the nude offended her on grounds of social decorum, going into a church in the raw was positively sacrilegious. She stood in the porch and tried frantically to steel herself to go in. There were bound to be surplices for the choir in the vestry and dressed in a surplice she could go up to the house. Or could she? Eva wasn’t sure about the significance of surplices and the Vicar might be angry. Oh dear it was all so awkward. In the end she opened the church door and went inside. It was cold and damp and empty. Clutching the ivy to her she crossed to the vestry door and tried it. It was locked. Eva stood shivering and tried to think. Finally she went outside and stood in the sunshine trying to get warm.
In the Staff room at the Tech, Dr Board was holding court. ‘All things considered I think we came out of the whole business rather creditably,’ he said. ‘The Principal has always said he wanted to put the college on the map and with the help of friend Wilt it must be said he has succeeded. The newspaper coverage has been positively prodigious. I shouldn’t be surprised if our student intake jumped astonishingly.’
‘The committee didn’t approve our facilities,’ said Mr Morris, ’so you can hardly claim their visit was an unqualified success.’
‘Personally I think they got their money’s worth,’ said Dr Board. ‘It’s not every day you get the chance to see an exhumation and an execution at the same time. The one usually precedes the other and certainly the experience of seeing what to all intents and purposes was a woman turn in a matter of seconds into a man, an instantaneous sex change, was to use a modern idiom, a mind-blowing one.’
‘Talking of poor Mayfield,’ said the Head of Geography, ‘I understand he’s still at the Mental Hospital.’
‘Committed?’ asked Dr Board hopefully.
‘Depressed. And suffering from exhaustion.’
‘Hardly surprising. Anyone who can use language…abuse language like that is asking for trouble. Structure as a verb, for example.’
‘He had set great score by the joint Honours degree and the fact that it has been turned down…’
‘Quite right too,’ said Dr Board. ‘The educative value of stuffing second-rate students with fifth-rate ideas on subjects as diverse as Medieval Poetry and Urban Studies escapes me. Far better that they should spend their time watching the police dig up the supposed body of a woman coated in concrete, stretch her neck, rip all her clothes off her, hang her and finally blow her up until she explodes. Now that is what I call a truly educational experience. It combines archaeology with criminology, zoology with physics, anatomy with economic theory, while maintaining the students’ undivided attention all the time. If we must have joint Honours degrees let them be of that vitality. Practical too. I’m thinking of sending away for one of those dolls.’
‘It still leaves unresolved the question of Mrs Wilt’s disappearance,’ said Mr Morris.
‘Ah, dear Eva,’ said Dr Board wistfully. ‘Having seen so much of what I imagined to be her I shall, if I ever have the pleasure of meeting her again treat her with the utmost courtesy. An amazingly versatile woman and interestingly proportioned. I think I shall christen my doll Eva.’
‘But the police still seem to think she is dead.’
‘A woman like that can never die.’ said Dr Board. ‘She may explode but her memory lingers on indelibly.’
In his study the Rev St John Froude shared Dr Board’s opinion. The memory of the large and apparently naked lady he had glimpsed emerging from the willow tree at the bottom of his garden like some disgustingly oversized nymph and scuttling through the churchyard was not something he was ever likely to forget. Coming so shortly after the apparition of the inflated contraceptives it lent weight to the suspicion that he had been overdoing things on the alcohol side. Abandoning the sermon he had been preparing on the apostate Archdeacon of Ongar–he had had ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’ in mind as a text–he got up and peered out of the window in the direction of the church and was wondering if he shouldn’t go down and see if there wasn’t a large fat naked lady there when his attention was drawn to the reeds across the water. They were there again, those infernal things. This time there could be no doubt about it. He grabbed his binoculars and stared furiously through them. He could see them much more clearly than the first time and much more ominously. The sun was high in the sky and a mist rose over Eel Stretch so that the contraceptives had a luminescent sheen about them, an insubstantiality that was almost spiritual in its implications. Worse still, there appeared to be something written on them. The message was clear if incomprehensible. It read PEESOP. The Rev St John Froude lowered his binoculars and reached for the whisky bottle and considered the significance of PEESOP etched ectoplasmically against the sky. By the time he had finished his third hurried glass and had decided that spiritualism might after all have something to be said for it though why you almost always found yourself in touch with a Red Indian who was acting by proxy for an aunt which might account for the misspelling of Peasoup while removing some of the less attractive ingredients from the stuff, the wind had changed the letters round. This time when he looked the message read EELPOPS. The Vicar shuddered. What eel was popping and how?