Lempriere's Dictionary (7 page)

Thoughts of his flock did not soften his mood. Damn it, only this morning that priggish young ass had burst in demanding that he exorcise the field behind his house. Exorcise it! There hadn’t been an exorcism on Jersey for two-hundred years and if John Lemprière wanted one he could damn well do it himself. The little twit, babbling on about ancient gods rising out of the ground and grinning or crying, one of the two. If the idiot
wanted a pope, there was always Italy. That should have shut him up but in the end he fobbed him off with one of those pamphlets
On the Right Guidance of the Rectal Soule
or somesuch. Old Eli kept printing the damn things and delivering them by the crateload. God might know why, but he didn’t. He doubted if Eli did either, stupid, old …’ But his machine awaited, there were more important things to occupy him than Eli’s stupidity. It was high time to operate the engine.

He picked up one of the five potatoes which lay on his work-bench, feeling its smooth, cold skin in the palm of his hand. Father Calveston braced himself and took a firm hold on the handle. An expression of pleasurable anticipation spread across his face making him seem, for a moment, rather younger. His bald head shone gloriously as little beads of oily sweat percolated up through his skin to form a reflective sheen on its surface.

Lemprière walked back from Calveston’s cottage, and only occasionally did his thoughts stray into the forbidden areas of which he had spoken to the minister. The priest had seemed preoccupied when he had walked in, had seemed sceptical when asked for guidance, and scornful when Lemprière had brought himself finally to tell of what he had seen. He had not raised his expectations overmuch.

The sun shone down. On impulse he made a run at the venerable and ancient tree about which the lane ahead curved respectfully. Without stopping, he shinned up the trunk and swung himself into the cage of branches where he sat and enjoyed the novel prospect the height afforded him. The baying of hounds could be heard faintly from some miles away and the sun broke through the leaves in vivid flashes as the breeze rustled the canopy of leaves which shaded him. A long line of ants was making slow progress along the branch to his left. He perched there and watched them for some minutes. He had not thought of ants as tree-dwellers. What determination was it that marshalled them in so orderly a file? He heard the sound of light footsteps below. Lemprière turning and angling himself to get a view. His hand reached out for a branch to steady himself. Alarums and calls to battle among the ants go unheeded by Lemprière. Fat white insect larvae crawling with ants are exposed briefly as Lemprière’s hand takes hold of the rotted branch and it crumbles like paper beneath his touch.

The sun was suddenly very bright as Lemprière made an uncontrolled descent from the tree and landed heavily in the dust of the track. As he
struggled to right himself, an unknown hand took firm hold of his collar and helped him to his feet.

‘Your liking for the soil befits a farmer, not a scholar,’ said a familiar voice.

Stumbling and dusting at the same time, her words brought his head up with a start. Juliette smiled her sweetest smile. A strand of jet-black hair had escaped the clutches of her bonnet and lay across her cheek, dimpled. Lemprière was shaken and tongue-tied. How ridiculous he must seem to her, five years her elder at least and behaving like a truant. No wonder she wanted to laugh at him. But she smiled with, not at him. He coughed and managed a smile in return.

‘Good morning, Miss Casterleigh.’ That seemed acceptable. A silence followed. They looked at each other. He should try something else, a compliment.

‘Your hair….’ And he stopped. Anything he said about her hair would border on the scandalous, so black and thick….

‘Oh dear.’ She caught the loose strand and tucked it beneath her bonnet. ‘I would not have noticed,’ running her fingers over her ears, her head tilted back a little.

‘No, no I didn’t mean to…. I mean, it looked very nice, at least I think it was very….’ It was all going terribly wrong. Perhaps he should feign madness and run. Madmen could make the most appalling indiscretions and be excused. But Aphrodite, with the experience of two and one millennia behind her, seemed to understand John Lemprière well enough.

‘Your fall has saved me a journey,’ she announced brightly. ‘Father has a favour to beg of you….’ And Lemprière listened, as much to the sound of her voice as to the message, while Juliette explained that the Casterleigh library, which had been bought wholesale from a bankrupt estate on the mainland, had a very curious omission.

‘Of the several thousand volumes….’ She dropped the figure lightly but saw from the expression on his face that the hook had caught. Several thousands! An almost unimaginable figure in Lemprière’s experience. ‘Of the several thousands of volumes,’ she continued, ‘there are none of those in whose study
you
have distinguished yourself, Doctor Lemprière.’

‘Not yet a doctor,’ Lemprière murmured.

‘Among them all, the Ancient authors go unrepresented and Father believes this is a matter for concern, you would understand, and that you are the man to redress it.’ She talked on lightly. Her father would be grateful if Lemprière might advise on some suitable editions, he had heard that Lemprière was a scholar of great promise, his advice would be invaluable. He would be free to use the library whenever he desired … could he come next Thursday? Had it been a century hence in the East
Indies Lemprière would not have refused. He blushed at the compliments and fidgeted with his eye-glasses as Juliette said that they would expect him after lunch. She offered him her hand, bade him good-day, and walked off down the lane. Ten paces and she turned.

‘John Lemprière!’ she called after him. ‘Tell me, is Father Calveston home today?’

Five potatoes all in a row. How hungry would he be that night? Three potato hungry or only two potato hungry? Only two potato hungry, he thought. Good, three for the engine. Humming to himself and moving purposefully in quick strides, the Reverend Calveston gave the first potato an affectionate squeeze and popped it into the cylinder.

‘Pull down,’ he said aloud as he did so. In the bowels of the engine a complicated system of pistons and cogs ground the meshes together in a blur of metal. They clattered against each other for a moment before biting into the fibrous potato-flesh. At the bottom of the cylinder a gleaming metal tray collected first a drip, then a large glutinous dollop of the thoroughly mashed potato. Father Calveston regarded his invention with pride: it was a potato-masher. But now he was getting that tickly-prickly sensation all over his sensitive white skin…. Just the sight of the cool purée. He popped another potato into the cylinder and pulled down hard.

How foolish Lemprière had looked, all arms and legs in the middle of the road. Why was he up a tree? Papa had said he was very clever. Very learned, even if he did go red as a beet every time he looked at her. Red as a beet. But she liked that too. Papa would be angry if he knew that. He would guess anyway, she knew. Papa knew everything. He had known John Lemprière would fall for her head over heels, and there he was, falling and grinning and stammering every time she tossed her head.

‘Ho, there!’ She barely glanced up. The farm-hand hailed her again. Silly man in a silly cocked hat. How could they do that, work in the fields all day? But everyone has to do things they don’t like sometimes, she thought. Why else would I be going to talk to the egg-pate? There was the rectory cottage ahead. Her feet dragged her reluctantly onward.

Cool, squelchy, pulpy potato. White and gooey, grey and gluey. Handfuls and dollops and slimy slurps of splodgy, sweaty mashed potato. He loved to slap it on, a great generous handful of it. Father Calveston, naked. With potato. He writhes, he slithers, he oozes potato-paroxysms of joy. A freezing wad on the nape of his neck trickles down his spine to disappear between quivering, globular buttocks. Slimy coatings all over his chest, harden his nipples, tighten his navel. Gelatinous gloops slap and splat all over his nakedly naked body.
All
over his utterly naked body. How he loves it, so exciting and disgusting, how his sap rises to join with the potato sap, to join, as the doorknob turns, unseen on the far side of the room, to join, as the hinge creaks, alerting him too late, he turns, to join….

‘Good morning, Father Calveston.’

The Reverend Calveston, defrocked, froze. Slowly, and with a patience only possessed by the insentient, a modest dollop of mashed potato eased a passage down his stiffened penis and trickled off his right testicle to land with a muted slap on the floor. Its passing revealed the fiery, shiny red head of that erstwhile exulting (now wilting) implement which, within the taxonomy of reds currently offered by the Reverend Calveston’s naked body, was only exceeded in radiance by the very top of his head. He blushed from the cranium down, as if his very humiliation threatened to burst the bounds of his body like a chick from its egg.

‘Sit down Father Calveston. Please.’ But the iron tone of that voice, sounding almost grotesque from one so young, belied any notion of this being a request.

‘Now,’ she paused, leaned back against the work-bench and folded her arms, ‘let us talk.’ He seemed to have no choice.