This window is not an eye. This window is a sightless membrane that traps the fluttering afternoon shadows in the room like exhausted moths. It is the pigeon sheltering against the shallow brick embrasure, its feathers as grey as the hard spits of rain, that sees. In fact, the mean black eye on the nearside of its profiled head peers into the study with such steadfastness that its inhabitant begins to feel not just observed but judged: as judged as if the mighty Lord himself has suddenly torn a peep-hole in the heavens and crossly demanded to know what he, The Reverend Douglas Millfoye Carduggan, thinks he’s up to, exactly.
And what does he think he’s up to, exactly, this tall, ruddy complexioned, pot-bellied man-of-the-cloth, as he billows about his book-lined study, the delicious crumbs of a recent witticism regarding the Venerable Bede still exercising the corners of his mouth? The pigeon shifts its weight backwards slightly on its brittle, scaly legs, the very picture of avian loucheness, and continues its ocular persecution. ‘Well?!’ it seems to say, and the Rev. Carduggan sweats a little more under the dog collar that is already chafing his plump, pink neck.
The Reverend has been undergoing something of a crisis of faith, lately. It is to help him make the most of this interesting phase in his life that he has courted the friendship of a bright young literature scholar from the University by the name of Michael Glebe. Michael now sits in an upholstered carved-back chair in the corner of the study. He, too, retains in his youthful cheeks sufficient flexion to indicate that the Reverend’s recent witticism regarding the Venerable Bede has been understood in all its subtle complexity. Such is the level of self-consciousness required to sustain this posture of youthful brilliance that Michael fails to notice Douglas Carduggan’s agitation and so he adds, quite uselessly but with sufficient aplomb to satisfy them both, ‘Ah yes – indeed - the Venerable Bede!’ and smiles into his tea-cup in a manner suggestive of vast reserves of unspoken knowledge. Michael uncrosses his slender legs and recrosses them in the opposite direction. He teases at a lock of his straw-blond hair, and gazes into the middle distance as he tries to remember a rather lovely piece of dialogue he’s heard on the bus that morning that he thinks will amuse Douglas.
“Biscuit?” Asks the vicar, to distract himself from the birdy eye that still x-rays his heart from behind the blood red velvet curtain. He holds the family sized tin towards Michael not noticing that it contains only two empty plastic layers. Michael can only imagine the round jammy dodgers, the slender bourbons, the squat little custard creams that once nestled in columns of three in the variously shaped niches. Clearly, Rev. Carduggan’s parishioners have been busy with the selection: their spiritually replete but carnally hungry fingers delving expertly through the plastic inlays for their favourites, leaving Michael with nothing but a socially horrible vide. After some embarrassed rummaging he finally discovers, rejected and alone beneath the lowest layer, a single pink wafer.
Under normal circumstances Michael Glebe would not look twice at a pink wafer but he takes it now to avoid awkwardness and places it carefully on his saucer. No sooner has he done so, however, than the Reverend swoops back past him with such a brisk sense of purpose that the cloud of static worked up between his nylon trouser-legs pulls the wafer clean from Michael’s saucer and attaches it to the Vicar’s fly. Reverend Carduggan, unaware of the addition of this lightest of biscuits to his crackling trouser front, proceeds to the window where he is compelled against all his better instincts to pull aside the curtain to see if the pigeon is still there. It is, of course, but worse: as the Reverend stands at the upper floor window, the wafer still pinkly Priapic at his fly, his attention is diverted by a light suddenly visible across the street in the bedroom window of Glandice Morgan.
Glandice, the village’s very own opera singer, has parted her curtains and is now leaning out through the window. She is naked, at least from the waist up, and her unrestrained Canadian breasts tumble adventurously over the frontier of the windowsill. As she pulls the two halves of the casement shut Reverend Carduggan can make out the shape of Glandice’s husband, Cleanth, moving nudely about the room behind her. Is this a post- or a pre-coital moment, he wonders, apalled. Glandice spreads her arms wide like Moses at Amalek and takes a firm hold of each curtain: it is at this moment that she spots the Vicar of St. Margaret’s. For a moment their eyes meet across the street and then the curtains are drawn sharply shut thus bringing to an end the whole unfortunate vignette for both parties.
Michael Glebe presses his pretty pink lips together, turning the corners up neatly at the edges so as to leave only a small aperture in the centre, and raises his hands slightly. Unless he plans to play some Vivaldi on the air-oboe, this suggests he is about to impart a witty anecdote. He has, in fact, remembered the amusing exchange between the two women on the bus. Douglas, however, is in no mood to listen. An unpleasantly nebulous emotional energy threatens to overwhelm him and he needs to say something, anything. He sweeps back into the centre of the room. “Now then” he begins, expelling, at last, some carbon dioxide “we must get you launched.” He hasn’t decided what this means yet but he already feels comforted by the supervisory shape of the rhetoric. “Yes” he stops and presses his fingertips together. "I have a friend in the world of academic publishing.” He pauses as though considering Michael’s suitability for the project. “And I think I’m ready to introduce you to him, now.” He peers at Michael a little longer.
Michael inclines his head to one side in an attitude of grateful interest, letting his golden fringe fall slightly across his forehead so that he looks up from under it with lazy tourmaline eyes. He won’t let Douglas have all the advantages.
“I have a red-snapper in my freezer compartment.” Douglas continues. “You must both come to supper on Friday.”
Michael presumes that ‘both’ means him and the publisher, not him and the red snapper. “Thank you.” He says with a smile sufficiently delicate so as not to disturb his embouchure.
The Vicar of St. Margaret’s can’t decide whether he wants to keep young Michael in his study a little longer or whether he’s ready to let him go so that he can storm and stress in his own thoughts for a while. It is now that he discovers the pink wafer attached to his fly. He tries to brush it to the floor with an irritated flick of his hand but it simply re-attaches itself just above his left knee. “Oh for God’s sake!” He swipes at it again “You’d think someone, somewhere, with an ounce of wit could design a simple pair of trousers that didn’t pick up every damn piece of fluff and confection within a 20 yard radius!” The biscuit parabolas onto his shoe. “And why they continue to manufacture these absurdly flimsy wafers…!” He stoops to grab the offending biscuit from his laces and tries to fling it into the bin but it catches in the updraft of the gesture and floats at its own discretion to the carpet.
“I expect you’ve a lot to be getting on with.” He says to Michael, suddenly, and pretends to busy himself at his bookshelves.
“Oh yes, of course.” Michael leaps up and places his cup and saucer on the walnut occasional table. “I really must get going. Lots to do. On the thesis. He’s about to elaborate but thinks better of it.
“Come at seven, prompt, on Friday.” Reverend Carduggan says, without turning.
“Friday, at seven, yes. Thank you.” Michael accepts the invitation, gracefully.
“Not at all! Not at all!” Douglas Carduggan sweeps him away with notably better success than the pink wafer biscuit. “Alison will see you out.”
As soon as Michael has left, Douglas Carduggan pours himself a slug of scotch, downs it in one, and slings himself onto his day couch like an old school satchel, expelling a hrumph of peat-tinged breath. “Oh that boy!” he says, in mock exasperation, as though this explains everything, since he cannot, even to himself, explain anything at all about why this boy bothers him, exactly. He calls for Alison.
“Yes, darling.” his wife appears at the door.
“If anyone else should call, tell them I can’t see them at present.”
“Not feeling well, Dougie?”
“Oh, well, not ill as such. Just…weary.”
“Can I get you a nice cup of tea?”
“Oh, yes, that would be marvellous.”
The propriety of the conjugal exchange has soothed Reverend Carduggan’s nerves somewhat and he lays his head back against the cushions. Before Alison has returned with the tea he is asleep on the couch.
Michael stands behind him in the mirror. He is naked and Douglas sees for the first time his large, white wings. But now that he takes a closer look, Michael’s feathers aren’t quite so white, they’re more of a sooty grey, and he is shifting unpleasantly from foot to foot. What’s more, his eyes are really quite small and beady and seem to fix him with an accusing stare. “Here’s you’re tea.” Michael says, but it is not tea, it is a flaming chalice that he holds towards him.
“Darling. Your tea. I’ll just put it here on the table.”
“Hmmm, what? Oh…I wasn’t asleep, dear, just resting my eyes.” Rev Carduggan sits up on his day couch and drags his palms down across his fleshy jowels. The shame of the dream still clings to him like the residue of cheap cooking oil on the tiles of a pub kitchen.
As the Vicar sips his Darjeeling he doesn’t analyse his dream too closely. He reflects that the sight of Glandice Morgan spilling out of her window is enough to take its toll on any man’s psyche and leaves it at that. Instead, Douglas lets the dream sow in his mind the seeds of a new project; more ambitious even than Rags for Africa, or St Maggie’s Annual Interfaith Olympics. He will turn The Crisis of Faith to good advantage, he resolves. What the parish of Tendrinhoe needs is a relevant spiritual ‘happening’. He paces the study, his trousers a tremulous cloud of static excitement. To hell with yet another nativity play with all those whiney little bugger’s from Tendrinhoe JMI. This year he’ll write a proper ‘Christmas themed’ play that bravely explores man’s deeper, darker desires. Wasn’t he quite the literary enfant terrible at Keeble before God called him to higher things? Michael must be the archangel Gabriel, of course. Perhaps Gabriel becomes a kind of Brechtian narrator. A nude Brechtian narrator - that would put a firework up the backsides of his parishioners! Well, wasn’t the incarnation necessary because of man’s fall, the moment when he first feels shame at his own nakedness? Ah yes, Douglas Carduggan decides, it all makes perfect theological sense.
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