It is almost midnight, and apart from the sound of the odd car all is quiet in Tendringhoe High Street. A faint light can be seen at a first floor window of the vicarage. Alison Carduggan is sitting at the ancient computer in her husband's study, listening to her 'Classic FM's Top 100 Really Nice Things' CD and drafting her weekly page for St Maggie's Newsletter. Only the chutter of the 'a' drive and the shufflings of Len Magma above her in the loft cut across the mellifluous strains of The Sixteen singing Barber's Agnus Dei. Alison is about to type in her closing sentence when there is a heavy thump on the ceiling. She jumps slightly then tuts crossly. She guesses, correctly, that Len, recently returned from The Railway Tavern, has fallen over trying to remove his trousers.
Alison has tried to reflect objectively and charitably on her lodger's increasingly disturbing behaviour but she can't help feeling rather angry. Len might play the hapless victim but really the whole incident in the barn had been carefully staged. She's been taken for a fool. Well no more. In any case, it wouldn't help him. That wasn't what was meant by Christian charity: to encourage weakness. Alison saves her draft of 'What is The Triune Godhead When it's at Home, Anyway?' and sits back in her chair, her lips pressed tightly together. And then there is the way that he watches her, silent and lingering, furtively in her space without properly inhabiting his own. No, she is sorry, but there is something deeply devious about the man. Alison leans forward and shuts down the computer with an irritated series of taps on the mouse button. At the end of the day, this is her family home, the home of her nine year old daughter, and my goodness the work that she has put into making it a clean and happy environment she is blowed if that mucky little man is going to spoil it all.
This might seem uncharacteristically harsh, but in Alison's imagination Len's character has begun to coalesce disastrously with his physical appearance. His seeping libido is his moist, pursey mouth. His neediness is the splash of bird's mess on the back of his brown anorak. His manipulative nature is the knot of elastoplast holding together his glasses on one side. No matter how deeply she considers his loneliness, his awkwardness, his general incompetence at life, any empathetic movement towards him is instantly confounded by an equal and opposite repulsion. So it is that although she can see that he is a case to be pitied, tolerated, helped even, she cannot love him.
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