The Vicar of Morbing Vile

by Richard Harland

  We continued on down to the foot of the stairs. Now we were in the hall. It was the old-fashioned type of hall with a high moulded ceiling and a black-and-white tiled floor. There was a front door surmounted by a stained glass window, which cast deep glowing colours of red and purple light. Beside the door stood a glossy-leaved aspidistra in an ornate urn. It was all very Victorian.

  At the other end of the hall was an arched niche occupied by a hat and coat stand. Here the passage took a sudden ninety degree turn to the left. There was also an opening to the right, where a set of stone steps disappeared down into the dark. Presumably they led to an underground basement or cellar.

  I had time for only a glance. Then Craylene threw open a door on the other side of the hall. We trooped forward and went in.

  “Here it is!” she announced breathlessly. “The parlour!”

  It was a dark richly-upholstered room, very cloistered and still and stagnant. From the ceiling hung a chandelier laden with fat creamy candles. The wallpaper was crimson with a satiny sheen, the carpet like thick green velvet. There was a single tall window with black drapes drawn and gathered at the sides. Between the drapes, a white muslin under-curtain veiled the view. It seemed the kind of room that had never known sun or fresh air.

  The furniture was appropriately heavy and luxurious. There were two plush easy chairs with high backs and wings, and a long low sofa padded with plump cushions. A lace-covered table occupied the centre of the room, surrounded by half a dozen upright chairs. I couldn’t help staring at the table-decoration: an arrangement of wax fruit and leaves under a glass dome. There was also a massive polished black piano with bulbous legs and a matching stool.

  Mr Caulkiss and Mr Quode headed me towards one of the easy chairs in front of the fire. The fireplace was at the far end of the parlour facing away from the window. It had a fancy surround of green tiles and a large gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece. The flames were leaping up merrily from the logs in the grate.

  I was thankful when I could finally unwrap my arms from the shoulders of Mr Caulkiss and Mr Quode. With a sigh of relief I sank down comfortably into the soft deep plush.

  “There now,” said Mr Quode. “Isn’t that nice?”

  He bent forward and adjusted the dressing gown over my chest. Then he bent lower and adjusted the angle of my legs and the position of my feet. He seemed to feel that my limbs ought to be as close to one another as possible. I stared down in surprise at the bald crown of his head. There was a highly distinctive, slightly rancid smell about him.

  Mr Caulkiss put a stop to any further attentions. “Desist, Quode!” he said.

  Mr Quode looked up with a smooth soft-soaping expression on his face. But Mr Caulkiss only snorted. Reluctantly Mr Quode rose to his feet and stood with the others. They formed a semicircle around my chair.

  “I’m very grateful to you all,” I said. “For looking after me like this.”

  “Our pleasure, our pleasure,” twittered Craylene.

  “It’s very kind of you. A total stranger.”

  “No no!” protested Mr Quode. “We’re getting to be such good friends now!”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Eight days,” answered Mr Caulkiss.

  “Eight days?” I was amazed.

  “You were four days asleep after we rescued you.”

  “I see. Then I ought to let someone know what’s happened to me. People will be worried.”

  “Who?”

  I tried to think who would be worried. “My landlady in Cambridge. She’ll start calling the police. My landlady and…and…and other people.”

  The truth was that probably no-one else would notice my disappearance – not for a while anyway. That’s how isolated my life had become. Even my landlady didn’t know exactly when to expect me back.

  “So what do you want to do Mr Smythe?”

  “I don’t know. Phone? Write a letter?”

  “We have no telephones at Morbing Vyle. We don’t believe in them. Nor postboxes.”

  “What if I wrote a letter and one of you – ” There was no response. They just stood looking at me with smiling shining eyes. “But then you never go outside of Morbing Vyle, do you?”

  “Never.”

  “Not even to post a letter?”

  “Not for any reason.”

  “Ah well.” I could see that there was nothing to do but accept the situation gracefully. “I shall have to wait until I’m strong enough myself, won’t I?”

  “You will! You will!”

  “Praise the Lord!” cried Melestrina.

  With one accord, they lifted their hands in attitudes of prayer.

  “O Lord, we pray for our brother Mr Smythe!”

  “Help him and save him!”

  “Redeem and enlighten him!”

  “Lead him away from the paths of materialism!”

  “Inspire his soul with a true inclination!”

  “And gather him into they fold!”

  “We ask this for thy name’s sake!”

  “Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  They lowered their hands again. Mr Caulkiss made a sort of harumphing noise through his nose.

  “And now we must return to our great building work, Mr Smythe,” he said. “We shall have to leave you alone for a while. But never fear! Our thoughts will be with you.”

  They marched out of the parlour and down the hall. I could hear them taking their hats and coats from the hat and coat stand. Then they marched back along the hall. There was the sound of the front door opening and the front door slammed. I was left in the parlour all by myself.

  Or was I? I peered out around the wings of my chair and surveyed the room. I didn’t have to look very far. A strange unnatural hump had appeared in the lace tablecloth, just behind the wax fruit arrangement. Something small and round had crawled up onto the table and was hiding underneath the cloth. Even without seeing the eyes, I could tell that it was looking in my direction.

  I shrugged and turned back to the fire. It was what I’d expected. Baby Panker had followed me downstairs and was still keeping me under surveillance.

  ∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧

  Seventeen

  They returned at the end of the afternoon and assisted me back to my bunk in the nursery. The next morning they brought me downstairs again. That was the pattern for a whole week. I spent my nights in the nursery and my days sitting in the parlour in the easy chair. Much of the time I was left alone, while the inhabitants of Morbing Vyle went out to do the ‘great building work’ on their church. But Panker was always somewhere around, hiding and watching.

  I was no longer so sleepy now. I gazed at the flames in the fire and drifted from thought to thought. I had a great deal to think about.

  One thing was obvious. I had fallen in with a community of religious eccentrics – and they wanted me to join them. They hoped to win me over to their way of thinking. Indeed, they seemed almost to take it for granted. They expected me to stay forever in Morbing Vyle, as they themselves had done. I had the impression that no-one who arrived in Morbing Vyle had ever gone back to the ordinary world afterwards.

  I suppose I could have been frightened. Perhaps I should have been. But I never doubted that I could leave Morbing Vyle whenever I felt like it. And for the time being, I was happy to stay. Morbing Vyle had aroused my curiousity.

  Let me explain. It was like a historian’s dream come true. For so long I had been studying books and researching in libraries – boring old stuff. But what I had stumbled upon here was living history! A time capsule! A bizarre religious sect that no-one had ever discovered before, surviving in the heart of present-day England! I even began to contemplate the possibility of making a new thesis out of it.

  I could already guess how the sect had originated – with that mysterious vicar of Morbing Vyle. Why else did they hold him in such reverence? He must have lived around the turn of the century if he had been writing articles in 1899 – the
date mentioned by Mr Caulkiss. That was consistent with the time when the village of Morbing Vyle had disappeared off the map.

  What were his teachings though? I suspected that the inhabitants of Morbing Vyle followed some form of extreme Protestant Fundamentalism. I had heard of the Amish and similar sects in America sects which typically turned their backs on the twentieth century, rejecting the materialism of the modern world. The inhabitants of Morning Vyle seemed to have done the same.

  But apart from their anti-materialism, the inhabitants didn’t seem to follow any single set of teachings. The only belief they shared, so far as I could see, was a belief in cultivating ones own special interest – or ‘inclination’ as they called it. “Let every man be free to follow his own inclination.” The more I got to know them, the more I realised how very different they were. Each of them had his or her own peculiar interest – and very peculiar too! Mr Quode’s interest was the first that I found out about.

  ∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧

  Eighteen

  Unlike Mr Caulkiss and Craylene and Melestrina, Mr Quode didn’t spend his whole day out on the building site. He came back at various hours to take care of the cooking in the kitchen. And from time to time he slipped in to pay me little visits in the parlour.

  Usually he came bearing some small dish or bowl. He was always trying to tempt me with his special food preparations. ‘Invalid cuisine’ he called it. I ate what I could, though I really preferred a plain glass of milk. It was always something soft and bland and slippery, like a savoury blancmange or a vegetable custard or a fruit mousse with dumplings. As soft and bland and slippery as Mr Quode himself.

  He was particularly reluctant to give up baby-feeding me. “I love to watch it go down,” he said. He peered into my mouth after every spoonful like a dentist. But the unctuous hairless intimacy of his face was more than I could stand. In the end I had to wrest the spoon out of his hand and insist on feeding myself.

  Flattery was his typical mode of conversation. He was always going into ecstasies over things I said or did.

  “Oh, how well you say that!”

  “Oooh, you’re so strong and powerful!” (that was when I took the spoon from him). “Ah, what a nice smile you have!”

  It was his habit of making remarks about my physical appearance that I most disliked. “Isn’t your hair thick!”

  “What fresh young skin you have!”

  “Oh, isn’t it extraordinary to have such muscular legs!”

  And as he spoke, he lowered his voice and gave me a look of mutual understanding, as though these were secrets shared just between the two of us. Yet it was somehow very difficult to take offence. Whenever I tried, my words seemed to have the very opposite effect to what I’d intended.

  “Oh, I agree! We shouldn’t even mention such personal things!”

  “Mmmm, I know what you mean! There’s something especially private about legs, isn’t there!”

  Then his voice went even lower and he looked so understanding that his eyes were almost oozing out of his head.

  People’s bodies were Mr Quode’s peculiar interest. He was fascinated by them – and by his own body too. But his fascination was conditioned by a religious notion of temptation and sin. One time he pulled up the second easy chair in front of the fire and sat down facing me.

  “I don’t know how you do it!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know how you resist!”

  “Resist what?”

  “Everything! And beyond everything! So many possibilities! With such a long large body!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ah, perhaps you haven’t started feeling them yet? You’re still recovering perhaps?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Desires, Mr Smythe! Sin-ful desires!” He had a way of uttering the word ‘sin’ that made it sound peculiarly drawn-out and loathsome. “The urge to sin with the body! Using the parts of the body! Unspeakeable unthinkable desires!”

  “You mean sexual desires?”

  “Oh oh!” He licked his lips. “You have started to feel them then! The little urges and hankerings! Tingling all over! Wanting to do something – but you don’t know what! Building up and up and up!”

  “You make it sound very disgusting.”

  “Disgusting! Oh yes! Acts of carnality! Intolerable abominations! Monstrous corrupt obscenities! Sensations in every organ and cavity of the body!”

  He wallowed in his chair with a constant wriggling motion, sinking lower and lower into the velvet plush.

  “I see you take a very moralistic view of sex,” I said.

  “Sex? No, not sex, Mr Smythe! Sex is for animals. I’m talking about sexuality. What human beings do!”

  “I don’t see the difference. We’re animals too, aren’t we?”

  “Oh no! Animals are just biological. They can’t do anything outside of nature. They only have an instinct of reproduction. But we have the consciousness of moral choice!”

  “That sounds like a religious claim. Isn’t that the kind of thing that Protestant Fundamentalists say?”

  “Religion draws the boundary for us, Mr Smythe. Between what’s allowed and what’s forbidden. Between what’s wholesome and what’s unclean.”

  “Just one single boundary? As simple as that? But you don’t know what the modern social sciences have shown, Mr Quode. Every culture draws different boundaries. Even Western Christian culture has drawn different boundaries in different historical periods. If you knew anything about anthropology and history you couldn’t possibly believe in a single absolute boundary.”

  “But I don’t, I don’t!” Mr Quode leaned forward in his chair, with glowing eyes and gleaming cheeks. “I believe in lots of boundaries! Lots and lots of boundaries! And sexual desire keeps wanting to transgress them all! Transgression after transgression! Sin upon sin!”

  “Sin upon sin?”

  “That’s right! Because human sexuality is insatiable! Incontinent! It never knows when to stop! Oh, you see it so well Mr Smythe!”

  “No I don’t!”

  Mr Quode opened and closed his mouth like a gulping fish. “You don’t?”

  “No I don’t. It all sounds very old-fashioned to me. I don’t accept the religious point of view. If you condemn the sexual instinct as sinful, you end up making everyone feel bad. That’s what sociologists call a guilt culture.”

  Mr Quode flopped back into the depths of his chair, more boneless than ever. By now he had wriggled his underpants right out above the top of his trousers.

  “Oh how stern you are!” he gasped. “Quelle feroce! You’re so angry and determined with me!”

  “No, no. I’m interested to hear what you think. I’m just putting a more modern point of view.”

  Mr Quode pulled out a flap of his shirt and wiped it over his moist gleaming face.

  “Now you’ve made me ashamed!” he cried. “I don’t know how you can put up with me! It’s too much! Isn’t it? I don’t know how you can even bear me sitting up close to you!”

  “Don’t take it personally. I’ve got nothing against you as a person.”

  “As a person! Me as a person!” He wallowed even deeper down in his chair, slithering around in a sort of frictional ecstasy. “Oh you’re so wonderful! With your muscular legs and fresh young skin! You’ve got nothing against me as a person! Even though I’m low and vile and disgusting and low and – ”

  He broke off suddenly. He sat bolt upright, his face very red and pouring with sweat.

  “Oh,” he murmured breathlessly. “Excuse me. I’ve got to go.”

  He rose unsteadily to his feet. His eyes had gone quite glassy. He stood for a moment tucking in his shirt and readjusting his underpants.

  “I’ve got to go to my kitchen,” he said. “Oh.”

  He hurried across and out through the parlour door. I heard him making strange noises as he shuffled along the hall towards the back of the house.

  Actually it wasn’t true that I had nothing ag
ainst Mr Quode as a person. I found him somehow unwholesome and repellent. But it wasn’t in my interest to offend him.

  So he kept on paying me little visits from time to time. And we had several similar conversations about sin and desire. Sometimes I listened and sometimes I argued. After a while I knew it all by heart.

  In fact I thought I had Mr Quode fairly well worked out. On the one hand he vilified sex as sinful and wicked; on the other hand he was totally fascinated by what he vilified. By repressing and denying the body he had ended up making it into a source of endless fascination. By not acting out his impulses he had condemned himself to be always thinking about them. At least that was my explanation at the time. There were still a great many things I didn’t understand.

  ∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧

  Nineteen

  After about three days I was allowed to stay downstairs later into the evenings, until after dinnertime. Not that the inhabitants of Morbing Vyle dined in front of me. They had their meal in the kitchen while I still ate my ‘invalid cuisine’ from a tray on my lap in front of the fire. But they came into the parlour after dinner, to sit and have long talks with me.

  It was now that I learned about Mr Caulkiss’s interest. He was the main talker, delivering endless rambling monologues. On his own favourite topic, he was every bit as obsessive as Mr Quode.

  His favourite topic was bio-physics. He had tremendous abstract ideas about the universe and the principles of its functioning. Not scientific ideas though – or if they were, it was the strangest sort of science I’d ever heard.

  “Never believe,” he said, “that the world is mere solid matter! No! Even quantum physics has gone beyond that pathetic naivety! Photons and quanta and wavicles! Solidity is only a fallacy of perception! But quantum physics doesn’t go far enough! I ask you! What are these photons and quanta and wavicles?”

  He strode furiously up and down as he spoke. He was always knocking his bones against the furniture. He flailed his arms and stamped his feet. “They are energy!” he proclaimed. “Unappeasable energy! The principle of the universe! Energy everywhere urging forward and moving on and leaving behind. Endlessly exploding outwards, endlessly flying apart! Perpetual motion! Illimitable transcursion! Energy beyond all knowledge and all containment!”