Grey Area (5 page)

Running up from the room’s corners to its apex, were seams of lozenges entwined by ivy. But this simple decoration was nothing compared to the profusion of body parts – gargoyle heads, thrusting breasts, dangling penises; as well as a .comprehensive bestiary, griffins and sphinxes, bulls rampant, lions couchant – that sprouted across the rest of the curved surfaces. The eye could not take in the whole of this decoration – there were over four hundred individual reliefs – instead it reduced them to a warty effect.

Each side of the rood screen itself was adorned with some thirteen individual painted panels. Dr Morrison may have assured English Heritage that his assistants had used authentic reformulations of the original pigments to retouch the screen, yet the result was advertisingly garish. The white and flat bodies of the Grunters lay entwined in naive tableaux of sexual abandon. They sported in distorted copses of painful viridity and dug from the excremental earth the falsely dead cadavers of their brethren, dragging them back into the one and only world.

Peter Geddes couldn’t bear to look at the rood screen for too long. When he and June had bought the house some fifteen years ago, the Rood Room had been impressive, but in grimy decay. The screen was blackened and the images faint. The stippling of explicit carvings covering the walls had been chipped and disfigured into insignificance.

Dr Morrison and his crew had only finished their restoration work that spring. Now, in the glory of midsummer, with the garden outside groaning in prefructive labour, the Rood Room had acquired a pregnant burnish. The walls bellied pink, the screen glared. Even Peter was susceptible to the rioting colour and the strange sensation of heretical worship resonating down the ages. He wondered, idly, if the room might have an adverse psychological effect on his new research student.

This reverie was cut into by the sound of the family Volvo pulling up outside, and shortly after, the shouts of his teenage twins resounded through the house. He came back down the cramped stairway and found the four of them already at tea.

Peter wasn’t fazed as the four sets of eyes swivelled towards him. He knew that in his family’s eyes he cut a somewhat embarrassing figure. Not exactly a looker: his duck-egg body defied his clothes to assume recognisable forms. On him, trousers ceased to be bifurcated, shirts stopped being assemblies of linen planes and tubes; and shoes became hopelessly adrift – merely functional stops to his roly-poly body – wedged underneath, as if to stop him from toppling over.

None of this mattered to Peter, for he was one of those men who had managed in adolescence Wilfully to disregard his physical form – for good. So, he entered the kitchen unabashed and crying, ‘Here you are, you rude mechanicals!’ He cupped the head of his daughter and drew her cheek to his lips, then did the same with his son. Giselle, whose father’s touch was nothing but wince-provoking, was struck by the fact that neither twin struggled to avoid him. Quite the reverse: they seemed to lean into his kiss.

‘Well, and how were the Masai?’ Peter went on, sitting down at the head of the table and reaching for a cup of tea. ‘Did they let you drink milk and blood? Did you learn their eighty-seven different words to express the shape of their cattle’s horns?’

‘We haven’t been with the Masai, Dad,’ said Hal, the son. ‘We haven’t even been in Africa – ‘

‘Oh, I see, not in Africa. Next you’re going to tell me that you didn’t even leave England.’

‘We did leave England,’ said Pixie, the daughter, ‘but we went north rather than south. We’ve been at a rural development project, working with the Lapps in northern Sweden – ’

‘Drinking reindeer pee. And we’ve learnt fifteen different words to express the shape of a reindeer’s antlers.’ Her brother finished the account for her.

Giselle was charmed by this demonstration of familial good humour. Cuddling, nicknames, banter, all were alien to the privet-lined precincts of her proper parents.

They ate lardy cake and drank a lot of tea. The sounds of the B road that ran through the village reached them but faintly, drowned out by the rising evening chorus of the birds.

‘Well!’ June exclaimed. ‘I can’t sit here for the rest of the day. For one thing I shan’t have room for dinner. I don’t know if you had forgotten, Peter, but Henry and Caitlin are coming this evening – ‘

‘Of course I hadn’t. I’ve got some suitably caustic Burgundy. It’s just dying to climb right out of its bottles and scour that self-satisfied man’s mind.’

‘Of course, darling. I’m going to get back to work now, or I shan’t be able to finish re-turfing that lawn before dusk.’ June rubbed her hands on her trouser legs, as if she could already feel the peat on her palms. ‘You twins can do the cooking. Christ knows, you’re better at it than I am.’

‘Oh but, Ma, we’re jet lagged,’ they chorused.

‘Nonsense. Lapland is, as we all know, due north of here.’

There was a brief groaning duet, but no further protest. The twins went off to inhabit their rooms. Giselle stood up and began to tidy away the tea things.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ June called out from the front door, ‘leave it for the twins.’

‘Oh, ah, OK. Well,’ she giggled nervously, ‘what to do? Should we . . . ? I mean I have some notes relating to Chapter Four. It’s the rather technical stuff – you know, where you demolish the compatiblist arguments. If you’d like to – ‘

‘Ah no. Don’t worry about that now,’ Peter sighed, looking up from the cake corpse he was feeding on. ‘Free will and determinism will still be incompatible come the morning. You just relax. Breathe in the country air. I have some correspondence to deal with that’ll take me the rest of today.’

Giselle followed June out into the garden. The older woman was already plying a long-handled spade, picking up the turfs from a neat pile and laying them out in rows on the brushed bare soil. Giselle, rather than disturb her, walked in the opposite direction.

June Laughton had transformed the halt-acre or so of conventional ground into a miniature world of landscaping. Prospects had been foreshortened, or artificially lengthened, by clever earthworks, reflective pools and the planting of the obscurer varieties of pampas grass. On hummocks and in little dells she had embedded sub-tropical flowers and shrubs, varieties that survived in the local climate.

Giselle wandered enchanted. Like a lot of intellectuals she felt herself to be hopelessly impractical. This was an affectation that she had wilfully fostered, rather than a true trait. It allowed her to view the physical (and therefore inferior) achievements of others with false modesty, as heroic acts, as if they were plucky spastics who had entered a marathon.

So deceived was she by the clever layout of the garden, that Giselle was startled, on rounding a clump of flora, to come upon June.

‘Oh sorry!’ she barked, compounding her own surprise with June’s. June dropped her spade.

‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘Enjoying the evening?’

‘Oh it’s lovely, really lovely. And it’s amazing what you’ve done with this garden – I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.’

‘No, it’s not exactly your traditional English garden, is it? For years Peter and I were stuck in England, he with his work and I with the twins. I was determined to bring something of the foreign and the exotic into our lives, so I created this garden.’ June bent and picked up her turfing spade. She stood and turned to give Giselle her profile. Standing there in her peat-dusted corduroys, with her gingham shirt unbuttoned to the warm roots of her breasts, her thick blonde hair falling away in a drape from its hooking grips, June was like a William Morris Ceres, gesturing to the fruits of her labours.

For ten minutes she strolled the garden with Giselle, pointing out the individual plants and describing their properties. Her manner was so gracious, so unselfconscious, that the younger woman felt entirely at ease.

Giselle had been terribly worried about coming to stay with Dr Geddes. She was too young to be able to divorce the potency of the mind from that of the body, and when, in his capacity as her postgraduate supervisor, Peter enthused over ideas, slinging out arguments like conceptual clays, Giselle had been seduced, and longed for his wet mouth to clamp on hers.

She thought them a good match – they could be cuddly together. This was a dream she had harboured, but she was far too ethical, too upstanding, ever to imagine that anything would come of it. And anyway, she could tell that he didn’t even regard her as belonging to the same species as himself. In his disinterested gaze she saw only zoological interest.

While June and the twins made dinner Giselle was parcelled off to have a bath. She sported in the tub. She laved herself and laved herself and laved herself. Working up lather after lather after lather, until when at last she stood, steaming on the mat, her skin smelt of nothing but lavender; her personal, indefinable odour was eradicated, sluiced away.

Back in the Rood Room, Giselle unpacked. She inter-leaved her chemises, blouses, slips and underwear in the broad drawers of a large dresser. She placed her books on the footstool by the double bed, together with a candle, shaped and scented like an orange. With little touches such as these, the Rood Room soon began to seem to Giselle like her room. She had that ability to feel almost instantly at home simply by the application to a new place of a small coating of personal artefacts.

Giselle had a tea ceremony that completed her unpacking. It was part of her divine indwelling, her personal mythology. She primed the tiny spirit burner, lit it, set a diminutive kettle on its stand, and unpacked some translucent bowls from their tissue paper. Then she slipped a silk dressing gown over her round shoulders. All of this had a ritual quality, a sacred rhythm.

Here in Peter Geddes’s house, in the Rood Room, the whole tea ceremony took on a potent aura. The sun was sinking down and the thick beams of light that entered the room from the smaller western window were combed by the top of the rood screen. Carious shadows snaked across the quilt, and over Giselle’s crossed thighs, where she sat in its dead centre, her bowl of tea cradled in her lap.

Giselle felt drugged by bath and tea, ready to abandon herself to the Rood Room, to become just another painted panel.

Am I free? she thought, with an access of introspection as slight as a woodchip. That’s what I’m here for: to consider that question in its widest and narrowest senses. But am I? Wouldn’t it be an achingly reductive proposition for one who was truly un-free even to bother to consider the grounds of that un-freedom? Giselle hunched further upright on the lumpy softness of the mattress.

Her features were pretty enough. She had a fine-bridged nose, long and flaring into
retroussé.
Her eyes were large and dark violet. The smallness of her brow was well disguised by her long pelt of hair, which, falling inwards to her collarbone, served also to flatter the fullness of her figure.

The irony was that, seated there on her round haunches, although Giselle may not have possessed the sort of freedom that implies full moral responsibility, she nonetheless had plenty of that very prosaic power: the power of fey sexual self-awareness.

Pixie came scuttling under the low lintel and into the Rood Room. She was free. Entirely free of the painful shyness Giselle remembered blustering her way through at that age.

‘Ooh, what a clever little thing.’ Pixie was fiddling with the copper kettle on its spirit lamp, tipping it this way and that so splashes of still steaming water fell on to the windowsill.

‘Careful – ’ said Giselle.

‘Don’t worry,’ snapped back Pixie. ‘I won’t break it.’ She took a turn around the Rood Room, looking closely at the panels and the plaster reliefs. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she threw out after a while, ‘I always like to come up and check on the Rood Room after I’ve been away for a while – you don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, no, of course – ‘

‘So you’re a philosopher like Daddy, are you?’

‘Hardly,’ Giselle demurred, ‘your father is extremely eminent. He’s very likely to get the Pelagian Professorship next year, especially if this book is a success.’

‘And that’s what you’re here for?’

‘To help him with the book, yes. Dr Geddes is my postgraduate supervisor. He very kindly offered me a couple of months’ work, both helping him out and helping your mother around the house – ‘

‘So you’re not here to screw him then?’

‘Phsss No!’ Giselle sprayed the quilt with Lapsang Souchong.

‘Well, that’s just as well’ – Pixie was halfway out of the door – ‘because Mum says that he’s got so fat he’s hardly capable of it anymore.’ While Giselle was still too stunned to frame a rejoinder Pixie poked her blonde head back under the lintel. ‘The guests are here, by the way. You’d better dress and come down.’

As she hurriedly dressed, Giselle put Pixie’s behaviour down to precocity rather than conscious rudeness. The other possibility – that the girl had somehow sensed Giselle’s desire – was too awful to contemplate.

In the drawing room she found Peter Geddes and another man drinking whisky.

‘Giselle Dawson,’ said Peter, gesturing at her, ‘this is Henry Beckwood.’ He indicated the man, who was twitchily thin, sporting bifocals and wire-wool hair. ‘Henry, Giselle is my new research assistant. Giselle, Henry is big in plastics.’

‘And not much else besides,’ said the man called Henry, offering Giselle his hand. Seeing that she looked perplexed he added, ‘What Peter means is that I’m a polymer scientist.’

‘D’you want a drop of coloured water then, Giselle?’ Peter was holding the bottle around its shoulders and thrusting it at her, as if it were a club with which he was going to beat her into sedation.

‘Err . . . no thank you.’

‘If you want something else, some wine, say, you’ll find it in the kitchen, on the truth table.’

As she left the room Giselle could hear Peter explaining to Henry why he called it the truth table. She found Peter’s manner disconcerting. The bottle of whisky had been half-empty, but she couldn’t believe that the two of them had already drunk that much, it was only eight o’clock.