Grey Area Read online

  Stupid Gerard, he knocked against one shoulder, caromed off another.

  ‘Oi! Watch your step, mate – can’t you look out where you’re going?’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry.’

  ‘ ‘‘Aim offly sorry”.’ They cruelly parodied his posh accent. I freed my arm from his and walked on, letting him fall away from me like the first stage of a rocket. He dropped into an ocean of Babel.

  Terrified Gerard, looking from face to face. Old, young, black, white. Their uniform lapels poking out from their overcoat collars; their aprons dangling from beneath the hems of their macs. They sized him up, assessed him. Would he make good copy?

  One of them, young and lean, grabbed him by the arm, detaining him. ‘Think we’re of no account, eh? Just a bunch of waiters – is that what you think?’ Gerard tried to speak but couldn’t. His lips were tightly compressed, a red line cancelling out his expression. ‘Perhaps you think we should be proud of our work. Well we are matey, we fucking are. We’ve been watching your kind, noting it all down, putting it in our order pads while you snort in your trough. It may be fragmentary, it may not be prettified, it may not be in the Grand Tradition, but let me tell you,’ and with this the young man hit Gerard, quite lightly but in the face, ‘it’s ours, and we’re about ready to publish!’

  Then they all waded in.

  I was late for work. Marcel, the maître d’, tut-tutted as I swung open the door of the staff entrance. ‘That’s the third time late this week, Geraldine. Hurry up now, and change – we need to lay up.’ He minced off down the corridor. I did as he said without rancour. Le Caprice may no longer be the best restaurant in London to eat at, but it’s a great place to work. If you’re a waiter, that is.

  Incubus

  or

  The Impossibility of

  Self-Determination as to Desire

  June Laughton, a prize-winning gardener, and Peter Geddes, her husband, a philosopher no less, were having an altercation in the kitchen of their ugly house.

  The house was indubitably ugly but it had an interesting feature which meant that English Heritage paid for its maintenance and upkeep. The altercation was on the verge of getting ugly – although not quite so ugly as the house. It concerned Peter Geddes’s habit of employing the very tip of his little finger as a spatula with which to scoop out the fine, white rheum from the corners of his pink eyes. This he transferred to his moist mouth, again and again. Each fingerful was so Lilliputian a repast that he required constant refreshment.

  It was one of those aspects of her husband that June Laughton could stomach on a good day but only on a good day.

  ‘It’s disgusting – ‘ she expostulated.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ he retorted, ‘it’s a compulsion.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. How can something like that be a compulsion?’

  ‘Oh, all right – I don’t mean compulsion. I mean that it’s an involuntary action, I don’t have any control over it.’

  ‘Sometimes I think that you don’t have any control over anything,’ and she banged the egg’ encrusted frying pan into the sink to give her judgement proper emphasis.

  The action was a failure. Her husband didn’t pay any attention and the frying pan broke a glass. A glass dirtied with stale whisky that was lingering in the bottom of the aluminium trough. Naturally it was June who had to pick the fragments out, extract them from the slurry of food and cutlery that loitered around the plughole.

  ‘Of course, strictly speaking you could be right about that . . . Mmm.’ Peter’s head was bent as he fiddled on the table top.

  ‘Ouch!’ June registered intense irritation and intense pain simultaneously: her husband’s edifying tone lancing up under her fingernail alongside a sliver of glass from the broken vessel. ‘Why can’t you do your own washing up? Look what you’ve done to me.’ She turned from the sink to face him, holding up her wounded paw, fingers outstretched.

  Peter Geddes regarded his wife and thought: How like the Madonna she is, or Marcel’s description of the Duchesse de Guermantes, the first time he sees her in the church at Combray. He had a point, June Laughton was formidably beautiful. Behind her face bone tented flesh into pure arabesque. Her neck was long and undulant. So long that she could never hold her head straight. It was always at an angle, capturing whatever wash of prettifying light was on offer. Now, in this particular pose, with her hand spread, red rivulet running down her index finger, she was even beatified by the commonplace.

  ‘But, darling, that’s what Giselle is for, in part at any rate. She’ll do all the washing up.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Peter. You can’t expect a research assistant to labour at your turgid book all day and do domestic service as well – ‘

  ‘That’s what she’s for. That’s what she’s offered to do. Look, I know you find it very difficult to believe but I’m actually well thought of, respected, in what I do – ‘

  ‘What’s that you’re doing now?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re writing on the table. You’re writing on the bloody table! I suppose you’re going to tell me that’s an involuntary action as well.’

  ‘What, this, this? H-hn, h-hn-hn, ha-hn.’ He went into his affected, fat-man’s chortle. ‘Oh no, no no. No, this is a truth table. A truth table as it were on a truth table. H-hn h-hn, insofar as when we sit at this table we attempt to tell the truth. And this, this’ – he gestured at the square grid of letters and symbols that he had inscribed on the formica surface – ‘is a truth table expressing the necessary and sufficient conditions of an action being intentional, being willed. Do you want me to explain it further, old girl?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I want you out of here. And that girl, research assistant, au pair, factotum or scullery maid. Whatever she is – you’ll have to pick her up from Grantham yourself in the Renault. Unless you’ve forgotten, the twins get back today.’

  ‘No, I hadn’t forgotten. How long will they be here for?’

  ‘A week or two, and then they’re off to Burgundy for the grape picking.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They cracked up in the synchronised spasm that only comes after souls have been engrafted, bonded by white rheum, cemented by dusty semen, glued by placenta. The funniest thing in their lives was the fact of their children, the non-identical twins, the girl tall and opulently beautiful like her mother, the boy short, fat, cardigan-cuddly like his dear old buffer-dad.

  The twins’ inseparability had resisted all their parents’ attempts to drive them apart, to wedge them into individuality. When they came home together, from their university, or their predictable travels – Inter-railing, inefficiently digging irrigation ditches for peasants, offending Muslims – their parents laughed again at the funhouse image of their young selves incestuously bonded.

  ‘Had you thought of putting them in the Rood Room?’ Peter flung this over his shoulder as he worked his way round the awkward curved corridor that led from the kitchen to the rest of the house.

  ‘Oh no, your Giselle must have the Rood Room. After all she has to have some compensation for becoming an indentured serf.’

  Later that day Peter Geddes waited in his crap car for Giselle to exit from Grantham Station. There were never many passengers on this mid-afternoon stopper from King’s Cross so he knew he wouldn’t miss her. Despite this he adopted a sort of sit-up-and-beg posture in the hard, functional seat of the car, as if he were a private detective waiting to follow a suspect. He did this because he had the heightened self-consciousness of an intelligent person who has drunk slightly too much alcohol in the middle of the day.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Giselle, coming up on Peter unawares and hallooing in the characteristic manner of an English bourgeois.

  ‘Whossat!’ he started.

  ‘Sorry,’ she reiterated, ‘I was late and got stuck in the rear carriage. It’s taken me ages to lug this lot up the platform. I couldn’t find a porter or anyone.’

  It d
idn’t occur to Peter to cancel out her superfluous apology with one more justified. But he did get out and load her luggage through the back hatch. There was a lot of it. Two scuffed, functional suitcases, two straw baskets that wafted pot-pourri, a rolled Peruvian blanket and so on.

  They drove through Grantham. A plump man and a plump girl. Both philosophers and therefore necessarily free in spirit, yet still mundanely hobbled by avoirdupois, like battery porkers being fattened up to do metaphysics.

  Peter spoke first. ‘It’s a dull little town, we hardly bother to come in here. You can get just about everything you need in Bumford.’

  ‘Is your house right in the village?’

  ‘No, it’s on the outskirts, on the Vale of Belvoir side.’

  ‘Oh, that must be lovely.’

  ‘No, not exactly. You’ll see what I mean.’

  She did. The town of Grantham gave way to the unmade, unfinished countryside of South Notts. The scrappy alternation of light industry and industrial farming gave the area a sort of kitchen-where-no-one-has-washed-up feeling. The Vale of Belvoir, which was the only eminence for miles around, was little more than a yellow, rape-filled runnel, spreading out towards a hazy horizon, giving the distinct impression that all of England was a desultory plateau, falling away to the north.

  ‘Well, Giselle, this is your home for the foreseeable future, or at least until we can get this bloody book finished.’ Peter abruptly braked the Renault, scrunching the gravel. They sat for a moment, still in the monochrome of a dull summer afternoon, listening to an electric mower and each other’s breathing.

  Even Giselle couldn’t summon up much more of a comment about the house than, ‘Ooh, what an interesting house. It must have been quite unique when it was built.’ As good an example of the enigma of the counterfactual as any.

  Peter took her inside. June was off getting the twins from Stansted. He led her through the cramped rooms on the ground floor and up the back stairs. They entered the Rood Room.

  ‘Good heavens!’ cried Giselle. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before. How? I mean what – ?’

  ‘Yes, yes, well, the Rood Room often does take people this way. I’ll give you the edited lecture, then if you want to know more you can read the pamphlet English Heritage have done on it.’

  ‘Is this – ?’

  ‘Where you’ll be sleeping, yes, that is, if you think you can cope with it?’

  ‘Cope with it, why, it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s putting it a bit strongly but it is an unusual room, a characterful room. It was built by a local craftsman called Peter Horner, in the mid, seventeenth century. As you can see, the room is dominated by an outsize version of a traditional rood screen. Originally this feature would have separated the nave of the church from the chancel and been surmounted by a crucifix. Its status as a symbolic dividing off of the congregation from the priest is obvious, but here in the Rood Room the symbolism of the screen has been subverted.

  ‘Horner was a member of a local Manichaean sect called the Grunters. He probably built the room as a secret worshipping place for the sect. The screen itself, instead of being topped by a crucifix, is capped by a number of phalluses. Some of these descend from the ceiling, like plaster stalactites, some ascend from the screen like wooden stalagmites. The overall effect is rather toothy, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘It’s astonishing. And all the carving, painting and plasterwork. It’s all so fresh and vivid.’

  ‘Yes, well, of course the Rood Room has been extensively restored. As a matter of fact by a team of unemployed architectural graduates working under the direction of our own dear Dr Morrison. Nevertheless it was remarkably preserved to begin with. It is without doubt the foremost example of seventeenth-century vernacular architecture still extant in England.’

  ‘Actually, Dr Geddes, it does seem odd . . . I mean not that I don’t want to . . . but sleeping in a place of worship – ‘

  ‘Oh I shouldn’t give it another thought. We’ve been living here for years, since the twins were ten, and they always slept here. And anyway, you have to consider what the Grunters’ probable form of worship was. Like other Manichaeans they believed that, as the Devil was co-eternal with God, forms of behaviour that orthodox Christians regarded as sinful were in fact to be enjoined. Hence all these rude, rather than “rood”, paintings and carvings.’

  Giselle fell to examining the panels of the rood screen and Peter, remembering his more material duties as host and employer, went off to fetch her cases from the car.

  Standing in front of the house Peter looked up at its facade and shook his head in weary enjoyment. It never fails, he thought, it never fails to surprise them. Had he troubled to analyse his glee at exposing the Rood Room to Giselle, he might have found it to be a more complicated and troublesome emotion. After all, shocking guests with the Rood Room was akin to a sophisticated form of flashing.

  Because the exterior of the Geddes–Laughton house was so uncompromisingly Victorian – two shoeboxes of dark-red London brick, topped off with a steeply gabled tiled roof – any visitor was bound to expect its interior to correspond. But it was only a cladding, a long mackintosh that could be twitched aside to reveal a priapic core. For really the house was a collection of seventeenth-century cottages and hovels that had been cemented together over the centuries by a mucilage of plaster, wattle, daub and stonework. The only room of any substance was the Rood Room; all the others were awkward moulded cells, connected by bulging, serpentine corridors.

  But Peter didn’t trouble to analyse his emotions – it wasn’t his style. It’s difficult to imagine what the interior scape of a philosopher’s mind might be like. Modern works of analytic philosophy are so arid. How could anyone hold so many fiddly Faberge arguments in his or her mind for so long? Without the drifting motes of decaying brain cells – used-up thoughts and prototypical thoughts never to be employed – beginning to fill the atmosphere and cloud the clarity of introspection with intellectual plaster dust.

  To get around the problem, Peter’s mind was akilter to real time. Like a gyroscope spinning slowly, set inside another gyroscope spinning faster, Peter’s mind went on churning through chains, puzzles and tables of ratiocination, while the world zipped by him: a time-lapse film with a soundtrack of piping, irrelevant Pinky and Perky voices. And while not exactly fecund, the similes required to describe his mental processes were sterile rather than decaying. They were like three-dimensional word puzzles: propositions, premises, theses and antitheses, all were manipulated in free fall, coaxed into place with a definite ‘click’. It was if Peter’s will were a robotic claw that lanced into a radioactive interior in order to perform subtle manipulations.

  But then the greatest paradox of all is that nothing is farther off from self-knowledge than introspection, and nothing more remote from wisdom than pure intellect.

  On re-entering the house, Peter found Giselle in the kitchen. She was arranging some freesias in a jamjar full of water as he popped puffing through the narrow door.

  ‘You must let me help you with those – they’re awfully heavy.’

  ‘Oh no – no. Don’t worry. You sit down. Bung on the kettle if you like.’ He was already mounting the awkward steps.

  Back upstairs he placed her cases and baskets by the big pine bedstead set beneath the largest window. He sat on the edge of the bed and lost himself for a while in the Rood Room’s gullet confines.

  It really was an astonishing place, hardly like a room in a house at all, more of a grotto. There was one large diamond-mullioned window over the bed and another, much smaller, on the opposite wall, the other side of the rood screen. The light from these came in in thick shafts, given body by swirls of golden dust motes. But it was the ceiling that gave the room its organic feel. It was thrown over the top like a counterpane and tied down by each corner to a respective corner. The middle of the billowing roof was held aloft, over the dead centre of the rood screen, supported there by i
ts petrified folds. Between these folds, studding the rippling walls, were hundreds of plaster mouldings.

  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.