Grey Area

by Will Self

  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.

  ‘Pissed already, are they?’ said June as Giselle came into the kitchen. ‘I know it’s only eight but once you get Peter and Henry together there’s no stopping them, is there, Caitlin?’ Giselle saw that there was another woman in the kitchen. She was middle-aged but with the figure of a gamine. She had pretty little features and an uncomfortably sharp, trowel-like chin. Giselle proffered her hand.

  ‘Hi, I’m Giselle Dawson.’

  ‘And I’m Caitlin Beckwood – and that’s the only straight statement you’re likely to get out of me all evening. June, d’you have a corkscrew, I’m sure Giselle is dying for a glass of wine, I know I am.’

  Dinner was accorded a great success.

  A success as far as the two couples were concerned, perhaps, but Giselle felt distinctly sidelined. The older people took one end of the table and the twins consorted at the other. Giselle was stuck in the middle, faced with either having to force herself into the grown-ups’ conversation, which was raucous and full of shared allusions, references to a communal history, or else relapse into her teens and the kind of join-the-dots self-assertion and clumsily plotted intimacy that was still all too fresh from her days as an undergraduate.

  She got up after courses to help June and the twins with the clearing, but each time she was shooed back down into her seat. Not even this form of ordinary intercourse was allowed her.

  It wasn’t anything intentional on anyone’s part – she knew that. It was just that the two older women had a lot to talk about – and so it seemed did the men. As for the twins, their communication consisted almost entirely of near-telepathic nods and lid dips, betokening leisured centres of self but thinly partitioned-off from one another.

  Giselle was struck by the way that neither of the men offered to assist in any way. Caitlin Beckwood had got up to do a late whip of the syllabub because she was ‘good at that sort of thing’, but the only contribution Peter made throughout the evening was to open bottle after bottle of the caustic Burgundy, and the only contribution Henry made was to drink them. By the time the cheese board was passed round, the plot of the table that lay between them had been over-developed with empty bottles. They stood about like glass missile silos that had already shot their wad.

  The wine had got to Peter and Henry’s faces. It was particularly remarkable in Peter’s case, because he was wearing an intense, burgundy-coloured smoking jacket with quilted lapels. His white shirt was a wedge of light between the two blobs of vinous darkness.

  It looked ridiculous, this posh bit of plush cast over his teddy-bear torso, and Peter seemed to regard it accordingly as a joke prop, occasionally flicking invisible particles of dust from the cuffs, as if punctuating his interminable philosophical wrangles with Henry by alluding to the insubstantiality of matter itself.

  Throughout dinner, and even when they moved next door to have coffee and After Eights, they had talked Free Will. This was capitalised – in Giselle’s mind – because so intense were their clashes that they might have been arguing the tactics relating to some Amnesty International campaign to liberate a freedom fighter of that name.

  ‘Look, Henry.’ Peter plunked the table with outspread pudgy fingers. ‘It doesn’t matter at what point you introduce indeterminacy into the material world, that isn’t the issue. The impossibility of free will rests on a misconception of what it is to be truly free; and indeed, the irony of the great superstructure of argument that has been built on top of this category error is that it – in and of itself – represents the very acting-out of unfreedom – ‘

  ‘Bollocks,’ Henry countered expertly. ‘Total crap. You go round and around, Peter, up and down the rhetorical escalator like a child, but really your arguments are a naive outgrowth of adolescent cynicism. Your refusal to face up to the freedom of the will is a wish to avoid full moral responsibility – ‘

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Henry, give it
a bloody rest.’

  And so they went on. To begin with Giselle had listened to the argument with close attention. Her eyes flicked over the net of Burgundy bottles, from player to player, as they volleyed rubberised sophistries back and forth, struggling to win the bon point. Eventually she grew weary.

  The paradox that it was Beckwood, the polymer scientist working with the testable proofs of science, who clung on to the moral essence of free will, wasn’t lost on her. And although she was disappointed by Peter’s unwillingness to include her in the debate – apart from an occasional ‘Giselle will back this up, she’s a philosopher too, y’know’ – she couldn’t help being thrilled once more, as she had been in his seminars, by the audacity of his pronouncements, the sure rigidity of his mental projections.

  Peter kept on creating truth tables to illustrate his more technical points. At the dinner table these were constructed from rolled-up pellets of bread, lain out on the mahogany surface like edible Go counters. From time to time, Caitlin and June broke off from their intimate conversation to say things like, ‘Really, Peter, playing with your food like an infant, is this what you do at High Table . . .’

  Giselle was amazed by how dismissive the women were of their menfolk. They either ignored them, or joshed them unmercifully. Their remarks betrayed such condescension, such refusal to admit any equality with Peter and Henry, that she was surprised that the men didn’t retaliate in any way. But perhaps they were simply too drunk.

  ‘That’s what Jowett used to say.’ They were in the drawing room and Henry and Peter were drinking Rémy Martin out of mismatched tumblers. ‘Are you a two-bottle man, or a three-bottle man!’ They guffawed at this.

  ‘Joyce doesn’t realise what she’s putting up with,’ Caitlin was saying to June. ‘If she did, she wouldn’t allow them to bully her in this fashion.’ It had transpired that Caitlin was a landscape gardener as well – and a successful one. Giselle could work this out from the famous names that were inadvertently kicked between them as they discussed ideas, billings, possible commissions, the impossibility of getting good workers.