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