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.’