‘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.
Giselle had had more wine that she should. She was almost drunk. When she turned her head, from the bookcase to the men’s mulberry faces, from these faces to those of the animated women, her eyes followed on lazily, lurching against the insides of their sockets as if intoxicated in their own right.
The voices burred and lowed. Giselle tried to imagine her hosts as cattle. They fitted the role well, set down on the field of carpet by the pools of wavering light, grazing on conversation.
‘You look ready to drop, Giselle.’ It was June, her voice maternal, gently concerned.
‘I’m, I’m sorry. .?’
‘You’d better go up to bed, my dear, you’ll need a good night if you’re going to cope with Peter and his hangover in the morning.’
‘Oh, yeah, urn, s’pose so.’ Giselle struggled to her feet, the distance from the bottom of the low armchair to being upright was an Everest ascent.
She said her good-nights. Peter and Henry barely interrupted their conversation, they just waved their glasses at her and made valedictory noises. The women were more polite.