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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 didn’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 its 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.

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.