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
