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.
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