Grey Area by Will Self Page A

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