Will Self - Grey Area

‘Oh, I see. Well, that’s too bad. Anyway, come in now, come in here to the drawing room, where it’s warm.’

Simon-Arthur ushered Dave-Dave into a long room that took up half of the Brown House’s ground floor. Dave-Dave could see at once that this was where the family spent the bulk of their time. There were two separate groupings of over-stuffed armchairs and sofas, one at either end of the room. Mahogany bookcases went clear along one of the walls, interrupted only by two windows in the centre and a door which presumably led to the garden.

On the other wall there was a vast collection of icons set on a number of shelves that were unevenly spaced, giving the impression that the icons were somehow radiating from the smouldering fire in the grate. Everywhere in the room, set on little tables — occasional, coffee and otherwise — on the arms of the chairs, and even the floor itself, were votive objects: crucifixes, incense burners, hanks of rosary beads, statuettes of the Blessed Virgin. The long room vibrated with the hum of so many patterns flowing into one another: wallpaper into carpet; carpet into seat-cover; seat-cover into cushion; cushion into the gilded frame of an icon. It was like a peacock’s tail under the glass dome of a taxidermist’s collation.

The overwhelming clutteredness of the room so impressed itself upon Dave-Dave Hutchinson that it wasn’t until Simon-Arthur said, ‘Jean-Drusilla, I want to introduce Mr Hutchinson, he manages the newsagent’s in Thame,’ that he realised there was anyone in it besides the two of them. A rather gaunt woman with severely chopped black hair and a prominent, red-tipped nose rose from behind the moulting back of a horsehair armchair where she had been seated.

‘I am so pleased to meet you, Mr Hutchinson,’ she said, holding out her hand. Dave-Dave Hutchinson advanced towards her, picking his way between the outcroppings of religionalia. She was wearing a crushed velvet, floor-length dress. Both the lace at her throat and that of her handkerchief broadcast the caramel smell of Friar’s Balsam.

He kissed her hand, and releasing it looked up into her eyes, which were deep brown. There, he caught a glimpse of her graphic religiosity: circling the two diminutive Hutchinson heads, reflected in her pupils, hovered imps, satyrs, minor demons and hummingbird angels. ‘A-and I you, Mrs Dykes,’ he stammered.

‘Simon-Arthur told me about the help you gave him this afternoon — and the concern you showed him as well.’

‘Really, Mrs Dykes, it was nothing, nothing at all.’

‘No, not nothing, Mr Hutchinson, far from it. It was a truly Christian act, the behaviour of a man of true feeling. A Samaritan casting aside the partisan claims of place, people and estate, selflessly to aid another.’

She was still holding his hand and she used it to draw him round and pilot him into an armchair that faced her own. ‘I fear my husband was asthmatic even before the fog, and he will let his emotions run away with him. Like all artists he is so terribly sensitive. When he gets upset. .’ She tailed off and shrugged expressively, both of her hands held palm-upwards. Dave-Dave Hutchinson stared at the many heavy gold rings, studded with amethysts and emeralds, that striped her fingers.

‘What exactly is it that you paint, Mr Dykes?’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson asked, turning in his chair to face Simon-Arthur, who was still hovering by the door. Even as the newsagent said it, he felt that the question was both too prosaic and too forward. He was painfully aware that his own social position was quite inferior to that of the Dykeses, and while it didn’t matter when he and Simon Dykes had formed that spontaneous bond of friendship at Marten’s — which was after all his own preserve — here at the Brown House he felt awkward and gauche, on guard lest he commit some appalling gaffe, or utter a solecism that would point up his humble origins.

‘Oh, I don’t paint much besides icons nowadays. These are some of mine around the fireplace.’

The newsagent rose from his chair and walked over to the wall. The icons were really very strange indeed. They featured all the correct elements of traditional icons, but the Trinity and the saints depicted were drawn not from life, nor imagination, but from the sort of photographs of public personages that are printed in the newspapers. These bland faces and reassuring eyes had been done in oils with total exactitude. The artist had even rendered the minute moiré patterning of coloured dots that constituted the printed image.

‘I can see why you’re so concerned to get your newspaper in good condition each day, Mr Dykes,’ he said — and immediately regretted it, it sounded so trite, so bourgeois a comment.

‘Ye-es,’ Simon-Arthur replied, ‘it’s very difficult to get that level of detail if you’re working from a soggy paper.’

‘Is there much of a demand for icons at the moment?’

‘A huge demand,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes, ‘a vast demand, but Simon-Arthur doesn’t sell his. He paints them for the greater glory of our Saviour, for no other client.’

Just then the door of the room swung open and Christabel-Sharon came in, carrying her three-year-old daughter Storm in her thin arms. The little girl was feverish. She was murmuring in a distracted way and had two bright, scarlet spots high up on her cheeks. Christabel-Sharon herself was in tears. ‘Henry has thrown Storm out of the oxygen tent again, Simon-Arthur; really, you must do something about it, look at the state she’s in.’

Simon-Arthur didn’t say anything, but left the room immediately. Dave-Dave Hutchinson could hear heavy feet thudding up the stairs and then voices raised in the room above, one deep, the other reedy.

‘Christabel-Sharon,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes when her husband had gone, ‘this is Mr Hutchinson who manages the newsagent’s in Thame. Mr Hutchinson, this is my cousin Christabel-Sharon Lannière.’

‘I’m delighted to meet you, Ms Lannière, said Dave Hutchinson, and waited for her to put the child down somewhere so that he might kiss her hand. She dumped the little girl quite unceremoniously on a chaise-longue, and advanced towards him smiling broadly, hand outstretched, the tears already drying on her cheeks, like snail trails in the morning sun.

And as he took the hand, and noticed how small and fine it was, Dave-Dave Hutchinson decided that she was unquestionably the most beautiful woman he had seen in a very long time. He was, after all, so conditioned to accepting emaciation as a body-type, that he could dwell on the hollow beneath a woman’s clavicle, even if it threatened to bore through her thorax. Christabel-Sharon must have sensed this silent homage on his part, for, as she curtsied, she gave an extra little bob, as if acknowledging this new allegiance to her attractions.

They stood like that for a while, looking at one another, whilst Jean-Drusilla Dykes tended to the little girl, propping her up on some cushions, finding a coverlet for her, and eventually placing the nebuliser mask over her whispering mouth and turning the machine on.

‘Oh, is that the nebuliser?’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson asked. ‘It looks absolutely fantastic.’

‘Isn’t it,’ said Christabel-Sharon, with equal enthusiasm. ‘We’ve been on the waiting list for one now for months, but somehow Simon-Arthur managed to get priority — ‘

‘We don’t talk about that, Christabel-Sharon,’ Jean-Drusilla Dykes cut in. ‘It isn’t seemly.’

‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ Dave-Dave Hutchinson said hurriedly. ‘I didn’t mean to seem intrusive.’

‘No, no, Mr Hutchinson, it’s not your fault, but the truth of the matter” is that Simon-Arthur did use connections to get hold of the nebuliser; and even though I’m delighted to have it I can’t help feeling that the way in which it was obtained will tell against us eventually. Oh Mr Hutchinson, what a shoddy, cheap world we live in when a fine man like my husband, a moral man, a just man, has to resort to such expedients merely in order to aid his suffering family — ‘ Her voice broke, quite abruptly, and she began to sob, screwing the handkerchief soaked with Friar’s Balsam into her eye.