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,