The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  Harriet, who had half risen from her chair, anticipating a flood of tears—and ready to tell Cleo that the bicycle being found proved nothing at all—sank back, and a rather puzzled concern clouded her features. “Darling,” she said, “what do you mean, you knew?”

  A most peculiar thing happened then. There was a sudden flare of energy in Cleo, but it was a strange, wild energy. She laughed, you see, in a joyless, manic sort of way, and cried out, “What I say, Mummy! I knew! He came and told me!”

  “Darling, do sit down, please. Who told you?”

  “He did! Sidney did!” And then she burst into tears and flung herself into an armchair, where she buried her face in her hands and sobbed convulsively. Harriet was beside her instantly. “But darling, darling—”

  With an awful wail Cleo brushed her mother aside and fled from the room. Harriet gazed at me, dumb with shock, and then, went after the girl. “No, Harriet,” I said sharply, “let her go.” Harriet paused, her hand on the doorknob; she turned toward me. “Let her go,” I said quietly, and crossing the room, I led her back to her armchair by the fire, where she sat in a state of dazed dismay while I made her a drink.

  I sit here in my cave, in my grotto, and think of Cleo, Cleo with her buckteeth and lively eyes, her elfin presence, her quick, light ways... Did I mention that the only good that has come of this term I’ve spent among the ontologically dead has been Cleo’s sympathy? That sympathy has, alas, become rarer and more fleeting; the scene I have just described, in which she told us that she knew what had happened to Sidney, that he had told her, was the first indication to Harriet and myself that something was seriously amiss with our daughter; it was, in fact, the first manifestation of a mental illness that has, in recent months, progressively enshrouded her mind. She does have moments of lucidity—inspired lucidity—and it was during one of these that she saw what all the rest of them are blind to, that I, Hugo, am still thinking and feeling within the frame of this inert and failing flesh.

  You see, after my cerebral accident Crook entered a period of tranquillity. The storm of my personality had ceased to rage, and a smooth calm settled on the surface of life, a deceptive calm, I believe, that concealed within it the workings of dark and restless forces—but a calm, nonetheless. I was much alone, in those early days after leaving the hospital, with the grotesques of my imagination; and when I believed myself unobserved, I would at times permit myself to weep, as I contemplated my own ruin and the ruin of my house. The day I sat facing the wall and, hearing the sounds of a chess game behind me, imagined a scene of venereal depravity —that day I permitted the tears to fall, and when Cleo entered the drawing room and with a cry of indignation turned my wheelchair to the light, she saw the tears and, suddenly quiet, sank to her knees beside me, and bringing her face close to mine, gazed into my eyes—and saw me. “Daddy,” she breathed, her face still but a few inches from mine, so that I gazed back at eyes the precise same shade of gray as my own, “Daddy,” she whispered, “you’re in there, I know you are.” And from that moment forward I was no longer alone. Fledge knew, of course, but he used the knowledge to torment me. Cleo loved me.

  But as I say, Cleo is rarely with us anymore. Like me she has been trapped in a false world of shadows and phantoms; for her, as for me, the borders and boundaries of the real and the fantastic have become blurred, unreliable, faulty. In her, as in me, order is crumbling. But I at least can see it crumbling. Cleo cannot do even that, or rather, she does it increasingly rarely. In fact, in these last days her recognition of my own sentient existence has grown so sporadic that she no longer provides me any real support. It is Fledge, ironically, who maintains me—he maintains me with his hatred. I think that were he to cease to hate me, were he to deprive me of this last fragile link, this last relation with the world, then I should be swallowed up, sink into darkness for good. Doubtless there would be a final gasp, a last solipsistic flurry of ideation, but then I would fall silent, truly become the vegetable the world takes me for. This, as I say, is the irony of my existence, that I have come to require the hatred of a bad servant simply to be. Ontologically I am not dead, but I am clinging to the ledge with my fingernails!

  But Cleo. It was of Cleo, not myself, that I intended to speak, for as I say, with her mysterious declaration that Sidney had told her what had happened to him, Harriet and I first began to understand how deeply the loss of the boy had touched her. “Let her go, Harriet,” I had said in the study that night; I knew that, like me, Cleo would prefer to recover from an access of intense emotion privately and alone, that she would seek us out as and when she wished to speak about it, and not before. For the next two days, then, a pall of sadness lay upon the house, as the fact of Cleo’s grief permeated the atmosphere. Everybody felt it, everybody understood it. The girl came down to meals but was silent and listless. Her face, normally so lively, so mobile, rapidly and dramatically reflected her inner state—dark shadows appeared around her eyes, her cheeks seemed to hollow out, to become gaunt and harrowed with pain. We all felt for her, and waited for her to begin to come to terms with her emotions. That process was disturbed, however, by two events; and the first of these was the pipes of Crook bursting.

  ❖

  It was my grandfather, a farsighted and energetic Victorian called Sir Digby Coal, who introduced indoor plumbing to Crook. The household is today still served by the lavatories he installed, which, in their day, were much admired: the seats and covers were of pale oak, all the brass fittings shone like gold, and the bowls were sculpted from the finest white china. The tank is in the attic, and Sir Digby did not rest until the flushing mechanism functioned to that standard of efficiency that his generation brought to bear on everything it undertook. For Sir Digby Coal, even the humble lavatory served to express the idea of Progress.

  But last winter Crook experienced a cold snap that was suddenly, in the days after Christmas, punctuated by a thaw, and Sir Digby’s obsolescent and cantankerous pipes promptly burst. A crisis ensued: the kitchen was flooded, and the central heating, senile and inefficient though it was, had to be shut down. There was no running water. In the very somber atmosphere that had descended upon us, it was as though the house were performing its own tearful requiem for Sidney Giblet, a sort of gesture of hydraulic condolence. So it was that on New Year’s Eve we all sat down to a breakfast of deviled kidneys amid the noise and clatter of the Ceck plumber and his two sons; and where before had reigned the hushed silence appropriate to the situation, there was now the sloshing of mops, the banging of spanners, and the cheery, whistling bustle of men at work. And as we sat in this din, the telephone suddenly raised its shrill mechanic voice. Some moments later Fledge materialized at my elbow.

  “Telephone, Sir Hugo.”

  Down the table eyes were lifted in mild curiosity, except Victor’s; he was deep in his Freud.

  “Who is it, Fledge?”

  Hilary began to smear marmalade on a piece of toast. Harriet was stirring her tea. I folded the Times.

  “It’s Mrs. Giblet.”

  “Oh no!” This from Cleo, who rose from the table and left the room.

  ❖

  I returned to the dining room five minutes later. An expectant hush greeted my reentry. “Well?” said Harriet. I sat down. I told Fledge to give me more tea. I then reported that Mrs. Giblet had been informed by Inspector Limp about the bicycle being dug up in the marsh. That, I said, was not all. Considering herself qualified to furnish some real assistance to the police (of whose intelligence she was apparently no great admirer), she had traveled to Ceck, and was even now ensconced in the Hodge and Purlet.

  A gasp from Harriet. “Oh good heavens,” she said, gazing at me with genuine distress. “Hugo, must we have her here? We must.”

  “I explained to Mrs. Giblet about our pipes,” I replied. “I told her she would be more comfortable where she was.”

  “Well that’s a relief, at any rate,” murmured Harriet.

  “I did, however, feel obliged to ask h
er to dine with us tonight.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Harriet. “Oh dear, poor woman. She’s probably just as upset as Cleo. More so!” She sighed. She had already extended her full sympathy, as a woman and as a mother, to that ghastly old battle-ax, that dragon, who had settled now in our midst and would undoubtedly belch flame and ill-smelling smoke into all our lives. I made for the barn, reflecting, not for the first time, that if I’d had the slightest inkling of the trouble Sidney Giblet was going to cause, I’d never have let him within a mile of Crook in the first place.

  ❖

  The last night of the old year; and seven of us sat down to dinner. Next to me and to my left was Mrs. Giblet. She had arrived at Crook in a vast and shapeless fur coat with padded shoulders, and a black hat whose brim was pinned up on one side and embellished with sprigs of lace and crimson cherries. In one arm she clutched her lapdog; with the other she gripped the handle of her rubber-tipped walking stick, the one with the skull embedded in the crook. She wore gloves of black satin and a large white pearl in each pendent and withered earlobe. Fledge attempted to take her coat from her, but she insisted on keeping it on for the time being, until she was “adjusted.” Wily old bird, she realized immediately of course that in a house like this the central heating was probably tepid at the best of times. With burst pipes we had only fires to warm us, and Crook is a house of drafts.

  Along the hallway she advanced, inspecting as she went and nodding to left and right with royal approbation. Her entry into the drawing room was stately; Henry and Victor both rose to their feet, and Harriet came forward with both arms outstretched. “Dear Mrs. Giblet,” she said warmly, “how good of you to come at such short notice.”

  It was the perfect thing to say to Mrs. Giblet. “Not at all, Lady Coal,” she purred. “Ah! Cleo!” Cleo came forward quietly and brushed the old woman’s cheek with her lips. Mrs. Giblet then sank into the armchair Henry had vacated by the fire, and began to fumble for cigarettes. Harriet introduced her to the Horns, apologized profusely for the cold, and invited her to have a glass of sherry. Mrs. Giblet thought that would be nice. Then, failing altogether to beat about the bush, she declared to the room at large: “I have met the man Limp. Sir Hugo”—she wheeled about in her chair— “I am surprised that you place any confidence in him at all; to my mind he is a total incompetent.”

  I frowned. “He has had very little to work with, Mrs. Giblet,” I said.

  “That’s a moot point, Sir Hugo. With all the progress Limp is making we’ll be lucky to see Sidney in a box. I’m sorry, my dear”—Cleo had been unable to suppress a small cry—“but there’s no use holding out false hopes.”

  She puffed lugubriously at her cigarette. A silence fell. The light died in her eyes and her face slowly collapsed, and in the sag of it there seemed to dwell such an immense despair that the atmosphere rapidly became very black indeed. Harriet rushed in to fill the breach. “Mrs. Giblet,” she cried, “come! There is no reason to despair, none at all. I keep telling Cleo, digging up a bicycle tells us nothing at all.”

  Mrs. Giblet looked up. She reached for Harriet’s hand, and smiled that oddly charming smile I’d seen in London. “Of course it doesn’t,” she said. “Lady Coal, forgive me for infecting your home with my gloom. May I, I wonder, have more of that sherry? It really is very good.” And while Fledge was busy with the task, Mrs. Giblet, apparently somewhat “adjusted,” opened her coat. “Thank you,” she said, raising her face to Fledge, as he appeared with her sherry. “Personally,” she said, “I intend to go over the Ceck Marsh with a fine-tooth comb. You may be right about Limp, Sir Hugo, or then again you may not. I should simply like to convince myself that nothing has been overlooked. Would anyone, I wonder, care to help me?”

  The brief silence that followed upon this bizarre invitation was broken by Victor. “Yes,” he cried, with alacrity, “I would!” This functioned as a piece of comic relief, although the boy was quite serious. A ripple of amusement passed over the drawing room, and then Fledge announced that dinner was served.

  ❖

  Going in to dinner, Mrs. Giblet attached herself to Harriet, to whom she had apparently taken a “shine,” and gushed. “All this wood, Lady Coal, how comforting it must be to live in a house with walls paneled with wood. Oak, I imagine, isn’t it? Good English oak; it makes for a feeling of continuity with the past, is what I’ve always thought. Are you a great believer in tradition, Lady Coal?”

  “I suppose I am, Mrs. Giblet,” murmured Harriet.

  “I, too, am deeply conservative,” said Mrs. Giblet. “I always have been. Churchill’s my man; I knew him once, you know. Brilliant chap, erudite, extremely, and such wit!” The old lady chuckled slightly and tapped Harriet’s arm, upon which rested her own gnarled old claw. “Why once—but no, you don’t want to hear my stories, do you. Up here, next to Sir Hugo? Delighted. Thank you, Fledge.”

  Seven of us, as I say, sat down to dinner that night, and a curious-looking group we made. With the central heating shut down, Crook was really very chilly, and in view of this fact I had decided that jerseys might be worn with evening dress. We thus had the spectacle of Henry Horn in a thick gray fisherman’s sweater that bulked clumsily under his dinner jacket and, in concert with his beard, made him look more than ever like a sea captain. Hilary, Harriet, and Cleo all looked very gauche, all in their thickest cardigans, with headscarves tied under their chins. Victor was hardy, and wore only his school uniform; and Mrs. Giblet, having, clearly, adjusted, and no doubt thinking it highly improper, regardless of climatic conditions, to dine in a country house in her coat, had slipped the great fur off her shoulders and was revealed in the full majesty and splendor of her evening gown.

  It was a black satin garment that had resided, I hypothesized, for a good forty years in some mahogany wardrobe in that dingy house near the British Museum. It was shiny and sleeveless, and hung to the ground in stiff folds, and rustled, I noticed, when she moved. As she seated herself by me, I became aware of a distinct smell of mothballs; nor was that the only smell that clung to the woman. Rather, it served as a sort of deep bass to a veritable symphony of aromas, the melody, so to speak, being carried by a sharp little perfume which, so she told me (for I inquired) had been purchased in Strasbourg in 1934. Its sour and astringent qualities were vulgarized, however (my own nose, though not good, detected this), by a liberal application of cheap eau-de-cologne, and the whole was grimly inflected with the mundane odors of cigarette smoke, sherry, and the perfectly natural emanations of an aging flesh.

  Her shoulders were bare, as were her upper arms, from which the skin hung in copious limp pouches. She’d donned her jewelry for dinner in the country, a tiara dotted with a diamond or two, and a string of pearls that dipped alarmingly toward the chasm that gaped within her bosom. The satin gloves reached to her elbows; she had wondered, she confided to me, whether they might not be a trifle dressy outside London. I assured her that, on the contrary, one could never be overdressed in the country, temperatures did not permit it. She took this quip in good humor. She ate well, occasionally dropping morsels to the beast in her lap, and she was deeply appreciative of my claret, which she loudly swilled about her mouth and swallowed with evident pleasure. I found myself, surprisingly, warming rather to the old buzzard, the old turkey, and when, apropos a remark of mine about a piece of fossilized bone with which I was much preoccupied at the time, she began to speak about her arthritis, I told her in an undertone that the man near the other end of the table, the one she’d taken for a sea captain, was in fact one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country, and that after dinner she should tell him about her arthritis. She said she would. Henry, I thought, will be delighted.

  The soup came and went, and then the main course—Doris had outdone herself with a joint of roast beef, and there was ham as well—and we were on to the Stilton when Cleo could finally contain herself no longer. She had been very quiet all evening; and now, as Mrs. Giblet demurely accepted more port from Fl
edge, and raised her glass to Henry, whom she had clearly earmarked as her healer, Cleo rose to her feet, perceptibly quivering with emotion, and pointed an unsteady finger at the old woman. “How can you?” she cried, and a strange, unnaturally fierce light burned in her eyes. “How can you sit and stuff yourself when Sidney’s still out there somewhere, in the cold, in pain? Oh, you disgust me—no Mummy, don’t try and shut me up, this is true—you sit here as if nothing had happened, when all the time the most appalling things are happening”—her finger swung round to the window—“out there! Outside! You have no conception of the evil that exists out there! You think the worst thing in the world is a burst pipe or a gamy ham, and all the time, right under your noses, the most foul and loathsome evil thing creeps on the earth, and you don’t see it, you make yourselves blind to it because it’s just too much trouble! Oh, if it touched your comfort, that would be different, but just the fact that a hideous, stinking, evil thing is crawling around outside this house—that won’t rouse you, but it’s there all the same! It’s there! And you’ll find it, Mrs. Giblet, you’ll find it, out in the marsh, but you better go after dark! Oh! Oh!” —and she burst into tears and fled weeping from the room.

  ❖