The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  “What is it?”

  The key turns in the lock and the door swings open.

  “Someone to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “King George the Sixth, who do you think? On your feet.”

  George wearily rises. His hair is cropped even shorter than I remember it, and in his long, dour face, particularly around his eyes and in the cleft of his thick eyebrows, can be read a slackening of the man’s tight-knit nature, the unmistakable signs of exhaustion and despair. He seems devitalized, enfeebled, unnerved. He shuffles to the door, hitching the loose, baggy prison trousers about his narrow hips, and, stooping slightly, emerges into the corridor.

  The warder locks the door behind them and slips his vast bunch of keys, which are linked by a chain to his belt, into a deep side pocket of his trousers. “Come on, Lecky,” he says, and the pair of them move down the corridor toward the office at the end of the block, their advancing shadows falling across the hard-edged grids of sunlight that come slicing through cell doors and skylights as the two men go trudging by.

  At the end of the cell block stood a senior warder. “You’ve got a visitor, George,” he said. He was an older man, kindly and paternalistic. “Got tobacco, have you, George?”

  George nodded.

  “Right. Down you go then.” He unlocked a grille gate giving onto a steep cast-iron spiral staircase. As George and his warder descended, the gate banged shut behind them and the harsh metallic clangor of the key turning in the lock echoed loudly down the stairwell. At the bottom George stood by while the procedure was repeated; then down a short hallway and into a small square room with a single barred window set high in one wall. The walls were painted a dingy green to chest height, thereafter a sort of off-beige color. In the center of the room stood a sturdy wooden table scarred by cigarette burns; there was a dirty tin ashtray on it, and above it hung a light bulb in a green tin shade. The room was bright with strips and squares of sunshine, and on each side of the table stood a wooden chair. As George entered an old woman on one of those chairs turned toward him and, wrapping her hands about the handle of her walking stick, scrutinized him closely. It was Mrs. Giblet.

  I often find myself, in this, Crook’s late period, as I think of it, wondering what exactly Fledge makes of me. The man himself gives me almost nothing, of course, nor has he since the day he turned my wheelchair to the wall. No, phlegmatic as ever, he demonstrates no sign that, for example, his successful seduction and domination of Harriet afford him pride or pleasure. I wonder if, in addition to his innate sly caution, he is a superstitious man? Does he think, perhaps, that an outward manifestation of feeling might be unlucky, does he think that there are gods or fates supervising the affairs of mortals, and that these supernatural entities delight in the ruin of our projects? (I’ve certainly begun to harbor such suspicions with regard to my own life.) Does he, therefore, in order to avoid their interference, practice the tight lip, the blank gaze— that repertoire of stiff and formal gestures from which he seems never to deviate? Is this why he acts as he does—is he attempting to pursue his ambitions unnoticed and unchallenged by the gods? I think quite probably it is.

  What, then, does he make of me? I clearly pose no further threat to him, for Crook is, I should say, essentially his at this stage. I think actually I may function in Fledge’s mind as a sort of trophy, rather like the stag’s head opposite the clock in the hallway. I think perhaps he sees me as something he has conquered, and thus as a symbol of his potency (and I might as well be stuffed and mounted, given my current condition). But there is something else going on between Fledge and myself, though the only basis I have for saying any of this is the intuition of a chronic and passive observer. For Fledge, remember, is dressing in a manner very similar to my own now; when he glances over from the fireplace, and sees me grinning at him in a tweed jacket almost precisely the same shade and pattern as his, in cavalry twill trousers of an identical beige, with an equally sharp crease, and leather-soled brogues with ornamental perforations on the toe cap, again no different from his own—what does he see? As for my tie, he may well be wearing its brother; I’ve noticed that the man has been making free with my ties for some time now, and I’ve cursed Harriet in my heart that she could betray me so intimately.

  Yes, there he stands, tall and straight and sleek and elegant and handsome and, looking over, he sees—himself. But it is himself transformed, it is a stunted and grinning reflection he sees—as though he has looked into a distorting mirror and found himself turned into a grotesque. I am his grotesque double; he reads in me an outward sign of his own corruption, I am the externalization, the manifestation, the fleshly representation of his true inner nature— which is a deformed and withered thing. He recognizes this—and it fascinates him, to see his own soul grinning at him from a corner of the room. At first his shock of self-recognition was intense—that was the day he turned my wheelchair to the wall, that’s why he did it, I now realize—but in time he has come to take a sort of blackly narcissistic pleasure in the image of his own grotesqueness. And this is why I think of myself as his shriveled conscience, I am the atrophied memory of good that is even now fading and shrinking and wasting away before his eyes. For as I sink, so he rises; aware of this, he sees me as a sort of inversion of himself, the negative to his positive. The irony is that in truth he is the negative of me, for in me the good persists, and for all my flaws—and I do not claim to be perfect, never have, I’ve been a bad husband and an indifferent father—but for all my flaws I have never abandoned moral value. In contrast to the naked cynicism, the violence and the perversity of Fledge, I, a grotesque, can still glimpse the good. Fledge, diabolical man that he is, enjoys the spectacle of my decay in his drawing room; and just as the gargoyle on a Gothic church was a defeated demon forced to serve as a sewer, so, inversely, am I forced to serve as a gargoyle in this anti-cathedral, this hell-hall that Fledge has made of Crook. Fledge is the grotesque—not I!

  And having thought this, I begin to snort uproariously, and Harriet runs over to thump my bent and brittle spine. One of these days someone’s going to thump it so hard the bloody thing will snap in two, and that’ll be the end of Sir Hugo, thank God.

  They dance now, you know, Harriet and the grotesque, generally as a prelude to sex. He puts a record on the gramophone, then takes Harriet in his arms and the pair of them quite shamelessly foxtrot around the drawing room. The French windows are open, and the sweet rank smells of my wildly overgrown flower garden come drifting in, along with birdsong, much birdsong. The lights have not been turned on yet, and in the gloom of evening the air is rich with the stink of musky blossoms, and sometimes he even foxtrots her out onto the terrace, for I hear their shoes on the flagstones. Fledge dances well, of course, and carries Harriet along with sinuous and effortless grace; it’s a prelude to sex, as I say, for after ten minutes or so they invariably slip off to his pantry, and there, I imagine, Fledge settles himself on the chair by the workbench, his trousers and underpants at his ankles and his cock up like a shinbone. Harriet, in her haste and lust, will have abandoned her own underpants even while descending the staircase and then, having hitched her skirt about her waist, she straddles him. They jog up and down, gently at first, but with gathering velocity. Harriet clings to the man, her fingers clutching at his shoulders, his neck, his hair, and then, with her little chin lifted, her eyes closed, her hair coming loose and tumbling about her shoulders, she emits small cries and squawks as she bumps unsteadily toward the first climax of the evening. She finishes with tears streaming down her cheeks, and rains wet kisses on the face of this marvelous man she has found.

  ❖

  Meanwhile I am sitting in the drawing room listening in great agony as the foxtrot record goes round and round and round, no sooner finished than it starts all over again.

  Back in London, back in prison, George listened in stoic silence to the news that the Home Secretary had refused to reprieve him. He was standing at the end of his bunk, with t
he window at his back. The Governor stood in the doorway of the cell and imparted the news in somber tones. “I’m sorry, George,” he said. He liked George. They all did.

  The change in George was by this stage a dramatic one. He’d lost a good deal of weight, and he had been a lean man when he went in. The long blue jaw, the sunken cheeks and the shaven skull —they all rendered his face extremely haggard. The countryman’s stride had been transformed by months of confinement into a stooped, uncertain shuffle, and the constant exercise of willpower had made him uncharacteristically tense. He exercised willpower so as not to lose control; the loss of his life seemed preferable, to George, to loss of control. The Governor and the warders recognized this, that he refused to submit to terror, and they respected it. He smoked his pipe almost constantly.

  How well I knew that good, solid man—it was the deprivation of fresh air, and soil, and trees, more than anything else that was breaking him down. He’d spent his life outdoors; he’d been a farmer, and before that a soldier, a good soldier, too, and now for months he’d had nothing but a small patch of sky to remind him that the world was made of more than bricks and steel. They took him out to the yard each day for forty minutes, by himself, but it was almost worse than nothing. He tramped around the dusty stones with the pipe clenched firmly between those big strong teeth of his, unaware, fortunately, of the eyes that gazed from every window overlooking the yard. Add to those eyes my eye—my mind’s eye—for I too was keeping George under surveillance, in my imagination, though unlike the others I had for him only love, and pity, and compassion. There was a deep bitterness eating away at George’s innards, and this depression, this progressive darkening of the spirit, was spiked ever more frequently by waves of sheer giddy panic at the prospect of dying. It was at those moments that he bit fiercely on the stem of his pipe, and clenched his fists until the knuckles blanched. His mind behaved irrationally: he loved the table and chair in his cell, he loved the bed and the chamber pot, the window and the small blue square of sky. He clutched at them all like a drowning man. But then, at the next moment, his thoughts darted ahead and tried to pierce the darkness and know what would happen—afterwards. George had no religion to speak of, and shunned the prison chaplain, who appeared each day and left a tract or two. It wasn’t the loss of the soul that terrified George but the loss of the senses, the loss of the sensible world: hence his sudden fierce spurts of love for the simple chair he sat upon, for the smell of black tobacco, and for the solid warmth in the voice of a warder called Bert. Then the wave would pass, and he would be left with the dull sardonic ache that throbbed behind all his thoughts, and was only kept manageable by the smoking of his pipe. He played endless games of dominoes with Bert, and the hours seemed at times to drag by with painful slowness, at other times to slip away with terrifying speed. He thought about his trial, quite listlessly; he often thought about me, and asked for news of me. Did he understand why I had forsaken him? I hope to God he did. The prison doctor came to examine him, and pronounced him in sound health. Suddenly George realized that he’d had his allotment, that all that remained was to break down his body and create a death. He was forty-nine years old, and on the far side of the prison they had dug his grave.

  During this period, after the trial, Mrs. Giblet was working on George—against me. This was why she came to the prison; why else would she visit the man who had fed her hams fattened on the flesh of her own son? She was plotting against me, trying to get George to betray me, suggesting to him, either in subtle and oblique terms, or quite candidly, that he could save himself by indicting me. She was having no success, at this stage, for George was intensely loyal to me, had been since our African days. But there was another factor in all this, and that was the intense loneliness that a man in George’s position feels. To contemplate one’s own imminent death—I speak now from personal experience—while the rest of humanity looks breezily forward to years, decades—indefinite spans: this sets a man apart. There is a sort of solitude that touches every traveler leaving home, a melancholy that lives deep within the sense of excitement or purpose that prompts the journey. Take that melancholy—Is it the primal fear of the hunter leaving the cave? The fear of never returning? Or of returning to a deserted home, or a home in ruins?—take that melancholy and magnify it a thousandfold, and that is the sadness and the isolation of the condemned man. I know. And I suspect that Mrs. Giblet was quite canny enough to know it too, and thus to realize just how vulnerable George was.

  For George was pathetically grateful that she visited him, I see that now. In the eyes of the world he was a monster, and the visits of this old woman, the mother of his supposed victim, were the only sort of external support he had with which to buttress his increasingly fragile sense of who he was. Mrs. Giblet functioned in relation to George as Cleo did to me—they shored us up with their faith and enabled us to go on. They gave us back a reflection of ourselves that was not grotesque or monstrous. They allowed us to believe we were still human, still men. With Mrs. Giblet, however, that support had a price.

  ❖

  Time passed, and the strain grew more intense. George’s thoughts revolved constantly around this one stark theme: I’m going to swing for what I didn’t do. He began to have doubts. Until this point he had talked to Mrs. Giblet only because she seemed to want to talk —the profound sense of gratification he derived from her visits had less to do with conversation than with the simple fact that she’d come to see him. He hardly even needed to see her—just to know that she’d come was enough. But if it was talk she wanted, then talk he would give her, that clipped, brusque countryman’s talk, the only kind George knew. So he talked about Crook, about the weather last winter, the state of the garden, the state of the soil. And when the old woman asked him about me—or rather, when she told him what she suspected of me—well, George just sucked on the stem of his pipe and gazed at the ceiling.

  And still the days slipped by, and May 24 loomed larger and larger, like some great animal advancing upon him, and him powerless to move out of its path. Up and down the cell he paced, pulling furiously on that much-chewed pipe stem. Bert could no longer tempt him to dominoes, so he sat in placid silence as George paced up and down, up and down that narrow cell. The prison grays flapped about his bony frame like winding sheets.

  George at last reached a decision. He sat down across the table from Bert and stared him straight in the eye. “Bert,” he said, “you know who done young Giblet?”

  A cloud of unease crossed the other man’s face. He said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you, Bert,” said George. There was a husky rasp to his voice. This was going against the grain, but he had to do it, now. “Sir Hugo done him, Bert. Not me, Sir Hugo.”

  There, it was out. He, too, had betrayed me. In terror of losing his life, he had betrayed his old comrade. He sat there, waiting for Bert’s reaction. Bert gazed at his face, a small frown etched between his sandy eyebrows. From far away came the clang of a metal door and the rattle of a bunch of keys. It was night. At last he spoke. “Don’t get worked up, George,” he murmured. “Don’t get yourself in a state, not now.”

  George gaped at the man. With a rather sick sensation, a sensation of dizzying vertigo, it came to him that he wasn’t going to be listened to. He began to protest, but he knew, with utter certainty, that it would do no good. He’d left it too late, much, much too late.

  Poor George. Even after what he’d done, I still had love and compassion in my heart for the man.

  On the afternoon of May 23 Cleo brought Herbert to the kitchen. Yes, my old toady friend was still alive and well, still living in a glass tank in my study and being sporadically fed. The dear girl sat at the kitchen table and put before him a saucer of diced chicken entrails, while I sat looking on with that ever-present bloody grin on my face. Doris, meanwhile, was not very steady on her pins, having been at the gin a little earlier. Something of a novelty for Doris, gin, and her susceptibility to the stuff was distressingly evident. Bac
k and forth she lurched on the other side of the table, a large sharp chopper in one hand and, on the cutting board in front of her, a plucked chicken.

  It was a warm afternoon and we had the back door open, and all was tranquil enough, I suppose, apart from this unsteadiness of Doris’s. Cleo didn’t seem to notice, engrossed as she was with Herbert, and I think I must have dozed off, for it was with a rude shock, as though I had awoken from a dream, that I suddenly heard Doris shout out with pain. I opened my eyes: there she stood, the chopper in her right hand, gazing with astonishment at her left hand, which she held up in front of her face. She had chopped half the index finger clean off. It lay on the table beside the cutting board. There was a good deal of blood around it, and also on the chicken. Cleo was paying no attention at all, but instead sat gazing, her hands flat on the table and her chin on her hands, at Herbert, who had hopped from his saucer of entrails to Doris’s severed finger and was lapping at the puddle of blood around the thing with his long flickering amphibian tongue. Doris sank into a chair and sat there in a daze, and watched the blood oozing thickly from the stump of her finger. I sat there grinning at the woman as, with her good hand, she reached down to the floor and picked up the gin bottle and poured herself a stiff one.

  ❖

  George, meanwhile, was pacing up and down the condemned cell. Up and down he paced, up and down. Bert was disappointed in George. He thought he was made of sterner stuff. The chaplain came, for this was May 23, and George had one day left to live. George told him it was I who’d “done” Sidney Giblet—he couldn’t help it, in his terror of death he would say anything. The chaplain tried to turn his thoughts to the state of his immortal soul, but with no success. The doctor came, and he too was subjected to an impassioned harangue. The word went quickly round the prison, as these things will, that George Lecky had cracked. It made men sad. For in a way he died for all of them.