The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  When Mrs. Giblet visited George that afternoon she found him in a mood very different from the brusque taciturnity she had come to expect. There had even been some doubt as to whether he should be allowed to see her; finally the visit was approved, but the warders were instructed to take George back to his cell if he became at all excited. They warned George of this before they took him down.

  George was no sooner seated in that dingy little visitors’ room than he seized Mrs. Giblet’s hands across the table and began to speak. Nobody, I think, myself included, had ever heard George speak as he must have spoken that afternoon. When he had finished Mrs. Giblet hurriedly left the room, made several telephone calls from the front office of the prison, then took a taxi to Waterloo Station. She was coming to Crook.

  ❖

  Difficult to say how long I sat in the kitchen watching Doris drink gin while the stump of her finger bled all over the chicken. Twenty minutes, maybe more, maybe an hour. Eventually Fledge came down the hall. He quickly took in the scene, his eyes darting from the blood on the table, to Doris, to Cleo, to myself, then back to the blood; and it was all too easy to understand the quick twitch of contempt that touched his lips. His intoxicated wife looked on dumbly as her own blood dripped steadily onto a plucked chicken, and watching it all, in utter passivity, grinning and withered and huddled like a heap of old sticks in a suit of clothes now vastly too large for his slumped and shrunken frame, sat the master of the house. In his place I too should have twitched with contempt. To be reduced to such flaccid inertia! My eyes, I know, were sunk now deep in shadowy, hollow sockets; my cheekbones protruded sharply from a face that had all the brittle and yellowy consistency of parchment; I was stubbled and food-stained and drooling, and altogether like a grubby little caterpillar as I clung grimly to existence in my housing of tweed. And did nothing; Cleo and I, myself and my elf, we sat there and did nothing. It was as though my own eye, like the halibut’s, had migrated, shifted into Fledge’s skull to witness the state to which we’d been reduced.

  Things happened quickly after that. Briskly and competently Fledge disinfected and bandaged Doris’s wound, then telephoned the doctor. As I heard him replace the receiver there was a loud rap at the front door. I heard him go down the hall. I saw the front door open, and standing on the threshold was Mrs. Giblet. There was an obscure buzz of voices, and they entered the drawing room. Less than a minute later Fledge reappeared in the kitchen, took my chair by the handles and wheeled me down the hall. I was placed against the drawing-room wall, facing the fireplace. Mrs. Giblet and Harriet were standing in the middle of the room, Harriet perturbed and the old woman in a state of some impatience. Fledge withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  “Time is very short, Lady Coal,” said Mrs. Giblet. “I am afraid we must dispense with the niceties—a man’s life hangs in the balance.”

  “But what is all this?” said Harriet. “Won’t you at least sit down, Mrs. Giblet? A cup of tea?”

  “I have come straight from Wandsworth, Lady Coal. George Lecky told me what happened the night Sidney disappeared.”

  I felt some pain in my chest, a rather vivid burning pain that spread across the top of my body like a set of tentacles, tentacles of flame. “But surely we know—?” murmured Harriet.

  “George Lecky did not tell the truth,” said Mrs. Giblet. “He was trying to protect your husband, Lady Coal.”

  “But protect him from what, precisely, Mrs. Giblet?” Harriet gazed at me, then sank into an armchair, her hands folded in her lap and a small frown picked between her eyebrows as she turned to Mrs. Giblet.

  “From the consequences of his actions, Lady Coal. Sir Hugo came to George Lecky’s farmhouse that night; he was in a very bad state.”

  “Very bad?” said Harriet faintly.

  “Shocked, excited. And he had been drinking. He said there had been an accident, and that George must come back to Crook with him. George agreed; he followed Sir Hugo back in his swill lorry. They parked halfway up the drive. Sir Hugo led him into the trees. In a shallow depression, partially covered with leaves, lay the body of my son, Lady Coal. His throat had been cut.”

  “Oh good God!” cried Harriet. Her hands flew to her lips and she turned toward me with wide, horrified eyes.

  “They carried Sidney to the lorry and crammed him into a dustbin, Lady Coal. They threw the bicycle up after him. George said Sidney’s neck had been cut so deeply he feared the head would come away from the body.” The voice was firm as a rock—not a quaver, not a tremor. “Then he drove back to Ceck’s Bottom, and they did together what George said in court that he had done alone.”

  The pain in my chest had suddenly subsided, and been replaced by a sort of tingling numbness, all over the top half of my body. Poor George; once he’d cracked he would have said anything to escape the gallows. This thin piece of horror by moonlight—the pity of it was that Harriet appeared to be swallowing it whole. She continued to stare at me as though she were seeing me for the first time. But so weary was I by now, so ready to let it all slip from my hands, I could barely summon a twinge of outrage that she should view me in this light, and I with no chance to tell her the truth.

  “But why?” Harriet was saying. “Why would Hugo want to murder Sidney?”

  The pain in my chest had disappeared; now, only that numbness. “According to George Lecky,” said Mrs. Giblet slowly, and looking intently at me, “Sir Hugo was being blackmailed by my son, Lady Coal.”

  A brief silence descended as the three of us contemplated this bizarre piece of nonsense. Oh how desperate that poor man was, to twist the truth like this! Had Fledge gotten to him, too? I no longer cared. The pain in my chest had passed, but I could feel the first convulsions of a snorting fit begin to rock my frame. Within a few seconds I was in a state of helpless paroxysm, and Harriet, wifely solicitude overcoming whatever involuntary sensation of horror the old woman’s words had aroused in her, was beside me and slapping my back. Mrs. Giblet continued to stare intently at me.

  When the fit was over Harriet appeared to have recovered her common sense. She sat in her armchair and said: “But this is incredible. Why would Sidney blackmail Hugo? Whatever for? And why do you say these things, Mrs. Giblet? What good can they do now, these—wild accusations?”

  Mrs. Giblet reluctantly turned from me and sank into the armchair opposite Harriet’s. Wrapping her claws about the crook of her stick, she heaved a sigh of great weariness. There followed a long silence, and I had the distinct impression that the old woman was debating with herself whether to voice more of her grotesque suspicions. “Perhaps none,” she murmured at last. “Perhaps none at all. A man’s life hangs in the balance, Lady Coal,” she said again. “It had occurred to me that if Sir Hugo were confronted with what George Lecky has sworn to me is the truth, it might somehow unblock him.”

  “Unblock him?” said Harriet slowly. “Unblock him? But this is not possible, Mrs. Giblet, this I have been told on best authority, and God knows—”

  “Quite, Lady Coal, quite,” said the old woman. “But I simply could not rule out the possibility that Sir Hugo’s paralysis was hysterical.”

  “Hysterical!”

  Mrs. Giblet turned to me again for a moment, and then began to fumble in her coat for cigarettes. “Apparently not,” she said quietly.

  It was then that the doctor arrived.

  I spent the night in considerable distress, not least because I suffered fresh outbreaks of those burning pains in my chest. To suggest that I was being blackmailed by Sidney—absurd! I, the invert? I, the murderer? Quite absurd. You know my feelings about Fledge—I merely embody his monstrousness, make salient his inner deformity, and thus mirror his nature.

  George was hanged shortly after eight o’clock the following morning. He found peace, I hope; God knows, he’d had little enough since the day he cracked in prison. The atmosphere in Crook was bleak; Cleo had withdrawn to her room, and Doris, her finger heavily bandaged and her arm in a sling, sat in the kitc
hen and stared out at the day, which was windy and fresh. The doctor had not attempted to sew the finger back together, it had apparently been off too long. We had scrambled eggs for lunch, cooked by Harriet. After lunch I was wheeled down the hall and into the drawing room and over to the French windows. The pain in my chest had suddenly disappeared, as it had the day before, to be replaced by a spreading numbness. It was then that I saw George in the garden.

  I have spoken to you of these sightings. They are phantoms, projections, this I know, but nevertheless they feel real. George was not alone this time; he was standing at the head of a great crowd, a crowd that completely filled the garden and pushed up against the walls on every side. They jostled and shuffled slightly, and they all, without exception, were gazing up at me, where I sat on the terrace outside the French windows. The air was thick with birds, for some reason, thrushes and sparrows, and even some crows. A light breeze touched the trees beyond the garden wall, and a few thin white clouds went drifting and kicking across the sky. Who were these people? George was in his work clothes, his old frayed pin-striped jacket and his brown corduroy trousers. The men and women who clustered so closely about him, they too were in work clothes. They were country folk, farm folk, and I could make no sense of their shuffling, silent presence in my flower garden.

  I remember reading somewhere that the living are just a rare species of the dead. I don’t believe this. The living, I think, are larvae of the dead—dead bodies at an early stage of development. But why should I have thought of this now—were these the dead thronging my garden? Harriet and Fledge had brought their coffee down to the drawing room and were sitting by the fireplace, talking in low tones about George, I think. After a few minutes I heard Fledge cross the room to the drinks cabinet. Getting out the brandy, I presume, and he certainly had cause to celebrate, the case of Sidney Giblet having now been closed. He had got away with murder, and was now the undisputed master of Crook. In his place, I too should have had a brandy.

  I shall be buried in the Ceck churchyard, beside my mother, and my funeral, I imagine, will be only slightly better attended than my lecture. Paleontologists hate to bury things, especially bones; I’m sure I don’t have to tell you why. Poor George will not have done so well: an unmarked lime pit within the prison walls, this is where he’ll have been laid to rest. I do worry about Cleo; I’ve told you we Coals have a tendency to despair, and I’m rather afraid that with me out of the picture it may well get the better of her. I’m rather afraid she’ll go the way of Sir Digby.

  Fledge has turned on the gramophone, and is asking Harriet if she will dance. That numbness in my upper body: it feels now as though I have been suffused with a great light. In the garden, George has begun to rise from the ground. Very slowly he ascends, to a height of about ten or twelve feet, and as he does so he very slowly opens his arms. They are all still gazing at me, but from George’s eyes, and ears, and mouth, and from the region of his heart, a sort of silvery radiance is spilling forth, dazzling me and filling me with a sensation of immense, oceanic peace, a quite extraordinary feeling of bliss. He is surrounded by fluttering birds, barely visible in this blinding, gorgeous light. What is happening to me? Nil desperandum, I hear myself murmur, as behind me Harriet and Fledge begin dancing the foxtrot, and continue to do so throughout this unsettled afternoon, as the wind freshens, and wails about the gables of Crook, blowing from the south.

  About the Author

  Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital, where for many years his father was Medical Superintendent. He has lived in various parts of North America, and for several years on a remote island in the north Pacific. He moved to New York City in 1981. He is the author of the critically acclaimed collection Blood and Water and Other Tales. The Grotesque is his first novel.