The Grotesque

by Patrick Mcgrath

  It occurs to me that you may be wondering why we need a butler at all, so I should perhaps explain that this was, for Harriet, an indispensable part of “observing the proprieties.” She was brought up in the belief that a house was not a house without some sort of manservant in it. Not that she’s a snob, but she so totally assimilated the outlook of her father, the colonel, that she finds it impossible, in some respects, to adapt to changing social and economic conditions. Failure to adapt, I would tell her, leads to extinction; but she never cared. “Let us die out then,” she blithely replied, “but let us at least do it comfortably.” Hence the butler. We’ve always had one, but the last, an ancient fossil called Dome, died of old age in the summer, and his wife followed him to the grave within a fortnight.

  Harriet would then have led them down the hall and through to the back of the house, and so to their quarters, a large, low-ceilinged room at the end of a dark, flagstoned passage, adjacent to an ancient bathroom with tarnished brass taps and a hundred-year-old lavatory. Having been installed in these obscure regions, the Fledges then, presumably, were shown over the house and had their duties explained to them. By the time the gong went for lunch they had taken root.

  What else should you know before we go on? The house is called Crook. It is a sixteenth-century manor house, the basic plan of which is the E-shape, two gabled wings projecting at either end and a porch in the middle. Constructed of brick and timber, the walls are now completely overgrown with ivy, and the windows peer through the foliage like the eyes of some stunted and shaggy beast. There is moss between the roof tiles, and in front of the house the driveway curves round a small pond overgrown with rushes and coated with a thick green scum. To the right of the house a cobble-stoned alley leads to the back yard, which is enclosed on two sides by empty stables and outhouses, and on the third, facing the back door, by a brick wall that gives onto the vegetable garden and the orchard. Off to the left of the house stands the barn. Crook, curiously, faces south, a remarkable decision on the part of the builder, given the sixteenth-century belief that the south wind brought corruption and evil vapors. It requires extensive work, particularly the roof, which leaks, and the plumbing, which is not only unreliable but noisy. A flushed toilet rumbles like thunder, in Crook.

  House and barn stand in the few acres that remain of a once-sizeable estate; only the pig farm down in Ceck’s Bottom has not been sold off, largely because it’s not worth anything. Behind the house, to the north, the land drops gently to the valley of the Fling, a narrow, serpentine river that soon slips out of sight on its way to the Ceck Marsh. This is an extensive stretch of wild country that lies beyond the village of Ceck, the spire of whose Norman church is visible over the distant treetops. I shall have more to say about the Ceck Marsh shortly. On the far side of the valley the land begins to climb quite steeply, and here open fields give way to dense woodland, beeches and oaks mainly. The village lies to the east, while to the west the trees gradually thin out to a jumble of copses and dells, among which a famous colony of rocks has long been established. This is abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds. Ten miles further west you come to a market town called Pock-on-the-Fling; this is the nearest settlement of any size. Crook itself lies within the parish of Ceck, in the northeast corner of Berkshire, and my story begins in the autumn of 1949.

  It was shortly after the arrival of the Fledges that a rather bizarre incident occurred, one to which I paid no more than a cursory attention at the time but which now strikes me as being charged with a sort of eerie, portentous significance. Have I told you that I was to deliver an important lecture to the Royal Society of Paleontology, a lecture concerning a species of late Mesozoic predatory carnivore that I discovered myself in East Africa as a young man, and to whose bone structure I had devoted my entire career? Phlegmosaurus carbonensis (so named because the bones came up slightly charred—Greek phlegein, to burn) has, I still believe, quite revolutionary implications not only for the science of paleontology but for zoology in general—but I need not weary you with that now. The point is, it was my habit, when I still had the use of my limbs, to think out my lectures in the Ceck Marsh; the silence and the solitude were somehow conducive to mental rigor and clarity, I found.

  So one afternoon I set off with a flask of whisky and a stout stick, and after tramping down a soggy cart track between thick growths of birch and alder I found myself beneath a vast gray sky with miles of flat, boggy fen before me and a lake in the distance. The air had a smoky, autumnal tang to it, I remember, and as I picked my way over the rough damp clumps of peat and moss, all tufted with marsh grass and bristling in the wind, and puddled between with rank, black water, my heart exulted at the stillness and desolation of it all. Wildfowl rose from their nests in the weeds and with a great honking flurry went flapping off towards the water, and I came squelching on through in my Wellington boots, with my thick tweed cap pulled low against the bite of the wind.

  It was when I had settled myself on a hummock of dry bracken close to the edge of the lake, and was casting my eye idly over the gray, wind-furrowed water, that I noticed a bulky horned object half-submerged in a bed of reeds close by. I splashed forward through the shallows to investigate, and discovered to my astonishment that it was a dead cow. I poked at it with my walking stick, then with the crook of the stick I hooked its horn and dragged it further into the shallows, and as I did so I caused the head to rise and water poured from its empty eye sockets as though from a fountain. Then the great body began to turn, began to go belly-up, and suddenly a foul, nauseating stench was released into the air and a pike, a big one, four feet long, slid out of the cow’s belly and gazed at me for an instant, its gills quietly lapping, before gliding away into the depths of the lake.

  Not so extraordinary, you will say; but have you ever seen a pike? They have narrow, pointed snouts, and a projecting lower jaw crammed with sharp teeth, and they seem to grin at you; and this one was very big, and very old. The construction of their heads is an instance of natural functional design, no more than that, but it tends to make one think them malevolent; and when this one appeared with such sinister suddenness from inside the bloated and foul-smelling corpse of the cow, the gaze of its cold killer’s eyes (and pike will eat anything, even their own kind) seemed so charged with malice and evil that my hair, for a moment, quite literally froze on my head. I did not, as I say, take the incident very seriously at the time, beyond, that is, describing it in detail at dinner that night; but often in recent days the picture of that wicked old pike sliding out of the cow’s belly has come into my mind, without any apparent pretext.

  Just to finish the story, it occurred to me that the dead cow would make good feed for George’s pigs, so I tramped off across the marsh in a northeasterly direction, to Ceck’s Bottom, and told him about it. And as far as I know it was George’s pigs that got the rest of that cow, not the old pike.

  ♦

  I soon made the acquaintance of Doris Fledge, she of the crowlike features and red-tipped nose. In those early days of autumn she cooked us solid, unpretentious meals that always came hot to the table, and I was well satisfied. Maybe Harriet had been right about the Fledges, I thought. Like Darwin I do not care what I eat as long as it’s the same every day, and I had been used to depend on old Mrs. Dome (when her rheumatism wasn’t “playing up”) to put square, English meals before me, meat and vegetables unadulterated by sauces, spices, or savories. Mrs. Fledge was apparently in the same culinary tradition, and this permitted me to devote my mealtimes to reading the Times, or thinking about my lecture, or tormenting Sidney Giblet, with no anxieties about what would appear on my plate.

  One morning, feeling particularly jaunty before going out to the barn, I decided on impulse to visit the kitchen, and inquire of Mrs. Fledge what was for lunch, and say a kind word or two—a kind word from the master never goes amiss, with servants. I had been out in the vegetable garden with George, who was building a bonfire of dead leav
es and other garden rubbish, and as I remember it was a fine, crisp day, which was why I was feeling jaunty. Crossing the yard toward the back door, I glimpsed Mrs. Fledge in the kitchen; she had her back to the window, and was occupied with something at the large oak dresser that fills one entire wall of the room. Even from halfway across the yard there was an unmistakably furtive character to the woman’s movements, and I remembered a hunch I’d formed about her the first time I clapped eyes on her. Well, I advanced briskly across the yard, my leather-soled brogues ringing out sharp and clear on the dry stones, and she must have heard me, for she quickly moved away from the dresser, and over to the sink, where I found her washing up the breakfast dishes when I came in through the back door.

  “Morning Mrs. Fledge,” I said.

  “Good morning, Sir Hugo,” said she, rapidly wiping her hands on the apron lashed tightly about her narrow waist, and looking flustered in a way I rather enjoyed. A strand of silver-threaded hair had escaped her bun, and she pushed it aside with a quick, nervous movement.

  “Go on with your work, Mrs. Fledge,” I said, airily, striding about the kitchen. “I merely wanted to know what sweetmeats and dainties you planned to tempt us with at luncheon today.”

  I had fetched up hard by the oak dresser; the woman’s fluster increased perceptibly. “Chops, Sir Hugo,” she said.

  “Splendid! I love a chop. Grilled?”

  “Yes, Sir Hugo.”

  In the middle of the kitchen, which is rather a low room with black beams running across the ceiling, and a flagstoned floor, and a huge black wood-burning stove at the far end, there stands a table of scrubbed oak, and upon it lay a thick bunch of carrots, the soil still clinging to them and their leafy tops splayed greenly across the pale wood, and beside them a bowl of large potatoes, a bowl of onions, and a cabbage. All products of the Crook garden, reared with loving care by that good man George Lecky. “And carrots, Mrs. Fledge?” I said.

  “Yes, Sir Hugo.” She was standing with her back to the sink, polishing a teacup and positively reeking of guilt. I dug my hands deep in my trouser pockets and approached the woman. As I suspected, it was not only guilt she reeked of—she’d been at my sherry! She must have a bottle stashed in the dresser! I drew close. Terror blazed up in her blackbird eyes. She almost dropped the teacup. From about eighteen inches I gazed into her horror-struck face and examined the delicate lacework of ruptured capillaries on the point of her beak, and smiled. “And onions, Mrs. Fledge?” I said.

  “Yes, Sir Hugo.” She had frozen rigid. I pushed aside the strand of silver hair that had again worked loose from the bun. I ran my fingers across her cheek, and squeezed her little earlobe. “Jolly good,” I said, and sauntered out of the kitchen. I would say nothing yet, I decided. I would choose my moment. There would, I felt sure, come a perfect opportunity to bring up with Harriet the housekeeper about whom she had insisted there would not be a “problem.” Your housekeeper, I would say, does have a “problem,” Harriet. She “drinks.”

  I paid particularly close attention to the chops that day, curious as to whether Mrs. Fledge’s tippling hampered her performance in the kitchen. They were delicious. They were grilled to perfection. The carrots were thoroughly boiled, and the potatoes flawlessly mashed. Perhaps, I thought, like Churchill she functions best on a steady tipple. I was right, I reflected, to say nothing. I turned to Sidney and asked him what he knew about the life cycle of the botfly. The poor dummy blushed scarlet; he had never even heard of the bot-fly, so I told him all about it. Do you know about the life cycle of the bot-fly? Gastrophilus equi? It lays its eggs on the forequarters of a horse. When the eggs hatch out, the irritation makes the horse lick the hairs and swallow the larvae. The larvae feed on the inner lining of the horse’s stomach for a year, and then lodge in its dung and are excreted. They bury themselves in the ground and pupate—and the process starts all over again. Elegant, no? Elegant, invariable—and pointless.

  Of all the various perspectives I am offered by the chance emplacement of my wheelchair, there are two that I particularly favor. The first, a strong contender on warm days, is between the French windows at the far end of the drawing room. From there I can look out over the flower garden, with its terraces and its goldfish pond, its hedges and lawns, all threaded with narrow, winding paths and enclosed by a crumbling brick wall. I used to enjoy watching George work among the flowers there, down on his knees in the soil; he’s gone now, of course, and the garden is growing wild without him. No one else gives a damn.

  My other favorite is the fireplace. Like a small boy I can gaze for hours into a fire and see cathedrals and monsters, basilisks, dragons, and gorgons; and when I tire of the flames, the elaborate carving of the chimneypiece, which I will describe to you in due course, is an unfailing source of pleasure, and even moral support, in these dark times.

  Often, though, my wheelchair is placed with no thought as to the view I will be afforded. I am put before windows that look out onto empty yards, or wheeled into dark corners so that floors can be waxed and carpets swept. Sometimes I end up in the alcove under the stairs, and there is deep irony in this, as you will learn. It occurs to no one but Cleo that I might mind this; they think me a vegetable. So what am I to make of the fact that Fledge quite deliberately turns my wheelchair to the wall? Am I to presume that he does not care for the blank eyes of a vegetable upon him as he goes about his work? Or is it something else? Does he know I’m still thinking, and does he do it, therefore, to intensify my pain? Is it a form of torture? I am inclined to believe that it is.

  You see, I believe that even before he entered the front door of Crook—even before he met me!—Fledge had conceived the ambition to usurp me. I would hazard that there had always been a seed of discontent, a seed of revolt, in his nature, but that only now, comparatively late (for Fledge is not a young man), had he fully resolved to act on it. “Better to reign in hell,” he might have said, like Milton’s Satan, “than to serve in heav’n,” and it’s not hard to see him as a Satan, as a serpent that came slithering into Crook with nothing but evil intentions, though of course it is only by means of the small gestures and fleeting expressions he made that I realize now how intensely, even in those days, he hated me. He had to hate me, you see—I doubt he could have gone through with it otherwise. And this is why, today, he turns my wheelchair to the wall: hating me has become a habit.

  It’s a curious thing how glibly complacent we tend to be about the superiority of the mammal. I remarked earlier, apropos of something or other, that the life cycle of the bot-fly was pointless. I didn’t mean it, of course. It would be absurd to suggest that any species has more “point” to it than any other. The natural scientist cannot help, however, developing preferences, and mine lie in the direction of big, predatory, meat-eating creatures—like Phlegmosaurus carbonensis. This is why I bring up the mammal, for it’s often forgotten that the mammal came into his own only after the dinosaur became extinct. When the dinosaur was active the mammal dared not emerge from his hole. He was a timid, hairy little creature —I speak now in layman’s terms—who never mounted any sort of a challenge to the dinosaur’s domination of the Mesozoic environment. The point is, if we keep a close eye on Fledge, we will observe an identical tactic being employed—in this case, calculated opportunism on the part of an innately devious inferior with inflated social aspirations.

  I don’t wish to pursue the analogy; suffice it to say that Fledge’s game was a waiting game and, as I say, only by the small signs he made is it now apparent what he was about. One such sign I remember distinctly, for it came, oddly enough, at a moment of, for me, bitter professional disappointment.

  ♦

  The blow fell on one of those lovely crisp, clear mornings we enjoyed last autumn; and it fell, appropriately, in the barn. I had as usual eaten a good breakfast, spent half-an-hour in the lavatory with the Times, and made my way downstairs; and there, on the hall table, I found a letter from the Royal Society. I turned it over in my hands for a few
seconds; I was seized with a powerful premonition that the news it contained would be bad. I tucked it into my pocket and crossed the driveway to the barn.

  Now the barn, I should tell you, is structurally no different from any other barn in this part of Berkshire. A central area is bounded by four pairs of upright timbers, and it was in this space that I conducted my research. At the north end (the barn stands at right angles to the house, and faces east) a narrow flight of wooden steps leads to a gallery that extends down the west wall and along the south wall and forms a sort of loft I used for storage of bones. Small windows high in the gables permitted a few shafts of daylight to penetrate the gloom, and as I entered, and closed the door behind me, I noticed a small bird, a sparrow, fluttering among the rafters.

  I stood for a few moments with my back to the door, without turning on the lights. Structurally, as I say, this was like any other Berkshire barn; functionally it was not. This barn, you see, had been converted into a working research laboratory, and as my eyes adjusted to the obscurity, so did the bony creature on which I had been working for a quarter of a century come dimly into view. It was Phlegmosaurus himself—my reconstruction of the entire skeleton.