The Grotesque

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “By all means,” I snapped. “Perhaps,” I said, glancing at Cleo, “we won’t be quite so vague later.”

  “Oh Daddy.”

  “Don’t ‘Oh Daddy’ me, young woman! I’m perfectly serious; you’ll have to be a good deal more realistic about the future if you want my consent to any of this. You do still intend to go up to Oxford in October, I take it?”

  But before we could get into the Oxford question—Cleo was to read philosophy at St. Anne’s, and I was not going to permit her to jeopardize that—Fledge opened the door, then stood aside to let his wife come in. She was bearing a large white cake on the top of which, in some sort of horrible pink paste, had been drawn a rather wobbly heart, and an arrow, and, intertwined among them, the names of the lovers. Cleo let out a large snort of mirth and rose to her feet. “Bravo, Mrs. Fledge!” she shouted, lifting her wineglass. “What a creation!”

  Mrs. Fledge set the cake on the table with a small simper and then stood back, absently drying her hands on her apron. She appeared slightly glazed, and her hair was unkempt, as usual. I lit a cigar and kept my eye on her, as Sidney and Harriet made noises of awe and wonder over her revolting confection. I presume all this was in honor of the “engagement.” Fledge came forward with a knife, and as he began to cut the cake Mrs. Fledge sniffed once or twice, then produced from her sleeve a small handkerchief, and blew her nose. She brushed a tear from her eye—I had not yet realized how easily she succumbed to weepy emotion—and only then did she become aware of my gaze upon her. With my teeth clenched about my cigar, my chin resting on my interlocked fingers, and my eyes narrowed, I stared at her across the candlelit table, and she, for a moment, through damply shining eyes, quite boldly answered my stare. What a queer bird she is, I thought, as she grew suddenly frightened, and her eyes darted away. I could pursue my reflections no further, as Harriet was attempting to press upon me a slice of cake; I had to employ considerable forcefulness to avoid being given a piece of the thing.

  ♦

  The weather grew very wild shortly after dinner, and I remember retiring to my study to do some work on the lecture. I couldn’t seem to concentrate; the wind was howling about the house and hurling sheets of rain at the windows, and it unsettled me. I remember ringing for Fledge, as I couldn’t locate any whisky for some reason, but the bloody man didn’t appear. Eventually I went storming down the hallway to the kitchen. The lights had not been lit; a single candle threw a dim glow over a long figure reclining in a chair by the stove. “Fledge!” I cried, with some passion. “Didn’t you hear me ring? Why didn’t you come to me?”

  The figure stirred—it was not Fledge, I realized, but his wife. “Oh Sir Hugo,” she mumbled, “I do beg your pardon. I must have dropped off!”

  “Where is your husband, Mrs. Fledge?” I demanded to know.

  “I believe he’s upstairs, Sir Hugo, with Mr. Sidney.”

  “Upstairs with Mr. Sidney? What on earth is he doing upstairs with Mr. Sidney?” This information for some reason inflamed my irritation to the point of downright fury. What was he doing upstairs with Mr. Sidney? He was my butler, damnit!

  “I’m sure I can’t say, Sir Hugo,” whispered Mrs. Fledge, sitting bolt upright in her chair and gazing at me with terrified eyes. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Eh? Eh?” I glared at her as I tried to bring myself under control. “No, never mind, Mrs. Fledge,” I said, after a moment or two, “I’ll get it myself.” And I strode out of the kitchen, still bristling, quite unaccountably, with rage, and went to look for whisky.

  ♦

  That night I had the strangest dream. Much of it is lost now, but what little remains is so startlingly bizarre I presume it is the core or meat of the dream, if a dream can be said to have meat. There were, to begin with, the sounds of a storm, and these I imagine permeated my sleeping mind directly from the night itself. The wind was wailing with a dreadful keening sound, and branches of trees lashed at the windowpanes while somewhere nearby the unlatched door of an outhouse kept banging relentlessly on its hinges. There was a howling, too, that was charged with the most profound misery imaginable, and all these wailings and howlings and lashings seemed magnified, both in volume and intensity, to such an extent that I felt, in the dream, confined and pressed in upon by them, and physically endangered. I was in a darkened room; it had features both of the public bar of the Hodge and Purlet—most vividly an uncurtained window filled with the moon—and of the drawing room at Crook. For I knew, somehow, that I sat, in the darkness, in one of the leather armchairs by the fireplace, which in the dream was a black, empty hole, a void, a nothingness. There were other people in the room, and scraps of talk, none of which I remember; my overwhelming sensation was one of fear, but also of great frustration, the frustration, I think, of being unable to move away from the source of the fear, which I identified simply as “outside.” I gazed at the moon, and something went rapidly and furtively past the window, a sort of nude, hairy, red-brown thing with the head of a fox and the body of a man. And then I saw a figure kneeling on the rug before me, staring into the emptiness of the fireplace. I leaned forward and turned the face to mine: it was Mrs. Fledge. Lifting her chin with my fingertips, I kissed her mouth; and then I was overcome with sexual desire.

  Somehow I got myself out of the armchair and onto the rug beside her. I remember that she still smelled of carbolic soap. I put my hand under her apron and ran it up her stockinged thigh. She grinned at me in a sort of lewd, hungry manner quite foreign to the real Mrs. Fledge. I took hold of her underpants—they were men’s underpants, oddly enough, like my own—and tried to pull them down. She said something indistinct in a curiously deep voice, then sat up and unfastened her suspenders. Then she lay back on the rug again, and, lifting her bottom, permitted me to slide her underpants off. She pulled up her apron, and the moonlight glowed on the white skin at the tops of her thighs, though the valley between them was black with shadow.

  This now becomes the strange part of the dream, though maybe, to those who study such things, it is perfectly commonplace, perfectly banal. You see, I remember scrambling to my feet, and pulling off my overcoat, and then my jacket, and then my waistcoat, so that I could get at my braces, and push them off my shoulders, and get my trousers down; and as I struggled with these operations—they seemed never to end—I was feeling the most furious urgency to take advantage of this woman who was offering herself so frankly to me. I unbuttoned my trousers—I was wearing my winter suit, the heavy tweeds—and pushed them down. My penis—I am being very candid with you now—was, in the dream, quite stiff, and I daresay it was stiff also in the reality of my bed in the east wing of Crook, and it sprang forward through the buttons of my underpants and stood up at a steep angle, throbbing. Doris had meanwhile risen from the floor and was propped against one of the carved oak pillars flanking the empty fireplace, her back arched such that the moonlight gleamed upon the shiny material of her apron. I began to shuffle forward, though the tweeds about my ankles were heavily constricting. Doris’s hands hung down by her sides and reminded me of a pair of long, pale, dead fish.

  There was by now a wailing and howling outside the house fit to wake the dead, and the outhouse door kept banging, banging, banging on its hinges. Mrs. Fledge turned her back to me and, lifting her apron once more, offered me her bottom; the expression on her face, as she grinned at me over her shoulder, was one of quite brazen sexual invitation. But the trousers at my ankles by this time prevented me from going forward at all! I seem to remember that I groped at her with outstretched arms, but I simply could not move! The feeling of urgent, cruelly blocked desire became almost intolerable—doubtless I was suffering, physiologically, and at precisely the same moment, in my bed. And then, from inside the room, I heard a cough, and I turned, my arms still outstretched before me, toward the door. There, to my horror, stood Fledge.

  I sat up in bed with a shout. The storm still raged; my head was pounding and my mouth was painfully dry. I no longer h
ad an erection; there was, however, a small stain of discharged semen on my sheets. I poured a glass of water from the jug on my bedside table, as my head spun crazily in the aftermath of this dreadful dream, this nightmare. The strange thing was, you see, that I had not experienced sexual desire for—well, for a good many years.

  ♦

  The storm began to die down shortly afterwards, and by the time I arose the next morning it was a mere ghost of itself, a stiff breeze, I saw from my window, picking and ruffling through the boughs it had brought down in the night. The sky had a pale, washed-out aspect, a few high, white clouds drifting across it, fleecy, elongated things. The day seemed already exhausted, emptied of vigor, as it gazed upon the evidence of its nocturnal excesses; it mirrored my own mood exactly. There is a very comfortable white wicker chair in the barn, and it was in that chair that I used to sit when I wanted to mull things over quietly. Into that chair I now sank, having avoided the dining room entirely, and as my eyes played wearily over the familiar bones (I had not turned on the lights) and came finally to rest upon the spurred and gleaming leg of Phlegmosaurus, I attempted to shake off the very distasteful residue of that appalling dream. That it was purely and simply the effect of far too much whisky, a good deal of anger, and, quite probably, indigestion, I had no doubt, no doubt at all. But all the same, I had no little trouble regaining sufficient peace of mind to resume my work; I also had something of a hangover.

  But slowly the bones reclaimed me, and in particular, the clawed toe on the foot of Phlegmosaurus, and the old, familiar question arose once more: what did a long, thin, sharply curved claw like that suggest about the creature that possessed it? There was only one answer possible: that as he went into the attack, he reared up on one leg to slash with it. Oh, he was a ripper, my Phlegmosaurus, he was a big, fast, fierce, dynamic animal capable of delicate balance and complex maneuvering. Does this sound like a reptile to you?

  ♦

  There was one curious and not strictly relevant sequel to my nightmare that I think deserves mention, as it has some bearing on my relationship with Fledge. You see, when I went back to the house for lunch that day, and encountered him in the dining room, I was for a moment seized with a quite irrational feeling of shame—as though I had in reality offended him as I’d dreamed I had, and should either avoid him altogether or apologize profusely. I did neither, of course; I gave him my usual curt grunt and took my place at the head of the table. He himself was as composed and inscrutable as ever, and served my soup and poured my wine just as he always did. But while Harriet chattered away to Sidney and Cleo about the storm, I could not help throwing surreptitious glances at the man, as if to confirm to myself that I had in fact dreamed the whole thing.

  At this time I was no great believer in omens and auguries and so on (I was still an empiricist, of course), so I did not connect my dream with an incident in the butler’s pantry that occurred just a few nights later, an incident which, now that I look back on it, is quite clearly of crucial importance to the foul eruption of violence that in one sense forms the very marrow of this story. It was many months before we learned exactly what happened out on the Ceck Marsh that terrible night, but even before it happened I knew that things were going badly wrong, that we were entering a state of disorder. At the time I did not, as I say, connect my dream with the butler’s pantry incident—there was no reason why I should, after all—but when I link them now, hold them in my mind in tandem, as it were, it is all too clear to me that even before the violence occurred there existed in Crook what I can only call “corrupt energies”—and I need hardly spell out who the source of those energies was. In fact, it occurs to me now that perhaps right from the start Fledge was causing a sort of moral infection in those around him—without our even being aware of it! I wonder, for example, whether he was responsible for that disgusting dream. And in retrospect I rather think he was, though as I say, at the time I wasn’t aware of it; and with regard to the incident in the butler’s pantry, I held Sidney as much to blame for that, if not more so.

  ♦

  Let me describe it just as it happened. I had been working late in the barn, and when I returned to the house it was all in darkness but for a single light left burning in the porch. I came in through the front door and very quietly closed it behind me. Before I had taken a single step down the hall, I heard a noise: someone was coming down the stairs.

  Now, close to the front door of Crook there is a small table on which the mail is placed, and above it, attached to a baseboard of pale oak, rears the head of a large stag with glassy eyes and a fine spread of antlers. Directly opposite the stag stands a grandfather clock, and into the shadow of this clock I tiptoed, and waited there as the footsteps descended the last flight. Why I did this I have no clear idea, for I certainly wasn’t in the habit of hiding in my own house. Whoever it was, though, he was carrying a candle, for its feeble light preceded him, throwing a faint flickering glow into the darkness of the hallway. I peered round the side of the clock as the footstep reached the hall, and then abruptly stopped. Standing, listening intently at the bottom of the stairs, was Sidney.

  He was wearing a tightly belted silver-colored dressing gown of some silky material, and the candlelight gleamed and flashed upon it as he turned this way and that, apparently assuring himself that he was alone downstairs. His pale, oval face, lit from beneath by the candle flame, glowed in a faintly eerie manner, the smooth cheeks plump and yellow as moons. Having satisfied himself that no one was about, he then moved off, on fawn-colored slippers of a very soft leather, toward the kitchen.

  Separating the front of the house—the family rooms—from the back, where the kitchen, larders, and sculleries are situated, is a green baize door. I tiptoed down the hall and opened this door a crack, expecting to see the boy going along the passage to the kitchen. But that passage was empty; the door to the butler’s pantry, however, which gave off the passage into the east wing, was just closing; I heard the latch click softly, and then there was silence.

  In Crook, as in many country houses, the butler’s pantry is that room where the butler can perform such tasks as polishing the silverware and sorting the mail, and, more important, where he can enjoy an isolation and privacy denied his inferiors in the domestic hierarchy. Not that this had much meaning here, of course, where the inside staff comprised only Fledge himself and his wife. But Fledge not only used this room, he apparently also lived in it—this I’d ascertained with my own eyes when I’d gone into the place a few days before. One descended a flight of stone steps—the stone floor of the pantry was below ground level—to a long narrow room with store cupboards along each wall, in which various household supplies were kept, light bulbs, mousetraps, and so on. A narrow, tightly blanketed iron bed was pushed up against the end wall, and beside it stood a washstand with hairbrushes and shaving gear. Sandwiched between two high cupboards, and beneath a very small window that looked out onto the lane that ran round the side of the house, was a workbench with a shelf just above it from which hung a set of small tools. Everything was very neat and well-swept the afternoon I went in, hunting, I seem to remember, for toilet paper. Whatever did Sidney want here at the dead of night?

  My curiosity now thoroughly aroused, I retraced my steps back down the hall and out of the front door. There was some cloud that night, but the moon, which was close to the full, shone brightly on the slates and chimneys of Crook’s steep gables. The thick coat of ivy that furred the walls glinted with a silvery sheen as its thousand fronds stirred gently in the night breeze. I made my way silently round the side of the house, to the lane that gave onto the back yard. Halfway along, at the foot of the wall, a neat square of light spilled onto the cobblestones from a small window. This was the window over Fledge’s workbench. I crept towards it, my heart now beating dangerously fast.

  Just before I reached the window I got down onto my hands and knees. Advancing on all fours, I very cautiously peeped round the side of the window. The pantry was lit by a
single lamp, standing on the workbench. In the center of the room Sidney was facing Fledge such that I could see both of them quite clearly in profile. I had never really noticed before how tall Sidney was; he was the same height as Fledge, five foot eleven or more. He was talking with some animation, smiling frequently and gesturing with his right hand, in which he held his little rosewood pipe. His hair gleamed in the lamplight, as did the silky, silver material of his dressing gown; it glimmered in streaks when he moved his arm. Fledge was in his shirtsleeves with his arms folded across his chest. His face was heavily obscured by shadow, and it was impossible for me to make out his expression as he listened to Sidney. I changed position, I hunkered down on the balls of my feet, clutching the edge of the windowframe, trying to get a clearer view of Fledge’s face. Suddenly he smiled—never before, nor since, come to think of it, have I seen Fledge smile—and opened his arms. The two men seemed then to lean toward one another, and it was at this crucial moment, my blood rushing in hot turmoil in my veins, that I lost my balance and sat back heavily on my bottom, my feet scrunching loudly on the cobblestones as I did so. Of course they would have heard me; in an instant I had flattened myself against the wall, and I clung there, not even breathing, like a lizard. Fortunately it was not a window that could be opened, and so I was not observed. But a moment later the curtain was drawn and the small square of light blotted out. I slipped back round to the front of the house, but I did not go in. Instead I returned to the barn, where I sat and drank several scotches, lit only by the stray moonbeams that drifted through the little windows high in the gables. There I sat in my wicker chair until I reckoned it safe to make for the east wing. I regained my bedroom without incident, but, deeply disturbed by what I’d seen, I did not fall asleep until the first light of dawn had crept over the marsh to the east. You see, as I’d fallen back from the window, I think I’d seen Sidney taking Fledge into his arms to kiss him—yes, my butler, damnit, in the arms of that spineless boy!