The Grotesque

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “Such as what, Sir Hugo?” Her tone was very arch; apparently not.

  “My dear Mrs. Giblet, I have no intention of casting aspersions on Sidney’s character or motives. However, I find it hard to believe that some accident befell him; we should surely have found him if it had.”

  “No doubt. Please go on, Sir Hugo.”

  I was feeling distinctly nettled. I remained civil, however. “When he had not returned by ten, Cleo and I drove into the village, but we found no sign of him. No one has reported seeing him that night, or subsequently. We telephoned the police the following morning. They have since begun a systematic search of the district.”

  “Tell me please the name of the man in charge of the search for my son.”

  “Limp,” I said. “Inspector Limp.”

  It did not inspire confidence. “Ah,” she said. She pondered. There were deep bags under her eyes, semicircular flaps of rather bluish skin on which the years had etched delicate crow’s-foot patterns. “And how does this—Limp—strike you, Sir Hugo?”

  “He is not,” I said, choosing my words with some care, “a very prepossessing character. Nevertheless, I’ve no reason to doubt his competence.” In fact, Limp was about as stimulating as a bucket of water. But as I said, I had no reason to doubt he could mount a search for a missing person.

  “I see. So Sidney remains lost in the countryside and a man called Limp is trying to find him. With dogs, Sir Hugo?”

  “I believe so.”

  “And what do you think has happened to him, Sir Hugo?”

  “Mrs. Giblet, I may as well ask you the same question. I honestly have no idea. I’d thought at first that he might have got lost in the marsh.”

  “The marsh?”

  “The Ceck Marsh. It’s dangerous in spots—boggy.”

  “I see.”

  “But then of course we’d have found him by now.”

  “Not if he’s been swallowed by one of your bogs, presumably.” The idea did not appear to distress her unduly.

  “In that case we should have found his bicycle.”

  “Perhaps he went down with his bicycle?” Those filmy old eyes glittered at me from under their hoods. The old bat seemed to be positively relishing this.

  “That seems unlikely,” I said.

  “Which is why, Sir Hugo, you think Sidney has gone off somewhere of his own volition.”

  “It’s possible, Mrs. Giblet, I say no more than that.”

  “But why would he do such a thing, Sir Hugo?”

  “I thought you might be able to answer that, Mrs. Giblet.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “No more do I.”

  “Ah.”

  We had been staring straight at one another during this exchange. The old woman was utterly insensitive to my hints. I would have liked to speak frankly, but she wasn’t making it easy. Now she dropped her eyes, and leaving her cigarette to dangle loosely from the corner of her mouth, clamped both hands atop her stick— into the crook of which, I now noticed, was set a tiny white skull, carved from a piece of ivory. Again she fell to pondering. I glanced at my watch. I would have to leave in five minutes if I was going to catch the 3:47. “And his bicycle?” she said at length. “They haven’t found his bicycle?”

  “No sign of the bicycle,” I said.

  “That’s bad,” she murmured.

  “On the contrary, Mrs. Giblet,” I replied, “that’s good. You see, I’m quite sure that Sidney is safe, and will come forward very shortly and clear up this distressing mystery.” This at least was honest. “In the meantime”—I rose to my feet—“Inspector Limp has assured us that his description is being circulated to every police station and hospital in the Home Counties.”

  There was another long silence from the old woman. She heaved a deep sigh, her great bosom rose once, then fell, and those rheumy blue eyes flickered to mine. Wordlessly she picked a small bell from the table and shook it violently. The mouse appeared and helped her to rise from her chair. “Sir Hugo,” she said, extending a hook, “so good of you to come and see me. Excuse me if I’ve been short with you—a mother’s anxiety, I’m sure you understand”— and her whole face, the entire complex structure of flaps and jowls, heaved upward like a hulk being lifted from deep water and hung, trembling, for a moment, in an expression of genuine charm, before settling once more to its habitual aspect of irascible gloom. What a fierce old bird she was! I began to understand how Sidney had come by his tendencies. “Not at all, Mrs. Giblet. Nil desperandum, eh?”

  “Nil desperandum, Sir Hugo,” she said, taking my hand in hers and patting it once or twice. “Keep me informed.”

  “I shall.”

  I made the 3:47 with a minute to spare.

  There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque. Fledge knows it too—this is why he turns my wheelchair to the wall. He knows that when I sit gazing at a panel of old oak, at its knots and whorls and striations, and hear behind me only the murmur of soft, muted voices, perhaps the rustle of silk, an intake of breath, and even—from Harriet—a snort of mirth, then the scene I construct will be one of venereal depravity, of sex in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon.

  This is what I mean when I speak of the grotesque—the fanciful, the bizarre, the absurdly incongruous. For when, on one occasion, Cleo entered the drawing room, and with a cry of indignation turned my wheelchair back around, I found the pair of them, Harriet and Fledge—playing chess! It thus becomes my task to allow for this tendency, to sift with rigorous care the circumscribed evidence of my senses, if I am to arrive at some approximation of the truth about what is happening in Crook. This, you will say, should not be difficult for a scientist such as I; but even for a scientist, pure empiricism is extremely hard to achieve, so hard, in fact, that one begins to doubt the possibility of constructing any version of reality that is not skewed in advance by the projections, denials, and impostures of the mind—or even (chilling thought) by a factor as simple and crude as the angle of vision afforded by the chance emplacement of one’s wheelchair. Out of such accidents does “truth” emerge; I begin to think it a chimera.

  I’m rambling. Sometimes it’s an effort to keep everything in order. The reason is, that as I sit here brooding in my cave beneath the stairs, I suddenly detect fresh patterns of significance in the events that have occurred in Crook since the autumn, and these emerging patterns, if I’m not careful, play havoc with my chronology. This is unavoidable to a certain extent, but I shall nevertheless attempt to keep havoc at bay; I am determined, you see, that you should judge for yourself, rationally and impartially, the full extent of Fledge’s duplicity. For it was at around this time—I can’t be sure precisely when, sometime in October or November—that he set in motion the next stage of his plan, which involved the seduction of Harriet. And knowing what you do about the nature of Fledge’s physical affections, you will recognize in this development just how far he was prepared to go to fulfill his ambition: he was prepared to assume the appetites of a normal man. Fledge’s “normality” must be seen, then, for what it is: a sort of double inversion, an inversion of inversion itself.

  But at the time I wasn’t aware of any of this. At the time I had only the knowledge of what I’d seen in the pantry that night in September, and my suspicions regarding Sidney’s disappearance. And what I’d seen in the pantry was not merely immoral, it was also criminal—men were once hanged for buggery, and not so long ago, either! Exposure meant publicity, it meant notoriety, complete loss of face and reputation, for the press, particularly the gutter press, tends to be shrill and vigorous in its condemnation of such offenses. Conscious as I was, then, of these factors, the farthest thing from my mind was the possibility of Fledge having designs on Harriet. It is only by going backwards, step-by-step, that I am able to reconstruct the probable course of the affair.

  I hadn’t sacked him as I’d intended to, you see.
My interview with Sykes-Herring had gone well, surprisingly, and we had fixed a new date for the lecture, February 7, and shaken hands on it. This was what I’d gone to London for—I knew they didn’t want me to speak, they were far too suspicious of my opinions, but if I could get a date and a handshake, then the gentlemanly code would ensure that on that day I would indeed have my podium and my audience. The point is, with the opportunity to get some real work done, I was loath to deal with the sort of distress that sacking the Fledges would provoke in Harriet. Cheap domestic servants were so hard to find, as she frequently reminded me, that losing these “treasures” would upset her for weeks. I decided to wait until I’d given my talk to the Royal Society; then they’d be out on their ears.

  Harriet, I might add, was prepared to keep them on even after she’d learned Doris’s “secret.”

  “Hugo,” she said to me one morning in a low voice, “I believe Mrs. Fledge drinks!”

  “Of course she drinks, Harriet,” I said, “anyone can see that from her nose.” Harriet, in many ways, is an innocent.

  “Do you suppose we should sack her?” she said. “Oh good Lord, we can’t, Hugo! We were really so very lucky to get them, we’ll never replace them at these wages. Do you realize what Connie Babblehump had to pay her last butler? And he wouldn’t polish shoes!”

  We were at breakfast. “Oh do be quiet, Harriet,” I said from behind the Times. “Sack them if you want to, it’s all the same to me.” (I knew of course that she wouldn’t.) “You hired them. Just don’t gabble so.”

  “Hugo,” she said, in a certain hurt tone that I knew well and enjoyed provoking, “you can be most horridly rude when you choose. Why do you choose?”

  I said nothing to this; wasn’t I the “impossible” man?

  ♦

  Soon enough the newspapers learned of Sidney’s disappearance, and apparently decided that the situation was one that merited exploitation. The publicity was extremely unwelcome. After several very tiresome intrusions I instructed Fledge to turn away any reporters who came to the door, and George to see off trespassers, with a shotgun blast if necessary. The press, I should tell you, is no respecter of one’s personal privacy. And in spite of everything they still clustered at the gates of Crook, and when Harriet tried to cycle into the village one morning she was literally mobbed, and had to dismount, and returned to the house in great distress. I was much relieved when, after a few days of rabid excitement, they lost interest in us, having fresh rubbish with which to titillate their readers. And mass literacy, they tell me, is a boon.

  The days passed. The swallows flew away, the trees shed their leaves, and the garden grew less and less productive. It was damp and misty; it often rained. Cleo left for Oxford later in the month; she had been accepted at St. Anne’s, to read moral philosophy. She only lasted a term, poor child. Sidney’s disappearance upset her badly, she worried and worried at it, unable somehow to mesh the fact that he’d simply dropped out of sight into any workable picture of reality. She became convinced that evil had occurred, and nothing I could say would dissuade her of it. She tormented herself with the idea that someone, or something, had killed her Sidney—her sweet, gentle, spineless Sidney. Her ferret. Who could do such a thing? And why? It was not a happy Cleo who left us to begin her university life that October. I hold the newspapers responsible for putting those lurid and terrible ideas in her head. The irony was that I couldn’t tell her that I knew Sidney was alive and well, lying low somewhere to avoid being blackmailed by Fledge. Then the whole story would have had to come out, and it was from precisely this that I was trying to shield the girl.

  I did not dream of Doris again, I’m happy to say, after that extraordinary recrudescence of libido she aroused in me the night of the storm. I theorized that what had happened was that the frustration I’d been feeling with regard to the deferred lecture had by some odd psychic process been displaced, shunted sideways, as it were, into the realm of physical desire—a nice confusion, perhaps, of Logos and Eros. At any rate, as my work went forward in the autumn and early winter, I actually felt grateful for the delay. I was able to refine the thing, polish it, give it some style.

  We had the first snow of the year on December 15. I awoke early, and through lead-latticed windows marbled with frost I glimpsed the dazzling whiteness of the countryside. I threw wide the windows, then, and stood, in my dressing gown, and smoking a cigar, as the sun began its low arc across the sky, picking diamonds of light from the snow as it went. My bedroom faces north, across the valley of the Fling to the wooded hills beyond, and in fields and lanes the tracks of birds and foxes were visible as faint wandering lines, slender as hairs, inscribed upon the natural world by its creatures. I imagined then the children of Ceck, their eyes ablaze with the primitive wonder of savages, and their noses squashed bloodless on chilled cottage windows, desperate to be out and trampling in the stuff, hurling it about, building men with it. This predilection we have for constructing effigies of ourselves—it is surely instinctual, witness the spontaneous behavior of children in snow.

  Fledge appeared with my morning tea. “Snow at last, Fledge,” I said, still gazing out across the fields.

  “So it would appear, Sir Hugo,” he said. “Will there be anything else, Sir Hugo?”

  “No thank you, Fledge.” He left the room. Only then did I turn from the window and approach my tea. So it would appear, Sir Hugo! That snow didn’t “appear”; it existed! It was real! One could see it, touch it, taste it, probably smell it, if you had a good nose (I don’t). Probably hear it, if you were an Eskimo! Fledge was a man who took not even the evidence of his senses on trust, and veiled his cynicism in that mannered cant he spoke. Christ how I hated him, him and his phlegmatic evasions, his low cunning, his secret lusts!

  ♦

  That evening, the evening of the first snow, Harriet and I sat as usual at the dinner table. Our talk was desultory. A dozen flames flickered on a branch of silver candlesticks as Fledge moved soundlessly around the table, removing a plate, refilling a glass (usually mine), generally performing his tasks with a scrupulous punctilio. A fire crackled in the hearth and once, high above, a wedge of snow slithered down the roof and landed with a soft thump on the path below. Otherwise Crook was still and silent, and slightly fragrant with the smell of the Christmas tree out in the hall. From the outside, to one coming up the drive, it must have seemed, with its snow-crusted gables, the holly wreath nailed over the porch, and the firelight gleaming through the mullioned windows, to emanate an aura of solidity and repose, of benevolence, warmth, and shelter. Ha! There was a snake in this garden, a worm in this bud! We were about to rise from the table when children’s voices reached us. “Listen Hugo,” whispered Harriet, and together we sat there, in the candlelight, straining to hear. “It’s the carol singers.”

  We went to the front door, and opened it, and there, standing in a group, and flanked by two schoolteachers, each with a lantern mounted on a stick, were the children of Ceck Primary, all booted and hatted and warmly coated. Their reedy little voices rose over the gables of Crook, and from the kitchen Mrs. Fledge appeared, and came down the hall to listen. And then Fledge himself joined us, and to the strains of “Silent Night” we stood, together, in silence, though Doris was unable to stifle a sob (drunk no doubt).

  When they had finished, in they all came, and the children went tramping down to the kitchen, where Doris gave them mince pies and lemonade. Harriet and I steered the teachers into the drawing room and made them drink whisky by the fire.

  ♦

  All of which, while no doubt arousing tender feelings in the hearts of the mawkish, promised nothing but disruption and distraction as far as I was concerned. I know the Christmas season for what it is, you see—a period of tedious social obligations, frenzied domestic activity, and unlimited opportunity for alcoholic excess. For one such as I, with an important lecture to prepare, it spelled disaster. Are you familiar, by the way, with the etymology of mawkish? It comes from an Old Nors
e word for maggot, or flesh worm, and means “nauseatingly insipid.”

  Harriet is a sentimental woman, and, as I say, an innocent. In many ways she is still the girl I married in 1921, and Fledge I imagine must have smiled inwardly at the ease with which he accomplished her seduction. Harriet had not led a happy life, she had not been fulfilled by the mature love of a devoted husband, for, as I think must be clear by now, I had been far too interested in my bones ever to give her the tenderness and candor that every woman needs from a man. There was, thus—and these insights, ironically enough, I have had the leisure to develop only since becoming paralyzed—a sort of aching void within her, a void she had for years attempted to fill with religion. This was why her priest, Pin, was so important to her—he was a surrogate of Jesus Christ, who was in turn a surrogate of me—the husband who had so utterly failed her.

  Not that our marriage had been empty from the start, far from it. In the early days we shared a bedroom in the west wing and we were happy. The African expedition was still in the early planning stages, and I seemed, somehow, to have room in my life for both paleontology and love. Harriet was a sweet, vivacious girl, an English rose, people used to call her, on account of her complexion; and, seeing her with the clever, ambitious young naturalist I then was, they remarked on what a well-suited couple we seemed. What went wrong? I’d always assumed that our marriage began to founder only after I’d come back from Africa with George—that Phlegmosaurus had demanded so much of me, I’d allowed our love to die. But in fact—and this is another of those insights that came to me as I moldered in the alcove under the stairs—Harriet and I had stopped sleeping together even before I left for Africa.

  One incident came back to me then with particular clarity. I remember the day—this must have been, oh, 1924, 1925—that Dome put up a picture on a wall of our bedroom, a framed reproduction of a watercolor called The Virgin of the Lilies. There was already a large wooden crucifix hanging over the bed, and the experience of going to sleep immediately beneath those bleeding feet I used to find distinctly macabre; but as I say, I loved Harriet then, and I tolerated it for her. But The Virgin of the Lilies was too much. The thing oozed a sort of sickly religiosity that frankly embarrassed me, and the idea that I would now have to spend my nights not only with Jesus Christ but with his mother as well was not to be borne. Down the stairs I clattered and had it out with Harriet there and then. Oh, there were tears, but I stood firm, young prig that I was in those days. Dome removed The Virgin of the Lilies that very afternoon, but somehow, after that, things were never the same between us. Actually, I believe she told Patrick Pin about it (that bloody priest has been in Ceck forever), and he began to turn her against me. By the winter of 1949 I had been sleeping over in the east wing for twenty-five years, and love—the love of a husband and a wife—had long since died between us. I can’t say I missed it. I had my bones, as I say, and if I was very occasionally troubled with “urges” I would just slip down to the Hodge and Purlet, where a few hours in the company of men like John Crowthorne and George Lecky would get them out of my system. (This is why that dream about Doris Fledge was so disconcertingly bizarre.) But in all those years, it had never once occurred to me to wonder if Harriet was ever similarly afflicted, and if so, how she dealt with it. Hardly a thing one can discuss with a woman, after all.