The Grotesque

by Patrick Mcgrath

  I said nothing more for some minutes. I had come round to the back of George’s chair. I gripped him by the shoulders and squeezed them warmly. I understood his predicament; he would never go to the police with this story; for one thing, he had worked beside old John Crowthorne almost as long as he’d been in Ceck, and besides, his own complicity was clear. But I put it to him anyway, and as I expected he was adamant. He was a countryman, and he had all the countryman’s suspicion of police and officials and institutions; he followed natural law, but the ghastly irony at the heart of all this was that so did John Crowthorne. I told him he should stay in the barn while we tried to think the thing through. Then I went over to the house to get bread and cheese for him, and ointment for the rash on his neck.

  Crossing the driveway I began to see a net of guilt, a net that originated with Fledge, that had enmeshed old John Crowthorne, and then George, and now me too, inasmuch as I was shielding George from the law. As I entered the house Fledge was emerging from the drawing room. The effect of seeing him, then, was strong, but I attempted not to show it. He followed me down to the kitchen and began to prepare Harriet’s tea tray. “Have we any ointment, Fledge?” I said, after fetching out a loaf of bread and some cheddar.

  “Ointment, Sir Hugo?”

  “Yes, ointment,” I snapped. “Salve, embrocation—something to soothe a rash. Oh never mind,” I said, “I’ll find it myself.” I’d suddenly realized how precarious George’s situation was; it would be extremely unwise to let Fledge know he was here. I left the kitchen to look for ointment, conscious of the butler’s curious eyes upon me as he laid the tray for Harriet’s afternoon tea.

  I returned to the barn and found George still sitting in the wicker chair with his head in his hands. The light was fading by this time, and the shadows had begun to cluster about him. He sat across from Phlegmosaurus, and an oddly dramatic tableau they made, the heavy-jawed skeleton rearing over the rigid figure in the wicker chair. He ate ravenously and drank more whisky, but first he rubbed the ointment I’d brought him into the rash, which extended, I now saw, almost all the way round his neck. “In a bloody sack,” he muttered as he ate. “Who done him, tell me that? Who put him out there in a sack like that?”

  I hesitated to tell him. I frowned. I rose from my chair and turned on the lights. “No,” cried George, lifting a hand to his eyes. “Leave them off!” I turned them off and returned to my chair. George had finished eating. He wiped his hand across his mouth and glared at me. He was stronger for having eaten, much stronger. “Who done him, Sir Hugo? You know. Tell me.”

  Still I hesitated. Would it, I wondered, be to George’s advantage to know what I knew? I was aware of an indefinite feeling of deep unease at the prospect of telling George the truth. “Tell me,” he said.

  “All right, George,” I said, and I told him. He listened in silence. When I had finished he said he wanted to smoke; I only had cigars, so I gave him one of those. Still he made no comment on what I had told him. His mind was busy, however, and suddenly I glimpsed the old George, the tough and taciturn man I knew so well, the man who kept his own counsel. The food, the drink, the shelter of my gloomy barn—these things had dispelled the fear that he had acquired in the marsh. Soon, I knew, he would take his destiny in his own hands once more. What did this mean for me? For Fledge? Suddenly I felt great dread, as I felt control of the situation slipping through my fingers. George and I sat smoking as the barn grew darker, and all I could see of him then was a brooding, silent, shadowy phantom, hunched around the glowing red tip of a cigar.

  George slept in the barn that night, up in the loft among the stored bones, and the next night also, and he continued to grow stronger. And as he grew stronger, so did he grow more silent, and if he formed a plan of some sort, he did not communicate it to me. I quickly came to regret having told him about Fledge. I began to think that he should give himself up, and regardless of his scruples tell the police what he knew. This would mean involving me, and Fledge too, of course. It would be extremely tiresome for the family, particularly for Cleo, but after all there had been murder committed. George would have to serve time in prison, and Fledge would swing. Or would he? I had no confidence that this was so. All I had were my suspicions, my convictions, but nothing in the way of hard, incontrovertible, empirical fact. Perhaps George would simply put his own head in the noose, if he went to the police—his own or John Crowthorne’s. Could old John be persuaded to go to the police? Unlikely. That old poacher was deeply deficient in the moral sense, this was clear; this was a man who could find a body in a sack and, because “it weren’t a local man,” cheerfully butcher it for pig feed. But George would never betray him, this I knew; for I had had ample opportunity, over the years, to observe how deep the loyalty ran in George Lecky, once he was committed to a man. For twenty-five years, you see, George had been fiercely, discreetly, and uncompromisingly loyal to me.

  Two days and two nights George stayed in the barn. Limp’s men were still out on the marsh looking for him, though according to the papers his description had been circulated throughout the southeast, suggesting that the police now considered it at least possible that he’d left the area. The atmosphere in the house was tense, not least because I was being impossible. For quite apart from the strain I was experiencing hiding George, I had also to assimilate what was probably the single most humiliating event of my scientific career.

  ♦

  For I had, indeed, delivered my lecture on the seventh, I’d delivered it to an audience of four: Hilary, Victor, Sykes-Herring, and a man called Sir Edward Cleghorn. Cleghorn is an eccentric crank; he is Harriet’s “pterodactyl man,” and he claims that he and I are the only gentlemen naturalists still working in Britain. His presence was frankly an embarrassment. Sykes-Herring was there because he had to be, as, in a way, were Hilary and Victor. Harriet and Cleo had not attended, Sidney’s bones having come up only two days before. Two old men blundered in, thinking it a lecture on coprolites, then blundered out again; and that, in terms of what should have been the crowning moment of my paleontological career, was it.

  Afterwards, after I had reviewed the dinosaur-bird relationship from evolutionary and anatomical perspective, after I had spoken at length about the phlegmosaurian claw and the phlegmosaurian hipbone, and the implications of said claw and hipbone, after I had thumped the pulpit, like Thomas Huxley, for Archaeopteryx, oldest of the fossil birds, after I had talked about atavisms, and stressed the necessity of asking ourselves whether the dinosaur was truly the cold-blooded reptile we unthinkingly assumed him to be—after I had said all this, and more, there was the small, thin sound, in that vast, empty auditorium, of eight hands clapping. “Very interesting,” said Sykes-Herring, as he took us to tea in the senior common room. “Most provocative.” He didn’t believe a word I’d said. In his own mind he was harrumphing like a walrus. Cleghorn drew me aside and, spraying me with cake crumbs and saliva as he spoke, told me I was wasting my breath. “Can’t go meddling with the taxonomy,” he said, “terrifies people. It’s been this way since Baron Cuvier, and he died”—here he half-choked on a piece of cake—“in 1832! Darwin was barely aboard the Beagle!” I could have done without this; Eddy Cleghorn is extremely unstable, and quite probably mad. Young Victor was enthusiastic, and this was something, I suppose. Perhaps he would follow in my footsteps, revolutionize paleontology. He was, after all, a Coal. But why, I asked myself, had the professional scientific community so unanimously ignored me? Was it, as Cleghorn suggested, because they were made anxious at seeing the established classification of dinosaurs challenged? “Can’t go meddling with the taxonomy,” the old crank had said. “See what happens to a misshelved book? Ceases to exist. Shake up the order, you shake up the world. Frightens people, Hugo, believe me. You’re a radical.” Bloody fool. I began to suspect, actually, that the true cause of my humiliation was Sykes-Herring. I began to suspect that he had failed to publicize the lecture. No one came, I think, simply because no one knew about it.
Once again, it seems, I was being persecuted. Sykes-Herring had done this before, you see, in fact he had blighted my entire career, and I now saw that if I was ever to teach the world the phlegmosaurian lesson, I should have to circumvent Sykes-Herring. He was a malevolent, obscurantist reactionary. I should have to be very careful, very cunning, if I was going to best him. He was, after all, the Secretary of the Royal Society. Ha! Little did I know that scientific politics would soon be beyond me forever!

  It was difficult, extremely difficult, to resume paleontology after that. In a way, then, it was fortunate that I had George’s welfare to occupy me in the days that followed, otherwise I might well have succumbed to depression. For two days and two nights he slept among my bones, growing stronger, emanating a silent purposefulness that made me very uneasy indeed. I tried to talk to him but he would not be drawn. He sat in my wicker chair by the hour, smoking, frowning abstractedly, from time to time stamping a boot on the floor. The house was no less grim. Cleo had reacted to the rising of Sidney’s bones by crawling even further into her shell, and to Harriet’s distress she never appeared for meals. She was, of course, oppressed by the conviction that Fledge was the evil creeping thing that had murdered Sidney on the marsh, and she bore no small antagonism toward Harriet and myself for continuing to tolerate the man. Harriet told me that if I didn’t telephone Henry Horn about the girl soon, then she would. There was, thus, an atmosphere of brooding malevolence in both house and barn, and it very quickly degenerated into a sort of smoldering latent explosiveness.

  The only one not directly implicated in any of this was Doris, of course; but she felt it, and quite unconsciously she responded to it. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of this was the raw fish incident.

  This occurred at lunchtime on the Friday of that week. We always had fish on Fridays, Harriet being Roman Catholic, and this day we were to be served a nice piece of halibut. Interesting creature, the halibut—Hippoglossus hippoglossus, literally, horse-tongue horse-tongue. It begins life upright, one eye on either side of its head, and then in early youth develops the peculiar habit of lying on the bottom of the sea and covering itself with sand. In such a position the eye on the lower side, invariably the left side, cannot serve any useful purpose, so it migrates to the top side, socket and all. Yes, the halibut has a migrating eye. A voracious feeder, it consumes all sorts of other fish, an occasional sea bird, and relishes rubbish, like the pig.

  But that’s not strictly relevant. Fledge set an earthenware casserole dish in front of Harriet, and when she lifted the lid, there lay the piece of halibut, skin, fins, and all—completely raw. It had seen neither knife nor oven; there hadn’t even been the pretense of cooking it! Harriet is a placid soul, but this roused her. “What on earth is the woman up to?” she murmured. And then, I remember this well, just when one would have expected her to turn to Fledge, and demand an explanation—she did not. She dabbed at her lips with her napkin, rose from her chair, and left the room without another word. There was a moment’s silence. “Take it away, Fledge,” I said, “and bring the cheeseboard.” I presumed Harriet had gone to the kitchen to talk to Doris, but as she never returned to the dining room it occurs to me now that possibly she did not go near the kitchen at all. It occurs to me now that this was as good a demonstration as one could want of a woman embarrassed in front of her butler. Had something happened? Had Fledge made another advance and, as I predicted, been repulsed, but weakly? I rather think he had.

  Things came to a head that afternoon. George was in the wicker chair; I was striding up and down and attempting to make him tell me what was on his mind. How long did he intend “holing up” in my barn, I demanded? He had to act, I told him. I was feeling the strain, myself, and I may have been more passionate than was strictly necessary. George said nothing. He sat there doggedly, smoking my cigars and rubbing his rash, which the ointment had done little to help. His name was all over the newspapers. The Daily Express had called him the “Ceck monster.” It had referred to the “abomination” of the “bones in the marsh” that had shocked this “sleepy village” in the “depths” of the countryside. The press assumed that George was responsible for the entire abomination, and was shrill in its clamor for his prompt capture. The village was crawling with reporters, and half-a-dozen of the creatures were even then clustered at the gates of Crook. They’d already got to John Crowthorne, but he’d played the rustic bumpkin and claimed total ignorance, as he had to the police also, which left George, poor George, to bear the brunt alone. What was his plan, I asked him. What did he intend to do? I certainly hoped, I said, that he wouldn’t draw me into it.

  There was, at that moment, a knock at the door of the barn. George rose to his feet. I moved toward the door, turning to wave him into the shadows. The door swung open; framed against the light stood Fledge. For a moment nothing happened. I turned my eyes from Fledge and saw George disappearing beneath the dinosaur. Fledge had seen him, of this I have no doubt, for without delivering whatever message he’d come with he abruptly stepped out of the barn and the door swung shut behind him.

  I lingered another moment in indecision. George had vanished into the obscurity. “Stay there!” I cried, then ran across the barn and through the door—which is low, and is set into one of two massive arched gates fastened with studded iron hinges. On impulse I locked it behind me. Fledge was moving rapidly toward the house. I caught up to him before he reached the porch, and clutched him by the arm. “Fledge,” I gasped, “you saw nothing just now! Do you understand me? Nothing!” The man displayed not a twitch, not a flicker; but I saw it all the same, I saw the sudden flare of exultant power—the triumphalism—in him. He had me, and he knew it, this I could see in his long blank face, in those reddish eyebrows that lifted, perhaps, a millimeter, in scorn, I could see it in those thin and bloodless lips that may, I now think, have betrayed the merest tiny quiver of derision as he realized how dumbly I had played into his hands, how clumsily I had given him the game. And then the slight bow, the subtle gesture of contemptuous deference. “Very well, Sir Hugo,” he said. My fingers were still gripping his arm. Glancing about me, I now saw Harriet standing at the drawing-room window, and gazing at us with intense perplexity.

  Fledge returned to the house, and I to the barn. “George!” I shouted. “George!” But he had gone, out through the loose plank at the back that he had forced open three days previously.

  ♦

  Within fifteen minutes Limp was at Crook with four carloads of policemen. They poured into the barn and into the house, into the gardens and the orchard. I was in the drawing room with Harriet when, about half-an-hour after that, George emerged from the trees beside the driveway between several policemen. He had been handcuffed. Never before have I seen such black rage in a man’s face. Just as they pushed him into the back of one of the cars he lifted his eyes to the face of Crook and spat on the gravel. Fledge was not at the window with us to observe this.

  I am, as I say, in the kitchen as I remember all this, and I find myself attempting to postpone telling you what happened next. For we are drawing close to the cerebral accident that has condemned me to this wheelchair—this hellchair—and reduced me to the status of a vegetable. Doris, having finished the washing up, comes and sits down opposite me, and pours us each a glass of wine. Dear Doris, I would much rather talk about her, quite frankly. She drinks much more heavily now than she ever used to, this I have had ample opportunity to observe, for in the past she never indulged herself to excess until her day’s work was done. Now, though, Fledge seems to have relaxed his stern prohibition in this regard; he turns a blind eye when she miscalculates, as she usually does, and becomes incoherent by six. She doesn’t have to conceal her drinking anymore, she told me during one of our “chats,” and though this robs the activity of a good deal of its pleasure she has determined, she says, to take advantage of the new, permissive regime. With the result that when Fledge comes into the kitchen before dinner, he usually finds his wife standing rather
unsteadily at the stove and clutching a pot of vegetables either crisped to black cinders or raw. “Shan’t be long,” she calls, hearing him enter and trying not to lurch; and he, quietly frowning, will take over, pull the meal together in some fashion, and serve it himself. Doris sinks into her chair by the stove and, no longer fit to knit, as was her habit in better days, tipples gently toward oblivion.

  But these “chats” that we enjoy, Doris and I: they occur in the kitchen, usually in the evening but often earlier in the day, and they include the consumption, by Doris, of at least two bottles of sherry, bordeaux, or burgundy. No great connoisseur, Doris, but there are two things she likes in a wine, quantity and bite. And the cellars of Crook, amply stocked over several generations—we Coals like our bottle—offer her plenty of wine with plenty of bite. This is what happens: she pushes my wheelchair up to the table, and sets a glass before me. She fills my glass. Then, settling herself on the other side of the table, she fills her own glass. I sit there and gaze at her as she lifts it and gives me my health. She then proceeds deliberately and loquaciously to drink herself stupid. And throughout, she addresses all her “chat” to me, even going so far as to respond to the imaginary responses I have made to her inanities. And why, you ask, does Fledge permit her to do this? It’s a question that intrigued me for some time. Then I realized: because he is upstairs, fornicating with Harriet in her bedroom in the west wing, and it suits them both very nicely to have Doris “out of commission.” Fledge actually encourages her drinking, these days, for this very reason.