The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  I wonder, has it ever occurred to you that a certain analogy can be drawn between drinking and suicide? It’s very apparent to me, who can now partake of neither form of release and am, instead, literally incarcerated within my own flesh. But what the drinker would doubtless spurn is the sudden death, the sudden blessed cessation of experience, and liberation from the self, that the suicide craves. Sudden death is anathema to the drinker, for the approach to the void must be gradual, it must be attenuated. And so I observe Doris tantalizing herself, dallying over the first three-quarters of the first bottle, even, at times, consuming a slice of bread and a raw onion to further defer, to cunctate (lovely word, Latin cunctari, to linger) the delicious onset and progress of her drunkenness. “Sseady now, Doris old girl,” she murmurs, as she rises clumsily to her feet to drain and refill my glass—she drinks for both of us—and bumps against the table as she does so, spilling red wine onto the old scrubbed boards. The back door is still open, and the sounds and smells of the early evening come drifting in, birdsong, manure, the bark of a dog on a distant farm, and Doris, one ear cocked for Fledge coming down the passage, sits drinking with me, talking of the years in Kenya, then gazing off with filmed eyes into unseen stadiums of memory. What does she think of, I wonder at such times, though I know that her mind, by this stage, strictly speaking is not thinking but instead drifting in the vague, associative, oceanic way that the mind does when it sloshes off beyond language and surrenders to the booze. I am no stranger to it myself.

  It grows dark outside, and the putt-putt-putt of a tractor comes from the road beyond the gates of Crook. Doris has opened her second bottle, and her oceanic consciousness is becoming befogged, benumbed, and her eyes have acquired a glazed fixity not unlike my own. Strands of silver hair come drifting loose from her bun, and though she is slumped untidily in the chair a certain mechanical precision is evident in her gestures, the lifting of the glass has come to resemble the operation of an automaton.

  At last she rises from her chair and moves with slow, careful steps to the back door, which she closes and latches against the night. No lamp has yet been lit; moonlight spreads a weak and silvery glow across the kitchen, and beyond its cold fingers the shadows thicken, deepen, clot. Doris stiffly resumes her chair and gazes across the table at me. What must I look like now, I wonder —rigid and upright, with the moonlight gleaming from the great hook of my nose, my eyes in their hollows mere pinpricks of brightness in the gloom of the evening? A grotesque; a grotesque, locked in the grotto of his own bones. “Sir Hugo,” murmurs Doris, “oh, Sir Hugo.” She lays her head on her arms and begins to sob softly in the darkness, and I gaze on, unmoving, but not unmoved, across her quietly heaving shoulders and through the kitchen window to the moonlit yard beyond. It is then that I would wish to weep, too, but cannot—not because the ability to weep is blocked, as everything else is blocked, but because I’m much too old to learn to weep in the presence of another person. And this is another of those ironies, those inversions, of the vegetable state. It is long training, you see, that prevents me from weeping in public, with the result that the only means I have of communicating to the world that I am mentally alive and that I can feel—I cannot employ. I cannot employ it because the habit of self-restraint, maintained over a lifetime, is impossible to break. So, when not in the private darkness of my grotto, I preserve the dry-eyed, manly fortitude—of a fossil!

  ❖

  How vividly it all comes back to me, as I sit in the darkened kitchen and listen to Doris weeping herself to sleep. For as she weeps I remember the night—it was just after the first snow—that I compromised her, that I imposed my long-dormant sex instincts upon her; and I remember, too, the disgust I felt at the shabbiness, the vulgarity, and the intemperance of my behavior.

  It happened during Harriet’s Christmas party. She does this every year, throws a party for the local gentry; it’s a thing we have to do, she says, one of the “proprieties.” She extracts from me a promise to be welcoming and normal, and I invariably station myself by the Christmas tree and make sure the scotches keep coming at a steady clip. There was an awful lot of babble this year, and I’d managed to put up with Freddy Hough’s so-called conversation for about ten minutes when it suddenly occurred to me to wonder where Cleo was (this was the day she’d come back from Oxford). I realized that I’d missed the girl, so I promptly abandoned Freddy and set off to the kitchen to find her. She was not there; but I did find Doris, loading a tray with cocktail sausages.

  The kitchen was hot, Doris was working hard, and her face was damp with perspiration. Strands of hair clung wetly to her brow. She wore a freshly laundered black uniform with white cuffs, collar, and apron, and it fitted her narrow frame quite snugly. I sat down and, lighting a cigar, watched with some pleasure as she bustled between oven and table. “I bet you’d like a drink, Mrs. Fledge,” I said. The noise of the party drifted down from the front of the house, muted and distant.

  “I would dearly love a drink, Sir Hugo,” she said, barely pausing in her work, “but there’s the sausages to be seen to, and then I’ve to open more sardines.”

  “Let me help,” I said. “I used to be an expert at opening sardines. In Africa,” I added.

  This time she stopped, and stood pushing the hair out of her eyes. “Oh no, Sir Hugo,” she said. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “I intend to abolish the division of labor; it’s inherently unjust. Give me the sardines, Mrs. Fledge!”

  Sardine tins, as you know, are opened with a sort of key with a slit in it, into which one inserts a small metal tongue that protrudes from the edge of the tin; by turning the key, one peels away the lid of the tin and reveals the oily treasures within. If you break off the little tongue, however, the task becomes much more complicated. I broke off the little tongue, and in the process cut my finger. “Damn!” I cried.

  Doris came over with a worried frown. I was sitting at the table. She lifted my hand and peered at the tiny cut, from which had swelled a single drop of blood. She carried a faint odor of cocktail sausages, mingled with sweat. Like a fool I slipped my hand up the inside of her leg. I felt the roughness of her nylons. “No, Sir Hugo,” she hissed, her eyes wide with horror as she backed away. I went after her—can you believe this of me?—I went after her. I knew that Fledge was certain to appear in the kitchen at any moment, and still I did it. “Sir Hugo!” hissed Doris, retreating rapidly across the kitchen towards the stove. Doubtless I presented a bizarre and frightening spectacle, wild-eyed from whisky, bleeding from the finger, and manifestly out of control. I trapped her in the corner. Doris is a head taller than me, and the kiss I attempted to plant on her mouth missed completely, my chin barely grazing her shoulder. But I did get a hand on one of her little breasts, so audaciously pointy in that tight black uniform. And then it happened, precisely what I’d known would happen—a loud, bogus cough from the doorway, and there stood Fledge, clutching an empty silver tray and glaring at me with what, for him, was fury. Doris scampered out of the corner and, sniffing once or twice, and with lowered eyes, set about loading the empty tray with sausages. I ran a hand through my hair; it was all smeared with blood, I noticed, as was Doris’s apron. “Ha!” I said jauntily. Then: “Well!” Then, mustering my dignity, I sauntered across the kitchen, buttoning my dinner jacket and straightening my bow tie. “Excuse me,” I said, eyeing the man, and cleared my throat rather noisily. For a moment Fledge did not move; then he stepped aside from the door, glancing sharply at my blood-smeared fingers, and I made my way back to the party.

  My reaction, as I say, was one of profound self-disgust. At breakfast the next morning Harriet chattered brightly about who had and had not enjoyed themselves, about some old dowager who’d been sick into the gramophone, and why no one would touch the ham after that. “Still, the cocktail sausages were a great success, don’t you think? You seemed to like them, Hugo.”

  I did not dignify this with a reply. In the cold light of sobriety I was squirm
ing with shame, and quite unable to look Fledge in the eye, despite what I knew about him. I was simply not up to small talk about cocktail sausages. After breakfast I holed up in the barn. The one dim ray of hope was that the Horns were arriving in a few days. The house, I thought, would then be so full of bustle, the thing would have a chance to “blow over.” Ha!

  ❖

  And even as I remember that night, Fledge himself silently enters the kitchen. Doris by this point is splayed slackly in her chair, her head thrown back and her mouth wide open, snoring loudly and stinking of wine. He stands there for a moment before rousing her, he gazes down at her long, white, scraggy neck, her stretched, inviting gullet, and I watch his face, see his lips twitch, as a certain familiar temptation returns; but he never succumbs, for he has his plan, you see; and it is my guess that Doris won’t be removed from the picture until I myself am dead. We will never know if I am right or wrong, but had I a voice I would say to Doris: flee, woman, flee for your life!

  He wakes her, and in due course she stumbles off to bed, and I sit there in my wheelchair, staring at the shadows on the ceiling and hoping for sleep. But in my mind’s eye I see Fledge moving through the darkened house, locking doors and turning off lights, and then, with his candle, ascending the staircase and making his way past one window and then another into the west wing, to a bedroom where a light still burns. Ten or twelve minutes pass; all is still; out there in the countryside, the usual wealth of night sounds, a gust of wind moving suddenly through the trees, a fox barking at the moon. In Harriet’s bedroom, only a candle burns now; the butler’s clothes are neatly arranged upon a chair, beneath which gleam his shoes, their decorative perforations tiny points of blackness in the flickering gloom, and his socks neatly balled and tucked into the left one. The bedcovers are folded back and Fledge, naked, reclines on one elbow on the white sheet, and the candlelight touches his body with a shadowy glow. A line of fine, reddish-brown hair runs from the very center of his chest to his navel, and from there spreads lightly over his lower belly to be swallowed in the silky denseness of his pubic hair. A slight chubbiness is apparent about his chest and belly, a slight hint of fattening in a man who otherwise retains the leanness of his youth. He has long, well-formed legs covered with a fine red down that licks about his crossed ankles and reappears as mere filmy wisps on the arches of his shapely feet. At the fork of his body the penis lies slumbering on the testicular sac, the nicked dome of its dark head silvered by a stray moonbeam and the stem thickly and blackly corded with veins, while about it, like the wings of a sprite, spreads a fleece of soft red pubic hair. He is gazing through languid and half-closed eyes toward the window, where Harriet, my Harriet, stands in a billowing white nightgown, her hair loosed and tumbling, and pulls closed the curtains against the moon. She turns, and approaches the bed, thinking she comes to a man and failing to see that he is a monster.

  Yes, a monster. What else are we to think him, that furtive, ruthless, doubly inverted creature? Harriet deserves all she gets at his hands, for she went in with her eyes open. Actually I don’t believe he’s interested in her at all. I believe he suffers from an acute sense of inferiority, and this manifests in pathological jealousy—of me. Hence his interest in Harriet. To be honest, I think he’s clinically insane, a paranoid schizophrenic, in fact. But it’s his treatment of Doris I’m concerned with now, it’s his callous negligence and infidelity to that good woman that infuriate me beyond reason—though of course one would hardly expect better from a homosexual. Yes, Fledge is a homosexual, of the worst type, and if there remains any doubt in your mind on that score, then allow me to describe to you now the circumstances surrounding my cerebral accident.

  We must return to the middle of February, to the days immediately following George’s arrest. I had of course been questioned by the police, but no charges had yet been laid with regard to my harboring a fugitive from justice. Unable to tolerate the atmosphere in the house, I had been spending all my time in the barn, attempting to turn my mind to paleontology once more. I was in there one afternoon when, at about two thirty, there came a knock at the door. I can picture all too clearly, now, the strained and bulging blood vessel inside my skull, its leakage clotted on the thin inner wall which, even as the knocking died away, was rapidly losing the ability to bear the pressure of my thudding blood. “Come!” I shouted. It was Fledge.

  He closed the door behind him and approached my chair. He carried a tray upon which was set my lunch, for I had not been into the house since breakfast. “Put it down there, Fledge,” I said, gesturing vaguely at the small table. The man’s presence aroused considerable antagonism in me, for it was only a few days since he had quite deliberately ignored my appeal regarding George. I have mentioned the aura of triumphalism he had seemed to emanate when I’d made that appeal, out on the driveway, the unspoken relish with which he’d grasped the fact that I had, as it were, given him the game: I felt that same vindictive exultation oozing from him now. But I had as yet formulated no satisfactory plan for “getting back” at him. You see, I could hardly rebuke him for having informed the police that a fugitive from justice was on the grounds of Crook, without revealing the extent of my own involvement in the affair. “That’s all, Fledge,” I said, not even turning in my chair.

  He coughed lightly. “Your jacket, Sir Hugo,” he said. I was still in the brown lab coat I wore while working.

  “Oh yes,” I said. I rose to my feet, and he helped me out of the lab coat. Laying it on the back of the chair, he then held open my tweed jacket, and I thrust my arms into the sleeves. He patted the shoulders once or twice, then brushed at the thing with the side of his palm. “Don’t fuss, Fledge,” I snapped. “That’ll do.”

  “Very good, Sir Hugo,” he murmured, and then, coming round, he moved the small table in front of my chair. “Wine, Sir Hugo?”

  “Yes of course,” I said, resuming my seat. He uncorked a bottle of burgundy and poured me a glass, and then stood by as I began to eat. “That’s all right, Fledge,” I said irritably, glancing up at the man as I chewed a potato. “You can go.”

  “Ah, Sir Hugo?” he said.

  “What is it, Fledge?” I washed down the potato with a mouthful of burgundy.

  “A young man from the village called at the house this morning; he wished to know if you would be requiring a new gardener.”

  “A new gardener? Christ almighty, are the vultures gathering already? Certainly not. I expect George Lecky to be back with us quite soon.”

  “Very good, Sir Hugo.” Still he did not leave; he hovered by the table like a waiter.

  “That’s all, Fledge. You can go.”

  “Yes, Sir Hugo.” He poured me more wine. He bent down and picked up a threepenny bit from under my chair, and put it on the table.

  I laid my knife and fork down on my plate with a clatter. “Well good God man, what is it? What are you hanging about for? What do you want?”

  “Sir Hugo, I wished only to say how sorry I am about everything that’s happened.”

  I responded to this with an ironic snort. “That’s hard to believe,” I said. Then I glanced up at him. His expression had changed. The masklike blankness was touched now with a sort of subtle derision. Hard to say quite how I realized this; I could see it in the glint in his eyes, I think, in the flicker of mockery at the corners of his mouth.

  “No, it’s true, Sir Hugo,” he said, in very soft, very silky tones—and then he reached out a hand, and put it on my shoulder!

  I was out of my chair in an instant, and in the process I managed to knock over the table. Glass and china shattered on the floor as I shouted: “How dare you touch me!”

  He backed off a little. He was watching me intently, his head slightly lowered and his hand to his lip, which he appeared to have bitten when I’d pushed him away, for there was blood on his mouth. I was furious; my fists were clenched, my eyes were flashing, I was seething like an angry little bantam. I had never been insulted in such a fashion—now he would hav
e to go, no question! He took a step toward me. “Back off, you bastard!” I shouted. “No more of your foul tricks!”

  He paid no attention. He advanced, menacingly, a sneer now twisting his stained lips. The fumes of spilt wine were rising all about me and making my head spin. A very bad pain had begun to throb in my left temple. “Don’t try it, Fledge,” I warned him. My blood was in hot turmoil—there was going to be physical violence, this I now saw, and I was damned if I’d be bested by Fledge. His teeth suddenly gleamed in the light, and he grinned—and then he came at me, seized me by the hair with one hand and with the other gripped my wrist. Holding me thus he then dropped to one knee, and though I flailed and struggled like a wild thing he forced me down with him until I lay sprawled upon the floor, crablike and ungainly, with my head upon his arched thigh, and his fingers still knotted in my hair. In helpless rage I could do little but gaze up into his face; his expression had again changed, for now I read there only a sort of cold hunger, a cold light in his dead eyes and a cold and rather twitchy little smile on his pale thin lips, where there still remained a light smear of blood. A lick of his reddish hair had worked loose in the struggle and fell over his forehead in a floppy curve. I was powerless to resist as he brought his face down close to mine; and then his grinning features filled my vision entirely. I closed my eyes, the pain in my head now dreadfully intense. After a moment I felt it, and you may imagine my disgust: his mouth upon mine.

  All the strength seemed to drain out of my body then. At last he lifted his face from this unholy kiss, and there was fire in his eyes, as he regarded me with a sort of brisk amusement; then suddenly I felt the grip of his fingers tighten in my hair, and he yanked my head violently backwards—and several things happened at once. I was now gazing straight up into the roof of the barn, where I saw the crow flap through the shadows from one rafter to another. At the same time there was a hot burst of searing pain in my head; and a sudden rapping at the door of the barn. “Daddy?” I heard Cleo calling from outside. “Daddy?”