The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  Fledge quickly lifted his head from my throat and turned toward the door. His fingers slackened their grip in my hair, as he knelt there, alert and upright, concentrating on the voice from beyond the door. He seemed to forget me entirely; he let me go, and rose to his feet, allowing my body to slide like a rag doll off his thigh and onto the floor. And there I lay, as that weary, worn-out blood vessel in the inferior frontal convolution of my left hemisphere burst open; and as the blackness swept over me I was aware only of his footsteps receding toward the door, from behind which Cleo’s voice could still be heard, saying: “Daddy?”

  ❖

  How long did I lie there? What happened at the door of the barn? It seems I will never know. But it’s impossible not to speculate on what I might be now, if Fledge had raised the alarm immediately, if he had not simply left me there to die. Is it unreasonable, then, that I should take this obscure attempt on my own life as proving beyond a shadow of a doubt his guilt with regard to Sidney’s?

  Cleo is comfortable in the kitchen. She can talk freely here, not oppressed, as she always is in the drawing room, by her conviction that Fledge is the evil creeping thing that murdered Sidney, and that Harriet is complicit with him. Doris is a nonthreatening figure, and I, Hugo, the girl has come to realize, am the perfect ally, for while I understand all she says, and she knows I understand it, I will never reprimand her, nor, worse still, show her the pitying sympathy that Harriet invariably displays toward her. With the result that she has gradually opened up to me, and as Doris goes about her duties, peeling potatoes and whistling tunelessly between sips of sherry, Cleo sits beside me at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and endlessly arranging her and my intermingled nail clippings in those elaborate circular designs, and chattering away about any odd thing that comes into her head as long as it doesn’t touch upon Sidney or Harriet or Fledge. She was occupied thus the day Harriet came into the kitchen and said: “Mrs. Fledge, I’m going to have to ask you a favor. Mrs. Giblet is coming down to see me on Thursday, and Fledge won’t be here. Could you stand in for him, I wonder?”

  “Yes madam,” said Doris, meekly.

  “Oh good. Thank you so much. Cleo—”

  Nothing. The girl was at the kitchen window, gazing into the yard. She did not turn round. Harriet was not within my line of vision, but I could all too easily imagine the moue of irritability and concern that this behavior provoked. “I do wish,” said Harriet, “that you wouldn’t drink in the afternoon, Mrs. Fledge. So bad for you”—and then she was gone. The point was, though, that the old woman would undoubtedly bring news of George. Two months had passed since his arrest, and I had heard nothing.

  ❖

  Fledge was away from Crook the day Mrs. Giblet came—the reason for his absence will become clear in due course—so it was Doris who announced the old woman’s arrival. I was in the drawing room, gazing at the chimneypiece, and Harriet was sitting by the fire, reading a novel. It was rather a damp, cool afternoon, I seem to remember, and I had my tartan horse blanket tucked about my legs. Harriet sighed, and after carefully marking her place in the book with a dead matchstick, rose to her feet. In came Mrs. Giblet, in that huge fur coat of hers, and took both Harriet’s hands in her own. “Dear Lady Coal,” she wheezed, in husky tones, “such difficult times, for all of us.”

  “Indeed Mrs. Giblet,” said Harriet. “Do sit down, won’t you? Tea, please, Mrs. Fledge.”

  But Mrs. Giblet did not sit down. Instead, she turned toward me. Harriet, too, turned toward me, and the pair of them stood there, gazing at me, and I gazing back. The old woman was without her lapdog, but she did have her stick, and as she gazed at me she wrapped her claws about the handle and leaned on the thing. Her eyes bored into me like a pair of spiral drills, and as the seconds ticked by Harriet grew visibly uncomfortable. She laid a hand on her visitor’s sleeve. “Do sit down, won’t you, Mrs. Giblet?” she repeated.

  “Poor fellow,” said Mrs. Giblet, and began fumbling in the pockets of her coat for cigarettes; still she did not sit down. “Terrible thing, Lady Coal”—she turned toward Harriet—“how distressing for you. And him such a sprightly man, in his way.”

  “Life goes on, Mrs. Giblet,” murmured Harriet. She found it distasteful, I know, to have to account for her feelings. I was now a source of embarrassment to her.

  “And there’s no hope, they say?” Mrs. Giblet’s eyes were on me again. “His faculties will not return?”

  “Apparently not, Mrs. Giblet.”

  “And he will live out his normal span, Lady Coal?”

  Harriet winced at the brutal candor of this inquiry. “One doesn’t know,” she murmured. “One hopes and prays for the best, Mrs. Giblet.”

  “Whatever that may be. Tragic. And him still a young man.”

  “Hugo is over fifty,” said Harriet quietly.

  Mrs. Giblet snorted. “That’s young, Lady Coal, believe me!” She had managed to get a cigarette into her mouth by this stage. There was the flare of a match and a cloud of blue smoke. “He can still smoke, I suppose?”

  “Good heavens, Mrs. Giblet, it never occurred to me!” said Harriet and, apparently abandoning the effort to get the old woman to sit down, herself resumed her armchair. In point of fact I should have greatly enjoyed a cigar, but this was the first time anyone had thought of it. Mrs. Giblet did not pursue the point, unfortunately; she shuffled over to the armchair opposite Harriet’s, and lowered herself stiffly into it. “Such a sad thing to lose a husband before his time,” she said. “You’re still a young woman yourself, Lady Coal. Not as young as I was—I lost Sidney’s father when I was barely thirty, you know.”

  “No,” said Harriet, “I didn’t know. Ah, Mrs. Fledge.” Doris appeared with the tea tray.

  “Struck by a locomotive in Victoria Station. But that’s by the by. Lady Coal, I spoke to the solicitors this morning. The news is not good, I’m afraid. Lecky refuses to plead insanity.”

  “Oh dear,” said Harriet, who was not really equipped to deal with any of this.

  “Oh dear indeed,” said Mrs. Giblet. “We must think very hard what’s best, Lady Coal. I’m afraid if he sticks to his story he’ll swing.”

  Swing!

  “But I believe it’s the truth, Mrs. Giblet! George Lecky simply doesn’t have that sort of violence in him.”

  “Oh, I agree,” said Mrs. Giblet. “But if I understand Sir Fleckley correctly”—she referred to Sir Fleckley Tome, a barrister —“he will not be believed. This business has aroused strong emotion in the popular breast, Lady Coal; even a partial admission of guilt, he says, will tip the scales.”

  “But George must tell the truth,” said Harriet. “Surely that’s enough? This is England, after all.”

  Her faith was touching.

  “Dear Lady Coal,” said Mrs. Giblet, “your faith is touching. But you see, it will be assumed that a man who could stumble upon a dead body and feed it to his pigs is a man who could kill. We tend to lose the fine distinctions when it comes to such things.” It was hard to believe she was talking about her own son.

  “Yes, I do see, Mrs. Giblet. All the same—”

  “Public opinion is already strongly against him, Lady Coal. Have you been reading the papers?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Giblet, I haven’t. I find it all too distressing. To think that George Lecky—no, it doesn’t bear contemplating. But this is frightful, Mrs. Giblet! You mean that if George tells the truth he’ll be hanged, and if he lies he won’t?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Giblet.

  There was a silence. “Then what is to be done?” said Harriet. “That,” said Mrs. Giblet, “is precisely what I came to Crook to talk to you about. My interest in the case is very simple, Lady Coal; perhaps it’s unnecessary for me to say this, but like you, I don’t believe George Lecky killed my son. But if he swings—”

  “Please, Mrs. Giblet,” said Harriet; the word clearly distressed her.

  “If he is found guilty, Lady Coal, then Sidney’s murderer will go free. T
his I most emphatically do not wish to happen.”

  “No,” said Harriet, “of course not.”

  “Lady Coal,” said Mrs. Giblet, “let me ask you frankly: who killed Sidney?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Giblet, if I knew—”

  “Tell me your suspicions, Lady Coal, no matter how bizarre they seem.”

  “Well, I don’t know, I hardly think—”

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Lady Coal, that your husband was in any way involved?”

  “Rubbish!” The door flew open, and there stood Cleo—she had been listening in the hallway! Into the room she darted, her eyes flashing, and over to the fireplace, where she stood with her back to the fire between the two seated women, who, clasping their teacups, gazed at her in wide-mouthed astonishment. “Rubbish!” she hissed, all coiled up in her baggy black cardigan like a scorpion. “You foul old woman,” she cried, her voice charged with scorn and rage, “you ghastly old hag, you come floundering in here like a stinking whale and start accusing my father! How dare you! What gives you the right? You get out of here, with your foul lies! Get out, you hear!”

  “My dear girl—” said Mrs. Giblet, stiffening with anger. “Cleo!” breathed Harriet.

  Cleo’s voice grew wild. “You sat on Sidney all his life,” she shouted. “You mocked him and terrorized him, you tried to turn him into your slave! It’s a wonder there was anything left of him at all, after growing up with you!”

  “Sidney was a weak boy,” said Mrs. Giblet, with some contempt. “He needed a firm hand.”

  “A firm hand!” cried Cleo. “You call what you did to him a firm hand?”

  “Perhaps,” snapped the old woman, “a firm hand would have done you some good, young lady.”

  “You bloody old witch!” screamed Cleo, and flailed at her in that clumsy way that women have when they try to punch each other, all stiff-armed swings. Harriet screamed and leaped to her feet, and as she tried to pull Cleo away from the old woman a teacup fell off the table and smashed to pieces on the floor. For several moments there was a chaos of flailing arms and wild shrieks until at last there came a resounding smack! and Cleo stepped back, stunned, toward the fireplace, one hand to her cheek, and Harriet, aroused as I’d rarely seen her before, stood glaring at the girl in a positively Churchillian posture, and old Mrs. Giblet, with one gnarled claw upon her massive heaving bosom, and the other nervously touching her hair and face, as though to assure herself that no appendage had been torn off in the fracas, attempted to regain her composure.

  “Apologize, please, Cleo,” said Harriet, breathing heavily. Cleo, her anger suddenly dissipated, dropped her head in that mutely defiant manner she had recently adopted. Harriet advanced upon her. “Apologize,” she repeated, and there was a new tone in her voice, a tone of quietly dangerous authority. Cleo tried to brush past her, but Hairiet was having none of it. She gripped the girl by the wrists and told her, for the third time, to apologize. “You’re hurting me, Mummy,” wailed Cleo, not at all the plucky girl she’d once been. But Harriet’s dander was up, and she did not let go until at last Cleo turned to the old woman and mumbled: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Giblet.”

  The old woman had by this time regained her composure somewhat. She reared in her armchair, claws once more wrapped about her stick, head lifted, wattles awobble, and shot a glance of sheer majestic outrage at the defeated girl. “You will never, ever lay a finger on me again, young woman,” she declared. “Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” mumbled Cleo.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Yes,” said Cleo.

  “Very well then,” said Mrs. Giblet, settling herself. “I accept your apology.”

  “Sit down please, Cleo,” said Harriet firmly, “and we shall have tea. Mrs. Fledge?” How long, I wondered, had Doris been in the room? Had she witnessed the entire squalid incident? “Mrs. Fledge, clear these things away, please, and bring us fresh tea. Now, Mrs. Giblet, where were we?”

  But the old hag wasn’t going to risk slandering me any further, that was clear. “I have requested permission to visit George Lecky in prison,” she said, “and I am seeing my M.P. next week. I wonder if there’s anything else that occurs to you, Lady Coal?”

  But there wasn’t.

  ❖

  When Mrs. Giblet had left—she’d taken a room at the Hodge and Purlet again, and would not be persuaded to stay at Crook, hardly surprising, really, after being attacked by Cleo—when she’d left, Harriet came back to the drawing room and sat down opposite Cleo. “Darling,” she said, very seriously, “that was dreadful. It was outrageous. I don’t think I’ve ever been so embarrassed. Whatever came over you?”

  Cleo had resumed her drawing-room manner—the sunken head, the sulky silence. “Cleo!” said Harriet sharply. “Answer me!” Then up came the girl’s head, and fire flashed from her wild and tear-streaked eyes. “Didn’t you hear her, Mummy? Didn’t you hear what she said about Daddy?”

  “Of course I did, darling,” said Harriet, in slightly softer tones. “But she’s only trying to help, you must understand that.”

  “Help? Calling Daddy a murderer? That’s help?”

  “She didn’t call Daddy a murderer. Oh, I know, darling”— slowly the power was seeping out of her; Harriet was only truly potent when the proprieties were being flouted—“I do understand your point of view, but nothing justifies behavior like that, nothing.”

  “Mummy, how can you say that? She said Daddy was involved in Sidney’s murder, and you sit by and do nothing, and all the time Daddy’s sitting here, listening, and unable to defend himself.”

  “Daddy doesn’t know what’s going on, darling,” said Harriet quietly. “And I’m sure Mrs. Giblet didn’t mean to suggest that he had anything to do with what happened to Sidney.”

  “Of course she did! That’s precisely what she meant! And anyway, Daddy does know what’s going on. He understands everything.”

  “Cleo, dear”—a sharp note, here—“the doctors were quite clear about this. Hugo is not aware of what is happening around him.”

  “But he is, I tell you!”

  “Darling, he’s not. We’ve had the best neurologists in the country do extensive testing, and they’re absolutely certain about this: Hugo is massively brain-damaged; he has no real consciousness of the world. He cannot think.”

  “He can.”

  “Cleo, you’re making me angry. Do you suppose it was easy for me to accept? Do you think I didn’t hold out every hope? Darling, I hate to have to tell you all over again, but these are the facts—Daddy’s not able to think.”

  “He is.”

  “You’re being silly, Cleo. You’re imagining things. Why do you say this?”

  “I just know.”

  “But how, darling?”

  “I can tell by his eyes.”

  “Oh dear.” Harriet sighed.

  “And sometimes he cries.”

  “I daresay he does, darling, but crying doesn’t mean anything. Daddy cried in hospital; it’s an autonomous reaction, the doctors said—it’s a cleansing process.”

  “I don’t care. I know he knows everything that’s happening.”

  “I don’t wish to discuss this with you any further. These are fantasies, darling. I know you love Daddy, but you must accept what’s happened. I’ve had to, and God knows it’s not been easy for me, either. Now would you please go and help Mrs. Fledge in the kitchen.”

  Cleo slowly got to her feet and left the room, casting one long, warm glance in my direction. “See you later, Daddy,” she said. When the door had closed behind her Harriet sighed deeply and did something she did very rarely: she took a cigarette from the box on the mantelpiece and smoked it by the window, gazing out at the pond in front of the house. From time to time I could feel her looking over at me in a faintly quizzical manner; then, after tossing the butt in the fireplace, she left the room, and I was alone. But her words seemed to echo in my skull, and as I sat there staring at the chimneypiece, at the coat-of-arms and the
motto, I could hear her insisting, on best authority, that I was unable to think. If I couldn’t think, what then is all this? A figment of Cleo’s imagination?

  The next morning there came another shock. I had not as yet had an opportunity to assimilate the events of the afternoon— and there was much to assimilate, with regard not only to George, but also to myself. For though there was no logical reason why Harriet’s insistence upon my inability to think should disturb me —it’s self-evident, after all, that I can—yet all the same I was shaken by it, shaken to the core. As though my identity were merely a reflection, or construct, of the opinion of others. I found myself reeling, very much on the defensive, forced to assert my own self to myself and thus confirm that I was, still, in effect, viable. Can you understand that? It was, then, in this very shaky state, this state of ontological instability, so to speak, that I was forced to cope with the implications of both Mrs. Giblet’s visit and an attempted metamorphosis on the part of Fledge.

  Yes, a metamorphosis. For, apparently with Harriet’s consent (perhaps, it now occurs to me, at her instigation?) he had relinquished his morning suit, traditional uniform of the butler, and adopted, instead, a tweed jacket and twill trousers. He had gone up to London in propria persona, a butler, and returned disguised as a gentleman. I’m afraid I got these two events—the Giblet visit and Fledge’s new clothes—rather muddled, and lost track of causation, agency, and empirical precision.

  Probably I should begin by describing in closer detail what the man looked like when I saw him in the kitchen that morning. The jacket was, as I say, tweed, and not unlike my own. That is, it was slightly hairy, greenish-brown in color, with a fine herringbone pattern, leather patches on the elbows, and leather edgings on the cuffs. With wide lapels and square shoulders, it tapered to the waist then flared over the hips, and had two vents at the back. The buttons were leather-covered, and there were flaps on the pockets. The trousers were of a beige cavalry twill, sharply creased and with turnups that broke nicely on the insteps of a pair of highly polished, squeaky brown brogues. A well-tailored sports shirt with a quiet check, and a dark brown tie with a narrow yellow diagonal stripe; and thus Fledge, sleek and elegant, as he entered the kitchen for Harriet’s breakfast tray. He was, as I say, pretending to be a gentleman; and it took a gentleman’s nose, like mine, to detect the imposture.