The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  I mentioned earlier that Fledge had an indefinable quality to him, a facet, I suggested, of his guarded and secretive nature. I said that he could be “anything,” and that only the presence of Doris at his side served to situate and define the man. I was wrong. Watching him organizing Harriet’s breakfast tray I realized that Fledge was no chameleon, a change of costume did not transform him, as he so clearly intended it to, into a gentleman. Something essential was lacking, a certain facial creasing, I think, that would denote affable skepticism and the expectation of deference—for such things show in a gentleman’s face. Fledge looked like a steward, or a bailiff, one who almost straddles the chasm, but not quite. An interstitial man. An in-between man. He did not look ridiculous, but he did look indeterminate, as though he did not know his place.

  Pondering the new Fledge I constructed a hypothesis. I imagined how, as he dressed himself each morning, in Harriet’s bedroom, in the gloom of dawn, he must have resented assuming the garb of servility that the morning suit represented. For in Harriet’s bed (from which he would have just arisen) a place of grace was available to him; in Harriet’s bed he was an essential sexual man, whereas the moment he donned that morning suit he became once more the servant; this, clearly, was what lay behind the sudden, drastic transformation. Transformation I say; to me, then, it was experienced as a transgression, as a gross disturbance in the order of things, and this sense of disorder somehow fed into the turmoil I was experiencing as a result of Mrs. Giblet’s visit, and intensified to the point of volcanic snorting my rage that George’s dire predicament, my own increasingly wobbly grasp of things— the entire constellation of disturbances, in short—had their source and origin in the silent, ruthless, and violent ambition of this vulpine intruder. I was convulsed with mute fury and had to have my back thumped hard.

  It rained all day—we had much rain at around this time—and the atmosphere in the kitchen was dark and subdued. Nobody mentioned Fledge’s new clothes. Cleo looked awful; she had great black rings around her eyes, and I was sure she had not slept at all. Poor child, her coming so spiritedly to my defense, and then what she had suffered at the hands of the two older women—all this had clearly sapped her strength. I can’t begin to say how touched I was that she would stand up for me so staunchly, my brave little elf; like George she had a core of integrity that was unshakeable and incorruptible; like him she maintained toward me a fierce protective loyalty now that I could no longer fight my own battles. After lunch, when Doris had finished washing the dishes and gone upstairs to “do out” Harriet’s bedroom, the girl sat beside me at the kitchen table and began to speak. It was not immediately clear to me what, or rather who, she was talking about; she spoke of his being “very angry” with her; and though she did not use his name, I realized after a moment or two that she was referring to Sidney. I then understood why she thought he was angry with her—it was because she had used his name yesterday. This, apparently, was forbidden.

  Poor, dear, haunted Cleo. She was so desperately alone, and I could only sit there, staring straight ahead, stiff as a plank of wood, and grinning. The rain came drizzling down into the back yard, drizzling down from a leaden sky in which the clouds hung oppressively low and heavy. She sat beside me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and the tears rolled down her face as she mumbled on about Sidney, who was no longer, it seems, the pale and faintly sweet-smelling ghoulish creature she had conjured in a fit of hysterical weeping that night in February. His features were unrecognizable now, she said, owing to the copious discharge of a yellowy, viscous substance that oozed from his flesh. His eyes and ears and mouth were crawling with worms, she said. These were appalling nightmares for the child to experience, and I grew very angry with Harriet, that in her infatuation with Fledge she could permit her daughter to suffer like this, and I’m afraid I began to snort yet again. This at least served to rouse Cleo from her morbid and incoherent mumblings; she had to get up and pound me on the back, as she’d seen Doris doing on more than one occasion, until I could breathe properly once more.

  A little later Doris herself came back downstairs and began to prepare tea, and Cleo relapsed into silence. When Fledge came in for the tray I noticed that three cups and saucers, and three plates, had been set out upon it. Were we to have visitors again? Was old Giblet coming back for more? As he picked up the tray, Fledge murmured to his wife that I was to be brought down to the drawing room. Cleo rose wearily from the kitchen table—she had been sitting there since after lunch—and followed him down the hallway. I came rumbling along in the rear, pushed by Doris, and in the gloom of that damp and miserable afternoon I could see, up front, the steam that issued from the spout of the teapot as it drifted up to the ceiling in little wispy puffs. There was a fire burning in the drawing room, and I was placed in my usual position, against the wall directly opposite. Cleo sank into her usual armchair, and Harriet sat at the tea table, as she always did, and poured. I was still puzzled as to who would get the third cup. I was not kept in suspense for very long; after Cleo had been given hers, Fledge took a cup and, having stirred in two spoons of sugar, sat down opposite Harriet and began to make conversation to her in low, inaudible tones. Cleo took in this development with barely a glance; for me, however, it demonstrated with shocking clarity just how absurd the entire situation was becoming. What sort of a house was this, that a homicidal butler who no longer wore his morning suit should sit down and drink tea with the mistress?

  ❖

  The weather continued miserably damp. Though I saw the man every day, I could not accustom myself to Fledge’s new clothes, nor to his new role in Crook, which I found impossible to define. In some respects he still behaved as a servant, in others as some sort of a house guest. And though I no longer ate in the dining room, I came to suspect that he now occupied my chair at the head of the table during lunch and dinner.

  Harriet was clearly happy with the new arrangements. In the evening she would drink a glass of brandy with him in the drawing room, and offer him one of my cigars. She herself was smoking several cigarettes a day at this time. I can see it now so clearly, and what a cloying little drama they always made of it. Harriet would take a cigarette from the proffered box, then sit forward on the edge of her armchair, frowning, the cigarette between her slightly trembling fingers, as the tall sleek man in the herringbone tweed jacket bent stiffly forward from the waist with his thumb deflecting the cap of the lighter; a slender flame sprang up like a tiny golden spearhead, and Harriet’s eyes would flicker upwards to his. (The pair of them are framed against the fireplace for this touching little tableau.) She prolongs the operation for an instant longer than is strictly necessary; then, inexpertly expelling a lungful of smoke, she murmurs: “Thank you, Fledge,” and sits back in her armchair, picking up her brandy glass and swirling its contents about in a manner entirely unfamiliar to me.

  ❖

  Did I mention how dearly I should have liked to go out to the barn and commune for a while with Phlegmosaurus? I missed the old scoundrel, frankly, and often wondered how he was. Well, one afternoon during this period Cleo apparently read my mind, for quite spontaneously she suggested to Doris that they do that very thing—that is, that the pair of them take me out to the barn. “Just for a little outing,” said Cleo. “I’m sure he misses his bones, aren’t you, Mrs. Fledge?”

  It was raining again. Harriet had driven into Ceck, and Fledge was off somewhere by himself, probably in his pantry. There was thus nobody present to prohibit the expedition. Cleo procured raincoats and umbrellas, while Doris tucked me up warmly in the wheelchair. Fortunately there was a key to the barn hanging on a nail in the back kitchen.

  We went out through the back door and across the yard to the gate that gave onto the driveway. Doris was pushing the wheelchair and Cleo was holding the umbrella. We bumped and scrunched across the gravel, in the rain, and Cleo kept up a cheery stream of chatter. It was months since I had seen the barn, and gazing at it now, as Cleo fiddled with the padlock, I fe
lt a tremor of anxiety as to what I would find within. The door swung open, the wheelchair lurched over the threshold, and for the moment or two that Cleo hunted for the switch I beheld the familiar looming form, and felt the familiar surge of pride and awe, despite the stink of rotten hay and damp sacking that choked the barn. But then the lights flickered to life overhead, and I was able to see the toll the elements had taken in my absence. It was as I had feared; my dinosaur was overrun with fungus.

  Damp was the problem. Nobody had thought to cover the bones, and the rain had been dripping through the roof for weeks. Everywhere the greenish mold endemic to this part of the county was in evidence. It clustered in spongy masses in the hollows of the bones, and licked outward in thin, blotchy fingers, and dripped from the jaws, and the long-clawed fingers, and the pelvis of the beast, in delicate lacy clumps. I was shocked at how quickly and how extensively Phlegmosaurus had been infested, and it was not difficult to imagine what a few more months of dampness and darkness would do to him: transform him into a huge living hulk of mold, the bones within merely the frame or scaffold of a voracious fungus. It depressed me acutely to observe all this, and I sat there in a state of bitter mortification as Cleo, apparently fascinated, wandered around the thing. I was happy when Doris suggested we go back to the house lest I catch cold.

  ❖

  I presume it was the sight of Phlegmosaurus overgrown with fungus that provoked the dream I had that night, in which I discovered to my horror that my wheelchair was an excrescence of the living boards of Crook, and that I was its sentient blossom, that I was growing into my wheelchair, merging with it and in the process turning into a sort of giant plant. Hindered though I was from investigating my own extremities I knew somehow that green, leafy extrusions were sprouting from my back and my arse and my arms and legs and feet, and these extrusions, these sprouts and tendrils, had fused with the wood and the basketwork of the wheelchair, and had begun to crawl across the floorboards and clutch at table legs and doorknobs and electrical wires, and I knew they would in time colonize the entire structure, and bring it down; I would then merge organically with Crook and we would rot together on that high hill overlooking the valley of the Fling. God alone knows what monstrosity would sprout from our composting remains.

  Breakdown and decay were much on my mind, during those rainy days of late April. It occurs to me, in retrospect, that perhaps I was merely finding echoes in the outside world for that which I intuitively understood to be happening within my own body. Perhaps there’s a limit, a threshold, to what a man can take when his relation to the world is one of pure passivity. Perhaps the world begins slowly to overwhelm him, if he is without the power to react to it. Is this feasible? I’ve told you about Harriet’s assault, her insistence on my inability to think, and how it weakened me. Inasmuch as George, and Cleo, and Doris, and Phlegmosaurus were all dear to me, their respective breakdowns also weakened me, for I was acutely conscious of my inability to intervene in any way— watching things fall apart takes its toll, I discovered; one tends to fall apart oneself. When, a few days later, George’s trial began, I was not even equipped to provide him, at a distance, with the spiritual support he so desperately needed. I seemed able to muster only a sort of helpless, hopeless resignation as I saw how things would go with him. (Even in the kitchen of Crook the case was discussed, and in this way I was able to keep abreast of developments.) I did at least retain my imaginative faculties, and attempted to generate some idea of what the poor man was going through; whether it did him, or me, any good that I did this, I very much doubt.

  Yes, it was of George that I was mostly thinking, as we emerged from that dismal rainy period and into springtime proper. I was imprisoned myself, locked away in a cage of bones, and so my sympathy for George in his prison of bricks and steel was rendered all the more poignant. That silent good man had been a sort of right arm to me ever since our first encounter in a sweltering and fetid little fly-infested, tin-roofed bar on the east coast of Africa, and for this reason I was now, despite my catalepsy, profoundly implicated in whatever fate should befall him.

  I saw him in the dock. He stood between a pair of grim-faced, black-clad prison warders, meshing his eyebrows in fierce concentration as he gathered his depleted moral resources for the coming ordeal. Below him, in the well of the court, eminent counsel in tight-curled wigs of an unnatural whiteness murmured one to another, while over to his left was the witness stand, and beyond it the jury. Directly opposite him, and similarly elevated, sat the judge, Mr. Justice Congreve, an old man, and in my mind’s eye I saw him survey his courtroom from bleary, tired eyes, as his bony fingers clutched the gavel then thumped it three times for order. When his moment came George stepped up to the rail of the dock and barked out in a deep, gruff, defiant voice: “Not guilty.” He did not make a good impression at all. Mr. Justice Congreve had seen enough men in the dock to know at a glance that this one was going to swing.

  Why do I say that? Why, even then, was I so certain that George was doomed? Perhaps because I was doomed myself, and could not help yoking his fate to mine. Bear with me, please, but those occasions when I was able to observe the events occurring around me with any vestige of objectivity were growing increasingly rare. In fact, I began to find that the only events that I could record with any real precision were not those that happened outside myself but, rather, the operations that my own mind performed upon the fragmentary stimuli that now constituted reality for me. And one of the most pernicious of these operations was the tendency to, as it were, cast nets of my own thought outward onto those close to me, and see them not as separate and distinct from myself but rather as extensions or manifestations of elements of my own mind. George, in other words, was becoming a bit of me, inasmuch as I was now able only to imagine his experience, and had only the most fragmentary means of testing my projections against reality. The same was true of Cleo and Doris, to a lesser extent. Oddly enough, the only ones I could see at all clearly were Harriet and Fledge.

  Forgive me if I’m being tendentious. I do feel, though, that in the interests of candor I should warn you of the distortions to which the passive and isolated mind is prone; you will perhaps take this into account, should I slip unwittingly into anomalous or contradictory positions. George was in the witness box—and this I am not inventing, but paraphrasing from the Daily Express—standing stiff as a ramrod, his hands gripping the rail so fiercely that the knuckles whitened to livid bony knobs. He had been called as first witness for the defense; Sir Fleckley Tome, prevented by the accused man from making a plea of insanity, was forced to argue that all the evidence was circumstantial. The entire courtroom listened attentively as he gently and carefully drew out George’s version of what happened out on the Ceck Marsh that night, and so mellifluous, so utterly reasonable was the flow of the discourse Sir Fleckley produced that one could begin to feel the jury succumb, and this I imagine is an exhilarating feeling for a trial lawyer, though Sir Fleckley was, of course, far too experienced to express pleasure in his own rhetoric. So it was, then, that George, in the collective gaze of that packed courtroom, was gradually transformed from a monster in human form to a simple, decent man of the soil, a man who’d made a foolish blunder in failing to report the finding of Sidney’s body—but a foolish blunder, Sir Fleckley implied, was by no means the same thing as capital murder. George Lecky was a foolish man, a wrong-headed man, but he was not a killer. And then he sat down.

  As I say, I’m translating this from that appalling species of “prose” that organs like the Daily Express perpetrate upon their gullible and vulgar public. In any event, the apprehension I mentioned earlier (whatever its origins) that George was bound to swing, was to some extent dissipated by the account Cleo read me of that first morning’s session. The afternoon, however, utterly dashed those hopes. For counsel for the prosecution, an energetic barrister called Humphrey Stoker cross-examined George so vigorously that he totally destroyed any faint aureole of innocence that might have begun to sh
immer about him. Why, he wanted to know, had George failed to report finding a body out on the marsh? With withering scorn he lacerated George’s somewhat inarticulate explanation, held it up to ridicule, implied that George was a liar, and then set about exploiting the pig-related aspect of the affair; and soon poor George was bathed once more in a lurid and terrible glow. Time and again a thrill of horror rippled around the courtroom as Mr. Stoker enlarged upon the events of that night—several women turned pale and had to leave the courtroom—and though Sir Fleckley repeatedly rose to his feet with objections to his learned friend’s questions, Mr. Justice Congreve consistently overruled him.

  George grew increasingly tense, and his warders sensed it. “Take it easy, George,” they murmured, but this was not a situation that George could take easily, not at all.

  “I suggest to you,” cried Mr. Stoker, who had worked himself into a fine lather of indignation, “that from some primitive motive hard for civilized men and women to understand, you plotted the killing of an innocent young man, and then you carried out your inhuman plan, and then you cold-bloodedly disposed of his body in the manner you yourself have described!”