The Grotesque

by McGrath, Patrick

  “It’s not true, damn you!” shouted George, incapable of further restraint. He leaned over the rail, banging his fist on the paneling of the box. “I didn’t kill him, I tell you!”

  Down came Mr. Justice Congreve’s gavel. “Order!” cried the old man as a hubbub of excited chatter broke from the public gallery and drowned out George’s shouts. “Order!” And then, at a nod from on high, the two warders clamped George’s arms to his side and hauled him, still shouting, out of the courtroom and down to a cell below. Mr. Stoker, who had of course set out to provoke just such an outburst, wiped his brow with a snowy handerkerchief and then sat down, glancing, as he did so, with one uplifted eyebrow, at Sir Fleckley; and Sir Fleckley made a wry moue at his colleague. The story appeared under the banner headline: CECK MONSTER DRAGGED FROM COURT: BLACK LECKY LOSES CONTROL.

  ❖

  But if that was bad, there was worse to come. For when, the next morning, Humphrey Stoker got George back on the stand, he elicited from him the shocking information that after feeding Sidney to the pigs, he’d then slaughtered those same pigs, butchered them, and sent the meat to Crook!

  Cleo began to giggle hysterically, and Doris turned white; and I quickly realized that all autumn and winter we had been eating meat from Ceck’s Bottom. And it was not only the Coals who were implicated. The local gentry had hungrily devoured sausages and ham sandwiches during Harriet’s Christmas party. Patrick Pin and the Catholics had been in Crook on Christmas morning, drinking my sherry and eating ham sandwiches. The Horns had eaten ham with us on New Year’s Eve, and so had Mrs. Giblet. We had all, indirectly, and unknowingly, eaten Sidney.

  And then I thought of the satyrs of Ceck, sitting in George’s kitchen on Christmas night with their bottles of brown ale and their roast haunch of pork; and it suddenly occurred to me to wonder, as I remembered their gusts of coarse rustic mirth, if they, unlike the rest of us, had known. It’s a question that perplexes me still; but I rather think so.

  I have been experiencing painful twinges from the region of my ticker. I have sclerotic coronary arteries, did I mention that? A bad heart; a faulty pump. Also, certain of my facial muscles have been pulled back and clamped tight in a rather ghastly grimace, a fierce, involuntary grin that never leaves my features now, regardless of what I am feeling. Often in the alcove I weep and grin simultaneously. My breathing is stertorous all the time, so I’m an unpleasant piece of work, all told, and I’m not surprised that Fledge turned my wheelchair to the wall that day, though of course there was a great deal more to the man’s action than that.

  But the rainy days of March and April were behind us now, and the weather was warm enough that I could be put out in the back yard for hours at a time. There I would sit, listening to the birds sing (those little dinosaurs!), and grinning at the gate in the old brick wall on the far side. At other times I sat on the terrace just outside the French windows and bestowed my smiling bounty on the little jungle that the flower garden had become. I saw George down there once, by the pond. That day the garden was a riot of color, and so was I. A garland of oak leaves encircled my skull, and peeping through it was a pair of little white horns with blunt tips. My forehead had fallen, my eyes slanted upwards, and my brows came sweeping together at the root of my nose like a pair of hairy handlebars. My mouth was frozen in a broad, lascivious grin. George was on his knees among the flowers, and when he saw me he rose to his feet and stood with a weeding trowel in one hand and the other shading his eyes from the sun, which blazed down upon him from a cloudless blue sky and reminded me of the days he’d gazed up the hill in Africa at me, before setting off for the coast. The sun was strong, and he seemed to shimmer, just as his reflection in the black pond water would shimmer when a goldfish rose to the surface for a bot-fly. He was wearing his collarless blue policeman’s shirt and his old brown corduroys, but not his boots, I noticed, because his feet were cloven now, he was a hoofed man, and a fringe of coarse hair licked in thick bristly hanks over his goatish ankles. Phantom, of course, projection of a crumbling mind; also I was bareheaded, exposed to the sun, for Doris had forgotten my hat.

  Another time I saw Fledge in the garden, and I saw him die. He was lying naked in the grass. I’ve told you what Fledge looks like naked: he is long and thin with a very slight plumping of the flesh on his chest and belly. He is very white, and a narrow line of reddish hair runs down his body from a point midway between those plump chests of his, all the way to his pubic hair. Cleo, all in black, was crawling toward him through the grass. She had a knife between her teeth. The sun was directly overhead, and shining so brilliantly that the blade was like a bar of molten silver. Cleo reared up on her knees and drove the shining knife into Fledge’s heart. His body arched up as a great glob of blood and other body fluids exploded from his mouth. For a few moments his arched body shuddered in convulsion over the grass, and his mouth fell open; his eyes stared up at the sun. Then he subsided onto the earth with a long gasp. Another time, just as Cleo lifted the knife, he suddenly sat up and seized her wrists, and the pair of them began to struggle violently on their knees, then keeled over and writhed together in the grass. Events like these, if I can call them events, disturbed me greatly, for while I knew they were entirely illusory, at the same time they appeared quite real; they felt real. But they were hallucinations, merely, symptomatic of the sort of slippage, or dislocation, to which my mind was increasingly subject in the late spring.

  But it was mostly George I saw down there. I would sit at the French windows and watch the fine spring rain come drifting like gauze upon the flower garden, where the untended weeds were crowding the blooms of the bulbs he’d planted in the autumn. The shrubs and the hedges spilled in an unruly manner onto the paths and flower beds, and their greenness had a peculiarly vivid quality to it, in that misty rain, a sort of viridescent effulgence that struck me as oddly and wildly beautiful. The smell of the garden rose to my nostrils, the damp, rich smell of vegetation luxuriating in its own unchecked profusion, and as I gazed out over this hazy jungle, over the lily pond, which was spotted and circled with the gentle, unceasing rain, I grinned at the phantom of my imprisoned comrade toiling in the earth.

  ❖

  His trial only lasted five days, and Harriet stayed in London throughout, for she was to be called as a witness for the defense, a character witness. That’s how weak George’s case was: there was only the circumstantiality argument, and the testimony of Lady Coal. And even that backfired, for after Sir Fleckley had elicited from Harriet the opinion that George was trustworthy, decent, and incapable of violence, Humphrey Stoker rose to his feet and, examining his fingernails in an offhand manner, casually asked Harriet what precisely was the nature of her relationship with the accused man.

  “He is my gardener,” said Harriet.

  “And what does this entail, Lady Coal?” said Stoker, removing his spectacles and absently polishing them on the hem of his robe.

  “Well, the usual things,” said Harriet. “I tell him what we need in the way of flowers and vegetables and so on, and he lets me know if, oh, if we must have a new wheelbarrow or whatever. Things to do with the garden.”

  “I see,” said Stoker, and his voice was now dripping irony. “This is the nature of your relationship with the accused, Lady Coal: he lets you know if you must have a new wheelbarrow.”

  “Objection,” said Sir Fleckley, wearily, rising to his feet. “Overruled,” said Mr. Justice Congreve.

  “No more questions, my lord,” said Stoker, and sat down. Harriet looked for a moment as though she would burst into tears, aware that she’d been made a fool of at George’s expense.

  I remember that that night, after dinner, Doris drank a bottle of bordeaux. I watched the wine go gurgling into her glass, a big, stout-stemmed, widemouthed wineglass. She shuffled over to the back door, I remember, and threw it open, and I sat there watching her as she gazed out into the twilit yard, and the birds twittered their evening chorus from the trees over by the barn. She leaned her
back against the doorframe, so that I had her profile, in silhouette: she was tall, tall and thin, with a long pointed nose and a receding chin, and her hair was scraped to a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Still outlined sharply against the last light, she raised the glass to her lips and drank. The long, bobbing throat, the slightly concave spine, feet flat on the step and one long hand hanging limp at her side—her body seemed to surrender utterly to the tilted wineglass. She emptied it, then stood a few minutes more, head still thrown back against the doorframe, as the sounds and smells of dusk came drifting in; then she turned her head toward me and heaved a deep sigh. “Ah, Sir Hugo,” she murmured, “we’ve lost him.” I sat there grinning at her, and thinking: you’re right, you’re right.

  ❖

  Harriet was staying with the Horns, of course, and there were glum faces in that house the night of the fourth day. The next morning the barristers would present their closing arguments, the judge would sum up, and the jury would retire. Victor had followed the case closely in the newspapers, and he was very upset. Or so I imagine. For he liked George Lecky, the pair of them had often talked in the garden of Crook about football, and Africa, and dinosaurs, and the war, and I knew that George, for his part, always took a strong, quiet pleasure, as he went about his work, pipe between his teeth, in the boy’s eager questions and lively mind. Even as a very small child Victor had been a friend of George’s, and I can remember an afternoon one autumn when, from my bedroom window in the east wing, I’d watched George pushing a wheelbarrow of dead leaves across the back yard, with Victor, aged six, perched fatly atop the load, bouncing up and down and shouting with glee, and clutching George’s three-pronged fork like a little god of the sea, an infant Poseidon being borne home across the waves in his chariot. Victor knew that George was incapable of killing anybody; why then did the newspapers say he’d done it?

  “Because,” said his father, “some newspapers always try to make things worse than they really are. They sell more copies that way.”

  “Well, if people know that,” said Victor, “they won’t pay any attention, and Mr. Lecky will be acquitted.”

  “I wish that were true,” said Henry.

  And so the last day began. Humphrey Stoker first reviewed the evidence, and demonstrated how deeply it incriminated George. Having made his arguments in a relatively rational tone, he then became histrionic. With some passion he told the jury that a monster capable of such inhuman brutality toward a young man with everything to live for—a young man, he stressed, on the brink of a promising literary career—such a monster deserved the most extreme penalty the law could exact. He for one, he said, would not sleep soundly in his bed until he knew that George Lecky would never walk the land again. He implored the jury neither to flinch nor falter from their duty; and their duty, their terrible duty, he said quietly, he believed, with humility, he had established: they must reach a verdict of guilty, guilty of murder in the first degree. Then he sat down.

  Then Sir Fleckley stood up. His learned friend, he said, was perfectly correct. “If you find,” he said, “beyond a reasonable doubt that George Lecky murdered Sidney Giblet, then your verdict must indeed be one of guilty. But I wonder, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, whether we cannot say that here, surely, reasonable doubt exists?” He then, at length, and in detail, elaborated upon the circumstantial nature of the evidence, admitting that George had erred, and erred badly, in not reporting the body to the authorities; but that error, he reiterated, was not the same thing as capital murder. And if they had any doubt, any doubt at all, as he was sure they must have, then they must bring in a verdict of not guilty. In his summing up, Mr. Justice Congreve made a similar point; his instructions to the jury in fact revolved around this very point, for none of the evidence had been contested. With watery eyes and quavery voice the little old man then sent them off to deliberate, and the court adjourned.

  It took them forty-three minutes to reach their verdict, and a tense forty-three minutes it was. For so eloquent had been Sir Fleckley’s closing address, and so emphatically had the judge supported his circumstantiality argument, that fresh hope had sprung up in Harriet’s and Hilary’s hearts. Mrs. Giblet joined them in the small chamber Sir Fleckley had put at their disposal, adjacent to his own; and for forty-three minutes the three women waited there in an agony of suspense. Sir Fleckley suddenly appeared through the door connecting to his own chambers, the skirts of his robe swirling about his pin-striped trousers. “They’re back,” he said.

  ❖

  “Guilty of murder in the first degree,” said the foreman, and George opened his mouth, drew back his lips, clamped his great teeth together then pressed a hand to his eyes. Yes, he answered Mr. Justice Congreve, he did have something to say before sentence was passed: he was innocent, he had told the truth; and if he died for his crime, he died unjustly. That was all. Harriet and Hilary were not the only ones in the courtroom whose cheeks were damp with tears. Mr. Justice Congreve very slowly donned his white gloves and black cap. His baggy throat, his small, wobbling, wizened head: they seemed such tiny, fragile shreds of flesh to be bearing the weighty majesty of those red robes, that glorious wig with the black cap fitted to the crown. His voice was the voice of an old, old man, unspeakably tired and yearning for death.

  “George Kitchener Lecky, you have been found guilty of a terrible crime. The sentence of the court upon you is, that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution, and that you there be hanged by the neck until you be dead; and that your body be afterwards buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall have been confined before your execution. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

  “Amen,” said the chaplain of the court, who stood behind the judge and to his left.

  The long grim shadow of the gallows stretched all the way to Crook, and in the days that followed an eerie stillness settled on the house. Mrs. Giblet was often on the telephone to Harriet, and I understood from conversations in the drawing room that the only hope now was an appeal for clemency that had been put before the Home Secretary. And that was all George had to clutch at as he languished, hollow-eyed and black of heart, in his lonely cell at the core of one of the oldest of England’s great prisons. And as I say, we all felt it, at Crook, we all felt the crushing weight of the death sentence. Even Fledge betrayed emotion, on at least one occasion, when dealing with Doris in the kitchen after dinner. It was a mark of the intense strain he was feeling, for as I’ve indicated, the expression of emotion was anathema to the man. Not passion, I hasten to add, not the expression of passion. Passion he could express, and did, nightly, and this I imagine helped to divert Harriet from brooding constantly on George’s fate. In fact, the routine established in the weeks after my accident was soon in place once more. Doris weaved off to bed well before midnight, having sometimes got me down before passing out herself. After this Fledge would take a turn round the grounds, then lock up, and noiselessly ascend the back stairs with a candle.

  Harriet and Fledge were by this time at a point in their relationship where, despite the tensions endemic to their situation, they were subject to an almost uncontrollable physical longing for one another. The touch of a hand, a stray glance, a certain tone of voice —and I would be left alone in the drawing room as the pair slipped out, headed, I have no doubt, either for Fledge’s pantry or Harriet’s bedroom. I believe he even took her in the dining room once, right after dinner, on the floor, heedless that Doris might enter. Harriet, you see, having finally abandoned all moral and religious scruples, had quickly come to adore the sight of Fledge’s fine penis rising stiff and faintly throbbing from that soft fleece of red-brown pubic hair. Herself damp, her upper thighs already smeared with fluid secretions indicative of deep arousal, she would lift her plump-fingered hands to loosen the great coils of copper-colored hair that lay heavily piled atop her skull. She would gaze at the man with immense, inhuman hunger, and then, at last—sweet consummation!—she reached o
ut for him, drew him into her arms, and covered his pale body with her kisses.

  Afterwards there would be a spell of languid torpor, and then —oh, how well I knew my Harriet!—her brow would darken as her thoughts fled from the butler in her bed to the gardener in his distant cell. So it was that in the very bower of love arose the specter of death.

  ❖

  George’s date of execution was set for May 24, roughly three weeks from sentencing. Having been probed, analyzed, and defined by the police, by the lawyers, by the jury of his peers, and even by the psychiatric community, George was now exclusively the property of the worst sort of newspapers and their public. They called him a brute, a maniac, and a monster. Like a screen he was illuminated by their lurid projections. Cleo read me the stories, and my heart wept for my old African comrade. Nor was it only the press that maintained a relentless scrutiny of the man: in his prison cell George was the object of dozens of pairs of custodial eyes. I, too, saw him, I saw him in my mind’s eye, one afternoon in the middle of May. He was sitting on the edge of a low concrete bunk, his elbows on his knees, his long jaw cradled in his palms and his fingertips laid upon his eyelids.

  “Lecky.”

  George is in ill-fitting prison clothes with a number stenciled across the pocket of the shirt. He pulls his fingers down his cheeks, briefly stretching the skin from his eye sockets. Sunlight streams through the barred window and falls in slats across the cell floor, and stripes the hunched form of the man on the bunk. A pair of flies goes endlessly round and round just beneath the ceiling. Slowly straightening his back and laying his palms flat on his knees, George turns to the door and, lit from behind, his face is dark with shadow. From out of this darkness comes a hollow sound, barely recognizable as the once-gruff voice of George Lecky.