The Grotesque (15 page)

I
am sitting
not
in my grotto under the stairs as I tell you this, but in the kitchen, with Doris and Cleo, having my fingernails clipped. It is mid-April, and I have been back from the hospital for more than a month. I spend most of my time in the kitchen now; Cleo is still far from well, but at least she’s not brooding in the east wing anymore; she, too, now spends her days hanging round the kitchen, and thus a sort of splitting has occurred in Crook, a sort of crisp demarcation between the front of the house and the back, with Harriet and Fledge at one end and Doris and Cleo at the other, and myself as a neutral term that goes wheeling back and forth between the two like a tennis ball. So I sit here enjoying the sunshine, and the attention of Doris and Cleo, and try to construct for you as full and coherent an account as I can of
how things got this way.
You must forgive me if I appear at times to contradict myself, or in other ways violate the natural order of the events I am disclosing; this business of selecting and organizing one’s memories so as to describe precisely
what happened
is a delicate, perilous undertaking, and I’m beginning to wonder whether it may not be beyond me. The scientific attitude to which I have for decades been faithful, with its strict notions of objectivity, etc., has come under heavy assault since the accident. Cracks have appeared, and from out of those cracks grin monstrous anomalies. I cannot subdue them. I have become superstitious. I am subject to “sightings.”

I suppose I shall have to describe the circumstances surrounding the accident sooner or later. Frankly, I would rather do it later; the whole incident still causes me intense embarrassment and pain, because Fledge, you see, was present when it occurred, he was instrumental, in fact, in causing it. I shall render a full account of all this in due course. Suffice for now that after I regained consciousness I went through a very morbid period indeed, for it is terrifying to will to move and remain inert, and it is terrifying to experience the sense of disorder this inertia produces. And although in time I began to negotiate some sort of commerce with objective reality, to
adapt,
during my first days in hospital I was afflicted by, of all things, a sense of failure. I would lie in the darkness, trapped in the dungeon of my own skull, which throbbed like a jackhammer, and I would strain with every fiber of my being just to lift the little finger of my right hand. I threw all my resources into lifting that pinky a tenth of an inch off the bedsheet. This would intensify my headache to the point that I expected my head quite literally to explode, but the damn pinky
would not move,
and after some minutes I would be seized, first, with the utmost sense of despair and futility, and then with shame at my own failure. This was in the early days, as I say, before I began actively to accept that I was
a man without a body.
Later of course I came to terms with my condition. This was not courage but instinct, pure instinct, the will to survive, and I share it with all living organisms. There was, though, this period when it seemed to me that if I never moved again it would be my own fault, because I had not tried hard enough. Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

Oh, but the back door is open, the birds are singing, and the sunshine of the afternoon is puddling warmly on the old gray stones. It is springtime now, and the damp days of that awful February are behind us. Cleo, I notice, is indulging a bizarre new hobby of hers, collecting nail clippings in a matchbox, and Doris, who is operating the scissors, pauses now and then to sip her sherry. A scene of pleasant domestic tranquillity, then, and frankly it’s hard for me to keep my mind on gnawed bones and dismembered corpses. “Now your toenails,” says Cleo, and the pair of them get down on their hands and knees to remove my shoes and socks. I derive enormous pleasure from this ritual, indeed from any situation in which I am physically touched, though feeling their fingers on my feet is ticklish, and I should giggle like a child if I were capable of it. “What smelly feet you’ve got, Daddy,” says Cleo. “Like a pair of old Cheddars, aren’t they, Mrs. Fledge?”

Doris is giving me her lopsided smile. Dear Doris, I would much rather think about her than about dead Sidney and his pig-gnawed bones. Doris for me is the source of life now. She feeds me. She washes me. She changes me, she dresses me. She coos and burbles over me like the fondest young mother. And I, devoid of any other physical contact with the world, have come to crave and adore the touch of her hands on my body, I have come to love everything about the woman, even the smell of drink on her breath and the intoxicated fumblings of the night. I cry sometimes when I am with Doris, when she handles me tenderly in the bathroom or the lavatory, but it never occurs to her, as it has to Cleo, that crying should be impossible for a vegetable. This is because she does not see me as others see me, in terms of my brain damage. I am her baby.

Dear Doris. I haven’t told you about my return to Crook; it could hardly be called triumphant. My condition had apparently “stabilized”—“fossilized,” I should have said. I could sit in a wheelchair, masticate and swallow, defecate, weep—and that, in terms of physical activity, was it. I had an alarming tendency to grind my teeth, and sometimes my breathing would become heavily labored—I would
snore,
in fact, while wide awake. I noticed that this snoring occurred when I thought about painful topics, like Fledge, and hence I would snore much of the day, though in sleep, apparently, I was quiet. (Such reversals were common, in my life as a vegetable.) At moments of vivid emotion the snores would become increasingly strained and build towards a crescendo of honks and grunts, at which point I would be forced to abandon thought altogether and concentrate hard on bringing my respiration back under control; nurses would run over to clap me violently on the back. It was this phenomenon that provoked Walter Dendrite, my neurologist, to refer to me publicly as a pig. But the point is, Doris volunteered to look after the snorting monster I had become; she agreed to perform the services of a mother to me, and for this I love her.

Harriet and Hilary traveled back to Crook with me in the ambulance. Harriet no longer burst into tears every time she laid eyes on me, the doctors had seen to that, I’d heard them murmuring at the foot of my bed. In fact, it was one of the most striking aspects of that first stage of my vegetal existence, the experience of seeing my family’s reactions shift from grief and compassion to acceptance and apparent indifference in a remarkably short period of time. Thus, I notice, are the dead forgotten; thus are persons in my state rendered tolerable. For who can look long upon a creature whose one stark message is: see how close
you
are to grotesquerie. Our kinship with the grotesque is something to be shunned; it requires an act of rejection, of brisk alienation, and here the doctors were most cooperative, for they permitted Harriet and the rest of them to reject my persisting humanity by means of a gobbledygook that carried the imprimatur of—science! Science! And this is not the least of the ironies with which this tale of mine is so liberally peppered—science proposes, this is how I had lived, but science also
dis
poses, and now I found myself frozen, stuck fast, like a fly in a web, in the grid of a medical taxonomy. My identity was now neuropathological. I was no longer a man, I was an instance of a disease, and as such I could no longer arouse the profound pity I so richly deserved. I don’t think they gave me very long to live, frankly. They knew about my ticker and its sclerotic arteries. I imagine if I’d been an Eskimo they’d just have pushed me out into a blizzard, and that would have been that. I wouldn’t have minded, or rather, I wouldn’t have minded if I could have taken Fledge out into the blizzard with me. Then I’d have died a happy man. Did I mention that the appalling Patrick Pin had been hovering at my bedside when I regained consciousness? It seems that Harriet, fearing for my life, had had him administer Extreme Unction. That was not all: I now sported a small crucifix on a silver chain around my neck. I would be safe from vampires, in any event. Ha!

But the point is, my return to Crook was remarkable for what it taught me about the nature of
hope.
Bear with me, please, the pertinence of these remarks will soon become clear. Fledge, you see, had wheeled me from the ambulance to the house, and down the hall to the drawing room, and as he’d done so it had been impossible not to be aware of a quite sickening aura of triumphalism that clung to the man like a smell, that seeped malodorously from all his wretched pores. He put me against the wall, facing the fireplace, and left me there.

Now Crook, as Sidney’s mother had so astutely remarked to Harriet on New Year’s Eve, is a house of wood; and despite the fact that it is falling down, it retains strong character precisely because it
is
wood. The staircase and all the floorboards are of oak, as is the wall paneling, which is dark, and makes the rooms snug and warm. The doorframes are also wood, and have a lovely shallow arch to them, delicately cusped at the center. The front door is divided into studded panels, but decoration is otherwise limited to the tops of the wall panels and the downstairs skirting boards. Around the chimneypiece in the drawing room, however—and my wheelchair, as I say, had been placed so that I gazed directly at it—there is some very elaborate work. It is in fact a masterpiece, a masterpiece of Tudor low-relief carving.

A pair of oak columns flank the fireplace, supporting an entablature, or superstructure, comprising architrave, frieze, and cornice. The projection of the latter forms the mantelpiece, and upon it the design of the entire fireplace is repeated, though naturally in greatly reduced proportions. There is thus an
echo
upon the mantelpiece of the whole fireplace—can you picture it?—and whereas the space between the lower columns is the open grate itself, in the carving above are displayed the arms of the Coal family (Chimaera, salient, gules on sable) and beneath them our motto:
NIL DESPERANDUM
.

Nil desperandum.
Since I was a boy I’ve felt that those words were meant for me. At times of crisis—in Africa, for instance— they have given me strength. It’s surprising, is it not, how much solace can be had from two words—literally, “there is no reason to despair”? Perhaps they matter so much to me because I have a very real tendency to despair. It runs in the family: Sir Digby Coal was a suicide, and Cleo, I’m very much afraid, appears also to have a melancholy cast of mind; along with the teeth she gets it from me. But for four centuries the words over the fireplace, standing, perhaps, in allegorical relation to the fire beneath, have helped my forebears to struggle against their innate inclination to give up hope. These words have warmed their souls, while the flames beneath have warmed their bones. There is a way, I have come to believe, that a structure, in time, becomes immanent with the spirit of its residents, and to this also I may have been responding when I gazed at the chimneypiece that morning. Strange sentiments for a scientist, you say. But as I think is becoming clear, I was by this time losing my grip on the sternly empirico-mechanist view of Nature to which I had for years been faithful.

Well, as I gazed at the chimneypiece, at the coat-of-arms and, below it, our motto, something totally unexpected occurred. Something stirred within me, and I felt a brief surge of exaltation. Those immortal words over the fireplace, you see, reminded me that
I was a Coal,
and that
I would not be bested by a servant.
Completely unwittingly, Fledge had provided me the one single stimulus that was guaranteed to brace and hearten me—and for the first time since the accident I felt the spirit move within me. Perhaps, indeed, I suddenly thought, there really was no reason to despair. From what I had heard in the hospital, the doctors had no confidence in my ever regaining the use of my body, but I decided, there and then, to hope all the same, and within the fossil of my frozen frame something took fire and blazed.

Yes, coming back to Crook revived and reinvigorated me, and so it was, after all, a sort of triumph. As I think back on it now, I remember being shocked at first at the racket my wheelchair made on the old wooden floorboards, how it had rumbled and thundered down the hall, me at the helm with my prowlike nose jutting forward and my old claws clamped on the arms of the thing; but I remember too how, after a moment or so, the shock had been replaced by a grim delight that my progress about my house would be such a noisy business, that my movement would be signaled so loudly and emphatically to all within earshot by this thunder of wheels on boards. Then, too, I was in my tweeds again. I had shrunk in hospital, they were ill-fitting now, but they were
my
tweeds, my hairy tweeds, with leather patches on the elbows and thick flaps on the pockets so that nothing could fall out. It was a suit that had been made for me by a firm of London tailors who catered exclusively to the country gentleman, and who had dressed my father, and his father before him. (They have since gone out of business, sadly.) But all these things helped to revive me from that awful torpor to which my month in hell had reduced me. And while not a hint, not a flicker, of any of this was apparent in my posture or expression, there was, within, a sort of life-affirming celebration under way.
Nil desperandum,
Hugo, I told myself,
nil desperandum,
old chap.

O
h good God, I’ve drifted far ahead of myself. My chronology is all skewed again. Where am I?

George Lecky had gone into the Ceck Marsh, and Limp’s men had been unable to find him. Nothing strange about this; George had lived close to the marsh for twenty-five years, ever since I’d brought him back from Africa with me, and he probably knew that drear tract better than any man in Berkshire, with the exception of old John Crowthorne. So it would not have been hard for him to evade the constabulary out there. But I was not surprised when, three days later, he appeared in my barn. Actually I’d been expecting him—who else would he go to but his old African comrade?