The Grotesque (17 page)

I
t was difficult, extremely difficult, to resume paleontology after that. In a way, then, it was fortunate that I had George’s welfare to occupy me in the days that followed, otherwise I might well have succumbed to depression. For two days and two nights he slept among my bones, growing stronger, emanating a silent purposefulness that made me very uneasy indeed. I tried to talk to him but he would not be drawn. He sat in my wicker chair by the hour, smoking, frowning abstractedly, from time to time stamping a boot on the floor. The house was no less grim. Cleo had reacted to the rising of Sidney’s bones by crawling even further into her shell, and to Harriet’s distress she never appeared for meals. She was, of course, oppressed by the conviction that Fledge was the evil creeping thing that had murdered Sidney on the marsh, and she bore no small antagonism toward Harriet and myself for continuing to tolerate the man. Harriet told me that if I didn’t telephone Henry Horn about the girl soon, then she would. There was, thus, an atmosphere of brooding malevolence in both house and barn, and it very quickly degenerated into a sort of smoldering latent explosiveness.

The only one not directly implicated in any of this was Doris, of course; but she felt it, and quite unconsciously she responded to it. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of this was the raw fish incident.

This occurred at lunchtime on the Friday of that week. We always had fish on Fridays, Harriet being Roman Catholic, and this day we were to be served a nice piece of halibut. Interesting creature, the halibut—Hippoglossus hippoglossus, literally, horse-tongue horse-tongue. It begins life upright, one eye on either side of its head, and then in early youth develops the peculiar habit of lying on the bottom of the sea and covering itself with sand. In such a position the eye on the lower side, invariably the left side, cannot serve any useful purpose, so it migrates to the top side, socket and all. Yes, the halibut has a migrating eye. A voracious feeder, it consumes all sorts of other fish, an occasional sea bird, and relishes rubbish, like the pig.

But that’s not strictly relevant. Fledge set an earthenware casserole dish in front of Harriet, and when she lifted the lid, there lay the piece of halibut, skin, fins, and all—completely raw. It had seen neither knife nor oven; there hadn’t even been the pretense of cooking it! Harriet is a placid soul, but this roused her. “What on earth is the woman up to?” she murmured. And then, I remember this well, just when one would have expected her to turn to Fledge, and demand an explanation—she did not. She dabbed at her lips with her napkin, rose from her chair, and left the room without another word. There was a moment’s silence. “Take it away, Fledge,” I said, “and bring the cheeseboard.” I presumed Harriet had gone to the kitchen to talk to Doris, but as she never returned to the dining room it occurs to me now that possibly she did not go near the kitchen at all. It occurs to me now that this was as good a demonstration as one could want of a woman embarrassed in front of her butler. Had something happened? Had Fledge made another advance and, as I predicted, been repulsed, but weakly? I rather think he had.

Things came to a head that afternoon. George was in the wicker chair; I was striding up and down and attempting to make him tell me what was on his mind. How long did he intend “holing up” in my barn, I demanded? He had to act, I told him. I was feeling the strain, myself, and I may have been more passionate than was strictly necessary. George said nothing. He sat there doggedly, smoking my cigars and rubbing his rash, which the ointment had done little to help. His name was all over the newspapers. The Daily Express had called him the “Ceck monster.” It had referred to the “abomination” of the “bones in the marsh” that had shocked this “sleepy village” in the “depths” of the countryside. The press assumed that George was responsible for the entire abomination, and was shrill in its clamor for his prompt capture. The village was crawling with reporters, and half-a-dozen of the creatures were even then clustered at the gates of Crook. They’d already got to John Crowthorne, but he’d played the rustic bumpkin and claimed total ignorance, as he had to the police also, which left George, poor George, to bear the brunt alone. What was his plan, I asked him. What did he intend to do? I certainly hoped, I said, that he wouldn’t draw me into it.

There was, at that moment, a knock at the door of the barn. George rose to his feet. I moved toward the door, turning to wave him into the shadows. The door swung open; framed against the light stood Fledge. For a moment nothing happened. I turned my eyes from Fledge and saw George disappearing beneath the dinosaur. Fledge had seen him, of this I have no doubt, for without delivering whatever message he’d come with he abruptly stepped out of the barn and the door swung shut behind him.

I lingered another moment in indecision. George had vanished into the obscurity. “Stay there!” I cried, then ran across the barn and through the door—which is low, and is set into one of two massive arched gates fastened with studded iron hinges. On impulse I locked it behind me. Fledge was moving rapidly toward the house. I caught up to him before he reached the porch, and clutched him by the arm. “Fledge,” I gasped, “you saw nothing just now! Do you understand me? Nothing!” The man displayed not a twitch, not a flicker; but I saw it all the same, I saw the sudden flare of exultant power—the triumphalism—in him. He had me, and he knew it, this I could see in his long blank face, in those reddish eyebrows that lifted, perhaps, a millimeter, in scorn, I could see it in those thin and bloodless lips that may, I now think, have betrayed the merest tiny quiver of derision as he realized how dumbly I had played into his hands, how clumsily I had given him the game. And then the slight bow, the subtle gesture of contemptuous deference. “Very well, Sir Hugo,” he said. My fingers were still gripping his arm. Glancing about me, I now saw Harriet standing at the drawing-room window, and gazing at us with intense perplexity.

Fledge returned to the house, and I to the barn. “George!” I shouted. “George!” But he had gone, out through the loose plank at the back that he had forced open three days previously.

❖

Within fifteen minutes Limp was at Crook with four carloads of policemen. They poured into the barn and into the house, into the gardens and the orchard. I was in the drawing room with Harriet when, about half-an-hour after that, George emerged from the trees beside the driveway between several policemen. He had been handcuffed. Never before have I seen such black rage in a man’s face. Just as they pushed him into the back of one of the cars he lifted his eyes to the face of Crook and spat on the gravel. Fledge was not at the window with us to observe this.

I
am, as I say, in the kitchen as I remember all this, and I find myself attempting to postpone telling you what happened next. For we are drawing close to the cerebral accident that has condemned me to this wheelchair—this
hell
chair—and reduced me to the status of a vegetable. Doris, having finished the washing up, comes and sits down opposite me, and pours us each a glass of wine. Dear Doris, I would much rather talk about her, quite frankly. She drinks much more heavily now than she ever used to, this I have had ample opportunity to observe, for in the past she never indulged herself to excess until her day’s work was done. Now, though, Fledge seems to have relaxed his stern prohibition in this regard; he turns a blind eye when she miscalculates, as she usually does, and becomes incoherent by six. She doesn’t have to conceal her drinking anymore, she told me during one of our “chats,” and though this robs the activity of a good deal of its pleasure she has determined, she says, to take advantage of the new, permissive regime. With the result that when Fledge comes into the kitchen before dinner, he usually finds his wife standing rather unsteadily at the stove and clutching a pot of vegetables either crisped to black cinders or raw. “Shan’t be long,” she calls, hearing him enter and trying not to lurch; and he, quietly frowning, will take over, pull the meal together in some fashion, and serve it himself. Doris sinks into her chair by the stove and, no longer fit to knit, as was her habit in better days, tipples gently toward oblivion.

But these “chats” that we enjoy, Doris and I: they occur in the kitchen, usually in the evening but often earlier in the day, and they include the consumption, by Doris, of at least two bottles of sherry, bordeaux, or burgundy. No great connoisseur, Doris, but there are two things she likes in a wine, quantity and bite. And the cellars of Crook, amply stocked over several generations—we Coals like our bottle—offer her plenty of wine with plenty of bite. This is what happens: she pushes my wheelchair up to the table, and sets a glass before me. She fills my glass. Then, settling herself on the other side of the table, she fills her own glass. I sit there and gaze at her as she lifts it and gives me my health. She then proceeds deliberately and loquaciously to drink herself stupid. And throughout, she addresses all her “chat” to me, even going so far as to respond to the imaginary responses I have made to her inanities. And why, you ask, does Fledge permit her to do this? It’s a question that intrigued me for some time. Then I realized: because he is upstairs, fornicating with Harriet in her bedroom in the west wing, and it suits them both very nicely to have Doris “out of commission.” Fledge actually encourages her drinking, these days, for this very reason.

And so Doris drinks and chats, and I have come to know well the successive phases through which she passes on the road to oblivion. Doris is one of those in whom the first drink of the day can arouse a sense of consummate fulfillment unrivaled in the spectrum of human gratification. She is aware, too, that it is only in the satisfaction of an illicit desire that pleasure in its fullest measure can be known. So she fills her glass with wine, almost to the top, and there is, I can tell, in its sweet odor, and its ruby hue, a feast for the woman’s sensorium, even before she tastes it. She lifts the brimming glass to her eager, parted lips and again pauses, prolonging for one delicious instant more the anticipation of drinking. There is no sound from the hall or staircase; the smell of the wine, slightly musky, is strong in her nostrils. She tips the glass. She swallows, in one long, ecstatic draft, half its contents and then, slumping in her chair with a deep sigh, picks up the bottle and gazes at it, taking a sort of supplementary pleasure in its shape and its label, the outward signs of the essence within. She finishes that first glass in two further movements, and sits a moment permitting the glow to mount from her belly to her brain. And then, as the familiar misty warmth begins to kindle, she will compliment me on my cellar.

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!