The Grotesque Page 4

  It is no exaggeration, I think, to say that without George Lecky I would never have brought Phlegmosaurus back to Crook, and my contribution to British paleontology would have been nil. I was in Africa for the bones, of course; nor was mine by any means the first expedition to take the steamer from Dar es Salaam down to Lindi, that torpid, mosquito-ridden little hellhole on the Indian Ocean, just ten degrees below the equator. I don’t wish to bore you with my African stories; suffice that when I learned that on account of the insects no donkeys or mules could be used for the trek inland to my prospective site—nor, more crucially, for bringing out the bones I planned to unearth there—my first impulse was to abort the expedition altogether. Then, a day or two later, as I sat morosely in a squalid little tin-roofed bar near the docks, drinking quinine and gin beneath a slowly turning ceiling fan that barely stirred the thick, dripping heat of the afternoon, a British soldier, recently discharged from the service, came to me and announced that he would recruit and supervise the native bearers I required. I hired him on the spot; it was George, of course.

  It was a four-day tramp, in intense tropical heat, inland from Lindi to the range of hills in which I found my Phlegmosaurus. Into those hills we had to sink deep pits to get at the fossil-bearing strata, for the bones had not been exposed, as they are in cliffs and ravines when erosion has helped the paleontologist in his labors and scattered them about the landscape. How many times George made the grueling trip from the diggings to the coast and back, I cannot now remember. He was very tough. I do remember how, in the early morning, while the sun was still bearable, I would pause on the peak of a steep, grassy hill, and there, under the huge African sky, with tree-spotted plains stretching for miles on every side, I would watch George organize his bearers in the camp below. The small bones they carried in boxes on their heads; the heavy ones, the femurs and vertebrae, would be slung on poles, and each pole hoisted between the shoulders of two men. When they were ready George would gaze up the hill and, shielding his eyes from the sun, bare his teeth at me. I doffed my pith helmet and, from my grassy eminence, waved it at him; then off they would go, in a long, snaking line, across the plain towards the sea, chanting as they went. But I knew that in a week I would see them again, with letters from home, newspapers, and fresh supplies of chocolate, quinine, and brandy.

  When it was all over, and enough bones had been shipped to England to keep me busy for a lifetime, I asked George to come back with me to Ceck, and run the pig farm. He’d spoken of his ambition to farm; I was only sorry, I said, that I couldn’t offer him anything better.

  ♦

  John Crowthorne loved to hear me talk of those days. Though he must have heard the African stories on a hundred occasions, the romance and the exoticism seemed never to fade; he was like a child listening to its favorite fairy tale. George, though, simply sucked on the stem of his pipe, wearing his habitual, slightly amused air of fatalistic resignation. We emerged, some hours later, into the afternoon. The Hodge and Purlet faces the Ceck green, on the far side of which a few boys were kicking a football around. The day was hazy, the shadows had grown long, and the sun was now a molten ball as it sank behind a bank of gilded clouds, low in the reddening western sky. Upon the windows of the Hodge and Purlet bars of late sunshine gleamed like gold. Old John went off about his own affairs, and George and I walked slowly round to the yard, where he had parked his swill lorry. This was a filthy, dilapidated vehicle the back of which was crowded with the dustbins in which he twice weekly collected his swill, the scrapings and peelings of the Ceck kitchens, which, mixed with damp bran, fed the pigs. We stood there in the soft, misty light of that late September afternoon, mellowed by drink and memories, and as the good organic stink of his dustbins reached my nostrils, I said: “They were good days, George.”

  He was gazing out past the pub at the boys on the far side of the green, and doing some business with his pipe. He gave me one of those sardonic looks of his. I read the humor in his eyes, and though he said nothing I knew what he was thinking: the old days are always the good days—such is the nature of memory. How wise he was.

  I made my way back to Crook as the light thickened; and what a glorious dusk it was! For a mile or so I walked due west, and across a flat expanse of fields I watched the sky steadily deepen in color as the sun settled on the black wedge of the horizon, and then went down. The clouds had massed in a peculiar arrowlike formation, the tip of which seemed fastened to the sinking sun, so that they swept toward the horizon in two great converging wings, all in bitty, vaporous flecks that shifted through a layered spectrum from the pale pastel blues and grays of the upper strata through violets and purples to rich, sultry crimsons that merged almost imperceptibly with the blackness of the land. The smells were strong as ever, and spiked now with wood smoke, and in the middle distance reared a single stark dead elm tree, its fingery, leafless limbs etched sharp and densely black against this vivid cloth of sky.

  My road then swung round to the south and began gently to climb, and now I moved toward a darkened sky that bristled with trees, though still, to the west, the sunset continued quite gloriously to play itself out. I remember it all so distinctly because these were in a sense the last good days. Of course I was not aware of this at the time; at the time I was preoccupied, as you know, with my professional and domestic problems. Only now, in retrospect, do I see the true dimensions of those problems; for they were soon to be massively overshadowed, and the darkness that then entered my life was as dramatic in contrast to what went before as night is to day.

  I plodded on through the dusk, and very elegiac my mood should have been, I suppose; but I was untouched, I confess, by mournful reflections on death and the dead. I was thinking, rather, about the birdlike characteristics of the hipbone and hind leg of the dinosaur. Even full of brandy and African memories, you see, even in the presence of that gorgeous sunset, my mind went slipping back to its single, all-consuming passion—the beast that bore my name, P. carbonensis.

  The road wound gently up the hill toward Crook, and now I had trees on either side of me, and the descent of darkness was almost complete. The cries of birds, and the sudden scufflings of furtive woodland creatures, broke now and then into the stillness of this twilit world. For some minutes I permitted myself to become absorbed in a familiar fantasy, in which the civilization that encroached with increasing shrillness upon these quiet natural places simply vanished into thin air, and I moved upon a planet that knew nothing of humanity. How hard it is to lose the self! Almost impossible, to ditch that gibbering little monkey and merge for even a moment with the Nature of which we are a part, yet from which we have so effectively alienated ourselves. Drink helps; drink opens the receptive faculties, and as I climbed the hill to Crook I managed, for a minute or two, to attain some sort of primal, unmediated contact with the earth. Such experiences are rare and fleeting and now, for me, impossible of course. My next unmediated encounter with Nature will occur six feet under!

  At last I reached the rusting, wrought-iron gates of Crook, so overgrown with grass and ivy that they would never again be closed; and so up the drive between the trees, the evening chorus of the birds raucous in my ears. Rounding the bend in the drive, I found Crook heaving up before me against a sky in which the last dim light still faintly lingered. Black against that darkling air, no line straight, it seemed a great, skirted creature that rose by sheer force of will to thrust its wavering gables at the sky—a foundering mastodon, it seemed, a dying mammoth, down on its knees but tossing its tusks against heaven in one last doomed flourish of revolt. In the windows downstairs the lights shone into the night, and thus did the life of the house still burn, still feebly burn, and then, only then, as I stood at the bend in the drive and leaned, panting, after my climb, on my walking stick, only then did I experience a sudden intimation of mortality: my house would go down as I would go down; we were the last of the line.

  I had had my elegiac moment after all. In through the front door I came, suddenly
very hungry indeed. There, on his hands and knees, halfway down the hall, was Sidney Giblet. Whatever was the fool up to? He turned his head toward me; he had been examining a section of decorative carving on the skirting board. “Sir Hugo,” he cried, in tones of aesthetic fervor, “what a treasure!” Silly ass, I thought; and, glaring at his little bum, sticking into the air, I suppressed only with difficulty a powerful urge to give it a good kick.

  These, as I say, were the last of the good days, and I think often of them now, for I wonder if anything occurred then that might have warned me about what was to come. I was unaware at the time of Fledge’s designs; I knew only that he displayed toward me a good deal less of the deferential respect than I had a right to expect from my butler, but of his evil I was still ignorant. And other than his presence, and Doris’s, all was as usual in Ceck and environs. There was the business with Sykes-Herring, of course, but that was nothing new; I’d been warring with the Royal Society for years. I telephoned the man a day or so later and made an appointment to see him two weeks hence. He was smoothly affable to me, deeply regretted, so he claimed, the “unavoidable postponement” of my talk, treated me, in short, with the sort of patronizing smugness that the gentleman naturalist must expect from his “professional” colleague in these times. The problem is, men like Sykes-Herring, themselves blinkered, find the breadth of vision of a naturalist like myself acutely threatening, for, as a function of their long formal training, they are devoid of the most vital of scientific attributes, imagination. They bring too much categorical and theoretical baggage to the task, they see what they expect to see and no more. The gentleman naturalist, by contrast, has an open-minded and theoretically eclectic attitude toward natural phenomena, and is thus far better equipped for informed, imaginative speculation. He is far more likely to make the sudden brilliant intuitive leap to revolutionary truth. This is why I have always had such trouble with the Royal Society, with men like Sykes-Herring; this is why they accuse me of mixing up my bones, why they refuse to publish my papers, why they sabotage my lectures. They practice safe science, and safe science to my mind is no sort of science at all.

  All this I had of course long been aware of. Nevertheless, Sykes-Herring’s letter, and the animosity that lay behind it, disturbed my concentration, for I found myself during the days that followed unable to spend more than an hour or two at any one time with the bones. The whole business, my lifework, Phlegmosaurus: a sense of bitter futility impregnated all my thoughts, and I simply could not stay with it with any sort of zeal.

  I spent many afternoons in the Hodge and Purlet during this period, but I don’t want to give you the impression that I always returned to Crook in the wistful, elegiac mood I have just described. In fact, it was only on that one occasion it occurred, I believe, which is probably why I remember it. No, after a few hours in the public bar I tended to come home in a fractious, irritable state of mind; day drinking always makes me irritable, for some reason. I would look for trouble. I would pick on people (usually Sidney). I’m rather sorry, then, in the light of what happened, that on the notable evening that Sidney and Cleo announced their engagement I did not respond very graciously. This I regret not only because I hate at any time to give Cleo pain, but also because it was, for Sidney, one of the last moments of happiness he would know.

  We always dress for dinner in Crook, and I prefer candlelight to electric light in the dining room. The meal thus tends to be an affair of rather gloomy formality (and this, frankly, is altogether to my taste). Fledge was striking the gong as I emerged from my bedroom in the east wing, and as I clattered down the stairs I heard Harriet and Sidney and Cleo leave the drawing room with a gush of giggles and excited whispering, and cross the hall to the dining room. What, I asked myself, are they all so happy about? Probably still discussing whether Sidney looked more like a ferret or a lobster.

  Mrs. Fledge had made us one of her shepherd’s pies. She makes a fine shepherd’s pie, the meat bubbling gently in its own juices and the mashed potato on top whipped up like a choppy sea, its little crests crisply browned under the grill. All through soup (we had Heinz canned tomato soup) I’d been aware of a sort of suppressed giddiness in Sidney and Cleo—frequent glances across the table, grins and snorts and so on, and I knew something was afoot, though I was not particularly interested in what. Fledge served the shepherd’s pie from the sideboard, and then came round the table with the runner beans; and barely had I washed down the first mouthful with a draft of burgundy than Harriet said: “Hugo.”

  Here it comes, I thought. “Yes?”

  “Sidney has something to tell you, dear.”

  I glanced over at the boy, pushing a small mound of meat, potato, and runner bean onto the end of my fork as I did so. Even in this dimness I could see him blushing. His fingers—Sidney had rather long, thin fingers—fluttered to his horn-rims, then touched his hair, which was combed sleekly back from his forehead and oiled so heavily that it gleamed in the flickering candlelight (it was this sleekness, I presume, that had provoked all the ferret-and-otter nonsense). He looked across at Cleo and tittered. “One feels so silly,” he said. “You tell him, darling!”

  Cleo had her arms flat on the table and was leaning forward toward the boy, grinning. Her eyes were alight. She shook her head slightly and said nothing. She was enjoying his embarrassment.

  “Come on, Sidney,” I said, dabbing at my lips with my napkin and swallowing more burgundy, “spit it out.”

  “Yes, Sidney,” said Cleo, “spit it out.”

  He controlled the wave of hysteria that this remark evidently provoked. “Cleo and I,” he began; and then, turning to Harriet: “Oh I can’t, Lady Coal, I simply can’t!”

  “What Sidney is trying to say,” said Harriet, “is that—”

  “That Cleo and I want to be married!”

  I allowed a small silence to occur. “You do,” I said at last. “Yes, Sir Hugo,” he said, gazing at me now with an expression of great earnestness and trying not to look at Cleo. “Not immediately, of course, we can’t afford to, immediately, but we should like, that is, with your blessing, of course, to, ah, announce our engagement.” Then he permitted his eyes to drift back across the table to Cleo’s, and the pair of them grinned at each other in the candlelight, and he stretched out a fluttery hand and laid it upon hers. Harriet gazed at me with a sorr of expectant complacency, but I was concentrating on the assembly of neat forkfuls of meat, potato, and runner bean, each followed by a swallow of burgundy. They all awaited my response. Fledge loomed over by the sideboard, still and impassive in the shadows. I lifted my glass and the candle flames caught the crystal facets and darted off in all directions in thin sharp glinty spears of light. Fledge floated over with the decanter and refilled me. I was thinking of the evening I proposed to Harriet. I had had to go to her father, the colonel—Herbert—in his study after dinner, and quite an ordeal it was too. The old man had questioned me briskly about my prospects, and afterwards we had smoked cigars and talked blue-chip stocks by the fire. Apparently one didn’t go about it like that anymore; apparently one now did it over dinner, in front of the servants, with grins and giggles. And to this piece of levity I was expected to give my blessing; Harriet clearly expected this; I’d have thought she knew me better than that.

  My eyes were on my plate; my knife and fork were busy. “Prospects?” I murmured, without looking up.

  “I beg your pardon, Sir Hugo?” Sidney’s hand fluttered off Cleo’s and dabbed at his spectacles, then at his hair.

  I lifted my head, raised my eyebrows, and said again, quite mildly: “Prospects. What are your prospects, Sidney?”

  “Oh darling, I hardly think we need go into that now,” said Harriet, suddenly sensing danger.

  “On the contrary,” I said. “Sidney apparently considers the dinner table a fit place to ask for my daughter’s hand; I consider it no less fit to ask him how he proposes to support her.”

  “Oh don’t be stuffy, Daddy,” said Cleo. “We want to
celebrate.”

  I turned upon the girl. “I am not being, as you put it, stuffy.

  I am asking a perfectly reasonable question. I am asking how Sidney intends to support you.”

  “We’ll muddle along,” said Cleo blithely, “just like everybody else does.”

  I was suddenly struck with the notion of telling the colonel, all those years ago, that Harriet and I intended to “muddle along.” Ha!

  “I have my job in the bookshop,” said Sidney, “and when I’ve learned the business I should like to open a bookshop of my own.”

  “What with?” I said, as I consumed the last of my shepherd’s pie. It really was very good.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What with!” I cried, reaching for my wine. “Where will you get the money? Save it from your clerk’s salary?”

  “My mother said she might help me,” said Sidney.

  “She might!”

  “Oh Daddy, stop being so awful. You’re deliberately being difficult. I shall work too.”

  “What as, may I ask?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll find something or other.”

  “Something or other,” I said dryly. It was at that moment that I noticed Fledge leaning over to whisper something to Harriet. What new conspiracy was this?

  “Darling,” said Harriet, gazing down at the table at me as Fledge quietly left the room, “can we talk about this later? Mrs. Fledge has made something special.”