The Grotesque Page 6

  I need not tell you my attitude toward that sort of thing. Men had been sent down from Oxford for less, in my day. Frankly I find it distasteful to have to mention it at all—I needed those scotches in the barn, they calmed me. My first reaction was to try and determine who bore the major responsibility for the incident. Fledge was the older man, of course, but Sidney was his better, in terms of social class, and in the fleeting glimpse I’d had of them it was Sidney who seemed, so to speak, the “aggressive” party. But I soon realized it hardly mattered which of them was more to blame, for in the normal course of events they’d both have been on their way before breakfast. But there was a complication, and it was this that kept me awake till morning.

  My daughter Cleo was a spirited girl of eighteen, and this relationship with Sidney was her first real sentimental attachment. I’ve always had something of a soft spot for Cleo, despite my disappointment that she wasn’t a boy. Cleo’s a true Coal, as I may have mentioned; small-boned and wiry, she has prominent front teeth and fears nothing, not even me. I remember how, when the girls were growing up, I would at times have the entire household trembling with terror, and a sort of ghastly, oppressed silence hung upon the place, an “atmosphere,” as Harriet called it. Cleo, though, would quite boldly bait me, not in the least intimidated by my snapping, snarling ill-humor. You see, she stoutly maintained the belief that beneath this splenetic and ogreish exterior there beat a heart of gold, though this I imagine was something she had to do, the idea that her father was splenetic and ogreish all the way through being just too grim to contemplate. In fact, not only is my heart not made of gold, it isn’t even made of sound organic tissue —the arteries are sclerotic, and will kill me in the end!

  I admired the girl, you see. Though I never showed it, I was delighted that she refused to allow me to tyrannize over her. So while Harriet and Hilary, my elder daughter, a plump and rabbity little thing like her mother, crept around in a state of deep funk, Cleo sought ways to provoke in me an outburst of truly foul temper. Punishment didn’t deter her—as I say, she did not know the meaning of fear, and I remember once, during the war, how she climbed onto the roof of Crook and stood at the peak of the very highest gable to wave at the Spitfire pilots. Harriet almost died of anxiety, and I was far from calm myself as I stood in the driveway at the front of the house shouting at the bloody girl to come down, then watching her sliding and jumping over those mossy old slates, and clambering down a rickety drainpipe, certain that at any moment she would plunge to her death.

  Given my feelings for the girl, then, I felt less than sanguine about rudely shattering her first affair, sending Sidney off with my execrations ringing in his ears, and then having to explain to Cleo why. It could scar her for life, put her off men for good. Marriage was now completely out of the question, of course, but I wondered if the thing could not be gently broken up—say, after Sidney had returned to his mother’s house in London, about ten days hence. There would be no sudden shock, that way, no brutal exposure of the girl to the fact of Sidney’s tendencies; he would leave Crook, and then I would quietly and firmly indicate to him, in writing, that any further contact with the family was impossible. Cleo would doubtless strike up new friendships at Oxford, and with any luck it would all “blow over.” As for Fledge, I would have to keep him on until Cleo had gone, in case he made a scene; but once the girl was safely off to Oxford he’d be let go. And without references, I might add. It occurred to me then to wonder what precisely had happened in Kenya, that the Fledges should appear in England without papers of any sort. I felt a fleeting tremor of unease as I remembered what Harriet had said about the planter who’d been trampled to death by his own ox. I should have paid more attention to that tremor of unease; but I was not, in those days, in the habit of giving credence to such ephemeral and ultimately untestable phenomena.

  All this I worked out in the long hours of the night, first in the unlit barn, and then in my bed in the east wing. As you may imagine, I was not a happy man at breakfast the next morning. I found it impossible to meet the eye of either Sidney or Fledge, and it was, as I say, only for Cleo’s sake that I suppressed the disgust I felt at being in the same room as they. What perhaps was most sickening was that business of the “engagement” a night or two previously. How right I had been to remain aloof and skeptical— what a shoddy travesty it had been, what a mockery, what an insult, not only to Cleo, but to Harriet and myself. Just thinking about it made my blood boil; it was as well I had the barn to escape to, for had I been compelled to spend much time under the same roof as those two inverts I might well have been unable to mask my feelings.

  ♦

  I spent most of the next two days in the barn, and I’m afraid I drank a good deal of whisky. I hadn’t as yet said anything to Harriet; that, I thought, should wait until Sidney was out of the house and back in London, for I had no confidence that she could keep up a pretense of normality if she knew what I knew. She would become upset, she would upset Cleo, and there would be no peace for any of us; and despite my recent setback I still had to work on my lecture. Better for everybody, I thought, if I keep it to myself. Mealtimes were difficult, and it was all I could do to maintain a sort of surly unsociability. But surly unsociability was not uncommon with me, and Harriet and Cleo were not particularly alarmed. Just Hugo having one of his “moods,” they thought. Just Hugo being “impossible.” Ha!

  My plan, then, was to stay out of the house as much as possible for the last week-and-a-half of Sidney’s visit. But three nights after the incident in the pantry a sudden and dramatic development occurred. And it was then, I think, that it can all be said to have definitely begun.

  ♦

  I was in my study, quite late, writing, when there came a tapping at my door. It was Cleo. She came in and sank into an armchair by the fire. “Daddy,” she said, “Sidney’s not back yet.”

  I did not look up from my work. Sidney’s whereabouts did not interest me, not in the very least. “It’s been more than three hours,” said Cleo. “He was just going into the village to post a letter.”

  A rather cruel insinuation sprang to my lips. I suppressed it. Instead I said: “Perhaps he’s discussing poetry with Father Pin.” This was the parish priest, a friend of Harriet’s.

  “It’s not like him,” she said, gazing into the fire. “He’s always so punctual about everything.” Her hair fell forward in a short thick black curtain so that, in profile, I could see only the tip of her nose and her protruding top lip.

  “Yes,” I said, “I imagine he is.”

  “Don’t be horrid, Daddy.”

  “Horrid?”

  “I know you don’t think very much of Sidney,” she said, “but that’s because you don’t know him very well. He’s always so shy in front of you.”

  My pen ran across the page, amassing the familiar evidence, drawing the bold conclusions. I reject the official notion that the dinosaur was a reptile. I claim a new class, the Dinosauria, separate and distinct from the Reptilia, and I include within it the birds. Yes, I claim the birds as living dinosaurs.

  “You intimidate him,” said Cleo. “He’s not combative, like you. He has a gentle nature.”

  This of course was why Sykes-Herring was trying to muzzle me. “You think that’s just weakness, but it’s not. I like gentleness, Daddy. All women do.”

  The idea was not original with me, unfortunately; Victorian paleontologists like Owen and Huxley knew all about the birdness of dinosaurs, and vice versa, but the insight had somehow been lost.

  “Daddy, can’t we drive into the village and look for him?”

  I screwed the top onto my fountain pen and gave her my full attention. “Very well,” I said. “Go and put your coat on.”

  We drove slowly into Ceck. The moon was full, though intermittently obscured by ragged black rainclouds. I parked in the yard behind the Hodge and Purlet and went into the saloon bar, then the public bar, while Cleo waited in the car. But no one had seen Sidney, so we walked up the
lane behind the inn, between high brick walls and spreading elms in which a restless wind was gently murmuring. Entering by the lych-gate, we followed the narrow path that led through the graveyard to the church, which stood out sharply against the night sky, flooded by moonlight that silvered the stonework and threw the belfry and lancets into slender blocks of darkness. High above the little steepled building black rainclouds still fled across the face of the moon. We passed through the graveyard in silence, passed the scattered, tilting headstones, whose shadows were linked in shifting arabesques by the delicate tracery of the foliage of the trees along the fence, and but for the stirring of the boughs, and of their shadows on the moon-bleached grass, all was still as death.

  We went round to the back of the church to the priest’s cottage, and knocked on the door. Patrick Pin had not seen Sidney. Hunched in the dark little entrance of his cottage, the fat priest tried hard to get us inside, but I refused. We retraced our steps to the car, then drove out to Ceck’s Bottom, on the possibility that Sidney had gone to see George. Off to our left, over the marsh, the moon hung huge and low and yellow against the sky. I began, then, to form an idea of what might have happened to Sidney, though I said nothing to Cleo.

  I parked in the yard, beside the swill lorry. George’s farmhouse was a square, squat, yellowing structure, and this night it seemed to glow, somehow, with an eerily vivid and unwholesome luster. I pushed open the back door and shouted his name. There was no answer. We went in, and the wind, which had freshened considerably in the last few minutes, slammed the door behind us with a bang. The kitchen was empty. A naked bulb hung from a length of twisted cord in the middle of the room and shed a dull, harsh light on the few sticks of furniture, the flagstoned floor, the rusting stove with its tin chimney rising crookedly through a hole in the ceiling and rattling dully as the wind came gusting down. A first volley of rain beat up against the window, which was uncurtained, one smashed pane patched over with a piece of damp cardboard. “George!” I shouted, and again there was no answer. It was weirdly disturbing, and my scalp for a moment prickled with a vague sense of dread—his lorry was in the yard and the light was on, but where was the man himself? I told Cleo to wait in the kitchen while I went through the house; but all the rooms were empty. “He’s not here,” I told her as I came back into the kitchen. The rain was lashing the windows by this time, and we could hear the pigs grunting on the far side of the yard. There was suddenly an ugly noise overhead, and Cleo turned to me, her eyes bright with alarm. It was a raspy, grating, scraping sound, and it seemed to accelerate, and as it did so it grew thunderously loud—it was a slate, I realized, dislodged by the wind, sliding down the roof. A second later it shattered on the stones of the yard, just outside the kitchen door. “Let’s go back,” said Cleo, with a shiver. It was all very uncanny. We returned to Crook in silence.

  We left the front door unlocked that night, and we left the lights on in the drawing room. But Sidney did not come back.

  ♦

  “I suppose,” said Harriet at breakfast, “we should telephone his mother. Perhaps he’s gone home.”

  “But why, Mummy?” said Cleo, looking up from her boiled egg, the shell of which she was listlessly tapping with the back of her spoon. “Why on earth would he go home without telling anyone?”

  “I don’t know, darling,” said Harriet. “And please don’t play with your egg.” She threw up her hands. “I simply don’t understand the boy, do you, Hugo?”

  I was behind my Times. I lowered it briefly. “Frankly no,” I said. “But you’re right, Harriet. Mrs. Giblet should be telephoned. I think you should do it.”

  Harriet sighed. “Yes, I suppose I should.”

  “Do it now, Mummy,” said Cleo. “I just hate all this not knowing.”

  ♦

  Poor Cleo. I’d said I didn’t understand why Sidney had not returned to Crook. In fact I’d begun to form a pretty good hypothesis. That it was connected to his dealings with Fledge, this, I think, was clear; and it was my opinion that Fledge had attempted to blackmail the boy. It would hardly be the first time, after all, that a servant had tried to extort money from a “gentleman” in such a situation. No, my guess was that Sidney, having no cash with which to pay off the man, and unable to explain to his mother or anybody else why he needed the cash, had decided that the only solution was simply to drop out of sight for a while. I was relieved, frankly; this spared me the rather odious task of breaking up the relationship, for by the time Sidney surfaced again Cleo would have lost all interest in him—and I didn’t expect him to surface again for a long time. In retrospect, this assumption on my part merits a loud, ironic snort. As for Fledge, I would wait until Cleo had gone up to Oxford, and then I’d sack him, as planned.

  There remained one rather annoying loose end to tie up, and that was Sidney’s mother. Ever since Harriet had telephoned her the old woman had been calling us from London three times a day for news. As I had an appointment in the city at the end of the week, with Sykes-Herring, I agreed to go and see the woman. Not a task I relished, and I think you can understand why. How, after all, to tell the boy’s mother that I was sure he was all right, without telling her why I thought so?

  Mrs. Giblet occupied a house in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum. After keeping my appointment with Sykes-Herring, and then eating lunch at the home of my elder daughter, Hilary, I took a taxi there. The sun had abandoned its efforts to bring light to the sordid metropolis, and retreated behind a thick mass of gray cloud. The weather served only to accentuate the aura of faded gentility that clung to Mrs. Giblet’s street, which in turn deepened my own ill-humor, for I hate London. The knocker was a snarling griffin in tarnished brass; it provoked the shrill yap of a dog and a sort of muffled shuffling within. The door opened a crack and a timid face peered out. “Good afternoon,” I said. “I believe Mrs. Giblet is expecting me.”

  The door opened a further crack to reveal a mousy girl in a housemaid’s uniform from the 1920s with a feather duster clutched in her paw.

  “Who is it, Mary?” cried a raspy voice from the upper regions. The mouse peered at me in terror. “Sir Hugo Coal,” I said. “Sir Hugo Coal!” she cried, surprisingly lustily.

  “Who?”

  “Sir Hugo Coal!” I shouted. “It’s about Sidney.”

  “Show him into the parlor,” came the voice. “I’m coming down.” I was then relieved of hat and coat and led down a narrow hallway, heavily carpeted, between walls crammed with sepia-toned photographs of young men in uniform and sour-looking family groups clustered in gardens. Various pieces of huge dark furniture constricted the passage, and the place smelled of boiled fish. I was shown into the parlor, where the gloom of that overcast day was filtered through windows curtained in dingy lace.

  “Mrs. Giblet will be with you shortly,” said the mouse, unnecessarily, and flicked her duster at a dead clock squatting massively on the mantelpiece. I removed a hank of animal hair from an overstuffed armchair and sat down. The air was musty, and whatever natural light did manage to penetrate the room was promptly swallowed by the unrelieved somberness of the hangings and furniture.

  Some minutes passed; for me they were not happy minutes. I glanced at my watch. Nothing, I told myself, would keep me from the 3:47.

  At last Mrs. Giblet appeared, leaning on a stick and clutching to her bosom a silky-haired, pug-nosed lapdog. The creature fixed me with an alert and hostile stare as I rose to my feet. With barely a glance at me, Mrs. Giblet made her way to a wing chair. Lowering herself ponderously into its depths, she wheezed heavily for several moments and regarded me from rheumy, china-blue eyes as her puckered lips worked over what I guessed were freshly inserted teeth. The voice, when it came, was rasping and steely and quite clearly accustomed to command. “Sherry, Sir Hugo? Or something stronger?”

  “Sherry, if I may, Mrs. Giblet.”

  She nodded at the mouse, who scuttled away. Mrs. Giblet was what is popularly known as a battle-ax, a type I distinctly dislike
(I knew several in Berkshire). Confirmed terrorists themselves, they are notoriously difficult to intimidate. Shrewd, too. She set her stick upright before her and folded her hands upon the handle. Her fingers were glittering with stones, the nails painted scarlet. Between their hooded flaps her eyes too were glittering. Her mouth was smeared with lipstick and her throat swung bagged and crosshatched from a wrinkled knob of chin flanked by rouged jowls loosely depending from lumpy cheekbones. Powerful gusts of stale scent emanated from the crannies of her person; the little dog was curled in her lap like a hairy tumor. The mouse returned with two glasses of sherry and was told to fetch the bottle. Mrs. Giblet fumbled in the depths of her clothing and produced a packet of Capstan Full Strength. “Cigarette, Sir Hugo?” she wheezed.

  “Thank you,” I said. There followed some business with matches and ashtray. When we were both alight, and the sherry bottle close to hand on a small round table with three clawed feet, I said, “Let me tell you what has happened.”

  “That would be a start,” she said.

  I sipped my sherry. It was very bad stuff. I frowned. “There isn’t a great deal that you have not already heard from my wife,” I began. “Sidney left our house on Monday evening at around seven o’clock, having told my daughter Cleo he was cycling into the village to post a letter to you.”

  Mrs. Giblet at this point lifted a hooked finger. “It is now Friday, Sir Hugo, and I have received no letter from Sidney. Even allowing for the idiosyncrasies of the Post Office, I think it would have come by now.”

  “Oh I agree, Mrs. Giblet. Clearly Sidney did not post the letter, if indeed there was a letter to post.”

  “You think,” she said, with a rising inflection, “that Sidney had some other reason for going into the village?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Giblet. I think it possible. I’ve wondered if he might have had a reason for suddenly dropping out of sight?” I thought this would serve as an “opening.”