Patrick McGrath - The Grotesque

I have thought long and hard about that gesture of Fledge’s, for it was the first real indication I had that the man was not what he seemed; and yes, he was laughing at me. He found me absurd. He thought it ridiculous, clearly, that I should angle for my wife’s sympathy and then allow myself to be slighted as I had. I daresay he was right—but I was damned if I’d let him laugh in my face like that! I could hardly confront him with it, however; it was all too easy to imagine his cool “Sir?”, his cool “I beg your pardon, Sir Hugo?” I would merely compound my absurdity, my humiliation, in his eyes.

I returned to the barn in a foul, black mood, a mood that grew fouler and blacker all afternoon, as, indeed, did the weather. I stopped working on the leg at about three, and had a large scotch. I was of course furious with the Royal Society, and with Sykes-Herring in particular, for obstructing me, for putting obstacles in my path. But this was not new; my relationship with the paleontological establishment had never been cordial, for I was no orthodox paleontologist, I was no house paleontologist, like Sykes-Herring and his ilk. No, this was a familiar conflict. What did raise my hackles was the lack of sympathy I found in Crook. Harriet was more concerned about this alleged “impossibility” of mine than she was about Sykes-Herring’s machinations, and my own butler laughed at me to my face! I went back to the house at six, and learned that Sidney and Cleo had come home wet and miserable a half-hour previously and been packed off by Harriet to have hot baths. This is always a perilous undertaking in Crook, given the state of the plumbing, but whatever household gods are responsible for pipes, boilers, etc., that day, apparently, they were smiling.

I, however, was not smiling. I sat on the edge of my bed, over in the east wing, in my socks and underwear, and I seethed. I had brought a large scotch up with me; I was smoking a cigar. There came a light tap on the door. “Come!” I barked. It was Mrs. Fledge. She had brought me a clean shirt. “Oh excuse me, Sir Hugo,” she whispered, and made as if to withdraw.

“Come in, come in!” I shouted. “Never seen a man in his underpants, Mrs. Fledge? Just hang it on the back of the chair, will you.”

She scurried across the bedroom with eyes downcast. What a timid creature she was—had Fledge reduced her to this, with his chilly, sardonic ways? “Mrs. Fledge!” I said. Having hung up my shirt, she was halfway to the door. She froze, and stood there, her eyes averted from me, her back slightly stooped, her shoulders pulled in toward her flat bosom, a tall, workworn woman with a tight bun on the back of her head and a beaky, red-tipped nose. Her long white hands drooped limply from the wrists, red and rough about the knuckles, I noticed, from all the washing she did. She would not look at me. I clamped the cigar between my teeth, rose to my feet, and began to put on my clean shirt. “Mrs. Fledge,” I said, “what do you think of me?”

“Oh Sir Hugo,” she murmured, casting at me one quick furtive sideways glance, “that’s not for me to say.”

“No, come, Mrs. Fledge,” I said, buttoning the shirt, “do you think, for instance, that I am an impossible man?”

“Oh not a bit, Sir Hugo,” she said, with apparent sincerity. This was something, at any rate.

“You don’t find me impossible?” I said. “You find me—reasonable?”

“Yes, Sir Hugo.”

“Am I absurd to you, Mrs. Fledge?”

“No, Sir Hugo.”

“Not absurd? Not impossible? A perfectly decent, reasonable, straightforward man?”

“Yes, Sir Hugo.”

“I wonder, Mrs. Fledge, if you would mind fastening my cuff links for me.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and she leaned over me, fastening my cuff links with her long thin washerwoman’s fingers. She smelled of carbolic soap, but not of sherry—on the wagon, perhaps. “Mrs. Fledge,” I said. I was gazing at the top of her skull, as she bent over me, examining her silver-threaded hair. “Mrs. Fledge, I wanted to ask you about your husband’s sense of humor.”

“I beg your pardon, Sir Hugo?” she murmured faintly. Her fingertips brushed my left wrist.

“Fledge’s sense of humor. Does he like a joke? A prank? A bit of fun?”

“Not so as you’d notice, Sir Hugo.”

“Laughter does not come easily to him, Mrs. Fledge?” I said. She lifted her head then, and looked me straight in the eye. She twitched her nose and sniffed. Then she dropped her head once more, and busied herself with my right cuff. “We’ve not had much to laugh about, Fledge and I,” she muttered.

“Is that so?” I said. I chewed my cigar, mulling this over. “A hard life, eh?”

“Hard enough, Sir Hugo.”

“You knew hardship in Kenya?”

“Of a sort, Sir Hugo. There!” She stood up. “Will that be all, Sir Hugo? I’ve still the potatoes to see to.”

“And what,” I said, ignoring her evident desire to flee, “would amuse your husband, then, Mrs. Fledge?”

She had retreated to the door. “I’m sure I can’t say, Sir Hugo. Excuse me!” And she was out of the door, leaving only a faint whiff of carbolic behind her. I rather like the smell of carbolic; it reminds me of my own days in Africa.

My little chat with Mrs. Fledge cheered me, in some curious way, and when I descended the stairs, dressed for dinner, some fifteen minutes later, I was feeling a good deal more jaunty than I had all day. Not that I intended to demonstrate this; there were still scores to settle, with Harriet and with Fledge, and I did not intend that this should be a happy evening in Crook. I reached the drawing room to find Harriet asking Sidney whether his bath had been hot enough. Sidney was always animated when he talked to Harriet. “Oh yes, Lady Coal,” he cried—he was sitting on the edge of the couch, beside Cleo, the pair of them like some latter-day Hansel and Gretel—“oh, it was as hot as I could bear it! And I sat there so long I came out wrinkled like a prune and pink as a lobster!”

I suppressed a savage snort of rage that an inanity like this should be uttered in my own drawing room. Harriet smiled anxiously at the young couple. “I do hope you didn’t catch colds?” she said.

Cleo was drinking a large gin. She drinks heavily for a girl her age—my fault, I’m afraid, she takes after me. “Well I don’t think you look like a lobster,” she said.

Sidney turned to her. They were sitting very close together on the couch—it was Cleo’s proximity that permitted him to express himself so freely, despite my glowering, terrifying presence. His soft baby’s skin grew puckered with silliness. “Oh you don’t!” he said, with a shrill laugh.

“No,” declared Cleo, “I think you look more like a ferret.”

“A ferret!” he screamed, and the pair of them dissolved in giggles.

Harriet smiled indulgently. “A ferret,” she said. “Oh no, darling, Sidney doesn’t look at all like a ferret. I should say Sidney looked like—an otter. Yes, an otter.”

As this fascinating conversation went forward Fledge appeared and announced that dinner was served.

Iam not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamored of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled. My relationships, as a result, are few, and those few are tenuous, prickly sorts of arrangements, altogether lacking in the spontaneity and intimacy for which humans, I’m told, have an instinctive need. I am aware of no such instincts in myself. But there is a type of dour and taciturn individual in whose company I can, I find, be at ease —men with strong, uncomplicated natures and no interest in chatter. Silent, solid men. My gardener, George Lecky, was just such a man, and it is high time, I think, after listening to Sidney’s fatuous nonsense, and witnessing the furtive mockery of Fledge, that you were introduced to him.