Patrick McGrath - The Grotesque

One morning, shortly after the Sykes-Herring letter, unable to work, I left the barn and set off briskly down the road to Ceck. This was not a thing my doctor recommended, on account of my sclerotic coronary arteries, but it was something I used to do anyway, as nothing gave me more pleasure than a brisk walk in the country round Crook. Sadly, I had no dog with me—my old setter Wallace had died during the summer, and I hadn’t had the heart yet to replace him. Well, the sky was blue, with squadrons of big, thick white clouds blustering across it, and the air was rank with the good strong smell of manure, and of fallen leaves just beginning to rot. The fresh-turned soil in the fields beside the road contributed its own rich odors to the day, and there were still, I noticed, a number of birds about, swallows and martins for the most part, and of course the crows that stay with us year round; a group of them were assembled on the roof of the Hodge and Purlet, and as I approached the pub they set up a raucous chorus of derisive caws.

The Hodge and Purlet is an old establishment, almost as old as Crook itself, and it shows its age. The ceilings are low, the floors uneven, and the framing timbers that stand out so blackly against the white-plastered walls are riddled with deathwatch beetle. But while Crook is built on high ground, the Hodge and Purlet stands not far from the marsh, and the dampness of the earth beneath has for centuries been seeping up through the cracks in the flagged stone floors such that the building has a faintly greenish tinge to it today, caused by tiny fungoid colonies that, despite being constantly scrubbed off, always come creeping back. As for the name, hodge derives from an Old Dutch word for mutton stew, and purlet refers to a chain of twisted loops such as might once have been embroidered on the edge of a piece of lace, or inlaid in the border of a violin. Accordingly, upon the weathered sign that hung over the door of the inn was painted a steaming stewpot within a faded circle of interlinked, oval-shaped loops. This wordless sign was gently creaking on its rusty chains as I passed beneath it and entered the public bar, seeking the solace of men with strong, uncomplicated natures. Shortly before noon George appeared, accompanied by old John Crowthorne, who helped him with the pigs.

George was a big man, and he had to bend his head to get through the door. Then, straightening up, he cast his eye over the room and, finding it occupied only by myself, he suddenly opened wide his jaws and displayed a set of large, square, yellowing, horselike teeth. Now George, I should tell you, was a man of extremely few words. But he did possess a deep and subtle intelligence—a sort of wisdom, in fact, a countryman’s wisdom—and many years ago, in Africa, where I met him, I had learned to watch his gestures, if I wished to know his meaning, and the fleeting expressions that touched his long-jawed, horsey face, rather than listen to his words, which were, as I say, rare and brief. It was only through this mute, muscular vocabulary of gesture and expression that one could ever know what George was thinking. The drawing back of the lips from the teeth that I have just described—a most peculiar and unsightly rictus—the meaning of that, however, the emotion it was intended to express, I had never been able to fathom. It certainly wasn’t a smile; simply, it was something George did in situations that seemed to call for it. I took it for a greeting in this context, and waved gaily at him as he took off his cap, rubbed his cropped and nubbled skull with a huge, grimy hand, and then patted the pockets of his old, frayed, pin-striped jacket, looking for his pipe.

A big man, I’ve said; and there was not an ounce of fat on him, he was as lean and strong today as he had been when I’d first met him, more than twenty-five years before. He had thick black eyebrows that meshed in a heavy hedge at the root of his nose, and he wore old brown corduroy trousers tied at the ankles, above big muddy boots, with string; and having found his pipe, he advanced into the room, smelling of pigs and earth and twinkling with a sort of dry, laconic irony that was habitual with him and a true reflection of his nature. Old John Crowthorne, a local man, was already at the bar and had bid me a good morning; he too smelled strongly of pigs. I paid for their pints and began to regain my good humor.

With men like these I could forget Sykes-Herring and his petty machinations, I could forget the simpering Sidney, and the scheming Fledge.

Well, we stood there at the bar, and the light of that brisk autumn day came drifting in through the little windows and fell in irregular splotches and puddles on the old worn gray flagstones that still bore the scratches where, in the old days, they’d been nightly chalked to keep out the witches. A good fire was burning in the grate, and our talk was of pigs, and the weather, and the land, and such, and it came in sporadic bursts, all in that rich, slurry Berkshire dialect I’d picked up as a boy, and could still fall into at times like this; and in the silences George would charge his great black pipe with shag, and old John would whistle between his toothless gums as his bright, restless old eyes darted about the place, as if he were searching for some lost object. Harbottle, the landlord, in a white apron as vast as a mainsail, leaned on the bar and murmured scraps of the Ceck gossip to us.

It gives me pain to think about him now, poor George, for he was not a bad man, and I can see him still, so clearly, standing there at the bar beside me, quietly smoking his pipe, a pint of brown ale before him, and occasionally lifting his leg to stamp a hobnailed boot on the stone floor with a great ringing sound. The sunlight shafted across his body in a thick, yellowy stripe, and along its beam, faintly buzzing, drifted a languid wasp, last survivor of the summer, just emerged, perhaps, from a basket of wrinkled apples that stood neglected in a little window alcove on the far side of the room. It crawled across the bar toward a pool of spilt beer and George, who had been gazing absently into some middle distance of his memory, suddenly took notice of the creature. Placing a large thumb into the pool of beer, he permitted the insect to crawl onto his cracked, horny nail, then he lifted it into the light. The yellow-striped bulb of the wasp’s abdomen twitched with a sort of sleepy reflex as it crawled up the nail and onto the tip of George’s thumb. For some reason both old John and myself were gazing intently at this silent drama. George then bared his teeth and, placing his middle finger on the insect’s thorax, very slowly crushed it to a pulp on the end of his thumb. Old John sniggered; I snorted once, myself, then lit a cigar and ordered more drinks as George wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers. The incident prompted me, I remember, to start talking about the insects of Africa; for it was in large part due to an infestation of flies in Tanganyika in 1926 that George and I had ever met.

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.