The Grotesque Page 8

  But by ignoring Harriet all those years, I now realized, I had played right into Fledge’s hands. For he awakened her, in a romantic sense, my sleeping beauty (ha!) and, brushing aside the religious sentiments with which she had for so long masked from herself her loneliness and frustration, he quickly dominated her heart, as a means of dominating my house.

  ❖

  Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated. I saw it beginning in the larder, for some reason, that’s where I saw Fledge making his first move, emerging from the underbrush of servility, as it were, to strike at the master. I imagine they were conducting one of Harriet’s “inventories”; she does this every so often to ensure that we don’t run out of food and starve to death.

  The larder of Crook is a narrow room, high-ceilinged, dimly lit, its marble-tiled shelves crowded with jars of pickles and preserves, dried fruit and stewed fruit, leftovers of cold joints and milk puddings and jellies. Harriet—this is all conjectural, you must remember, but it hardly strains credibility, given what we already know—Harriet edges slowly forward between the shelves, her worried eyes scanning from side to side till she fetches up before the jams. She begins to count jars. Her hair, today, is pinned in a particularly lustrous and unruly bun; she turns to Fledge and asks him does he think we should order more from the village?

  Fledge thinks not. A tall man, he peers at the high shelves and reads off the labels: “Plum jam, raspberry jam, strawberry jam, gooseberry jam. At least half-a-dozen of each, madam.”

  “Is there, Fledge?” says Harriet. “I had no idea we’d eaten so little jam.”

  Fledge turns to her in that narrow place. He cannot fail to notice how Harriet’s eyes shine in the gloom, nor how a strand or two of her rich, coppery bun drifts loose of its pin and makes her look rather attractively distrait. And Harriet? What does she see, what does she feel? A vague tenderness for the man, possibly, such as she feels for most of humanity; she has never consciously examined her feelings, really; he is Fledge, he is the butler. But now she looks up into his face, and there between the pickled gherkins and the rhubarb chutney a rather warm, liquid event occurs inside her.

  Suddenly, all is very still. The smile dies on Harriet’s lips, but she does not look away: she has recognized the expression on Fledge’s face. The silence throbs vibrantly in that ill-lit larder, and then he gently places a hand on the small of her back, and, with the other round her shoulders, he draws her to him and kisses her on the mouth.

  Harriet closes her eyes. His kiss is firm, soft, hungry, sweet, and terribly, terribly arousing. Suddenly, oh how she wants him, his long pale slender body, his quiet, strong maleness—“Oh Fledge,” she breathes. Her respiration is disturbed and the color has risen in her cheeks. She withdraws a little. She gazes at him with intense seriousness and then, lifting her arms, she links her fingers behind his neck and draws his face to hers once more. When they break apart this time tears are streaming down her cheeks and her mind is in turmoil. “Oh Fledge,” she murmurs, “just hold me for a moment. I think I shall faint.”

  Fledge holds her, and Harriet slowly brings her breathing under control. She pulls a small handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan and dabs at her eyes, which shine now more radiantly than ever. “Oh Fledge,” she says, with a small gurgle of laughter, then sniffs several times and blows her nose. Tucking the handkerchief back up her sleeve, she takes the butler’s hands firmly in her own. “You are a dear man,” she says, “but we must get on. Have we, dear Fledge, enough jam?”

  “Yes madam,” says Fledge. “We have enough jam.”

  Faithless woman! Jezebel! Oh how I raged and seethed in my grotto, as my drooling body snorted in that loud, piggy manner that had Doris running down the hall to clap me on the back in case I suffocated on my own phlegm! In time I calmed down, and, when I could think again, it occurred to me that if Harriet did, indeed, permit herself to surrender to passion for a few brief moments in the larder, I should not assume that a lifetime of devout Catholic practice would thereupon simply collapse, regardless of the psychology behind it, that a single kiss would usher in a period of uncontrolled promiscuity. No, that would take a little longer to come about. First there would have to be the soul-searching.

  I see Harriet in her bedroom in the west wing. She has retired to write letters before lunch. But though her fountain pen is filled, and the crested sheet of white bond lies before her on the leaf of her escritoire, no mark has yet appeared upon the virgin page. She gazes out of the window to the hills north of Crook, and watches a bird rising and falling on the currents of the clear, cold air, so distant as to seem no more than a speck. Her long-dormant sexuality has been awakened—is she to lay it to rest once more, let it sleep and be forgotten, as it has this last quarter-century, and die?

  “Darling Hilary,” she writes. “We are so looking forward to seeing you all for Christmas. Fledge and I were in the larder this morning, making sure there was enough jam in the house.” Harriet stops writing and again gazes out of the window. This will not do, not at all. She screws up the sheet of notepaper and tosses it into her wastebasket. Fetching out a clean sheet, she writes: “Dear Fledge,” and then sits once more with her eyes fixed on that far, circling bird and her pen poised, unmoving, at a shallow angle over the paper. Finally she rises to her feet and rings for him.

  “Fledge,” she says, turning to him as he silently materializes in the doorway of her bedroom. He is as inscrutable as ever, despite what has happened in the larder. His collar is spotless, his tailcoat perfectly pressed, the crease in his gray striped trousers as sharp as a blade. His oxfords shine with a dull gleam, as does his red-brown hair. His chin is impeccably shaved. “Madam?”

  “Fledge, whatever were we thinking of this morning? We must have been mad! What if someone had seen us? Fledge, it must never be spoken of, and naturally it must never, ever happen again.”

  “Yes madam.”

  “That will be all.”

  Fledge bows, and retires.

  ❖

  One further incident is probably necessary before we send Harriet scurrying to her priest. I imagine it occurring a day or two later. Harriet is again in her room, and has just rung for her afternoon tea. She sits gazing at the picture I have already alluded to, The Virgin of the Lilies. Fledge knocks, and enters with her tea tray, and sets it down. Then, sinking to one knee beside her chair, he takes Harriet’s hand and presses the palm to his lips.

  “Oh Fledge,” she murmurs, as the tears come. They come so easily, these days, for some reason. She reaches for him, opening her arms, and gathers him to her breast. She clings chastely to him for a few moments, weeping, and then becomes aware of his hand under her skirt upon the flesh of her inside thigh. “No!” she cries, thrusting him away. “No, Fledge, this is all wrong, all wrong!” She rises to her feet and moves away, nervously touching her hair, very flustered indeed. “Fledge, you must not do this. It’s simply absurd of you to do this! Too absurd for words!”

  Fledge has moved to the door; then he is gone, without a word, and the door closes with a soft click of the latch behind him. Harriet sinks into her chair once more and absently smooths her skirt where the man’s hand crept under it. She gazes out unseeing over the bleak wintry countryside, and then her damp eyes return to the painting. From the foreground clusters of lilies tinted a delicate shade of mauve sweep back in a graceful curve to the figure of the Virgin, who clasps to her white-robed body the infant Jesus. She stands upon a bank of cloud, while far beneath a river winds through green and rolling countryside—countryside not unlike our own part of Berkshire, oddly enough. Harriet has often sat before this painting, pondering the ancient metaphorical association of altitude and divinity, and thinking of her dead savior. It is not Jesus Christ who occupies her thoughts now, however, but Fledge; and he is very much alive.

  ❖

  But perhaps you think I’m making all this up, perhaps you th
ink these the delusions of a diseased imagination. Explain to me why, then, if Fledge had not seduced Harriet, and thus bent her to his will, she made no protest when he turned my wheelchair to the wall?

  I was in the barn on Christmas morning, the place rendered temperate by a pair of powerful hot-air blowers, when Fledge tapped at the door: Inspector Limp was waiting in the drawing room to see me. Now Crook tends to be rather crowded at Christmas, and most of the problem is the Horns. The Horns are the family of my elder daughter, Hilary, whom I may have mentioned to you. She takes after Harriet and has been terrified of me since early childhood. Every year she and her husband, Henry, an orthopedic surgeon who wears a thick black beard that makes him look like a sea captain (I used to tell people he earned his living making ships in bottles) bring their son, my grandson, Victor, now aged ten, down to Crook for Christmas. Harriet of course loves having them, and works herself into a fine dither as she fusses in advance over food, drink, the tree, the decorations, etc. Henry Horn is, I suppose, a tolerable enough fellow; he always takes a lively interest in my bones, and I in his, but quite frankly the only member of that family for whom I have any real affection is Victor.

  Victor Horn is a true Coal. He is a fat boy with a thick fringe of brown hair that falls into his eyes rather as Cleo’s does. He has Cleo’s teeth, too, Coal teeth, and when he grins, which is often, his cheeks plump up to shiny freckled balls and his front teeth protrude far and goonishly over his lower lip. A precocious child, he had brought a volume of Freud with him, Totem and Taboo, never read it myself, and told me very seriously that he planned to become a psychoanalyst. The point is, that when all these people are about it is much harder than usual for me to maintain an atmosphere of slightly sulky gloom in the house; there’s altogether far too much jollity. Actually, it wasn’t quite so bad this year, for Cleo’s depression cast something of a general pall over the proceedings.

  They were all at Mass in the village when Limp came to call. A small bald man in a long gray raincoat, he apologized for disturbing my Christmas and asked me to go down to the station with him. I agreed, of course. We drove into Ceck and I was led through the tiny police station and into the back room, which was bare but for a simple wooden table, two upright chairs, and, leaning against the wall, something cloaked in a heavy, dark green tarpaulin. The Ceck policeman stood beside it. “All right Cleggie,” said Limp, and the policeman removed the tarpaulin.

  It was a bicycle, a high, black one. Splinters of ice and frozen clods of mud clung to it; small dirty puddles were already forming on the floor as they melted and fell off. A number of spokes on the back wheel were bent, and the saddle had been twisted around backwards. Limp asked me if I’d ever seen it before. “Yes,” I said. I knew that bicycle. I used to ride it myself. It had been dug up in the Ceck Marsh that morning, after a handlebar was reported poking up through a fissure in the frozen earth. “Is that,” said Limp, “the bicycle Sidney Giblet was riding the night he disappeared?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

  ❖

  I returned to Crook. A large number of Roman Catholics were milling about the drawing room, drinking my sherry and eating ham sandwiches. “There you are, dear,” said Harriet, coming forward to peck my cheek. “Fledge told us Inspector Limp came for you. We thought you’d been thrown in clink.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” I replied. I groped about for some suitable fiction. “Just some silly nonsense about poachers.”

  “Poachers!” cried Connie Babblehump. I groaned inwardly. “Curse of the countryside,” she declared.

  “Mantraps,” said Freddy Hough, a magistrate. “That’s the answer. Big pair of iron jaws, with a spring. Chap steps on it— snap!”

  “Freddy, really,” said Harriet quietly.

  “Take his leg right off,” said Freddy, then swallowed the remains of his sandwich and washed it down with a mouthful of amontillado. “That old rogue Crowthorne,” he said, “he’s the worst.”

  I was quiet and subdued the rest of the day. Nobody noticed, I think, what with the presents being opened and the flurry of preparations for dinner. Patrick Pin traditionally ate his Christmas dinner at Crook, so after Harriet’s guests had gone I permitted myself to be drawn into light eschatological chat by the drawingroom fire. I have no great liking for Patrick Pin; I believe he tries to turn people against me because I refuse to accept transubstantiation. But this particular afternoon I was preoccupied with what I’d seen at the police station, and remained civil. The smells drifting down the passage from the kitchen grew increasingly tantalizing as the afternoon drew on. We ate at six; Victor was very jolly, having been allowed a glass of beer.

  When it was all over, and the turkey and the ham had been largely demolished, a soporific reaction set in, a digestive torpor, and I decided to go down to Ceck’s Bottom and mull things over for a while. This was actually something I did every year, a facet of my role as landlord and squire.

  ❖

  George was standing, grinning, at the head of the table, wielding a long, sharp, bone-handled carving knife in one hand, a fork in the other, and cutting steaming slices of meat from a large haunch of pork. Frank Bracknell was there, and Bill Cudlip (sexton and gravedigger), and old John Crowthorne of course. All were in braces and shirtsleeves, for the stove was stoked and burning, and all were drinking beer from large, froth-ringed glasses. Someone, from an impulse probably pagan in origin, had nailed sprigs of holly and mistletoe to various jambs and lintels, and several wooden crates of brown ale were stacked by the back door. As the room steamed up the men received heaped plates of roast meat and potatoes from George; they sat there like feasting gods, like woodland deities, these satyrs of Ceck, and their talk was brusque and clipped and jocular. The candles flickered, the lamps glowed, and I could feel the spirits of deep winter drifting over the cold, snow-covered, moon-silvered country outside. I sank into a chair in the corner, accepted a glass of beer, and pondered the implications of the morning’s revelation. I could make no sense of it. Why would the boy bury his bicycle? I allowed my mind to go blank, my thoughts to wander, and slowly, in my imagination, a picture began to form.

  It was night. I saw a man on a bicycle, with a load on his shoulder, pedaling toward me down the Ceck’s Bottom road. It was a bulky load, all tied up in an old sack, and it flopped about as the bicycle glided through the shadows of oak boughs and foliage. He sat up very erect in the saddle, this dark rider, and as he drew close I recognized something familiar in the stiffness of his figure. It was not until he passed through a pool of blotchy moonlight, however, that I was able to make out his features. It was Fledge, of course; and as he turned off down the cart track I realized with a lurch of shock that what he carried in the sack on his shoulder could only be the body of Sidney Giblet: he was taking it out to the marsh.

  What did this mean? What was I trying to tell myself? Why would he be carting Sidney’s body out to the marsh? Then slowly, and with a dawning sensation of horror, I realized that I’d got the whole thing the wrong way round, completely arse-backwards. It was Fledge who was being blackmailed by Sidney, I realized, not vice versa, and for this he had murdered the boy. I sat up rigid in my chair, the beer glass suspended halfway to my lips. But why, I thought? What was at stake, that he would murder for it? What on earth would justify murder? And it was then, for the first time, that I glimpsed the true outline of the fiend’s design: he had murdered Sidney to prevent the boy from disturbing his scheme to usurp me —the bastard was after my house!

  I drained off my beer and returned in my mind to the marsh; and now I saw him standing on the edge of a pit he had dug, at the bottom of which lay a blackly gleaming pool of water. I saw him guide the bicycle over the edge, and I saw it tip, and fall, and splash to rest in the black water at the bottom. He stood there at the edge of the pit, framed against the moon, and it was as though I were at the bottom, gazing up at him. But why didn’t he toss the sack in too? Why hadn’t the sack come up with the bicycle? This was stra
nge. I frowned. I lit a cigar. I sank back into the chair, and allowed my mind to drift once more. And it occurred to me then that perhaps he had been disturbed in his work, that he had heard someone coming through the trees, and been forced to creep off into the darkness—to come back later and fill in the pit. But if he’d been surprised in this way (so ran my reasoning), it was unlikely he’d have been able to haul off the bulk of a sacked corpse with him, it was far too cumbersome; and if this was so, if he’d crept off without it—and for some weird reason I felt certain that this indeed was what had happened—then whoever it was had disturbed him would have come upon the ghastly thing, and then, improbable though it may seem, would have removed it from the vicinity of the bicycle pit. Again I sat up in my chair, puffing energetically on my cigar. Was this feasible? It did at least explain why the bicycle had come up but not the sack. But if it furnished an answer to that question, it raised the even more perplexing one of why the other man had failed to report what he’d found.

  And it was at that point I realized I could think of only four men who would be out on the Ceck Marsh at that time of night; and all four were at that very moment sitting with me in George Lecky’s kitchen, barking with laughter as they swallowed brown ale.

  I did not get any further with my speculations that night. Frankly, I backed off; these were men I’d known for many years, all my life in the case of Crowthorne, Cudlip, and Bracknell, and it was impossible to imagine any of them trying to dispose of a corpse in some improper manner. I decided to suspend my hypothesis for the time being, and await new facts. This is the inductive method; it had guided my thinking for over thirty years.

  What I dreaded now, having made a positive identification of the bicycle, was breaking the news to Cleo. At first she took it like a Coal, square on the chin. “I knew it,” she muttered, clenching her fists and taking a number of deep breaths. It was Boxing Day, we were in my study, and Harriet, whom I’d already told, was sitting anxiously on the edge of an armchair, ready with the solace of the maternal bosom. But the maternal bosom, it seemed, was not needed. Pressing her lips together and frowning darkly, the girl turned toward the fire and, plunging her hands into the pockets of her skirt, gazed for a few moments into the flames. “Well,” she said, looking up at last, brisk and brave, “it rather looks as if Sidney came to grief on the marsh after all. You see, I’ve been expecting this; I knew.”