The Grotesque (16 page)

I was sitting in my wicker chair, gazing at
Phlegmosaurus,
when I became aware of movement in the roof. I looked up; he was standing at the top of the staircase to the loft, his head bathed in a pool of wintry sunlight from the little window in the gable behind him, so that his features were entirely masked by shadow. For a moment neither of us spoke, neither of us moved. It was an important moment, a sort of test. I did not hesitate. Rising from my chair, and extending my arms upward toward him, I cried: “Well good God man, come down. You must be starving!”

I embraced my old comrade warmly, despite the smell. A man who has been living rough in the Ceck Marsh for several days is not in pleasant condition. His jacket and trousers were filthy with mud, still damp on the seat and cuffs, sticks of straw and other plant matter clinging to them. He was bareheaded, unshaven, and foul of breath, and from his features had disappeared that habitually stoic and tranquil expression, replaced now by watchfulness, nervousness, and fear. He had a
hunted
look. I sat him in the wicker chair and gave him some scotch. He took a swallow, then pulled back his lips from his teeth and briefly rubbed his scalp and then his eyes. He drank more whisky. I could sense it heating and reviving him. I gave him a few minutes to compose himself. Should I go to the house for food? No, not yet, he wanted to talk first. He finished the whisky and bent his body forward in the chair, his palms on his knees and his elbows sticking out, his arms thus forming a pair of rigid buttresses to his tense, exhausted frame. He gazed at the floor of the barn and took a series of deep breaths. “So George,” I said at last, “what’s going on?”

Have I spoken to you of the unreliability of memory? Retrospection does yield order, no doubt about that, but I wonder if this order isn’t perhaps achieved solely as a function of the remembering mind, which of its very nature tends to yield order. I say this only because the conversation that follows occurred a long time ago, and much has happened in the interim. But the
spirit
of that conversation—this I think I have captured, and this is the important thing.

George shook his head. His hand kept going to his neck, where he rubbed it hard against an angry rash, the result of contact with some virulent piece of vegetation out in the marsh, I presume. Clearly the thing itched badly, and I made a mental note to bring ointment with me from the house. Still staring at the floor he began to speak; and he surprised me, for it was John Crowthorne he spoke about, he was abusing the man, calling him an old fool—it had occurred to me that old John might play a part in all this, but I hadn’t pursued it very far. George spoke with a low, halting cadence; then up came his head, and he glared at me with an angry but pathetically futile passion, the passion of a man who knows his predicament is intractable and hopeless.

“But what about old John?” I coaxed him. In the silence that followed we could both distinctly hear a rat scuffling through the hay at the far end of the barn. “I give him the lorry,” said George at last, dropping his eyes to the floor, “and he takes it round the back of the marsh.” I nodded; old John used George’s swill lorry for his more far-ranging nocturnal poaching expeditions, this I knew well. “I didn’t hear him when he come back, but something woke me in the night so I go to the window, and there’s a light in the shed. Well, I open the window and I
hear
it.”

Another silence. “Hear what, George?” I said softly. I gave him more scotch.

He rubbed his neck. “Someone chopping in there. I could hear someone chopping in there. So I go down.”

I nodded again; when George mentioned the shed, it was his slaughterhouse he was referring to. “I go down,” he said. His voice had become blank of emotion, hollow, as though unable to admit to comprehension of what he was saying. “I go down,” he repeated. “I can hear him in there as I cross the yard; he’s chopping something. ‘That you, John?’ I say, when I’m at the door. He’s at the back and he’s chopping something up. He turns round, grinning at me like a bloody monkey.”

George fell silent again. His eyes were wide as he stared at the floor. “He didn’t know who it was,” he muttered, and a terrible understanding dawned upon me, and as George stared at the floor the barn seemed to grow suddenly very dark, and in my own mind I could hear that terrible chopping in the night, the terrible chopping that woke George from sleep, and I could see old John grinning in the gloom of the shed as he chopped up what he’d found out on the marsh. “He didn’t know who it was,” whispered George, and there was horror in his voice. “He found him out on the marsh in a sack, and since it weren’t a local man, he says to himself I’ll let the pigs have him.” Silence again; George dropped his head, set his elbows on his knees, and again rubbed his neck. “I took the chopper from him,” he muttered, “but it was too late.”

“Too late?”

Another long pause. George didn’t answer; it hardly mattered, I’d guessed his meaning. “I wanted to knock him down, I was that furious,” he muttered. His voice had a faraway sound to it now, as though it came from the end of a very long tunnel. “Wouldn’t have done no good.” Another silence; the crow stirred in the rafters overhead, then flapped noisily to another perch a few feet higher in the roof. I rose from my chair and again paced the barn; I was now all too clear about what had happened. Just as I’d speculated on Christmas night, someone had disturbed Fledge out on the marsh, and found Sidney’s body in a sack. That someone was old John Crowthorne. “Just had to finish the job,” George murmured, a little later, “that’s all there was to it.” Then he looked up and said in a clear, firm voice: “It was old John buried the bones, when the pigs was done. Didn’t do a very good job of it, eh? Eh?” George laughed, a terrible laugh, hopeless and black. “Made a bloody awful job of it, didn’t he? Oh good Christ”—and he clenched his fists tight, closed his eyes, and pulled back the lips from his teeth in that terrible grimace. A single harsh screech came from the rafters, and again the clumsy flap of wings.

I said nothing more for some minutes. I had come round to the back of George’s chair. I gripped him by the shoulders and squeezed them warmly. I understood his predicament; he would never go to the police with this story; for one thing, he had worked beside old John Crowthorne almost as long as he’d been in Ceck, and besides, his own complicity was clear. But I put it to him anyway, and as I expected he was adamant. He was a countryman, and he had all the countryman’s suspicion of police and officials and institutions; he followed natural law, but the ghastly irony at the heart of all this was that so did John Crowthorne. I told him he should stay in the barn while we tried to think the thing through. Then I went over to the house to get bread and cheese for him, and ointment for the rash on his neck.

Crossing the driveway I began to see a net of guilt, a net that originated with Fledge, that had enmeshed old John Crowthorne, and then George, and now me too, inasmuch as I was shielding George from the law. As I entered the house Fledge was emerging from the drawing room. The effect of seeing
him, then,
was strong, but I attempted not to show it. He followed me down to the kitchen and began to prepare Harriet’s tea tray. “Have we any ointment, Fledge?” I said, after fetching out a loaf of bread and some cheddar.

“Ointment, Sir Hugo?”

“Yes, ointment,” I snapped. “Salve, embrocation—something to soothe a rash. Oh never mind,” I said, “I’ll find it myself.” I’d suddenly realized how precarious George’s situation was; it would be extremely unwise to let Fledge know he was here. I left the kitchen to look for ointment, conscious of the butler’s curious eyes upon me as he laid the tray for Harriet’s afternoon tea.

I returned to the barn and found George still sitting in the wicker chair with his head in his hands. The light was fading by this time, and the shadows had begun to cluster about him. He sat across from
Phlegmosaurus,
and an oddly dramatic tableau they made, the heavy-jawed skeleton rearing over the rigid figure in the wicker chair. He ate ravenously and drank more whisky, but first he rubbed the ointment I’d brought him into the rash, which extended, I now saw, almost all the way round his neck. “In a bloody sack,” he muttered as he ate. “Who done him, tell me that? Who put him out there in a sack like that?”

I hesitated to tell him. I frowned. I rose from my chair and turned on the lights. “No,” cried George, lifting a hand to his eyes. “Leave them off!” I turned them off and returned to my chair. George had finished eating. He wiped his hand across his mouth and glared at me. He was stronger for having eaten, much stronger. “Who done him, Sir Hugo? You know. Tell me.”

Still I hesitated. Would it, I wondered, be to George’s advantage to know what I knew? I was aware of an indefinite feeling of deep unease at the prospect of telling George the truth. “Tell me,” he said.

“All right, George,” I said, and I told him. He listened in silence. When I had finished he said he wanted to smoke; I only had cigars, so I gave him one of those. Still he made no comment on what I had told him. His mind was busy, however, and suddenly I glimpsed the old George, the tough and taciturn man I knew so well, the man who kept his own counsel. The food, the drink, the shelter of my gloomy barn—these things had dispelled the fear that he had acquired in the marsh. Soon, I knew, he would take his destiny in his own hands once more. What did this mean for me? For Fledge? Suddenly I felt great dread, as I felt control of the situation slipping through my fingers. George and I sat smoking as the barn grew darker, and all I could see of him then was a brooding, silent, shadowy phantom, hunched around the glowing red tip of a cigar.

George slept in the barn that night, up in the loft among the stored bones, and the next night also, and he continued to grow stronger. And as he grew stronger, so did he grow more silent, and if he formed a plan of some sort, he did not communicate it to me. I quickly came to regret having told him about Fledge. I began to think that he should give himself up, and regardless of his scruples tell the police what he knew. This would mean involving me, and Fledge too, of course. It would be extremely tiresome for the family, particularly for Cleo, but after all there
had
been murder committed. George would have to serve time in prison, and Fledge would swing. Or would he? I had no confidence that this was so. All I had were my suspicions, my convictions, but nothing in the way of hard, incontrovertible, empirical
fact.
Perhaps George would simply put his own head in the noose, if he went to the police—his own or John Crowthorne’s. Could old John be persuaded to go to the police? Unlikely. That old poacher was deeply deficient in the moral sense, this was clear; this was a man who could find a body in a sack and, because “it weren’t a local man,” cheerfully butcher it for pig feed. But George would never betray him, this I knew; for I had had ample opportunity, over the years, to observe how deep the loyalty ran in George Lecky, once he was committed to a man. For twenty-five years, you see, George had been fiercely, discreetly, and uncompromisingly loyal to
me.

Two days and two nights George stayed in the barn. Limp’s men were still out on the marsh looking for him, though according to the papers his description had been circulated throughout the southeast, suggesting that the police now considered it at least possible that he’d left the area. The atmosphere in the house was tense, not least because I was being impossible. For quite apart from the strain I was experiencing hiding George, I had also to assimilate what was probably the single most humiliating event of my scientific career.

❖

For I had, indeed, delivered my lecture on the seventh, I’d delivered it to an audience of four: Hilary, Victor, Sykes-Herring, and a man called Sir Edward Cleghorn. Cleghorn is an eccentric crank; he is Harriet’s “pterodactyl man,” and he claims that he and I are the only gentlemen naturalists still working in Britain. His presence was frankly an embarrassment. Sykes-Herring was there because he had to be, as, in a way, were Hilary and Victor. Harriet and Cleo had not attended, Sidney’s bones having come up only two days before. Two old men blundered in, thinking it a lecture on coprolites, then blundered out again; and that, in terms of what should have been the crowning moment of my paleontological career, was it.

Afterwards, after I had reviewed the dinosaur-bird relationship from evolutionary and anatomical perspective, after I had spoken at length about the phlegmosaurian claw and the phlegmosaurian hipbone, and the implications of said claw and hipbone, after I had thumped the pulpit, like Thomas Huxley, for
Archaeopteryx,
oldest of the fossil birds, after I had talked about atavisms, and stressed the necessity of asking ourselves whether the dinosaur was truly the cold-blooded reptile we unthinkingly assumed him to be—after I had said all this, and more, there was the small, thin sound, in that vast, empty auditorium, of eight hands clapping. “Very interesting,” said Sykes-Herring, as he took us to tea in the senior common room. “Most provocative.” He didn’t believe a word I’d said. In his own mind he was harrumphing like a walrus. Cleghorn drew me aside and, spraying me with cake crumbs and saliva as he spoke, told me I was wasting my breath. “Can’t go meddling with the taxonomy,” he said, “terrifies people. It’s been this way since Baron Cuvier, and he died”—here he half-choked on a piece of cake—“in 1832! Darwin was barely aboard the
Beagle!”
I could have done without this; Eddy Cleghorn is extremely unstable, and quite probably mad. Young Victor was enthusiastic, and this was something, I suppose. Perhaps he would follow in my footsteps, revolutionize paleontology. He was, after all, a Coal. But why, I asked myself, had the professional scientific community so unanimously ignored me? Was it, as Cleghorn suggested, because they were made anxious at seeing the established classification of dinosaurs challenged? “Can’t go meddling with the taxonomy,” the old crank had said. “See what happens to a misshelved book? Ceases to exist. Shake up the order, you shake up the world. Frightens people, Hugo, believe me. You’re a radical.” Bloody fool. I began to suspect, actually, that the true cause of my humiliation was Sykes-Herring. I began to suspect that he had failed to publicize the lecture. No one came, I think, simply because no one knew about it. Once again, it seems, I was being persecuted. Sykes-Herring had done this before, you see, in fact he had blighted my entire career, and I now saw that if I was ever to teach the world the phlegmosaurian lesson, I should have to circumvent Sykes-Herring. He was a malevolent, obscurantist reactionary. I should have to be very careful, very cunning, if I was going to best him. He was, after all, the Secretary of the Royal Society. Ha! Little did I know that scientific politics would soon be beyond me forever!