The Grotesque (4 page)

“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.

I
am 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.

❖

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.

It was a four-day tramp, in intense tropical heat, inland from Lindi to the range of hills in which I found my
Phlegmosaurus.
Into those hills we had to sink deep pits to get at the fossil-bearing strata, for the bones had not been exposed, as they are in cliffs and ravines when erosion has helped the paleontologist in his labors and scattered them about the landscape. How many times George made the grueling trip from the diggings to the coast and back, I cannot now remember. He was very tough. I do remember how, in the early morning, while the sun was still bearable, I would pause on the peak of a steep, grassy hill, and there, under the huge African sky, with tree-spotted plains stretching for miles on every side, I would watch George organize his bearers in the camp below. The small bones they carried in boxes on their heads; the heavy ones, the femurs and vertebrae, would be slung on poles, and each pole hoisted between the shoulders of two men. When they were ready George would gaze up the hill and, shielding his eyes from the sun, bare his teeth at me. I doffed my pith helmet and, from my grassy eminence, waved it at him; then off they would go, in a long, snaking line, across the plain towards the sea, chanting as they went. But I knew that in a week I would see them again, with letters from home, newspapers, and fresh supplies of chocolate, quinine, and brandy.