I have had much leisure in the past months to reflect on my first encounter with Fledge, and why he formed such an immediate and intense antipathy toward me. Butlers, I think, are born, not made; the qualities of a good butler—deference, capability, a sort of dignified servility—are qualities of character that arise in cultures where a stable social hierarchy has existed, essentially undisturbed, for centuries. One rarely encounters a good butler in France, for instance, and a good American butler is a contradiction in terms. Fledge is not a born butler; he does not, by nature, defer, nor does he naturally serve. There is in him, at a quite deep level, I believe, a furious resentment that he should be doing this work. Not that one can detect it in the man’s behavior, but it’s there all the same. It has become apparent to me not only that he felt humiliated by what he was doing, but that he bore toward me a fierce antagonism for being the instrument of it. I was not particularly sympathetic; if he enters my house as a butler, I thought, then I shall treat him as a butler. How could I have guessed the lengths to which his ambition would drive him?
All this I have reconstructed since being confined to a wheelchair. At the time I was aware only of a certain emanation from the man, and I remember thinking that though he was a bit bloody-minded, a bit bolshie, if he made Harriet happy then I could quite easily put up with a spot of subdued rancor, as long, of course, as it stayed subdued. After all, I thought, what truck did I have with the man? To a large extent I lived in the barn with my bones, and when in the house I needed him only to put plates of food and glasses of drink under my nose. Let him be bolshie, I thought (by no means selflessly), if he keeps Harriet happy. As a connoisseur of ironies, I cannot, now, help recognizing just how rich this one is.
Since the onset of paralysis I have lost weight, and my tweeds these days hang limp and baggy from my stick-thin frame. My face, too, has changed, as I have ascertained from those fleeting glimpses I catch of it while being wheeled past a mirror. I am humped and cadaverous; my hands lie clawlike on the arms of the wheelchair, and my eyes gaze blankly from a bony, sunken head whose jaw has come permanently to rest upon my clavicle. But in the days of which I speak I held my head upright, and from my steel-gray eyes there leaped sparks of fierce intelligence, no less fierce, in fact, than the barbs of wit that rose constantly to my rather thin and mocking lips. I had a sharp and aquiline nose (I still do), a patrician nose, I always thought it, and atop a clear and lofty brow my thick black hair sprang sideways with oily, crinkly, irrepressibly shaggy energy.
This, then, is what I looked like as I strode briskly into the drawing room that fateful morning last autumn, to find Sidney Giblet leaning against the mantelpiece with a glass of my sherry in his hand, while Harriet and Cleo, also drinking sherry, were sprawled in armchairs, and popular music of some sort came out of the gramophone. “Here you are, darling,” said Harriet. “What about some sherry? Sidney has been telling us about the death of Rupert Brooke.”
I snorted inwardly. The death of Rupert Brooke—this was quintessential Sidney. On the far side of the room, over by the drinks cabinet, I noticed the new butler. I remember feeling, even then, a twinge of unease. Dome, you see, had been so old and helpless, much of the time we had had to wait on him! “I believe he was assaulted by a mosquito,” I said dryly, “and died of his wounds.”
“Oh Daddy,” cried Cleo, “don’t be so horrid.”
“It’s true,” said Sidney, who was clearly in truckling mood, and eager to avoid conflict. “He saw no action, and died in bed of an infection.”
“An infection,” said Cleo, sadly. “And him so keen on cleanness.”
I grinned wolfishly at this rich irony, and Sidney glanced at me uneasily. I think what irritated me most about Sidney, apart from his shrill laughter and his vegetarianism, was his pipe. He smoked a little pipe with a slender reddish rosewood stem and a petite bowl that took no more than a pinch or two of delicately scented herb tobacco—I am not making this up, he smoked herb tobacco! It may, in fact, it now occurs to me, have been his very daintiness, his weediness, that attracted Cleo to him; have you noticed how often vivacious women are attracted to spineless types of men? It’s a phenomenon one frequently observes in Nature, particularly among the insects. For weeks now Sidney had been fluttering about the dark-paneled rooms of Crook like some rare and exotic butterfly, trailing his delicate pipe fumes behind him and generally being a pest. I should have liked to throw him out, but of course I couldn’t, for Cleo apparently had feelings for the creature. “Tell us more,” I said, as the new butler appeared at my elbow with a silver tray upon which stood an infinitesimal glass of sherry, “about Rupert’s infection. You,” I said, turning to the butler, “must be Fledge.”
“I’m so sorry, darling,” cried Harriet, rising to her feet, “how silly I am! Of course he is; and Fledge, this is Sir Hugo.”
He bowed.
“Now Fledge,” I said, “you will have to learn about sherry. One does not drink it from a thimble. Bring me a glass of sherry, please.”
He made another bow and returned to the drinks cabinet. Harriet, who clearly intended that the man’s initiation to life at Crook should be a happy one, joined him there, and began whispering, doubtless instructing him in the alcoholic idiosyncrasies of the master.
“Oh, I know very little about it,” said Sidney, with a sigh. “I believe the doctors were to blame—they misdiagnosed him, or some such thing. I believe it was very painful at the end.”
I beamed at Cleo, who shivered quite dramatically, her girlish imagination having already transported her to the hero’s deathbed, out there in the barbarous Aegean. Then Fledge reappeared with a proper glass of sherry, and before insisting that the gramophone be turned off I proposed a toast to mosquitoes everywhere.
Sidney seemed unwilling, at lunch, to talk more about the nature of Rupert Brooke’s infection, probably out of consideration to Cleo. I don’t go for this, myself; I always think it’s a mistake to pander to the squeamishness of women. Disease, infection, rot, filth, feces, maggots—they’re all part of life’s rich weft and woof, and anyone with a properly scientific outlook should welcome such phenomena as facets of Nature every bit as wonderful as golden eagles and oak trees and great rift valleys and the like. I think the family of a scientist, particularly, should not be permitted to discriminate among Nature’s variety, and to press home this point it was in those days my habit over coffee to send for Herbert.
Herbert was a toad, and I kept him in a glass tank in my study. Because I fed him well, and he did not take much exercise, he was extremely large. I did not find him monstrous, however, nor was there anything revolting to me in the spectacle of a toad eating maggots at the dinner table. These maggots (which are produced by the eggs of the cheese-fly, Piophila casei) George Lecky, my gardener, collected for me on the pig farm down in Ceck’s Bottom. I would spill a few of them onto my plate and watch Herbert set to. Harriet and Cleo had long ago learned to ignore this ritual, and Sidney, whom I generally took the opportunity of instructing in the reproductive and other habits of the species, never knew quite where to look, or how much enthusiasm he had to affect to keep me happy. I do admit that Harriet’s distaste for the toad was not altogether groundless. Her father, the colonel, you see, was called Herbert, and I had somewhat mischievously suggested to her on an earlier occasion that my little beast bore a passing resemblance to the old man, who was, in point of fact, remarkable for his warts. Somehow, and to Harriet’s chagrin, the name had stuck.
So it was, then, that after Fledge had poured and served the coffee I told him to bring Herbert to the table.
“Sir?” he said. Harriet, clearly, had not mentioned Herbert when she outlined the man’s duties to him.
“Oh no, Hugo, please,” she said.
“My dear,” I said, “didn’t you tell Fledge about Herbert? Come, Fledge,” I said, rising to my feet and dabbing at my lips with a starched white napkin, “and meet Herbert.”
Fledge was soon instructed in the proper method of extracting Herbert from his tank, and bringing him to the dining room; and though I could tell the man had no natural feeling for toads, he showed not a flicker of distaste at performing the, to him, disgusting task. Soon Herbert was established on the table, with a big plateful of squirmy white maggots in front of him. I told Sidney that it was once thought that toads were poisonous, but the secretion in question was in fact merely a sort of defensive slime that is highly unpleasant to predators. “Really?’ said Sidney, and set down his coffee untasted. It was at that point that I noticed the butler’s eyes upon me, glinting, for the first time, from beneath hooded lids, with unmistakable hostility; but no sooner had I apprehended the fact than he shifted his glance and continued about his duties.
After lunch I returned to the barn and had, I seem to remember, rather a good afternoon with the leg.
The brain is poorly comprehended by our doctors, though none of course care to admit just how profound is their ignorance. They prefer to gloss over the gulfs in their knowledge with jargon —screeds of verbiage that never explain, only occasionally describe, and generally obfuscate. Take this, for instance: “Damage to the posterior sectors of the inferior frontal convolution of the patient’s left hemisphere may have been the cause of the disintegration of his capacity for speech.” It was my damaged convolution they were referring to here, but could any of them explain to me (even if they thought it worth the effort, which they didn’t) why certain mental faculties were spared, and the rest frozen? Why am I able to see, know, and evaluate the world, yet lift not a finger, nor even blink at will? They don’t know. In fact, they don’t even know that I am capable of experience. Only Cleo does; and possibly Fledge.
Consciousness can be inferred only from behavior, and as I produced no behavior after my “cerebral accident” (about which more in due course), I remained to all intents and purposes a vegetable. No one ever actually called me a vegetable, not within my hearing; but there are other ways of saying it. Toward the end of my hospitalization I remember being wheeled out in front of a group of medical students in order that certain points about catalepsy could be made. It was remarked by a neurologist called Dendrite, who took an occasional interest in me, that I lacked “mental presence,” that I was “ontologically dead.” He went on to describe what he called the “clinical picture.” He referred to my “severe masking,” to my “cataleptic fixity of posture,” to my compulsive grimace, my grinding teeth, my stertorous breathing, accompanied, he said, by “guttural phonation not unlike the grunting of a pig.” Mortified as I was by this last remark, it did not cut me as had the reference to my ontological deadness. What torture, after all, could compare to an experience of isolation like mine? I, ontologically dead? I was, I believe, the most ontologically alive person in that room.
This, then, is the “I” who speaks: cocooned in bone, I pupate behind a blank and lizardlike stare, as my body is slowly consumed by its own metabolism. “He is a pitiful, motionless, misshapen man, unwholesome in appearance and destined to vegetate for the rest of his days.” My neurologist never actually said this, but he might as well have. As for destiny, I have come to believe that to be a grotesque is my destiny. For a man who turns into a vegetable —isn’t that a grotesque?
I seem to remember I was out in the barn the morning the Fledges arrived. I still had the use of my body in those days, I was an active man doing hard intellectual work, not so young that I took for granted my own health and vitality, nor old enough to have become preoccupied with them. I was middle-aged, a middle-aged scientist, in fact a paleontologist, an expert on the great carnosaurs of the late Mesozoic era. I was extremely busy at the time, for I had an important lecture to deliver to the Royal Society; this partly explains why I had no part in the hiring of the Fledges. Harriet saw to all that.
Harriet is my wife. I will not pretend that ours has been a happy marriage, and now that I am paralyzed I find myself saddened at what we wasted. The fault is largely mine. Harriet believes the doctors when they tell her I am a vegetable, she has no reason to think otherwise. We created no strong spiritual bond, nothing that might enable us to transcend my paralysis and maintain contact. With Cleo this is possible, but not with Harriet. She makes sure that I am properly attended to by Mrs. Fledge, but except in one important regard her life has not changed dramatically with my condition; you see, from Harriet’s point of view I have always in a sense been paralyzed. What has changed is that for the first time since our marriage she has become interested in another man. The new man in her life is Fledge.
It was Harriet, as I say, who hired the Fledges. She went up to London and interviewed them, and came back very impressed. She engaged them on the spot, and I was not very happy about that, as there seemed to be some difficulty with their papers. They’d been in the employ of a coffee planter in Kenya, a man who apparently was trampled by an ox and expired without writing them references. But Harriet was sure there wouldn’t be a problem. She had a “feeling” about them, she said. And since the servants’ wages come out of her money, not mine, I merely registered an objection and left it at that.
On reflection this strikes me as fairly typical of my involvement in the running of the house—I occasionally registered an objection and left it at that. You see, I had for so long been preoccupied with my bones that I was oblivious to the domestic arrangements that formed the grounds, so to speak, of my existence. I ate, I drank, and I slept in the house, but my passion, my vitality— that was exercised only in the barn. I lived in the barn, I merely existed in the house. This is not to say that I bear no responsibility for what followed. On the contrary, I was derelict, I see that now, in letting Harriet have a completely free hand to staff the house as she saw fit. Though I must say in my own defense that I had never had reason to doubt her judgment; there was never a problem with the Domes.
I was in the barn, then, when the Fledges arrived. I can imagine only too well what happened: Harriet came to the front door and exclaimed: “Mr. and Mrs. Fledge!”—then opened her arms in a brief ceremonial gesture of welcome. She has a way of doing this, a way of greeting visitors, that implies that with their arrival all, at last, is well. It’s an endearing trait, and but one manifestation of Harriet’s “warmth.” Harriet herself, I should perhaps tell you, is small, plump, and fifty, dresses in trim and comfortable tweeds, and her crowning glory is a magnificent head of coppery tresses which she coils in a bun at the back of her skull and fastens with a sort of knitting needle. Her complexion is pink and unblemished, and she has little, nibbling teeth, like a hamster’s. Cleo does not take after Harriet at all; Cleo is a true Coal, she takes after me.
Do you detect bitterness here? Am I displaying the suppressed rage that simmers constantly in this dying heart of mine? I cannot deny it; if Harriet had kept her wits about her, if her intuitive faculties had not been dulled long ago by a compulsion to observe what she calls “the proprieties,” she would never have brought the diabolical man under my roof, and I would not be in this wheelchair today. But this is wishful thinking. It is not my intention to whine, merely to describe what I have suffered at the hands of a treacherous servant and a faithless wife. You may, when you have heard me out, bestow upon me your sympathy, and then again you may not. It hardly matters; when my story is over I shall be dead.
So. I have told you what Harriet did on the doorstep that morning last autumn; but what sort of a spectacle did the Fledges present, standing there in their long dark overcoats, among their black suitcases? I will tell you: they were like a pair of gaunt and leafless trees.
Fledge himself is difficult to describe. Indeterminacy clings to the man like a mist. He has for so long concealed his true feelings that whatever core of real self yet glows within him, it is invisible to the naked eye. He is neat, of course, in fact he is impeccable, as befits a butler. Slim, slightly over medium height, with reddish-brown hair oiled back at a sleek angle from a peak dead in the middle of his forehead, he could be anything; but the presence at his side of Mrs. Fledge—Doris—situates and defines the man. For Doris is unmistakably a servant. As tall as her husband (and thus a clear head taller than me), thin as a rake, with a sharp, pinched face and black hair scraped back off her forehead and threaded with iron-gray wires, her being is indelibly stamped with the mark of domestic toil. Her nose is prominent and beaky, and her eyes are very dark, iris and pupil both so black they seem fused in a single orb with the merest pinprick of light dead in the center. Those black eyes lend to her face a rather opaque, birdlike quality, and though the simplicity of the woman’s nature very soon becomes apparent, at first sight she gives the appearance of a large crow, an unblinking alien to human affairs, a corvine transmigrated into woman’s form. Only the tip of her nose, enlivened by a network of tiny broken blood vessels, lends color and humanity to her face. And thus they presented themselves, the ghoul and the crow, and then they were over the threshold and under my roof.
It occurs to me that you may be wondering why we need a butler at all, so I should perhaps explain that this was, for Harriet, an indispensable part of “observing the proprieties.” She was brought up in the belief that a house was not a house without some sort of manservant in it. Not that she’s a snob, but she so totally assimilated the outlook of her father, the colonel, that she finds it impossible, in some respects, to adapt to changing social and economic conditions. Failure to adapt, I would tell her, leads to extinction; but she never cared. “Let us die out then,” she blithely replied, “but let us at least do it comfortably.” Hence the butler. We’ve always had one, but the last, an ancient fossil called Dome, died of old age in the summer, and his wife followed him to the grave within a fortnight.
Harriet would then have led them down the hall and through to the back of the house, and so to their quarters, a large, low-ceilinged room at the end of a dark, flagstoned passage, adjacent to an ancient bathroom with tarnished brass taps and a hundred-year-old lavatory. Having been installed in these obscure regions, the Fledges then, presumably, were shown over the house and had their duties explained to them. By the time the gong went for lunch they had taken root.
What else should you know before we go on? The house is called Crook. It is a sixteenth-century manor house, the basic plan of which is the E-shape, two gabled wings projecting at either end and a porch in the middle. Constructed of brick and timber, the walls are now completely overgrown with ivy, and the windows peer through the foliage like the eyes of some stunted and shaggy beast. There is moss between the roof tiles, and in front of the house the driveway curves round a small pond overgrown with rushes and coated with a thick green scum. To the right of the house a cobble-stoned alley leads to the back yard, which is enclosed on two sides by empty stables and outhouses, and on the third, facing the back door, by a brick wall that gives onto the vegetable garden and the orchard. Off to the left of the house stands the barn. Crook, curiously, faces south, a remarkable decision on the part of the builder, given the sixteenth-century belief that the south wind brought corruption and evil vapors. It requires extensive work, particularly the roof, which leaks, and the plumbing, which is not only unreliable but noisy. A flushed toilet rumbles like thunder, in Crook.
House and barn stand in the few acres that remain of a once-sizeable estate; only the pig farm down in Ceck’s Bottom has not been sold off, largely because it’s not worth anything. Behind the house, to the north, the land drops gently to the valley of the Fling, a narrow, serpentine river that soon slips out of sight on its way to the Ceck Marsh. This is an extensive stretch of wild country that lies beyond the village of Ceck, the spire of whose Norman church is visible over the distant treetops. I shall have more to say about the Ceck Marsh shortly. On the far side of the valley the land begins to climb quite steeply, and here open fields give way to dense woodland, beeches and oaks mainly. The village lies to the east, while to the west the trees gradually thin out to a jumble of copses and dells, among which a famous colony of rocks has long been established. This is abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds. Ten miles further west you come to a market town called Pock-on-the-Fling; this is the nearest settlement of any size. Crook itself lies within the parish of Ceck, in the northeast corner of Berkshire, and my story begins in the autumn of 1949.
It was shortly after the arrival of the Fledges that a rather bizarre incident occurred, one to which I paid no more than a cursory attention at the time but which now strikes me as being charged with a sort of eerie, portentous significance. Have I told you that I was to deliver an important lecture to the Royal Society of Paleontology, a lecture concerning a species of late Mesozoic predatory carnivore that I discovered myself in East Africa as a young man, and to whose bone structure I had devoted my entire career? Phlegmosaurus carbonensis (so named because the bones came up slightly charred—Greek phlegein, to burn) has, I still believe, quite revolutionary implications not only for the science of paleontology but for zoology in general—but I need not weary you with that now. The point is, it was my habit, when I still had the use of my limbs, to think out my lectures in the Ceck Marsh; the silence and the solitude were somehow conducive to mental rigor and clarity, I found.
So one afternoon I set off with a flask of whisky and a stout stick, and after tramping down a soggy cart track between thick growths of birch and alder I found myself beneath a vast gray sky with miles of flat, boggy fen before me and a lake in the distance. The air had a smoky, autumnal tang to it, I remember, and as I picked my way over the rough damp clumps of peat and moss, all tufted with marsh grass and bristling in the wind, and puddled between with rank, black water, my heart exulted at the stillness and desolation of it all. Wildfowl rose from their nests in the weeds and with a great honking flurry went flapping off towards the water, and I came squelching on through in my Wellington boots, with my thick tweed cap pulled low against the bite of the wind.
It was when I had settled myself on a hummock of dry bracken close to the edge of the lake, and was casting my eye idly over the gray, wind-furrowed water, that I noticed a bulky horned object half-submerged in a bed of reeds close by. I splashed forward through the shallows to investigate, and discovered to my astonishment that it was a dead cow. I poked at it with my walking stick, then with the crook of the stick I hooked its horn and dragged it further into the shallows, and as I did so I caused the head to rise and water poured from its empty eye sockets as though from a fountain. Then the great body began to turn, began to go belly-up, and suddenly a foul, nauseating stench was released into the air and a pike, a big one, four feet long, slid out of the cow’s belly and gazed at me for an instant, its gills quietly lapping, before gliding away into the depths of the lake.
Not so extraordinary, you will say; but have you ever seen a pike? They have narrow, pointed snouts, and a projecting lower jaw crammed with sharp teeth, and they seem to grin at you; and this one was very big, and very old. The construction of their heads is an instance of natural functional design, no more than that, but it tends to make one think them malevolent; and when this one appeared with such sinister suddenness from inside the bloated and foul-smelling corpse of the cow, the gaze of its cold killer’s eyes (and pike will eat anything, even their own kind) seemed so charged with malice and evil that my hair, for a moment, quite literally froze on my head. I did not, as I say, take the incident very seriously at the time, beyond, that is, describing it in detail at dinner that night; but often in recent days the picture of that wicked old pike sliding out of the cow’s belly has come into my mind, without any apparent pretext.
Just to finish the story, it occurred to me that the dead cow would make good feed for George’s pigs, so I tramped off across the marsh in a northeasterly direction, to Ceck’s Bottom, and told him about it. And as far as I know it was George’s pigs that got the rest of that cow, not the old pike.
I soon made the acquaintance of Doris Fledge, she of the crowlike features and red-tipped nose. In those early days of autumn she cooked us solid, unpretentious meals that always came hot to the table, and I was well satisfied. Maybe Harriet had been right about the Fledges, I thought. Like Darwin I do not care what I eat as long as it’s the same every day, and I had been used to depend on old Mrs. Dome (when her rheumatism wasn’t “playing up”) to put square, English meals before me, meat and vegetables unadulterated by sauces, spices, or savories. Mrs. Fledge was apparently in the same culinary tradition, and this permitted me to devote my mealtimes to reading the Times, or thinking about my lecture, or tormenting Sidney Giblet, with no anxieties about what would appear on my plate.
One morning, feeling particularly jaunty before going out to the barn, I decided on impulse to visit the kitchen, and inquire of Mrs. Fledge what was for lunch, and say a kind word or two—a kind word from the master never goes amiss, with servants. I had been out in the vegetable garden with George, who was building a bonfire of dead leaves and other garden rubbish, and as I remember it was a fine, crisp day, which was why I was feeling jaunty. Crossing the yard toward the back door, I glimpsed Mrs. Fledge in the kitchen; she had her back to the window, and was occupied with something at the large oak dresser that fills one entire wall of the room. Even from halfway across the yard there was an unmistakably furtive character to the woman’s movements, and I remembered a hunch I’d formed about her the first time I clapped eyes on her. Well, I advanced briskly across the yard, my leather-soled brogues ringing out sharp and clear on the dry stones, and she must have heard me, for she quickly moved away from the dresser, and over to the sink, where I found her washing up the breakfast dishes when I came in through the back door.
“Morning Mrs. Fledge,” I said.
“Good morning, Sir Hugo,” said she, rapidly wiping her hands on the apron lashed tightly about her narrow waist, and looking flustered in a way I rather enjoyed. A strand of silver-threaded hair had escaped her bun, and she pushed it aside with a quick, nervous movement.
“Go on with your work, Mrs. Fledge,” I said, airily, striding about the kitchen. “I merely wanted to know what sweetmeats and dainties you planned to tempt us with at luncheon today.”
I had fetched up hard by the oak dresser; the woman’s fluster increased perceptibly. “Chops, Sir Hugo,” she said.
“Splendid! I love a chop. Grilled?”
“Yes, Sir Hugo.”
In the middle of the kitchen, which is rather a low room with black beams running across the ceiling, and a flagstoned floor, and a huge black wood-burning stove at the far end, there stands a table of scrubbed oak, and upon it lay a thick bunch of carrots, the soil still clinging to them and their leafy tops splayed greenly across the pale wood, and beside them a bowl of large potatoes, a bowl of onions, and a cabbage. All products of the Crook garden, reared with loving care by that good man George Lecky. “And carrots, Mrs. Fledge?” I said.
“Yes, Sir Hugo.” She was standing with her back to the sink, polishing a teacup and positively reeking of guilt. I dug my hands deep in my trouser pockets and approached the woman. As I suspected, it was not only guilt she reeked of—she’d been at my sherry! She must have a bottle stashed in the dresser! I drew close. Terror blazed up in her blackbird eyes. She almost dropped the teacup. From about eighteen inches I gazed into her horror-struck face and examined the delicate lacework of ruptured capillaries on the point of her beak, and smiled. “And onions, Mrs. Fledge?” I said.
“Yes, Sir Hugo.” She had frozen rigid. I pushed aside the strand of silver hair that had again worked loose from the bun. I ran my fingers across her cheek, and squeezed her little earlobe. “Jolly good,” I said, and sauntered out of the kitchen. I would say nothing yet, I decided. I would choose my moment. There would, I felt sure, come a perfect opportunity to bring up with Harriet the housekeeper about whom she had insisted there would not be a “problem.” Your housekeeper, I would say, does have a “problem,” Harriet. She “drinks.”
I paid particularly close attention to the chops that day, curious as to whether Mrs. Fledge’s tippling hampered her performance in the kitchen. They were delicious. They were grilled to perfection. The carrots were thoroughly boiled, and the potatoes flawlessly mashed. Perhaps, I thought, like Churchill she functions best on a steady tipple. I was right, I reflected, to say nothing. I turned to Sidney and asked him what he knew about the life cycle of the botfly. The poor dummy blushed scarlet; he had never even heard of the bot-fly, so I told him all about it. Do you know about the life cycle of the bot-fly? Gastrophilus equi? It lays its eggs on the forequarters of a horse. When the eggs hatch out, the irritation makes the horse lick the hairs and swallow the larvae. The larvae feed on the inner lining of the horse’s stomach for a year, and then lodge in its dung and are excreted. They bury themselves in the ground and pupate—and the process starts all over again. Elegant, no? Elegant, invariable—and pointless.
Of all the various perspectives I am offered by the chance emplacement of my wheelchair, there are two that I particularly favor. The first, a strong contender on warm days, is between the French windows at the far end of the drawing room. From there I can look out over the flower garden, with its terraces and its goldfish pond, its hedges and lawns, all threaded with narrow, winding paths and enclosed by a crumbling brick wall. I used to enjoy watching George work among the flowers there, down on his knees in the soil; he’s gone now, of course, and the garden is growing wild without him. No one else gives a damn.
My other favorite is the fireplace. Like a small boy I can gaze for hours into a fire and see cathedrals and monsters, basilisks, dragons, and gorgons; and when I tire of the flames, the elaborate carving of the chimneypiece, which I will describe to you in due course, is an unfailing source of pleasure, and even moral support, in these dark times.
Often, though, my wheelchair is placed with no thought as to the view I will be afforded. I am put before windows that look out onto empty yards, or wheeled into dark corners so that floors can be waxed and carpets swept. Sometimes I end up in the alcove under the stairs, and there is deep irony in this, as you will learn. It occurs to no one but Cleo that I might mind this; they think me a vegetable. So what am I to make of the fact that Fledge quite deliberately turns my wheelchair to the wall? Am I to presume that he does not care for the blank eyes of a vegetable upon him as he goes about his work? Or is it something else? Does he know I’m still thinking, and does he do it, therefore, to intensify my pain? Is it a form of torture? I am inclined to believe that it is.
You see, I believe that even before he entered the front door of Crook—even before he met me!—Fledge had conceived the ambition to usurp me. I would hazard that there had always been a seed of discontent, a seed of revolt, in his nature, but that only now, comparatively late (for Fledge is not a young man), had he fully resolved to act on it. “Better to reign in hell,” he might have said, like Milton’s Satan, “than to serve in heav’n,” and it’s not hard to see him as a Satan, as a serpent that came slithering into Crook with nothing but evil intentions, though of course it is only by means of the small gestures and fleeting expressions he made that I realize now how intensely, even in those days, he hated me. He had to hate me, you see—I doubt he could have gone through with it otherwise. And this is why, today, he turns my wheelchair to the wall: hating me has become a habit.
It’s a curious thing how glibly complacent we tend to be about the superiority of the mammal. I remarked earlier, apropos of something or other, that the life cycle of the bot-fly was pointless. I didn’t mean it, of course. It would be absurd to suggest that any species has more “point” to it than any other. The natural scientist cannot help, however, developing preferences, and mine lie in the direction of big, predatory, meat-eating creatures—like Phlegmosaurus carbonensis. This is why I bring up the mammal, for it’s often forgotten that the mammal came into his own only after the dinosaur became extinct. When the dinosaur was active the mammal dared not emerge from his hole. He was a timid, hairy little creature —I speak now in layman’s terms—who never mounted any sort of a challenge to the dinosaur’s domination of the Mesozoic environment. The point is, if we keep a close eye on Fledge, we will observe an identical tactic being employed—in this case, calculated opportunism on the part of an innately devious inferior with inflated social aspirations.
I don’t wish to pursue the analogy; suffice it to say that Fledge’s game was a waiting game and, as I say, only by the small signs he made is it now apparent what he was about. One such sign I remember distinctly, for it came, oddly enough, at a moment of, for me, bitter professional disappointment.
The blow fell on one of those lovely crisp, clear mornings we enjoyed last autumn; and it fell, appropriately, in the barn. I had as usual eaten a good breakfast, spent half-an-hour in the lavatory with the Times, and made my way downstairs; and there, on the hall table, I found a letter from the Royal Society. I turned it over in my hands for a few seconds; I was seized with a powerful premonition that the news it contained would be bad. I tucked it into my pocket and crossed the driveway to the barn.
Now the barn, I should tell you, is structurally no different from any other barn in this part of Berkshire. A central area is bounded by four pairs of upright timbers, and it was in this space that I conducted my research. At the north end (the barn stands at right angles to the house, and faces east) a narrow flight of wooden steps leads to a gallery that extends down the west wall and along the south wall and forms a sort of loft I used for storage of bones. Small windows high in the gables permitted a few shafts of daylight to penetrate the gloom, and as I entered, and closed the door behind me, I noticed a small bird, a sparrow, fluttering among the rafters.
I stood for a few moments with my back to the door, without turning on the lights. Structurally, as I say, this was like any other Berkshire barn; functionally it was not. This barn, you see, had been converted into a working research laboratory, and as my eyes adjusted to the obscurity, so did the bony creature on which I had been working for a quarter of a century come dimly into view. It was Phlegmosaurus himself—my reconstruction of the entire skeleton.
He was not tall, as dinosaurs go, a little under seven feet, with a long tail jutting out behind and supported by an iron upright embedded in a block of concrete. Birdlike best approximates the creature, I think, with his huge feet, comprising two long, multiply articulated toes and a third inner toe resembling an oversized claw with a thin, curved, sickle-shaped blade. The hind legs were long, the hipbones broad, and from the pelvic arch the pubis protruded like a sort of giant flat-headed hammer. The barrel-ribbed torso was short, as were the long-fingered forearms, and atop the neck the head of the beast was narrow and pointed and crammed with vicious, fanglike teeth, all set in sockets. I had fixed the jaws wide apart such that he seemed, in his upright, rearing position, to be snarling, roaring even, and when I first brought Victor Horn, my grandson, into the barn to see him, the poor child was frightened half to death! But it was to the hind legs that my eyes were most often drawn in this, the final stage of my research, to the great claw-toes, to the single-hinged ankles, each with a sharp spur of bone projecting from the back like a crocket; to the long shanks, strutted with exquisitely slender fibulae, and to the long stem of femur that fit so snugly into its socket in the hip. Birdlike, I say; those legs looked like the legs of a pheasant, an immense pheasant, a monster of a pheasant, and it was this startling resemblance that had first set me thinking about the dinosaur-bird connection, and the possibility of a kinship far more intimate than orthodox paleontology was then prepared to admit. Distant cousins, orthodox paleontology would consider them. Not me. For me, Phlegmosaurus was the patriarch, and the line of descent was direct. Yes, Phlegmosaurus was the father of the birds—and this of course was the subject of my lecture.
I pressed the switch beside the door. Fluorescent tubes, suspended from the rafters, flickered to life, and my haunted ossuary metamorphosed into the laboratory of a working paleontologist. It was only then that I sat down in the white wicker chair that faced the beast and opened my letter from the Royal Society. The news, indeed, was bad.
At lunch I was silent and morose. “Sykes-Herring,” I said, “has written to me.” There were only the two of us at table, Cleo and Sidney having gone off on bicycles to take rubbings from gravestones near Pock. Harriet had been out in the garden, and the brisk autumn weather had brought a glow to her cheeks. Her hair was gathered and pinned rather higher on her skull than usual, and she was gazing out of the window, giving me her profile, her nose slightly uptipped, her buttonlike chin couched snugly in the warm swell of flesh that had once been her neck. Her brow furrowed as she turned to me. “Now tell me again, dear, which one Sykes-Herring is, I get them all mixed up. Is he the pterodactyl man?”
“No, Harriet,” I said, trying to keep the snappish tone out of my voice. “He’s the Secretary of the Royal Society.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Rather a sweet little man.”
“Sweet or not,” I said dryly, “he doesn’t want me to give my lecture.”
Harriet was indignant. “Not give your lecture?” she cried. “What, never?”
“He doesn’t say. Apparently he’s having trouble with the scheduling; I am to contact him at my earliest convenience.”
“Well,” said Harriet crossly, “I think that’s perfectly dreadful of him. Now you’ll be impossible all winter.”
I frowned. This was not what I wished to hear, not at all. Impossible indeed! Harriet, I think, realized her gaffe, and nervously touched her hair. A sort of cough came from Fledge. A sudden gust rattled the windowpanes, and was followed by a brisk volley of rain. Harriet turned toward the window again and said, distractedly, “Oh dear, Cleo and Sidney will be quite soaked.” I glanced at Fledge, and I saw it: he was covering his mouth with his hand. He was doing this, I am convinced, not to muffle a cough, but to conceal the fact that he was laughing at me.
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.
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.
When it was all over, and enough bones had been shipped to England to keep me busy for a lifetime, I asked George to come back with me to Ceck, and run the pig farm. He’d spoken of his ambition to farm; I was only sorry, I said, that I couldn’t offer him anything better.
John Crowthorne loved to hear me talk of those days. Though he must have heard the African stories on a hundred occasions, the romance and the exoticism seemed never to fade; he was like a child listening to its favorite fairy tale. George, though, simply sucked on the stem of his pipe, wearing his habitual, slightly amused air of fatalistic resignation. We emerged, some hours later, into the afternoon. The Hodge and Purlet faces the Ceck green, on the far side of which a few boys were kicking a football around. The day was hazy, the shadows had grown long, and the sun was now a molten ball as it sank behind a bank of gilded clouds, low in the reddening western sky. Upon the windows of the Hodge and Purlet bars of late sunshine gleamed like gold. Old John went off about his own affairs, and George and I walked slowly round to the yard, where he had parked his swill lorry. This was a filthy, dilapidated vehicle the back of which was crowded with the dustbins in which he twice weekly collected his swill, the scrapings and peelings of the Ceck kitchens, which, mixed with damp bran, fed the pigs. We stood there in the soft, misty light of that late September afternoon, mellowed by drink and memories, and as the good organic stink of his dustbins reached my nostrils, I said: “They were good days, George.”
He was gazing out past the pub at the boys on the far side of the green, and doing some business with his pipe. He gave me one of those sardonic looks of his. I read the humor in his eyes, and though he said nothing I knew what he was thinking: the old days are always the good days—such is the nature of memory. How wise he was.
I made my way back to Crook as the light thickened; and what a glorious dusk it was! For a mile or so I walked due west, and across a flat expanse of fields I watched the sky steadily deepen in color as the sun settled on the black wedge of the horizon, and then went down. The clouds had massed in a peculiar arrowlike formation, the tip of which seemed fastened to the sinking sun, so that they swept toward the horizon in two great converging wings, all in bitty, vaporous flecks that shifted through a layered spectrum from the pale pastel blues and grays of the upper strata through violets and purples to rich, sultry crimsons that merged almost imperceptibly with the blackness of the land. The smells were strong as ever, and spiked now with wood smoke, and in the middle distance reared a single stark dead elm tree, its fingery, leafless limbs etched sharp and densely black against this vivid cloth of sky.
My road then swung round to the south and began gently to climb, and now I moved toward a darkened sky that bristled with trees, though still, to the west, the sunset continued quite gloriously to play itself out. I remember it all so distinctly because these were in a sense the last good days. Of course I was not aware of this at the time; at the time I was preoccupied, as you know, with my professional and domestic problems. Only now, in retrospect, do I see the true dimensions of those problems; for they were soon to be massively overshadowed, and the darkness that then entered my life was as dramatic in contrast to what went before as night is to day.
I plodded on through the dusk, and very elegiac my mood should have been, I suppose; but I was untouched, I confess, by mournful reflections on death and the dead. I was thinking, rather, about the birdlike characteristics of the hipbone and hind leg of the dinosaur. Even full of brandy and African memories, you see, even in the presence of that gorgeous sunset, my mind went slipping back to its single, all-consuming passion—the beast that bore my name, P. carbonensis.
The road wound gently up the hill toward Crook, and now I had trees on either side of me, and the descent of darkness was almost complete. The cries of birds, and the sudden scufflings of furtive woodland creatures, broke now and then into the stillness of this twilit world. For some minutes I permitted myself to become absorbed in a familiar fantasy, in which the civilization that encroached with increasing shrillness upon these quiet natural places simply vanished into thin air, and I moved upon a planet that knew nothing of humanity. How hard it is to lose the self! Almost impossible, to ditch that gibbering little monkey and merge for even a moment with the Nature of which we are a part, yet from which we have so effectively alienated ourselves. Drink helps; drink opens the receptive faculties, and as I climbed the hill to Crook I managed, for a minute or two, to attain some sort of primal, unmediated contact with the earth. Such experiences are rare and fleeting and now, for me, impossible of course. My next unmediated encounter with Nature will occur six feet under!
At last I reached the rusting, wrought-iron gates of Crook, so overgrown with grass and ivy that they would never again be closed; and so up the drive between the trees, the evening chorus of the birds raucous in my ears. Rounding the bend in the drive, I found Crook heaving up before me against a sky in which the last dim light still faintly lingered. Black against that darkling air, no line straight, it seemed a great, skirted creature that rose by sheer force of will to thrust its wavering gables at the sky—a foundering mastodon, it seemed, a dying mammoth, down on its knees but tossing its tusks against heaven in one last doomed flourish of revolt. In the windows downstairs the lights shone into the night, and thus did the life of the house still burn, still feebly burn, and then, only then, as I stood at the bend in the drive and leaned, panting, after my climb, on my walking stick, only then did I experience a sudden intimation of mortality: my house would go down as I would go down; we were the last of the line.
I had had my elegiac moment after all. In through the front door I came, suddenly very hungry indeed. There, on his hands and knees, halfway down the hall, was Sidney Giblet. Whatever was the fool up to? He turned his head toward me; he had been examining a section of decorative carving on the skirting board. “Sir Hugo,” he cried, in tones of aesthetic fervor, “what a treasure!” Silly ass, I thought; and, glaring at his little bum, sticking into the air, I suppressed only with difficulty a powerful urge to give it a good kick.
These, as I say, were the last of the good days, and I think often of them now, for I wonder if anything occurred then that might have warned me about what was to come. I was unaware at the time of Fledge’s designs; I knew only that he displayed toward me a good deal less of the deferential respect than I had a right to expect from my butler, but of his evil I was still ignorant. And other than his presence, and Doris’s, all was as usual in Ceck and environs. There was the business with Sykes-Herring, of course, but that was nothing new; I’d been warring with the Royal Society for years. I telephoned the man a day or so later and made an appointment to see him two weeks hence. He was smoothly affable to me, deeply regretted, so he claimed, the “unavoidable postponement” of my talk, treated me, in short, with the sort of patronizing smugness that the gentleman naturalist must expect from his “professional” colleague in these times. The problem is, men like Sykes-Herring, themselves blinkered, find the breadth of vision of a naturalist like myself acutely threatening, for, as a function of their long formal training, they are devoid of the most vital of scientific attributes, imagination. They bring too much categorical and theoretical baggage to the task, they see what they expect to see and no more. The gentleman naturalist, by contrast, has an open-minded and theoretically eclectic attitude toward natural phenomena, and is thus far better equipped for informed, imaginative speculation. He is far more likely to make the sudden brilliant intuitive leap to revolutionary truth. This is why I have always had such trouble with the Royal Society, with men like Sykes-Herring; this is why they accuse me of mixing up my bones, why they refuse to publish my papers, why they sabotage my lectures. They practice safe science, and safe science to my mind is no sort of science at all.
All this I had of course long been aware of. Nevertheless, Sykes-Herring’s letter, and the animosity that lay behind it, disturbed my concentration, for I found myself during the days that followed unable to spend more than an hour or two at any one time with the bones. The whole business, my lifework, Phlegmosaurus: a sense of bitter futility impregnated all my thoughts, and I simply could not stay with it with any sort of zeal.
I spent many afternoons in the Hodge and Purlet during this period, but I don’t want to give you the impression that I always returned to Crook in the wistful, elegiac mood I have just described. In fact, it was only on that one occasion it occurred, I believe, which is probably why I remember it. No, after a few hours in the public bar I tended to come home in a fractious, irritable state of mind; day drinking always makes me irritable, for some reason. I would look for trouble. I would pick on people (usually Sidney). I’m rather sorry, then, in the light of what happened, that on the notable evening that Sidney and Cleo announced their engagement I did not respond very graciously. This I regret not only because I hate at any time to give Cleo pain, but also because it was, for Sidney, one of the last moments of happiness he would know.
We always dress for dinner in Crook, and I prefer candlelight to electric light in the dining room. The meal thus tends to be an affair of rather gloomy formality (and this, frankly, is altogether to my taste). Fledge was striking the gong as I emerged from my bedroom in the east wing, and as I clattered down the stairs I heard Harriet and Sidney and Cleo leave the drawing room with a gush of giggles and excited whispering, and cross the hall to the dining room. What, I asked myself, are they all so happy about? Probably still discussing whether Sidney looked more like a ferret or a lobster.
Mrs. Fledge had made us one of her shepherd’s pies. She makes a fine shepherd’s pie, the meat bubbling gently in its own juices and the mashed potato on top whipped up like a choppy sea, its little crests crisply browned under the grill. All through soup (we had Heinz canned tomato soup) I’d been aware of a sort of suppressed giddiness in Sidney and Cleo—frequent glances across the table, grins and snorts and so on, and I knew something was afoot, though I was not particularly interested in what. Fledge served the shepherd’s pie from the sideboard, and then came round the table with the runner beans; and barely had I washed down the first mouthful with a draft of burgundy than Harriet said: “Hugo.”
Here it comes, I thought. “Yes?”
“Sidney has something to tell you, dear.”
I glanced over at the boy, pushing a small mound of meat, potato, and runner bean onto the end of my fork as I did so. Even in this dimness I could see him blushing. His fingers—Sidney had rather long, thin fingers—fluttered to his horn-rims, then touched his hair, which was combed sleekly back from his forehead and oiled so heavily that it gleamed in the flickering candlelight (it was this sleekness, I presume, that had provoked all the ferret-and-otter nonsense). He looked across at Cleo and tittered. “One feels so silly,” he said. “You tell him, darling!”
Cleo had her arms flat on the table and was leaning forward toward the boy, grinning. Her eyes were alight. She shook her head slightly and said nothing. She was enjoying his embarrassment.
“Come on, Sidney,” I said, dabbing at my lips with my napkin and swallowing more burgundy, “spit it out.”
“Yes, Sidney,” said Cleo, “spit it out.”
He controlled the wave of hysteria that this remark evidently provoked. “Cleo and I,” he began; and then, turning to Harriet: “Oh I can’t, Lady Coal, I simply can’t!”
“What Sidney is trying to say,” said Harriet, “is that—”
“That Cleo and I want to be married!”
I allowed a small silence to occur. “You do,” I said at last. “Yes, Sir Hugo,” he said, gazing at me now with an expression of great earnestness and trying not to look at Cleo. “Not immediately, of course, we can’t afford to, immediately, but we should like, that is, with your blessing, of course, to, ah, announce our engagement.” Then he permitted his eyes to drift back across the table to Cleo’s, and the pair of them grinned at each other in the candlelight, and he stretched out a fluttery hand and laid it upon hers. Harriet gazed at me with a sorr of expectant complacency, but I was concentrating on the assembly of neat forkfuls of meat, potato, and runner bean, each followed by a swallow of burgundy. They all awaited my response. Fledge loomed over by the sideboard, still and impassive in the shadows. I lifted my glass and the candle flames caught the crystal facets and darted off in all directions in thin sharp glinty spears of light. Fledge floated over with the decanter and refilled me. I was thinking of the evening I proposed to Harriet. I had had to go to her father, the colonel—Herbert—in his study after dinner, and quite an ordeal it was too. The old man had questioned me briskly about my prospects, and afterwards we had smoked cigars and talked blue-chip stocks by the fire. Apparently one didn’t go about it like that anymore; apparently one now did it over dinner, in front of the servants, with grins and giggles. And to this piece of levity I was expected to give my blessing; Harriet clearly expected this; I’d have thought she knew me better than that.
My eyes were on my plate; my knife and fork were busy. “Prospects?” I murmured, without looking up.
“I beg your pardon, Sir Hugo?” Sidney’s hand fluttered off Cleo’s and dabbed at his spectacles, then at his hair.
I lifted my head, raised my eyebrows, and said again, quite mildly: “Prospects. What are your prospects, Sidney?”
“Oh darling, I hardly think we need go into that now,” said Harriet, suddenly sensing danger.
“On the contrary,” I said. “Sidney apparently considers the dinner table a fit place to ask for my daughter’s hand; I consider it no less fit to ask him how he proposes to support her.”
“Oh don’t be stuffy, Daddy,” said Cleo. “We want to celebrate.”
I turned upon the girl. “I am not being, as you put it, stuffy.
I am asking a perfectly reasonable question. I am asking how Sidney intends to support you.”
“We’ll muddle along,” said Cleo blithely, “just like everybody else does.”
I was suddenly struck with the notion of telling the colonel, all those years ago, that Harriet and I intended to “muddle along.” Ha!
“I have my job in the bookshop,” said Sidney, “and when I’ve learned the business I should like to open a bookshop of my own.”
“What with?” I said, as I consumed the last of my shepherd’s pie. It really was very good.
“I beg your pardon?”
“What with!” I cried, reaching for my wine. “Where will you get the money? Save it from your clerk’s salary?”
“My mother said she might help me,” said Sidney.
“She might!”
“Oh Daddy, stop being so awful. You’re deliberately being difficult. I shall work too.”
“What as, may I ask?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll find something or other.”
“Something or other,” I said dryly. It was at that moment that I noticed Fledge leaning over to whisper something to Harriet. What new conspiracy was this?
“Darling,” said Harriet, gazing down at the table at me as Fledge quietly left the room, “can we talk about this later? Mrs. Fledge has made something special.”
“By all means,” I snapped. “Perhaps,” I said, glancing at Cleo, “we won’t be quite so vague later.”
“Oh Daddy.”
“Don’t ‘Oh Daddy’ me, young woman! I’m perfectly serious; you’ll have to be a good deal more realistic about the future if you want my consent to any of this. You do still intend to go up to Oxford in October, I take it?”
But before we could get into the Oxford question—Cleo was to read philosophy at St. Anne’s, and I was not going to permit her to jeopardize that—Fledge opened the door, then stood aside to let his wife come in. She was bearing a large white cake on the top of which, in some sort of horrible pink paste, had been drawn a rather wobbly heart, and an arrow, and, intertwined among them, the names of the lovers. Cleo let out a large snort of mirth and rose to her feet. “Bravo, Mrs. Fledge!” she shouted, lifting her wineglass. “What a creation!”
Mrs. Fledge set the cake on the table with a small simper and then stood back, absently drying her hands on her apron. She appeared slightly glazed, and her hair was unkempt, as usual. I lit a cigar and kept my eye on her, as Sidney and Harriet made noises of awe and wonder over her revolting confection. I presume all this was in honor of the “engagement.” Fledge came forward with a knife, and as he began to cut the cake Mrs. Fledge sniffed once or twice, then produced from her sleeve a small handkerchief, and blew her nose. She brushed a tear from her eye—I had not yet realized how easily she succumbed to weepy emotion—and only then did she become aware of my gaze upon her. With my teeth clenched about my cigar, my chin resting on my interlocked fingers, and my eyes narrowed, I stared at her across the candlelit table, and she, for a moment, through damply shining eyes, quite boldly answered my stare. What a queer bird she is, I thought, as she grew suddenly frightened, and her eyes darted away. I could pursue my reflections no further, as Harriet was attempting to press upon me a slice of cake; I had to employ considerable forcefulness to avoid being given a piece of the thing.
The weather grew very wild shortly after dinner, and I remember retiring to my study to do some work on the lecture. I couldn’t seem to concentrate; the wind was howling about the house and hurling sheets of rain at the windows, and it unsettled me. I remember ringing for Fledge, as I couldn’t locate any whisky for some reason, but the bloody man didn’t appear. Eventually I went storming down the hallway to the kitchen. The lights had not been lit; a single candle threw a dim glow over a long figure reclining in a chair by the stove. “Fledge!” I cried, with some passion. “Didn’t you hear me ring? Why didn’t you come to me?”
The figure stirred—it was not Fledge, I realized, but his wife. “Oh Sir Hugo,” she mumbled, “I do beg your pardon. I must have dropped off!”
“Where is your husband, Mrs. Fledge?” I demanded to know.
“I believe he’s upstairs, Sir Hugo, with Mr. Sidney.”
“Upstairs with Mr. Sidney? What on earth is he doing upstairs with Mr. Sidney?” This information for some reason inflamed my irritation to the point of downright fury. What was he doing upstairs with Mr. Sidney? He was my butler, damnit!
“I’m sure I can’t say, Sir Hugo,” whispered Mrs. Fledge, sitting bolt upright in her chair and gazing at me with terrified eyes. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“Eh? Eh?” I glared at her as I tried to bring myself under control. “No, never mind, Mrs. Fledge,” I said, after a moment or two, “I’ll get it myself.” And I strode out of the kitchen, still bristling, quite unaccountably, with rage, and went to look for whisky.
That night I had the strangest dream. Much of it is lost now, but what little remains is so startlingly bizarre I presume it is the core or meat of the dream, if a dream can be said to have meat. There were, to begin with, the sounds of a storm, and these I imagine permeated my sleeping mind directly from the night itself. The wind was wailing with a dreadful keening sound, and branches of trees lashed at the windowpanes while somewhere nearby the unlatched door of an outhouse kept banging relentlessly on its hinges. There was a howling, too, that was charged with the most profound misery imaginable, and all these wailings and howlings and lashings seemed magnified, both in volume and intensity, to such an extent that I felt, in the dream, confined and pressed in upon by them, and physically endangered. I was in a darkened room; it had features both of the public bar of the Hodge and Purlet—most vividly an uncurtained window filled with the moon—and of the drawing room at Crook. For I knew, somehow, that I sat, in the darkness, in one of the leather armchairs by the fireplace, which in the dream was a black, empty hole, a void, a nothingness. There were other people in the room, and scraps of talk, none of which I remember; my overwhelming sensation was one of fear, but also of great frustration, the frustration, I think, of being unable to move away from the source of the fear, which I identified simply as “outside.” I gazed at the moon, and something went rapidly and furtively past the window, a sort of nude, hairy, red-brown thing with the head of a fox and the body of a man. And then I saw a figure kneeling on the rug before me, staring into the emptiness of the fireplace. I leaned forward and turned the face to mine: it was Mrs. Fledge. Lifting her chin with my fingertips, I kissed her mouth; and then I was overcome with sexual desire.
Somehow I got myself out of the armchair and onto the rug beside her. I remember that she still smelled of carbolic soap. I put my hand under her apron and ran it up her stockinged thigh. She grinned at me in a sort of lewd, hungry manner quite foreign to the real Mrs. Fledge. I took hold of her underpants—they were men’s underpants, oddly enough, like my own—and tried to pull them down. She said something indistinct in a curiously deep voice, then sat up and unfastened her suspenders. Then she lay back on the rug again, and, lifting her bottom, permitted me to slide her underpants off. She pulled up her apron, and the moonlight glowed on the white skin at the tops of her thighs, though the valley between them was black with shadow.
This now becomes the strange part of the dream, though maybe, to those who study such things, it is perfectly commonplace, perfectly banal. You see, I remember scrambling to my feet, and pulling off my overcoat, and then my jacket, and then my waistcoat, so that I could get at my braces, and push them off my shoulders, and get my trousers down; and as I struggled with these operations—they seemed never to end—I was feeling the most furious urgency to take advantage of this woman who was offering herself so frankly to me. I unbuttoned my trousers—I was wearing my winter suit, the heavy tweeds—and pushed them down. My penis—I am being very candid with you now—was, in the dream, quite stiff, and I daresay it was stiff also in the reality of my bed in the east wing of Crook, and it sprang forward through the buttons of my underpants and stood up at a steep angle, throbbing. Doris had meanwhile risen from the floor and was propped against one of the carved oak pillars flanking the empty fireplace, her back arched such that the moonlight gleamed upon the shiny material of her apron. I began to shuffle forward, though the tweeds about my ankles were heavily constricting. Doris’s hands hung down by her sides and reminded me of a pair of long, pale, dead fish.
There was by now a wailing and howling outside the house fit to wake the dead, and the outhouse door kept banging, banging, banging on its hinges. Mrs. Fledge turned her back to me and, lifting her apron once more, offered me her bottom; the expression on her face, as she grinned at me over her shoulder, was one of quite brazen sexual invitation. But the trousers at my ankles by this time prevented me from going forward at all! I seem to remember that I groped at her with outstretched arms, but I simply could not move! The feeling of urgent, cruelly blocked desire became almost intolerable—doubtless I was suffering, physiologically, and at precisely the same moment, in my bed. And then, from inside the room, I heard a cough, and I turned, my arms still outstretched before me, toward the door. There, to my horror, stood Fledge.
I sat up in bed with a shout. The storm still raged; my head was pounding and my mouth was painfully dry. I no longer had an erection; there was, however, a small stain of discharged semen on my sheets. I poured a glass of water from the jug on my bedside table, as my head spun crazily in the aftermath of this dreadful dream, this nightmare. The strange thing was, you see, that I had not experienced sexual desire for—well, for a good many years.
The storm began to die down shortly afterwards, and by the time I arose the next morning it was a mere ghost of itself, a stiff breeze, I saw from my window, picking and ruffling through the boughs it had brought down in the night. The sky had a pale, washed-out aspect, a few high, white clouds drifting across it, fleecy, elongated things. The day seemed already exhausted, emptied of vigor, as it gazed upon the evidence of its nocturnal excesses; it mirrored my own mood exactly. There is a very comfortable white wicker chair in the barn, and it was in that chair that I used to sit when I wanted to mull things over quietly. Into that chair I now sank, having avoided the dining room entirely, and as my eyes played wearily over the familiar bones (I had not turned on the lights) and came finally to rest upon the spurred and gleaming leg of Phlegmosaurus, I attempted to shake off the very distasteful residue of that appalling dream. That it was purely and simply the effect of far too much whisky, a good deal of anger, and, quite probably, indigestion, I had no doubt, no doubt at all. But all the same, I had no little trouble regaining sufficient peace of mind to resume my work; I also had something of a hangover.
But slowly the bones reclaimed me, and in particular, the clawed toe on the foot of Phlegmosaurus, and the old, familiar question arose once more: what did a long, thin, sharply curved claw like that suggest about the creature that possessed it? There was only one answer possible: that as he went into the attack, he reared up on one leg to slash with it. Oh, he was a ripper, my Phlegmosaurus, he was a big, fast, fierce, dynamic animal capable of delicate balance and complex maneuvering. Does this sound like a reptile to you?
There was one curious and not strictly relevant sequel to my nightmare that I think deserves mention, as it has some bearing on my relationship with Fledge. You see, when I went back to the house for lunch that day, and encountered him in the dining room, I was for a moment seized with a quite irrational feeling of shame—as though I had in reality offended him as I’d dreamed I had, and should either avoid him altogether or apologize profusely. I did neither, of course; I gave him my usual curt grunt and took my place at the head of the table. He himself was as composed and inscrutable as ever, and served my soup and poured my wine just as he always did. But while Harriet chattered away to Sidney and Cleo about the storm, I could not help throwing surreptitious glances at the man, as if to confirm to myself that I had in fact dreamed the whole thing.
At this time I was no great believer in omens and auguries and so on (I was still an empiricist, of course), so I did not connect my dream with an incident in the butler’s pantry that occurred just a few nights later, an incident which, now that I look back on it, is quite clearly of crucial importance to the foul eruption of violence that in one sense forms the very marrow of this story. It was many months before we learned exactly what happened out on the Ceck Marsh that terrible night, but even before it happened I knew that things were going badly wrong, that we were entering a state of disorder. At the time I did not, as I say, connect my dream with the butler’s pantry incident—there was no reason why I should, after all—but when I link them now, hold them in my mind in tandem, as it were, it is all too clear to me that even before the violence occurred there existed in Crook what I can only call “corrupt energies”—and I need hardly spell out who the source of those energies was. In fact, it occurs to me now that perhaps right from the start Fledge was causing a sort of moral infection in those around him—without our even being aware of it! I wonder, for example, whether he was responsible for that disgusting dream. And in retrospect I rather think he was, though as I say, at the time I wasn’t aware of it; and with regard to the incident in the butler’s pantry, I held Sidney as much to blame for that, if not more so.
Let me describe it just as it happened. I had been working late in the barn, and when I returned to the house it was all in darkness but for a single light left burning in the porch. I came in through the front door and very quietly closed it behind me. Before I had taken a single step down the hall, I heard a noise: someone was coming down the stairs.
Now, close to the front door of Crook there is a small table on which the mail is placed, and above it, attached to a baseboard of pale oak, rears the head of a large stag with glassy eyes and a fine spread of antlers. Directly opposite the stag stands a grandfather clock, and into the shadow of this clock I tiptoed, and waited there as the footsteps descended the last flight. Why I did this I have no clear idea, for I certainly wasn’t in the habit of hiding in my own house. Whoever it was, though, he was carrying a candle, for its feeble light preceded him, throwing a faint flickering glow into the darkness of the hallway. I peered round the side of the clock as the footstep reached the hall, and then abruptly stopped. Standing, listening intently at the bottom of the stairs, was Sidney.
He was wearing a tightly belted silver-colored dressing gown of some silky material, and the candlelight gleamed and flashed upon it as he turned this way and that, apparently assuring himself that he was alone downstairs. His pale, oval face, lit from beneath by the candle flame, glowed in a faintly eerie manner, the smooth cheeks plump and yellow as moons. Having satisfied himself that no one was about, he then moved off, on fawn-colored slippers of a very soft leather, toward the kitchen.
Separating the front of the house—the family rooms—from the back, where the kitchen, larders, and sculleries are situated, is a green baize door. I tiptoed down the hall and opened this door a crack, expecting to see the boy going along the passage to the kitchen. But that passage was empty; the door to the butler’s pantry, however, which gave off the passage into the east wing, was just closing; I heard the latch click softly, and then there was silence.
In Crook, as in many country houses, the butler’s pantry is that room where the butler can perform such tasks as polishing the silverware and sorting the mail, and, more important, where he can enjoy an isolation and privacy denied his inferiors in the domestic hierarchy. Not that this had much meaning here, of course, where the inside staff comprised only Fledge himself and his wife. But Fledge not only used this room, he apparently also lived in it—this I’d ascertained with my own eyes when I’d gone into the place a few days before. One descended a flight of stone steps—the stone floor of the pantry was below ground level—to a long narrow room with store cupboards along each wall, in which various household supplies were kept, light bulbs, mousetraps, and so on. A narrow, tightly blanketed iron bed was pushed up against the end wall, and beside it stood a washstand with hairbrushes and shaving gear. Sandwiched between two high cupboards, and beneath a very small window that looked out onto the lane that ran round the side of the house, was a workbench with a shelf just above it from which hung a set of small tools. Everything was very neat and well-swept the afternoon I went in, hunting, I seem to remember, for toilet paper. Whatever did Sidney want here at the dead of night?
My curiosity now thoroughly aroused, I retraced my steps back down the hall and out of the front door. There was some cloud that night, but the moon, which was close to the full, shone brightly on the slates and chimneys of Crook’s steep gables. The thick coat of ivy that furred the walls glinted with a silvery sheen as its thousand fronds stirred gently in the night breeze. I made my way silently round the side of the house, to the lane that gave onto the back yard. Halfway along, at the foot of the wall, a neat square of light spilled onto the cobblestones from a small window. This was the window over Fledge’s workbench. I crept towards it, my heart now beating dangerously fast.
Just before I reached the window I got down onto my hands and knees. Advancing on all fours, I very cautiously peeped round the side of the window. The pantry was lit by a single lamp, standing on the workbench. In the center of the room Sidney was facing Fledge such that I could see both of them quite clearly in profile. I had never really noticed before how tall Sidney was; he was the same height as Fledge, five foot eleven or more. He was talking with some animation, smiling frequently and gesturing with his right hand, in which he held his little rosewood pipe. His hair gleamed in the lamplight, as did the silky, silver material of his dressing gown; it glimmered in streaks when he moved his arm. Fledge was in his shirtsleeves with his arms folded across his chest. His face was heavily obscured by shadow, and it was impossible for me to make out his expression as he listened to Sidney. I changed position, I hunkered down on the balls of my feet, clutching the edge of the windowframe, trying to get a clearer view of Fledge’s face. Suddenly he smiled—never before, nor since, come to think of it, have I seen Fledge smile—and opened his arms. The two men seemed then to lean toward one another, and it was at this crucial moment, my blood rushing in hot turmoil in my veins, that I lost my balance and sat back heavily on my bottom, my feet scrunching loudly on the cobblestones as I did so. Of course they would have heard me; in an instant I had flattened myself against the wall, and I clung there, not even breathing, like a lizard. Fortunately it was not a window that could be opened, and so I was not observed. But a moment later the curtain was drawn and the small square of light blotted out. I slipped back round to the front of the house, but I did not go in. Instead I returned to the barn, where I sat and drank several scotches, lit only by the stray moonbeams that drifted through the little windows high in the gables. There I sat in my wicker chair until I reckoned it safe to make for the east wing. I regained my bedroom without incident, but, deeply disturbed by what I’d seen, I did not fall asleep until the first light of dawn had crept over the marsh to the east. You see, as I’d fallen back from the window, I think I’d seen Sidney taking Fledge into his arms to kiss him—yes, my butler, damnit, in the arms of that spineless boy!
I need not tell you my attitude toward that sort of thing. Men had been sent down from Oxford for less, in my day. Frankly I find it distasteful to have to mention it at all—I needed those scotches in the barn, they calmed me. My first reaction was to try and determine who bore the major responsibility for the incident. Fledge was the older man, of course, but Sidney was his better, in terms of social class, and in the fleeting glimpse I’d had of them it was Sidney who seemed, so to speak, the “aggressive” party. But I soon realized it hardly mattered which of them was more to blame, for in the normal course of events they’d both have been on their way before breakfast. But there was a complication, and it was this that kept me awake till morning.
My daughter Cleo was a spirited girl of eighteen, and this relationship with Sidney was her first real sentimental attachment. I’ve always had something of a soft spot for Cleo, despite my disappointment that she wasn’t a boy. Cleo’s a true Coal, as I may have mentioned; small-boned and wiry, she has prominent front teeth and fears nothing, not even me. I remember how, when the girls were growing up, I would at times have the entire household trembling with terror, and a sort of ghastly, oppressed silence hung upon the place, an “atmosphere,” as Harriet called it. Cleo, though, would quite boldly bait me, not in the least intimidated by my snapping, snarling ill-humor. You see, she stoutly maintained the belief that beneath this splenetic and ogreish exterior there beat a heart of gold, though this I imagine was something she had to do, the idea that her father was splenetic and ogreish all the way through being just too grim to contemplate. In fact, not only is my heart not made of gold, it isn’t even made of sound organic tissue —the arteries are sclerotic, and will kill me in the end!
I admired the girl, you see. Though I never showed it, I was delighted that she refused to allow me to tyrannize over her. So while Harriet and Hilary, my elder daughter, a plump and rabbity little thing like her mother, crept around in a state of deep funk, Cleo sought ways to provoke in me an outburst of truly foul temper. Punishment didn’t deter her—as I say, she did not know the meaning of fear, and I remember once, during the war, how she climbed onto the roof of Crook and stood at the peak of the very highest gable to wave at the Spitfire pilots. Harriet almost died of anxiety, and I was far from calm myself as I stood in the driveway at the front of the house shouting at the bloody girl to come down, then watching her sliding and jumping over those mossy old slates, and clambering down a rickety drainpipe, certain that at any moment she would plunge to her death.
Given my feelings for the girl, then, I felt less than sanguine about rudely shattering her first affair, sending Sidney off with my execrations ringing in his ears, and then having to explain to Cleo why. It could scar her for life, put her off men for good. Marriage was now completely out of the question, of course, but I wondered if the thing could not be gently broken up—say, after Sidney had returned to his mother’s house in London, about ten days hence. There would be no sudden shock, that way, no brutal exposure of the girl to the fact of Sidney’s tendencies; he would leave Crook, and then I would quietly and firmly indicate to him, in writing, that any further contact with the family was impossible. Cleo would doubtless strike up new friendships at Oxford, and with any luck it would all “blow over.” As for Fledge, I would have to keep him on until Cleo had gone, in case he made a scene; but once the girl was safely off to Oxford he’d be let go. And without references, I might add. It occurred to me then to wonder what precisely had happened in Kenya, that the Fledges should appear in England without papers of any sort. I felt a fleeting tremor of unease as I remembered what Harriet had said about the planter who’d been trampled to death by his own ox. I should have paid more attention to that tremor of unease; but I was not, in those days, in the habit of giving credence to such ephemeral and ultimately untestable phenomena.
All this I worked out in the long hours of the night, first in the unlit barn, and then in my bed in the east wing. As you may imagine, I was not a happy man at breakfast the next morning. I found it impossible to meet the eye of either Sidney or Fledge, and it was, as I say, only for Cleo’s sake that I suppressed the disgust I felt at being in the same room as they. What perhaps was most sickening was that business of the “engagement” a night or two previously. How right I had been to remain aloof and skeptical— what a shoddy travesty it had been, what a mockery, what an insult, not only to Cleo, but to Harriet and myself. Just thinking about it made my blood boil; it was as well I had the barn to escape to, for had I been compelled to spend much time under the same roof as those two inverts I might well have been unable to mask my feelings.
I spent most of the next two days in the barn, and I’m afraid I drank a good deal of whisky. I hadn’t as yet said anything to Harriet; that, I thought, should wait until Sidney was out of the house and back in London, for I had no confidence that she could keep up a pretense of normality if she knew what I knew. She would become upset, she would upset Cleo, and there would be no peace for any of us; and despite my recent setback I still had to work on my lecture. Better for everybody, I thought, if I keep it to myself. Mealtimes were difficult, and it was all I could do to maintain a sort of surly unsociability. But surly unsociability was not uncommon with me, and Harriet and Cleo were not particularly alarmed. Just Hugo having one of his “moods,” they thought. Just Hugo being “impossible.” Ha!
My plan, then, was to stay out of the house as much as possible for the last week-and-a-half of Sidney’s visit. But three nights after the incident in the pantry a sudden and dramatic development occurred. And it was then, I think, that it can all be said to have definitely begun.
I was in my study, quite late, writing, when there came a tapping at my door. It was Cleo. She came in and sank into an armchair by the fire. “Daddy,” she said, “Sidney’s not back yet.”
I did not look up from my work. Sidney’s whereabouts did not interest me, not in the very least. “It’s been more than three hours,” said Cleo. “He was just going into the village to post a letter.”
A rather cruel insinuation sprang to my lips. I suppressed it. Instead I said: “Perhaps he’s discussing poetry with Father Pin.” This was the parish priest, a friend of Harriet’s.
“It’s not like him,” she said, gazing into the fire. “He’s always so punctual about everything.” Her hair fell forward in a short thick black curtain so that, in profile, I could see only the tip of her nose and her protruding top lip.
“Yes,” I said, “I imagine he is.”
“Don’t be horrid, Daddy.”
“Horrid?”
“I know you don’t think very much of Sidney,” she said, “but that’s because you don’t know him very well. He’s always so shy in front of you.”
My pen ran across the page, amassing the familiar evidence, drawing the bold conclusions. I reject the official notion that the dinosaur was a reptile. I claim a new class, the Dinosauria, separate and distinct from the Reptilia, and I include within it the birds. Yes, I claim the birds as living dinosaurs.
“You intimidate him,” said Cleo. “He’s not combative, like you. He has a gentle nature.”
This of course was why Sykes-Herring was trying to muzzle me. “You think that’s just weakness, but it’s not. I like gentleness, Daddy. All women do.”
The idea was not original with me, unfortunately; Victorian paleontologists like Owen and Huxley knew all about the birdness of dinosaurs, and vice versa, but the insight had somehow been lost.
“Daddy, can’t we drive into the village and look for him?”
I screwed the top onto my fountain pen and gave her my full attention. “Very well,” I said. “Go and put your coat on.”
We drove slowly into Ceck. The moon was full, though intermittently obscured by ragged black rainclouds. I parked in the yard behind the Hodge and Purlet and went into the saloon bar, then the public bar, while Cleo waited in the car. But no one had seen Sidney, so we walked up the lane behind the inn, between high brick walls and spreading elms in which a restless wind was gently murmuring. Entering by the lych-gate, we followed the narrow path that led through the graveyard to the church, which stood out sharply against the night sky, flooded by moonlight that silvered the stonework and threw the belfry and lancets into slender blocks of darkness. High above the little steepled building black rainclouds still fled across the face of the moon. We passed through the graveyard in silence, passed the scattered, tilting headstones, whose shadows were linked in shifting arabesques by the delicate tracery of the foliage of the trees along the fence, and but for the stirring of the boughs, and of their shadows on the moon-bleached grass, all was still as death.
We went round to the back of the church to the priest’s cottage, and knocked on the door. Patrick Pin had not seen Sidney. Hunched in the dark little entrance of his cottage, the fat priest tried hard to get us inside, but I refused. We retraced our steps to the car, then drove out to Ceck’s Bottom, on the possibility that Sidney had gone to see George. Off to our left, over the marsh, the moon hung huge and low and yellow against the sky. I began, then, to form an idea of what might have happened to Sidney, though I said nothing to Cleo.
I parked in the yard, beside the swill lorry. George’s farmhouse was a square, squat, yellowing structure, and this night it seemed to glow, somehow, with an eerily vivid and unwholesome luster. I pushed open the back door and shouted his name. There was no answer. We went in, and the wind, which had freshened considerably in the last few minutes, slammed the door behind us with a bang. The kitchen was empty. A naked bulb hung from a length of twisted cord in the middle of the room and shed a dull, harsh light on the few sticks of furniture, the flagstoned floor, the rusting stove with its tin chimney rising crookedly through a hole in the ceiling and rattling dully as the wind came gusting down. A first volley of rain beat up against the window, which was uncurtained, one smashed pane patched over with a piece of damp cardboard. “George!” I shouted, and again there was no answer. It was weirdly disturbing, and my scalp for a moment prickled with a vague sense of dread—his lorry was in the yard and the light was on, but where was the man himself? I told Cleo to wait in the kitchen while I went through the house; but all the rooms were empty. “He’s not here,” I told her as I came back into the kitchen. The rain was lashing the windows by this time, and we could hear the pigs grunting on the far side of the yard. There was suddenly an ugly noise overhead, and Cleo turned to me, her eyes bright with alarm. It was a raspy, grating, scraping sound, and it seemed to accelerate, and as it did so it grew thunderously loud—it was a slate, I realized, dislodged by the wind, sliding down the roof. A second later it shattered on the stones of the yard, just outside the kitchen door. “Let’s go back,” said Cleo, with a shiver. It was all very uncanny. We returned to Crook in silence.
We left the front door unlocked that night, and we left the lights on in the drawing room. But Sidney did not come back.
“I suppose,” said Harriet at breakfast, “we should telephone his mother. Perhaps he’s gone home.”
“But why, Mummy?” said Cleo, looking up from her boiled egg, the shell of which she was listlessly tapping with the back of her spoon. “Why on earth would he go home without telling anyone?”
“I don’t know, darling,” said Harriet. “And please don’t play with your egg.” She threw up her hands. “I simply don’t understand the boy, do you, Hugo?”
I was behind my Times. I lowered it briefly. “Frankly no,” I said. “But you’re right, Harriet. Mrs. Giblet should be telephoned. I think you should do it.”
Harriet sighed. “Yes, I suppose I should.”
“Do it now, Mummy,” said Cleo. “I just hate all this not knowing.”
Poor Cleo. I’d said I didn’t understand why Sidney had not returned to Crook. In fact I’d begun to form a pretty good hypothesis. That it was connected to his dealings with Fledge, this, I think, was clear; and it was my opinion that Fledge had attempted to blackmail the boy. It would hardly be the first time, after all, that a servant had tried to extort money from a “gentleman” in such a situation. No, my guess was that Sidney, having no cash with which to pay off the man, and unable to explain to his mother or anybody else why he needed the cash, had decided that the only solution was simply to drop out of sight for a while. I was relieved, frankly; this spared me the rather odious task of breaking up the relationship, for by the time Sidney surfaced again Cleo would have lost all interest in him—and I didn’t expect him to surface again for a long time. In retrospect, this assumption on my part merits a loud, ironic snort. As for Fledge, I would wait until Cleo had gone up to Oxford, and then I’d sack him, as planned.
There remained one rather annoying loose end to tie up, and that was Sidney’s mother. Ever since Harriet had telephoned her the old woman had been calling us from London three times a day for news. As I had an appointment in the city at the end of the week, with Sykes-Herring, I agreed to go and see the woman. Not a task I relished, and I think you can understand why. How, after all, to tell the boy’s mother that I was sure he was all right, without telling her why I thought so?
Mrs. Giblet occupied a house in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum. After keeping my appointment with Sykes-Herring, and then eating lunch at the home of my elder daughter, Hilary, I took a taxi there. The sun had abandoned its efforts to bring light to the sordid metropolis, and retreated behind a thick mass of gray cloud. The weather served only to accentuate the aura of faded gentility that clung to Mrs. Giblet’s street, which in turn deepened my own ill-humor, for I hate London. The knocker was a snarling griffin in tarnished brass; it provoked the shrill yap of a dog and a sort of muffled shuffling within. The door opened a crack and a timid face peered out. “Good afternoon,” I said. “I believe Mrs. Giblet is expecting me.”
The door opened a further crack to reveal a mousy girl in a housemaid’s uniform from the 1920s with a feather duster clutched in her paw.
“Who is it, Mary?” cried a raspy voice from the upper regions. The mouse peered at me in terror. “Sir Hugo Coal,” I said. “Sir Hugo Coal!” she cried, surprisingly lustily.
“Who?”
“Sir Hugo Coal!” I shouted. “It’s about Sidney.”
“Show him into the parlor,” came the voice. “I’m coming down.” I was then relieved of hat and coat and led down a narrow hallway, heavily carpeted, between walls crammed with sepia-toned photographs of young men in uniform and sour-looking family groups clustered in gardens. Various pieces of huge dark furniture constricted the passage, and the place smelled of boiled fish. I was shown into the parlor, where the gloom of that overcast day was filtered through windows curtained in dingy lace.
“Mrs. Giblet will be with you shortly,” said the mouse, unnecessarily, and flicked her duster at a dead clock squatting massively on the mantelpiece. I removed a hank of animal hair from an overstuffed armchair and sat down. The air was musty, and whatever natural light did manage to penetrate the room was promptly swallowed by the unrelieved somberness of the hangings and furniture.
Some minutes passed; for me they were not happy minutes. I glanced at my watch. Nothing, I told myself, would keep me from the 3:47.
At last Mrs. Giblet appeared, leaning on a stick and clutching to her bosom a silky-haired, pug-nosed lapdog. The creature fixed me with an alert and hostile stare as I rose to my feet. With barely a glance at me, Mrs. Giblet made her way to a wing chair. Lowering herself ponderously into its depths, she wheezed heavily for several moments and regarded me from rheumy, china-blue eyes as her puckered lips worked over what I guessed were freshly inserted teeth. The voice, when it came, was rasping and steely and quite clearly accustomed to command. “Sherry, Sir Hugo? Or something stronger?”
“Sherry, if I may, Mrs. Giblet.”
She nodded at the mouse, who scuttled away. Mrs. Giblet was what is popularly known as a battle-ax, a type I distinctly dislike (I knew several in Berkshire). Confirmed terrorists themselves, they are notoriously difficult to intimidate. Shrewd, too. She set her stick upright before her and folded her hands upon the handle. Her fingers were glittering with stones, the nails painted scarlet. Between their hooded flaps her eyes too were glittering. Her mouth was smeared with lipstick and her throat swung bagged and crosshatched from a wrinkled knob of chin flanked by rouged jowls loosely depending from lumpy cheekbones. Powerful gusts of stale scent emanated from the crannies of her person; the little dog was curled in her lap like a hairy tumor. The mouse returned with two glasses of sherry and was told to fetch the bottle. Mrs. Giblet fumbled in the depths of her clothing and produced a packet of Capstan Full Strength. “Cigarette, Sir Hugo?” she wheezed.
“Thank you,” I said. There followed some business with matches and ashtray. When we were both alight, and the sherry bottle close to hand on a small round table with three clawed feet, I said, “Let me tell you what has happened.”
“That would be a start,” she said.
I sipped my sherry. It was very bad stuff. I frowned. “There isn’t a great deal that you have not already heard from my wife,” I began. “Sidney left our house on Monday evening at around seven o’clock, having told my daughter Cleo he was cycling into the village to post a letter to you.”
Mrs. Giblet at this point lifted a hooked finger. “It is now Friday, Sir Hugo, and I have received no letter from Sidney. Even allowing for the idiosyncrasies of the Post Office, I think it would have come by now.”
“Oh I agree, Mrs. Giblet. Clearly Sidney did not post the letter, if indeed there was a letter to post.”
“You think,” she said, with a rising inflection, “that Sidney had some other reason for going into the village?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Giblet. I think it possible. I’ve wondered if he might have had a reason for suddenly dropping out of sight?” I thought this would serve as an “opening.”
“Such as what, Sir Hugo?” Her tone was very arch; apparently not.
“My dear Mrs. Giblet, I have no intention of casting aspersions on Sidney’s character or motives. However, I find it hard to believe that some accident befell him; we should surely have found him if it had.”
“No doubt. Please go on, Sir Hugo.”
I was feeling distinctly nettled. I remained civil, however. “When he had not returned by ten, Cleo and I drove into the village, but we found no sign of him. No one has reported seeing him that night, or subsequently. We telephoned the police the following morning. They have since begun a systematic search of the district.”
“Tell me please the name of the man in charge of the search for my son.”
“Limp,” I said. “Inspector Limp.”
It did not inspire confidence. “Ah,” she said. She pondered. There were deep bags under her eyes, semicircular flaps of rather bluish skin on which the years had etched delicate crow’s-foot patterns. “And how does this—Limp—strike you, Sir Hugo?”
“He is not,” I said, choosing my words with some care, “a very prepossessing character. Nevertheless, I’ve no reason to doubt his competence.” In fact, Limp was about as stimulating as a bucket of water. But as I said, I had no reason to doubt he could mount a search for a missing person.
“I see. So Sidney remains lost in the countryside and a man called Limp is trying to find him. With dogs, Sir Hugo?”
“I believe so.”
“And what do you think has happened to him, Sir Hugo?”
“Mrs. Giblet, I may as well ask you the same question. I honestly have no idea. I’d thought at first that he might have got lost in the marsh.”
“The marsh?”
“The Ceck Marsh. It’s dangerous in spots—boggy.”
“I see.”
“But then of course we’d have found him by now.”
“Not if he’s been swallowed by one of your bogs, presumably.” The idea did not appear to distress her unduly.
“In that case we should have found his bicycle.”
“Perhaps he went down with his bicycle?” Those filmy old eyes glittered at me from under their hoods. The old bat seemed to be positively relishing this.
“That seems unlikely,” I said.
“Which is why, Sir Hugo, you think Sidney has gone off somewhere of his own volition.”
“It’s possible, Mrs. Giblet, I say no more than that.”
“But why would he do such a thing, Sir Hugo?”
“I thought you might be able to answer that, Mrs. Giblet.”
“I have no idea.”
“No more do I.”
“Ah.”
We had been staring straight at one another during this exchange. The old woman was utterly insensitive to my hints. I would have liked to speak frankly, but she wasn’t making it easy. Now she dropped her eyes, and leaving her cigarette to dangle loosely from the corner of her mouth, clamped both hands atop her stick— into the crook of which, I now noticed, was set a tiny white skull, carved from a piece of ivory. Again she fell to pondering. I glanced at my watch. I would have to leave in five minutes if I was going to catch the 3:47. “And his bicycle?” she said at length. “They haven’t found his bicycle?”
“No sign of the bicycle,” I said.
“That’s bad,” she murmured.
“On the contrary, Mrs. Giblet,” I replied, “that’s good. You see, I’m quite sure that Sidney is safe, and will come forward very shortly and clear up this distressing mystery.” This at least was honest. “In the meantime”—I rose to my feet—“Inspector Limp has assured us that his description is being circulated to every police station and hospital in the Home Counties.”
There was another long silence from the old woman. She heaved a deep sigh, her great bosom rose once, then fell, and those rheumy blue eyes flickered to mine. Wordlessly she picked a small bell from the table and shook it violently. The mouse appeared and helped her to rise from her chair. “Sir Hugo,” she said, extending a hook, “so good of you to come and see me. Excuse me if I’ve been short with you—a mother’s anxiety, I’m sure you understand”— and her whole face, the entire complex structure of flaps and jowls, heaved upward like a hulk being lifted from deep water and hung, trembling, for a moment, in an expression of genuine charm, before settling once more to its habitual aspect of irascible gloom. What a fierce old bird she was! I began to understand how Sidney had come by his tendencies. “Not at all, Mrs. Giblet. Nil desperandum, eh?”
“Nil desperandum, Sir Hugo,” she said, taking my hand in hers and patting it once or twice. “Keep me informed.”
“I shall.”
I made the 3:47 with a minute to spare.
There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque. Fledge knows it too—this is why he turns my wheelchair to the wall. He knows that when I sit gazing at a panel of old oak, at its knots and whorls and striations, and hear behind me only the murmur of soft, muted voices, perhaps the rustle of silk, an intake of breath, and even—from Harriet—a snort of mirth, then the scene I construct will be one of venereal depravity, of sex in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon.
This is what I mean when I speak of the grotesque—the fanciful, the bizarre, the absurdly incongruous. For when, on one occasion, Cleo entered the drawing room, and with a cry of indignation turned my wheelchair back around, I found the pair of them, Harriet and Fledge—playing chess! It thus becomes my task to allow for this tendency, to sift with rigorous care the circumscribed evidence of my senses, if I am to arrive at some approximation of the truth about what is happening in Crook. This, you will say, should not be difficult for a scientist such as I; but even for a scientist, pure empiricism is extremely hard to achieve, so hard, in fact, that one begins to doubt the possibility of constructing any version of reality that is not skewed in advance by the projections, denials, and impostures of the mind—or even (chilling thought) by a factor as simple and crude as the angle of vision afforded by the chance emplacement of one’s wheelchair. Out of such accidents does “truth” emerge; I begin to think it a chimera.
I’m rambling. Sometimes it’s an effort to keep everything in order. The reason is, that as I sit here brooding in my cave beneath the stairs, I suddenly detect fresh patterns of significance in the events that have occurred in Crook since the autumn, and these emerging patterns, if I’m not careful, play havoc with my chronology. This is unavoidable to a certain extent, but I shall nevertheless attempt to keep havoc at bay; I am determined, you see, that you should judge for yourself, rationally and impartially, the full extent of Fledge’s duplicity. For it was at around this time—I can’t be sure precisely when, sometime in October or November—that he set in motion the next stage of his plan, which involved the seduction of Harriet. And knowing what you do about the nature of Fledge’s physical affections, you will recognize in this development just how far he was prepared to go to fulfill his ambition: he was prepared to assume the appetites of a normal man. Fledge’s “normality” must be seen, then, for what it is: a sort of double inversion, an inversion of inversion itself.
But at the time I wasn’t aware of any of this. At the time I had only the knowledge of what I’d seen in the pantry that night in September, and my suspicions regarding Sidney’s disappearance. And what I’d seen in the pantry was not merely immoral, it was also criminal—men were once hanged for buggery, and not so long ago, either! Exposure meant publicity, it meant notoriety, complete loss of face and reputation, for the press, particularly the gutter press, tends to be shrill and vigorous in its condemnation of such offenses. Conscious as I was, then, of these factors, the farthest thing from my mind was the possibility of Fledge having designs on Harriet. It is only by going backwards, step-by-step, that I am able to reconstruct the probable course of the affair.
I hadn’t sacked him as I’d intended to, you see. My interview with Sykes-Herring had gone well, surprisingly, and we had fixed a new date for the lecture, February 7, and shaken hands on it. This was what I’d gone to London for—I knew they didn’t want me to speak, they were far too suspicious of my opinions, but if I could get a date and a handshake, then the gentlemanly code would ensure that on that day I would indeed have my podium and my audience. The point is, with the opportunity to get some real work done, I was loath to deal with the sort of distress that sacking the Fledges would provoke in Harriet. Cheap domestic servants were so hard to find, as she frequently reminded me, that losing these “treasures” would upset her for weeks. I decided to wait until I’d given my talk to the Royal Society; then they’d be out on their ears.
Harriet, I might add, was prepared to keep them on even after she’d learned Doris’s “secret.”
“Hugo,” she said to me one morning in a low voice, “I believe Mrs. Fledge drinks!”
“Of course she drinks, Harriet,” I said, “anyone can see that from her nose.” Harriet, in many ways, is an innocent.
“Do you suppose we should sack her?” she said. “Oh good Lord, we can’t, Hugo! We were really so very lucky to get them, we’ll never replace them at these wages. Do you realize what Connie Babblehump had to pay her last butler? And he wouldn’t polish shoes!”
We were at breakfast. “Oh do be quiet, Harriet,” I said from behind the Times. “Sack them if you want to, it’s all the same to me.” (I knew of course that she wouldn’t.) “You hired them. Just don’t gabble so.”
“Hugo,” she said, in a certain hurt tone that I knew well and enjoyed provoking, “you can be most horridly rude when you choose. Why do you choose?”
I said nothing to this; wasn’t I the “impossible” man?
Soon enough the newspapers learned of Sidney’s disappearance, and apparently decided that the situation was one that merited exploitation. The publicity was extremely unwelcome. After several very tiresome intrusions I instructed Fledge to turn away any reporters who came to the door, and George to see off trespassers, with a shotgun blast if necessary. The press, I should tell you, is no respecter of one’s personal privacy. And in spite of everything they still clustered at the gates of Crook, and when Harriet tried to cycle into the village one morning she was literally mobbed, and had to dismount, and returned to the house in great distress. I was much relieved when, after a few days of rabid excitement, they lost interest in us, having fresh rubbish with which to titillate their readers. And mass literacy, they tell me, is a boon.
The days passed. The swallows flew away, the trees shed their leaves, and the garden grew less and less productive. It was damp and misty; it often rained. Cleo left for Oxford later in the month; she had been accepted at St. Anne’s, to read moral philosophy. She only lasted a term, poor child. Sidney’s disappearance upset her badly, she worried and worried at it, unable somehow to mesh the fact that he’d simply dropped out of sight into any workable picture of reality. She became convinced that evil had occurred, and nothing I could say would dissuade her of it. She tormented herself with the idea that someone, or something, had killed her Sidney—her sweet, gentle, spineless Sidney. Her ferret. Who could do such a thing? And why? It was not a happy Cleo who left us to begin her university life that October. I hold the newspapers responsible for putting those lurid and terrible ideas in her head. The irony was that I couldn’t tell her that I knew Sidney was alive and well, lying low somewhere to avoid being blackmailed by Fledge. Then the whole story would have had to come out, and it was from precisely this that I was trying to shield the girl.
I did not dream of Doris again, I’m happy to say, after that extraordinary recrudescence of libido she aroused in me the night of the storm. I theorized that what had happened was that the frustration I’d been feeling with regard to the deferred lecture had by some odd psychic process been displaced, shunted sideways, as it were, into the realm of physical desire—a nice confusion, perhaps, of Logos and Eros. At any rate, as my work went forward in the autumn and early winter, I actually felt grateful for the delay. I was able to refine the thing, polish it, give it some style.
We had the first snow of the year on December 15. I awoke early, and through lead-latticed windows marbled with frost I glimpsed the dazzling whiteness of the countryside. I threw wide the windows, then, and stood, in my dressing gown, and smoking a cigar, as the sun began its low arc across the sky, picking diamonds of light from the snow as it went. My bedroom faces north, across the valley of the Fling to the wooded hills beyond, and in fields and lanes the tracks of birds and foxes were visible as faint wandering lines, slender as hairs, inscribed upon the natural world by its creatures. I imagined then the children of Ceck, their eyes ablaze with the primitive wonder of savages, and their noses squashed bloodless on chilled cottage windows, desperate to be out and trampling in the stuff, hurling it about, building men with it. This predilection we have for constructing effigies of ourselves—it is surely instinctual, witness the spontaneous behavior of children in snow.
Fledge appeared with my morning tea. “Snow at last, Fledge,” I said, still gazing out across the fields.
“So it would appear, Sir Hugo,” he said. “Will there be anything else, Sir Hugo?”
“No thank you, Fledge.” He left the room. Only then did I turn from the window and approach my tea. So it would appear, Sir Hugo! That snow didn’t “appear”; it existed! It was real! One could see it, touch it, taste it, probably smell it, if you had a good nose (I don’t). Probably hear it, if you were an Eskimo! Fledge was a man who took not even the evidence of his senses on trust, and veiled his cynicism in that mannered cant he spoke. Christ how I hated him, him and his phlegmatic evasions, his low cunning, his secret lusts!
That evening, the evening of the first snow, Harriet and I sat as usual at the dinner table. Our talk was desultory. A dozen flames flickered on a branch of silver candlesticks as Fledge moved soundlessly around the table, removing a plate, refilling a glass (usually mine), generally performing his tasks with a scrupulous punctilio. A fire crackled in the hearth and once, high above, a wedge of snow slithered down the roof and landed with a soft thump on the path below. Otherwise Crook was still and silent, and slightly fragrant with the smell of the Christmas tree out in the hall. From the outside, to one coming up the drive, it must have seemed, with its snow-crusted gables, the holly wreath nailed over the porch, and the firelight gleaming through the mullioned windows, to emanate an aura of solidity and repose, of benevolence, warmth, and shelter. Ha! There was a snake in this garden, a worm in this bud! We were about to rise from the table when children’s voices reached us. “Listen Hugo,” whispered Harriet, and together we sat there, in the candlelight, straining to hear. “It’s the carol singers.”
We went to the front door, and opened it, and there, standing in a group, and flanked by two schoolteachers, each with a lantern mounted on a stick, were the children of Ceck Primary, all booted and hatted and warmly coated. Their reedy little voices rose over the gables of Crook, and from the kitchen Mrs. Fledge appeared, and came down the hall to listen. And then Fledge himself joined us, and to the strains of “Silent Night” we stood, together, in silence, though Doris was unable to stifle a sob (drunk no doubt).
When they had finished, in they all came, and the children went tramping down to the kitchen, where Doris gave them mince pies and lemonade. Harriet and I steered the teachers into the drawing room and made them drink whisky by the fire.
All of which, while no doubt arousing tender feelings in the hearts of the mawkish, promised nothing but disruption and distraction as far as I was concerned. I know the Christmas season for what it is, you see—a period of tedious social obligations, frenzied domestic activity, and unlimited opportunity for alcoholic excess. For one such as I, with an important lecture to prepare, it spelled disaster. Are you familiar, by the way, with the etymology of mawkish? It comes from an Old Norse word for maggot, or flesh worm, and means “nauseatingly insipid.”
Harriet is a sentimental woman, and, as I say, an innocent. In many ways she is still the girl I married in 1921, and Fledge I imagine must have smiled inwardly at the ease with which he accomplished her seduction. Harriet had not led a happy life, she had not been fulfilled by the mature love of a devoted husband, for, as I think must be clear by now, I had been far too interested in my bones ever to give her the tenderness and candor that every woman needs from a man. There was, thus—and these insights, ironically enough, I have had the leisure to develop only since becoming paralyzed—a sort of aching void within her, a void she had for years attempted to fill with religion. This was why her priest, Pin, was so important to her—he was a surrogate of Jesus Christ, who was in turn a surrogate of me—the husband who had so utterly failed her.
Not that our marriage had been empty from the start, far from it. In the early days we shared a bedroom in the west wing and we were happy. The African expedition was still in the early planning stages, and I seemed, somehow, to have room in my life for both paleontology and love. Harriet was a sweet, vivacious girl, an English rose, people used to call her, on account of her complexion; and, seeing her with the clever, ambitious young naturalist I then was, they remarked on what a well-suited couple we seemed. What went wrong? I’d always assumed that our marriage began to founder only after I’d come back from Africa with George—that Phlegmosaurus had demanded so much of me, I’d allowed our love to die. But in fact—and this is another of those insights that came to me as I moldered in the alcove under the stairs—Harriet and I had stopped sleeping together even before I left for Africa.
One incident came back to me then with particular clarity. I remember the day—this must have been, oh, 1924, 1925—that Dome put up a picture on a wall of our bedroom, a framed reproduction of a watercolor called The Virgin of the Lilies. There was already a large wooden crucifix hanging over the bed, and the experience of going to sleep immediately beneath those bleeding feet I used to find distinctly macabre; but as I say, I loved Harriet then, and I tolerated it for her. But The Virgin of the Lilies was too much. The thing oozed a sort of sickly religiosity that frankly embarrassed me, and the idea that I would now have to spend my nights not only with Jesus Christ but with his mother as well was not to be borne. Down the stairs I clattered and had it out with Harriet there and then. Oh, there were tears, but I stood firm, young prig that I was in those days. Dome removed The Virgin of the Lilies that very afternoon, but somehow, after that, things were never the same between us. Actually, I believe she told Patrick Pin about it (that bloody priest has been in Ceck forever), and he began to turn her against me. By the winter of 1949 I had been sleeping over in the east wing for twenty-five years, and love—the love of a husband and a wife—had long since died between us. I can’t say I missed it. I had my bones, as I say, and if I was very occasionally troubled with “urges” I would just slip down to the Hodge and Purlet, where a few hours in the company of men like John Crowthorne and George Lecky would get them out of my system. (This is why that dream about Doris Fledge was so disconcertingly bizarre.) But in all those years, it had never once occurred to me to wonder if Harriet was ever similarly afflicted, and if so, how she dealt with it. Hardly a thing one can discuss with a woman, after all.
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 think 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 strange. 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.”
Harriet, who had half risen from her chair, anticipating a flood of tears—and ready to tell Cleo that the bicycle being found proved nothing at all—sank back, and a rather puzzled concern clouded her features. “Darling,” she said, “what do you mean, you knew?”
A most peculiar thing happened then. There was a sudden flare of energy in Cleo, but it was a strange, wild energy. She laughed, you see, in a joyless, manic sort of way, and cried out, “What I say, Mummy! I knew! He came and told me!”
“Darling, do sit down, please. Who told you?”
“He did! Sidney did!” And then she burst into tears and flung herself into an armchair, where she buried her face in her hands and sobbed convulsively. Harriet was beside her instantly. “But darling, darling—”
With an awful wail Cleo brushed her mother aside and fled from the room. Harriet gazed at me, dumb with shock, and then, went after the girl. “No, Harriet,” I said sharply, “let her go.” Harriet paused, her hand on the doorknob; she turned toward me. “Let her go,” I said quietly, and crossing the room, I led her back to her armchair by the fire, where she sat in a state of dazed dismay while I made her a drink.
I sit here in my cave, in my grotto, and think of Cleo, Cleo with her buckteeth and lively eyes, her elfin presence, her quick, light ways… Did I mention that the only good that has come of this term I’ve spent among the ontologically dead has been Cleo’s sympathy? That sympathy has, alas, become rarer and more fleeting; the scene I have just described, in which she told us that she knew what had happened to Sidney, that he had told her, was the first indication to Harriet and myself that something was seriously amiss with our daughter; it was, in fact, the first manifestation of a mental illness that has, in recent months, progressively enshrouded her mind. She does have moments of lucidity—inspired lucidity—and it was during one of these that she saw what all the rest of them are blind to, that I, Hugo, am still thinking and feeling within the frame of this inert and failing flesh.
You see, after my cerebral accident Crook entered a period of tranquillity. The storm of my personality had ceased to rage, and a smooth calm settled on the surface of life, a deceptive calm, I believe, that concealed within it the workings of dark and restless forces—but a calm, nonetheless. I was much alone, in those early days after leaving the hospital, with the grotesques of my imagination; and when I believed myself unobserved, I would at times permit myself to weep, as I contemplated my own ruin and the ruin of my house. The day I sat facing the wall and, hearing the sounds of a chess game behind me, imagined a scene of venereal depravity —that day I permitted the tears to fall, and when Cleo entered the drawing room and with a cry of indignation turned my wheelchair to the light, she saw the tears and, suddenly quiet, sank to her knees beside me, and bringing her face close to mine, gazed into my eyes—and saw me. “Daddy,” she breathed, her face still but a few inches from mine, so that I gazed back at eyes the precise same shade of gray as my own, “Daddy,” she whispered, “you’re in there, I know you are.” And from that moment forward I was no longer alone. Fledge knew, of course, but he used the knowledge to torment me. Cleo loved me.
But as I say, Cleo is rarely with us anymore. Like me she has been trapped in a false world of shadows and phantoms; for her, as for me, the borders and boundaries of the real and the fantastic have become blurred, unreliable, faulty. In her, as in me, order is crumbling. But I at least can see it crumbling. Cleo cannot do even that, or rather, she does it increasingly rarely. In fact, in these last days her recognition of my own sentient existence has grown so sporadic that she no longer provides me any real support. It is Fledge, ironically, who maintains me—he maintains me with his hatred. I think that were he to cease to hate me, were he to deprive me of this last fragile link, this last relation with the world, then I should be swallowed up, sink into darkness for good. Doubtless there would be a final gasp, a last solipsistic flurry of ideation, but then I would fall silent, truly become the vegetable the world takes me for. This, as I say, is the irony of my existence, that I have come to require the hatred of a bad servant simply to be. Ontologically I am not dead, but I am clinging to the ledge with my fingernails!
But Cleo. It was of Cleo, not myself, that I intended to speak, for as I say, with her mysterious declaration that Sidney had told her what had happened to him, Harriet and I first began to understand how deeply the loss of the boy had touched her. “Let her go, Harriet,” I had said in the study that night; I knew that, like me, Cleo would prefer to recover from an access of intense emotion privately and alone, that she would seek us out as and when she wished to speak about it, and not before. For the next two days, then, a pall of sadness lay upon the house, as the fact of Cleo’s grief permeated the atmosphere. Everybody felt it, everybody understood it. The girl came down to meals but was silent and listless. Her face, normally so lively, so mobile, rapidly and dramatically reflected her inner state—dark shadows appeared around her eyes, her cheeks seemed to hollow out, to become gaunt and harrowed with pain. We all felt for her, and waited for her to begin to come to terms with her emotions. That process was disturbed, however, by two events; and the first of these was the pipes of Crook bursting.
It was my grandfather, a farsighted and energetic Victorian called Sir Digby Coal, who introduced indoor plumbing to Crook. The household is today still served by the lavatories he installed, which, in their day, were much admired: the seats and covers were of pale oak, all the brass fittings shone like gold, and the bowls were sculpted from the finest white china. The tank is in the attic, and Sir Digby did not rest until the flushing mechanism functioned to that standard of efficiency that his generation brought to bear on everything it undertook. For Sir Digby Coal, even the humble lavatory served to express the idea of Progress.
But last winter Crook experienced a cold snap that was suddenly, in the days after Christmas, punctuated by a thaw, and Sir Digby’s obsolescent and cantankerous pipes promptly burst. A crisis ensued: the kitchen was flooded, and the central heating, senile and inefficient though it was, had to be shut down. There was no running water. In the very somber atmosphere that had descended upon us, it was as though the house were performing its own tearful requiem for Sidney Giblet, a sort of gesture of hydraulic condolence. So it was that on New Year’s Eve we all sat down to a breakfast of deviled kidneys amid the noise and clatter of the Ceck plumber and his two sons; and where before had reigned the hushed silence appropriate to the situation, there was now the sloshing of mops, the banging of spanners, and the cheery, whistling bustle of men at work. And as we sat in this din, the telephone suddenly raised its shrill mechanic voice. Some moments later Fledge materialized at my elbow.
“Telephone, Sir Hugo.”
Down the table eyes were lifted in mild curiosity, except Victor’s; he was deep in his Freud.
“Who is it, Fledge?”
Hilary began to smear marmalade on a piece of toast. Harriet was stirring her tea. I folded the Times.
“It’s Mrs. Giblet.”
“Oh no!” This from Cleo, who rose from the table and left the room.
I returned to the dining room five minutes later. An expectant hush greeted my reentry. “Well?” said Harriet. I sat down. I told Fledge to give me more tea. I then reported that Mrs. Giblet had been informed by Inspector Limp about the bicycle being dug up in the marsh. That, I said, was not all. Considering herself qualified to furnish some real assistance to the police (of whose intelligence she was apparently no great admirer), she had traveled to Ceck, and was even now ensconced in the Hodge and Purlet.
A gasp from Harriet. “Oh good heavens,” she said, gazing at me with genuine distress. “Hugo, must we have her here? We must.”
“I explained to Mrs. Giblet about our pipes,” I replied. “I told her she would be more comfortable where she was.”
“Well that’s a relief, at any rate,” murmured Harriet.
“I did, however, feel obliged to ask her to dine with us tonight.”
“Yes, of course,” said Harriet. “Oh dear, poor woman. She’s probably just as upset as Cleo. More so!” She sighed. She had already extended her full sympathy, as a woman and as a mother, to that ghastly old battle-ax, that dragon, who had settled now in our midst and would undoubtedly belch flame and ill-smelling smoke into all our lives. I made for the barn, reflecting, not for the first time, that if I’d had the slightest inkling of the trouble Sidney Giblet was going to cause, I’d never have let him within a mile of Crook in the first place.
The last night of the old year; and seven of us sat down to dinner. Next to me and to my left was Mrs. Giblet. She had arrived at Crook in a vast and shapeless fur coat with padded shoulders, and a black hat whose brim was pinned up on one side and embellished with sprigs of lace and crimson cherries. In one arm she clutched her lapdog; with the other she gripped the handle of her rubber-tipped walking stick, the one with the skull embedded in the crook. She wore gloves of black satin and a large white pearl in each pendent and withered earlobe. Fledge attempted to take her coat from her, but she insisted on keeping it on for the time being, until she was “adjusted.” Wily old bird, she realized immediately of course that in a house like this the central heating was probably tepid at the best of times. With burst pipes we had only fires to warm us, and Crook is a house of drafts.
Along the hallway she advanced, inspecting as she went and nodding to left and right with royal approbation. Her entry into the drawing room was stately; Henry and Victor both rose to their feet, and Harriet came forward with both arms outstretched. “Dear Mrs. Giblet,” she said warmly, “how good of you to come at such short notice.”
It was the perfect thing to say to Mrs. Giblet. “Not at all, Lady Coal,” she purred. “Ah! Cleo!” Cleo came forward quietly and brushed the old woman’s cheek with her lips. Mrs. Giblet then sank into the armchair Henry had vacated by the fire, and began to fumble for cigarettes. Harriet introduced her to the Horns, apologized profusely for the cold, and invited her to have a glass of sherry. Mrs. Giblet thought that would be nice. Then, failing altogether to beat about the bush, she declared to the room at large: “I have met the man Limp. Sir Hugo”—she wheeled about in her chair— “I am surprised that you place any confidence in him at all; to my mind he is a total incompetent.”
I frowned. “He has had very little to work with, Mrs. Giblet,” I said.
“That’s a moot point, Sir Hugo. With all the progress Limp is making we’ll be lucky to see Sidney in a box. I’m sorry, my dear”—Cleo had been unable to suppress a small cry—“but there’s no use holding out false hopes.”
She puffed lugubriously at her cigarette. A silence fell. The light died in her eyes and her face slowly collapsed, and in the sag of it there seemed to dwell such an immense despair that the atmosphere rapidly became very black indeed. Harriet rushed in to fill the breach. “Mrs. Giblet,” she cried, “come! There is no reason to despair, none at all. I keep telling Cleo, digging up a bicycle tells us nothing at all.”
Mrs. Giblet looked up. She reached for Harriet’s hand, and smiled that oddly charming smile I’d seen in London. “Of course it doesn’t,” she said. “Lady Coal, forgive me for infecting your home with my gloom. May I, I wonder, have more of that sherry? It really is very good.” And while Fledge was busy with the task, Mrs. Giblet, apparently somewhat “adjusted,” opened her coat. “Thank you,” she said, raising her face to Fledge, as he appeared with her sherry. “Personally,” she said, “I intend to go over the Ceck Marsh with a fine-tooth comb. You may be right about Limp, Sir Hugo, or then again you may not. I should simply like to convince myself that nothing has been overlooked. Would anyone, I wonder, care to help me?”
The brief silence that followed upon this bizarre invitation was broken by Victor. “Yes,” he cried, with alacrity, “I would!” This functioned as a piece of comic relief, although the boy was quite serious. A ripple of amusement passed over the drawing room, and then Fledge announced that dinner was served.
Going in to dinner, Mrs. Giblet attached herself to Harriet, to whom she had apparently taken a “shine,” and gushed. “All this wood, Lady Coal, how comforting it must be to live in a house with walls paneled with wood. Oak, I imagine, isn’t it? Good English oak; it makes for a feeling of continuity with the past, is what I’ve always thought. Are you a great believer in tradition, Lady Coal?”
“I suppose I am, Mrs. Giblet,” murmured Harriet.
“I, too, am deeply conservative,” said Mrs. Giblet. “I always have been. Churchill’s my man; I knew him once, you know. Brilliant chap, erudite, extremely, and such wit!” The old lady chuckled slightly and tapped Harriet’s arm, upon which rested her own gnarled old claw. “Why once—but no, you don’t want to hear my stories, do you. Up here, next to Sir Hugo? Delighted. Thank you, Fledge.”
Seven of us, as I say, sat down to dinner that night, and a curious-looking group we made. With the central heating shut down, Crook was really very chilly, and in view of this fact I had decided that jerseys might be worn with evening dress. We thus had the spectacle of Henry Horn in a thick gray fisherman’s sweater that bulked clumsily under his dinner jacket and, in concert with his beard, made him look more than ever like a sea captain. Hilary, Harriet, and Cleo all looked very gauche, all in their thickest cardigans, with headscarves tied under their chins. Victor was hardy, and wore only his school uniform; and Mrs. Giblet, having, clearly, adjusted, and no doubt thinking it highly improper, regardless of climatic conditions, to dine in a country house in her coat, had slipped the great fur off her shoulders and was revealed in the full majesty and splendor of her evening gown.
It was a black satin garment that had resided, I hypothesized, for a good forty years in some mahogany wardrobe in that dingy house near the British Museum. It was shiny and sleeveless, and hung to the ground in stiff folds, and rustled, I noticed, when she moved. As she seated herself by me, I became aware of a distinct smell of mothballs; nor was that the only smell that clung to the woman. Rather, it served as a sort of deep bass to a veritable symphony of aromas, the melody, so to speak, being carried by a sharp little perfume which, so she told me (for I inquired) had been purchased in Strasbourg in 1934. Its sour and astringent qualities were vulgarized, however (my own nose, though not good, detected this), by a liberal application of cheap eau-de-cologne, and the whole was grimly inflected with the mundane odors of cigarette smoke, sherry, and the perfectly natural emanations of an aging flesh.
Her shoulders were bare, as were her upper arms, from which the skin hung in copious limp pouches. She’d donned her jewelry for dinner in the country, a tiara dotted with a diamond or two, and a string of pearls that dipped alarmingly toward the chasm that gaped within her bosom. The satin gloves reached to her elbows; she had wondered, she confided to me, whether they might not be a trifle dressy outside London. I assured her that, on the contrary, one could never be overdressed in the country, temperatures did not permit it. She took this quip in good humor. She ate well, occasionally dropping morsels to the beast in her lap, and she was deeply appreciative of my claret, which she loudly swilled about her mouth and swallowed with evident pleasure. I found myself, surprisingly, warming rather to the old buzzard, the old turkey, and when, apropos a remark of mine about a piece of fossilized bone with which I was much preoccupied at the time, she began to speak about her arthritis, I told her in an undertone that the man near the other end of the table, the one she’d taken for a sea captain, was in fact one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country, and that after dinner she should tell him about her arthritis. She said she would. Henry, I thought, will be delighted.
The soup came and went, and then the main course—Doris had outdone herself with a joint of roast beef, and there was ham as well—and we were on to the Stilton when Cleo could finally contain herself no longer. She had been very quiet all evening; and now, as Mrs. Giblet demurely accepted more port from Fledge, and raised her glass to Henry, whom she had clearly earmarked as her healer, Cleo rose to her feet, perceptibly quivering with emotion, and pointed an unsteady finger at the old woman. “How can you?” she cried, and a strange, unnaturally fierce light burned in her eyes. “How can you sit and stuff yourself when Sidney’s still out there somewhere, in the cold, in pain? Oh, you disgust me—no Mummy, don’t try and shut me up, this is true—you sit here as if nothing had happened, when all the time the most appalling things are happening”—her finger swung round to the window—“out there! Outside! You have no conception of the evil that exists out there! You think the worst thing in the world is a burst pipe or a gamy ham, and all the time, right under your noses, the most foul and loathsome evil thing creeps on the earth, and you don’t see it, you make yourselves blind to it because it’s just too much trouble! Oh, if it touched your comfort, that would be different, but just the fact that a hideous, stinking, evil thing is crawling around outside this house—that won’t rouse you, but it’s there all the same! It’s there! And you’ll find it, Mrs. Giblet, you’ll find it, out in the marsh, but you better go after dark! Oh! Oh!” —and she burst into tears and fled weeping from the room.
There was a brief bewildered silence. Then Harriet rose and followed Cleo, and then Hilary. I did not try to stop them. Then Mrs. Giblet spoke. “Poor child,” she said, with a sigh. “I will tell her that we all feel it as she does. But young people do like to see feelings displayed; they can’t understand that with the years one learns to preserve one’s energies; one has to. Is that not so, Sir Hugo?”
I had listened to Cleo’s outburst with my elbows on the table, my forearms forming an arch, and my mouth and chin pressed to the interlocked fingers at its cusp. I glanced sideways at the old woman, but, knowing what I knew, I did not shift my head from my hands to respond. Instead, Victor spoke. “Daddy,” he said, “I think that’s hysteria, but I’m not sure what sort.”
“Victor,” said his father, “shut up.”