The Grotesque

Patrick McGrath THE GROTESQUE

ORSOLYANAK

(FOR ORSOLYA)

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

—Baudelaire

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.