The Grotesque

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