The Grotesque

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,