The Grotesque

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!”