The Grotesque

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.”

The Horns went back to London at the beginning of January. They had not had a terribly festive time of it at Crook, I’m afraid. Sidney’s specter had hovered over all of us, particularly Cleo of course, and what with the pipes bursting, the atmosphere in the house had been not only cheerless but uncomfortably cold and drafty as well. Hilary told Harriet that she was reluctant to go, with Cleo so unhappy, but Victor had to be back at school. Harriet assured her that she could cope perfectly well here. It was all very distressing. Henry actually drew me aside, just before they were to leave, and told me he was quite concerned about Cleo. He thought he detected a morbid element in her grief; this disturbed him. He suggested that if she was still depressed in a week or so we should telephone him; he would arrange for her to “see someone” in Harley Street. I told him I appreciated his concern. But I was sure, I said, there was no cause for alarm. Didn’t he know, I said, that all the Coals were mad? He ought to know, having married one of them! I grinned at him around my cigar and clapped him on the back. I asked him where his next voyage would take him, what far-flung corner of the globe—Singapore? The Caribbean? Or maybe the pine-girt shores of British Columbia, for a cargo of good pulping timber!

“Seriously, Hugo,” he said.

“Seriously, Henry,” I said, “don’t worry about Cleo; she’ll be fine with us.”

I was sorry to see Victor go, I was fond of that little chap. I gave him a ten-shilling note when his parents weren’t looking and told him to forget Freud, read Darwin instead. “Read The Origin of the Species, my boy,” I said. “Find out where you came from.” His hair falling over his eyes in a thick fringe, he grinned at me in mock outrage, those good Coal teeth of his protruding far beyond the bottom lip, and ran a plump finger across his throat. “Never!” he said. I cuffed him once or twice, shook his hand, and stamped off to the barn.

Mrs. Giblet was as good as her word. She resumed her tenure at the Hodge and Purlet, and early in the new year I began to hear reports from the village about her. She would apparently leave the inn after breakfast and be driven down the Ceck’s Bottom road as far as the cart track that gives onto the marsh. She would then make her way out onto the marsh and spend the day, in her huge fur coat, picking slowly across the frozen ground until, at around five, when the light began to thicken, she returned to the road, where the car would pick her up. Several people saw her out there, including Bill Cudlip and old John Crowthorne, and they mentioned it to me with quiet expressions of scorn. I found it oddly touching, though, the picture of the old woman, out on the marsh alone beneath the cold gray sky, searching for traces of her lost son. I presumed she did not follow Cleo’s advice and go out there after dark, when the “evil creeping thing” was abroad; the Ceck Marsh, after dark, is an uncanny sort of place, even without evil creeping things. I was out there one night myself.

As for Cleo, she went into semi-seclusion over in the east wing, where she has her bedroom, and only rarely came downstairs. When she did appear, she was either angry or depressed or both. “Where,”

I chided, “has my laughing girl gone?”

She rounded on me, eyes blazing. “Why should I laugh, Daddy? What do I have to laugh about?”

“Steady, darling,” murmured Harriet. “Not so fierce, darling.”

Then the girl started to cry, and Harriet had to comfort her. Harriet later came to me, worried, and asked me didn’t I think we should call Henry and have someone “see” Cleo, as he’d suggested? Nonsense, I said, she’ll pull through. Perfectly normal thing, no cause for alarm. Coals don’t go to shrinks, I said. Very well, said Harriet, but I could see she wasn’t altogether convinced.

But what had been uppermost in my mind, ever since Sidney’s bicycle came up on Christmas Day, was the Fledge question. I was now certain that he must have ambushed the boy on his way into Ceck that night, murdered him, and then abandoned the body out on the marsh. But where was the body? You see my predicament? Even though I was certain in my own mind what had happened, I was hardly in a position to go to the police. I needed facts, I needed evidence—I needed a body, above all! I would just have to wait a little longer, and keep in the forefront of consciousness the knowledge that I was harboring under my roof a desperate and violent man—a cold-blooded killer, in fact.

January was, on the surface, a period of calm, and though I was maintaining a discreet surveillance of Fledge I spent most of my time out in the barn, where I was putting the finishing touches to the lecture. I’ve told you how conducive to clear thinking I found the Ceck Marsh, particularly when I was in the throes of composition. I drove out there one Saturday afternoon toward the end of the month and parked the Morris, as was my habit, on the cart track that gave off the Ceck’s Bottom road.

The ground was muddy, for we had had some rain, and the sky was gray and overcast. I squelched down the track in my Wei-lington boots and then, emerging from the trees, I experienced something of a shock—for the wide expanse of marsh that I had expected to find desolate and empty was, instead, peopled—there were figures in the landscape, tiny figures spread out in a long line against the horizon. I had at first no inkling of what this could mean. I knew that the police had gone over the marsh in late December, after finding the bicycle, but they had uncovered nothing more and so discontinued their search. But I soon recognized a familiar humped and shuffling form that, distant and indistinct though it was, could only be Mrs. Giblet. And the little figures abreast of her, moving slowly through the gloom of the afternoon —these were surely children!

I did not go further. The marsh was no use to me unless I found solitude there. I returned to the car and as I started it up a gentle, drizzling rain began to fall. I backed out into the road and turned in the direction of Ceck’s Bottom. The light was perceptibly fading when I reached the farm. I found George in his slaughterhouse, a dimly lit shed that reeked of offal beneath an old roof of corrugated tin on which the rain came softly pattering down. It was a dark and primal place, George’s slaughterhouse, and old John Crowthorne was in there with him, the pair of them in long, filthy aprons caked with blood; they were butchering the carcass of a freshly killed pig. It was a huge animal, and it was hanging upside down from its trotters from a hook in the beam overhead, sliced down the belly. Two buckets of faintly steaming blood stood on the floor nearby. George saw me in the doorway. He promptly