The Grotesque

I said nothing more for some minutes. I had come round to the back of George’s chair. I gripped him by the shoulders and squeezed them warmly. I understood his predicament; he would never go to the police with this story; for one thing, he had worked beside old John Crowthorne almost as long as he’d been in Ceck, and besides, his own complicity was clear. But I put it to him anyway, and as I expected he was adamant. He was a countryman, and he had all the countryman’s suspicion of police and officials and institutions; he followed natural law, but the ghastly irony at the heart of all this was that so did John Crowthorne. I told him he should stay in the barn while we tried to think the thing through. Then I went over to the house to get bread and cheese for him, and ointment for the rash on his neck.

Crossing the driveway I began to see a net of guilt, a net that originated with Fledge, that had enmeshed old John Crowthorne, and then George, and now me too, inasmuch as I was shielding George from the law. As I entered the house Fledge was emerging from the drawing room. The effect of seeing him, then, was strong, but I attempted not to show it. He followed me down to the kitchen and began to prepare Harriet’s tea tray. “Have we any ointment, Fledge?” I said, after fetching out a loaf of bread and some cheddar.

“Ointment, Sir Hugo?”

“Yes, ointment,” I snapped. “Salve, embrocation—something to soothe a rash. Oh never mind,” I said, “I’ll find it myself.” I’d suddenly realized how precarious George’s situation was; it would be extremely unwise to let Fledge know he was here. I left the kitchen to look for ointment, conscious of the butler’s curious eyes upon me as he laid the tray for Harriet’s afternoon tea.

I returned to the barn and found George still sitting in the wicker chair with his head in his hands. The light was fading by this time, and the shadows had begun to cluster about him. He sat across from Phlegmosaurus, and an oddly dramatic tableau they made, the heavy-jawed skeleton rearing over the rigid figure in the wicker chair. He ate ravenously and drank more whisky, but first he rubbed the ointment I’d brought him into the rash, which extended, I now saw, almost all the way round his neck. “In a bloody sack,” he muttered as he ate. “Who done him, tell me that? Who put him out there in a sack like that?”

I hesitated to tell him. I frowned. I rose from my chair and turned on the lights. “No,” cried George, lifting a hand to his eyes. “Leave them off!” I turned them off and returned to my chair. George had finished eating. He wiped his hand across his mouth and glared at me. He was stronger for having eaten, much stronger. “Who done him, Sir Hugo? You know. Tell me.”

Still I hesitated. Would it, I wondered, be to George’s advantage to know what I knew? I was aware of an indefinite feeling of deep unease at the prospect of telling George the truth. “Tell me,” he said.

“All right, George,” I said, and I told him. He listened in silence. When I had finished he said he wanted to smoke; I only had cigars, so I gave him one of those. Still he made no comment on what I had told him. His mind was busy, however, and suddenly I glimpsed the old George, the tough and taciturn man I knew so well, the man who kept his own counsel. The food, the drink, the shelter of my gloomy barn—these things had dispelled the fear that he had acquired in the marsh. Soon, I knew, he would take his destiny in his own hands once more. What did this mean for me? For Fledge? Suddenly I felt great dread, as I felt control of the situation slipping through my fingers. George and I sat smoking as the barn grew darker, and all I could see of him then was a brooding, silent, shadowy phantom, hunched around the glowing red tip of a cigar.

George slept in the barn that night, up in the loft among the stored bones, and the next night also, and he continued to grow stronger. And as he grew stronger, so did he grow more silent, and if he formed a plan of some sort, he did not communicate it to me. I quickly came to regret having told him about Fledge. I began to think that he should give himself up, and regardless of his scruples tell the police what he knew. This would mean involving me, and Fledge too, of course. It would be extremely tiresome for the family, particularly for Cleo, but after all there had been murder committed. George would have to serve time in prison, and Fledge would swing. Or would he? I had no confidence that this was so. All I had were my suspicions, my convictions, but nothing in the way of hard, incontrovertible, empirical fact. Perhaps George would simply put his own head in the noose, if he went to the police—his own or John Crowthorne’s. Could old John be persuaded to go to the police? Unlikely. That old poacher was deeply deficient in the moral sense, this was clear; this was a man who could find a body in a sack and, because “it weren’t a local man,” cheerfully butcher it for pig feed. But George would never betray him, this I knew; for I had had ample opportunity, over the years, to observe how deep the loyalty ran in George Lecky, once he was committed to a man. For twenty-five years, you see, George had been fiercely, discreetly, and uncompromisingly loyal to me.

Two days and two nights George stayed in the barn. Limp’s men were still out on the marsh looking for him, though according to the papers his description had been circulated throughout the southeast, suggesting that the police now considered it at least possible that he’d left the area. The atmosphere in the house was tense, not least because I was being impossible. For quite apart from the strain I was experiencing hiding George, I had also to assimilate what was probably the single most humiliating event of my scientific career.

¦

For I had, indeed, delivered my lecture on the seventh, I’d delivered it to an audience of four: Hilary, Victor, Sykes-Herring, and a man called Sir Edward Cleghorn. Cleghorn is an eccentric crank; he is Harriet’s “pterodactyl man,” and he claims that he and I are the only gentlemen naturalists still working in Britain. His presence was frankly an embarrassment. Sykes-Herring was there because he had to be, as, in a way, were Hilary and Victor. Harriet and Cleo had not attended, Sidney’s bones having come up only two days before. Two old men blundered in, thinking it a lecture on coprolites, then blundered out again; and that, in terms of what should have been the crowning moment of my paleontological career, was it.

Afterwards, after I had reviewed the dinosaur-bird relationship from evolutionary and anatomical perspective, after I had spoken at length about the phlegmosaurian claw and the phlegmosaurian hipbone, and the implications of said claw and hipbone, after I had thumped the pulpit, like Thomas Huxley, for Archaeopteryx, oldest of the fossil birds, after I had talked about atavisms, and stressed the necessity of asking ourselves whether the dinosaur was truly the cold-blooded reptile we unthinkingly assumed him to be—after I had said all this, and more, there was the small, thin sound, in that vast, empty auditorium, of eight hands clapping. “Very interesting,” said Sykes-Herring, as he took us to tea in the senior common room. “Most provocative.” He didn’t believe a word I’d said. In his own mind he was harrumphing like a walrus. Cleghorn drew me aside and, spraying me with cake crumbs and saliva as he spoke, told me I was wasting my breath. “Can’t go meddling with the taxonomy,” he said, “terrifies people. It’s been this way since Baron Cuvier, and he died”—here he half-choked on a piece of cake—“in 1832! Darwin was barely aboard the Beagle!” I could have done without this; Eddy Cleghorn is extremely unstable, and quite probably mad. Young Victor was enthusiastic, and this was something, I suppose. Perhaps he would follow in my footsteps, revolutionize paleontology. He was, after all, a Coal. But why, I asked myself, had the professional scientific community so unanimously ignored me? Was it, as Cleghorn suggested, because they were made anxious at seeing the established classification of dinosaurs challenged? “Can’t go meddling with the taxonomy,” the old crank had said. “See what happens to a misshelved book? Ceases to exist. Shake up the order, you shake up the world. Frightens people, Hugo, believe me. You’re a radical.” Bloody fool. I began to suspect, actually, that the true cause of my humiliation was Sykes-Herring. I began to suspect that he had failed to publicize the lecture. No one came, I think, simply because no one knew about it. Once again, it seems, I was being persecuted. Sykes-Herring had done this before, you see, in fact he had blighted my entire career, and I now saw that if I was ever to teach the world the phlegmosaurian lesson, I should have to circumvent Sykes-Herring. He was a malevolent, obscurantist reactionary. I should have to be very careful, very cunning, if I was going to best him. He was, after all, the Secretary of the Royal Society. Ha! Little did I know that scientific politics would soon be beyond me forever!

It was difficult, extremely difficult, to resume paleontology after that. In a way, then, it was fortunate that I had George’s welfare to occupy me in the days that followed, otherwise I might well have succumbed to depression. For two days and two nights he slept among my bones, growing stronger, emanating a silent purposefulness that made me very uneasy indeed. I tried to talk to him but he would not be drawn. He sat in my wicker chair by the hour, smoking, frowning abstractedly, from time to time stamping a boot on the floor. The house was no less grim. Cleo had reacted to the rising of Sidney’s bones by crawling even further into her shell, and to Harriet’s distress she never appeared for meals. She was, of course, oppressed by the conviction that Fledge was the evil creeping thing that had murdered Sidney on the marsh, and she bore no small antagonism toward Harriet