all is still; out there in the countryside, the usual wealth of night sounds, a gust of wind moving suddenly through the trees, a fox barking at the moon. In Harriet’s bedroom, only a candle burns now; the butler’s clothes are neatly arranged upon a chair, beneath which gleam his shoes, their decorative perforations tiny points of blackness in the flickering gloom, and his socks neatly balled and tucked into the left one. The bedcovers are folded back and Fledge, naked, reclines on one elbow on the white sheet, and the candlelight touches his body with a shadowy glow. A line of fine, reddish-brown hair runs from the very center of his chest to his navel, and from there spreads lightly over his lower belly to be swallowed in the silky denseness of his pubic hair. A slight chubbiness is apparent about his chest and belly, a slight hint of fattening in a man who otherwise retains the leanness of his youth. He has long, well-formed legs covered with a fine red down that licks about his crossed ankles and reappears as mere filmy wisps on the arches of his shapely feet. At the fork of his body the penis lies slumbering on the testicular sac, the nicked dome of its dark head silvered by a stray moonbeam and the stem thickly and blackly corded with veins, while about it, like the wings of a sprite, spreads a fleece of soft red pubic hair. He is gazing through languid and half-closed eyes toward the window, where Harriet, my Harriet, stands in a billowing white nightgown, her hair loosed and tumbling, and pulls closed the curtains against the moon. She turns, and approaches the bed, thinking she comes to a man and failing to see that he is a monster.
Yes, a monster. What else are we to think him, that furtive, ruthless, doubly inverted creature? Harriet deserves all she gets at his hands, for she went in with her eyes open. Actually I don’t believe he’s interested in her at all. I believe he suffers from an acute sense of inferiority, and this manifests in pathological jealousy—of me. Hence his interest in Harriet. To be honest, I think he’s clinically insane, a paranoid schizophrenic, in fact. But it’s his treatment of Doris I’m concerned with now, it’s his callous negligence and infidelity to that good woman that infuriate me beyond reason—though of course one would hardly expect better from a homosexual. Yes, Fledge is a homosexual, of the worst type, and if there remains any doubt in your mind on that score, then allow me to describe to you now the circumstances surrounding my cerebral accident.
We must return to the middle of February, to the days immediately following George’s arrest. I had of course been questioned by the police, but no charges had yet been laid with regard to my harboring a fugitive from justice. Unable to tolerate the atmosphere in the house, I had been spending all my time in the barn, attempting to turn my mind to paleontology once more. I was in there one afternoon when, at about two thirty, there came a knock at the door. I can picture all too clearly, now, the strained and bulging blood vessel inside my skull, its leakage clotted on the thin inner wall which, even as the knocking died away, was rapidly losing the ability to bear the pressure of my thudding blood. “Come!” I shouted. It was Fledge.
He closed the door behind him and approached my chair. He carried a tray upon which was set my lunch, for I had not been into the house since breakfast. “Put it down there, Fledge,” I said, gesturing vaguely at the small table. The man’s presence aroused considerable antagonism in me, for it was only a few days since he had quite deliberately ignored my appeal regarding George. I have mentioned the aura of triumphalism he had seemed to emanate when I’d made that appeal, out on the driveway, the unspoken relish with which he’d grasped the fact that I had, as it were, given him the game: I felt that same vindictive exultation oozing from him now. But I had as yet formulated no satisfactory plan for “getting back” at him. You see, I could hardly rebuke him for having informed the police that a fugitive from justice was on the grounds of Crook, without revealing the extent of my own involvement in the affair. “That’s all, Fledge,” I said, not even turning in my chair.
He coughed lightly. “Your jacket, Sir Hugo,” he said. I was still in the brown lab coat I wore while working.
“Oh yes,” I said. I rose to my feet, and he helped me out of the lab coat. Laying it on the back of the chair, he then held open my tweed jacket, and I thrust my arms into the sleeves. He patted the shoulders once or twice, then brushed at the thing with the side of his palm. “Don’t fuss, Fledge,” I snapped. “That’ll do.”
“Very good, Sir Hugo,” he murmured, and then, coming round, he moved the small table in front of my chair. “Wine, Sir Hugo?”
“Yes of course,” I said, resuming my seat. He uncorked a bottle of burgundy and poured me a glass, and then stood by as I began to eat. “That’s all right, Fledge,” I said irritably, glancing up at the man as I chewed a potato. “You can go.”
“Ah, Sir Hugo?” he said.
“What is it, Fledge?” I washed down the potato with a mouthful of burgundy.
“A young man from the village called at the house this morning; he wished to know if you would be requiring a new gardener.”
“A new gardener? Christ almighty, are the vultures gathering already? Certainly not. I expect George Lecky to be back with us quite soon.”
“Very good, Sir Hugo.” Still he did not leave; he hovered by the table like a waiter.
“That’s all, Fledge. You can go.”
“Yes, Sir Hugo.” He poured me more wine. He bent down and picked up a threepenny bit from under my chair, and put it on the table.
I laid my knife and fork down on my plate with a clatter. “Well good God man, what is it? What are you hanging about for? What do you want?”
“Sir Hugo, I wished only to say how sorry I am about everything that’s happened.”
I responded to this with an ironic snort. “That’s hard to believe,” I said. Then I glanced up at him. His expression had changed. The masklike blankness was touched now with a sort of subtle derision. Hard to say quite how I realized this; I could see it in the glint in his eyes, I think, in the flicker of mockery at the corners of his mouth.
“No, it’s true, Sir Hugo,” he said, in very soft, very silky tones—and then he reached out a hand, and put it on my shoulder!
I was out of my chair in an instant, and in the process I managed to knock over the table. Glass and china shattered on the floor as I shouted: “How dare you touch me!”
He backed off a little. He was watching me intently, his head slightly lowered and his hand to his lip, which he appeared to have bitten when I’d pushed him away, for there was blood on his mouth. I was furious; my fists were clenched, my eyes were flashing, I was seething like an angry little bantam. I had never been insulted in such a fashion—now he would have to go, no question! He took a step toward me. “Back off, you bastard!” I shouted. “No more of your foul tricks!”
He paid no attention. He advanced, menacingly, a sneer now twisting his stained lips. The fumes of spilt wine were rising all about me and making my head spin. A very bad pain had begun to throb in my left temple. “Don’t try it, Fledge,” I warned him. My blood was in hot turmoil—there was going to be physical violence, this I now saw, and I was damned if I’d be bested by Fledge. His teeth suddenly gleamed in the light, and he grinned—and then he came at me, seized me by the hair with one hand and with the other gripped my wrist. Holding me thus he then dropped to one knee, and though I flailed and struggled like a wild thing he forced me down with him until I lay sprawled upon the floor, crablike and ungainly, with my head upon his arched thigh, and his fingers still knotted in my hair. In helpless rage I could do little but gaze up into his face; his expression had again changed, for now I read there only a sort of cold hunger, a cold light in his dead eyes and a cold and rather twitchy little smile on his pale thin lips, where there still remained a light smear of blood. A lick of his reddish hair had worked loose in the struggle and fell over his forehead in a floppy curve. I was powerless to resist as he brought his face down close to mine; and then his grinning features filled my vision entirely. I closed my eyes, the pain in my head now dreadfully intense. After a moment I felt it, and you may imagine my disgust: his mouth upon mine.
All the strength seemed to drain out of my body then. At last he lifted his face from this unholy kiss, and there was fire in his eyes, as he regarded me with a sort of brisk amusement; then suddenly I felt the grip of his fingers tighten in my hair, and he yanked my head violently backwards—and several things happened at once. I was now gazing straight up into the roof of the barn, where I saw the crow flap through the shadows from one rafter to another. At the same time there was a hot burst of searing pain in my head; and a sudden rapping at the door of the barn. “Daddy?” I heard Cleo calling from outside. “Daddy?”
Fledge quickly lifted his head from my throat and turned toward the door. His fingers slackened their grip in my hair, as he knelt there, alert and upright, concentrating on the voice from beyond the door. He seemed to forget me entirely; he let me go, and rose to his feet, allowing my body to slide like a rag doll off his thigh and onto the floor. And there I lay, as that weary, worn-out blood vessel in the inferior frontal convolution of my left hemisphere
