and rage, “you ghastly old hag, you come floundering in here like a stinking whale and start accusing my father! How dare you! What gives you the right? You get out of here, with your foul lies! Get out, you hear!”
“My dear girl—” said Mrs. Giblet, stiffening with anger. “Cleo!” breathed Harriet.
Cleo’s voice grew wild. “You sat on Sidney all his life,” she shouted. “You mocked him and terrorized him, you tried to turn him into your slave! It’s a wonder there was anything left of him at all, after growing up with you!”
“Sidney was a weak boy,” said Mrs. Giblet, with some contempt. “He needed a firm hand.”
“A firm hand!” cried Cleo. “You call what you did to him a firm hand?”
“Perhaps,” snapped the old woman, “a firm hand would have done you some good, young lady.”
“You bloody old witch!” screamed Cleo, and flailed at her in that clumsy way that women have when they try to punch each other, all stiff-armed swings. Harriet screamed and leaped to her feet, and as she tried to pull Cleo away from the old woman a teacup fell off the table and smashed to pieces on the floor. For several moments there was a chaos of flailing arms and wild shrieks until at last there came a resounding smack! and Cleo stepped back, stunned, toward the fireplace, one hand to her cheek, and Harriet, aroused as I’d rarely seen her before, stood glaring at the girl in a positively Churchillian posture, and old Mrs. Giblet, with one gnarled claw upon her massive heaving bosom, and the other nervously touching her hair and face, as though to assure herself that no appendage had been torn off in the fracas, attempted to regain her composure.
“Apologize, please, Cleo,” said Harriet, breathing heavily. Cleo, her anger suddenly dissipated, dropped her head in that mutely defiant manner she had recently adopted. Harriet advanced upon her. “Apologize,” she repeated, and there was a new tone in her voice, a tone of quietly dangerous authority. Cleo tried to brush past her, but Hairiet was having none of it. She gripped the girl by the wrists and told her, for the third time, to apologize. “You’re hurting me, Mummy,” wailed Cleo, not at all the plucky girl she’d once been. But Harriet’s dander was up, and she did not let go until at last Cleo turned to the old woman and mumbled: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Giblet.”
The old woman had by this time regained her composure somewhat. She reared in her armchair, claws once more wrapped about her stick, head lifted, wattles awobble, and shot a glance of sheer majestic outrage at the defeated girl. “You will never, ever lay a finger on me again, young woman,” she declared. “Is that clear?”
“Yes,” mumbled Cleo.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Yes,” said Cleo.
“Very well then,” said Mrs. Giblet, settling herself. “I accept your apology.”
“Sit down please, Cleo,” said Harriet firmly, “and we shall have tea. Mrs. Fledge?” How long, I wondered, had Doris been in the room? Had she witnessed the entire squalid incident? “Mrs. Fledge, clear these things away, please, and bring us fresh tea. Now, Mrs. Giblet, where were we?”
But the old hag wasn’t going to risk slandering me any further, that was clear. “I have requested permission to visit George Lecky in prison,” she said, “and I am seeing my M.P. next week. I wonder if there’s anything else that occurs to you, Lady Coal?”
But there wasn’t.
When Mrs. Giblet had left—she’d taken a room at the Hodge and Purlet again, and would not be persuaded to stay at Crook, hardly surprising, really, after being attacked by Cleo—when she’d left, Harriet came back to the drawing room and sat down opposite Cleo. “Darling,” she said, very seriously, “that was dreadful. It was outrageous. I don’t think I’ve ever been so embarrassed. Whatever came over you?”
Cleo had resumed her drawing-room manner—the sunken head, the sulky silence. “Cleo!” said Harriet sharply. “Answer me!” Then up came the girl’s head, and fire flashed from her wild and tear-streaked eyes. “Didn’t you hear her, Mummy? Didn’t you hear what she said about Daddy?”
“Of course I did, darling,” said Harriet, in slightly softer tones. “But she’s only trying to help, you must understand that.”
“Help? Calling Daddy a murderer? That’s help?”
“She didn’t call Daddy a murderer. Oh, I know, darling”— slowly the power was seeping out of her; Harriet was only truly potent when the proprieties were being flouted—“I do understand your point of view, but nothing justifies behavior like that, nothing.”
“Mummy, how can you say that? She said Daddy was involved in Sidney’s murder, and you sit by and do nothing, and all the time Daddy’s sitting here, listening, and unable to defend himself.”
“Daddy doesn’t know what’s going on, darling,” said Harriet quietly. “And I’m sure Mrs. Giblet didn’t mean to suggest that he had anything to do with what happened to Sidney.”
“Of course she did! That’s precisely what she meant! And anyway, Daddy does know what’s going on. He understands everything.”
“Cleo, dear”—a sharp note, here—“the doctors were quite clear about this. Hugo is not aware of what is happening around him.”
“But he is, I tell you!”
“Darling, he’s not. We’ve had the best neurologists in the country do extensive testing, and they’re absolutely certain about this: Hugo is massively brain-damaged; he has no real consciousness of the world. He cannot think.”
“He can.”
“Cleo, you’re making me angry. Do you suppose it was easy for me to accept? Do you think I didn’t hold out every hope? Darling, I hate to have to tell you all over again, but these are the facts—Daddy’s not able to think.”
“He is.”
“You’re being silly, Cleo. You’re imagining things. Why do you say this?”
“I just know.”
“But how, darling?”
“I can tell by his eyes.”
“Oh dear.” Harriet sighed.
“And sometimes he cries.”
“I daresay he does, darling, but crying doesn’t mean anything. Daddy cried in hospital; it’s an autonomous reaction, the doctors said—it’s a cleansing process.”
“I don’t care. I know he knows everything that’s happening.”
“I don’t wish to discuss this with you any further. These are fantasies, darling. I know you love Daddy, but you must accept what’s happened. I’ve had to, and God knows it’s not been easy for me, either. Now would you please go and help Mrs. Fledge in the kitchen.”
Cleo slowly got to her feet and left the room, casting one long, warm glance in my direction. “See you later, Daddy,” she said. When the door had closed behind her Harriet sighed deeply and did something she did very rarely: she took a cigarette from the box on the mantelpiece and smoked it by the window, gazing out at the pond in front of the house. From time to time I could feel her looking over at me in a faintly quizzical manner; then, after tossing the butt in the fireplace, she left the room, and I was alone. But her words seemed to echo in my skull, and as I sat there staring at the chimneypiece, at the coat-of-arms and the motto, I could hear her insisting, on best authority, that I was unable to think. If I couldn’t think, what then is all this? A figment of Cleo’s imagination?
The next morning there came another shock. I had not as yet had an opportunity to assimilate the events of the afternoon— and there was much to assimilate, with regard not only to George, but also to myself. For though there was no logical reason why Harriet’s insistence upon my inability to think should disturb me —it’s self-evident, after all, that I can—yet all the same I was shaken by it, shaken to the core. As though my identity were merely a reflection, or construct, of the opinion of others. I found myself reeling, very much on the defensive, forced to assert my own self to myself and thus confirm that I was, still, in effect, viable. Can you understand that? It was, then, in this very shaky state, this state of ontological instability, so to speak, that I was forced to cope with the implications of both Mrs. Giblet’s visit and an attempted metamorphosis on the part of Fledge.
Yes, a metamorphosis. For, apparently with Harriet’s consent (perhaps, it now occurs to me, at her instigation?) he had relinquished his morning suit, traditional uniform of the butler, and adopted, instead, a tweed
