below. Mr. Stoker, who had of course set out to provoke just such an outburst, wiped his brow with a snowy handerkerchief and then sat down, glancing, as he did so, with one uplifted eyebrow, at Sir Fleckley; and Sir Fleckley made a wry moue at his colleague. The story appeared under the banner headline: CECK MONSTER DRAGGED FROM COURT: BLACK LECKY LOSES CONTROL.
But if that was bad, there was worse to come. For when, the next morning, Humphrey Stoker got George back on the stand, he elicited from him the shocking information that after feeding Sidney to the pigs, he’d then slaughtered those same pigs, butchered them, and sent the meat to Crook!
Cleo began to giggle hysterically, and Doris turned white; and I quickly realized that all autumn and winter we had been eating meat from Ceck’s Bottom. And it was not only the Coals who were implicated. The local gentry had hungrily devoured sausages and ham sandwiches during Harriet’s Christmas party. Patrick Pin and the Catholics had been in Crook on Christmas morning, drinking my sherry and eating ham sandwiches. The Horns had eaten ham with us on New Year’s Eve, and so had Mrs. Giblet. We had all, indirectly, and unknowingly, eaten Sidney.
And then I thought of the satyrs of Ceck, sitting in George’s kitchen on Christmas night with their bottles of brown ale and their roast haunch of pork; and it suddenly occurred to me to wonder, as I remembered their gusts of coarse rustic mirth, if they, unlike the rest of us, had known. It’s a question that perplexes me still; but I rather think so.
I have been experiencing painful twinges from the region of my ticker. I have sclerotic coronary arteries, did I mention that? A bad heart; a faulty pump. Also, certain of my facial muscles have been pulled back and clamped tight in a rather ghastly grimace, a fierce, involuntary grin that never leaves my features now, regardless of what I am feeling. Often in the alcove I weep and grin simultaneously. My breathing is stertorous all the time, so I’m an unpleasant piece of work, all told, and I’m not surprised that Fledge turned my wheelchair to the wall that day, though of course there was a great deal more to the man’s action than that.
But the rainy days of March and April were behind us now, and the weather was warm enough that I could be put out in the back yard for hours at a time. There I would sit, listening to the birds sing (those little dinosaurs!), and grinning at the gate in the old brick wall on the far side. At other times I sat on the terrace just outside the French windows and bestowed my smiling bounty on the little jungle that the flower garden had become. I saw George down there once, by the pond. That day the garden was a riot of color, and so was I. A garland of oak leaves encircled my skull, and peeping through it was a pair of little white horns with blunt tips. My forehead had fallen, my eyes slanted upwards, and my brows came sweeping together at the root of my nose like a pair of hairy handlebars. My mouth was frozen in a broad, lascivious grin. George was on his knees among the flowers, and when he saw me he rose to his feet and stood with a weeding trowel in one hand and the other shading his eyes from the sun, which blazed down upon him from a cloudless blue sky and reminded me of the days he’d gazed up the hill in Africa at me, before setting off for the coast. The sun was strong, and he seemed to shimmer, just as his reflection in the black pond water would shimmer when a goldfish rose to the surface for a bot-fly. He was wearing his collarless blue policeman’s shirt and his old brown corduroys, but not his boots, I noticed, because his feet were cloven now, he was a hoofed man, and a fringe of coarse hair licked in thick bristly hanks over his goatish ankles. Phantom, of course, projection of a crumbling mind; also I was bareheaded, exposed to the sun, for Doris had forgotten my hat.
Another time I saw Fledge in the garden, and I saw him die. He was lying naked in the grass. I’ve told you what Fledge looks like naked: he is long and thin with a very slight plumping of the flesh on his chest and belly. He is very white, and a narrow line of reddish hair runs down his body from a point midway between those plump chests of his, all the way to his pubic hair. Cleo, all in black, was crawling toward him through the grass. She had a knife between her teeth. The sun was directly overhead, and shining so brilliantly that the blade was like a bar of molten silver. Cleo reared up on her knees and drove the shining knife into Fledge’s heart. His body arched up as a great glob of blood and other body fluids exploded from his mouth. For a few moments his arched body shuddered in convulsion over the grass, and his mouth fell open; his eyes stared up at the sun. Then he subsided onto the earth with a long gasp. Another time, just as Cleo lifted the knife, he suddenly sat up and seized her wrists, and the pair of them began to struggle violently on their knees, then keeled over and writhed together in the grass. Events like these, if I can call them events, disturbed me greatly, for while I knew they were entirely illusory, at the same time they appeared quite real; they felt real. But they were hallucinations, merely, symptomatic of the sort of slippage, or dislocation, to which my mind was increasingly subject in the late spring.
But it was mostly George I saw down there. I would sit at the French windows and watch the fine spring rain come drifting like gauze upon the flower garden, where the untended weeds were crowding the blooms of the bulbs he’d planted in the autumn. The shrubs and the hedges spilled in an unruly manner onto the paths and flower beds, and their greenness had a peculiarly vivid quality to it, in that misty rain, a sort of viridescent effulgence that struck me as oddly and wildly beautiful. The smell of the garden rose to my nostrils, the damp, rich smell of vegetation luxuriating in its own unchecked profusion, and as I gazed out over this hazy jungle, over the lily pond, which was spotted and circled with the gentle, unceasing rain, I grinned at the phantom of my imprisoned comrade toiling in the earth.
His trial only lasted five days, and Harriet stayed in London throughout, for she was to be called as a witness for the defense, a character witness. That’s how weak George’s case was: there was only the circumstantiality argument, and the testimony of Lady Coal. And even that backfired, for after Sir Fleckley had elicited from Harriet the opinion that George was trustworthy, decent, and incapable of violence, Humphrey Stoker rose to his feet and, examining his fingernails in an offhand manner, casually asked Harriet what precisely was the nature of her relationship with the accused man.
“He is my gardener,” said Harriet.
“And what does this entail, Lady Coal?” said Stoker, removing his spectacles and absently polishing them on the hem of his robe.
“Well, the usual things,” said Harriet. “I tell him what we need in the way of flowers and vegetables and so on, and he lets me know if, oh, if we must have a new wheelbarrow or whatever. Things to do with the garden.”
“I see,” said Stoker, and his voice was now dripping irony. “This is the nature of your relationship with the accused, Lady Coal: he lets you know if you must have a new wheelbarrow.”
“Objection,” said Sir Fleckley, wearily, rising to his feet. “Overruled,” said Mr. Justice Congreve.
“No more questions, my lord,” said Stoker, and sat down. Harriet looked for a moment as though she would burst into tears, aware that she’d been made a fool of at George’s expense.
I remember that that night, after dinner, Doris drank a bottle of bordeaux. I watched the wine go gurgling into her glass, a big, stout-stemmed, widemouthed wineglass. She shuffled over to the back door, I remember, and threw it open, and I sat there watching her as she gazed out into the twilit yard, and the birds twittered their evening chorus from the trees over by the barn. She leaned her back against the doorframe, so that I had her profile, in silhouette: she was tall, tall and thin, with a long pointed nose and a receding chin, and her hair was scraped to a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Still outlined sharply against the last light, she raised the glass to her lips and drank. The long, bobbing throat, the slightly concave spine, feet flat on the step and one long hand hanging limp at her side—her body seemed to surrender utterly to the tilted wineglass. She emptied it, then stood a few minutes more, head still thrown back against the doorframe, as the sounds and smells of dusk came drifting in; then she turned her head toward me and heaved a deep sigh. “Ah, Sir Hugo,” she murmured, “we’ve lost him.” I sat there grinning at her, and thinking: you’re right, you’re right.
Harriet was staying with the Horns, of course, and there were glum faces in that house the night of the fourth day. The next morning the barristers would present their closing arguments, the judge would sum up, and the jury would retire. Victor had followed the case closely in the newspapers, and he was very upset. Or so I imagine. For he liked George Lecky, the pair of them had often talked in the garden of Crook about football, and Africa, and dinosaurs, and the war, and I knew that George, for his part, always took a strong, quiet pleasure, as he went about his work, pipe between his teeth, in the boy’s eager questions and lively mind. Even as a very small child Victor had been a friend of George’s, and I can remember an afternoon one autumn when, from my bedroom window in the east wing, I’d watched George pushing a wheelbarrow of dead leaves across the back yard, with
