The Abominable: A Novel

horizontal) protrusions: obelisks with no seeming purpose, a magnificent clock tower with the face of the clock turned toward the apparently unused-for-guests south face of the house, row upon row of high, ancient-Greek- looking columns that are actually smokestacks for the countless fireplaces in the city-sized house below, arches arching over nothing to speak of, crenellated towers with high, thin windows on their erect shafts and tiny little round windows under their priapic muffinheads, more windows on horizontal Old London Bridge–style hanging upper floors that connected some of these thicker and more windowed erections, and finally a series of taller, thinner, more sexually provocative towers scattered at apparent random around and between and above the other projections on the tower-cluttered rooftop. These last are graceful towers which look like nothing so much as Moslem minarets pilfered from some Middle Eastern mosque.

Another butler in very formal and old-fashioned livery—this gentleman apparently even older than our carriage driver but clean-shaven, bald as a proverbial billiard ball, and with a much more stooped posture caused by curvature of the spine—bows toward us at the open east entrance door and says, “Welcome, gentlemen. Lady Bromley is expecting you and will join you shortly. Master Deacon, you must forgive me if I comment that you look extremely well and tanned and fit.”

“Thank you, Harrison,” says the Deacon.

“Pardon me, sir?” says Harrison, cupping his left ear. He seems to be almost deaf as well as terminally stooped over and evidently not very good at reading lips. The Deacon repeats his three words in a low shout. Harrison smiles—showing perfect dentures—and rasping out, “Please follow me, gentlemen,” turns to lead us inside.

As we follow this ancient butler’s slow shuffle through anterooms and then into a series of Great Rooms on our march to God Knows Where, the Deacon whispers to us, “Harrison is the butler who paddled my arse when I punched young Lord Percival thirty years ago.”

“I would like to see him try it today,” whispers Jean-Claude with an evil smile that I’ve seen before and which somehow manages to look attractively roguish to the ladies.

We follow the shuffling old butler through a series of art-hung, Persian-carpeted, and red-drapery-laden foyers, then out into and through at least three “public rooms,” where the art and color and size and quality of the antiques alone take one’s breath away.

But it’s not the gilded antique furniture that almost makes me stop in amazement.

Harrison manages a feeble wave of his left arm toward the ceiling and room in general and announces in his old man’s croak, “The Heaven Room, gentlemen. Quite…”

I don’t catch the last word, but it might have been “famous.”

To me it seems more like “the Football Room,” since the ceilings are at least forty feet high and the room looks to be as long and almost as wide as an American football field. My thought is that you could set rows of bleachers up against these gilded, picture-addled walls and hold the Harvard-Yale game in here.

But it is the endless and elaborately painted ceiling that makes my jaw drop open again.

I’m sure that the hundreds (hundreds!) of naked or mostly naked male and female grappling forms up there are supposed to be gods and goddesses gamboling in some innocent pagan god way, but it just looks like the world’s largest orgy to my barbarian’s eye. Amazingly, the artist has many of the figures spilling off the ceiling itself and grappling and tumbling and evidently fornicating their way down the actual walls, stacking up in the corners in fleshy masses of thighs, breasts, and biceps, with more intertwined bodies painted onto side doors and mirrors, as if they’re trying to stop their tangled mass from falling to the Persian-carpeted parquet floor. The three-dimensional effect is dizzying and disturbing.

“Antonio Verrio did most of these murals in sixteen ninety-five and ninety-six,” the Deacon says softly, obviously assuming that our aged guide won’t hear him. “If you think this is something, you ought to see his Mouth of Hell murals on the ceiling at the head of the grand staircase—according to Verrio, the Mouth of Hell is the maw of a giant cat gobbling up naked lost souls like so many mangled mice.”

“Magnifique,” whispers Jean-Claude, also looking at the Heaven Room ceiling. And in an even lower whisper, “Although—what is your word?—ostentatious. Very ostentatious.”

The Deacon smiles. “Word is that during the year or so Verrio was here painting, he had his way with every female servant on the estate—including the peasant girls who worked in the fields. Actually the walls weren’t completely finished when they brought in a children’s book illustrator—I think his name was Stothard—to finish off this hell of a heaven.”

I stare at the scores upon scores of entangled, thrusting, intertwined naked male and female forms, many —as I mentioned—falling off the ceiling and writhing down the walls in their physical grapplings, and think, A children’s book illustrator painted some of this?

As I follow the shuffling, silent butler through the Heaven Room, I’m grateful that the Deacon insisted on my going to his tailor on Savile Row for a proper dark suit. Since J.C. had once mentioned to me that the Deacon, the last of his once well-to-do family, had little money these days, I protested strongly, but the Deacon said that he simply couldn’t allow me to meet Lady Bromley in that “dusty, dung-colored, misshapen tweedy thing that you wear when a suit is called for.” I huffily explained to the Deacon that this “dung-colored thing”—my best tweed suit—had seen me through all of the formal demands of Harvard (at least where evening dress wasn’t necessary), but my British climbing friend was not impressed with my argument.

So as we leave the Heaven Room to enter a smaller, much more intimate side room, I once again appreciate the tailored smoothness of my new Deacon-chosen and Deacon-paid-for Savile Row suit. Jean-Claude, on the other hand, has enough personal confidence that he’s wearing an old suit in which he’s probably guided climbs—it looks as if it would go well with mountain boots, and I’m sure it has.

Old Harrison the butler finally parks us in a side room only two absurdly imposing hallways and a breathtaking library away from the Heaven Room. After the great expanses we’ve covered getting here, this cozy little side room seems like a dollhouse miniature, even though it’s probably half again the size of most middle-class Americans’ front parlors.

“Please have a seat, gentlemen. Tea and Lady Bromley will be with you promptly,” says old Harrison and shuffles out. The way he announces it makes the tea and the lady of one of England’s greatest estates somehow sound like conjoined equals. Perhaps one never travels anywhere without the other.

For a moment the small size and sense of intimacy of this little room—only a few pieces of furniture centered atop a gorgeous Persian rug surrounded by gleaming parquet floors, one high-backed chair upholstered in a fabric that looks to be from the nineteenth century, a low round table presumably for the imminent tea service, two delicate chairs on either side looking too flimsy for an adult male to sit in, and a red settee directly across from the upholstered chair—make me think that this is one of the private rooms in Bromley House, but then I immediately realize I’m wrong. The small paintings and photographs on the delicately wallpapered wall are all of women. The few bookshelves, unlike the impossibly huge library we glimpsed earlier, hold only a few volumes, and they look homemade, perhaps scrapbooks or photo albums or collections of recipes or family genealogy.

But, no, however much it looks like one, this room is not a private room for the house. I realize that Lady Bromley must use it to meet people of lesser social stature in an informal setting. Perhaps she’d talk to her landscaper or head gamekeeper or very distant visiting relatives here—ones that were not going to be offered a room for the night.

Jean-Claude, the Deacon, and I are squished thigh to thigh as we sit upright and waiting on the red settee. It’s an uncomfortable piece of furniture—perhaps another invitation not to stay too long. I nervously run my thumb and finger down the sharp crease in my new suit trousers.

Suddenly a door hidden in the library wall opens and Lady Elizabeth Marion Bromley comes through. The three of us almost stumble over one another in our hurry to stand.

Lady Bromley is tall, and her height is emphasized by the fact that she’s dressed all in black, a lacy sort of dress with a high frilly black collar that might have been from the nineteenth century but which looks strangely modern. Her erect posture and poised but seemingly unself-conscious way of walking add to the sense of height and importance. I’d expected to meet an old lady—Lord Percival Bromley was in his thirties when he disappeared on Everest this summer—but Lady Bromley’s hair, swept up in a complicated fashion I’d seen only in magazines, is mostly dark with only the slightest traces of gray at the temples. Her dark eyes are bright and alert and—to my