The Grotesque (12 page)

Along the hallway she advanced, inspecting as she went and nodding to left and right with royal approbation. Her entry into the drawing room was stately; Henry and Victor both rose to their feet, and Harriet came forward with both arms outstretched. “Dear Mrs. Giblet,” she said warmly, “how good of you to come at such short notice.”

It was the perfect thing to say to Mrs. Giblet. “Not at all, Lady Coal,” she purred. “Ah! Cleo!” Cleo came forward quietly and brushed the old woman’s cheek with her lips. Mrs. Giblet then sank into the armchair Henry had vacated by the fire, and began to fumble for cigarettes. Harriet introduced her to the Horns, apologized profusely for the cold, and invited her to have a glass of sherry. Mrs. Giblet thought that would be nice. Then, failing altogether to beat about the bush, she declared to the room at large: “I have met the man Limp. Sir Hugo”—she wheeled about in her chair— “I am surprised that you place any confidence in him at all; to my mind he is a total incompetent.”

I frowned. “He has had very little to work with, Mrs. Giblet,” I said.

“That’s a moot point, Sir Hugo. With all the progress Limp is making we’ll be lucky to see Sidney in a box. I’m sorry, my dear”—Cleo had been unable to suppress a small cry—“but there’s no use holding out false hopes.”

She puffed lugubriously at her cigarette. A silence fell. The light died in her eyes and her face slowly collapsed, and in the sag of it there seemed to dwell such an immense despair that the atmosphere rapidly became very black indeed. Harriet rushed in to fill the breach. “Mrs. Giblet,” she cried, “come! There is no reason to despair, none at all. I keep telling Cleo, digging up a bicycle tells us nothing at all.”

Mrs. Giblet looked up. She reached for Harriet’s hand, and smiled that oddly charming smile I’d seen in London. “Of course it doesn’t,” she said. “Lady Coal, forgive me for infecting your home with my gloom. May I, I wonder, have more of that sherry? It really is very good.” And while Fledge was busy with the task, Mrs. Giblet, apparently somewhat “adjusted,” opened her coat. “Thank you,” she said, raising her face to Fledge, as he appeared with her sherry. “Personally,” she said, “I intend to go over the Ceck Marsh with a fine-tooth comb. You may be right about Limp, Sir Hugo, or then again you may not. I should simply like to convince myself that nothing has been overlooked. Would anyone, I wonder, care to help me?”

The brief silence that followed upon this bizarre invitation was broken by Victor. “Yes,” he cried, with alacrity, “I would!” This functioned as a piece of comic relief, although the boy was quite serious. A ripple of amusement passed over the drawing room, and then Fledge announced that dinner was served.

❖

Going in to dinner, Mrs. Giblet attached herself to Harriet, to whom she had apparently taken a “shine,” and gushed. “All this
wood
, Lady Coal, how comforting it must be to live in a house with walls paneled with
wood.
Oak, I imagine, isn’t it? Good English oak; it makes for a feeling of continuity with the past, is what I’ve always thought. Are you a great believer in tradition, Lady Coal?”

“I suppose I am, Mrs. Giblet,” murmured Harriet.

“I, too, am deeply conservative,” said Mrs. Giblet. “I always have been. Churchill’s my man; I knew him once, you know. Brilliant chap, erudite, extremely, and such wit!” The old lady chuckled slightly and tapped Harriet’s arm, upon which rested her own gnarled old claw. “Why once—but no, you don’t want to hear my stories, do you. Up here, next to Sir Hugo? Delighted. Thank you, Fledge.”

Seven of us, as I say, sat down to dinner that night, and a curious-looking group we made. With the central heating shut down, Crook was really very chilly, and in view of this fact I had decided that jerseys might be worn with evening dress. We thus had the spectacle of Henry Horn in a thick gray fisherman’s sweater that bulked clumsily under his dinner jacket and, in concert with his beard, made him look more than ever like a sea captain. Hilary, Harriet, and Cleo all looked very gauche, all in their thickest cardigans, with headscarves tied under their chins. Victor was hardy, and wore only his school uniform; and Mrs. Giblet, having, clearly, adjusted, and no doubt thinking it highly improper, regardless of climatic conditions, to dine in a country house in her coat, had slipped the great fur off her shoulders and was revealed in the full majesty and splendor of her evening gown.

It was a black satin garment that had resided, I hypothesized, for a good forty years in some mahogany wardrobe in that dingy house near the British Museum. It was shiny and sleeveless, and hung to the ground in stiff folds, and rustled, I noticed, when she moved. As she seated herself by me, I became aware of a distinct smell of mothballs; nor was that the only smell that clung to the woman. Rather, it served as a sort of deep bass to a veritable symphony of aromas, the melody, so to speak, being carried by a sharp little perfume which, so she told me (for I inquired) had been purchased in Strasbourg in 1934. Its sour and astringent qualities were vulgarized, however (my own nose, though not good, detected this), by a liberal application of cheap eau-de-cologne, and the whole was grimly inflected with the mundane odors of cigarette smoke, sherry, and the perfectly natural emanations of an aging flesh.

Her shoulders were bare, as were her upper arms, from which the skin hung in copious limp pouches. She’d donned her jewelry for dinner in the country, a tiara dotted with a diamond or two, and a string of pearls that dipped alarmingly toward the chasm that gaped within her bosom. The satin gloves reached to her elbows; she had wondered, she confided to me, whether they might not be a trifle
dressy
outside London. I assured her that, on the contrary, one could never be overdressed in the country, temperatures did not permit it. She took this quip in good humor. She ate well, occasionally dropping morsels to the beast in her lap, and she was deeply appreciative of my claret, which she loudly swilled about her mouth and swallowed with evident pleasure. I found myself, surprisingly, warming rather to the old buzzard, the old
turkey,
and when, apropos a remark of mine about a piece of fossilized bone with which I was much preoccupied at the time, she began to speak about her arthritis, I told her in an undertone that the man near the other end of the table, the one she’d taken for a sea captain, was in fact one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country, and that after dinner she should tell
him
about her arthritis. She said she would. Henry, I thought, will be delighted.

The soup came and went, and then the main course—Doris had outdone herself with a joint of roast beef, and there was ham as well—and we were on to the Stilton when Cleo could finally contain herself no longer. She had been very quiet all evening; and now, as Mrs. Giblet demurely accepted more port from Fledge, and raised her glass to Henry, whom she had clearly earmarked as her healer, Cleo rose to her feet, perceptibly quivering with emotion, and pointed an unsteady finger at the old woman. “How
can
you?” she cried, and a strange, unnaturally fierce light burned in her eyes. “How
can
you sit and stuff yourself when Sidney’s still
out there
somewhere, in the cold, in pain? Oh, you disgust me—no Mummy, don’t try and shut me up, this is true—you sit here as if nothing had happened, when all the time the most appalling things are happening”—her finger swung round to the window—“out there! Outside! You have no
conception
of the evil that exists out there! You think the worst thing in the world is a burst pipe or a gamy ham, and all the time, right under your noses, the most foul and loathsome evil thing creeps on the earth, and you don’t see it, you make yourselves blind to it because it’s just too much trouble! Oh, if it touched your comfort, that would be different, but just the fact that a hideous, stinking,
evil
thing is crawling around outside this house
—that
won’t rouse you, but it’s there all the same! It’s there! And you’ll find it, Mrs. Giblet, you’ll find it, out in the marsh, but you better go after dark! Oh! Oh!” —and she burst into tears and fled weeping from the room.

❖

There was a brief bewildered silence. Then Harriet rose and followed Cleo, and then Hilary. I did not try to stop them. Then Mrs. Giblet spoke. “Poor child,” she said, with a sigh. “I will tell her that we all feel it as she does. But young people do like to see feelings displayed; they can’t understand that with the years one learns to preserve one’s energies; one has to. Is that not so, Sir Hugo?”

I had listened to Cleo’s outburst with my elbows on the table, my forearms forming an arch, and my mouth and chin pressed to the interlocked fingers at its cusp. I glanced sideways at the old woman, but, knowing what I knew, I did not shift my head from my hands to respond. Instead, Victor spoke. “Daddy,” he said, “I think that’s hysteria, but I’m not sure what sort.”

“Victor,” said his father, “shut up.”

T
he Horns went back to London at the beginning of January. They had not had a terribly festive time of it at Crook, I’m afraid. Sidney’s specter had hovered over all of us, particularly Cleo of course, and what with the pipes bursting, the atmosphere in the house had been not only cheerless but uncomfortably cold and drafty as well. Hilary told Harriet that she was reluctant to go, with Cleo so unhappy, but Victor had to be back at school. Harriet assured her that she could cope perfectly well here. It was all very distressing. Henry actually drew me aside, just before they were to leave, and told me he was quite concerned about Cleo. He thought he detected a morbid element in her grief; this disturbed him. He suggested that if she was still depressed in a week or so we should telephone him; he would arrange for her to “see someone” in Harley Street. I told him I appreciated his concern. But I was sure, I said, there was no cause for alarm. Didn’t he know, I said, that all the Coals were mad? He ought to know, having married one of them! I grinned at him around my cigar and clapped him on the back. I asked him where his next voyage would take him, what far-flung corner of the globe—Singapore? The Caribbean? Or maybe the pine-girt shores of British Columbia, for a cargo of good pulping timber!

“Seriously, Hugo,” he said.

“Seriously, Henry,” I said, “don’t worry about Cleo; she’ll be fine with us.”

I was sorry to see Victor go, I was fond of that little chap. I gave him a ten-shilling note when his parents weren’t looking and told him to forget Freud, read Darwin instead. “Read
The Origin of the Species,
my boy,” I said. “Find out where you came from.” His hair falling over his eyes in a thick fringe, he grinned at me in mock outrage, those good Coal teeth of his protruding far beyond the bottom lip, and ran a plump finger across his throat. “Never!” he said. I cuffed him once or twice, shook his hand, and stamped off to the barn.

Mrs. Giblet was as good as her word. She resumed her tenure at the Hodge and Purlet, and early in the new year I began to hear reports from the village about her. She would apparently leave the inn after breakfast and be driven down the Ceck’s Bottom road as far as the cart track that gives onto the marsh. She would then make her way out onto the marsh and spend the day, in her huge fur coat, picking slowly across the frozen ground until, at around five, when the light began to thicken, she returned to the road, where the car would pick her up. Several people saw her out there, including Bill Cudlip and old John Crowthorne, and they mentioned it to me with quiet expressions of scorn. I found it oddly touching, though, the picture of the old woman, out on the marsh alone beneath the cold gray sky, searching for traces of her lost son. I presumed she did not follow Cleo’s advice and go out there after dark, when the “evil creeping thing” was abroad; the Ceck Marsh, after dark, is an uncanny sort of place, even without evil creeping things. I was out there one night myself.

As for Cleo, she went into semi-seclusion over in the east wing, where she has her bedroom, and only rarely came downstairs. When she did appear, she was either angry or depressed or both. “Where,”

I chided, “has my laughing girl gone?”

She rounded on me, eyes blazing. “Why should I laugh, Daddy? What do I have to laugh about?”

“Steady, darling,” murmured Harriet. “Not so
fierce,
darling.”

Then the girl started to cry, and Harriet had to comfort her. Harriet later came to me, worried, and asked me didn’t I think we should call Henry and have someone “see” Cleo, as he’d suggested? Nonsense, I said, she’ll pull through. Perfectly normal thing, no cause for alarm. Coals don’t go to shrinks, I said. Very well, said Harriet, but I could see she wasn’t altogether convinced.

But what had been uppermost in my mind, ever since Sidney’s bicycle came up on Christmas Day, was the Fledge question. I was now certain that he must have ambushed the boy on his way into Ceck that night, murdered him, and then abandoned the body out on the marsh. But where
was
the body? You see my predicament? Even though I was certain in my own mind what had happened, I was hardly in a position to go to the police. I needed
facts,
I needed
evidence
—I needed a body, above all! I would just have to wait a little longer, and keep in the forefront of consciousness the knowledge that I was harboring under my roof a desperate and violent man—a cold-blooded killer, in fact.

J
anuary was, on the surface, a period of calm, and though I was maintaining a discreet surveillance of Fledge I spent most of my time out in the barn, where I was putting the finishing touches to the lecture. I’ve told you how conducive to clear thinking I found the Ceck Marsh, particularly when I was in the throes of composition. I drove out there one Saturday afternoon toward the end of the month and parked the Morris, as was my habit, on the cart track that gave off the Ceck’s Bottom road.

The ground was muddy, for we had had some rain, and the sky was gray and overcast. I squelched down the track in my Wei-lington boots and then, emerging from the trees, I experienced something of a shock—for the wide expanse of marsh that I had expected to find desolate and empty was, instead, peopled—there were figures in the landscape, tiny figures spread out in a long line against the horizon. I had at first no inkling of what this could mean. I knew that the police had gone over the marsh in late December, after finding the bicycle, but they had uncovered nothing more and so discontinued their search. But I soon recognized a familiar humped and shuffling form that, distant and indistinct though it was, could only be Mrs. Giblet. And the little figures abreast of her, moving slowly through the gloom of the afternoon —these were surely children!