Read Online The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath - Free Book Online Page B

Cleo’s a true Coal, as I may have mentioned; small-boned and wiry, she has prominent front teeth and fears nothing, not even me. I remember how, when the girls were growing up, I would at times have the entire household trembling with terror, and a sort of ghastly, oppressed silence hung upon the place, an “atmosphere,” as Harriet called it. Cleo, though, would quite boldly bait me, not in the least intimidated by my snapping, snarling ill-humor. You see, she stoutly maintained the belief that beneath this splenetic and ogreish exterior there beat a heart of gold, though this I imagine was something she had to do, the idea that her father was splenetic and ogreish all the way through being just too grim to contemplate. In fact, not only is my heart not made of gold, it isn’t even made of sound organic tissue —the arteries are sclerotic, and will kill me in the end!
    I admired the girl, you see. Though I never showed it, I was delighted that she refused to allow me to tyrannize over her. So while Harriet and Hilary, my elder daughter, a plump and rabbity little thing like her mother, crept around in a state of deep funk, Cleo sought ways to provoke in me an outburst of truly foul temper. Punishment didn’t deter her—as I say, she did not know the meaning of fear, and I remember once, during the war, how she climbed onto the roof of Crook and stood at the peak of the very highest gable to wave at the Spitfire pilots. Harriet almost died of anxiety, and I was far from calm myself as I stood in the driveway at the front of the house shouting at the bloody girl to come down, then watching her sliding and jumping over those mossy old slates, and clambering down a rickety drainpipe, certain that at any moment she would plunge to her death.
    Given my feelings for the girl, then, I felt less than sanguine about rudely shattering her first affair, sending Sidney off with my execrations ringing in his ears, and then having to explain to Cleo why. It could scar her for life, put her off men for good. Marriage was now completely out of the question, of course, but I wondered if the thing could not be gently broken up—say, after Sidney had returned to his mother’s house in London, about ten days hence. There would be no sudden shock, that way, no brutal exposure of the girl to the fact of Sidney’s tendencies; he would leave Crook, and then I would quietly and firmly indicate to him, in writing, that any further contact with the family was impossible. Cleo would doubtless strike up new friendships at Oxford, and with any luck it would all “blow over.” As for Fledge, I would have to keep him on until Cleo had gone, in case he made a scene; but once the girl was safely off to Oxford he’d be let go. And without references, I might add. It occurred to me then to wonder what precisely had happened in Kenya, that the Fledges should appear in England without papers of any sort. I felt a fleeting tremor of unease as I remembered what Harriet had said about the planter who’d been trampled to death by his own ox. I should have paid more attention to that tremor of unease; but I was not, in those days, in the habit of giving credence to such ephemeral and ultimately untestable phenomena.
    All this I worked out in the long hours of the night, first in the unlit barn, and then in my bed in the east wing. As you may imagine, I was not a happy man at breakfast the next morning. I found it impossible to meet the eye of either Sidney or Fledge, and it was, as I say, only for Cleo’s sake that I suppressed the disgust I felt at being in the same room as they. What perhaps was most sickening was that business of the “engagement” a night or two previously. How right I had been to remain aloof and skeptical— what a shoddy travesty it had been, what a mockery, what an insult, not only to Cleo, but to Harriet and myself. Just thinking about it made my blood boil; it was as well I had the barn to escape to, for had I been compelled