Free The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath

to spend much time under the same roof as those two inverts I might well have been unable to mask my feelings.
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    I spent most of the next two days in the barn, and I’m afraid I drank a good deal of whisky. I hadn’t as yet said anything to Harriet; that, I thought, should wait until Sidney was out of the house and back in London, for I had no confidence that she could keep up a pretense of normality if she knew what I knew. She would become upset, she would upset Cleo, and there would be no peace for any of us; and despite my recent setback I still had to work on my lecture. Better for everybody, I thought, if I keep it to myself. Mealtimes were difficult, and it was all I could do to maintain a sort of surly unsociability. But surly unsociability was not uncommon with me, and Harriet and Cleo were not particularly alarmed. Just Hugo having one of his “moods,” they thought. Just Hugo being “impossible.” Ha!
    My plan, then, was to stay out of the house as much as possible for the last week-and-a-half of Sidney’s visit. But three nights after the incident in the pantry a sudden and dramatic development occurred. And it was then, I think, that it can all be said to have definitely begun.
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    I was in my study, quite late, writing, when there came a tapping at my door. It was Cleo. She came in and sank into an armchair by the fire. “Daddy,” she said, “Sidney’s not back yet.”
    I did not look up from my work. Sidney’s whereabouts did not interest me, not in the very least. “It’s been more than three hours,” said Cleo. “He was just going into the village to post a letter.”
    A rather cruel insinuation sprang to my lips. I suppressed it. Instead I said: “Perhaps he’s discussing poetry with Father Pin.” This was the parish priest, a friend of Harriet’s.
    “It’s not like him,” she said, gazing into the fire. “He’s always so punctual about everything.” Her hair fell forward in a short thick black curtain so that, in profile, I could see only the tip of her nose and her protruding top lip.
    “Yes,” I said, “I imagine he is.”
    “Don’t be horrid, Daddy.”
    “Horrid?”
    “I know you don’t think very much of Sidney,” she said, “but that’s because you don’t know him very well. He’s always so shy in front of you.”
    My pen ran across the page, amassing the familiar evidence, drawing the bold conclusions. I reject the official notion that the dinosaur was a reptile. I claim a new class, the Dinosauria, separate and distinct from the Reptilia, and I include within it the birds. Yes, I claim the birds as living dinosaurs.
    “You intimidate him,” said Cleo. “He’s not combative, like you. He has a gentle nature.”
    This of course was why Sykes-Herring was trying to muzzle me. “You think that’s just weakness, but it’s not. I like gentleness, Daddy. All women do.”
    The idea was not original with me, unfortunately; Victorian paleontologists like Owen and Huxley knew all about the birdness of dinosaurs, and vice versa, but the insight had somehow been lost.
    “Daddy, can’t we drive into the village and look for him?”
    I screwed the top onto my fountain pen and gave her my full attention. “Very well,” I said. “Go and put your coat on.”
    We drove slowly into Ceck. The moon was full, though intermittently obscured by ragged black rainclouds. I parked in the yard behind the Hodge and Purlet and went into the saloon bar, then the public bar, while Cleo waited in the car. But no one had seen Sidney, so we walked up the lane behind the inn, between high brick walls and spreading elms in which a restless wind was gently murmuring. Entering by the lych-gate, we followed the narrow path that led through the graveyard to the church, which stood out sharply against the night sky, flooded by moonlight that silvered the stonework and threw the belfry and lancets into slender blocks of darkness. High above the little steepled building black rainclouds