Blood and Water and Other Stories by Patrick McGrath

Author:Patrick McGrath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

THE SKEWER

* * *

September 21, 1985

I am an elderly gentleman of nervous disposition and independent means, and I live alone in a rambling Victorian house of which little needs to be said save that it stands close to Hampstead Heath and is colonized by a dense growth of English ivy. This house was built by my great-grandfather. It was completed in the summer of 1856, but he, poor man, never lived to sleep beneath its high-gabled roofs; for in a bizarre accident in the summer of that year he was kicked to death by his own horse. Mrs Digweed comes in thrice a week to do for me, and I keep a dog, a senile chow called Khrushchev.

Thus begins the final volume of my uncle’s journal, found on his desk shortly after his tragic death earlier this month. You will not yet have read about the case, but as it will no doubt be sensationalized by the gutter press I will present the facts here. My uncle was Neville Pilkington, the distinguished art critic; he wrote the definitive critical study of Horta de Velde. He was found, hanged, in his study, and it was I who cut him down. Let me say this at the outset: I do not concur with the findings of the coroner’s inquest. I repudiate Dr Max Nordau’s testimony, with its scurrilous implications regarding my uncle’s mental state. I suggest to you that this was no simple case of hereditary suicidal tendency; rather, that Max Nordau is guilty of gross professional misconduct, that he subjected my uncle to sustained verbal harassment, and that the effects of this harassment were so pernicious that my uncle was finally hounded, hectored, and driven to the grave! Moreover – but enough. Enough of this vulgar stridency. My outrage must not alienate your sympathy.

My uncle was a refined man, and a solitary aesthete; and on those rare occasions when he attended art-world functions he always cut a most singular figure. Dressed with impeccable restraint, always in dark glasses, slim and slight, his silver hair flowing over his shoulders, he hovered at the edge of society like a ghost. He had suffered serious burns as a young man, and the skin of his face and hands was all scar tissue. Perhaps this explains his reclusivcness. Perhaps, too, it explains why his mind took a mystical, not to say gothic, turn in the twilight of his life. Like Yeats, he came to believe in fairies; and his mysticism is, I think, evident in the journal entry which follows:

September 22. This afternoon a most extraordinary thing. Khrushchev and I out on the heath as is our wont, making our way down the path by the stream. The light was fading fast and the breeze soughing softly in the elms overhead. Darkness had not yet fully descended, but the trees and the water had begun to coalesce such that the separation of substance and absence was blurred and indistinct. It is precisely this atmosphere of

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