in both of them, gardens are associated with equilibrium. But they are an ambiguous symbol in McGrath’s fiction. They can also be associated with derangement and death. Crombeck may describe with bright eyes his ‘God-given’ garden, an English country garden, and yet have murder in his heart and in his hands (77).
‘God’ often signifies delusion in McGrath’s fiction. In ‘Ambrose Syme’ he draws upon his own unhappy experience of Stoneyhurst, the austere Catholic school where he had spent some time as a boy. He is also acknowledging a number of literary precursors. Colin Green has noted the influence of Mervyn Peake on this story, in which the school is called ‘Ravengloom’ and the Catholic Church is an ever-threatening and sinister presence.12 The raven in the name reminds us that Poe, too, is never far away in this early fiction. The setting maps on to Stoneyhurst’s location in the north-west of England, but the description of the topography also evokes the Dickensian world of Hard Times, with the Preston-inspired Coketown renamed ‘Gryme’. The Gothic edifice of Ravengloom reminds us of the historical origins of Gothic fiction, what Victor Sage has called ‘Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition’.13 Its transgressive priest, Syme, is – as his Christian name suggests – a latter-day Ambrosio, his crimes as shocking as those of Lewis’s monk. Yet he is treated more sympathetically than his eighteenth-century precursor, by a narrator who recognizes the foundations of repression that have made him a paedophile and murderer; he is shown to be himself a victim. Twenty years and more since the publication of this story, so many accounts of abuse in its institutions have emerged that the Catholic Church finds itself in crisis. The history in this instance seems to be as Gothic as the fiction. This story’s powerful representation of the link between repression and transgression reveals a cultural haunting at work; other stories explore further dimensions of the cultural haunting of England.
In the figure of Father Mungo, elderly rector of Ravengloom, McGrath’s preoccupation with the colonial aspect of British history is apparent. The name of this benevolent figure (‘who was still remembered with awe and affection by the natives of the Zambesi Basin’ (68)) is derived from that of the great explorer Mungo Park. McGrath has suggested that the African motif in his early fiction was ‘probably an outgrowth of [his] interest in pastiching nineteenth-century fictions’, and that in his writing ‘Africa became a symbol of the unconscious, the unpredictable, the chaotic’.14 The influence of Conrad is clear and, indeed, McGrath has identified Heart of Darkness as one of the books that has given him greatest pleasure.15 The figure of the explorer appears again in ‘The Lost Explorer’. The cultural history of colonial exploration here finds expression in the heart of the bourgeois family, where it represents an exotic ‘otherness’ in the imagination of a girl on the threshold of puberty. Like many Gothic tales, this story works within a liminal space. Evelyn Piker-Smith’s encounter with the exotic operates in the territory where realism gives way to fantasy, and the boundary between the two is unstable.16 This is signalled in the opening sentence, as ‘one fresh and gusty day in the damp autumn of her twelfth year Evelyn found a lost explorer in the garden of her parents’ London home’ (17). In another inflection of the garden trope, the explorer’s tent is pitched in the wild area at the bottom of the garden, an area that is described in terms of a Gothic desolation reminiscent of the sexually charged dream of Manderley in the opening of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca: ‘The rest of the garden beyond the pond was a tangled and overgrown mass of rhododendron bushes, into whose labyrinthine depths, since the death of the old gardener, only Evelyn now ventured’ (20). The trivialities of life carry on in their humdrum way in the Piker-Smiths’ bourgeois home, providing a contrast with the suffering of the explorer in his tropical delirium.
The two realities exist side by side for Evelyn, however, and both are narrated as such; only in the liminal area is there an acknowledgement of Evelyn’s imagination, as she thinks of the three white sheets billowing in the wind on the washing-line as sails on ‘a great ship shouldering on to the tropics’ (21). The narrative juxtaposes this with the next sentence, as she picks up ‘a jar containing a pickled thumb that Daddy had given her’ (21). Given the sexual connotations of hands in these early stories (in ‘Hand of a Wanker’, for example), it is difficult to read this other than in terms of a rather crude phallic symbol. It is, of course, not surprising in this house (Evelyn’s father is one of McGrath’s many medical men), where the topics of conversation at the dinner table include ‘a rather interesting colostomy [her father had] performed’, after which ‘Uncle Frank made some quips which might, in a non medical household, have been taken in rather bad taste’ (24). The body in this context is a masculinized domain.
In spite of his supernatural status, the explorer has for Evelyn a fully realized materiality in the text; there is nothing overtly spectral about him. From his ‘creased map of the upper reaches of the Congo’ to his torn mosquito net, he is accompanied by the trappings of his calling (17). In the liminal zone between childhood and adulthood, Evelyn shares with the explorer an alternative reality, aligning herself with neither female sexuality (as personified by Aunt Vera), domesticity (in the shape of her ‘plump, tweedy’ mother) nor the male doctors, who represent a banal rationality. Through her fantasy, the reader is offered an alternative perspective on an aspect of British history. Listening to Uncle Frank’s rambling account of Stanley’s adventures in the Congo, Evelyn glimpses over his shoulder the explorer, his ‘unshaven face deeply etched with gullies of suffering’ and his clothes looking ‘extraordinarily ragged and filthy against the beige flowered wallpaper of the hallway’ (25). When the explorer dies shortly afterwards, Evelyn stashes his body in the corner of a closet and tries to get rid of ‘the stink of a man too long in the jungle’. In one of the many comic turns in these early stories, her mother attributes the ‘funny smell’ the next morning to Evelyn’s ‘hockey things’, thus creating a bathetic closure to the explorer’s sojourn in the Piker-Smiths’ residence (28). After burying him with his possessions in the garden, Evelyn sees him occasionally as a spectral presence under a full moon, but by the time she has decided to become a doctor (at the age of fourteen and a half), ‘he disappeared from her life completely’ (31).
If this is a fantasy, it is (with its details of anthropophagous pygmies and a ‘creased and sweat-stained’ map (30–1)) a male adventure fantasy. Evelyn’s decision to become a doctor – entering into the male territory signified by the thumb – coincides with the disappearance of the explorer as she finds an adult role to pursue. The immediacy of her experience and her compassion towards the suffering man, as she tends to his needs, suggest, however, other possibilities for the medical profession than the smug indifference exemplified by the male doctors in the story. Hovering over both the fantasy and the quotidian reality, however, is a deeper fear, that of regression and entropy. In the wild zone of the garden, the wood-shed harbours ‘three substances, sacking, wood and the earth beneath the rotten wood, [which] had begun to coalesce, as if in attempting, in their nostalgia for some primeval state of slime, to abandon structure and identity, all that could distinguish or separate them’ (29). In the face of such forces the ephemeral nature of human lives is thrown into sharp relief, as are the ways in which they are recorded. The insubstantiality of textuality is represented by faded photographs in the shed, in which
barely a trace could now be detected of the humans who had stood, once, before the camera, vital, one presumes, and alive. It was as though they had died in the bad air, the malaria, of that neglected little corner of the garden, the thin dusty air of the old shed, within which everything must devolve to a fused state of formless unity … (30)
A less ambiguously comic treatment of the Englishwoman and Britain’s colonial past is to be found in ‘The Black Hand of the Raj’, which adopts an earlier setting, that of Victorian India. In this story the motif of the hand is central; its synecdochic quality places it in a tradition of hands with sinister import in Gothic texts.17 This hand acts autonomously and with lascivious intent, as does its American counterpart in ‘Hand of a Wanker’, but in this instance it is also murderous. Parodying the tradition of earlier stories of the Raj, from Kipling to Forster, and set in 1897, the story relates the experience of its young Victorian heroine, Lucy Hepplewhite. The narrator speaks from a mid
