but the domestic. This is contained by medical science at the end of the story, but the uncanny figure of the monkey is unsettling, reminding the reader of the limitations in understanding of its rational practices.
While the murderous degeneracy of the ‘cell of untreated anaemics’ provides the horror of ‘Blood Disease’, madness in the English upper class is the satiric target of the parody of the later story ‘Not Cricket’, which also plays with the idea of the vampire.20 The setting is a country house (Wallop Hall, ‘a fine example of rustic Gothic’ (119)21), where the butler is suggestively called Stoker. McGrath’s propensity for selecting evocative names thus sets the frame for the fantasies of the story’s narrator, Lady Hock, mistress of the Hall. She has taken herself off her medication, the nature of which is never specified but may be inferred from the hallucinations that then begin to beset her. This leads to her conviction that, in the person of Cleave, a cricketing visitor, she is entertaining not merely a demon bowler (who emasculates and sends off to hospital an inoffensive opponent with a fast ball to the testicles), but a vampire. In Lady Hock’s eyes, Cleave possesses all the physical attributes of the Stokerian vampire: ‘deep sunken eyes’ in a ‘disproportionately long face dominated by a huge, cadaverous jaw’ are combined with ‘a shock of jet-black hair, thickly oiled, that was brushed straight back from a sharp peak dead in the centre of a low cliff of overhanging forehead’ (121–2). Moreover, she discerns ‘a sort of red glow … deep in each of his eye sockets’ (122) and his ‘teeth shining with a nasty yellowish lustre’ (124). Determined to protect her daughter, though also carried away by what Millie Williamson has identified as ‘the lure of the vampire’,22 she determines to offer herself up to Cleave that night, but finds him sleeping. Admitting herself tempted, she instead hits him ‘extremely hard with a piece of metal piping that the plumbers had left behind’ and then hammers a meat skewer through his heart with that quintessential emblem of English country house recreation, a croquet mallet (130). It is only at the end of the story that she divulges that she is telling her story from the asylum where she is quite happy, playing bridge with her friend’s daughter, who has been incarcerated for ‘murdering the parish priest with a blunt axe in a moment of delusional psychosis’ (120). The reader is left to speculate whether this has indeed been a vampire story or an everyday tale of an unfortunate outsider with a good bowling arm who happened, like Stoker’s Dracula, to bear the markers of a different ethnicity.
In McGrath’s fiction, the English upper classes tend to be both mad and murderous; the asylum, it would appear, is their natural home. It is the final destination of Sir Norman Percy in ‘Blood and Water’, the title story of the collection, whose crime has been to decapitate a visiting Harley Street doctor. In this story, some of the persistent concerns of McGrath’s fiction may be discerned: the degeneracy of the upper classes; the limitations of the scientific perspective, specifically that of the medical profession; and a Gothic fascination with the instability of bodily forms. Sir Norman’s ancestral home, ‘Phlange’, is, like ‘Crook’ in McGrath’s first novel, The Grotesque, a place of grotesque perversity. Like many of the stories in the collection that bears its title, ‘Blood and Water’ demonstrates McGrath’s skill in using the comic potential of the Gothic.23 Domestic plumbing is used as an analogue for anatomy, as Sir Norman struggles with both an unreliable boiler and hermaphroditic developments in his wife’s genitalia, a struggle that culminates in her suicide and his incarceration.24 The punning link between plumbing and anatomy is sustained throughout (the estate handyman is called Tinkler), as the dispassionate narrative voice reconstructs the crime that lies at the centre of the story and invites the reader to view a series of scenes in phrases like ‘now turn your eyes’ and ‘our first clear glimpse’ (172, 173). The historical siting of the story is very precise: August 1936, ‘a cloudless Friday afternoon’ when ‘England is at peace’ (172), a point in history when ‘the landed gentry is hardly prospering’ (174).
The point of conflict in the story is Lady Percy’s body. She is not, however, represented as abject but as an ethereal figure from romance, ‘a pale woman in a white silk gown, utterly motionless and devoid of expression, gazing out over the copse of chestnuts on the brow of the distant hills, and into the deep sky beyond’ (172) from her chamber, with its ‘four-poster bed, spread with a fine-woven coverlet of medieval design’ (181). In contrast, it is the doctor who is rendered as monstrous: grossly fat and androgynous in his own way, marked as monstrously feminine with ‘wide, soft-nippled tyres of flesh’, but (in keeping with the joking but sinister use of the plumbing metaphor) a ‘little pink hose-end of a penis peeping out from below’ (173). It is the doctor’s proposal that Lady Percy’s case should be written up in the Lancet as ‘a scientific monograph’ (177) and Sir Norman’s fear that she will be subjected ‘to the knife’ (178) that precipitate the catastrophe. Suffering from the delusion that he is an Arthurian knight protecting his lady, the latter dispatches the foe with one plumber’s tool (‘a large spanner’) and saws off his head with another. Thus, in comic parodic mode, using a crude phallic symbol, Sir Norman asserts his masculinity and mastery of his domain. The story’s emphasis on the specular makes it particularly susceptible to a psychoanalytic reading. Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ identifies the fear of blinding as being symbolic of the fear of castration. Sir Norman, in presenting the doctor’s bloody severed head to his lady, says: ‘Show yourself to me’ (181) and her ‘deformity’ is revealed. ‘In deep psychotic territory’ (182), Sir Norman does not realize until it is too late that his wife has fled to the bathroom and committed suicide by cutting her wrist in the bath. He is instead ‘fascinated by the eyes of his enemy’ (182). He ‘seats himself before the bloody head set between the mirrors on the dresser and there gazes into its infinite deadness’ (182).
‘Blood and Water’ is a story of inversions; two kinds of masculinity are pitted against one another: the rationalizing of the scientific establishment that cannot recognize its own monstrosity and the aristocratic masculinity of Sir Norman, with its propensity for madness. Defending his family honour by the use of the phallic ‘tool’, the latter metaphorically castrates the doctor, who, in an inversion of Lady Percy, also represents androgyny through the markers of the monstrous feminine on his body. Sir Norman’s committal to Broadmoor does not prevent his resuming the role he had played so well all his life, that of the bucolic squire, and spending the rest of his life ‘in a state of happy and imperious insanity’ (183). McGrath pays tribute to one of the writers he most admires by using some lines of Melville’s for Sir Norman’s epitaph, which closes the story:
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life’s gate? (183)
The cloven ‘human integral’ may be a reference both to the division between the sexes and to the fragmentation of Sir Norman Percy’s psyche, where the flanges (to use the plumbing metaphor) no longer hold.
The unfortunate doctor in ‘Blood and Water’ is not the only medical man to meet a gruesome end in the short stories. In ‘The Skewer’, it is again gendered identity and the potential uncanniness of the body that is instrumental in bringing about the demise of an all-too confident doctor. McGrath’s interest in the gendered body reflects the fascination with gender instability in evidence in the popular culture of the 1980s. From Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie (1982) to the popularity of Boy George and Divine’s celebrated performance as a woman in Hairspray (1988), there was a growing awareness of the performativity of gender during this period. This awareness, that was to be so clearly articulated in theoretical work by scholars such as Judith Butler in the 1990s, became the stuff of a gleeful and often comic playfulness, in which parodic re-representations became of central importance. In a darker comic vein, Iain Banks’s novel The Wasp Factory (1984) plays the kind of narrative trick with gender that is to be found in McGrath’s story ‘The Skewer’, when its excessively masculinized narrator discovers himself to be biologically female.
In ‘The Skewer’, assumptions about gendered identity comically
