Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  *

  And Yapp was. As he drove down Rabbitry Road and parked the old car outside Number 9 he was filled with that same sense of personal benevolence and social indignation which so inspired his students and emptied the Senior Common-Room at Kloone. But now his benevolence was directed towards the Coppetts while his indignation was centred on the squalor of the neighbourhood and the failure of the Social Services to provide Willy with a disability pension. In Walden Yapp’s view Restricted Growth was a serious disability and it never occurred to him that not only would Willy Coppett’s self-respect be terribly hurt were he to be offered a pension, which he would in any case have refused, but that he actually enjoyed being the only dwarf in Buscott. No, to Yapp’s paradoxical way of thinking the right to work went with the right to a pension so that one didn’t have to. He had long ago overcome the argument that the working class would cease from fitting the category if they didn’t have to work by pointing out that the idle rich, with few exceptions, worked extremely hard, an answer that had been confirmed by the findings of Doris, the computer.

  But as he got out of the car and walked sadly through the grotesque garden gnomery which in the darkness lost all semblance of individuality and startled him into thinking for one second that all Willy’s relatives were waiting for him, he was wondering if there was some way he could use his influence to remove the Coppetts from these horrid surroundings and find them work at the University. He would have to talk to them about it. He went round the side of the house and in the kitchen door. The smell of tripe and onions still hung heavily in the air but it had been joined by another smell. For a moment Yapp stood still, holding his suitcase, and sniffed; as he did so an apparition appeared in the little hallway. Yapp stopped sniffing and stared. That it was an apparition he had no doubt, and logically it had to be because it appeared, but beyond that he could not go. Mrs Coppett’s make-up was so lurid, particularly the green eyelids, and so clumsily applied that in the half-light she looked like something Chagall had painted in a particularly inspired mood. But the blast of smells couldn’t be attributed to anyone. There was absolutely no need to sniff. Yapp’s nose was incapable of sorting out the number of stimuli it was receiving except that tripe and onions now figured far down the list. In the hours she had waited for him Rosie Coppett had changed her mind about what perfume to wear a great many times. She had started with Paris Nights and gone on through various bottles her mum had bequeathed her and others Willy had bought her in miniature and had become so bemused by the combinations that she had finally tried to drown them all with Paris Nights. Nor was that all. In her boredom she had found time to clean the bathroom and spray it with a pine-scented aerosol before spotting several flies in the kitchen and ending their brief span after a necessarily prolonged saturation with the only other aerosol she could find, which had originally been intended to maintain the matte look on Hush Puppies but which she had bought to keep Hector from barking.

  To Yapp all this was irrelevant. He was transfixed by what he now dimly though vividly saw to be Mrs Coppett in a state of undress, make-up, demeanour and smell that suggested she had not only been trying out every scent under the sun but had been drinking the stuff as well.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said striking a contorted pose against the banisters that gave ghastly prominence to and positively riveted Yapp’s disgusted attention on her putative suspender belt.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked, his voice harsh with tension as well as suede restorer.

  Mrs Coppett smiled. In other words her lipstick, smeared into what she had fondly, and falsely, imagined to be a Cupid’s-bow style, seemed to smudge itself sideways into what was undoubtedly a crimson crescent with a distinct bias to the right. But Yapp’s attention, such as it was, and he had the feeling demention would have been a better word, was still mesmerized by the remnants of Mrs Coppett’s late mother’s stays. Whatever they were, and from where he gaped there was no telling, they had a disconcertingly punitive look about them. At a rough guess he would have said that she had either half-managed to escape from a rather ill-fitting straitjacket designed for a Person of Restricted Growth, or had been caught in the act of trying to get into an upside-down and extremely primitive form of brassière. And what the hell were those tabs with knobs on the end? But his speculations into the archaeology of underwear were interrupted.

  ‘It’s all right. Willy’s at the pub,’ she whispered in tones which Willy’s presence at the pub should logically have made unnecessary. Not that Yapp had time to consider the matter apart from the wish that he was at the pub too.

  ‘Oh,’ he said to gain time and to fight down the increasing sense that something, either Mrs Coppett or his imagination, had gone terribly wrong.

  ‘And you did say you wanted extras,’ she continued. ‘You gave me five pounds.’

  ‘Extras?’ said Yapp. Mrs Coppett abandoned her pose and moved forward. Yapp put the kitchen table between them. The single unshaded light bulb threw a new and more unappealing light on things. And Mrs Coppett framed in the doorway definitely came into the category of things. Peering from behind the sheet in the garden as he had first seen her she had had a simple, honest and almost motherly look about her. The artifice of ill-applied cosmetics had changed all that. Virtually naked, the see-through nightdress lived up to its promise, and veiled in what he could now vaguely recognize as a mutilated corset, there was nothing honest or motherly about her. And the simplicity had gone too. He was confronted by a nymphomaniac, and with his limited knowledge of the species he didn’t consider them anything but extremely complicated. Maniacs by definition were mad and Yapp didn’t need abstract thought to tell him that Mrs Coppett was clean off her rocker. The green eyeshadow and the lipstick were enough. And what about that bloody dwarf? The little sod might be at the pub: on the other hand he might be lurking upstairs with that awful knife. In the light of Mrs Coppett’s ghastly appearance Yapp’s social conscience and concern for the underprivileged and deprived vanished. Whatever socio-economic mental and physical disadvantages they might suffer were as nothing to those he was in danger of suffering now.

  But at the very moment he renounced his principles Mrs Coppett’s artifice crumpled. ‘You don’t like me,’ she moaned, and sinking into a plastic-covered chair she looked pitifully at him and burst into tears. ‘You asked for extras and when I give them to you you don’t want them.’

  This lurch from the lurid to the pathetic held Yapp where he was and as the tears tracked down her daubed cheeks they drained with them his brief excursion into reality. He was himself again, a good, kindly and caring human being for whom self-preservation was a dirty word and empathy was all. And if ever Walden Yapp empathized it was now. From one moment to the next Mrs Coppett switched from being a nymphomaniac into a poor, deluded, suffering and sexually exploited person. In brief, a prostitute.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t understand what you meant. I had no idea.’

  Mrs Coppett’s sobs grew louder. If she couldn’t have extras after all the trouble she had taken (and in fact she didn’t much want them in spite of what the Marriage lady had said) she could do with a good cry. And so she indulged her feelings at the expense of Yapp’s.

  And Yapp responded. ‘My dear Mrs Coppett, you mustn’t think I don’t like you,’ he said oblivious of the fact that Mrs Coppett wasn’t thinking at all. ‘I like you very much.’

  ‘You do?’ she asked, shaken from her paroxysm of approximate self-pity by the avowal.

  Walden Yapp unwisely took a chair and sat down. ‘You mustn’t feel ashamed. When you’ve been taken advantage of as long as you have it’s only natural for you to have become sexologically orientated.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Of course. Society places the individual in the anomalous and analogical situation of a commercial commodity or object whose self-identification is a function of monetary value.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Completely. And when, proportio
nately speaking, a marriage is disadvantaged to the extent that yours is, the commodity factor becomes an overriding psychological motivation. You are forced to assert your objective value in the context of sex.’

  ‘I am?’ said Mrs Coppett, for whom his words, derived from the seminar on The Objectivization Of Interpersonal Relationships in A Consumer-Manipulated Society, were as meaningless as they were to the vast majority of his students. Yapp nodded, and to hide the embarrassment of suddenly realizing that the poor woman was incapable of comprehending such basic concepts he took her hand in his and patted it kindly. ‘I respect you, Mrs Coppett. I want you to know that I respect you deeply as a person.’

  But Mrs Coppett had nothing to say. What words had failed to convey to her his simple gesture did. He was a real gentleman and he respected her. And with his respect there came the feeling of shame.

  ‘What must you think of me?’ she said withdrawing her hand. And clutching the nightdress tautly over her extensive bosom she got up and rushed from the room.

  Yapp sighed and looked round the pathetic gallery of all-in wrestlers. It was from such fantastic monstrosities that so many lonely uneducated women drew their comfort. With a clear conscience and a new disgust for the commercial manipulators Yapp went upstairs to his room.

  *

  Outside in the darkness Willy stood invisible and immobile among the garden gnomes. What he had just witnessed and signally misinterpreted only reinforced his determination to find out everything he could about Professor Yapp – and not simply for Mr Frederick.

  He had a personal grudge now.

  12

  Walden Yapp spent a disturbed night. This was in part due to the sounds coming from the next room. They suggested that the Coppetts were not on the best of terms and that Willy was in a vile temper. In fact if Yapp hadn’t been privy to Mrs Coppett’s disproportionately powerful physique he would have said that her diminutive husband was beating the hell out of her. And if that was a disturbing thought, there were others. They concerned sex.

  Here it has to be said that Walden Yapp’s reputation for singularity was fully justified. He had never succumbed to the lure of students. Other Fellows and even some married Professors had, ostensibly in the name of Progressive Thinking, Radical Politics and Liberationist Sex, relieved the monotony of tutorials and family life by sleeping with their students. Not so Yapp. In fact, thanks to his mother’s high-minded neglect and his aunt’s devotion to low-Church ethics, he regarded such affairs with Puritan contempt. Which was all very well but he still had to cope with his own sexuality and in all honesty he had to admit that it wasn’t exactly pure either.

  At one level it expressed itself in delicate feelings for, and distant devotion to, women who were already married and who took not the slightest notice of him, while on another, more sinister plane it erupted in fantasies and irrepressible daydreams in which he did and had done to him acts of such remarkable sensuality that he suffered pangs of guilt and the suspicion that he was probably a pervert. In short, Walden Yapp at thirty was still in matters sexual at the age of puberty.

  As an antidote to these uncontrollable fantasies he worked harder than ever and, when the strain grew too great, indulged in what he had been brought up to call self-abuse. Fortunately he had, as part of a seminar on Sexual Discrimination in the Cotton Industry 1780 to 1850, inadvertently read R. D. Laing and had been reassured to learn that the eminent psychologist considered that masturbation could for some individuals be the most honest act in their lives. Not that Yapp was wholly convinced. Individualism conflicted with his own collectivist views and in spite of some semantic juggling with Doris, who suggested that the two views might be combined in masturbation, Yapp felt strongly that interpersonal relationships, preferably on a communal basis, were essential for human fulfilment. His instincts thought otherwise, and continued their solitary and disconcerting irrational eruptions into consciousness.

  And so, lying in bed free from the actuality of Mrs Coppett’s abundant presence, which had so frightened him, his imagination transformed her into the passionate creature of his fantasies. In fact she corresponded all too closely to his imagined lover, particularly in her lack of intelligence. It was one of the things that most baffled him. He might worship at a distance women of pure morality and high intellect, but his lusts were aroused by mature women with no morality or intellect at all. Mrs Coppett fitted the bill exactly. In his imagination he was in bed with her, he was kissing her extensive breasts, her mouth was on his and her tongue . . .

  Yapp sat up in bed and switched the light on. This wouldn’t do. He must put a stop to such irrational dreams. He reached for the folder containing the family correspondence Lord Petrefact had sent him and tried to exorcize the images, but like some welcome succubus Mrs Rosie Coppett was not to be denied. In the end he gave up, turned out the light and tried to act as honestly as he could. But here again he hit a snag. The bed squeaked too rhythmically for unembarrassed concentration and he gave up the attempt. Finally he fell into a troubled sleep and awoke next morning with the feeling that something peculiar was happening to him.

  He went through to the bathroom in a pensive mood and tried to concentrate on his plans for the day. He would visit the Museum and ask the Curator for the Petrefact Papers and see what he could glean about conditions of work at the Mill and rates of pay there when it was first started by Samuel Petrefact. From that solid base of statistics he would work towards the present family. Lord Petrefact might intend the history to be a more personal and almost biographical account of generations of Petrefacts, but Yapp had his principles. He would proceed in his own way from the general to the particular. He had already decided that the title of the book should be The Petrefact Inheritance: a Study of Emergent Multi-Nationalist Capitalism, and if the old man didn’t like it, he could lump it. The contract had given Yapp a free hand and he wasn’t an expert on Demotic Historiography for nothing.

  In a slightly less distracted state of mind he went down to breakfast. But here his rationalism took a fresh knock. Willy had already gone to work and Mrs Coppett, having shed her dubious finery of the night before, was fresh-faced and homely and dangerously concerned and coy.

  ‘I don’t know what you must think of me,’ she said, placing a large bowl of porridge in front of him, ‘and you a professor and all.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Yapp modestly.

  ‘Oh but it is. Willy told me last night. He was ever so cross.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Did he say what about?’

  Mrs Coppett broke two eggs into a frying-pan. ‘About you being a professor. They were talking about it down at the pub.’

  Yapp cursed silently through a mouthful of porridge. Once it got round Buscott, the Petrefacts would wonder why he hadn’t been in touch with them. On the other hand they were bound to know fairly soon and it had been naive of him to imagine that he could conduct his researches without their learning about it.

  All the time he ate and thought his attention was drawn back to Mrs Coppett, who chattered away over the gas stove, her conversation circling monotonously about his being a professor, a title she probably didn’t understand but one which endowed him with a tremendous importance. Yapp’s egalitarianism asserted itself.

  ‘You mustn’t think of me as someone special,’ he said in direct contradiction to his feelings. Decently dressed, she was an attractive working-class woman whose physical endowments were poignantly heightened by her lack of mental ones. ‘I’m just a guest in your house. I would like you to call me Walden.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Mrs Coppett and exchanged the porridge bowl for a plate of bacon and eggs. ‘I couldn’t.’

  Yapp concentrated on the eggs and said nothing. A waft of that perfume still lingered and this time he was aroused by its message. Besides, Mrs Coppett had very nice legs. He hurried through the rest of the meal and was on the point of leaving the house when she handed him a tin box.

  ‘Sandwiches. You mustn’t go hungr
y, must you?’

  Yapp muttered his thanks and was once again engulfed in the terrible empathy which her simple-minded kindness evoked in him. Taken in conjunction with the appeal of the rest of her, and in particular of her legs, its effect was devastating. Muttering his thanks with an embarrassment that masked his desire to take her in his arms and kiss her, Yapp turned away and hurried through the cenotaphs of gnomes and was presently striding down the road into Buscott, his mind sorely divided between what he was going to do to the Petrefacts and what he would like to do to and for the Coppetts.

  *

  At the abattoir Willy did not reciprocate this goodwill. He best expressed his feelings by stropping his knife on the end of his belt while explaining to the manager that he wanted the day off for apparently no good reason.

  ‘You must have some excuse,’ said the manager to the upper half of the face that stared at him over the edge of his desk. ‘Don’t you feel well? I mean if you’re sick . . .’

  ‘Not,’ said Willy.

  ‘Then perhaps your wife . . .’

  ‘Not sick either.’

  ‘Any relatives down with the . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Willy, ‘don’t have any.’ Under the desk he stropped his knife harder which, since he couldn’t tell exactly what Willy was doing, led the manager to suppose he was doing something else.

  ‘Listen, Willy,’ he said leaning forward, ‘I am perfectly prepared to let you have the day off. All you’ve got to do is give me some good reason. You can’t just come in and do whatever you are doing down there, and while we’re on the subject I wish you wouldn’t, and expect me to say ‘Yes’, just like that.’

  Willy considered this reasonable request and came to no very good conclusion. In the hierarchy of his regard Mr Frederick stood infinitely higher than the manager of the slaughterhouse, and while Mr Petrefact hadn’t actually told him not to say anything to anyone about following Yapp he didn’t feel like disclosing his instructions.