Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  *

  With everyone else involved in the drama things stood very differently and in the case of Willy didn’t stand at all. Lying in the boot of the Vauxhall he had stiffened rather gruesomely into a parody of a fully clothed foetus and was beyond recalling the nature of the reality which had hit him. Mr Jipson, to make sure that his tractor couldn’t be implicated, had already washed it down several times with a hose and was now busily getting it mucky again. It was up at the New House that some sort of reality was most at work. Frederick, summoned by his aunt’s letter, was amazed to find she had changed her mind.

  ‘But you told me to get rid of the chap,’ he countered when she said she had written to Yapp. ‘Now you’re inviting him to the house!’

  ‘Exactly. I intend to divert him and in any case I shall find out how much he knows.’

  ‘He must know something but I’m dashed if I understand how. We don’t call ourselves Fantasy Products Anonymous for nothing.’ Emmelia eyed him sceptically. ‘I mean that’s been the secret of our success. The main obstacle in individual marketing has always been the fact that we cater for the sexually insecure.’

  ‘Indeed? From what I saw I should have thought quite the contrary. Anyone strapping himself into that belt with the enema attachment would appear to require nerves of steel.’

  ‘By sexually insecure I mean they’re introverted. They’re often far too shy to go into shops selling sex aids or even to have the things sent through the post.’

  Emmelia sympathized but said nothing.

  ‘What they want is to be able to purchase our goods without revealing their identity and that’s exactly what we do, we guarantee their total anonymity.’

  ‘But not apparently your own.’

  ‘As far as I know we do,’ said Frederick. ‘We advertise through the usual channels and have a mail-order service based on an office in London. All communication between that office and the sales despatch department at the Mill is coded via computer so that even the girls in London have no idea they’re dealing with Buscott.’

  Emmelia sat back and closed her eyes and listened with apparent disinterest. At least Frederick was living up to the old reputation of the Petrefacts for keeping themselves obscure, which was more than could be said for his wretched father. She awoke from the bizarre picture of Lord Petrefact in a thermal chastity belt with enema variations to hear Frederick talking about means of delivery.

  ‘. . . and where there’s a large railway station with a left-luggage office we deposit the order there and mail the ticket to the client from the nearest post box so again there’s no possible way of tracing us. It’s perfectly simple.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Emmelia, opening her eyes. ‘It sounds highly complicated to me but then I’m hardly qualified to understand. If you know the client, as you call him, and his address . . .’

  ‘But I’ve explained that. We don’t know the client’s name. He phones the London office stating his requirements and is given a code number. Then he supplies a false name and we provide a box number where he can pick up his mail. Of course, not everyone requires this personalized service. It costs considerably more than the standard despatch method, but whichever method is used we never mail orders from Buscott. Every posting is done in London.’

  ‘Foreign sales too?’ asked Emmelia.

  ‘They’re handled by subsidiaries,’ said Frederick complacently, ‘and again with a computer coded link-up.’

  ‘Perhaps someone in the Mill has been talking.’

  Frederick shook his head. ‘Every employee is thoroughly vetted and we get them to sign the Official Secrets Act document.’

  ‘But you can’t do that. It’s illegal.’

  ‘Not, you know,’ said Frederick with a smile. ‘The Defector Encouragement Branch of MI9 has a standing order for dildos and whatnot.’ He paused and stared into space. ‘That might explain it.’

  ‘It explains nothing to me,’ said Emmelia. ‘I can think of nothing less likely to encourage me to defect than one of those monstrous things. I would rather spend the rest of my days in a salt mine than . . .’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean Yapp. The man’s a home-grown Bolshevik and as bent as Blunt. The whole thing could be KGB-inspired. The Russians will go to any lengths to cause trouble.’

  ‘Then they must be anatomically most curious,’ said Emmelia. ‘In any case I have invited the wretched fellow to tea and to tea he shall come. If your father has put him up to this I intend to see that he lives to regret it.’

  16

  Lord Petrefact was already regretting it. What the oyster had begun in the way of making him relatively immobile and intensely irritable, Yapp’s catastrophic use of the Synchronized Ablution Bath and the subsequent career of the wheelchair had completed. He was now doubly dependent on Croxley, not only for his infallible grasp of the myriad details of Petrefact Consolidated Enterprises, but also to push his wheelchair. Having seen what a self-animated one could do he had no intention of trusting his precious body to another.

  All of which would have been bad enough, but there was the additional annoyance of knowing that he need never have paid Yapp so much. At the time it had seemed a necessary precaution. There had been the very real risk that the Trade Unions might call on Yapp to arbitrate in the small matter of putting 8,000 men out of work at the plant in Hull without paying them for their redundancy, but that risk had been removed by a fire which had burnt the factory to the ground. Anyone else would have been grateful to the charred buffoon who had started it by having an extremely loud smoke in the fuel store. Not so Lord Petrefact, who felt cheated. In his old age he could afford to indulge a perverse delight in strikes, lock-outs, the use of black-leg labour, the abuse of shop stewards and union leaders and the bewilderment expressed in the editorials of even right-wing papers at his obduracy. They all helped to revitalize his sense of power and, since Petrefact Consolidated’s profits stemmed in the main from the efficient use of extremely cheap labour in Africa and Asia, he considered the millions of pounds lost by strikes of his own fomenting were well spent. They infuriated his relatives and in his opinion served to restore the morale of other industrialists.

  But if he was prepared to be profligate in the matter of strikes he was extremely irked by the thought that he wasn’t getting value for money from Yapp. Having seen what the lunatic could do at Fawcett in the matter of a short weekend he would have expected Buscott to have been flooded, devastated – the news that parts of North England had been hit by a minor earthquake temporarily raised his hopes – and in general to have followed the example of Troy after the introduction of the wooden horse. But as the days passed and no violent protests arrived from Emmelia he was beginning to think that Yapp had reneged on his obligations as a human disaster area. It irritated him still further because he couldn’t take Croxley into his confidence. The damned man’s devotion to the family made him untrustworthy. There were even moments when only the conviction, born of self-knowledge, that all true Petrefacts had hidden depths of deceit and privately loathed their kith and kin persuaded him that Croxley wasn’t a member of the blasted family himself. Anyway he had no intention of asking the bastard’s advice on this matter. And with every day Lord Petrefact’s smile became more lopsided as he tried to think of some fresh goad to spur Yapp into action. He’d already sent him the family correspondence dealing with Great-Uncle Ruskin’s bigamous relationship with several goats when he was already married to Maude and bestiality was definitely not in fashion, and if that wasn’t enough to give Emmelia galloping hysteria there was also the matter of Percival Petrefact’s unbiased supply of arms and ammunition to both the German Army and the Allies in the First World War. All in all, Yapp had enough material to blast the Petrefacts from their obscurity several times over. And if the swine didn’t start producing repercussions soon he’d have to look to his lawyers to save even the twenty thousand pounds he had already received, let alone the rest. Lord Petrefact had his reputation as the hardest-headed fi
nancier in the City to consider. To help pass the time he snarled more frequently at Croxley, conducted several managerial purges for no obvious reason, and in general made life as hellish as possible for everyone he came in touch with. Unfortunately Yapp didn’t, and when, having sent Croxley on a needless errand, he phoned the Faculty of History at Kloone the only information he could obtain was that the Professor was away and had left no forwarding address.

  ‘Well when do you expect him back?’ he demanded. The secretary couldn’t say. Professor Yapp’s movements were always a little erratic.

  ‘They’ll be a fucking sight more erratic if the shit doesn’t contact me in the course of the next day or two,’ shouted Lord Petrefact, slamming down the phone and leaving the secretary in some doubt as to his identity. Being a well-brought-up girl from a working-class home she could hardly bring herself to believe that peers swore like that.

  In his office Croxley monitored the call. It was one of the few advantages of Lord Petrefact’s new-found loathing for motorized wheelchairs that while the old devil could hurl insults more violently than ever he couldn’t hurl himself from room to room without help and Croxley could go about his business without being interrupted by more than the intercom buzzer which he could ignore. And Croxley’s business had begun to alter its emphasis. Lord Petrefact’s annoyance at his secretary’s devotion to the family was only partly justified.

  The new regime of unadulterated abuse was taking its toll on the secretary’s tolerance and Croxley had reached the age when he found being called a cunt-loving son of a syphilitic whore neither appropriate nor, by inversion, vaguely flattering. To add to his resentment, the recent purges of perfectly competent executives had made him question his own future and reach the conclusion that his prospects of comfortable retirement were under threat. To counter this threat he had broken the resolution of a lifetime not to dabble on the stockmarket and by using his savings, remortgaging his house in Pimlico and monitoring Lord Petrefact’s more private telephone calls, Croxley had done rather well. So well in fact that, given a little more time and private enterprise, he hoped shortly to be in a position to tell the old swine what he really thought of him. But if his own interests were beginning to burgeon, he remained loyal to that faction of the Petrefact family which detested the peer. He was particularly devoted to Miss Emmelia and it was one of his many regrets that his station in life had prevented him from devoting himself more intimately to her.

  In short, Croxley’s thoughts frequently wandered towards Buscott and he was alarmed to learn from this latest call that Lord Petrefact had evidently sent Walden Yapp there. It added one more puzzling factor to the whole enigma of Yapp’s visit to Fawcett. The old devil was up to something unusually devious concerning the family but what it was Croxley had no idea. Yapp in Buscott? Odd, distinctly odd. And the Mill was making excellent profits from ethnic clothing, as well. That was curious too. He had never thought of Miss Emmelia as a businesswoman but with the Petrefacts there were always surprises. He was just considering the idea of retiring to Buscott – the old swine would never bother him there and he’d be close to Miss Emmelia – when the buzer went and Lord Petrefact demanded his lunch.

  ‘And see there’s a double helping of cognac in the Complan,’ he yelled. ‘Yesterday I couldn’t even smell the fucking stuff.’

  ‘One brandy Complan coming up,’ said Croxley and switched the intercom off before Lord Petrefact could bawl him out for being familiar. He went down to the kitchen with strychnine on his mind.

  *

  At Number 9 Rabbitry Road, Yapp sat in bed and rather reluctantly finished reading the letters Lord Petrefact had sent him. He had recovered from his bout of summer flu, but had been shaken rigid by the contents of the letters. While his own demotic leanings were less towards illicit interpersonal relationships between goats and Great-Uncle Ruskin, he had to admit that the revelations threw an entirely new light on the family. But it was the impartial arms dealings of Percival Petrefact in the First World War that gripped his attention. Here was material that would expose the multinational capitalism of the Petrefacts to the entire world, though he couldn’t for the life of him understand why he had been given this extraordinary correspondence. But at least he was clear on one matter: he must lay his hands on the Petrefact Papers in the Museum. If they contained a fraction of the damaging admissions of these letters the family history was as good as written. He would have to see Miss Emmelia Petrefact and get her permission to view them. That was essential.

  He got out of bed and staggered through to the bathroom with new resolution, but by the time he had shaved it had been diluted by sounds coming through the floor from the kitchen. Rosie Coppett was having another good cry over the absence of her Willy. Yapp sighed. If Willy had really run off with another woman, as Rosie claimed more insistently every day, it was clear that his morals were as restricted as his growth. Moreover, he had placed Yapp in a very invidious position. He could hardly leave a deserted and mentally sub-normal woman in her hour of need; at the same time, to stay on in the house would be to invite scandal and gossip. Regarding himself in the shaving mirror, a process which involved going down on his knees because Willy had fixed the mirror firmly to the wall at two feet for his own needs, Yapp decided that he had no right to put Mrs Coppett’s reputation in jeopardy. Besides, his own peculiar feelings for her made staying on impossible. He would leave her a cheque for two hundred pounds and steal quietly away. That was definitely the solution. It would avoid all the heart-rending tears of a more public departure.

  Having shaved and cut himself in consequence of the height of the mirror he returned to his room, dressed, packed his bag and wrote out a cheque for three hundred pounds, at the same time adding a note saying he would get in touch with her as soon as it was proper to do so. Finally, with a surge of daring that was to be his undoing, he signed himself ‘Yours most affectionately, Walden Yapp.’

  Twenty minutes later he saw her go down the garden path with a shopping-bag; as she disappeared towards Buscott, he left the house with his rucksack and suitcase, threw them onto the back seat of the Vauxhall and drove off in the opposite direction. The sun shone down out of a cloudless sky but Yapp had no heart for the beauties of nature. He was thinking how sad a place the world was and how strange his own nature that it should find so strong an appeal in the large body and little mind of a woman like Rosie Coppett.

  There was also a rather strange smell in the car, a distinctly nasty smell suggestive of blocked drains, but Yapp dismissed it as one of the less savoury features of agriculture, possibly some farmer mucking his fields with pig dung, and concentrated on the best approach to Miss Petrefact. From what he had gathered during his walkabouts in Buscott and from Rosie he had gained the impression that she was somewhat eccentric, definitely reclusive but not unpopular. In any case she could hardly be as thoroughly disagreeable as her brother and, while he would have preferred to continue his researches at grass-roots level, it was obvious that without her consent there would be no grass-roots to research. He had just reached this conclusion and the bottom of the hill leading to the New House when he remembered that Rosie had said something about a letter from Miss Emmelia. He’d forgotten the damned thing during his illness. It was too late to go back for it now. He would just have to press ahead.

  He drove on up the hill and turned in at the gates and stopped on the gravel outside the front door. For a moment he sat there grudgingly admitting to himself that Samuel Petrefact, the founder of the Mill and the family’s immense fortune, had had modest and distinctly refined tastes in domestic architecture. Yapp felt aggrieved. It was a tenet of his philosophy that entrepreneur capitalists who made life a misery for the mill-hands should proclaim that awfulness in the houses they built. Samuel Petrefact hadn’t. Yapp got out and was about to ring the front doorbell when he became aware that something was moving in the depths of the shrubbery across the lawn and, as he watched, a figure emerged above the bushes clutching a fork. It was
wearing a cloth cap which came down over its ears and its hands and old apron were very largely caked with mud. Yapp moved across the lawn and the figure promptly disappeared into the undergrowth.

  ‘I wonder if you can tell me if Miss Petrefact is in,’ he said, addressing himself to a large expanse of corduroy under a Viburnum fragrans.

  The corduroy moved further into the shrubbery. ‘Strictly speaking she isn’t,’ it said gruffly. ‘And who might you be?’

  Yapp hesitated. He disliked being addressed so arrogantly even by jobbing gardeners, but then the servants of the rich frequently took on the airs and lack of graces of their employers. ‘My name is Yapp. Professor Yapp. I’d like to speak to Miss Petrefact.’

  A series of grunts from the depths of an Australian Bottlebrush seemed to suggest that he’d just have to wait until she was in. Yapp stood on the lawn uncertainly and surveyed the garden. It was, he supposed, a very fine one though his own tastes gravitated more towards allotments, cabbage patches and the pot leeks of the provident poor than to the artifice of herbaceous borders, shrubberies and rockeries.