The Gropes

by Tom Sharpe

  In fact, her performance did not go unseen. Horace watched her from the bedroom and was puzzled. He had grown accustomed to her theatricals and sudden changes of mood, so in the present circumstances he would have expected something more melodramatic and vigorous than this pensive and melancholy performance. A woman wailing for her demon lover or, in the present case, a mother wailing for her demon son seemed more appropriate than this demure and mournful progress. A new sense of unease crept over him. He’d desperately like to know what that damned oaf Albert had told her. It must have been something perfectly frightful to put her in this melancholy. Horace turned over and tried to sleep.

  Chapter 10

  By the time Esmond arrived home from school, his mother had played out her role. It wasn’t sufficiently active to sustain for very long, and besides, she was determined to be bright and cheerful so that her darling boy wouldn’t be traumatised.

  ‘Daddy’s much better today,’ she announced, as she made tea and toast with honey. ‘He’s been working ever so hard lately and he needs to rest so we’ve got to be quiet and not disturb him.’

  ‘I am quiet,’ said Esmond. ‘I’ve been quiet ever since I gave up the drums and the piano lessons ages ago.’

  ‘Yes, dear, you’ve been very good. It’s just that Daddy’s nerves aren’t very … well, he’s exhausted himself mentally.’

  ‘You mean he’s been drinking,’ said Esmond, with rather more insight into his father’s problem than Mrs Wiley liked. She preferred her Esmond to be innocent.

  ‘I know all about it, Mum. He goes to the Gibbet & Goose and sits there drinking double Scotches when he gets off the train every night.’

  Vera was appalled, though less by the fact than by Esmond’s understanding.

  ‘He doesn’t. I mean, he may do occasionally, but … Anyway, how do you know?’

  ‘Because Rosie Bitchall told me. Her dad’s the barman there.’

  ‘Rosie Bitchall? That horrid girl who came to your seventeenth birthday party and went behind the sofa with Richard? You don’t still see her?’

  Vera was genuinely agitated now.

  ‘She’s in my class and we’re going to the same college next year.’

  Vera stopped pouring tea and put the pot down. Esmond’s simple statement had decided her. She had no intention of allowing her only son to fall in love with a slut like Rosie Bitchall who wore a ring through her nose and who, to put it mildly, was no better than she should be and who, in the words of Mrs Blewett, was a chip off the old block, the old block in question being her mother, Mabel. Vera knew exactly what that meant.

  ‘Well, Rosie Bitchall must have been mistaken. Anyway, enough of that. Your Uncle Albert came here to see Daddy this morning,’ she said, ‘and he and Auntie Belinda have invited you to stay with them until Daddy’s better. Now, isn’t that nice of them?’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  Mrs Wiley wasn’t having any ‘buts’.

  ‘I’m not going to argue about it,’ she said. ‘I’m not having you rampage about the house with your father lying upstairs ill in bed. And besides, you’ll learn something useful from your Uncle Albert.’

  ‘I don’t want to become a second-hand car dealer,’ said Esmond stubbornly. ‘I want to go into a bank like Dad and make money.’

  This was too much for Mrs Wiley. It swept aside the last vestiges of her romanticism. She’d rather Esmond became a rogue – a dashing rogue naturally – than a bank manager like Horace.

  ‘If you think … if you think your father makes money being a bank manager … well, let me tell you that Albert makes four times as much as your father. He’s a rich man is Uncle Albert. Whoever heard of a rich bank manager?’ She paused and found another argument. ‘Besides, your uncle will give you a reference and they were saying only the other day that what young people need nowadays is work experience. Having work experience does you more good than anything else.’

  Which didn’t help to persuade Esmond. Caught between his mother’s public adulation and his father’s rejection, a rejection that had reached the point where he had tried to stab him with a carving knife in a drunken frenzy, he was now to be subjected to his Uncle Albert who was as embarrassing to be with as his mother was. And who was, as his father had said repeatedly, as crooked as any second-hand car dealer who ever welded two insurance write-offs into one single-owned Cavalier. To add to that, he lived in Essex.

  In any case, his mother’s reaction to the mention of Rosie Bitchall had so obviously supposed he was in love with her that it made him cringe and squirm with disgust. He wasn’t in the least interested in the wretched Rosie. In fact, he was unique among his peers in being rather revolted than attracted by the whole notion of sex.

  This was Esmond’s wake-up call. The only good thing to have come out of the past twenty-four hours was that it had given him important things to think about, primarily the obvious need to avoid being anything like his parents. After years in which he had done his utmost to fulfil their conflicting expectations for him and had so obviously failed, he was now determined to be himself. Who that self was he had no idea, or only vague and fleeting ones. As a boy he had been subject to a host of temporary impulses that came and went of their own accord and over which he had absolutely no control. One moment he was going to be a poet – his mother’s fondness for Tennyson’s ‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’ and the fact that as a child she’d overdosed him on Rupert Bear had given him the gift of scansion and the curse of automatic rhyme – then a few minutes later the contrary impulse to be a bulldozer driver and smash his way through hedges and generally destroy things had swept poetry aside. He had once seen a demolition team on television bring an enormous factory chimney crashing to the ground by removing bricks at the base which they had replaced with wood and had then set fire to, and the idea of being such a demolition expert fleetingly appealed to him. It spoke to something within him in much the same way his drum-beating had: it expressed the violence of his emotions and his overwhelming desire to assert himself somehow. Unfortunately, he had no sooner arrived at this notion of selfhood than it too was swept aside by the feeling that he had been put on earth to do something more important and constructive than blow up chimneys and demolish things.

  And now becoming a bank manager had lost its appeal for him too. Not if it meant getting up at six in the morning and coming home drunk after nine at night and not even making as much money as Uncle Albert. His future had to hold something better than that.

  For the first time in his life Esmond had begun to think for himself.

  Chapter 11

  At the end of the week, after enduring many sleepless nights, Vera drove Esmond to her brother’s flash bungalow near Colchester, all the way stressing the importance of behaving properly and not telling Auntie Belinda about Daddy getting drunk and trying to attack him with the carving knife.

  ‘That’s something nobody but us must ever know about,’ she said. ‘As you know, your father’s been under a lot of strain lately. And don’t go around telling them he’s had a nervous breakdown either. The least said the soonest mended.’

  Esmond promised he wouldn’t say anything but he kept his real thoughts to himself.

  They mainly centred round the prospect of living in the same house as his Aunt Belinda. That morning he’d overheard his father say that, while he disapproved of Uncle Albert’s vulgarity and dodgy second-hand car business, he was at least partly human which wasn’t something that could be said for that fucking termagant of a wife of his. It was about the only time Esmond had heard Horace use that swear word and, having not understood what a termagant was and having had to find its meaning in a dictionary, he wasn’t looking forward to his stay with her.

  Mr Wiley had also called her a harridan, a virago and a shrew. Once again Esmond had recourse to the dictionary and had come away with an even more terrifying impression of Aunt Belinda, made worse by his mother’s agreement that what his father had said was perfectly true. But from his
own experience, going on what little he’d seen of his aunt on the very infrequent visits the Ponsons had made to the Wileys, she had seemed quite good-looking, if a bit snooty and quiet.

  All in all, the drive had done nothing to give Esmond any confidence in his future – if he had one, which was starting to seem unlikely. Mrs Wiley’s driving, ever-erratic, had been made positively lethal by the impending loss of her son for however short a time and, less importantly, the conviction that Horace was a murderous and philandering lunatic who would have to be placed in a mental hospital. Vera had come down to the kitchen that morning to find her husband sharpening carving knives – ‘honing’ would have been a more accurate word – until they had blades as dangerous as old-fashioned cut-throat razors. And then after breakfast – a difficult, largely silent affair – she’d caught him in the bathroom, his face covered in lather and evidently about to shave with the knife that had previously been reserved for Sunday roasts and special occasions. She had dragged it away from him, cutting her hand in the process, and had been horrified by the gleeful expression on his face and insane laughter that came from the bedroom when she had forced him back there and locked the door.

  Having taken the precaution of keeping his door locked as much as possible and of sleeping in the spare bedroom, she had been alarmed to hear Horace pacing the floor nightly and then laughing maniacally. As a result her sleep had been disturbed to the point where she frequently fell asleep at the kitchen table after getting Esmond his breakfast and then hurrying him out of the house with some money for his lunch and orders not to come home until seven in the evening. All this nodding off meant that, to add to her problems, she was unable to read any of her romances in a leisurely fashion or even on a daily basis. She’d scarcely even been able to risk leaving the house to go shopping. Returning home from a quick trip to the corner shop on Thursday, she found that the window cleaner had arrived to do inside and out. To her horror, there stood Horace, still in his pyjamas, standing where the bottom of the man’s ladder had been. Horace had let the ladder fall and now seemed to be closely examining the water butt at the back of the house, oblivious to the window cleaner’s demands that he put the ladder back so he could get down and on with his work.

  ‘For God’s sake, get him to put the ladder back up,’ the window cleaner yelled. ‘I’ve been stuck up here in your bedroom for forty minutes and I’ve got fifteen more houses to do today. That bloody man …’

  Mrs Wiley grabbed Horace and dragged him into the house and up to the bedroom. She unlocked the door, shoved him inside and let the man out. That done, she had made herself what in normal circumstances she’d have called ‘a nice cup of tea’ and tried to think. At least Esmond was going to the Ponsons’ and obviously she would have to … No, she couldn’t let a psychiatrist see Horace. He’d lose his job at the bank if he was sent to a loony bin or even if it got out that he had had a nervous breakdown. Loony bin was not the politically correct term she’d have used in polite society but in Horace’s case it seemed entirely appropriate; he was loony.

  So with these thoughts turbulently rising in what there was left of her own mind, it was hardly surprising that her driving was even more dangerously erratic than usual, leaving Esmond in a state of nervous exhaustion and terror.

  By the time they reached the Ponsons’ bungalow he was practically speechless. They were greeted by Uncle Albert, bubbling with false bonhomie. In the background, Belinda was far less enthusiastic, eventually offering them tea in a tone of voice that suggested it was the last thing she wanted to offer.

  ‘Now come on in and make yourselves at home,’ said Albert, but Vera was too upset to accept.

  ‘I’ve simply got to get home to poor Horace. He’s in a dreadful state,’ she said, and clasping Esmond to her ample bosom promptly burst into tears. Then, tearing herself away and kissing Esmond, much to his embarrassment, on his lips, she turned away from her darling boy and a moment later was driving back to Croydon and to her evidently demented husband.

  Chapter 12

  In Vera’s absence, Horace had had a marvellous day. She had been so distraught at the prospect of losing her darling son to that awful Belinda that she had forgotten to take the key to the bedroom out of the door and Horace had managed to push it through onto a sheet of newspaper and pull this into the bedroom. Five minutes later he had found his razor in the bathroom where Vera had hidden it. He shaved and then, dressed in his best suit and carrying a hastily packed suitcase, he locked the door of the bedroom, pocketed the key and hurriedly left the house with a smile on his face.

  It was more than a smile; it was a look of triumph. For the first time since his marriage, Horace Wiley felt a free man, a new man, a man with none of the ghastly emotional encumbrances his bloody wife had foisted onto him.

  Spending the week in bed feigning madness – walking the floor at night and laughing maniacally whenever he thought Vera might be listening – had given him time to think. He’d decided that, finally, enough was enough. He was done with Vera, with her horrible relatives and with his lurking beast of a son. He wasn’t going back to his job at the bank. He didn’t need the salary now that he had escaped his responsibilities. For years he had been putting money into a private pension fund and an even larger amount he’d made on the stock market into a numbered account in Switzerland, both without telling his damnable wife. From now on she could fend for herself and for her wretched son.

  Horace strode down Selhurst Road and, finding himself passing the Swan & Sugar Loaf, a pub he’d never frequented and where he wouldn’t be recognised, went in and ordered a large whisky by way of celebration.

  Horace took his drink to an empty corner and considered his next move. It was going to be a radical one. Going abroad was the obvious answer: Vera would never imagine him doing that. She was too scared of flying and until this moment he hadn’t been too keen on it himself. But now he was a free man, a new man, he no longer cared how he travelled, only that he got as far away as possible.

  Because of their fear of flying the Wileys had never been abroad, and Horace realised that his first priority was to get a passport. He wasn’t at all certain, now he came to think about it, just how one went about it but he had an awful feeling that it involved filling in lots of forms and having photographs signed by doctors or fellow bank managers. He was sure that he had had to sign, in an official capacity, a photograph of a very dodgy-looking Jenkins when the junior clerk had been off to Amsterdam on his stag do. Horace wouldn’t even be able to take the first step of getting a photograph taken quickly since it was Saturday and the post office where there was a photo booth was closed in the afternoon.

  For a while Horace was crestfallen at this early curtailment of his plans but he brightened up when a fresh idea struck him. Finishing his whisky, he went down to the bank, unlocked the door and cut off the alarm system before entering. Once inside he locked the door again and unlocked the safe containing the personal documents etc. of the clients. It took over an hour to sift through the various last wills and testaments, ancient Premium Bonds and frayed and faded love letters stored in the safety-deposit boxes, but finally he found a passport with a photograph which bore at least a passing resemblance to him. It was perhaps less than ideal that it was held in the name of one Mr Ludwig Jansens who had been born in Jelgava some seventy years previously but the toll recent events had taken on Horace’s looks meant that in a dim light it might do.

  Having finished and locked the door once more, he set the alarm and went further along the high street where he caught a bus to the station on East Road. Two hours later, he was happily installed in an expensive hotel in London under his new false name. From now on he was going to treat himself well, and besides, it was the last place Vera would look for him.

  That night Horace had an excellent dinner and got uproariously drunk to celebrate his freedom.

  The next morning he had breakfast in his hotel bedroom trying to think how he could escape Britain without leaving any
evidence of his ultimate destination. It would have to be in Europe. He now had a passport but that could be recorded if he tried to get into somewhere like America and his whereabouts subsequently traced. He would be safe enough once he was in the EU. There were no records of frontier crossings between Italy and France or Germany for that matter.

  Horace still wasn’t sure where he would hide from that dreadful wife he had so insanely married. And from the son he had obviously conceived, and whose mirror image had driven him to drink and, almost, to madness. It was only when he went down to settle his bill that he was inspired by an article in a newspaper on a side table. It mentioned Latvia belonging to the European Union. It was meant to be. Why on earth hadn’t Ludwig’s passport made him think of Latvia in the first place? It was perfect. From there he could get into Poland and then into Germany or anywhere else leaving no trail behind him.

  Horace paid the hotel in cash and went to a travel agency where he explained that he had a phobia about flying and wanted instead to travel by boat to Latvia.

  ‘The boats to Latvia are not liners. They are essentially steamers carrying cargo,’ the clerk told Horace.

  ‘Why are they called tramp steamers?’

  ‘I’ve always thought it’s because they’re so slow. And I have to warn you that the passenger accommodation is nothing to write home about.’

  Horace was about to say that writing home was the last thing he was going to do, but kept his thoughts to himself. He booked a passage and paid for it, then went out into the street with his documents. He was particularly pleased that the clerk had merely glanced at his passport and had written the wrong name down. Things were going well.