Ancestral Vices (13 page)

‘It’s just that I do like Willy to have a shower before he has his tea,’ she explained. Yapp said he quite understood.

‘If you don’t use all the hot water . . .’ said Mrs Coppett. Yapp went back to his room and, having
examined his feet and found them in better condition than they felt, crossed the landing and was about to go into the bathroom when he noticed that the door of the Coppetts’ bedroom was open.

For a moment he stopped and eyed the apparent evidence of yet another domestic tragedy. Beside the double bed stood an empty cot. Since Mrs Coppett showed no signs of being pregnant and, considering her own inheritance, Yapp hoped that she never would be, the cot seemed to point to an unrealized dream or – worse still – a miscarriage. Even some fantasy of motherhood, because a diminutive pair of pyjamas were folded on the pillow. Yapp sighed and went into the bathroom. There too he was puzzled. The bath was there but no sign of a shower apart from an extension from the taps that was attached to the wall four feet above. With the thought that the human condition was in some ways irremediably sad, Yapp sat on the edge of the bath and bathed his feet.

He had just finished and was drying them cautiously when he heard voices from below. Mr Coppett had evidently come home from work, whatever that work was. Yapp opened the door and was crossing the landing when the full realization of just how irremediably sad the human condition could be, what Mrs Coppett had meant by triping, the significance of the cot, the tiny pyjamas and above all her insistence that Willy take a shower before sitting down to his tea – all these peculiarities were revealed to him. Mr William Coppett was a dwarf
(in his horror Yapp forgot the polite usage of Porg) and a bloody dwarf at that. In fact if he hadn’t been coming up the stairs Yapp might well have mistaken him for one of the more brilliantly painted gnomes in the garden. From his little cap to his once-white gumboots, size 3, Mr Coppett was stained with recently spilt blood and in his hands he held a particularly nasty-looking knife.

‘Evening,’ he said as Yapp stood transfixed. ‘Work down at abattoir. Horrible work.’

Before Yapp could begin to express his agreement Mr Coppett had disappeared into the bathroom.

An hour later Walden Yapp was still in a state of vicarious misery.

During all his years of dedicated research into poverty traps, post-adult isolation, racial and sexual discrimination and the miseries inflicted by the affluent society he had never come across a case of alienation to equal Mr Willy Coppett’s. That a deeply sensitive, animal-loving Person of Restricted Growth, married to a barren and frustrated Person of Extremely Limited Intelligence, should be forced to earn his living as a tripe-carver was a monstrous example of the failure of society to cater for the needs of the underprivileged. He was just considering how best to classify Mr Coppett’s case in socio-terminology and had decided that ‘an individual genetic catastrophe’ was not too strong when he was stopped in his tracks by a smell. Yapp sat on the edge of his bed and sniffed.

Drifting up from the kitchen came the unmistakable odour of tripe and onions. Yapp clenched his teeth and shuddered. Mrs Coppett might be a half-wit, and more probably an eighth one, but surely there were limits to her insensitivity. Yapp had to doubt it. The garden gnomes and the all-in wrestlers daubing the kitchen walls indicated a positively unerring, if unconscious, sense of
sadism in the woman. In the dim recesses of her mind she clearly blamed her husband for his inadequacies. Domestic cruelty compounded social misery. Yapp got up and went downstairs and out to his car. By staying with the Coppetts he was helping them financially but he had no intention of sitting down and witnessing the poor Porg’s humiliation over supper. Yapp drove down into town to look for a café.

But, as was so often the case, his diagnosis was wrong. In the kitchen of Number 9 all was perfectly well. Yapp might speak of Persons of Restricted Growth but Willy was more than content to be called a dwarf. It gave him status in Buscott, people were invariably polite to him and he was never short of part-time jobs. True, there were the few more genteel elements who felt it a shame that Willy should be asked to go down blocked drains with a trowel to clear them out or, on one occasion, lowered on the end of a rope into the well behind the Town Hall to retrieve the Mayor’s hat which had blown down there during a particularly windy inaugural speech, but Willy was ignorant of their concern. He enjoyed himself and regularly rode with the Bushampton Hunt seated on the cantle of Mr Symonds’ saddle facing the horse’s tail, where he had a very fine view of the countryside and was spared the sight of the kill.

Indeed, on one hunt he had been persuaded to insert himself into the badger’s sett, in which the fox had taken temporary refuge, by the argument that the terrier must have got stuck or hurt. The fact that the fox had already
departed from another hole and that the terrier was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with several enraged badgers who resented first the fox’s intrusion, then the terrier’s and finally Willy’s, escaped the notice of the Hunt. Willy was less fortunate; having been bitten on the nose by the terrier who mistook his rescue attempt for an attack from the rear, he was lucky not to lose an entire hand to an extremely disgruntled badger. In the end both Willy and the terrier had had to be dug out and carried, bleeding badly, to the local vet who disapproved violently of foxhunting. In his fury the vet was on the point of putting the unrecognizably human Willy down before attending to the terrier when Willy raised a bloodied and muddied handkerchief to his nose. The shock to the vet had been so extreme that all three had to be taken to the Buscott Cottage Hospital for treatment. Here the vet’s hysterical statement that he objected to blood sports and murdering dwarves wasn’t part of his job elicited little sympathy, while Mr Symonds could only account for Willy’s injuries by saying he had offered to lend a hand.

‘Lend a hand?’ shouted the doctor. ‘He’ll be lucky if he keeps the thing. And what the fuck did that to his nose?’

‘His handkerchief,’ moaned the vet, ‘if he hadn’t taken out his little handkerchief . . .’

The doctor turned savagely on the man. ‘If you’re seriously suggesting that a mere handkerchief savaged his nose in that terrible fashion you’re out of your mind.
And don’t keep bleating you could have killed him. From the look of his injuries you’ve damned near succeeded.’

But Willy’s stoicism and fondness for animals saved the day. He refused to blame even the badgers. ‘Went down hole. Couldn’t see,’ he maintained in tones of acute catarrh.

For which courageous refusal to blame anyone he was given the freedom of the beer at all Buscott’s pubs and earned himself fresh popularity. Only the Health Authorities took exception. ‘He ought to be in a home,’ they told Mrs Coppett when she visited him at the hospital.

‘He would be if he weren’t here,’ said Mrs Coppett with impeccable logic, ‘and a very nice home too.’

And, since Willy agreed, there was nothing they could do apart from send the occasional Health Inspector who invariably reported that Mrs Coppett was an excellent surrogate mother and met all Willy’s needs to perfection. As to whether or not he met hers, the Health Inspector couldn’t say and there was some understandable, if prurient, speculation.

‘I should think the poor fellow would be hard put to it,’ said the Medical Officer. ‘Of course one never knows. Hidden talents and all that. I remember a giant of a fellow in the army who had the . . .’

‘Let’s face it,’ interrupted the Chairman hurriedly, ‘we’re not here to go poking our noses into other people’s sex lives. What the Coppetts choose to do in the privacy of their own home has nothing to do with us.’

‘Blissfully,’ murmured the Medical Officer. ‘And talking of noses . . .’

‘I think the Marriage Advice Bureau should have a word with them,’ said the Senior Social Worker. ‘Mrs Coppett has a mental age of eight.’

‘Four on a good day.’

‘She is also a not unattractive woman . . .’

‘Listen,’ said the Medical Officer, ‘my experience with the Marriage Advice Bureau is that they do more harm than good. I’ve already had one moronic woman at the clinic demanding a post-natal abortion and I don’t want another.’

But in spite of his objections a Marriage Counsellor was sent to call at 9 Rabbitry Road. In true bureaucratic tradition she had not been adequately briefed and had no idea that Mr Coppett was a dwarf. And when after half an hour she discovered that Mrs Coppett was still apparently a virgin she did her best to instil in her a proper sense of sexual deprivation.

‘We’re not living in the Middle Ages, you know. The modern wife can demand her right to a regular orgasm and if your husband refuses to give you one, you’re entitled to an immediate divorce on grounds of non-consummation.’

‘But I love my little Willy,’ said Mrs Coppett, who hadn’t a clue what the woman was on about, ‘I tuck him up in his cot every night and he snores ever so sweetly. I don’t know what I’d do without him.’

‘But I understood you to say that you had never had sexual intercourse. Now you say you have a child called Willy,’ said the woman, ploughing forward into a mass of misapprehension.

‘Willy is my husband.’

‘And you put him to bed in a cot?’

Mrs Coppett nodded.

‘And he doesn’t sleep with you?’

Mrs Coppett shook her head. ‘He’s ever so happy in his cot,’ she said.

The woman hitched her chair forward with all the fervour of an outraged feminist. ‘That’s as maybe. But if you want my opinion your husband is clearly a sexually inadequate pervert.’

‘Is he really?’ said Mrs Coppett. ‘Well I never.’

‘No, and you’re not likely to so long as this unhealthy relationship continues. Your husband needs the help of a psychiatrist.’

‘A what?’

‘A doctor who deals with mental problems.’

‘He’s been to ever so many doctors but they can’t do no good. They wouldn’t, would they? Him being the way he is.’

‘No, it sounds as though he’s definitely incurable. And you won’t leave him?’

Mrs Coppett was adamant on the point. ‘Never. Vicar said we was to stay together and Vicar’s always right isn’t he?’

‘Possibly he wasn’t aware of your husband’s condition,’ said the Marriage Counsellor, suppressing her own atheism in the interests of rapport.

‘I think he must have been,’ said Mrs Coppett. ‘It was him as got Willy to sing in the boys’ choir.’

The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘And your husband agreed?’

‘Oh yes. He likes dressing up and all that.’

‘So I’ve gathered,’ said the Marriage Counsellor, making a mental note to stop at the police station on her way back to County Hall. ‘Well, my dear, if you won’t leave him the best I can suggest is that you find a proper, healthy sex life in an extramarital affair. No one could possibly blame you.’

And with this dubious counsel she got up to leave. By the time Willy came home that evening Mrs Coppett had forgotten the ‘marital’. All she knew was that the lady had said she ought to have ‘extra’.

‘Extra what?’ said Willy, tucking into his ham and eggs.

Mrs Coppett giggled. ‘You know, Willy. What we do in bed on Fridays.’

‘Oh that,’ said Willy, whose secret fear was that one of those Fridays he’d be crushed to death or suffocated.

‘You don’t mind?’

‘If the Marriage people say it I don’t see how I can do anything about it if I did mind,’ said Willy philosophically, ‘though I don’t want the neighbours to know.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of telling them,’ said Mrs Coppett.
And from that moment she had pursued extras as assiduously and as unsuccessfully as the police had kept a watch on the Vicar and the choirboys. Not that she really wanted extras but if the lady insisted she supposed it was her duty.

And now a gentleman had come and said he wanted extras too and he was a real gentleman. Mrs Coppett could tell a gentleman. They wore funny shorts and spoke like the clever people on
Any Questions
which she couldn’t understand. Mr Yapp was just like them and used long words. So while Willy walked down to the Horse and Barge where he helped pay for his free beer by working behind, or more accurately beneath the bar, drying glasses, Mrs Coppett prepared herself for extras. She got out her best nightie and did her face up with particularly green attention to her eyelids and studied several adverts in a three-year-old
Cosmopolitan
she’d picked up on a market stall for 2p to see what shape to make her lipstick. Having got so far she wondered about suspender belts. The girls in her
Confessions
magazines always wore them, though what for she couldn’t imagine. On the other hand they were evidently part of extras and Mr Yapp might feel hard done by if she didn’t wear them. The only trouble was that she didn’t have any. Mrs Coppett searched her tiny mind for a substitute and finally remembered her mum’s corsets which she’d just bought and never worn when she was took bad. If she cut them in half . . . She went downstairs and fetched a pair of scissors and set to work. By the time she had
finished and had tied them at the back so that what remained stayed approximately up, she looked at herself in the mirror and was satisfied. Now just a bit of perfume and she would be ready.

Yapp had spent a tortured evening. He had looked for a café in Buscott and had found several. They were all shut. He had gone into a pub and ordered his usual half of bitter before enquiring if they served food and learning that they didn’t. On the other hand he might get some at the Roisterers’ Arms. He finished his beer and set off hopefully only to be disappointed. The pub hardly lived up to its name and the landlord had been downright surly. Yapp had ordered another half, partly to appease the man and partly in the knowledge that it was from such embittered sources that some of his most revealing information might well be gleaned. But in spite of his efforts to get the man to talk, all he learnt was that the fellow came from Wapping and was sorry he hadn’t stayed there. ‘A dead-and-alive hole,’ had been his comment on Buscott and while not agreeing with the logic of the phrase Yapp could see what he meant. Two more pubs and he was of the same opinion. Buscott’s night-life was decidedly limited and while people drank in large quantities, they seemed to do so after eating at home. They also stopped talking whenever he entered a bar and were disconcertingly reticent about the Mill, the Petrefacts
and any other subject he happened to bring up in an attempt to take an interest in their exploited lives. Yapp made a mental note that they were typically cowed and in fear of losing their jobs. He would have to gain their confidence by making it clear that he was not on the side of the bosses and made a start by announcing that his father had been a toolmaker, his mother had fought in the Spanish Civil War and that he was down in Buscott to investigate the making of a TV film on low pay, long hours and lack of union representation down at Mill. The news was greeted with a lack of enthusiasm he found quite remarkable and in some cases with what he could only judge to be looks of genuine alarm.