Ancestral Vices (17 page)

‘So I said to him, “If you think you can go down the pub every night and drink the holiday money, one of these days you’ll have to cook your own supper. Two can play that game.”’

‘What did he say to that?’ asked a woman who was stitching
HIS
onto what until that moment Emmelia had assumed to be the sole necessity of
HERS
, namely a sanitary napkin.

‘Wasn’t much he could say, was there? Not that . . .’

There was nothing Emmelia could say. She tottered on past women discussing baby foods, last night’s episode of
Coronation Street
, where they were going for their holidays and other people’s matrimonial troubles. By the time she came to a group of evident artists who were painting veins onto what she would otherwise have assumed to be rather large and unfinished salt dispensers, she was feeling decidedly mad. She sank into a chair and stared dementedly into space.

At the far end of the workshop the forewoman was holding a heated discussion with the woman from the Enquiry desk.

‘Well, how was I to know? You let her through and naturally I thought she was a buyer . . .’

‘She’s Miss Petrefact, I tell you. I saw her at the Flower Show last year. She was judging the begonias.’

‘You should have stopped her.’

‘I couldn’t. She asked for Mr Petrefact and marched into his office. He’s going to have a fit when he finds out.’

‘Not the only one,’ said the forewoman and hurried down to intercept Miss Emmelia who had risen from her chair and was heading for what had formerly been the Loom Repair shop.

‘You can’t go in there,’ said the forewoman rather too imperatively, and promptly revived Miss Emmelia’s tattered sense of self-importance.

‘I most certainly can,’ she said with new authority. ‘And what is more I intend to.’

‘But . . .’ the forewoman faltered. Emmelia went past her and opened the door and was instantly deprived of the slight hope she had held that some part of The Petrefact Cotton Spinning Manufactory maintained its original purpose. A blast of warm air hit her and with it a particularly unattractive smell. For a moment she hesitated and then her attention centred on a conveyor belt of those revolting salt pots which had so distracted her in the other room. As they moved slowly past her the sense of unreality returned with, in the vernacular she had never used before, knobs on. Or whiskers or wands, certainly protrusions of some sort whose purpose she could only vaguely define and preferred not to. In short the erstwhile Loom Repair Shop became something she was only dreaming, a nightmare assembly line of
extruded plastic penises, perpetually erect. Emmelia shut the door and tried to regain her composure.

‘Are you all right?’ the forewoman asked anxiously. Emmelia’s pride reacted.

‘Of course I am,’ she snapped and then, partly out of unwilled curiosity but more from the stern sense of duty so ingrained in her character, pushed the door open again and stepped inside. The forewoman followed unhappily. Emmelia regarded the penises severely.

‘And what do you call those?’ she enquired, and added dildos to her vocabulary.

‘Do many men require them?’ But the faint hope that the Mill was less what first impressions – and particularly those revolting crotchless camiknickers – suggested than an artificial limb factory for the sexually mutilated was doused by the reply.

‘They’re for women,’ said the woman faintly.

‘Ultimately I suppose they would be but initially men must . . .’

‘Lesbian women,’ said the woman even more faintly.

Emmelia pursed her lips and then raising herself to her full height walked slowly down the line. At the end a machine was wrapping rather flimsy articles in foil.

‘French ticklers,’ explained the woman when Emmelia asked with almost royally affected interest what they were.

‘Remarkable.’

And so the progress continued and by the time they reached a young man who was hammering out male
chastity belts Emmelia was sufficiently majestic to stop and ask him if he enjoyed his work and found it rewarding. The youth gaped at her. Emmelia smiled and moved on. From Dildo Moulding and Handcrafted Chastity Belts they advanced to Hoods, Chains and Flagellation Accessories in the Bondage Department where Emmelia took a serene interest in inflatable gags.

‘To be used in conjunction with French ticklers no doubt,’ she said and without waiting for a more accurate explanation examined several types of whip. Even the clitoral stimulators failed to shake her composure.

‘It must be most satisfying to know you are helping to bring so much pleasure to so many people,’ she told the girl who was checking each one. Behind her the forewoman wilted still further but Emmelia merely walked on, smiling kindly and with all the outward appearance of imperturbable assurance. Inwardly she was seething and badly in need of a cup of tea.

‘I’ll wait in the office,’ she told the woman when the tour was over. ‘Be so good as to bring me a pot of tea.’

And leaving the forewoman standing in awe Emmelia went into Frederick’s office and seated herself behind the desk.

At the Buscott Working Men’s Liberal and Unionist Club Frederick rounded off his leisurely lunch break with a game of snooker and was about to go back to the Mill when he was called to the phone. Ten seconds later he
was ashen and all desire to go anywhere near the bloody Mill had left him.

‘She’s what?’ he shouted.

‘Sitting in your office,’ said his secretary. ‘She’s been right round the factory and now she says she’ll wait until you return.’

‘Oh, my God. Can’t you get rid . . . No, I don’t suppose you can.’ He put the phone down and went back to the bar.

‘I want something strong and odourless,’ he told the bartender, ‘preferably with aunt-repellent in it.’

‘Vodka’s not too smelly but I’ve never tried it on aunts.’

‘Any idea what they gave the condemned?’

The barman recommended brandy. Frederick drank a triple, tried frantically to think of a suitable explanation for Aunt Emmelia and gave up.

‘Here goes,’ he muttered, and walked down the lane back to the Mill. The pickets were still outside the gates and Frederick told them to pack up. Whatever their usefulness in keeping Yapp out he could see now that they had brought his aunt in, though why the hell she had chosen this of all days to come to town he couldn’t imagine. It was a secondary problem. The fact was that she had come. With a curse that embraced Yapp, his father, Aunt Emmelia and the hypocrisy from which he had been making a fortune and which now seemed certain to take it away from him, he entered the Mill and with affected surprise found Aunt Emmelia behind his desk.

‘How nice to see you,’ he said summoning what he hoped was charm to his aid.

Aunt Emmelia ignored it. ‘Shut the door and sit down,’ she said, ‘and wipe that inane grin off your face. I have seen enough repulsive objects in the last hour to last me a lifetime. I can do without smarm.’

‘Quite,’ said Frederick. ‘On the other hand, before you start sounding off about pornography, perverts and lack of moral fibre let me say—’

‘Oh, do keep quiet,’ said Aunt Emmelia, ‘I have far more urgent things to think about than your inverted conscience. Besides, if there is a market for such singularly tasteless contraptions as the Thermal Agitators With Enema Variations advertised in the latest catalogue I suppose it is not wholly unreasonable to supply it.’

‘You do?’

Emmelia poured herself another cup of tea. ‘Of course. I have never been very clear what market forces are but your grandfather held them in very high esteem and I see no reason to doubt his good judgement. No, what concerns me most is the presence of men with banners parading for all the world to see outside the gates. I want to know why they are there.’

‘To keep Professor Yapp out.’

‘Professor Yapp?’

‘He’s in Buscott and he wants to know what we’re making in the Mill.’

‘Does he indeed?’ said Emmelia, but a new and anxious note was in her voice.

‘What’s more he is staying with Willy Coppett and his wife up in Rabbitry Road and he’s been going round town asking everyone what we are making and so on.’

Aunt Emmelia put down her cup and saucer with a shaking hand. ‘In that case we are faced with a crisis. Rabbitry Road indeed! And the Coppetts. What on earth would persuade him to stay there instead of at The Buscott Arms or some other decent hotel?’

‘Lord alone knows. Presumably the wish to remain anonymous while he snoops about.’

Emmelia considered this and evidently found it more plausible than any other explanation. ‘So much for the notion that he is working on the family history. Even your father, for whom I have the lowest possible regard, would not stoop to sully the name of Petrefact by revealing the fact that we are running a fetish factory. The man must be what in my youth was properly known as a muck-raker and is now called an investigative journalist. He must be got rid of.’

‘Rid of?’

‘That’s what I said and that’s what I meant.’

Frederick stared at her and wondered what the hell she did mean. There were, after all, degrees of getting rid of people and from the tone of his aunt’s voice it sounded as though she had in mind the most extreme method.

‘Yes but . . .’

‘But me no buts,’ said Emmelia more sternly than ever. ‘If the man’s motives were honourable he would have called at the New House and announced his intentions.
Instead you tell me he’s staying with a mentally deficient woman and her stunted husband in so insalubrious a neighbourhood as Rabbitry Road. I find that most sinister.’

So did Frederick, though hardly so sinister as Aunt Emmelia’s suggestion that he be got rid of. But before he could raise objections she went on. ‘And since you have chosen to put us all in jeopardy – I am thinking of Nicholas who is standing in the by-election for North Chatterswall, not to mention your uncle the judge and everyone else – by diversifying what was a perfectly respectable pyjama factory into instruments of genuine self-abuse, I consider it your duty to get us out of it. Let me know when he has gone.’

And before Frederick could argue that it was impossible to diversify a factory out of pyjamas or could raise the more immediate question of how he was to get rid of Yapp, Aunt Emmelia rose and swept austerely from the room. From the entrance hall she could be heard telling his secretary that she need not call for a taxi.

‘I shall walk. The fresh air will do me a power of good,’ she said. Frederick watched her cross the yard and stride out of the Mill gates and wondered briefly what it was about the English character that made murder morally more respectable than masturbation. And what raving lunatic had first called women the fair sex?

It was not a question that bothered Yapp. His promenade round, across and through Buscott had been marred by a most peculiar feeling that he was somehow already a well-known figure. In the ordinary way he would have found such immediate recognition flattering and not altogether undeserved, but in Buscott there was something almost sinister about it. He had only to enter a shop or stop someone to ask the way to sense reticence. In the library, where he went to look for books on local history, the librarian froze almost immediately and was most unhelpful. Even the ladies in the teashop who had suggested Rabbitry Road for his lodgings stopped talking as soon as he entered and ordered a cup of coffee. More pointedly still, they started chatting again the moment he stepped outside the door. It was all most mysterious and not a little disturbing. For a while he wondered if he was wearing some item of clothing that was in bad taste or was regarded superstitiously as an omen of bad luck. But there was nothing about his dress that was markedly different from other people’s. Had he bothered to look behind him he would have seen the cause of his isolation, an agitated Willy whose facial contortions and pointed finger were sufficient to alert even the least intelligent that Yapp was not a man to associate with.

But Walden Yapp was too immersed in theoretical conjecture to notice his restricted shadow. It was one of the tenets of his ideological faith that every town could be divided into spatial categories of socio-economic class differentiation and he had once spent months programming
Macclesfield into Doris, the computer, together with answers from random samples of opinion collected by his more devoted students, and had come up with the not very surprising findings that the richer areas tended to be inhabited by Tory voters while Labour predominated in the poorer quarters.

But in Buscott these simple preconceptions were strangely at odds with the facts. Having found that no one was prepared to discuss the Mill or the Petrefacts – and Yapp had put this reluctance down to fear of losing their jobs or houses – he had tried questioning people on their political opinions only to be told to mind his own bloody business or to have doors shut in his face without any reply at all. It was all very disheartening and made the more so by his failure to discover any real cases of hardship or even grievance. One old man had got so far as to complain that he had had to give up gardening because of his arthritis before Yapp realized he was talking about his own garden and not someone else’s.

‘You don’t think I’d work some other bugger’s garden, do you? I’m not daft.’

In short Buscott was not merely a prosperous little town, it was a cheerful one and, as such, outside the range of Yapp’s experience.

As the day and his disappointment wore on, his thoughts vacillated between the horrid suspicion that Lord Petrefact had sent him down with the deliberate aim of showing him what amounted to a model of beneficent capitalism, and a yearning for the warmth and
peculiar sexual attractions of Mrs Coppett. He found it difficult to decide which was the more alarming, being deceived by that damnable old swine or attracted by the body of a dim-witted woman, who was already married – and to a Porg at that. Worse still, there was no longer any doubting his feelings for her. In some quite frightening way she represented everything his singular upbringing had taught him to despise and pity. And that was the trouble. He could hardly despise Rosie Coppett for her lack of the rational and intellectual when she was manifestly so educationally subnormal, but her kindly simplicity doubled and even trebled his pity and combined with her attractive legs, her abundant breasts, and (when not covered by mutilated corsets) her presumably fulsome buttocks, to transform her into a woman of his wildest fantasies and noblest dreams. To distract himself from the particularly noble dream of transporting the Coppetts from Rabbitry Road to Kloone University and a comfortable job for Willy, he walked back towards the Mill again. After all there was a strike and strikes necessitated genuine grievances. Yes, he would concentrate his enquiries there.