Ancestral Vices (20 page)

‘I’ll read it later. I just want to sleep.’

All day Yapp slept while Rosie worried, first about Willy and what he was up to and then about the Professor and what Miss Petrefact had written about in her letter. She thought about going down to the pub to see if Willy had been there, considered the abattoir and would have gone down if Yapp hadn’t been ill. And what about the doctor? It wasn’t even as though she could ask the neighbours. She’d never got on with Mrs Mane and she wasn’t going to ask her help now. Instead to ease her mind she tidied the house, made shepherd’s pie and apple dumpling for Willy’s tea, and read the horoscope in the newspaper he’d brought the tripe home in three days before. She had to rootle in the dustbin for it and when she found it and had worked out she was a Pisces it didn’t say anything about disappearing husbands but was very accurate on financial benefits, romantic attachments and the need to be careful about health. After that she had another good cry and gave a great deal of unrequited affection to Blondie, the rabbit. Every now and then she poked her head round the door of Yapp’s room in the hope that he was awake and could give her the advice she so badly needed, but Walden Yapp slept on unaware of the reality that was looming over him.

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.’

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 financier 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.