Ancestral Vices (27 page)

*

For once his opinion was shared by the group of Petrefacts gathered in the fetish factory. Emmelia had proved her point that publicity was to be avoided at all costs. The Judge had been particularly hard-hit by the merkins. Coming on top of his long-held opinion that all homosexuals were congenital criminals who ought to be castrated at birth and sentenced to penal servitude as soon as legally possible, he had been so incensed that he had had to be helped to Frederick’s office and several stiff brandies, and had still refused to continue the tour.

Emmelia had led the others on to dildos. Here the Brigadier-General, who had escaped the full implications of merkins thanks to an inadequate acquaintance with the sexual attributes of anything larger than female gerbils and Siamese cats, was forced to recognize what he was looking at.

‘Monstrous, utterly monstrous!’ he snarled, his pique evidently provoked by personal comparison. ‘Even a Bengal tiger doesn’t have a . . . well, a thingamajig . . . a watchermacallit of such fearful proportions. You could do someone a terrible mischief with a . . . Anyway who on God’s earth would want a thing like that hanging about the house?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ said Fiona, only to be herself surprised and infuriated by the chastity belts. ‘They’re outrageous. To expect anyone to hobble round in a medieval instrument of clitoral torture is an insult to modern womanhood.’

‘As I understand it, dear,’ said Emmelia, ‘they’re actually for men.’

‘That’s entirely different, of course,’ said Fiona, provoking Osbert into a paroxysm of alarm, ‘men ought to be restrained.’

‘Restrained?’ shouted Osbert. ‘You must be insane. Put some poor blighter in a thing like that and have him go hunting and he’d be a damned gelding at the first fence.’

In the background the Van der Fleet-Petrefacts were being disabused of their hope that the thermal agitators with enema variations were a form of personal fire extinguisher by closer examination of the garments. By the time Emmelia had led the way to the Bondage Department, nearly everyone was appalled.

Only Fiona maintained an odd combination of Women’s Power and sexual permissiveness. ‘After all, everyone is entitled to find her sexual satisfaction in her own personal way,’ she insisted, adding with unconscious irony in the face of the gags, handcuffs, shackles and plastic straitjackets, that society had no right to impose restraints on the freedom of the individual.

‘Don’t keep using that word,’ squealed Osbert, still maniacally obsessed with the terrible consequences certain to result from hunting in a male chastity belt.

‘And never mind the freedom of the individual who dons one of those thingamajigs,’ roared the Brigadier-General, picking up a cat-o’nine-tails with dangerous relish, ‘I’m going to find that bloody manager, Cuddlybey,
and flay the hide off the swine. He must have gone off his rocker to switch from flannel pyjamas to these . . .’

‘You’ll do no such thing, Randle,’ interrupted Emmelia. ‘Besides, you’d have considerable difficulty. Mr Cuddlybey retired fourteen years ago and died last August.’

‘Damned lucky for him. If I—’

‘If you had taken a little more interest in family affairs and a little less in those of Seal-Pointers and gerbils you’d have known that.’

‘Then who is the manager now?’ demanded Osbert. For a moment Emmelia hesitated but only for a moment.

‘I am,’ she declared.

The group gazed at her in horror.

‘You don’t mean to say . . .’ began the Brigadier-General.

‘I’m saying nothing more until Ronald arrives.’

‘Ronald?’

‘Oh really, Osbert, don’t keep repeating things. I said Ronald and I meant Ronald. And now let’s see if Purbeck has recovered sufficiently to be at all coherent.’

They made their way back to the office where the Judge, having taken several small pills in addition to the brandy, was engrossed in the catalogue. Coherency wasn’t his problem.

‘The Do-It-Yourself Sodomy Kit,’ he bellowed at the cowering Frederick. ‘Do you realize that you’ve been putting on the market an accessory before, during and after a crime punishable by death?’

‘Death?’ quavered Frederick. ‘But surely it’s legal between consenting adults?’

‘Consenting? What the hell do you mean consenting? Not even the most depraved, perverted, sado-masochistic, insane, perverted, perverted . . .’

‘You’ve said that three times, Uncle,’ ventured Frederick with remarkable courage.

‘Said what?’

‘Perverted.’

‘And I meant it three times, you damned scoundrel. In fact I meant it continuously. Not even the most perverted
ad infinitum
perverted swine of an arse-bandit would consent to have that diabolical contraption rammed past his sphincter . . .’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Osbert with feeling. The Judge turned on him lividly.

‘And I don’t require your comments, Osbert. I’ve always suspected there was something wrong with you ever since you put that pink-eyed weasel in my bed with a tin can tied to its tail and now . . .’

‘Never did anything of the sort. In any case it was a ferret.’

‘Whatever it was it—’

‘I think we should concentrate on the present,’ intervened Emmelia. ‘The question is what are we to do about Ronald?’

The Judge shifted his own pink eyes to her. ‘Ronald? What’s Ronald got to do with these inventions of the devil?’

‘We all know he sent Professor Yapp down here ostensibly to do research on the family history.’

The Judge took another small pill. ‘Is it your contention that Ronald knows about this . . . this . . .?’ he croaked.

‘I can’t be sure. The point is that if this dreadful creature Yapp continues his researches he may well find out.’

A fearful silence fell over the little party, broken only by the sound of clanging tongs and pokers as Mrs Van der Fleet-Petrefact swooned into the empty fireplace. Her husband ignored her.

‘In that case he must not be allowed to find out,’ said the Judge finally.

‘Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more,’ said the Brigadier-General and might have continued to agree even more if he hadn’t been quelled by the look in his brother’s eye.

‘That’s easier said than done,’ Emmelia went on. ‘He’s already tried to get in here and he’s asked to see the family papers. Naturally I refused permission.’

This time it was Emmelia who got the full bloodshot blast from the Judge. ‘You refused him permission to see the Petrefact Papers when they would have taken his mind off this?’ he demanded tapping the catalogue. ‘I find that a most curious decision. I do indeed.’

‘But think of the scandal,’ said Emmelia. ‘A family history would reveal . . .’

‘Nothing compared to this,’ yelled the Judge. ‘If it ever gets known that we are the owners of a . . .’

‘A merkin manufactory?’ suggested Osbert.

‘Whatever you choose to call it, why, we’ll be the laughing stock, and more than laughing in my opinion, the very dregs of society. Have to resign, leave the bench, consequences would be incalculable.’

Silence fell once more in the office.

‘I still think . . .’ began Emmelia, but a storm of words broke over her.

‘You allowed this disgusting youth to produce these . . . these . . . things,’ roared the Judge. ‘I hold you responsible for our appalling predicament.’

The Brigadier-General and Mr Van der Fleet-Petrefact, even Osbert and Fiona, turned on Emmelia. She sat in a chair, hardly listening. The family she had protected for so long had deserted her.

‘All right,’ she said finally when the abuse abated, ‘I accept responsibility. Now will you tell me what we should do.’

‘Perfectly obvious. Let this Professor Yapp have the Petrefact Papers. Let the fellow write the family history.’

‘And Ronald? He must have arrived by now.’

‘Where?’

‘At the New House. I invited him down too, you know.’

The Judge delivered his verdict. ‘I can only conclude that you must be demented, woman.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Emmelia sadly, ‘but what are we to tell him?’

‘Nothing whatsoever about this.’

‘But everything about the family?’

‘Precisely. We must distract him as much as possible. And I would advise you all to treat him with the greatest respect. Ronald has it in his power to destroy our entire future.’ And so saying the Judge rose unsteadily and moved towards the door. The others followed. Only Emmelia remained seated, mourning that obscure past which her relatives were bent on destroying in the interests of their own present. From the courtyard she could hear Osbert telling the Brigadier-General to remind him about the story of Great-Aunt Georgette and the Japanese naval attaché.

‘I’m sure that’s how Uncle Oswald got the contract for the floating dock . . .’

His voice trailed away. And they were going to remind the wretch Ronald of every family scandal in order to stop him from finding out about the fetish factory. For a moment Emmelia felt tempted to defy them all and present Ronald with a copy of his son’s catalogue and challenge him to go ahead with the family history in the light of its contents. But there was no point in alienating the rest of the family. She got up and followed them out.

‘I shall walk up,’ she said. ‘I feel the need for a breath of fresh air. And I don’t think Frederick should put in an appearance either.’

But Frederick had already arrived at the same
conclusion and was in the bar of the Club ordering a large whisky.

*

While the others climbed in the old Daimler Emmelia trudged wanly through the gates and into the street. It was a long time since she had seen the little town on a Saturday afternoon. The garden had been her domain, Buscott merely an extension of the garden and, at the same time, the beginning of that wide world she had so long avoided. Her occasional visits to the vet had been by car, while her nightly walks had taken her towards the countryside. It had been enough to know the gossip for her to imagine she knew the town, but this afternoon, in the knowledge that she had been abandoned by her relatives, she viewed Buscott differently. The buildings were still the same, pleasant in their suggestion of cosy interiors, and the shops much as she remembered them, though the windows were crowded with a surprising range of goods. All the same there was something she found strange and almost unrecognizable about the streets. As she paused before Cleete’s, Cornmerchant and Horticultural Supplies, and studied their offering of bulbs for autumn planting, she caught sight of herself in the reflection from the window and was startled by its message. It was as though she had seen Ronald staring back at her, though not the Ronald, Lord Petrefact, who was now confined to a wheelchair. Rather, she mirrored him as he had been twenty years before. Emmelia studied
the reflection without vanity and drew a message from it. If Ronald was not a nice person – and of that there could be no doubt – was it not possible that she had deluded herself that
she
was?

For a moment she remained glued to the window while her thoughts turned inward towards the very kernel of self-knowledge. She was not a nice person. The blood of those despicable Petrefacts she had so romantically endowed with virtues they had never possessed flowed as ruthlessly through her veins as it did, more transparently, through those of her brother. For sixty years she had subjugated her true nature in order to sustain her reputation and the approval of the world she fundamentally despised. It was as if she had remained a child anxious to please Nanny and her parents.

Now, at sixty, she recognized the woman she most decidedly was. As if to emphasize the void of intervening years she watched the reflection of a young mother with a pram cross the window, merge with her own tweedy substance and emerge on the other side. Emmelia turned away with a rage she had never experienced before. She had been cheated of her own life by hypocrisy. From now on she would exercise those gifts of malice which were her birthright.

With a firmer step she crossed the road towards New House Lane and was about to climb up it when her eye caught the placard outside the newspaper shop on the corner. It read:
PROFESSOR CHARGED WITH MURDER, FULL STORY
.

For the third time in the afternoon Emmelia had the conviction that something extraordinary was happening to her. She went in and bought the
Bushampton Gazette
and read the article standing on the pavement. By the time she had finished, the conviction of amazement had been validated. She strode up the hill exulting in the freedom of malice.

She was not alone in her feelings of strangeness. Things had manifestly changed for Lord Petrefact. He had spent a happy hour, waiting for his relatives to return, regaling Croxley with obnoxious memories of his spoilt childhood and his holidays at the New House, how here he had shot an under-gardener with an air rifle while the fellow was bending over the onions, and there in the fishpond drowned his first (and his Aunt’s favourite) Pekinese, when the family arrived. Lord Petrefact regarded them with his most repulsive expression and was amazed when his loathing was not reciprocated.

‘My dear Ronald, how splendid to see you looking so well,’ said the Judge with a bonhomie he had never in a lifetime displayed, and before Lord Petrefact could recover from this shock he was being overwhelmed with a most alarming geniality. Osbert, who had on more than one occasion argued that if he had his way he’d put Ronald down without the use of a humane killer, was positively beaming at him.

‘Marvellous idea, this of yours, for a family history,’ he boomed. ‘I wonder no one has thought of it before.’

Even Randle radiated a goodwill that was singularly
absent from his relations with anyone other than a gerbil or Siamese cat.

‘Picture of health, Ronald, absolute picture of health,’ he muttered while Fiona, stifling her repugnance for men, kissed him on the cheek. For a terrible moment Lord Petrefact could only conclude that he was in much worse health than he had supposed and that their remarkable cordiality was an augury of his deathbed. As they circled round him and Croxley wheeled the chair through the french windows into the drawing-room, Lord Petrefact rallied his hatred.