Ancestral Vices (3 page)

On the other hand his prodigious grasp of theory so baffled his teachers and examiners that, without knowing the limitations of his intellect, they had to pass him as
rapidly as possible on through school to university and from First-Class Honours degrees to his Doctorate. In fact his doctoral thesis on ‘The Incidence of Cervical Carcinoma in Female Mineworkers in 1840’, the statistics for which he had gathered from the records of hospitals and workhouses in the Newcastle area, had been so startling and in detail so repulsive that it had been accepted on first reading – and in the case of one examiner with only a cursory glance at the first few pages.

It was on the strength of his reputation for unthinking radicalism, and indeed for unthinking thought, that he was offered the fellowship at Kloone. From that unwarranted moment Walden Yapp had never looked back or, to be more precise, had never ceased looking back while moving steadily forward. His second monograph, ‘Syphilis: An Instrument of Class Warfare in the 19th Century’, had sustained his reputation, and his lectures proved so popular – he interspersed undiluted bias with irrefutable statistics to such an extent that his students were as untrammelled by the need to think or by intellectual uncertainty as if they had been required to learn a telephone directory off by heart – that his election to the Professorship of Demotic Historiography had been merely a matter of time and unremitting publication.

And so by the age of thirty he had established himself as the most harrowing chronicler of the horrors endured by the English Working Person in the post-Industrial Revolution since G. D. H. Cole and even Thompson.
More importantly, in his own eyes at any rate, he had made demographic history almost an art form by a series of TV plays on the domestic agonies of Victorian Britain aptly named
The Proof Of The Pudding
, which, if they had done little to enhance his reputation in the stuffier circles of academe and had caused more than one viewer to vomit, had helped to make the name of Walden Yapp and keep that of Kloone University before the disgusted public.

Nor was that all. In the field of industrial relations he had left his mark. Governments, anxious to appear impartial in the war to the national death waged between management and unions, could always rely upon Walden Yapp to act as arbitrator in unduly prolonged strikes. Yapp’s peace formula, while unpalatable among monetarists, invariably found favour with unions.

It was based on the simple assumption that demand must predicate supply and that what applied in the field of economics
per se
must have equal validity in wage negotiations. His application of this formula through hours, days and sleepless nights of intense discussion had resulted in the need to nationalize several previously profitable companies and the suspicion held in extreme right-wing circles that Walden Yapp was an agent of the Kremlin.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Walden Yapp’s dedication to democracy was as genuine as his belief that the poor need not always be with us but that, while they were, they must of necessity be in the right. It was a simple view, though never so simply
expressed, and it saved him the trouble of having to make decisions of more than a personal nature.

But it was here that his life lacked fulfilment. He had no personal life to speak of and what there was could hardly be called natural. From a lonely childhood he had progressed to a lonely adulthood, both abstract to the point where it was impossible to say he had ever been a child or had become an adult. He remained singular in every sense of that word and if students flocked to his simple lectures, his colleagues flocked out of the common-room the moment he entered rather than suffer the boredom of the wholly inconsequential monologues he mistook for conversation. In short, Walden Yapp’s personal life consisted of tutorials with his students, assisting PhD graduates with their theses, discussing his TV plays with bemused producers, and last but by no means least in playing chess with the computer Lord Petrefact had bequeathed to the University. If he had been asked to name his best friend he would truthfully have had to say the computer. Strictly speaking it was his only friend. And best of all, it was available day or night. Situated in the basement of the Library, it could never get away from him. He could either go down and sit at a keyboard there or, more conveniently, switch on the terminal beside his bed, type out his password and immediately get through to what amounted to his electronic alter ego. Even when he left the campus he could still take his modem with him and, by simply installing the telephone receiver in its slot, resume his discussions
with the computer. Since he programmed the computer according to his own ideas it had the inestimable merit, not to be found in human friends, of seldom disagreeing with him and then only on matters of fact but never of opinion. Into it he poured all his statistics, all his findings and theories, and from it he obtained his only companionship. About the only thing he couldn’t do was sleep with it, not because he objected to its physical appearance, which he found entirely acceptable, but from fear of electrocution and the thought that his physical intrusion would almost certainly put an end to their beautiful if Platonic relationship.

That it was a genuine friendship Yapp had no doubt. The computer told him things about his colleagues’ work and he could scan through their correspondence and their latest findings by the simple expedient of using their codewords. That these were supposedly secret was no deterrent. The hours and nights he had spent in the computer’s company had given him an uncanny insight into the creature’s peculiar dialect and mode of thought. It was as though it too, or she as Yapp preferred, had spent her formative years ingesting railway timetables and reconstituting them along lines similar to his own. Yes, there was no doubt in his mind that she was his friend and with her help he would arrive at that total knowledge of all things which his singular upbringing had taught him was the purpose of living.

In the meantime there was the bothersome business of reality to attend to.

Reality first intimated its intrusion into his life in the shape of an envelope with a crest of a griffon on the back. At least Walden supposed it to be a griffon, although it looked alarmingly like a vulture to him. Since he found it in his pigeon-hole at the Faculty of History it was only natural that his singular gift of association should lead him to suppose for a moment that it had perched there by mistake. But no, it was addressed to Professor Yapp and inside was a letter typed on similarly crested note-paper stating that Lord Petrefact would be staying at Fawcett House over the coming weekend and would much appreciate the company of Professor Yapp to discuss the possibility of ‘your writing a history of the Petrefact family and in particular the part played by the family in the industrial sphere’.

Yapp stared at the last sentence in disbelief. He knew exactly what part the Petrefact family had played in the industrial sphere. A remarkably foul one. A whole list of sweatshops, mines, lead-works, mills, foundries, shipyards and appalling factories jostled for pre-eminent vileness in his mind. Wherever labour was cheapest, conditions of work worst and profits highest, the Petrefact family had been there. And he was being invited to
write the family history? Considering that he had mentioned their role as exploiters of the working class in at least two of his TV plays it seemed a most unlikely invitation. About as likely in his opinion as the Rockefellers inviting Angela Davis to write a piece on their role in the sphere of race relations. In fact, even more unlikely. It was absurd and, with the thought that there must be some hoaxer who could lay his hands on Petrefact crested paper, Walden Yapp strode into the lecture room and gave a more than usually grisly account of the Match Workers’ Strike.

But when he returned to his office the letter was still there on his desk and the griffon looked more vulturine than ever. For a moment Walden Yapp considered discussing the question with the computer before remembering that Lord Petrefact had given it to the University and that its judgement might be tainted by this association. No, he would have to decide himself. And so picking up the phone he dialled the number of Fawcett House. The reply he got from a man who claimed that he was the frozen food auditor of a firm of contract caterers and he wouldn’t know Lord Petrefact from a cod fillet if he saw him did little to put his mind at rest. His second call was answered by a voice so tinged with revulsion that it suggested that its owner was holding the receiver with a pair of surgical forceps and talking through an antiseptic mask. Yes, the voice conceded, Lord Petrefact was in residence but on no account to be disturbed.

‘I merely want to confirm that he has invited me,’ said Yapp. The voice agreed that this was indeed the case but it implied that as far as it was concerned the presence of Professor Yapp at Fawcett House was about as welcome as a dose of Lassa fever.

Yapp put down the phone, finally convinced that the letter was genuine. Incivility of the order of that arrogant voice wasn’t typical of a practical joker. If Lord Petrefact thought he could get away with treating Walden Yapp like some forelock-tugging millhand he was in for another think. And if he imagined for one moment that the family history as written by Walden Yapp was going to be a paean of praise and a literary puff for a family that had made a fortune out of the miseries of ordinary decent working folk, he would learn what class solidarity really meant. To make quite sure that Lord Petrefact was under no illusions he turned to the keyboard of his automatic typewriter and composed a letter accepting the invitation but making it as abundantly and arrogantly plain as the voice he had spoken to that he disliked the idea of being a guest in the house of a capitalist bloodsucker.

Having got so far and stored the letter in his personal file in the computer for the information of his colleagues and to ensure that no one could say he wasn’t sticking firmly to his principles, he changed his mind and sent a brief telegram saying that he would arrive at Fawcett House on Saturday. There were in a curious way subtleties about Walden Yapp which the world had never
realized. And after all if the offer was genuine and he could lay his hands on the documentary evidence, the ledgers, the accounts of the Petrefact family in their most detestably exploitive period, he would write such an exposure of their activities as would make their name stink even in capitalist circles.

Lord Petrefact received the telegram with evident pleasure.

‘Splendid, splendid,’ he told Croxley, whose voice had already expressed its opinion of Yapp’s visit, ‘he’s taken the bait.’

‘Bait?’ said Croxley. He had once spent a very uncomfortable ten minutes watching an episode of
The Proof Of The Pudding
before trying to erase its memory by switching uncharacteristically to
Top Of The Pops
.

Lord Petrefact pressed the express button of his wheelchair and spun it delightedly in a circle. If that damned oyster hadn’t played havoc with his entire metabolism he would almost certainly have danced a jig.

‘Bait, my dear Croxley, bait. Now we must prepare the net for the fellow. Got to get him properly involved. What do you suppose he’d like for dinner?’

‘From what I saw of that disgusting programme of his I’d say trotters from an undernourished pig followed by last month’s bread and skimmed milk.’

Lord Petrefact shook his head. ‘No, no, nothing like that. After all we must feed his preconceptions too you
know. You have to realize, my dear Croxley, that we plutocrats do ourselves astonishingly well. Nothing less than an eight-course dinner will satisfy Yapp’s imagination.’

‘I suppose we could start with oysters,’ said Croxley, who disliked being included in the plutocracy.

Lord Petrefact winced. ‘You can,’ he said, ‘I certainly don’t intend to. No I think we’ll start with genuine turtle soup served from the shell of the turtle. He’s almost certainly got conservationist tendencies and that should give him pause for thought.’

‘I should think it would give the contract caterers pause for thought too,’ said Croxley. ‘Where on earth they’d get a genuine turtle—’

‘The Galapagos Islands,’ said Lord Petrefact. ‘They can fly one in.’

‘If you say so,’ said Croxley, making a mental note to tell the chef to lay his hands on a turtle-shell and fill it with tinned soup. ‘And after that?’

‘A large helping of caviar, genuine Beluga caviar, none of your substitute muck.’

‘It’s not mine,’ said Croxley, ‘and anyway Beluga caviar comes from Russia. He’ll probably approve of it.’

‘Never mind that. The thing is to give him the impression we dine like this every evening.’

‘It’s a mercy we don’t,’ said Croxley. ‘Any particular wine to go with it?’

Lord Petrefact thought for a moment. ‘Château d’Yquem,’ he said finally.

‘Dear God,’ said Croxley, ‘that’s a dessert wine. It’s as sweet as hell and with caviar . . .’

‘Of course it’s sweet. That’s the whole point of it. What you don’t seem to realize is that our ancestors drank sweet wines with every damned course.’

‘Not mine,’ said Croxley. ‘They had more sense. Stuck to small beer.’

‘Mine didn’t. You’ve only got to look at the menu they served up for the Prince of Wales’s visit in 1873.’

‘I’d just as soon not. They must have had constitutions like oxen.’

‘Never mind about their constitutions,’ said Lord Petrefact, who disliked reminders about his own almost as much as Croxley disliked being classed as a plutocrat. ‘Now with the sucking pig we’ll have—’

‘Sucking pig?’ said Croxley. ‘We’ve got a firm of frozen-food specialists downstairs and if you think they can rustle up a deep-freeze sucking pig at the drop of a hat . . .’

‘Listen Croxley, if I say I want sucking pig I mean I want sucking pig. And anyway they don’t rustle the sucking things. At least to the best of my knowledge they don’t. They snatch the little buggers from their mother’s teats and—’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Croxley hurriedly, cutting short the terrible explanation he could see coming. ‘Sucking pigs it is.’