Ancestral Vices (31 page)

Frederick regarded her with some suspicion. ‘And you’re not prepared to tell me why you want them?’

Emmelia shook her head. ‘All I am prepared to say is that it will be in your best interest to find them. Naturally you will go about the business anonymously.’

Frederick considered his best interest and found it difficult to square with an anonymous search for dwarves. ‘I suppose I could phone the local labour exchange but they’re going to think it a bit odd if I refuse to give my name and address. And anyway, what on earth am I going to tell them I want dwarves for?’

‘You’ll just have to think of something, and you’re certainly not to give them any idea who you are. That is the first point. The second is that you will forget all about
this conversation. As far as you are concerned it has not taken place. Is that clear?’

‘Only very vaguely,’ said Frederick.

‘In that case let me make my point in terms you will understand. I have decided to alter my will in your favour. In the past I had always intended to leave my share in the family business to all my nephews and nieces in equal portions. Now you will inherit the lot.’

‘Very kind of you, I must say. Most generous,’ said Frederick, beginning to understand that his best interests were definitely in doing what Aunt Emmelia said.

Emmelia regarded him with distaste. ‘It’s nothing of the sort,’ she said finally. ‘It is simply the only way I know of guaranteeing that, whatever happens, you will keep your mouth shut. In the event that you don’t I shall revoke the will and leave you nothing.’

‘Have no fear,’ said Frederick with a smirk, ‘I shan’t breathe a word. If it’s dwarves you want, it’s dwarves you shall have.’

‘Only their names and addresses, mind you,’ said Emmelia, and on this distinctly odd note she dismissed him. Left to herself she sat on, steeling herself for the next move. At twelve she left the house with a large shopping-bag and a torch and walked down to the Mill. There she let herself in through a side door and presently was carefully selecting those articles she needed. By the time she returned to the New House the shopping-bag contained several dildos, two handcuffs from the Bondage Department, a whip, a peephole bra and a pair of
open-crotch chamois-lined plastic camiknickers. Emmelia went up to her room, locked them away in her chest of drawers, and went to bed with a strange smile. For the first time in many a long year she was feeling excited and guilty. It was as though she had raided the pantry at Fawcett House when she was a child. How she had hated Fawcett! And how extraordinarily exhilarating it was to be acting outside the pale of respectability! Here she was, the guardian of the family’s reputation, intent now on redressing the balance of their sanctimonious and sinful hypocrisy. It was with the feeling that she was at long last living up to her true Petrefactian nature that she dozed off with some refrain about ‘ancestral vices prophesying war’ running through her tired mind.

For the next week Frederick applied himself to the tricky business of finding local dwarves without revealing his identity. He phoned round all the Employment Exchanges in the district only to discover that, curiously enough, there was no shortage of job opportunities for dwarves. Even his claim to be a representative of Disney Films interested in remaking
Snow White
along naturalistic lines with seven midget miners elicited no great interest, while his later tactics as a BBC producer working on a documentary dealing with the dangers to dwarves as a species, particularly after the murder of Willy Coppett, met with no response. In the end he had to report his lack of success to Emmelia.

‘They’re short on the ground,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried hospitals and circuses and just about every place I can think of. I suppose I could try the local Education Authority. They must have a list of teenage dwarves.’

But Emmelia wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Young adults, yes, but I have no intention of infl . . . of having anything to do with dwarves below the age of consent.’

‘Age of consent?’ said Frederick, for whom the phrase had distinctly perverse sexual connotations when combined with dwarves. ‘You’re surely not thinking of . . . well . . . er . . .’

‘What I am proposing remains my private business. Yours is simply to find me suitable candidates.’

‘If you say so,’ said Frederick. But the sexual motif solved his problem. That afternoon he used the Personal Column of the
Bushampton Gazette
to place an advert stating that he was a lonely middle-aged Gentleman of Restricted Growth with independent means seeking the companionship of a similarly constituted Lady and gave his interests: Lego, model railways and bonsai gardening. This time he was lucky, and two days later had eight replies which he took up to the New House. Emmelia studied them doubtfully.

‘I should have told you to specify male dwarves,’ she said, reinforcing Frederick’s suspicions that whatever his aunt had in mind was some form of dwarf fetish.

‘I’ve had enough trouble rustling this little lot up,’ he protested, ‘and if you think I’m going to advertise myself as a gay dwarf in this neck of the woods, I can assure you
I’m not. Quite frankly I find the whole business of masquerading as a heterosexual one unpleasant enough without being a deviant dwarf into the bargain.’

Emmelia brushed his objections aside. ‘I trust you didn’t go to the
Gazette
’s offices in person,’ she said.

‘Certainly not,’ said Frederick, ‘I’d have had to go in on my knees or have them wondering what a five-foot-ten man was doing inserting pieces in the agony column claiming to be three-foot-nothing. I phoned them and used a box number.’

‘Good. Well, these will just have to do. And remember that if you breathe a word of this to anyone, you will lose all chance of taking your father’s place as head of the family firm, quite apart from becoming an accessory before the fact.’

‘Before what fact?’ began Frederick and promptly decided that he didn’t want to know. Whatever Aunt Emmelia was up, or in this case down to, he wanted no part of it. Having said as much, he left the house and to avoid any further implication in her affairs drove to London and made hurried arrangements for a holiday in Spain.

For the next week Emmelia continued her preparations. She bought a secondhand car in Briskerton, drove round the various villages and towns looking at the houses in which the eight correspondents claimed to live, and in general behaved in so unusual a manner that even Annie commented on it.

‘I can’t think what’s come over her,’ she told Rosie,
whom she had delegated to do the washing-up. ‘Hardly ever out of the garden for years and years and now she’s gadding about like I don’t know what.’

It was an apt expression and one that corresponded at times to Emmelia’s own feelings. She didn’t know what either; what had become of her former self; what had happened to her family scruples; or what she now was. Only the how concerned her, that and the knowledge that she was no longer bored or driven by the dullness of life to write long letters to her relatives pretending to be what she had evidently never been, a dear, kind and gentle elderly lady.

Instead, something harsh and almost brutal had emerged in her character in response, paradoxically, to the affront done to her naively nice view of the world and its ways by the sentencing of a foolish but innocent man. And Lord Broadmoor had called her a virago. Emmelia looked the word up in her dictionary and found its original meaning: ‘a woman of masculine strength and spirit. (
Latin
= a female warrior)’. All in all it was a fair description of her present state, and it was reassuring to know that the Romans had so described some women. It placed her in a tradition older even than the Petrefact genealogy. But residues of her former self remained and at night she would wake with a start of horror at the thought of the actions she had premeditated.

To quell these moments of panic she hardened her
resolve by reading
The Times
most thoroughly and by joining Annie and Rosie in the boot-room of an evening to watch television. From these encounters with focused madness and violence she would come away reconciled to the relative mildness of her own intentions. A man had burnt twenty-two people to death in a Texas club ‘just for kicks’; in Manchester a father of five had raped an old-age pensioner; in Teheran more people had been executed by firing squad for ‘corruption against God’; another British soldier had been killed in Ulster while presumably trying to prevent Catholics and Protestants from slaughtering one another; a fourteen-year-old baby-sitter had dropped her charge from an upstairs window in a successful attempt to stop it crying. As if these acts of senseless violence were not enough to convince her that the world was mad, there were the TV series in which detectives were shot at or shot suspected villains with a gusto that was clearly shared by Annie and Rosie and presumably by millions of other viewers.

Emmelia came away from these sessions with a quiet conscience. If the rest of the world behaved so irrationally and with so little motive she had nothing to be concerned about. By the end of a month she had been transformed inwardly beyond all recognition. Outwardly she remained Miss Emmelia Petrefact, the dear old lady who loved gardening, cats and her family.

For Yapp very little remained. Since his arrival at Drampoole Prison he had lost his clothes, most of his hair, all his personal possessions, and the illusion that criminals were simply victims of the social system. Only the knowledge that they were mostly members of the working class persisted, and with it the experience of discovering what the proletariat thought of child-murderers. Yapp’s frantic attempts to explain that he hadn’t murdered anyone and that, even if he had, dwarves were not children hadn’t saved him from being assaulted by the two genuine murderers with whom he was forced to share a cell.

‘We know what to do with sods like you,’ they told him and had gone to work in several revolting and exceedingly painful ways which they had evidently learnt in the grim school of life Yapp had previously revered. By the following morning his reverence had gone and with it his ability to voice a demand to see the prison doctor. He was still whispering at the end of a week and it was only then that the warders, who clearly shared his cellmates’ hatred for dwarf-molesters, decided in their own interest that he needed medical attention before they had a corpse in custody.

‘One fucking squeak out of you and you’ll have testicles for tonsils,’ said the larger murderer gratuitously as Yapp hobbled out of the cell. ‘Tell the pill-popper you fell off your bunk.’

Yapp followed these instructions in a hoarse whisper.

‘Off your bunk?’ said the doctor shining a torch suspiciously on Yapp’s serrated sphincter. ‘You did say “bunk”?’

‘Yes,’ whispered Yapp.

‘And what precisely did you land on?’

Yapp said he wasn’t quite sure.

‘I am,’ said the doctor, who knew an arse-bandit when he saw one and was as prejudiced against the species as he was against child-murderers. ‘All right you can stand up now.’

Yapp tried and squeaked pitifully.

‘And what’s the matter with your voice? You’re not by any chance a knob-hound too?’

Yapp said he didn’t know what a knob-hound was. The doctor enlarged his vocabulary.

‘Then I’m certainly not,’ whispered Yapp as indignantly as his vocal cords would allow. ‘I resent the imputation.’

‘In that case would you mind telling me how your uvula got into its present disgusting condition?’ asked the doctor, prodding the thing irritably with a spatula.

Yapp made gurgling noises.

‘Call the doctor “sir”,’ said the warder, reinforcing the order by jabbing him in the ribs.

‘Sir,’ gurgled Yapp. The doctor turned back to his desk and wrote out his report.

‘One soluble pessary to be taken at both extremities three times a day,’ he said, ‘and can’t you move him in
with someone who’s less susceptible to the ghastly creature’s sexual charms?’

‘There’s only Watford,’ said the warder dubiously.

‘Thank God,’ said the doctor. ‘Well, we’ll just have to keep the stomach-pump handy.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Yapp was prodded back to his cell to collect his blankets. The two murderers eyed him expectantly.

‘He’s going in with Watford,’ said the warder. ‘You two buggers have had your fun.’

‘Serve the swine right,’ said the small murderer.

Yapp hobbled out onto the landing again with a terrible sense of premonition. ‘What’s the matter with Watford?’ he croaked.

‘You mean to say you’ve never heard of the Bournemouth poisoner? And you a fucking professor. Oh well, live and learn,’ said the warder, unlocking a cell door at the far end of the landing. ‘Got a friend for you, Watford.’

A small chubby man sitting on the bed eyed Yapp with an interest that was in no way reciprocated.

‘What are you in for?’ he asked as the door shut. Yapp slumped onto the other bed and decided for the first time in his life that the truth was definitely not to be told.

‘Must have been something really nasty,’ continued the cheerful Mr Watford, radiating a bedside manner. ‘They never give me anyone nice.’

Yapp croaked wordlessly and pointed to his mouth.

‘Oh a dummy,’ continued Mr Watford, ‘that’s handy.
Silence is golden, as I always say. Makes things so much easier. Want me to give you a medical examination?’

Yapp shook his head vigorously.

‘Oh well, just as you like. Mind you, I’m better than the prison doctor, not that that’s saying much. Of course that’s why I’m here. I mean nature intended me to be a great physician but my background was against me. My dad being a trolley-bus driver when he was sober and a sadist when he wasn’t and Mum having to make ends meet by scrubbing. I wasn’t allowed to stay on at school past fourteen. First job I got was with a scrap-iron merchant sorting out lead piping from other metal. Interesting stuff, lead. Gave me my first insight into the physiological effects of metallic poisons. Arsenic’s a metal too you know. Well anyway, from there I went to work for a photographer . . .’