The Gropes (7 page)

If Esmond was like his father then odds were that he would be timorous and biddable and easily influenced. In fact, the more Belinda thought about it the more pleasing the idea of having Esmond around the house became.

Almost precisely the opposite thoughts were going through Vera Wiley’s mind.

Vera still hadn’t got over the shock of hearing that Horace had got into debt by gambling on the stock market. She couldn’t bear to think of the consequences this would have if he didn’t recover from his breakdown and get back to his desk at the bank and sell whatever shares he still had that would go up when the market rose again.

On the other hand, the prospect of parting even temporarily with her love child Esmond appalled her. Especially having him go to that cow of a sister-in-law, Belinda. Albert was all right in his own bluff way,
even if his business was a bit dodgy, but that Belinda wasn’t a nice person at all.

‘If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times,’ she told Horace without exaggeration, ‘that Belinda is a cold fish. What Albert sees in her I can’t think.’

Horace could, but he kept his thoughts on the subject to himself. Albert’s choice of an expert property lawyer and tax consultant as his bride had been a shrewd one for a man in his line of business in Essex, even if Belinda had apparently retired from the profession on marriage. In his own devious heart, Horace rather envied him. Besides, Belinda was a good-looking woman and had kept her figure, which was more than could be said for Vera. And even more to his liking was that she kept herself to herself, at least when there was company. She was just there in the background, making herself useful in the kitchen and not hogging the limelight like Vera and Albert.

Not that the Wileys had been invited to many of the Ponsons’ parties, and the ones they had gone to had been too rowdy for Horace’s taste and his reputation as a respectable bank manager. And by all accounts they had been tame affairs compared to some Albert had boasted about. Even Vera had been shocked by her brother’s accounts of mixed couples in jacuzzis, though Horace had privately suspected her of a good deal of envy. Which made it all the more surprising that she was prepared to let Esmond go and stay at Ponson Place for the summer.

Horace lay in bed, nursing his hangover and resisting the urge to cover his ears as Vera rattled on. He wondered what the hell Albert had told her that had been so persuasive. Obviously he hadn’t mentioned the water butt behind the garage. Vera would have gone out of her mind with rage. But instead she was harping on about what a cold fish that Belinda was, and not being sure about Esmond being happy with going away to Essex. And how would a woman who couldn’t have children of her own know how to feed a growing boy like Esmond? Esmond was so fussy about his food and besides he was delicate and …

Horace listened to her and tried to look even sicker than he felt. As far as he was concerned, Belinda Ponson could starve his ghastly son to death or make his life utter hell as long as she didn’t drive the brute to come home.

‘I just need to rest,’ he whimpered, partly as an answer to his own unspoken thoughts, and was relieved to hear Vera sigh and most surprisingly agree, without the added comment that if he would come home stinking drunk he’d got what he deserved. Instead she went downstairs and waited for Esmond to come home from school to tell him that Uncle Albert and Auntie Belinda had very kindly asked him to stay for the summer holidays.

All the same, Vera’s doubts remained. Something was wrong and that something hadn’t anything to do with Horace getting drunk or coming home late
and talking about Esmond being him. It wasn’t even the inconceivable idea of Horace gambling on the stock market. There was something else niggling away at her.

Sitting at the kitchen table with Sackbut staring out the window from his customary place by the cactus, it slowly dawned on her what that something might be. And if she was right, then Horace’s behaviour, odd and mad as it had seemed, was actually calculated and purposeful and made complete sense. What if Horace had another woman or, as the romances she read put it, a mistress? That would explain everything, his leaving the house early and coming home later and later, his drinking and how he’d got into debt. It even explained his horrid behaviour to Esmond; he hated him because Esmond was a constant reminder of his duty as a father and a husband. And of course it explained why he was no good in bed and she’d always had to do all the lovemaking.

As this terrible conviction hit her and she knew herself to be a wronged woman, nay, a betrayed wife, and Horace no more than a philanderer, conflicting tidal waves of emotion crashed over her. Her first impulse, to rush upstairs and confront the faithless Horace with his guilt, was succeeded by the thought of the effect on her darling Esmond. The poor lad would be traumatised.

It wasn’t a word that came at all easily to a woman who lived an emotional life almost entirely based on
early-nineteenth-century Regency bucks who crushed maidens to their manly breasts, fought duels after dancing till dawn and then rode great black horses post-haste, etc., but she’d heard it on the telly and it came to her now.

She couldn’t allow Esmond to be traumatised. She had to do her duty as a mother, and if that meant sacrificing her own feelings, at least for the time being, she would do so. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t going to express her fury the moment Esmond had left for Ponson Place. Oh, she’d have something to say to Horace then …

She was stopped by another thought: the cunning and skill with which Horace had managed to get Esmond out of the house. He had said something to Albert, something that had so shocked that bluff man that Albert had come down to the kitchen clearly shaken to the core by what he had just heard. Vera had never seen her brother so ashen and Albert was not a man to be shocked easily.

Of course, of course, Horace had confessed everything to him. Albert had forced Horace to tell him everything about the other woman who haunted his dreams. Or Horace had boasted to Albert about his mistress who exhausted him nightly, which is why he was always late home with nothing left for Vera, his loyal wife.

For a moment Vera’s fury nearly sent her dashing up to the bedroom to have it out but the combination of
Esmond being traumatised and the feeling that she had more to gain by pretending to know nothing prevented her. Instead, she went out into the garden and sauntered tragically among the pink aubretia, the pelargoniums so red and the trailing lobelias so very, very blue. Here, among the bedding plants and the striped and weed-free lawn, she could weep unseen those tears her new role required.

In fact, her performance did not go unseen. Horace watched her from the bedroom and was puzzled. He had grown accustomed to her theatricals and sudden changes of mood, so in the present circumstances he would have expected something more melodramatic and vigorous than this pensive and melancholy performance. A woman wailing for her demon lover or, in the present case, a mother wailing for her demon son seemed more appropriate than this demure and mournful progress. A new sense of unease crept over him. He’d desperately like to know what that damned oaf Albert had told her. It must have been something perfectly frightful to put her in this melancholy. Horace turned over and tried to sleep.

By the time Esmond arrived home from school, his mother had played out her role. It wasn’t sufficiently active to sustain for very long, and besides, she was determined to be bright and cheerful so that her darling boy wouldn’t be traumatised.

‘Daddy’s much better today,’ she announced, as she made tea and toast with honey. ‘He’s been working ever so hard lately and he needs to rest so we’ve got to be quiet and not disturb him.’

‘I am quiet,’ said Esmond. ‘I’ve been quiet ever since I gave up the drums and the piano lessons ages ago.’

‘Yes, dear, you’ve been very good. It’s just that Daddy’s nerves aren’t very … well, he’s exhausted himself mentally.’

‘You mean he’s been drinking,’ said Esmond, with rather more insight into his father’s problem than Mrs Wiley liked. She preferred her Esmond to be innocent.

‘I know all about it, Mum. He goes to the Gibbet & Goose and sits there drinking double Scotches when he gets off the train every night.’

Vera was appalled, though less by the fact than by Esmond’s understanding.

‘He doesn’t. I mean, he may do occasionally, but … Anyway, how do you know?’

‘Because Rosie Bitchall told me. Her dad’s the barman there.’

‘Rosie Bitchall? That horrid girl who came to your seventeenth birthday party and went behind the sofa with Richard? You don’t still see her?’

Vera was genuinely agitated now.

‘She’s in my class and we’re going to the same college next year.’

Vera stopped pouring tea and put the pot down. Esmond’s simple statement had decided her. She had no intention of allowing her only son to fall in love with a slut like Rosie Bitchall who wore a ring through her nose and who, to put it mildly, was no better than she should be and who, in the words of Mrs Blewett, was a chip off the old block, the old block in question being her mother, Mabel. Vera knew exactly what that meant.

‘Well, Rosie Bitchall must have been mistaken.
Anyway, enough of that. Your Uncle Albert came here to see Daddy this morning,’ she said, ‘and he and Auntie Belinda have invited you to stay with them until Daddy’s better. Now, isn’t that nice of them?’

‘Yes, but –’

Mrs Wiley wasn’t having any ‘buts’.

‘I’m not going to argue about it,’ she said. ‘I’m not having you rampage about the house with your father lying upstairs ill in bed. And besides, you’ll learn something useful from your Uncle Albert.’

‘I don’t want to become a second-hand car dealer,’ said Esmond stubbornly. ‘I want to go into a bank like Dad and make money.’

This was too much for Mrs Wiley. It swept aside the last vestiges of her romanticism. She’d rather Esmond became a rogue – a dashing rogue naturally – than a bank manager like Horace.

‘If you think … if you think your father makes money being a bank manager … well, let me tell you that Albert makes four times as much as your father. He’s a rich man is Uncle Albert. Whoever heard of a rich bank manager?’ She paused and found another argument. ‘Besides, your uncle will give you a reference and they were saying only the other day that what young people need nowadays is work experience. Having work experience does you more good than anything else.’

Which didn’t help to persuade Esmond. Caught between his mother’s public adulation and his father’s
rejection, a rejection that had reached the point where he had tried to stab him with a carving knife in a drunken frenzy, he was now to be subjected to his Uncle Albert who was as embarrassing to be with as his mother was. And who was, as his father had said repeatedly, as crooked as any second-hand car dealer who ever welded two insurance write-offs into one single-owned Cavalier. To add to that, he lived in Essex.

In any case, his mother’s reaction to the mention of Rosie Bitchall had so obviously supposed he was in love with her that it made him cringe and squirm with disgust. He wasn’t in the least interested in the wretched Rosie. In fact, he was unique among his peers in being rather revolted than attracted by the whole notion of sex.

This was Esmond’s wake-up call. The only good thing to have come out of the past twenty-four hours was that it had given him important things to think about, primarily the obvious need to avoid being anything like his parents. After years in which he had done his utmost to fulfil their conflicting expectations for him and had so obviously failed, he was now determined to be himself. Who that self was he had no idea, or only vague and fleeting ones. As a boy he had been subject to a host of temporary impulses that came and went of their own accord and over which he had absolutely no control. One moment he was going to be a poet – his mother’s fondness for
Tennyson’s ‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’ and the fact that as a child she’d overdosed him on Rupert Bear had given him the gift of scansion and the curse of automatic rhyme – then a few minutes later the contrary impulse to be a bulldozer driver and smash his way through hedges and generally destroy things had swept poetry aside. He had once seen a demolition team on television bring an enormous factory chimney crashing to the ground by removing bricks at the base which they had replaced with wood and had then set fire to, and the idea of being such a demolition expert fleetingly appealed to him. It spoke to something within him in much the same way his drum-beating had: it expressed the violence of his emotions and his overwhelming desire to assert himself somehow. Unfortunately, he had no sooner arrived at this notion of selfhood than it too was swept aside by the feeling that he had been put on earth to do something more important and constructive than blow up chimneys and demolish things.

And now becoming a bank manager had lost its appeal for him too. Not if it meant getting up at six in the morning and coming home drunk after nine at night and not even making as much money as Uncle Albert. His future had to hold something better than that.

For the first time in his life Esmond had begun to think for himself.

At the end of the week, after enduring many sleepless nights, Vera drove Esmond to her brother’s flash bungalow near Colchester, all the way stressing the importance of behaving properly and not telling Auntie Belinda about Daddy getting drunk and trying to attack him with the carving knife.

‘That’s something nobody but us must ever know about,’ she said. ‘As you know, your father’s been under a lot of strain lately. And don’t go around telling them he’s had a nervous breakdown either. The least said the soonest mended.’

Esmond promised he wouldn’t say anything but he kept his real thoughts to himself.

They mainly centred round the prospect of living
in the same house as his Aunt Belinda. That morning he’d overheard his father say that, while he disapproved of Uncle Albert’s vulgarity and dodgy second-hand car business, he was at least partly human which wasn’t something that could be said for that fucking termagant of a wife of his. It was about the only time Esmond had heard Horace use that swear word and, having not understood what a termagant was and having had to find its meaning in a dictionary, he wasn’t looking forward to his stay with her.