Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  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.’

  ‘No it isn’t. It’s one, one with an apple between its gums.’

  Croxley shut his eyes. Lord Petrefact’s morbid interest in the details of sucking pigs was almost as unpleasant as the prospect of the dinner. ‘And the dessert after that, sir?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Dessert? Certainly not. An eight-course dinner needs eight courses. Now after the roast sucking pig I think we’ll move on to higher things.’

  He paused while Croxley prayed silently. ‘Game pie,’ said Lord Petrefact finally, ‘a thoroughly high game pie. That shall be the pièce de résistance.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ said Croxley. ‘If you ask me, this Yapp will have run for his life by the time you get to the sucking pig—’

  Lord Petrefact interrupted lividly. ‘I’m not getting anywhere near that bloody pig,’ he shouted, ‘you know that as well as I do. My digestion wouldn’t stand it and in any case I’m under doctor’s—’

  ‘Quite so, sir. One game pie.’

  ‘Two,’ said Lord Petrefact. ‘One for you and one for him. Both of them high. I shall enjoy the aroma.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Croxley after a brief colloquy with himself in which he considered raising the objection that the deep-freeze artists in the kitchen might find it as difficult to prime their game products to the heights demanded as to rustle up a sucking pig and deciding against it.

  ‘And make sure their tails drop off,’ continued Lord Petrefact.

  ‘Their tails?’

  ‘Their tails. You hang pheasants until their tails drop off.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Croxley, ‘aren’t you getting a bit confused? I shouldn’t have thought pheasants had—’

  ‘Tail feathers, you oaf. They’ve got to be so rotten their tail feathers come away in your hand. Any good chef knows that.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Croxley, deciding once and for all that he was going to see that the contract caterers forgot all about game pie.

  ‘Right, now how many courses is that?’

  ‘Six,’ said Croxley.

  ‘Four,’ said Lord Petrefact adamantly. ‘Now after the pie I think we’ll have champagne-flavoured zabaglione followed by Welsh rarebit gorgonzola . . .’

  Croxley tried to still his imagination and wrote down the instructions. ‘And where will Professor Yapp be trying to sleep?’ he asked finally.

  ‘In the North wing. Put him in the suite the King of the Belgians used in 1908. That should stir his historical imagination a bit.’

  ‘I doubt if he’ll have much time for his historical imagination after dinner,’ said Croxley, ‘I’d put him nearer the resuscitation team.’

  Lord Petrefact waved his objections away. ‘The trouble with you, Croxley, is that you lack vision.’

  Croxley didn’t but he knew better than to say so.

  ‘Vision, Croxley, that’s the hallmark of a great man. Now here we have this fellow Yapp and we want something from him so . . .’

  ‘What?’ said Croxley.

  ‘What do you mean, what?’

  ‘What on earth could we possibly want from a raving socialist radical like Yapp?’

  ‘Never mind what we want from him,’ said Lord Petrefact, who knew his secretary’s devotion to the family too well to provoke a prolonged argument, ‘the fact is we want something. Now the man without vision would suppose that the best way of going about it would be to put the request to him in a roundabout fashion. We know he’s an extreme left-winger and he loathes our guts.’

  ‘After that dinner I shouldn’t think he’ll be
particularly fond of his own, come to that.’

  ‘That’s beside the point. As I was saying, he regards us as capitalist swine and there’s nothing we can do to disillusion him. So we must act the part and play on his vanity. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Croxley for whom nothing was at all clear except that he was almost certainly in for a bout of convulsive indigestion unless he came to an agreement with the caterers as quickly as possible. ‘And now if you don’t mind I’ll go and attend to the arrangements.’

  He hurried from the room while Lord Petrefact pressed the button on his wheelchair and crossed to the window to stare with intense dislike at the garden his grandfather had laid out so meticulously. ‘The runt of the litter,’ the old brute had called him. Well, the runt was head of the litter now and nicely poised to shatter the public image of the family which had always despised him. In his own way Lord Petrefact loathed his family almost as fervently as Walden Yapp, though for more personal reasons.

  4

  Walden Yapp travelled to Fawcett by hire car. He usually went everywhere by train but Fawcett House was nowhere near a railway station and consultation with Doris, the computer, had merely confirmed that there was no bus or other form of public transport he could use to get there. And Yapp refused to own a private car, partly because he believed the State should own everything, partly because of those conservationist tendencies Lord Petrefact had so rightly diagnosed, but most of all because Doris had pointed out that the money required to run a car could provide enough food and medical aid to keep twenty-four children alive in Bangladesh. On the other hand she countered this argument by demonstrating that if he bought a car he would provide jobs for five British car workers, two Germans, or half a Japanese, depending on what make he chose. After a struggle with his conscience about making five British workers redundant Yapp had chosen not to own a car at all and had donated the money saved to Oxfam, with the sad reflection that it was more likely to keep two administrators behind desks than feed the starving anywhere else.

  But his thoughts as he turned up the drive were not concerned with the underdeveloped world. They were centred on the gross, vulgar and thoroughly overdeveloped sense of their own importance the Petrefacts had displayed in building the enormous mansion in front of him. Fawcett House was a misnomer. It was a repulsive palace, and to think that there were still people rich enough to live in such a vast establishment disgusted him. He was even more disgusted when he stopped outside the front door and was immediately confronted by a genteel lady in a twin-set who said the charge per visit was two pounds.

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Yapp, ‘I’m here on business.’

  ‘You’ll find the servants’ entrance round the back.’

  ‘With his majesty,’ said Yapp, descending to sarcasm. It was wasted on the twin-set.

  ‘Then you’re fifty years too late. The last time Royalty visited was in 1929.’

  She turned back into the house while Yapp took his borrowed Intourist bag out of the car, cast a disparaging eye on the bent figure of a gardener who was weeding a flower-bed, and finally strode into the house.

  ‘In case I didn’t make myself plain enough . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to try,’ said twin-set.

  ‘I’ve come to see the old bugger himself,’ said Yapp, maintaining his proletarian origins with some violence.

  ‘There’s no need to be vulgar.’

  ‘It would be hard not to be in these surroundings,’ said Yapp looking at the marble pillars and gilt-framed paintings as pointedly as possible. ‘The whole place stinks of a gross abuse of wealth. Anyway, I’m here at his Lordship’s invitation.’ He rummaged in his pocket for the letter.

  ‘In that case you’ll find him in the private wing to your right,’ said twin-set, ‘though I can’t say I envy him the company he keeps.’

  ‘And I don’t much care for his servants,’ said Yapp and made his way down a long corridor to a green baize door with a sign that said Private. Yapp shoved it open with his foot and stepped inside. Another long corridor, this time carpeted, greeted him and he was about to start down it when a small dapper man appeared from a door to his right and studied him briefly.

  ‘Professor Yapp?’ he enquired, with a deference that was in its own way as insulting as the woman at the door.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Yapp, not to be outdone.

  ‘If you’ll just step this way, sir. I’ll get one of the servants to show you your rooms. His Lordship will be available at six-thirty and doubtless you’ll wish to change.’

  ‘Listen, mate, let’s get things straight. In the world I come from, meaning the real world like, and not Poona in 1897 or the jungle round Timbuktu, the ordinary man doesn’t change for dinner. And I don’t need overfed underpaid butlers showing me where my room is. Just tell me where it is and I’ll find my own way.’

  ‘If you say so, sir,’ said Croxley, restraining himself from the repartee that as far as he knew the ordinary bloke never had changed for dinner and there weren’t any jungles in the neighbourhood of Timbuktu. ‘You’re on the first floor in the King Albert suite. If there’s anything you need you’ll find me here.’

  He went back into the study and left Walden Yapp to wander along the corridor and up a curving staircase to yet another corridor.

  *

  Twenty fruitless minutes later he was down again.

  ‘The Prince Albert suite . . .’ he began after opening the door without knocking. Croxley regarded him with palpable disdain.

  ‘The King Albert suite, sir,’ he said heading out of the door. ‘King Albert of Belgium stayed here in 1908. We’ve kept it for visitors with progressive views ever since.’

  ‘Progressive views? You’ve got to be joking. The swine was responsible for chopping off the hands of Africans in the Congo and the most appalling atrocities.’

  ‘So I’ve always understood, sir,’ said Croxley. ‘But we ordinary blokes do like to have our little jokes, sir. It’s one of the perks of being a menial.’

  And leaving Yapp to work that one out he went downstairs feeling rather pleased with himself.

  Behind him Yapp surveyed the King Albert suite with disgust, curiosity, and a disquieting sense of having been goaded into a quite unnecessary gaucherie. After all it was the system which was at fault and the dapper little man – and even twin-set, for all her condescension – were only servants and probably had families to support. If over the years they had succumbed to the temptation of, to quote a phrase he frequently used in lectures, ‘deferential ego-identity’, that was hardly to be wondered at and the surprising thing was that they retained any sense of humanity at all. And the little man with his dark suit and waistcoat and highly polished shoes had shown a nice self-awareness in calling himself a menial. Walden Yapp decided to reserve his more flamboyant class origins for Lord Petrefact.

  In the meantime he inspected the room which had once housed the king who had claimed the entire Belgian Congo as his private possession. It was appropriately gross and tasteless, with an enormous bed, a vast dressing-table on which with deliberate defiance Yapp placed his Intourist bag to cover the inlaid crest of monarchy, and a fireplace over which hung a portrait of the King in military array. But it was next door, through what had evidently been the dressing-room, that he came to something that really interested him. As an historian with a particular bias towards the objective, and again to quote him ‘the artefactual evidence of class disparity’, the bathroom held treasures of Victorian plumbing. Mahogany fittings surrounded the bath, the water-closet and the toilet pan. There was a huge stained mirror above the washbasin, a bell pull, a large radiator-cum-towel-rack, and a cupboard containing a number of enormous towels. But it was the bath itself, or rather the array of taps, dials and levers to one side, which fascinated him most. It was a remarkably large bath, deep-sided and fashioned like a four-poster bed with a canopy above and some sort of waterproof curtains draped along the side. Yapp leant across the bath and read the g
auges. One was a temperature indicator, another gave details of water pressure, while the third, which was larger than the others, had a lever and a dial with a series of settings engraved on it. Yapp sat down on the edge of the bath to read them better and for one horrid moment felt himself slipping sideways. He leapt off and regarded the bath suspiciously. The damned thing had definitely moved. And as he watched it tilted back to the horizontal again.

  Odd. Yapp reached out cautiously and pushed the mahogany surround down. The bath remained stationary. Not wishing to risk disturbing the thing again he knelt on the floor and peered across at the dial with the lever and arrow. At one end of the scale he read WAVE and at the other end STEAM. In between these two rather alarming commands – and now that he came to think of it the lever and dial reminded him of the engine-room signals he had seen in films of ships’ bridges – there were others. WAVE was followed by SWELL only to revert to STRONG WAVE then NEUTRAL and finally three sorts of JET, STRONG, MEDIUM and SLIGHT. It was all very fascinating and for a moment Yapp considered having a bath and trying what was evidently a quite remarkable example of early automation applied to domestic plumbing, and one which demonstrated the Imperialist obsession with naval supremacy, the Suez canal, trade routes and India. But it was already past six and after making a note of this comment in the diary he invariably carried when out of touch with Doris, he decided against it. Instead he made a sketch of the contraption, measured its dimensions and recorded the various settings on the dial. Finally, when he had finished and was about to leave, his eye caught sight of a faded yellow paper in a glass frame on the wall next to the washbasin. It was a set of instructions for use with THE SYNCHRONIZED ABLUTION BATH. Yapp glanced through them and noted that WAVE MOTION application required the Level Of Water In The Bath to be two-thirds when combined with the Displacement . . . The rest of the sentence had been eroded by steam and time.