Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘I’ll have to think about the offer,’ said Yapp, fighting down a sense of quite extraordinary euphoria and glancing at the first page of the contract. And as if to indicate that he was the last person to bring the pressure of his personality to bear on anyone Lord Petrefact whirred across the room to the door and with a final remark about helping himself to anything he wanted and not worrying about the lights because the servants would see to them, he wished Yapp goodnight and disappeared from the room. Yapp sat on, stunned by the suddenness of it all and with the heady feeling that he had been in the presence of one of the last great capitalist robber barons. Twenty thousand pounds on signature and twenty thousand . . . And no preconditions. Not a single thing to prevent him from documenting the exploitation, the misery, and the rapacity which lay behind that misery, which the Petrefacts had caused their workforce over more than a century.

  There had to be a snag somewhere. Walden Yapp emptied his glass, poured himself another brandy and settled down in comfort to read through the contract.

  5

  In the next room Lord Petrefact sat in the darkness for some time savouring his cigar but cursing himself for his stupidity. He also cursed Croxley for the episode of the foreshortened pig and would, if he could have reached him, have given the swine a week’s notice and a piece of his mind. But Croxley had chosen to sleep upstairs. Fawcett House was ill-equipped with elevators and Lord Petrefact too sensible even to consider attempting to manoeuvre his wheelchair up the marble staircase, particularly a marble staircase that had already demonstrated its lethal propensities in the case of Great-Uncle Erskine. Lord Petrefact could recall the tragedy with vivid satisfaction, though it remained a mystery why his great uncle should have first urinated against the balcony before stepping to his death clad only in a partially unveiled condom. Presumably the old goat had mistaken one of the marble statues in a niche for a housemaid.

  But that was beside the point. What was closest to it was that the egregious Croxley was upstairs and he was downstairs and he would have to wait until morning before venting his fury on the idiot. No, what was particularly irking him was that he had offered the imbecile Yapp such extraordinarily generous terms for research the raving lunatic would have gladly done for free. There was the added irritation of wondering if Yapp, for all his reputation, would prove the right man for the job. His politeness at dinner hadn’t suggested the ruthless hatchet-man Lord Petrefact would have chosen to let loose on his family. With the thought that he would have to point the brute in the right direction, Lord Petrefact trundled off to his bedroom and the ministrations of the resuscitation team whose female members had the unenviable task of getting him into bed at night and out in the morning.

  In the drawing-room Yapp finished studying the contract and, conscious that he was keeping the servants up until a quite unnecessarily late hour, made his way along the corridor and up to his room. As far as he could tell, and he had studied the fine print with particular care, there was absolutely nothing in the contract to prevent him from writing the most scurrilous history of the family imaginable. It was most extraordinary. And for this gift of socio-economic-fiscal data he was to be paid one hundred thousand pounds. It was an unnerving thought – almost as unnerving as knowing that he was about to sleep in a bed once occupied by the tyrant of the Congo.

  It was hardly surprising that Walden Yapp had difficulty in going to sleep. While Lord Petrefact lay below him considering which of his relatives would least appreciate Yapp’s enquiries into their private affairs, the great Demotic Historiographer found sleep almost as awkward. He kept waking and staring at the shape of the window, wondering at his good fortune before dozing off again. When he did sleep it was to dream of pigs in wheelchairs and Lord Petrefact horribly distorted with his slippered feet more or less where his shoulder blades should have been. To make matters worse, there was no reading lamp beside the bed and he couldn’t lull his imagination into a comfortable torpor by dwelling on the sufferings of knife-grinders in Sheffield in 1863, a doctoral thesis of one of his students he had brought with him to serve as bedside reading. Above all, there was no modem. If only he could have fed the contract to Doris he felt sure she would have seen the flaw in it somewhere. But that would have to wait until he got back to his apartment at Kloone.

  Even Croxley, normally an excellent sleeper, found himself for once prey to insomnia. He had managed to escape the immediate fury of Lord Petrefact in respect of the makeshift sucking pig, but the morning would undoubtedly see an explosion of wrath. Croxley resigned himself to this inevitable outburst. The old man might blast him to hell and gone, but Croxley knew his own worth and his job was not in danger. No, there was something more insidious going on, and for once he had no insight into Lord Petrefact’s motives. Why had he invited this subversive scholar to Fawcett? It was beyond Croxley. And if Lord Petrefact cursed himself for having offered such a large sum to Yapp for his research, Croxley blamed himself for not having used the opportunity at dinner to find out from Yapp why he was there. Anyway, whatever the reason, Croxley disapproved of it. Searching back in his mind for a motive, he could only suppose it had to do with the proposed closure of the plant at Hull. That was certainly on the cards and perhaps Yapp was a possible arbitrator in the dispute. In which case the old man might be trying to buy him off. But that didn’t explain the way in which he had fawned on the wretched creature. In half a century of self-indentured loyalty to Lord Petrefact and total devotion to the family, Croxley could remember only very few occasions when the old man had attempted so ferociously to hide his true feelings. There had been the time he needed Raphael Petrefact’s holdings in American Carboils to effect a take-over, and another when he had required the collaboration of Oscar Clapperstock to bankrupt a competitor, but apart from those two vital moments in his career Lord Petrefact had been conscientiously unpleasant. It was one of the qualities Croxley most admired about him, this relentless pursuit of private profit at the expense of personal popularity. But eventually even the puzzled Croxley drifted off and Fawcett House resumed the grim silence and sepulchral splendour that seemed to commemorate so eloquently the suffering millions who had made its building possible.

  *

  But it was precisely the thought of those suffering millions that finally drove Walden Yapp from his bed. How could he possibly accept one hundred thousand ill-gained pounds from a man whose proudest and most publicized boast had been to paraphrase Churchill, ‘Never in the field of private enterprise has so much been owed by so many to one man.’ The whole notion of being paid in coinage that was stamped with the blood, sweat, tears and sputum of silicotic miners in Bolivia and South Africa – not to mention tea workers in Sri Lanka, lumberjacks in Canada, bulldozer drivers in Queensland and in fact workers just about anywhere you cared to mention in the world – was intolerable. And if that wasn’t bad enough there was the thought of what the contract could do to his own immaculate reputation. It would be said that Walden Yapp had been bought, had become the lackey, the publicity man for Petrefact Consolidated Enterprises, and had renounced his principles for a mere hundred thousand pounds. He would be blackballed by the Tribune group, turned away from the steps of Transport House and cut in the street by such middle-of-the-roaders as Wedgie Benn. Unless, of course, he donated the entire sum to some deserving charity like the ILO or the Save Pol Pot Fund. Something of that order anyway would certainly answer his critics and he could go on with his research into methods of exploitation used by the Petrefacts. Yes, that was the answer, and with the happy thought that no one could possibly decry the name Yapp in the annals of Socialism he went through to the bathroom and decided that if he couldn’t sleep in the same bed as the vile monarch he might as well try out the antediluvian bath. It would be a start in his research into how the very rich had lived.

  In the event it surpassed his expectations. Having read the instructions again Yapp pulled the lever marked PLUG, turned the temperature gauge tap until the dial read 70° and waited while
the bath had reached the two-thirds capacity required for WAVE MOTION. Only then did he turn the tap off and step into the vast bath. Rather, he would have stepped if the thing hadn’t suddenly lurched sideways and thrown him off his feet. The next moment he was scrabbling for the lever and the bath had lurched the other way. Yapp slid down it and collided with the spout and was trying desperately to grab hold of it when, with an appalling grinding noise, the bath changed direction and simultaneously began to vibrate. As he slid precipitously down it, helped by a bar of soap that had lodged itself between his buttocks, Yapp grabbed the lever and swung it to JET. The indicator fulfilled this promise with an enthusiasm that came presumably from years of understandable neglect. Hot rusty water hurled itself from holes beneath the mahogany surround. With a yell Yapp grasped at a curtain and tried to pull himself to his feet. But the bath clearly had other ideas of its own. As the curtain tore from its corroded railing and the devotee of computers and multiple modes of function crashed once more into the water and scalding jets, the infernal contraption combined every mode of function its insane designer had contrived for it. It waved, it jetted, it vibrated and now it demonstrated its capacity to steam. From one series of holes came the jets, from another a cloud of steam that ended all Yapp’s attempts to grab the lever and shove it into neutral. He couldn’t even see the lever as he hurtled past it, let alone grab the thing. And all the time there came the thump and grind of whatever antiquated mechanism – Yapp could only suppose it to be some infernal beam engine – animated the Synchronized Ablution Bath.

  *

  It was this incessant thumping that finally woke Lord Petrefact in the room below. He opened his eyes, blinked, reached for his glasses, missed them and lay staring at the ornately plastered ceiling above him. Even without his glasses it was clear that something was seriously wrong, either with his liver – and the din gave the lie to that – or with the whole damned building. On first reflection he would have said that the place had been hit by an unusually severe earthquake, except that earthquakes didn’t go on and on and on. Nor, as far as he knew, were they accompanied by what sounded like a runaway steam engine.

  A piece of moulding fell from the ceiling and crashed into his tooth-glass, a portrait of his grandfather detached itself from the wall and impaled itself on the back of a chair, but it was the stain of rusty brown liquid spreading across the ceiling which decided Lord Petrefact. That and the chandelier, which from bouncing had now taken to gyrating in ever-increasing circles. If the damned thing came off there was no telling what might happen and he certainly wasn’t going to stay in bed to find out. With a vigour that was surprising for a man supposedly immobile, Lord Petrefact hurled himself from the bed and scrabbled for his wheelchair and the essential red button.

  He was too late. The chandelier had reached the end of its tether. To be precise, the entire portion of ceiling to which it was attached had, and with an unappealing groan and a crescendo of clashing crystal it peeled away and dropped. As it came Lord Petrefact was conscious of only one thing. He had to reach that red button before he was crushed, splintered or drowned. A murky brown liquid was pouring from the hole in the ceiling and now a new hazard entered the arena. A chunk of plaster dissociating itself from the chandelier dropped onto the wheelchair and in particular onto the very buttons Lord Petrefact so desperately needed. Behind him the chandelier disintegrated against the wall and lay still. In front the wheelchair, activated by the plaster, shot forward, gathered speed and collided first with a large ornamental vase and then with an embroidered silk screen which had until then been camouflaging Lord Petrefact’s portable commode. Having demolished the screen and emptied the commode the chair recoiled, with apparent disgust and evident urgency, in the opposite direction. As the damned thing scuttled past him Lord Petrefact made a final attempt to stop it but the wheelchair was intent on other things, this time a glass-fronted cabinet containing some extremely valuable jade pieces. With a horror that came in part from the knowledge that they were irreplaceable, and for all he knew underinsured, Lord Petrefact watched the wheelchair slam through the glass and spin round several times, shattering the treasures of half a dozen dynasties before heading straight towards him.

  But Lord Petrefact was ready. He had no intention of being decapitated by his own wheelchair or of joining the contents of the commode in that corner of the room. He shot sideways under the bed and lay crouched in a corner staring lividly at the footrest of the wheelchair which had nudged itself under the side of the bed and was still trying to get at him. That was certainly the impression Lord Petrefact had, and having seen what the bloody machine was capable of doing when it did get at something, he wasn’t having it get at him. On the other hand he didn’t want to be drowned either, and what appeared to be a domestic waterfall was gushing through the ceiling and spreading across the floor. He was just debating whether to risk the wheelchair or shove it in some less lethal direction when the door opened and someone shouted, ‘Lord Petrefact, Lord Petrefact, where are you?’

  Under the bed the great magnate tried to make his whereabouts known, but the infernal din upstairs, now joined by screams and the splash of falling water, drowned his reply. Having no dentures didn’t help. Gnashing his gums he crawled towards the wheelchair while keeping an eye on the feet of the resuscitation team who had gathered in the doorway and were surveying the shambles.

  ‘Where the hell can the old sod have got to?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Looks as though he’s blown his top with a vengeance,’ said someone else. ‘I always knew the old bugger was as mad as a March hare but this takes the biscuit.’

  Under the bed the old bugger wished he had a better view of the speaker. He’d show him what really happened when he blew his top. With a final effort to escape he reached out and shoved the footrest of the wheelchair to one side. For a moment the thing seemed to hesitate while its wheels spun in the murky fluid, a process that involved gathering the end of Lord Petrefact’s pyjama cord round its axle. And then it was off. Behind it, now convinced he was suffering from a terminal strangulated hernia, came Lord Petrefact. But it was the wheelchair that held the attention of the resuscitation team. They had seen many weird sights in their professional lives but an empty wheelchair gone berserk was not one of them. As it smashed its way through the remnants of the silk screen, as it ploughed across the commode, as it ricocheted off the wall and demolished yet another glass cabinet, this time containing a collection of Meissen figurines, the group stood transfixed in the doorway.

  It was a great mistake. The wheelchair had evidently imbibed some of the malevolent characteristics of its previous occupant, now merely an appendage and an unrecognizable one at that, and by some mechanical telepathy knew its enemies. It hurtled at the door and as the group of doctors tried to escape, ploughed into them. There was a brief moment of respite for Lord Petrefact as the machine bucketed about in the doorway and then it was off down the corridor carrying all before it. The resuscitation team it discarded, leaving them lying limply on the carpet, but the green baize door proved only a slight obstacle and one that allowed Lord Petrefact to collide with the rear of the wheelchair. After that the thing was away again bouncing from one wall of the corridor to another in its wild career.

  Behind it Lord Petrefact, now convinced that he was past the terminal stage of strangulated hernia and well into its after-effects, knew only one thing. If, and the conditional seemed hopelessly optimistic, if he survived this appalling ordeal somebody was going to pay for it with their jobs, their future, and, if he could arrange it, with their lives. Not that he was in any state to catalogue those responsible, though the inventor of the wheelchair came high on the list with the distributors of the portable and supposedly unspillable commode not far behind. And Croxley, God, just let him lay hands on Croxley . . .

  But these were subliminal thoughts and even they vanished as the wheelchair hurtled frenetically out of the corridor into the great marble entrance hall. For a moment Lord Petr
efact glimpsed a blurred face peering over the balcony as he slithered across the marble floor and then the wheelchair skidded sideways, banged into a large oak table, slamming Lord Petrefact against the wall in the process, and with a last dash for freedom lurched at the front door. For one terrible moment Lord Petrefact had a vision of himself being dragged down the steps and across the gravel drive towards the lake, but his fears were not fulfilled. Misjudging the door by a foot the chair smashed into a marble column. There was a crash as the footrest crumpled, a faint whirr before the motor stopped and Lord Petrefact caught up with the machine and, colliding with the back wheels, lay still.

  6

  From the balcony Croxley watched the final demise of the wheelchair, and with it presumably that of his employer, with a mixture of dismay and satisfaction. He had already risked life and limb by rescuing the egregious Yapp from what amounted to a combination of super-heated sauna and a rollercoaster bath, and had finally persuaded the distraught and buffeted professor that a deliberate attempt had not been made on his life. Yapp hadn’t been easily persuaded.

  ‘How the hell was I to know the bloody thing hadn’t been used for sixty years?’ he had squawked as Croxley dragged him from the wreckage.

  ‘I did warn you that it was like living in a museum.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything about the Chamber of Horrors and that fucking bath being an instrument of capital punishment. There ought to be a law against installing bathroom facilities with lethal tendencies. I might have been scalded to death.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Croxley wistfully. Walden Yapp hadn’t been a pleasant sight with his clothes on, but naked, pink, bruised and exuding a sense of outrage, he was the personification of his political opinions. Or so it seemed to Croxley. He left him with the deftly timed remark that he hoped Lord Petrefact wouldn’t take him to the cleaners for wrecking a very valuable piece of domestic Victoriana and, by the look of things through the hole in the floor, the entire room below.