Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘I’m looking for Mrs Coppett,’ he told the old woman who opened it.

  ‘She’s late with the rent again?’

  ‘No,’ said Yapp, ‘I understand she takes in paying guests.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what she does. Not my business is it?’

  ‘All I want to find out is where she lives.’

  ‘If you’re from the Welfare there’s . . .’

  ‘I am not from Welfare.’

  ‘Then she’s at Number 9,’ said the old woman and shut the door. Yapp limped back to the road and looked for Number 9. He found it at the far end of the row and was relieved by the evidence of tidiness in the front garden. Where the other houses had tended to merge with the grim landscape, Number 9 had an individuality all its own. The little lawn was crammed with garden ornaments, most of them gnomes but with the occasional stone frog or rabbit, and while Yapp had aesthetic reservations about such things – and even political objections on the grounds that they were a form of escapism from the concrete and objective social conditions which a proletarian consciousness demanded – in Rabbitry Road they seemed somehow comforting. And the little house was nicely painted and looked cheerful. Yapp went in the gate and was about to knock on the door when a woman’s voice called from the back, ‘Now you come here, Willy, and get Blondie before Hector has him for his dinner.’

  Yapp went round the side of the house and found a large woman hidden behind a sheet which she was hanging on the clothes line. In the background a dog of decidedly contragenic ancestry was chasing a rabbit through the patch of vegetables, most of them cabbages.

  Yapp coughed discreetly. ‘Mrs Coppett?’ he enquired. A pink oval face peered round the sheet.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ she said and transferred her gaze to his shorts.

  ‘I understand you take in paying guests.’

  Mrs Coppett dragged her attention back to his face with some difficulty. ‘I thought you was Willy,’ she said. ‘That Hector will have Blondie if I don’t do something.’

  And leaving Yapp standing she joined the mêlée in the cabbage patch, finally emerging with Hector’s tail in her hands. Hector followed scrabbling at the earth but Mrs Coppett clung on and took him into the kitchen. She came out a few minutes later with the dog on a length of string which she tied to a water tap. ‘You were wanting?’ she asked.

  Yapp adjusted his most concerned smile. It had dawned on him that Mrs Coppett was definitely wanting. If he had been asked to quantify he would have said an additional forty points of IQ.

  ‘You do do Bed and Breakfast?’ he said.

  Mrs Coppett gazed at him and put her head on one side. ‘In a manner of speaking,’ she said in a tone which Yapp had long since termed ‘The Means Test Syndrome’ in his lectures.

  ‘I would like to stay with you,’ he said, trying to make his point as simple as possible, ‘that is, if you have room.’ Mrs Coppett nodded her head several times vigorously and led the way into the house. Yapp followed with mixed feelings. There were social measures to alleviate poverty and make all men equal in material things, but mental inequalities defied his politics.

  The kitchen on the other hand defied even the gnomes in the garden when it came to aesthetics. Yapp found himself gazing with involuntary dismay at walls which were covered with photographs of all-in wrestlers, weightlifters and body-builders, all of whom bulged distorted muscles and wore suggestively inadequate clothing.

  ‘Ever so nice, aren’t they?’ said Mrs Coppett, evidently mistaking Yapp’s astonishment for admiration. ‘I do like a strong man.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Yapp, and found some relief in noticing how clean and tidy the rest of the kitchen was.

  ‘And we’ve got telly,’ she went on, leading the way into the hall and opening a door rather proudly. Yapp looked in and had another shock. The room was as tidy and neat as the kitchen but the walls were once again papered with images. This time they were coloured pictures, presumably cut from greeting cards, and depicted small furry animals with unnaturally large and expressive eyes which looked back at him with a quite nauseating sentimentality.

  ‘They’re Willy’s. He’s ever so fond of pussies.’

  Yapp found the remark gratuitous. Kittens dominated the room. At a rough estimate they were in an absolute majority over puppies, squirrels, bunnies and things that looked like remorseful skunks but which presumably weren’t.

  ‘Well, it helps take his mind off his work,’ continued Mrs Coppett as they made their way upstairs.

  ‘And what sort of work does Mr Coppett do?’ asked Yapp, hoping to hell he wasn’t going to find his room wallpapered with cigarette cards.

  ‘Well, days he does the triping and nights he dries up,’ said Mrs Coppett leaving Yapp with only a vague notion of Mr Coppett’s daily work and the impression that he helped out in the kitchen after supper.

  But at least the bedroom was relatively free from pictures. Some Confessions magazines lay on a dressing-table but apart from their lurid covers and a flight of plaster ducks on the wall the room was entirely to his taste.

  ‘Like a good read,’ Mrs Coppett explained, arranging the magazines more neatly in a pile.

  ‘It all looks very nice,’ said Yapp. ‘How much do you charge?’

  A glimmer of suggestive intelligence came into her eyes. ‘Depends,’ she said.

  ‘Would five pounds a night be reasonable?’

  Mrs Coppett giggled. ‘I’d have to ask Willy. Five pounds would mean extras, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Extras?’

  ‘Supper and sandwiches and all. Of course if you was to stay in evenings early I wouldn’t have to ask Willy, would I?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Yapp, unable to fathom the logic of her remark. ‘But sandwiches would be a great help. I shall be out all day.’

  He took out his wallet and extracted seven five-pound notes.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Mrs Coppett, ogling the notes, ‘you do want extras. I can tell that.’

  ‘I always like to pay in advance,’ said Yapp and handed her the money. ‘Now that’s for the week.’

  And with another giggle Mrs Coppett went downstairs.

  *

  Left to himself Yapp untied his boots before remembering that his knapsack was still in the car, did them up again, trudged down and ran the gauntlet of Mrs Coppett’s muscle-bound idols and the garden gnomes, got the bag and asked if it would be all right if he had a bath. Mrs Coppett hesitated and immediately Yapp went into convulsions of social embarrassment. The Coppetts were probably too deprived to have a bathroom. As usual he was wrong.

  ‘It’s just that I do like Willy to have a shower before he has his tea,’ she explained. Yapp said he quite understood.

  ‘If you don’t use all the hot water . . .’ said Mrs Coppett. Yapp went back to his room and, having examined his feet and found them in better condition than they felt, crossed the landing and was about to go into the bathroom when he noticed that the door of the Coppetts’ bedroom was open.

  For a moment he stopped and eyed the apparent evidence of yet another domestic tragedy. Beside the double bed stood an empty cot. Since Mrs Coppett showed no signs of being pregnant and, considering her own inheritance, Yapp hoped that she never would be, the cot seemed to point to an unrealized dream or – worse still – a miscarriage. Even some fantasy of motherhood, because a diminutive pair of pyjamas were folded on the pillow. Yapp sighed and went into the bathroom. There too he was puzzled. The bath was there but no sign of a shower apart from an extension from the taps that was attached to the wall four feet above. With the thought that the human condition was in some ways irremediably sad, Yapp sat on the edge of the bath and bathed his feet.

  He had just finished and was drying them cautiously when he heard voices from below. Mr Coppett had evidently come home from work, whatever that work was. Yapp opened the door and was crossing the landing when the full realization of just how irremediably sad the human condition could be, what Mrs Coppett had meant by t
riping, the significance of the cot, the tiny pyjamas and above all her insistence that Willy take a shower before sitting down to his tea – all these peculiarities were revealed to him. Mr William Coppett was a dwarf (in his horror Yapp forgot the polite usage of Porg) and a bloody dwarf at that. In fact if he hadn’t been coming up the stairs Yapp might well have mistaken him for one of the more brilliantly painted gnomes in the garden. From his little cap to his once-white gumboots, size 3, Mr Coppett was stained with recently spilt blood and in his hands he held a particularly nasty-looking knife.

  ‘Evening,’ he said as Yapp stood transfixed. ‘Work down at abattoir. Horrible work.’

  Before Yapp could begin to express his agreement Mr Coppett had disappeared into the bathroom.

  10

  An hour later Walden Yapp was still in a state of vicarious misery.

  During all his years of dedicated research into poverty traps, post-adult isolation, racial and sexual discrimination and the miseries inflicted by the affluent society he had never come across a case of alienation to equal Mr Willy Coppett’s. That a deeply sensitive, animal-loving Person of Restricted Growth, married to a barren and frustrated Person of Extremely Limited Intelligence, should be forced to earn his living as a tripe-carver was a monstrous example of the failure of society to cater for the needs of the underprivileged. He was just considering how best to classify Mr Coppett’s case in socio-terminology and had decided that ‘an individual genetic catastrophe’ was not too strong when he was stopped in his tracks by a smell. Yapp sat on the edge of his bed and sniffed.

  Drifting up from the kitchen came the unmistakable odour of tripe and onions. Yapp clenched his teeth and shuddered. Mrs Coppett might be a half-wit, and more probably an eighth one, but surely there were limits to her insensitivity. Yapp had to doubt it. The garden gnomes and the all-in wrestlers daubing the kitchen walls indicated a positively unerring, if unconscious, sense of sadism in the woman. In the dim recesses of her mind she clearly blamed her husband for his inadequacies. Domestic cruelty compounded social misery. Yapp got up and went downstairs and out to his car. By staying with the Coppetts he was helping them financially but he had no intention of sitting down and witnessing the poor Porg’s humiliation over supper. Yapp drove down into town to look for a café.

  But, as was so often the case, his diagnosis was wrong. In the kitchen of Number 9 all was perfectly well. Yapp might speak of Persons of Restricted Growth but Willy was more than content to be called a dwarf. It gave him status in Buscott, people were invariably polite to him and he was never short of part-time jobs. True, there were the few more genteel elements who felt it a shame that Willy should be asked to go down blocked drains with a trowel to clear them out or, on one occasion, lowered on the end of a rope into the well behind the Town Hall to retrieve the Mayor’s hat which had blown down there during a particularly windy inaugural speech, but Willy was ignorant of their concern. He enjoyed himself and regularly rode with the Bushampton Hunt seated on the cantle of Mr Symonds’ saddle facing the horse’s tail, where he had a very fine view of the countryside and was spared the sight of the kill.

  Indeed, on one hunt he had been persuaded to insert himself into the badger’s sett, in which the fox had taken temporary refuge, by the argument that the terrier must have got stuck or hurt. The fact that the fox had already departed from another hole and that the terrier was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with several enraged badgers who resented first the fox’s intrusion, then the terrier’s and finally Willy’s, escaped the notice of the Hunt. Willy was less fortunate; having been bitten on the nose by the terrier who mistook his rescue attempt for an attack from the rear, he was lucky not to lose an entire hand to an extremely disgruntled badger. In the end both Willy and the terrier had had to be dug out and carried, bleeding badly, to the local vet who disapproved violently of foxhunting. In his fury the vet was on the point of putting the unrecognizably human Willy down before attending to the terrier when Willy raised a bloodied and muddied handkerchief to his nose. The shock to the vet had been so extreme that all three had to be taken to the Buscott Cottage Hospital for treatment. Here the vet’s hysterical statement that he objected to blood sports and murdering dwarves wasn’t part of his job elicited little sympathy, while Mr Symonds could only account for Willy’s injuries by saying he had offered to lend a hand.

  ‘Lend a hand?’ shouted the doctor. ‘He’ll be lucky if he keeps the thing. And what the fuck did that to his nose?’

  ‘His handkerchief,’ moaned the vet, ‘if he hadn’t taken out his little handkerchief . . .’

  The doctor turned savagely on the man. ‘If you’re seriously suggesting that a mere handkerchief savaged his nose in that terrible fashion you’re out of your mind. And don’t keep bleating you could have killed him. From the look of his injuries you’ve damned near succeeded.’

  But Willy’s stoicism and fondness for animals saved the day. He refused to blame even the badgers. ‘Went down hole. Couldn’t see,’ he maintained in tones of acute catarrh.

  For which courageous refusal to blame anyone he was given the freedom of the beer at all Buscott’s pubs and earned himself fresh popularity. Only the Health Authorities took exception. ‘He ought to be in a home,’ they told Mrs Coppett when she visited him at the hospital.

  ‘He would be if he weren’t here,’ said Mrs Coppett with impeccable logic, ‘and a very nice home too.’

  And, since Willy agreed, there was nothing they could do apart from send the occasional Health Inspector who invariably reported that Mrs Coppett was an excellent surrogate mother and met all Willy’s needs to perfection. As to whether or not he met hers, the Health Inspector couldn’t say and there was some understandable, if prurient, speculation.

  ‘I should think the poor fellow would be hard put to it,’ said the Medical Officer. ‘Of course one never knows. Hidden talents and all that. I remember a giant of a fellow in the army who had the . . .’

  ‘Let’s face it,’ interrupted the Chairman hurriedly, ‘we’re not here to go poking our noses into other people’s sex lives. What the Coppetts choose to do in the privacy of their own home has nothing to do with us.’

  ‘Blissfully,’ murmured the Medical Officer. ‘And talking of noses . . .’

  ‘I think the Marriage Advice Bureau should have a word with them,’ said the Senior Social Worker. ‘Mrs Coppett has a mental age of eight.’

  ‘Four on a good day.’

  ‘She is also a not unattractive woman . . .’

  ‘Listen,’ said the Medical Officer, ‘my experience with the Marriage Advice Bureau is that they do more harm than good. I’ve already had one moronic woman at the clinic demanding a post-natal abortion and I don’t want another.’

  But in spite of his objections a Marriage Counsellor was sent to call at 9 Rabbitry Road. In true bureaucratic tradition she had not been adequately briefed and had no idea that Mr Coppett was a dwarf. And when after half an hour she discovered that Mrs Coppett was still apparently a virgin she did her best to instil in her a proper sense of sexual deprivation.

  ‘We’re not living in the Middle Ages, you know. The modern wife can demand her right to a regular orgasm and if your husband refuses to give you one, you’re entitled to an immediate divorce on grounds of non-consummation.’

  ‘But I love my little Willy,’ said Mrs Coppett, who hadn’t a clue what the woman was on about, ‘I tuck him up in his cot every night and he snores ever so sweetly. I don’t know what I’d do without him.’

  ‘But I understood you to say that you had never had sexual intercourse. Now you say you have a child called Willy,’ said the woman, ploughing forward into a mass of misapprehension.

  ‘Willy is my husband.’

  ‘And you put him to bed in a cot?’

  Mrs Coppett nodded.

  ‘And he doesn’t sleep with you?’

  Mrs Coppett shook her head. ‘He’s ever so happy in his cot,’ she said.

  The woman hitched her cha
ir forward with all the fervour of an outraged feminist. ‘That’s as maybe. But if you want my opinion your husband is clearly a sexually inadequate pervert.’

  ‘Is he really?’ said Mrs Coppett. ‘Well I never.’

  ‘No, and you’re not likely to so long as this unhealthy relationship continues. Your husband needs the help of a psychiatrist.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A doctor who deals with mental problems.’

  ‘He’s been to ever so many doctors but they can’t do no good. They wouldn’t, would they? Him being the way he is.’

  ‘No, it sounds as though he’s definitely incurable. And you won’t leave him?’

  Mrs Coppett was adamant on the point. ‘Never. Vicar said we was to stay together and Vicar’s always right isn’t he?’

  ‘Possibly he wasn’t aware of your husband’s condition,’ said the Marriage Counsellor, suppressing her own atheism in the interests of rapport.

  ‘I think he must have been,’ said Mrs Coppett. ‘It was him as got Willy to sing in the boys’ choir.’

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘And your husband agreed?’

  ‘Oh yes. He likes dressing up and all that.’

  ‘So I’ve gathered,’ said the Marriage Counsellor, making a mental note to stop at the police station on her way back to County Hall. ‘Well, my dear, if you won’t leave him the best I can suggest is that you find a proper, healthy sex life in an extramarital affair. No one could possibly blame you.’

  And with this dubious counsel she got up to leave. By the time Willy came home that evening Mrs Coppett had forgotten the ‘marital’. All she knew was that the lady had said she ought to have ‘extra’.

  ‘Extra what?’ said Willy, tucking into his ham and eggs.

  Mrs Coppett giggled. ‘You know, Willy. What we do in bed on Fridays.’

  ‘Oh that,’ said Willy, whose secret fear was that one of those Fridays he’d be crushed to death or suffocated.

  ‘You don’t mind?’