by Tom Sharpe
‘If the Marriage people say it I don’t see how I can do anything about it if I did mind,’ said Willy philosophically, ‘though I don’t want the neighbours to know.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of telling them,’ said Mrs Coppett. And from that moment she had pursued extras as assiduously and as unsuccessfully as the police had kept a watch on the Vicar and the choirboys. Not that she really wanted extras but if the lady insisted she supposed it was her duty.
And now a gentleman had come and said he wanted extras too and he was a real gentleman. Mrs Coppett could tell a gentleman. They wore funny shorts and spoke like the clever people on Any Questions which she couldn’t understand. Mr Yapp was just like them and used long words. So while Willy walked down to the Horse and Barge where he helped pay for his free beer by working behind, or more accurately beneath the bar, drying glasses, Mrs Coppett prepared herself for extras. She got out her best nightie and did her face up with particularly green attention to her eyelids and studied several adverts in a three-year-old Cosmopolitan she’d picked up on a market stall for 2p to see what shape to make her lipstick. Having got so far she wondered about suspender belts. The girls in her Confessions magazines always wore them, though what for she couldn’t imagine. On the other hand they were evidently part of extras and Mr Yapp might feel hard done by if she didn’t wear them. The only trouble was that she didn’t have any. Mrs Coppett searched her tiny mind for a substitute and finally remembered her mum’s corsets which she’d just bought and never worn when she was took bad. If she cut them in half . . . She went downstairs and fetched a pair of scissors and set to work. By the time she had finished and had tied them at the back so that what remained stayed approximately up, she looked at herself in the mirror and was satisfied. Now just a bit of perfume and she would be ready.
*
Yapp had spent a tortured evening. He had looked for a café in Buscott and had found several. They were all shut. He had gone into a pub and ordered his usual half of bitter before enquiring if they served food and learning that they didn’t. On the other hand he might get some at the Roisterers’ Arms. He finished his beer and set off hopefully only to be disappointed. The pub hardly lived up to its name and the landlord had been downright surly. Yapp had ordered another half, partly to appease the man and partly in the knowledge that it was from such embittered sources that some of his most revealing information might well be gleaned. But in spite of his efforts to get the man to talk, all he learnt was that the fellow came from Wapping and was sorry he hadn’t stayed there. ‘A dead-and-alive hole,’ had been his comment on Buscott and while not agreeing with the logic of the phrase Yapp could see what he meant. Two more pubs and he was of the same opinion. Buscott’s night-life was decidedly limited and while people drank in large quantities, they seemed to do so after eating at home. They also stopped talking whenever he entered a bar and were disconcertingly reticent about the Mill, the Petrefacts and any other subject he happened to bring up in an attempt to take an interest in their exploited lives. Yapp made a mental note that they were typically cowed and in fear of losing their jobs. He would have to gain their confidence by making it clear that he was not on the side of the bosses and made a start by announcing that his father had been a toolmaker, his mother had fought in the Spanish Civil War and that he was down in Buscott to investigate the making of a TV film on low pay, long hours and lack of union representation down at Mill. The news was greeted with a lack of enthusiasm he found quite remarkable and in some cases with what he could only judge to be looks of genuine alarm.
‘What did you say your name was?’ asked a more articulate if pugnacious man in the last pub he visited.
‘Yapp. Walden Yapp. I’m staying up Rabbitry Road with Coppetts,’ Yapp answered, dropping both the preposition and the definite article in the interests of working-class solidarity. The fellow ignored these overtures.
‘Well, you’d best be minding your own business,’ he said and finished his pint rather threateningly. Yapp took the hint and finished his own half and was about to order another, and a pint for his friend, when the man nodded to the landlord and left. Yapp smiled wanly and presently went out himself. Perhaps after all he would have to bring the research team down to Buscott and tackle the problem statistically. In the meantime he was extremely hungry and there was bound to be some café open in Briskerton where he had left his suitcase at the railway station. Yapp returned to the Vauxhall and drove out on the Briskerton road.
But for all the sense of anti-climax that Buscott was not as he had visualized it in his mind’s eye and the computer’s chips, and that barriers of almost rustic suspicion had to be broken down before he could get to the essence of the Petrefact influence, the question that most disturbed him was the personal one of Mr and Mrs Coppett’s inherited misfortunes. It was almost as if in some terrifying way they denied the very possibility of that happier world to which all his efforts were directed. A wave of pathos swept over Yapp and was assisted by the beer. He would have to see what he could do about finding Mr Willy Coppett a more fulfilling job than working in a slaughterhouse. It might even be possible to get through to Mrs Coppett that her husband was a sensitive man and to serve him tripe and onions for his supper must necessarily upset him.
With these well-intentioned and kindly thoughts Yapp drove into Briskerton and collected his suitcase at the station. All that remained now was to find a café. But in this respect Briskerton proved no more enlightened than Buscott and Yapp ended up drinking rather more beer than he’d intended while waiting for a plate of sandwiches in another pub.
11
Up at the New House Emmelia sat in the dusk writing letters. Through the open french windows she could see the blooms of Frau Karl Druschki which a long-dead aunt had planted to commemorate, somewhat ambiguously, the passing of her husband. Since the Frau was known to rosarians as ‘The Scentless Cold White Wonder’ and her uncle had been passionately fond of perfumed women, her aunt’s choice had often led Emmelia to wonder if Uncle Rundle had been inclined to warm black mistresses as well. The knowledge would have lent a subtle piquancy to the choice of the rose and a discretion worthy of Emmelia herself. But for the moment she had no time for speculation. She was too busy warning her nephews and nieces, cousins and her three sisters, every relative scattered around the world, of Ronald’s disgraceful plan for a family history.
‘Our honour and, I feel sure, our strength, lie in obscurity,’ she wrote repeatedly. ‘That has always been our greatest asset and I would not have it desecrated now.’
With true Petrifactian arrogance she ignored the mixed metaphor. Assets could be desecrated and while wealth assured the family reputation, the reputation was a means to wealth. Put a Petrefact, however penniless, anywhere on earth and he would by dint of hard work commercial cunning and self-esteem become a wealthy man. It was irrelevant that such a Petrefact could always borrow from the family bank or, if need be, use the credit of his name elsewhere to raise capital. Without the name he would have no credit and it was her business to see that the name remained exclusively obscure. Other great families had had similar opportunities and had disappeared into both poverty and total obscurity by profligate ostentation. The Petrefacts would not follow their example. Professor Yapp, and the name itself was an indication of her brother’s depravity, would find doors barred to him wherever he went in search of information.
And having finished her last letter, one to Fiona, a niece, who lived on Corfu with an epicene contemporary sculptor in what they chose to call a single-sex family, she sat back and considered how best to influence older and more distant relatives over whom she exercised less authority. There was old Aunt Persephone, now in her nineties and confined to a private nursing home near Bedford – partly because she was so old but more deliberately because she had emerged after forty years of widowhood to announce that she intended to marry an already wedded Jamaican ex-bus conductor who had rashly helped the old woman onto his bus on her weekly visit to the Zoo. A word to the Matr
on that Professor Yapp was not to be admitted to see her might be advisable. Judge Petrefact was no problem. He’d see the biographer off with a flea in his ear. So would Brigadier-General Petrefact who spent his retirement attempting to breed Seal-Pointed gerbils by crossing them with Siamese cats, a process that had doomed a great many female gerbils from the start and was now carried on more remotely but just as unsuccessfully by artificial insemination of the cats by the gerbils. Emmelia found the hobby harmless, if decidedly unpleasant, but at least the old soldier had the merit of monomania and she couldn’t see him divulging any information to Yapp. There were still the Irish Petrefacts but they were so subsidiary a branch of the family, and not even financially connected, that she dismissed them at once.
No, the danger lay in that direct line of descent from Great-great-grandfather Samuel Petrefact who had built the Mill, thus launching the family from landowning wealth into industrial fortune which had culminated in Petrefact Consolidated Enterprises. Not only the danger but that flaw in character so clearly manifest in her brother’s actions. It was as though the change of occupation had been the cause of a mutation in the family constitution or, to put it in terms she understood more readily from her love of roses, that somewhere along the line the family tree had grown a ‘sport’ like Kathleen Harrop from Zéphirine Drouhin, only sports were improvements – which was more than could be said for Ronald. It was all very puzzling and disturbing. If her brother was tainted she could hardly have escaped the change herself. Which was true.
With a smile of rather more self-knowledge than her acquaintances would have given her credit for, she closed the french windows, turned out the light and went up to bed.
*
Under the bar of the Horse and Barge Willy Coppett was having a good evening. He could work there washing and drying glasses without being seen, could help himself to bottled beer when he felt like it, and best of all could hear the discussions going on above his head without having to join in. He had already heard Mr Parmiter boasting about renting his old Vauxhall to a professor and making a tidy profit from the deal.
‘Said he only wanted it for a week but he paid for a month without arguing. Some of these scholar fellows know about as much about business as I do about Latin.’
‘Queer,’ said Mr Groce, the landlord. Under the counter Willy thought it queer too. He’d seen Mr Parmiter’s old Vauxhall parked outside the house when he’d come home from the slaughterhouse, but he had no idea that the lodger was a professor. He certainly hadn’t looked like a professor in his shoes and walking boots, and it was all the more surprising that a professor had chosen his house of all places to stay in. Queer, definitely queer. But any doubts about it were dispelled when Mr Parmiter mentioned that Professor Yapp was wearing shorts.
‘Those old-fashioned things they issued us in the desert. Caught you behind the knees, they did, and the sand came up them when you slid down to keep Jerry from shooting your head off.’
Under the bar Willy considered the horrid possibility that the Professor was staying at 9 Rabbitry Road in order to make some sort of medical study of him. It was the only explanation he could think of and he didn’t like the idea. He’d been studied by enough doctors to last him a lifetime and his secret fear was that one of these days they’d find a way of transplanting the bottom half of some very tall corpse onto him to bring him up to normal height. Which was all very well for dwarves that liked it, but he wasn’t one of them. Under the bar Willy shivered and helped himself to another bottled beer.
*
But his fears were as nothing to the consternation that reigned at The Buscott Working Men’s Liberal and Unionist Club. It was typical of the little town that it had managed to combine all colours of the political spectrum within a single institution. On the one hand it had the advantage of being economical, and on the other it maintained corporate unity and avoided the political wrangling that went on in other small towns. In fact Buscott had no politics and no MP and since the county invariably voted Tory there seemed no need to do more than pay lip-service to party allegiance by having a club that embraced them all. On a more practical level it served to keep Buscott’s few alcoholics off the streets by allowing them to drink in company from morning to midnight.
It was here that Frederick Petrefact, following the family tradition to be all things to all men until one could afford to be thoroughly unpleasant to everyone, held court, played snooker and kept an eye open for the arrival of those husbands whose wives he was employing on a piecework basis on the couch of his office at the Mill. And it was here that Mr Mackett, who had warned Walden Yapp that he’d better be minding his own business, arrived with the alarming news that the Professor had come to make a film on low pay, long hours and lack of Union representation at the factory.
‘The bugger’s staying up at Rabbitry Road with Willy and his missus,’ he told Frederick. ‘Says his name is Yapp.’
‘Christ,’ said Frederick, who hadn’t taken his aunt’s concern very seriously. ‘What sort of film?’
‘TV documentary. Something like that.’
‘Someone’s been opening his big mouth,’ said another man. ‘Must have. Stands to reason. We’ve got the system sewn up as watertight as a duck’s arse. So whose lip’s been slipping?’
In Frederick’s mind there was no question. Somehow his damned father had found out where he was and what he was doing and the talk about Yapp writing the family history was merely an excuse for souring his relations with Aunt Emmelia and wrecking his chances of making a fortune. Souring was too mild a word for his aunt’s reaction. She’d flip her lid. And if his father knew then Yapp did too, in which case Aunt Emmelia would certainly find out sooner or later.
Frederick’s mind followed devious lines while the other men argued.
‘The first thing to do is see he doesn’t set foot inside the Mill gates,’ said Mr Ponder. ‘He can think what he fucking likes but he can’t make a film without our cooperation and he’s not going to get it.’
‘He’s got someone’s or he wouldn’t be down here,’ said Mr Mackett.
‘Willy Coppett?’
‘Not in a month of Sundays.’
‘Then why’s he staying with them?’
‘Search me. What he said was he was making an economic something-or-other study of small town growth.’
‘He’s started at the right end with Willy,’ said Mr Ponder. ‘You can’t get much smaller than that.’
‘I think I’ll go over and have a word with Mr Coppett,’ said Frederick. ‘He may know something. In the meantime I suggest we concentrate on ways of making Professor Yapp’s life as uncomfortable as possible.’
‘I’d have thought he was doing that himself, staying with the Coppetts,’ said Mr Mackett. ‘According to Mrs Bryant who lives two houses away his missus won’t let him use the toilet in case he flushes himself down the thing when he pulls the chain. I know Rosie Coppett’s as thick as two planks but that takes the cake.’
Frederick left them discussing means of ensuring that Walden Yapp’s attention was distracted from the Mill and went up the street to the Horse and Barge and ordered a brandy.
‘Is Willy about?’ he enquired.
Willy’s head appeared between the pump handles and nodded.
‘I hear you’ve got a new lodger.’
Willy nodded again. He was in some awe of Mr Frederick. Mr Frederick was a Petrefact and everyone knew what they were. Gentry.
It was Mr Parmiter who came to his rescue. ‘News travels fast, don’t it now? I was only just saying to our Willy here that I didn’t like the look of this man Yapp and blow me if you come in and want to know about him.’
‘I just wanted to confirm what I’d heard.’
‘Shorts,’ said Willy, finally entering the discussion rather cryptically.
‘Give him a brandy,’ said Frederick in consequence.
Mr Groce poured Willy a brandy and handed it to him. Willy shook his head but took it all the same. ‘Wearin
g short trousers.’
Mr Parmiter interpreted. ‘The Professor, as he calls himself, was dressed like a hiker. Khaki shorts and boots. Came into my garage wanting to hire a car.’
Frederick sipped his brandy and listened to the story.
‘Do you think he’s genuine?’ Mr Parmiter asked finally.
Frederick did. ‘I’m afraid so. He’s quite a well-known figure, is Professor Yapp. He’s sat on Government commissions into pay awards and things of that sort.’
‘No wonder he was so short-tempered about income tax and discounts when I offered him one for cash.’
‘Paying five pounds a night,’ said Willy. ‘Given it to Rosie already.’
Frederick bought another round. ‘And has he said what he’s doing down here?’
Willy shook his head.
‘Well, I tell you what I want you to do for me. I want you to listen very carefully to everything he says and then come and tell me. Do you think you can do that?’ Frederick took a ten-pound note out of his wallet and put it on the bar. ‘And there will be more like that if you let me know where he goes and what he does.’
Willy nodded very vigorously. Whatever Professor Yapp might be he was certainly a very useful source of extra income.
‘Just come to my office when you learn anything,’ Frederick told him as he got up to go. Willy nodded and disappeared beneath the bar.
‘Odd,’ said Mr Parmiter when Frederick had gone, ‘must be something extra special to have Master Petrefact so interested. Mind you, it’s a bit of a tall order asking Willy to tail the blighter.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me to hear he’s Customs and Excise,’ said the landlord, ‘come down to have a look at the Bondage Warehouse I daresay.’
‘You could be right at that. In which case Mr Yapp is in for a very unpleasant surprise.’
