Ancestral Vices

  *

  Willy left the Horse and Barge drunkenly. He lurched up Tythe Lane and had an altercation with a Corgi at the back gate of Mrs Gogan’s garden before stabbing several plastic dustbins with his little waggler as a way of letting off steam about dogs that yapped and about Yapp himself. From the lane he crossed the main road after debating whether there were really two cars seemingly coming towards him abreast or merely one. The headlights suggested two and even when the car had passed Willy couldn’t be sure. The only fixed star in his mental firmament was that if he caught Rosie doling out extras to Professor Yapp when he got home he’d show the swine what his own tripes looked like. In short it was a very nasty dwarf who weaved his way up the hill as it began to rain. Willy ignored the rain. He was used to getting soaked but his feet had begun to hurt again. That was another score he had to settle with Yapp. He wasn’t going to spend the next day trotting round town after the long-legged sod. To rest his feet he climbed onto an ancient mile-post and promptly fell off it, in the process losing his beloved little waggler.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Willy and proceeded to grope about on the ground for it. But the knife had disappeared. Willy got down on all fours and crawled out into the road and had just grasped the blade of the knife and was wishing he hadn’t when he became vaguely aware of a noise. Something was coming down the road towards him something dark and large. With a desperate effort he staggered to his feet and tried to scramble up the bank. But it was too late. A moment later Willy Coppett was a badly mangled dwarf and Mr Jipson had stopped the tractor.

  He climbed out of the cab and went round to disentangle what ever bloody animal had got in his way. He had in mind a sheep or even more awkwardly a cow but a brief examination was enough to tell him it was neither. Cows didn’t wear size three shoes and no sheep he had ever known had buttons down its front. Mr Jipson struck a match and before it was blown out by the wind and rain he was a terrified man. He had just killed Buscott’s sole and very popular dwarf. There was no doubt about identification and in Mr Jipson’s mind no doubt that Willy was dead. You didn’t drive large tractors into small people at high speed without killing them. Just to make sure he felt Willy’s unbloodied wrist for the pulse beat.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Mr Jipson and considered the legal consequences of the accident, not to mention his local standing. Buscott might not object to blood sports, but killing dwarves came into an altogether different category. Besides he had been driving without lights, had no number plates on the tractor and far too much alcohol in his body. By adding these factors to Willy Coppett’s popularity it took him less than thirty seconds to decide that this was one accident he had no intention of reporting. He’d dump the body in the ditch and go home. But the body would be found, there would be police enquiries . . . Ditches weren’t enough. Besides, he had passed a car a hundred yards back up the road and while he hadn’t noticed anyone in it they were bound to be about somewhere. They’d be wondering why he’d stopped. Then again . . . Mr Jipson’s thoughts turned to cunning. He walked up the road and peered into the car. No one there. No one over the gate. He thought for a moment and tried the door. It opened. Supposing he took the handbrake off and rolled the car forward . . . No, that wouldn’t do. He’d have to move the tractor first and whoever was wherever they were might come back at any moment. On the other hand there was a chance here of getting Willy’s body as far away from the scene of the accident as possible. Mr Jipson opened the boot and left it open.

  Then he ran down to the tractor, took a plastic sack from the cab, put on a pair of protective gloves and with all the criminal expertise of a man who had watched hundreds of episodes of Z Cars, Hawaii Five-O, The Rockford Files and Kojak, carefully lifted the body and carried it up the road. Three minutes later Willy Coppett was inside the boot, the plastic sack was hanging outside the tractor cab where the rain would wash the blood off, and Mr Jipson was proceeding on his way with the temporary feeling that he’d got himself nicely out of a nasty incident.

  Behind him Willy Coppett’s little life trickled away without pain. Even his waggler was still with him, though he no longer grasped it. Instead, impelled by the front of the tractor, it was embedded in his stomach.

  *

  It was almost half an hour later that Walden Yapp decided that the rain had stopped sufficiently to allow him to get back to the car without getting drenched. Clutching his Y-fronts he climbed the stone wall, trudged across the field, caught his hand yet again on the barbed wire and finally climbed into the driver’s seat with a new resolution. He would leave Number 9 Rabbitry Road in the morning. To stay in so stimulating a presence as Rosie’s was to court disaster and while Yapp’s philosophy rejected such things as honour and conscience in any but the social sense, his innate decency told him that he could never come between a dwarf and his wife.

  Not for the first time Rosie Coppett had spoken the truth. Walden Yapp was a real gentleman.

  15

  The rainstorm that had seen Willy Coppett’s demise and Walden Yapp’s discomfort drove Emmelia into her lean-to greenhouse in the kitchen garden. Ever since her childhood visits to Aunt Maria she had taken refuge in the lean-to in times of stress. It was old, had a grapevine against the brick wall where it produced more foliage in summer than was necessary for its few bunches of grapes, and in winter she tended to use the place as a potting-shed. Here, hidden by the leaves of the vine and to a lesser extent by the algae that grew where the panes of glass overlapped, surrounded by old clay pots and geranium cuttings and with one or two cats who had come in out of the wet, she sat in the darkness listening to the raindrops tapping on the glass and felt almost secure. This was her inner sanctum, fragile and old but hidden away in the walled kitchen garden, itself a sanctuary within the walls surrounding the New House. Nowhere else could she savour her obscurity so religiously or rid herself of the dross of news that reached her via The Times and the radio. Emmelia eschewed television and left it to Annie to watch while she cleaned the silver in the old boot-room. No, she had no time for what went on in the outside world and so far as she could tell the changes that were blazoned by the jet trails across afternoon skies, or featured prominently in public debate about the need for progress, were mere ephemera which nature would one day shrug off with as little compunction as it had buried the forests or turned the Sahara into a desert. Even the threat of nuclear obliteration seemed no more menacing, in fact even less, than the Black Death must have appeared to people living in the fourteenth century. Nature was life and death and Emmelia was content to place herself at nature’s disposal with a cheerful fatalism that recognized no alternative. In her order of things the Petrefacts were an ancient species of articulate plant forever in danger of extinction unless they had their roots in the rich loam of past values.

  In spite of the aplomb she had shown at the Mill that afternoon Emmelia had returned to the house deeply disturbed. While she was the first to admit that past values of the family had included a disregard for the amenities provided for blacks on their slave ships, or for workers in the Mill, and a general preparedness to do whatever an age demanded, however distasteful, by contemporary standards, those methods might seem, the discovery that Frederick had sunk to the level of an artefactual pimp dismayed her. It was also quite extraordinary that she had had to find this out for herself and hadn’t been told. In spite of her isolation from the social life of Buscott and largely thanks to Annie, Emmelia had prided herself on knowing a great many things about events in the neighbourhood. But when she had questioned Annie on her return the housekeeper had denied any knowledge of what they were making at the Mill. Emmelia had to believe her. Annie had been with her for thirty-two years and she had never hidden anything from her before. That being the case she had to credit Frederick with a greater degree of authority and discretion than his repulsive products suggested. She would have to question him about his methods.

  Much more to the point was whether or not her wretched brother knew what his son was up to. If
he did, and had sent Professor Yapp down to disclose the knowledge to the world, she could only conclude that Ronald had gone mad. It was perfectly possible. A strain of insanity ran in the family emerging occasionally and varying in intensity from the mild eccentricity of the Brigadier-General’s obsession for achieving the Seal-Pointed Gerbil to the outright lunacy of a second cousin who, having been exposed at too tender an age to the unexpurgated whimsy of Winnie The Pooh, had grown up with the conviction that he was Roo and every sizeable woman Kanga and had so embarrassed the family at several dinners by leaping into the laps of large female guests that he had to be packed happily off to Australia. There, true to his origins, he had earned a fortune out of sheep and a notorious reputation for being into wallabies.

  Sitting in the darkness of the greenhouse among the pots and plants of her own gentle mania, Emmelia made up her mind. It didn’t matter whether Ronald was mad or not: by sending Professor Yapp to Buscott he was putting the family reputation in grave danger and must be stopped immediately. Nor was it enough to have told Frederick to get rid of Yapp. In fact she rather regretted her injunction now. Frederick was as impetuous and unreliable as his father. He might do something wilful, and in any case driving Yapp out of Buscott could have the effect of confirming Ronald’s suspicions, if that was all they were, that there was something to hide. And, knowing Ronald, next time he wouldn’t send a so-called family biographer but half a dozen ghastly reporters or, even worse, a TV team.

  As the rain lessened Emmelia left the lean-to and returned to the house. There she sat at her bureau and composed one letter rather carefully and a second more abruptly, placed them in envelopes and went through to the boot-room.

  ‘I’ve put two letters on the salver in the hall,’ she told Annie. ‘I want you to see that the postman takes them away and delivers them when he comes in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, mum,’ said Annie and almost provoked Emmelia into telling her for the thirty-second year not to call her mum. It was one of the many little irritations that made up the routine of the household and one she could neither get used to nor wholly regret. As far as she could tell it stemmed from Annie’s too literal interpretation of ‘Mum’s the word’, and since her words were Annie’s law the housekeeper was merely acknowledging the fact and, rather obliquely, her own discretion.

  Emmelia climbed the stairs to her bedroom thinking about another discreet dependant. There was always Croxley and in the last resort she could always call on him. Yes, Croxley, dear Croxley. Emmelia went to sleep thinking about him.

  *

  Walden Yapp hardly slept at all. Where his previous night had been disturbed by Willy apparently maltreating his wife, this time he was kept awake by the dwarf’s unexplained absence and Rosie’s growing agitation.

  ‘It’s not like him not to come home for his supper,’ she said when Yapp returned scratched and with his hands torn. ‘Oh, and what have you been doing to yourself?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Yapp, who wanted to get upstairs and dispose of his soiled Y-fronts in a suitcase before they congealed in his pocket.

  ‘That’s not nothing. You’ve been and gone and cut yourself something fearful. All bloody you are.’

  ‘Just a graze, I slipped on the road.’

  ‘But it’s all down your shirt front too,’ said Rosie. Yapp looked down at his shirt front and for the first time realized that he must have been bleeding more profusely than he had thought. His jacket had blood on it as well. In his examination of whatever he had knocked down Mr Jipson had bloodied himself rather more than he had known in the darkness and had transferred the gore to Yapp by way of the car door.

  ‘I’ll never get it off if you don’t give it to me now,’ said Rosie. ‘Milk’s the best thing.’

  But Yapp had refused to take his shirt off.

  ‘It’s not important,’ he muttered, ‘I can always give it to Oxfam. It’s a very old one.’

  In spite of his protests Rosie had insisted and when Mr Clebb, who lived four doors up Rabbitry Road, took his dog for its urinal walk he was able to witness an already suspect Yapp sitting in his string vest in the kitchen while Mrs Coppett bathed his hands in a basin of Dettol. Since the basin was on Yapp’s knees Mr Clebb couldn’t actually see what exactly she was bathing, but he drew his own conclusions.

  Rosie’s efforts with the shirt – she poured half a pint of milk on the stain and then washed it and hung it up to dry – were less successful. While Yapp went to bed with bandaged hands and the knowledge that if he had got tetanus it wasn’t Rosie’s fault, he was still perplexed about the intransigent bloodstain. He could have sworn he hadn’t wiped his hands on his shirt front but before he had time to consider the matter more fully he was distracted by sobs from the next room. Very briefly he supposed Willy had come home and was laying into Rosie again but, when the sobs went on, his good nature got the better of him. He climbed out of bed, sneezed three times, shivered, put his trousers on over his pyjamas and went out onto the landing.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, conscious that it was not a very relevant question in the circumstances. Rosie Coppett stopped sobbing and opened the bedroom door.

  ‘It’s Willy,’ she wailed, ‘he’s never been out this late before. He said he’d do it and he’s done it.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Run off with another woman.’

  ‘Another woman?’ From the little that Yapp had seen of Willy Coppett it didn’t seem a very likely explanation.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ continued the distraught widow, ‘I didn’t look after him properly.’

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ said Yapp, but Rosie wasn’t to be comforted so easily and with that sudden change of mood that Yapp found so disconcerting she clung to him. Yapp tried to disengage her. Rosie wasn’t easily removed, and this time the sight of Yapp with Mrs Coppett in his arms was viewed with disapproval by Mrs Mane who lived next door and who had come out into the back garden to see if she could make out what was happening at the Coppetts’. By the time Yapp had managed to lead Rosie back to her bed Mrs Mane had no doubts.

  ‘Disgusting,’ she told her husband, climbing back into bed. ‘To think of her and him taking advantage of a blooming dwarf like that. She ought to be ashamed of herself and as for him, calls himself a gentleman . . .’

  At Number 9 Yapp behaved like a gentleman. He did his best to reassure Rosie, thought of the storm as an excuse for Willy’s failure to return – ‘He’s probably staying the night down at the pub’ – discounted her next theory that Willy had been put down a badger’s sett again or was in hospital by pointing out that if that were the case the hospital authorities would have sent word, and that, in any case, putting Persons of Restricted Growth down badgers’ holes was strictly against the law.

  ‘Not in Buscott, it isn’t. They’ve done it before,’ she said and then, having horrified Yapp by her description of the hunt and its consequences, decided against the theory. ‘No, that’s not right. It’s not the time.’

  ‘It’s utterly barbaric, never mind the time,’ said Yapp, who put hunting in the same category as private medicine and would have abolished both these prerogatives of wealth and privilege.

  ‘Time of the year, silly,’ said Rosie. ‘They don’t hunt in summer. But they could still be ratting.’

  ‘Ratting?’

  ‘Put him in a ring with a hundred rats and see how many he could kill in a minute. Then they do the same with a terrier.’

  ‘You mean . . . dear God!’

  ‘They take bets too. Last time Willy got a hundred pounds.’

  ‘How appalling,’ said Yapp with a shudder.

  ‘Not that he won. Old Mr Hord’s dog Bitsy did. But they gave Willy the money for trying and getting bitten so often.’

  By the time he managed to escape Rosie’s list of horrific possibilities Yapp was incapable of sleep. He lay in the darkness, prey to the deepest depression and sudden jolts of terror in which he imagined himself in a ring with a hun
dred frantic rats. Buscott was, in spite of the Petrefact influence and his own computer-stored statistics, from his observations well into the twentieth century and relatively prosperous but beneath the surface there still lingered barbarous sports banned by law and wholly at odds with his faith in progressive thought. Yapp tried to think of a rational explanation for the anachronism of cruelty but as in the case of Idi Amin, Cambodia, Chile, South Africa and Ulster, could only conclude that some people liked killing for its own sake and had no regard for the historical process.

  If his mind was overactive his body matched it. His hands hurt, his head ached and he had pains in his legs and back. He also had a streaming cold which had progressed rapidly from violent sneezing to snuffling and coughing. Yapp tossed and turned restlessly and then fell asleep towards dawn. He was woken at ten by Rosie.

  ‘That’s a nasty cold you’ve got,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t never have got wet last night. Whatever was you up to?’ She felt his jacket on the back of a chair. ‘It’s all damp. No wonder you have been took ill. Now you just stay there and I’ll bring you some hot tea.’

  Yapp murmured his thanks and went back to sleep and when at eleven the postman delivered Emmelia Petrefact’s letter he was still too feverish to be interested.

  ‘It’s from Miss Petrefact,’ said Rosie with a sense of importance which would have irritated Yapp in the normal way but which he now ignored.

  ‘I’ll read it later. I just want to sleep.’

  All day Yapp slept while Rosie worried, first about Willy and what he was up to and then about the Professor and what Miss Petrefact had written about in her letter. She thought about going down to the pub to see if Willy had been there, considered the abattoir and would have gone down if Yapp hadn’t been ill. And what about the doctor? It wasn’t even as though she could ask the neighbours. She’d never got on with Mrs Mane and she wasn’t going to ask her help now. Instead to ease her mind she tidied the house, made shepherd’s pie and apple dumpling for Willy’s tea, and read the horoscope in the newspaper he’d brought the tripe home in three days before. She had to rootle in the dustbin for it and when she found it and had worked out she was a Pisces it didn’t say anything about disappearing husbands but was very accurate on financial benefits, romantic attachments and the need to be careful about health. After that she had another good cry and gave a great deal of unrequited affection to Blondie, the rabbit. Every now and then she poked her head round the door of Yapp’s room in the hope that he was awake and could give her the advice she so badly needed, but Walden Yapp slept on unaware of the reality that was looming over him.