Ancestral Vices (11 page)

‘What in Heaven’s name is that?’ he demanded.

Lord Petrefact ignored the question. When it came to dealing with public servants he had no scruples. ‘What
do you think you are doing on private property? There is no need to answer that question. I intend to lodge a complaint with the Home Secretary and doubtless you will be required to answer then. In the meantime I give you five minutes to get out of here lock, stock and barrel. If you are still here you will be charged with illegal entry, trespass and damage to property. Croxley, put a telephone call through to the Solicitor General. I’ll take it in the study. Professor Yapp will accompany me.’

And without further ado he ordered the sedan chair to be carried out and across the hall to the study. Yapp followed in a daze of speculation. He had heard of the Influence of The Establishment and had in fact lectured on it, but never before had he seen it so flagrantly in action.

‘Well, I’ll be fucked,’ said the Inspector as the procession departed. ‘Who the hell landed us in this bloody mess?’

‘Mrs Billington-Wall,’ said Croxley, who had stayed behind to avoid having to bear the weight of the sedan chair and to witness the dismay of the Crime Squad. ‘If you want to get yourself out of trouble I would advise you to take her in for questioning.’

And having left this suggestion to cause that wretched woman the maximum inconvenience he followed Yapp to the study. Ten minutes later the police had driven off. Mrs Billington-Wall accompanied them, much against her will.

‘This is a cover-up,’ she shouted as she was bundled
into a police car. ‘I tell you that creature with the Intourist bag is behind it.’

The Inspector privately agreed. He hadn’t liked Yapp from the word go, but then again he hadn’t liked what the Solicitor General had said on the telephone and couldn’t imagine he’d enjoy the inevitable interview with the Chief Constable. Since the weight of authority had come down against Mrs Billington-Wall he meant to concoct some form of excuse from her statement.

Behind them Fawcett House resumed its evil tenor. The notice announcing that visitors would be welcome at two pounds a head was taken down. Yapp accepted a glass of brandy. Croxley accepted the immediate notice of the contract chef and dismissed the caterers. The medical team made up another bed in the private study on the ground floor and Lord Petrefact, having entered it, ordered the converted hearse to be ready to take him to London as soon as he had rested.

Finally, Walden Yapp drove off down the long drive in his rented car with a cheque for twenty thousand pounds in his pocket and a new sense of social grievance to spur his research. He couldn’t wait to get back to his modem and tell Doris all about his recent experiences.

The little town of Buscott (population 7,048) nestles in the Vale of Bushampton in the heart of England. Or so the few guide books that bother to mention it would have the tourist believe. In fact it crouches beside the sluggish river from which it derives the first part of its name and the original Petrefacts had drawn much of their wealth. The old mill still stands beside the Bus and the remains of its wheel rust in a sump of plastic bottles and beer cans. It was here that they had for centuries past ground corn and, if Yapp’s assumptions were right, the faces of the poor. But it is further down the river that the New Mill, built, as Lord Petrefact said, in 1784, looms so monumentally and provides the little town with its sole industry and presumably underpaid employment. Inside its gaunt grey walls generations of Petrefacts had done a brief apprenticeship before moving on, suitably chastened by the experience, to greater and financially more rewarding occupations.

They were about the only people who did move. For the rest Buscott, unaffectionately known to the locals as Bus Stop for the illogical reason that buses had long stopped even passing through, has changed little over the years. It remains what it was, a small mill town, isolated
from the rest of Britain by its remoteness, the silting of the old canal and the axing of its railway line and, most strangely of all, by the very industriousness of its inhabitants. Whatever may be said about contemporary England, workers in Buscott work; the last strike occurred briefly in 1844 and is never mentioned. As if these oddities were not enough, climate and geography combine to cut Buscott off even more completely. TV reception is appalling and the weather so variable that in winter the roads are frequently blocked by snow and in summer are avoided by all but the hardiest hill-walkers.

It was in the guise of such a one that Walden Yapp moved towards the town. Wearing a pair of shorts which reached below his knees and which had been bequeathed him by a Fabian uncle, he strode across the moors carrying a slumped rucksack. Every now and again he stopped and surveyed the landscape with appreciation. Heather, bog, outcrop and the occasional coppice all fitted into his imagination most precisely. This was the approach to Buscott he had foreseen. Even the few tumbledown cottages he passed afforded him satisfaction and spoke nostalgically of rural depopulation in the eighteenth century. That they had never been more than shepherds’ huts and sheepfolds escaped him. His sense of demotic history prevailed. This was Petrefact land and honest yeomen had been driven from these moors to provide fodder for the mill and space for grouse.

By the time he reached the Vale of Bushampton Yapp was a happy man. The memory of his stay at Fawcett had
faded, his cheque had been deposited and he had received several handwritten letters from Lord Petrefact setting out the names of his various relatives who might prove mines of information. But Yapp was less interested in the personal reminiscences of plutocrats than in the objective socio-economic conditions of the working class, and with each stride forward he felt more certain that Buscott would provide in microcosm the definitive data he sought to validate the research he had already done in the University Library.

Over the weeks he had fed Doris with his findings; that the census records showed that the population had remained constant, more or less, since 1801; that the New Mill had until recent times produced cotton products of such excellent quality and low price that they had been able to stand competition from foreign mills far longer than factories elsewhere in Britain; that over half the working population were employees of the Petrefacts; and that ninety per cent of the households, far from holding their houses with anything approaching permanency, rented them from the damnably ubiquitous family. Even the shops in the town were Petrefact possessions and as far as Yapp could make out it seemed probable that he was going to find some form of truck system still in existence. Nothing would have surprised him, he confided to the computer in a preliminary draft of his findings; as usual Doris had obliged by agreeing.

But as in so many things Yapp’s theories proved at some variance to the facts. As he breasted the last rise
and looked down into the Vale he was disappointed not to see the obvious signs of squalor and opulence which marked the division between the town and its owners. From a distance Buscott looked disturbingly bright and cheerful. True, the mill cottages of his imagination were there, as was the New House on the hill. But the cottages were brightly painted, their gardens filled with flowers, while the New House had a gentle elegance about it that suggested a greater degree of good taste in the Petrefact who had built it than Yapp would have expected. It was a refined Regency house with delicately wrought iron balconies and a sloping canopy along its front. A gravelled drive ran up one side of a curved lawn and down the other and behind it there was an herbaceous border and a flowering shrubbery. Finally, a large conservatory gleamed along one side of the house. Even Yapp couldn’t claim that the New House dominated Buscott in the gloomy way he had expected. He turned his attention to the Mill and again was disappointed. The factory might loom over the river, but from where he sat it had a prosperous and positively cheerful air about it. As he watched, a brightly coloured van drove through the gates and stopped in the cobbled yard. The driver got out and opened the back doors and presently the van was being loaded with a speed and efficiency Yapp had never seen in any of the many factories he had studied. Worse still, the workers appeared to be laughing, and laughing workers were definitely outside his range of experience.

All in all his first impressions of Buscott were so
different from his hopes that he unhitched his knapsack, seated himself on the bank and fumbled for his sandwiches. As he munched them he sifted through the statistics he had gathered about Buscott, the low wages, the high unemployment, the absence of proper medical facilities, the total lack of trade-union representation, the number of houses without bathrooms, the infant mortality rate, the refusal of the local and undoubtedly Petrefact-dominated council to provide a comprehensive school on the suspicious grounds that since Buscott didn’t have a grammar school to begin with, the Secondary Modern was sufficiently comprehensive already. None of these grim facts squared with his first impressions of the place, and certainly they didn’t explain the laughter that had reached him from the Mill.

And so with the thought that he had been sensible to come alone to make a preliminary study of the town before sending for the team of sociologists and economic historians he had assembled at the University, he got to his feet and set off down through the woods towards the river.

In his office at the Mill Frederick Petrefact finished finding faults with the proof of the latest catalogue, made a few comments about the false register of the colour photographs, and decided it was time for lunch. Lunch on Thursday meant Aunt Emmelia, inconsequential conversation, cats and cold mutton. Of the four Frederick could never make up his mind which he disliked most.
The cold mutton had at least the merit of being dead, and from the inertia of several cats he had sat on in the past he judged that not all Aunt Emmelia’s menagerie were living. No, on the whole it was the combination of Aunt Emmelia and her conversation that made Thursday a black day for him. It was made worse by the knowledge that without her favour he wouldn’t be where he was, a circumstance that made it impossible for him to be downright rude to her. Not that he liked being in Buscott or running the Mill, but it did give him the chance to make another fortune to take the place of the one his father had denied him. And Aunt Emmelia shared one thing with him: she loathed his father.

‘Ronald is a bounder and a cad,’ she had said when he first came down to explain his problem. ‘He should never have sullied the family name by taking a peerage from that vile little man and I have the gravest doubts about what he had done to deserve it. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he had fled to Brazil. One can hardly see him following the proper example of that other creature who had the decency to shoot himself.’

It was an odd attitude to find in such an apparently homely woman, but Frederick was soon to learn that Aunt Emmelia had at least one absolute principle to which she clung. She had elevated social obscurity to a point of honour and was always quoting the seventeenth-century Petrefact who was supposed to have said that if God had been prepared to answer Moses by conceding only ‘I am that I am’ it behoved the family to be as
modest. Petrefacts were Petrefacts and the name was title enough. In Aunt Emmelia’s eyes her brother had defiled the family by adding ‘Lord’ to the name. It was this rather than his treatment of his son which had won Frederick a place in her peculiar affections and the sole management of the Mill.

‘You can do what you like down there,’ she had told him. ‘It is the business of a business to make money and if you are a true Petrefact you will succeed. I make only one condition. You will not communicate with your father. I will have nothing more to do with him.’

Frederick had agreed without hesitation. His last interview with his father had been so unpleasant he had no wish to repeat it. On the other hand, Aunt Emmelia’s character was too subtle for his liking. He never knew what she was thinking except on the subject of his father and beneath a façade of absent-minded kindness he suspected she was no nicer than the other members of the family.

Certainly her charities were so conspicuously arrogant or downright contradictory – she had once handed a pound to a very wealthy farmer who had celebrated the purchase of some more acres by getting so drunk that he had fallen into the gutter, and had compounded this insult by expressing the hope that he would find gainful employment as a road sweeper for the Council – that Frederick never knew where he stood with her. And as far as he could tell the rest of Buscott felt as uncertain. She refused to go to church and had rebuffed the
arguments of several vicars by pointing to the loving achievements of Christians in Ireland, Mexico and Reformation Britain.

‘I mind my own business and I expect others to do likewise,’ she said, ‘and why God should find merit in groups of people who gather in a building and sing ridiculous hymns rather badly is quite beyond my comprehension. He doesn’t sound right in the head to me.’

On the other hand, it was suspected that she sometimes slipped out at night and put money through the letter-boxes of pensioners, and the New House was a safe depository for unwanted kittens. Finally, there was some doubt as to why she had never married. At sixty she was still a handsome woman and it was generally considered that her objection to marriage lay in having to change her name. All in all, Aunt Emmelia was a human conundrum to everyone.

But duty called and Frederick drove up to the New House as usual. For once Aunt Emmelia was not on her knees tending the herbaceous border, and the conservatory was empty.

‘She’s in a frightful huff ever since the letter came,’ Annie told him. ‘She’s been in the library I don’t know how long.’ Frederick went across the hall to the library rather uncertainly. There were various personal reasons he could think of that might make him the cause of his aunt’s foul mood, but he pushed them to the back of his mind.

He found Aunt Emmelia sitting at her writing-table staring lividly out of the window.