Ancestral Vices (12 page)

‘I’ve just had the most preposterous letter from your Uncle Pirkin,’ she said and thrust the thing at him. ‘Of course your father’s entirely to blame but that Pirkin shouldn’t find it outrageous suggests to me that he is going senile.’

Frederick read the letter through. ‘Delusions of grandeur again,’ he said lightly, ‘though why Father should hire a man like Yapp to write the family history is beyond me.’

‘He’s doing it because he knows it will infuriate me.’

‘But Uncle Pirkin seems to think . . .’

‘Pirkin is incapable of thought,’ said Emmelia. ‘He is a collector and a hobbyist. First it was birds’ eggs and then when he grew too arthritic to climb proper trees he started on the family one.’

‘I was going to say that Pirkin seems to be considering some form of collaboration with this Professor Yapp.’

‘Which is precisely what irritates me. Pirkin can hardly string two words together comprehensibly, let alone write a book.’

‘Well at least he could prevent the Yapp man getting very far. A month trying to collaborate with Uncle Pirkin would undermine the most determined historian. And where have I heard the name Walden Yapp?’

‘Possibly in a book about ponds?’ suggested Aunt Emmelia.

‘No, rather more recently. I have an idea he’s some sort of personal Quango.’

‘How very helpful. A Quango indeed. I suppose it would be too much to hope that you are suggesting a comparison with an extinct species of Australian duck?’ said Aunt Emmelia with a vagueness that concealed a very considerable knowledge of current affairs.

‘A Quasi Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization, as you very well know.’

‘I would prefer not to. So we must assume your father has some political motive as well.’

‘Almost certainly,’ said Frederick. ‘If I’m right Professor Yapp has been employed in the past to give strikers what they’ve demanded without seeming to.’

‘It all sounds very unpleasant to me,’ said Aunt Emmelia, ‘and if the creature imagines he will receive any help from me he will soon be disillusioned. I shall do everything in my power to see that this project comes to a speedy end.’

And on this note she led the way towards the cold mutton and the latest family gossip. An hour later Frederick drove back to the Mill with relief. On the way he passed a tall angular man wearing unfashionably long shorts, but Frederick hardly noticed him. Hikers occasionally found Buscott, and he had no idea that the deadly virus of his father’s invention had already arrived in the town.

Nor was Yapp aware of his role. His first impressions of Buscott had been confirmed by his second and third. Far from being the bleak, grim early industrial town of his preconceived imagining, the place looked remarkably prosperous. The town hall, which proclaimed itself to have been built in 1653, was in the process of being restored; the Scientific and Philosophical Society’s building maintained at least a portion of its original purpose by combining Adult Evening Classes with Bingo in the old reading-room. But there was far worse to come. Several supermarkets competed in the main street, a shopping precinct had been converted all too tastefully from Barrack Square, the cattle market teemed with farmers gossiping over the fatstock sale, a second-hand bookshop accommodated almost as many rather fine antiques as it did books, and a glimpse through the wrought-iron gates of The Petrefact Cotton Spinning Manufactory suggested that if cotton was no longer profitable, something else was. All in all Buscott might be isolated but could hardly be described as run down.

But if Yapp’s impressions were disappointing he had more practical problems to deal with. Accommodation came first. Yapp avoided the two hotels on principle. Only the rich or reps stayed in hotels and Yapp wanted neither.

‘I’m looking for a boarding-house. Bed and Breakfast will do,’ he told the several ladies who manned The Buscott Bakery & Creamery where he had found a little tearoom and had ordered a coffee. A muttered discussion
took place behind the counter. Yapp caught as much of the argument as he could.

‘There’s Mrs Mooker used to but she’s given up I hear.’

‘And Kathie . . .’

Nobody thought Kathie suitable. ‘Home cooking I don’t think. Half the reason Joe walked out on her had to do with what she fed him, never minding the other half.’

The women glanced at Yapp and shook their heads.

‘The only place I can think of,’ said the ringleader finally, ‘is Mr and Mrs Coppett up on Rabbitry Road. They do take in visitors sometimes to help out with Social Security. Willy Coppett being what he is. But I wouldn’t recommend it, not with her being the way she is.’

‘I’m not really concerned about my meals,’ said Yapp.

‘It isn’t so much her meals as her . . .’ said another but Yapp was not to hear Mrs Coppett’s faults. A customer had come into the Bakery and the conversation turned to her husband’s accident. Yapp paid for his coffee and went out in search of Rabbitry Road. He found it eventually thanks to an Ordnance Survey map he bought in a stationers and no thanks at all to two people he asked in the street who directed him in several and opposite directions on the off-chance that since it wasn’t in any part of Buscott they knew it must be somewhere else. By then Yapp had walked twelve miles since leaving the train at Briskerton and was beginning to wish he hadn’t.
Buscott might be a small town but it was also a statistically low-density one and Rabbitry Road seemed about as far from the centre as it could possibly be without actually being part of the countryside.

Yapp asked for the bus centre, learned that there were no buses, and ended up in what looked like a wrecked-car dump but which claimed it was a Car Hire Service.

‘I shall only want a car for a few days,’ he told a fat bald man who emerged from beneath an ancient van and announced himself as Mr Parmiter ‘at your service’.

‘Only rent by the month,’ he said. ‘You’d be better off buying this fine van. Going cheap at £120.’

‘I don’t want a van,’ said Yapp.

‘Let you have it for eighty without M.O.T. Can’t say fairer than that.’

‘I still want to hire a car.’

Mr Parmiter sighed and led the way over to a large Vauxhall. ‘Five quid a day. Thirty days minimum,’ he said.

‘But that’s £150.’

Mr Parmiter nodded. ‘Couldn’t put it better myself. The van’s a bargain at a hundred and twenty with M.O.T. Let you have it on Monday. At eighty you can take it off now.’

Yapp stood unhappily and felt his feet. They were exceedingly sore. ‘I’ll hire the car,’ he said and consoled himself with the thought that Lord Petrefact was paying his expenses. He took out his cheque book.

Mr Parmiter looked at it doubtfully. ‘You wouldn’t by
any chance have cash?’ he asked. ‘I mean I can wait till the banks open tomorrow. And there’s discount with cash, you know.’

‘No,’ said Yapp, whose feet reinforced his principles. ‘And I don’t approve of tax-dodging.’

Mr Parmiter was offended. ‘Discount isn’t tax-dodging. It’s just that I don’t trust cheques. They’ve been known to bounce.’

‘I can assure you that mine don’t.’

All the same Mr Parmiter made him write his name and address on the back and then demanded to see his driving licence.

‘I’ve never been treated like this anywhere else,’ Yapp complained.

‘Then you should have bought the van. Stands to reason. A bloke walks in here and turns his nose up at a van for a hundred quid and hires a car . . .’

But eventually Yapp drove away in the Vauxhall and made his way up to Rabbitry Road.

Here at last he found the sort of poverty his statistics had led him to expect. A row of squalid houses backed onto what appeared to be an abandoned quarry and the road had presumably got its name from the remarkable number of holes in its surface. The Vauxhall bounced to a halt and Yapp got out. Yes, this was exactly the sort of social environment he had hoped to find. With the cheerful thought that he’d get the lowdown on Buscott and the Petrefacts from the genuinely deprived, he went down an untended garden and knocked on the door.

‘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.