Ancestral Vices (6 page)

But Lord Petrefact raised his hand. ‘No need, my dear fellow, no need at all. I know what you’re going to say and I agree absolutely with your preconditions. Precisely why I chose you. We Petrefacts may have our faults and I’ve no doubt you’ll catalogue them in detail, but one thing you won’t find in us is self-deception. I suppose another way of putting it would be to say we lack vanity, but that would be going too far. You’ve only got to look
at this infernal house to see to what lengths my grandparents went to proclaim their social superiority. And a fat lot of good it did them. Well, I’m of another generation, another epoch you might say, and if there’s one thing I value above all else it is the truth.’

And managing to hold both his cigar and his brandy glass in one hand he grasped Yapp’s wrist rather unnervingly with the other.

‘The truth, sir, is the last repository of youth. How’s that for a saying?’

Much to Yapp’s relief Lord Petrefact let go of his wrist and sat back in his chair looking remarkably pleased with himself.

‘Now what do you say to that?’ he insisted. ‘And there’s no use your looking in La Rochefoucauld or Voltaire for the maxim. Mine, sir, my very own and none the less true for that.’

‘It’s certainly a very interesting notion,’ said Yapp, not certain that he fully understood what the extraordinary old man was saying but feeling that it must have some significance for him.

‘Yes. The truth is the last repository of youth. And while a man is prepared to look truth in the face and see the mirror of his defects, let no man call him old.’

And having delivered himself of this phrase so redolent of Churchill, Beaverbrook and possibly even Baldwin at his most meaningless, Lord Petrefact blew a smoke ring from his cigar with great expertise. Yapp watched, mesmerized, as the ring of smoke, like some ectoplasmic
ripple of personality, wafted its way towards the fireplace.

‘If I read you right,’ he said, ‘what you’re saying is that you are prepared to give me a free hand to research the history of the Petrefact family with all the economic and financial data made available to me and that there will be no interference with my socio-economic deductions from that data.’

‘Exactly,’ said Lord Petrefact, ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

Yapp sipped his brandy and wondered at this remarkable generosity. He had prepared himself to turn the whole proposition down if there had been the slightest suggestion of his being asked to write a puff for the Petrefacts – and in fact had been rather looking forward to this demonstration of his high principles – but the last thing he had expected was to be given a free hand. It took some getting used to. Lord Petrefact eyed him closely and savoured his confusion.

‘No let or hindrance, sir,’ he said, evidently feeling that ham was paying off. ‘You can go where you like, look at whatever documents you want, talk to anyone, read the correspondence, and there’s enough of that I can tell you, most revealing stuff too, and all this for the . . .’ He checked ‘princely sum’ just in time. There was no point in alienating the young fool just when he had him hooked. Instead he felt in his pocket and produced a document. ‘One hundred thousand pounds. There’s the contract. Twenty thousand on signature, a
further twenty on completion of the manuscript and sixty thousand on publication. Can’t put it fairer than that. Read it through carefully, have whoever you like check it out, you won’t find a flaw in it. Drew it up myself, so I know.’

‘I’ll have to think about the offer,’ said Yapp, fighting down a sense of quite extraordinary euphoria and glancing at the first page of the contract. And as if to indicate that he was the last person to bring the pressure of his personality to bear on anyone Lord Petrefact whirred across the room to the door and with a final remark about helping himself to anything he wanted and not worrying about the lights because the servants would see to them, he wished Yapp goodnight and disappeared from the room. Yapp sat on, stunned by the suddenness of it all and with the heady feeling that he had been in the presence of one of the last great capitalist robber barons. Twenty thousand pounds on signature and twenty thousand . . . And no preconditions. Not a single thing to prevent him from documenting the exploitation, the misery, and the rapacity which lay behind that misery, which the Petrefacts had caused their workforce over more than a century.

There had to be a snag somewhere. Walden Yapp emptied his glass, poured himself another brandy and settled down in comfort to read through the contract.

In the next room Lord Petrefact sat in the darkness for some time savouring his cigar but cursing himself for his stupidity. He also cursed Croxley for the episode of the foreshortened pig and would, if he could have reached him, have given the swine a week’s notice and a piece of his mind. But Croxley had chosen to sleep upstairs. Fawcett House was ill-equipped with elevators and Lord Petrefact too sensible even to consider attempting to manoeuvre his wheelchair up the marble staircase, particularly a marble staircase that had already demonstrated its lethal propensities in the case of Great-Uncle Erskine. Lord Petrefact could recall the tragedy with vivid satisfaction, though it remained a mystery why his great uncle should have first urinated against the balcony before stepping to his death clad only in a partially unveiled condom. Presumably the old goat had mistaken one of the marble statues in a niche for a housemaid.

But that was beside the point. What was closest to it was that the egregious Croxley was upstairs and he was downstairs and he would have to wait until morning before venting his fury on the idiot. No, what was particularly irking him was that he had offered the imbecile Yapp such extraordinarily generous terms for
research the raving lunatic would have gladly done for free. There was the added irritation of wondering if Yapp, for all his reputation, would prove the right man for the job. His politeness at dinner hadn’t suggested the ruthless hatchet-man Lord Petrefact would have chosen to let loose on his family. With the thought that he would have to point the brute in the right direction, Lord Petrefact trundled off to his bedroom and the ministrations of the resuscitation team whose female members had the unenviable task of getting him into bed at night and out in the morning.

In the drawing-room Yapp finished studying the contract and, conscious that he was keeping the servants up until a quite unnecessarily late hour, made his way along the corridor and up to his room. As far as he could tell, and he had studied the fine print with particular care, there was absolutely nothing in the contract to prevent him from writing the most scurrilous history of the family imaginable. It was most extraordinary. And for this gift of socio-economic-fiscal data he was to be paid one hundred thousand pounds. It was an unnerving thought – almost as unnerving as knowing that he was about to sleep in a bed once occupied by the tyrant of the Congo.

It was hardly surprising that Walden Yapp had difficulty in going to sleep. While Lord Petrefact lay below him considering which of his relatives would least appreciate Yapp’s enquiries into their private affairs, the great Demotic Historiographer found sleep almost as awkward. He kept waking and staring at the shape of the
window, wondering at his good fortune before dozing off again. When he did sleep it was to dream of pigs in wheelchairs and Lord Petrefact horribly distorted with his slippered feet more or less where his shoulder blades should have been. To make matters worse, there was no reading lamp beside the bed and he couldn’t lull his imagination into a comfortable torpor by dwelling on the sufferings of knife-grinders in Sheffield in 1863, a doctoral thesis of one of his students he had brought with him to serve as bedside reading. Above all, there was no modem. If only he could have fed the contract to Doris he felt sure she would have seen the flaw in it somewhere. But that would have to wait until he got back to his apartment at Kloone.

Even Croxley, normally an excellent sleeper, found himself for once prey to insomnia. He had managed to escape the immediate fury of Lord Petrefact in respect of the makeshift sucking pig, but the morning would undoubtedly see an explosion of wrath. Croxley resigned himself to this inevitable outburst. The old man might blast him to hell and gone, but Croxley knew his own worth and his job was not in danger. No, there was something more insidious going on, and for once he had no insight into Lord Petrefact’s motives. Why had he invited this subversive scholar to Fawcett? It was beyond Croxley. And if Lord Petrefact cursed himself for having offered such a large sum to Yapp for his research, Croxley blamed himself for not having used the opportunity at dinner to find out from Yapp why he was there. Anyway,
whatever the reason, Croxley disapproved of it. Searching back in his mind for a motive, he could only suppose it had to do with the proposed closure of the plant at Hull. That was certainly on the cards and perhaps Yapp was a possible arbitrator in the dispute. In which case the old man might be trying to buy him off. But that didn’t explain the way in which he had fawned on the wretched creature. In half a century of self-indentured loyalty to Lord Petrefact and total devotion to the family, Croxley could remember only very few occasions when the old man had attempted so ferociously to hide his true feelings. There had been the time he needed Raphael Petrefact’s holdings in American Carboils to effect a take-over, and another when he had required the collaboration of Oscar Clapperstock to bankrupt a competitor, but apart from those two vital moments in his career Lord Petrefact had been conscientiously unpleasant. It was one of the qualities Croxley most admired about him, this relentless pursuit of private profit at the expense of personal popularity. But eventually even the puzzled Croxley drifted off and Fawcett House resumed the grim silence and sepulchral splendour that seemed to commemorate so eloquently the suffering millions who had made its building possible.

But it was precisely the thought of those suffering millions that finally drove Walden Yapp from his bed.
How could he possibly accept one hundred thousand ill-gained pounds from a man whose proudest and most publicized boast had been to paraphrase Churchill, ‘Never in the field of private enterprise has so much been owed by so many to one man.’ The whole notion of being paid in coinage that was stamped with the blood, sweat, tears and sputum of silicotic miners in Bolivia and South Africa – not to mention tea workers in Sri Lanka, lumberjacks in Canada, bulldozer drivers in Queensland and in fact workers just about anywhere you cared to mention in the world – was intolerable. And if that wasn’t bad enough there was the thought of what the contract could do to his own immaculate reputation. It would be said that Walden Yapp had been bought, had become the lackey, the publicity man for Petrefact Consolidated Enterprises, and had renounced his principles for a mere hundred thousand pounds. He would be blackballed by the Tribune group, turned away from the steps of Transport House and cut in the street by such middle-of-the-roaders as Wedgie Benn. Unless, of course, he donated the entire sum to some deserving charity like the ILO or the Save Pol Pot Fund. Something of that order anyway would certainly answer his critics and he could go on with his research into methods of exploitation used by the Petrefacts. Yes, that was the answer, and with the happy thought that no one could possibly decry the name Yapp in the annals of Socialism he went through to the bathroom and decided that if he
couldn’t sleep in the same bed as the vile monarch he might as well try out the antediluvian bath. It would be a start in his research into how the very rich had lived.

In the event it surpassed his expectations. Having read the instructions again Yapp pulled the lever marked
PLUG
, turned the temperature gauge tap until the dial read 70° and waited while the bath had reached the two-thirds capacity required for
WAVE MOTION
. Only then did he turn the tap off and step into the vast bath. Rather, he
would
have stepped if the thing hadn’t suddenly lurched sideways and thrown him off his feet. The next moment he was scrabbling for the lever and the bath had lurched the other way. Yapp slid down it and collided with the spout and was trying desperately to grab hold of it when, with an appalling grinding noise, the bath changed direction and simultaneously began to vibrate. As he slid precipitously down it, helped by a bar of soap that had lodged itself between his buttocks, Yapp grabbed the lever and swung it to
JET
. The indicator fulfilled this promise with an enthusiasm that came presumably from years of understandable neglect. Hot rusty water hurled itself from holes beneath the mahogany surround. With a yell Yapp grasped at a curtain and tried to pull himself to his feet. But the bath clearly had other ideas of its own. As the curtain tore from its corroded railing and the devotee of computers and multiple modes of function crashed once more into the water and scalding jets, the infernal contraption combined every mode of function its insane designer had contrived
for it. It waved, it jetted, it vibrated and now it demonstrated its capacity to steam. From one series of holes came the jets, from another a cloud of steam that ended all Yapp’s attempts to grab the lever and shove it into neutral. He couldn’t even see the lever as he hurtled past it, let alone grab the thing. And all the time there came the thump and grind of whatever antiquated mechanism – Yapp could only suppose it to be some infernal beam engine – animated the Synchronized Ablution Bath.

It was this incessant thumping that finally woke Lord Petrefact in the room below. He opened his eyes, blinked, reached for his glasses, missed them and lay staring at the ornately plastered ceiling above him. Even without his glasses it was clear that something was seriously wrong, either with his liver – and the din gave the lie to that – or with the whole damned building. On first reflection he would have said that the place had been hit by an unusually severe earthquake, except that earthquakes didn’t go on and on and on. Nor, as far as he knew, were they accompanied by what sounded like a runaway steam engine.