The Gropes Page 3

  The fact that Vera had completely misunderstood the expression, and was announcing to the world that her son had been born out of wedlock and was, as his father frequently thought though never dared say, a little bastard, never crossed her mind. It didn’t cross Esmond’s either. He was too busy enduring the jeers, catcalls and whistles of any and everyone who happened to be in the vicinity at the time.

  To have a blowsy mother who takes one out shopping and announces to the world at large, even if that world at large is merely Croydon, that ‘this is Esmond’ is bad enough, but to be known as ‘a love child’ as well is to put iron into the soul and red-hot iron at that. Not that Esmond Wiley had a soul, or if he did, it wasn’t a particularly noticeable one, but the gaggle of neurons, nerve endings, synapses and ganglia that constituted what little soul he might be supposed to have had were so churned up by these repeated and excruciating disclosures that there were times when Esmond wished he was dead. Or that his mother was. Indeed, a normal, healthy child might well, and justifiably, have done something to achieve one or other of these desirable ends. Unfortunately, Esmond Wiley was not a normal, healthy child. There was too much of his father’s caution and timidity in him. Small wonder perhaps that he took to lurking, hoping to avoid notice and forced to endure another of his mother’s public announcements.

  Esmond’s likeness to Horace Wiley was also a distinct handicap. Other fathers might have been delighted to have a son who so closely resembled them and whose characteristics were almost exact clones of their own. Mr Wiley’s feelings were very different. Over the years of his marriage he had done his utmost to persuade himself that his sole motive for such a rash and disastrous matrimonial investment had been to ensure that the world would be spared the production of any more cautious and timid Wileys with spindly legs and protruding ears. Accordingly, this self-delusive argument went, he had chosen for his wife a tall woman with substantial legs and well-proportioned ears who would bear children (progeny, he called them) of such mixed ancestry that they would be approximately normal. In short, they would be standard products, a choice blend of bravado and timidity, brashness and self-effacement, vulgar sentimentality and cautious good taste who would lead rational and productive lives and wouldn’t feel under any obligation to marry wholly unsuitable wives out of a sense of public duty and eugenics.

  Esmond Wiley made a mockery of his father’s hopes. He resembled Mr Wiley so precisely that there were moments in front of the shaving mirror when Horace had the terrifying illusion that his son was staring back at him. The same large ears, the same small eyes and thin lips, even the same nose, confronted him. Only Horace’s legs were spared this awful symmetry being hidden in striped pyjamas. All else was revealed, grossly apparent.

  And there was something even worse, though the shaving mirror did not show it. Esmond Wiley’s cast of mind, as well as his appearance, was exactly that of his father. Timid, cautious, above all a sad and melancholic lurker and, like his father, possessing a complete aversion to his mother’s taste in reading. In fact, Vera’s attempts to get him to read the books she had been so influenced by, so infatuated by, in her adolescence physically sickened him, and on the few occasions when he couldn’t be found lurking he was often discovered in the bathroom with his head strategically positioned above the bowl.

  In short, there was not a sign of his mother’s cheerful flamboyance, no manifestation of her good-hearted romanticism and not a hint of that passionate self-indulgence and vigour that had played havoc with Mr Wiley’s sensibilities on their honeymoon. Whatever passions and self-indulgences Esmond possessed – and there were days when Mr Wiley doubted the boy had any – were so well hidden that Mr Wiley occasionally wondered if he was autistic.

  At ten and even eleven years, Esmond was a singularly quiet child who communicated, when he spoke at all, only with Sackbut the cat, a neutered (a symbolic act on Mrs Wiley’s part and one that had more to do with Horace Wiley’s lack of performance than with Sackbut’s personal propensities), obese animal who slept around the clock and only roused himself to eat.

  Things might have gone on this way for ever, with Esmond conversing only with the impotent Sackbut and lurking in Croydon corners and never going near Northumberland let alone any of the Gropes, had puberty not had a peculiar impact on the boy.

  At the age of fourteen, Esmond suddenly changed, and in direct contrast to the timidity of his early years took to expressing his feelings with a vehemence that was deafening. In fact, quite literally deafening. The day before Esmond’s fourteenth birthday, Mr Wiley, returning from an enervating day at the bank, was appalled to find the house reverberating to the sound of drums.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he demanded, with a great deal more force than usual.

  ‘It’s Esmond’s birthday and Uncle Albert has given him a set of drums,’ Mrs Wiley replied. ‘I told him I thought Esmond might be artistic and Albert says in his opinion Esmond could be musically talented.’

  ‘He said what?’ Mr Wiley shouted, partly to express his incredulity and also to make himself heard above the din.

  ‘Uncle Albert thinks Esmond is musical and just needs encouraging. He’s given him a set of drums. I think it’s very sweet of him, don’t you?’

  Mr Wiley kept his thoughts about Uncle Albert to himself. Whatever motives Vera’s brother Albert might have had in distributing a set of large drums to an unquestionably highly disturbed adolescent – and from the infernal beat of the things they were very mixed indeed – ‘sweet’ was not the adjective Horace would have applied to Albert. Insane? Yes. Evil? Yes. Diabolical? Yes. But ‘sweet’? A definite no.

  Vera was devoted to her brother, and besides, Albert Ponson was a large and florid man who ran a distinctly dubious business involving supposedly second-hand cars which, in a surprising show of honesty, he advertised as ‘pre-owned’. That the business was in Essex and that, as a sideline, he had a half-share in a pig farm with a DIY abattoir attached, hardly inclined Horace Wiley to object at all strongly to his brother-in-law’s dreadful birthday present. He’d been up to Ponson Place, a sprawling bungalow set back from the road in ten acres of farmland, and the beastly man had insisted on showing him round that appalling slaughterhouse. As a result Horace had fainted at the sight of so much blood and eviscerated carcasses. When he recovered from this terrible visit, he’d come to a definite conclusion: too many of Albert Ponson’s competitors in the used-car business had chosen to retire very hurriedly – or, in the case of one or two more obstinate dealers, to disappear altogether, ostensibly for Australia or South America – for comfort. The fact that Albert had found it advisable to turn his big bungalow into what amounted to a miniature fortress with bullet-proofed and mirror-glazed window glass and steel-lined doors throughout only added to Horace’s fear of him. No, he couldn’t even think of mentioning those damnable drums. The bloody man was a gangster. He was sure of that.

  In an attempt to escape the reverberations coming from the drums, Horace found it expedient to go to the bank far earlier in the morning than usual and to return home a lot later at night. Vera began to believe that Horace was trying to avoid her and that it was the call of the pub rather than the call of work keeping him out late and indeed there was some truth to her suspicions. Be that as it may, it was left to the neighbours to complain about the savage din issuing – sometimes until two in the morning – from Esmond’s bedroom. Mrs Wiley did her best to fight back but the arrival of the Noise Abatement Officer at the height of one of Esmond’s most frenzied assaults on the drums, and the threat of prosecution if he continued, finally persuaded her to listen to reason.

  ‘All the same, I want him to have music lessons, private lessons,’ she told her husband, and was surprised to find he had already made enquiries and had found an excellent piano teacher who had the advantage of living in an isolated cottage ten miles away.

  Esmond went there five times before being asked not to come again.

  ‘But why not? There must be
a reason, Mr Howgood,’ Mrs Wiley said, but the music teacher only muttered something about his wife’s nerves and Esmond’s difficulty with scales.

  Mrs Wiley repeated her question.

  ‘Reason? A reason?’ said the pianist, evidently finding the greatest difficulty in associating Esmond’s awful idea of music with anything faintly rational. ‘Apart from not having my piano beaten to death … well, that is the reason.’

  ‘Beaten to death? What on earth do you mean?’

  Mr Howgood contemplated the empty space on the mantelshelf where his wife’s favourite Bernard Leach vase had stood until Esmond’s violent thumping on the piano had reverberated it off into the fireplace.

  ‘The piano is not entirely a percussion instrument,’ he said finally in a taut voice. ‘It is also stringed. And it is not a drum, Mrs Wiley, it is definitely not a drum. Unfortunately your son finds it impossible to make this distinction. If he has any musical gift … let’s just say he should stick to drumming.’

  Defeated in the matter of her son’s musical development, Mrs Wiley still persisted in her belief that the newly transformed Esmond was naturally artistic. However, after he had expressed himself visually with an indelible felt-tip pen in the downstairs toilet, even she had some reservations about him becoming a painter. Mr Wiley’s reservations were total.

  ‘I am not having the house desecrated simply because you think he’s Picasso come back from the grave, and the cost … when I think of the cost of redecoration! The repairs will come to several hundred pounds thanks to that damned felt-tip pen.’

  ‘I’m sure Esmond didn’t know it would permeate the plaster like that.’

  But Mr Wiley wasn’t to be diverted.

  ‘Seven coats of emulsion and it still showed through, and where has he seen a woman’s whatnot like that? That’s what I’d like to know.’

  Mrs Wiley preferred not to look at it like that.

  ‘We don’t know it was what … what you think,’ she said, drawing him into a trap. ‘That’s just your dirty imagination. I didn’t see it as any part of anyone’s anatomy. I saw it as purely abstract, as line and shape and form and –’

  ‘Line and shape and form of what?’ demanded her husband. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what Mrs Lumsden saw it as. She –’

  ‘I don’t want to hear. I won’t listen,’ Mrs Wiley said, and then saw her opportunity. ‘And how do you know what she saw? Are you saying Mrs Lumsden told you she thought it was a …’

  ‘Mr Lumsden did,’ said Mr Wiley as his wife ground to a halt before the unspeakable. ‘He came in to the bank to ask about extending his overdraft and just happened to mention at the same time that his damned wife had been fascinated to see the drawing of a woman’s fanny on our lavatory wall when she came round for coffee with you the other morning.’

  ‘Oh no, she can’t have. It had been painted over by then.’

  ‘So it had. Twice but it still came through the emulsion. Mrs Lumsden told her husband it actually grew as she sat there.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. How could it grow? Drawings don’t grow. She’s invented the whole thing.’

  Horace Wiley said that was hardly the point. The point was that Mrs Lumsden had seen the … well, the bloody thing growing … all right, not growing, appearing through the emulsion as she sat there, and that scoundrel Lumsden had the nerve to try to increase his overdraft by threatening to let it be known that the Wileys, or more precisely Horace Wiley, made a habit of drawing vulvas, – yes, to hell with whatnots and fannies, let’s get down to nitty-gritties – on the wall of his lavatory, and that being the case –

  ‘You are not going to let him? You can’t possibly allow him …’ Mrs Wiley squawked.

  Horace Wiley seemed to look at his wife for the first and, possibly, the last time.

  ‘Of course I denied everything,’ he said slowly, and paused. ‘I told him to bloody well come and check for himself if he didn’t believe me. Which is why the plasterers are arriving to repair the rest of the damage tomorrow.’

  ‘More damage? What damage?’

  ‘The damage done by a litre of Domestos, a hammer and a blowtorch I paid twenty-five pounds for. And if you don’t believe me, go and have a look yourself.’

  Mrs Wiley had already gone and from the silence that followed Horace knew that for the first time in their married life he had achieved the seemingly impossible. She had nothing to say and the question of Esmond’s artistic education was shelved for good.

  Mrs Wiley had other matters to occupy her mind now and the main one was how very manly she found her husband in this moment of assertiveness. Gazing at the vandalised cloakroom wall she couldn’t help wondering whether Horace might be persuaded to try on the, to date largely unworn, buckskin breeches she had bought him as a wedding present. All in all it might turn out to be rather a good thing that the newly loud Esmond no longer lurked.

  Chapter 4

  Unfortunately for Vera, Horace’s assertive moment was exactly that – a moment. He was back to his timorous ways in no time at all. And if in part it had been his mother’s ambition which had caused Esmond to react with such apparently mindless violence against anything faintly artistic or even sensitive, then his father’s influence over the next few years continued to be hardly less baleful.

  Mr Wiley’s profession no doubt contributed to his old-fashioned insistence that two plus two must invariably make four, that books had to balance and that money didn’t grow on trees but had to be earned, saved and accrue interest, and that the second law of thermodynamics applied as much to human affairs as it did to the realm of physics. Or, as he put it to Esmond one sultry afternoon when, much against both their wills, father and son were sent for a ‘nice’ walk on Croham Hurst, ‘Heat always flows from something that is hot to something that is cold, never the other way round. Is that clear?’

  ‘You mean something that is cold like an ice cube can’t warm a gas fire?’ said Esmond, rather surprising his father with his acumen. Horace himself had never thought of it in such obvious terms.

  ‘Exactly. Very good. Well, it’s the same with money. The law of thermodynamics is true in banking. Money always flows from those who have it to those that haven’t.’

  Under the birch trees at the top of Breakneck Hill, Esmond stopped.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘If the rich are always giving money to the poor, why do the poor stay poor?’

  ‘Because they spend the money of course,’ said Horace irritably.

  ‘But if the rich give away their money, they can’t keep it – and if they don’t keep it they can’t stay rich,’ Esmond objected.

  Mr Wiley looked wistfully at a distant golfer and sighed. He did not play golf himself but he rather wished he had taken it up. The desire to hit something was almost overwhelming and a small white ball might just have served as a sufficient substitute for his son. Resisting this impulse, he instead did his best to smile and at the same time to answer Esmond. Not that he had a clue what to say. He was saved by a faintly religious upbringing.

  ‘The poor are always with us,’ he quoted.

  ‘But why are they always with us?’

  Mr Wiley tried to think of a good reason for repeating a statement he had never considered before in any depth. There hadn’t been any need to. The poor didn’t require his services as a bank manager or, if they did, couldn’t afford them and the only person who might be described as being less than comfortably off in the neighbourhood the Wileys lived in was old Mrs Rugg, the cleaning lady, who came in twice a week to do the hoovering and the heavier housework and who extorted five pounds an hour for the privilege. Mr Wiley didn’t think she had any reason to call herself poor. All the same, having started this train of argument, he had to continue it.

  ‘The reason the poor are always with us,’ he said, suddenly inspired, ‘is that they don’t save. They spend all their earnings as soon as they get them and naturally the rich, who are much more clever, which is why they became rich in the
first instance, get their money back. It is a cyclical process and goes to prove my point. And now I’m going home for tea.’

  It was on such inconclusive arguments about the second law of thermodynamics and a whole host of other topics that young Esmond acquired a sense of certainty. In fact, it was less a sense of certainty than the conviction that, while he would never be able to understand why things were the way they were, there was a fixity of purpose about them, and an unalterable quality about the nature of society that made understanding wholly unnecessary.

  Actually, this was a fairly comforting conclusion, particularly for an adolescent subject not only to the unsettling effects of his own very faint sexual awakening, but also to the scorn of other boys and, worse still, girls for his name, his ears, his funny physique and his not-quite-abandoned tendency towards lurking, especially when under stress. The violence this contempt aroused in Esmond had been temporarily assuaged by his ferocious drumming and those devastating piano lessons, but that respite had been taken away from him.

  Since Esmond’s subsequent crude scribbles on the cloakroom wall failed to have any lasting effect on his mother’s deplorably mawkish feelings for him which she so frequently expressed in public and at such length, he felt somewhat happier at the prospect of a world where understanding why things were the way they were was largely unnecessary if not impossible.

  And so it was that having to choose between his mother’s excruciating love for him and the feelings that that provoked in him, and more comprehensibly his father’s restricted and unchanging views on just about everything, Esmond Wiley thought to model himself upon the latter. Thought being an inoperative word in the entire family’s case, his attempt was bound to fail.

  Chapter 5

  Horace Wiley had in recent weeks developed some slight affection for his son – a boy who could provide him with the means of silencing so voluble a wife, even if this required obscene drawings in the downstairs toilet and the expense of replacing the plaster and redecorating the place, could not be all bad.