Ancestral Vices
Authors: Tom Sharpe
About the Author
Tom Sharpe was born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He did his national service in the Marines before going to South Africa in 1951, where he did social work before teaching in Natal. He had a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg from 1957 until 1961, and from 1963 to 1972 he was a lecturer in History at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.
He is the author of sixteen novels, including
Porterhouse Blue
and
Blott on the Landscape
which were serialised on television, and
Wilt
which was made into a film. In 1986 he was awarded the XXIIIème Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir Xavier Forneret and in 2010 he received the inaugural BBK La Risa de Bilbao Prize. Tom Sharpe died in 2013.
Riotous Assembly
Indecent Exposure
Porterhouse Blue
Blott on the Landscape
Wilt
The Great Pursuit
The Throwback
The Wilt Alternative
Vintage Stuff
Wilt on High
Grantchester Grind
The Midden
Wilt in Nowhere
The Gropes
The Wilt Inheritance
Ancestral Vices
Tom Sharpe
1Lord Petrefact pressed the bell on the arm of his wheelchair and smiled. It was not a nice smile, but few of those who knew the President of Petrefact Consolidated Enterprises at all well, and they were an unlucky few indeed, would have expected him to smile nicely. Even Her Majesty, persuaded against her better judgement by the least scrupulous Prime Minister to grant Ronald Osprey Petrefact a peerage, had found his smile almost threatening. Lesser dignitaries were accorded smiles that ranged from the serpentine to the frankly sadistic depending upon their standing with him, a function purely of their temporary utility, or, in the case of his more memorable smiles, of his not needing them at all.
In short, Lord Petrefact’s smile was simply the needle of his mental barometer whose scale never registered anything more optimistic than favourable and was more frequently set at stormy. And since his illness, occasioned by the combined efforts of one of his financial editors (who had unwittingly slated shares in which Lord Petrefact had recently invested) and a particularly resentful oyster, his smile had assumed such a lopsided bias that it was possible to sit on one side of him and suppose that, far from smiling, he was merely baring his dentures.
But on this particular morning his smile almost approached the genial. He had, to employ his favourite metaphor, thought of a way of killing two birds with one stone, and since one of those birds consisted of the members of his own family, it was a singularly pleasing thought. Like so many great men Lord Petrefact loathed his nearest and dearest, their nearness and in the case of his son, Frederick, certainly his dearest in financial terms, being directly proportional to his loathing. But it wasn’t simply his immediate family who would be put out by what he had in mind. The numerous and infernally influential Petrefacts scattered about the world would be highly indignant, and since they had always disapproved of him he found a great deal of pleasure in anticipating their reactions.
In fact it had taken all his financial guile and the collaboration of an American company which he had surreptitiously taken over to put an end to their meddling in what had until then been the family business. Even his peerage had been a source of considerable acrimony and it had only been his argument that unless he was allowed to elevate his own name he would almost certainly desecrate that of the entire Petrefact tribe by going to gaol that had persuaded them. But then they prided themselves on being one of the oldest families in the Anglo-Saxon world and counted among their ancestors several who predated the Conquest. Not that they had made themselves socially conspicuous. They had, as it were, kept themselves to themselves to the point where
Uncle Pirkin, who compiled the genealogical record in Boston, Mass., had several times to invent spurious wives to obscure the taint of incest.
Certainly for some rather sinister reason the Petrefacts had produced a statistically abnormal number of supposedly male offspring. For once Lord Petrefact had to agree with old Pirkin. The evidence of abnormality, both statistical and sexual, had been brought home to him by his sons. His wife, the late Mrs Petrefact, had boasted rather prematurely that she never did things by halves and had promptly contradicted her assertion by producing twins. Their father had greeted their birth with some dismay. He had married her for her money, not for her ability to turn out twins at the drop of a hat.
‘I suppose it could have been worse,’ he had grudgingly admitted on hearing the news. ‘She could have spawned quadruplets, and daughters at that.’
But by the time the twins, Alexander and Frederick, had reached puberty even their doting mother was beginning to have doubts.
‘They’ll probably grow out of it,’ she told her husband when he complained that he had found them role-swapping in his
en suite
toilet. ‘They’ve simply got an identity problem.’
‘What I saw didn’t suggest simplicity,’ snapped Petrefact, ‘and when it comes to identity I’ll know one from the other when one of the little sods stops wearing earrings.’
‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘And I didn’t want to see. So for Chrissake lock your goddam suspender belts away someplace.’
‘But, Ronald, I gave up wearing them years ago.’
‘Well I just wish everyone else around here would too,’ said Lord Petrefact, slamming the door to emphasize his disgust. But the uncertain gender of his sons continued to haunt him and it was only when Frederick had proved his manhood, at least in part, by being seduced by one of his mother’s best friends that Lord Petrefact was reconciled to the thought that he had one male heir. With Alexander there was no knowing. Or not until one evening several years later when Frederick, who should have been at Oxford, sauntered into a reception being held to honour the Minister for Land Development in Paraguay who was on the point of negotiating the sale of ninety per cent of his country’s mineral rights to the Petrefact subsidiary, Groundhog Parities.
‘I am afraid I have to announce that we have just lost a member of the family,’ he told the assembled company, looking with pointed gloom at his mother.
‘Not . . . you can’t mean . . .’ began Mrs Petrefact.
Frederick nodded. ‘I am afraid my brother has taken the plunge. I tried to dissuade him but . . .’
‘You mean he’s drowned himself?’ Petrefact asked hopefully.
‘Oh my poor Alexander,’ moaned his wife.
Frederick waited until her sobs were clearly audible. ‘Not yet, though doubtless when she comes round . . .’
‘But I thought you said he was dead.’
‘Not dead but gone before,’ said the appalling Frederick. ‘What I actually said was that we had lost a member of the family. I can think of less delicate ways of putting it but none so exact. I didn’t, for instance, say—’
‘Then don’t,’ shouted Petrefact, who had finally caught the meaning of the altered pronoun. His wife had been more obtuse.
‘Then why did you say he had taken the plunge?’
Frederick helped himself to a glass of champagne. ‘I’ve always assumed there must be some degree of plunging in that sort of operation. And Alexandra, or Alexander as she then was, certainly took it . . .’
‘Shut up!’ yelled Petrefact, but Frederick was not to be silenced so easily.
‘I always wanted a sister,’ he murmured, ‘and while I may be a little premature you can at least console yourself, Mother dear, that you haven’t lost a son but gained a neuter.’
Nor was that all. As the unconscious Mrs Petrefact was carried from the room Frederick had enquired of the Minister if the Catholic Church held as strong views on sex change as it did on abortion.
‘But of course not. One has only to think of church choirs of castrati,’ said Frederick gaily before turning to the Minister’s wife to hope with assumed sympathy that she hadn’t found the operation too painful in her own case.
As the reception broke up Petrefact had formed one strong and unalterable resolution: neither his son nor his
presumed daughter would ever inherit their father’s estate. Nor was he reconciled by the premature death of Mrs Petrefact some six months later. Frederick had been cut off, appropriately in Lord Petrefact’s view, without a penny while Alexandra, already sufficiently excised, was paid a pitiful allowance on which she ran a hairdressing salon in Croydon.
Relieved of their presence and his matrimonial duties Lord Petrefact had continued his rise to fame and enormous fortune with a ruthless drive that was fuelled by his knowledge that his will, drawn up by a team of expert lawyers, was uncontestable. He had left his entire estate to Kloone University and had already installed the most advanced computer there as evidence of his goodwill and proof of his good sense. Petrefact Consolidated had been spared the expense of maintaining the computer themselves and the tax avoidance advantages of channelling profits through a charitable institution had proved considerable.
And now as he sat in his office overlooking the Thames Lord Petrefact’s thoughts, ever a mixture of family loathing and financial calculation, turned once more to Kloone. The University might hold his computer: it also held someone less amenable to programming in the person of Walden Yapp. And Yapp had arbitrated in too many industrial disputes to be taken lightly. He was just considering how nicely he had planned things when Croxley entered.
‘You rang?’
Lord Petrefact looked at his private secretary with his usual distaste. The man’s refusal to address him as ‘My Lord’ was a daily irritation but Croxley had been with him for almost half a century and at least his loyalty wasn’t in doubt. Nor, for that matter, his memory. Before the coming of the computer Croxley had been the nearest thing to a human information storage system Lord Petrefact had ever found.
‘Of course I rang. I intend to go to Fawcett.’
‘Fawcett? But there’s no one there to look after you. The indoor staff were dispensed with eight years ago.’
‘Then make provision for a firm of private caterers to deal with matters.’
‘And will you be wanting the resuscitation team?’
Lord Petrefact goggled at him. Sometimes he wondered if Croxley had the brains of a louse. Presumably he must have to possess his incredible memory, but there were moments when Lord Petrefact had his doubts.
‘Of course I want the resuscitation team,’ he shouted. ‘What the hell do you think I have this red button for?’
Croxley regarded the red button on the wheelchair as if seeing it for the first time.
‘And I want a computer forecast on production increases at the Hull plant.’
‘There aren’t any.’
‘Aren’t any? There’ve got to be. I don’t employ that damned computer to sit on its arse and not turn out forecasts. That’s what the bloody thing’s—’
‘Aren’t any increases. In fact to the best of my latest
knowledge since the new machinery was introduced production has fallen by almost seventeen point three recurring per cent. In the months March through April plant utilization was limited—’
‘All right, all right,’ snapped Lord Petrefact, ‘there’s no need to go on.’