Ancestral Vices (2 page)

And having dismissed his private secretary with the similarly private thought that the confounded man was a recurring point himself and why the hell he’d ever bothered to install the computer when he had Croxley he’d never know, Lord Petrefact settled back in his wheelchair and considered the next moves in his own interminable battle with his workforce. Closure of the Hull factory would be a well-chosen symbolic gesture. But first there was Yapp to be manipulated. And Fawcett House was near to Kloone.

The University Library at Kloone is not a building of outstanding beauty. It stands on a grassy mound overlooking the refinery, the propane tanks and the chemical installations from which its students had been intended to draw their inspiration and, even less successfully, the University had hoped to gain a large proportion of its income. In the event neither hope had been fulfilled. The University attracted the highest number of low-grade Arts students while earning a reputation second only to Oxford for producing the most incompetent scientists in the country.

In large part the building of the Library had been responsible for this strange reversal of expectation. Originally designed in the late fifties as a relatively demure structure, it had been given its new dimensions following the accidental visit of Sir Harold Wilson, then mere Harold, in the heady days at the start of his first administration. Thanks to a fog and the political bias of the Chief Constable, the Prime Minister had arrived at Kloone instead of Macclesfield and had been so overwhelmed by the changes evidently achieved at the local Working Men’s Club in so short a time since his last visit while campaigning that he had made an impassioned plea for
‘the creation of a library to commemorate and indeed sustain the technological advances the vast mass of people are about to see, and if this example of radical improvement is anything to go by, have already seen under Labour’. To further this great work the Prime Minister had taken out his cheque book there and then and had made the first subscription of one hundred pounds while noting on the stub that the sum was to be deducted from his income tax as a necessary expense. From this act of fortuitous generosity there had been no turning back. To protect the Prime Minister’s reputation, prominent businessmen with left-wing insurance policies, trade unions, party officials, multinational companies with an eye to North Sea oil, Members of Parliament and eminent prison visitors had all poured contributions into the Kloone University Library Fund while the university council had promptly scrapped the original plans and had offered a prize to the architect whose design best expressed the technological advances the Prime Minister had so eloquently prophesied. The Library fulfilled these conditions to the letter.

Built of reinforced and unnecessarily prestressed concrete, a maze of metal conduits and carbon fibre columns all of which supported nothing more substantial than an acre of glass, the Library managed to break every rule in the energy conservationist’s handbook. In summer it sweltered in post-tropical heat to the point where the lifts could only be prevented from seizing up between
floors by the installation of an intricate and enormously expensive air-conditioning system. During the winter months it switched to Arctic and the temperature dropped so abruptly that it was frequently necessary to use microwave ovens before books, which had suffered excessive humidity during the summer, could be defrosted and opened at all. To remedy these sub-zero effects it had been essential to duplicate the air-conditioning system with central heating using the same metal conduits for which some purpose had finally been found. Even then, thanks to the architect’s obsession with the idea of advanced technology and his consummate ignorance of its practical application, a slight spell of bright weather followed by a small cloud could threaten students who had been sunbathing one moment with frostbite the next.

In fact during early spring and autumn it was essential to run both cooling and heating systems at the same time or to alternate between them extremely abruptly to maintain even a moderately comfortable atmosphere. It had been during one of these sudden switches that a large section of glass, less ready to make allowances for the stresses to which it was being subjected than the human occupants, had disintegrated both itself and the deputy librarian who had been on the point of masturbating in the open-plan lavatories two hundred and thirty feet below. From that dreadful day the toilets had been known as Death Row and avoided by the more nervous
readers, much to the disgust of the surviving librarians and with a disregard for hygiene not normally associated with places of higher learning.

Faced with ultimatums from the library staff and in a frantic attempt to restore ordure to more sanitary disposal points than Early English and Middle Slavonic, the authorities had erected a screen of chicken wire immediately below the vast glass roof in the hope that this would engender fresh confidence in the toilets. As an incentive it was only partially successful. While it saved a number of valuable books from being used for improper purposes it had the disadvantage of making even limited ventilation impossible and the cleaning of the inside glass a matter of infinite patience and dubious value. Before long the great glass structure had assumed a mottled and perfervid green which had at least the merit of giving the Library a faintly botanical air from the outside. Inside, the ‘faintly’ could be omitted. In the unique climate strange bacteria, lichen and the lowest forms of vegetable life proliferated. A green light filtered down on the shelves and with it a fine mist of algae which, having condensed under the roof, now made homes for themselves in the carpet of the Reading Room or more irrevocably between the covers of books. Several stacks on the fourteenth floor actually exploded and in the Manuscript Room a number of irreplaceable papyri on loan from the University of Port Said were so finely composted, or formed such intractable symbiosis with their hosts, that they defied decipherment or even partial restoration.

In short, the cost of maintaining the Library proved catastrophic to the economy of the University. Science and Technology languished, laboratories lacked adequate equipment, and physicists, chemists and engineers migrated to more generous establishments.

Paradoxically the Humanities, and in particular the Social Sciences, flourished. Attracted by the spirit of innovation so clearly manifest in the Library, eminent scholars ignored at Oxbridge or bored by redbrick flocked to the concrete campus. They brought with them an evangelical fervour for the experimental, the radical, the anarchic and the interpersonally permissive that was, even in the middle sixties, far in advance of their students. What was demanded by revolutionary students at other universities was imposed on the undergraduates at Kloone.

Young women from respectable working-class homes found themselves marshalled into dual-sexed hostels with unisex washing facilities. Their complaints that sharing beds, bedrooms and almost inevitably parts of themselves with young men had not been mentioned in the prospectus and was hardly conducive to serious study were met by wholly unwarranted accusations of latent lesbianism, which in those days had yet to become entirely respectable.

Having imposed the ostensible aims of Women’s Liberation before anyone else, the authorities had gone on to inculcate their own classless ideals into students whose presence at the University was in itself a measure of their
determination to climb the social ladder by the only means made available in the Welfare State. Lecturers fashionably extolling the virtues of the proletariat to the sons and daughters of millhands, miners and steel workers found themselves faced by a blank bewilderment and an extraordinarily high rate of neurosis. And so, while other universities became battlegrounds between A-level enragés and proto-Fascist dons, attempts to engender left-wing militancy at Kloone failed hopelessly. There were no ‘sit-ins’ – no one in his right mind would willingly sit in the Library and there was no other building large enough to accommodate the numbers required to create mass hysteria; no demands for student control; no invasion of the records office; and a positive refusal to attend staff self-criticism seminars. Even the graffiti sprayed so ineptly by lecturers were promptly scrubbed off by student volunteers and the only demands voiced were those asking for the end of continuous assessment, the re-imposition of exams and the introduction of strict discipline with rules and regulations which would free the student body from the agonies of decision.

‘If only they wouldn’t listen so attentively,’ the Reader in the Mechanics of Socio-Political Engineering had complained after spending an hour fulminating against the militaristic excesses of contemporary democracy. ‘They give one the entirely false impression of understanding the objective conditions under which they are media-manipulated, then hand in essays that might well have been dictated by Peregrine Worsthorne.’

The Professor of Positive Criminology sympathized. His efforts to persuade his students that murder, rape and particularly violent crimes against the person were forms of social protest, and as such no less estimable than burglary, bank robbery and fraud, had failed so hopelessly that he had twice been visited by the police investigating complaints from undergraduates that he was guilty of incitement.

‘I sometimes think we would get a more sympathetic hearing at a meeting of the Monday Club. At least there would be some degree of controversy. My lot simply write down everything I say and then spew it back to me with conclusions so far at variance with my own that I can only assume they think I’m being ironical.’

‘If they think at all,’ said the Reader. ‘In my opinion they’ve been so grossly indoctrinated since childhood they’re incapable of conceptual thought in the first place.’

In this atmosphere of staff disillusionment and student dedication the singular figure of Walden Yapp, Professor of Demotic Historiography, stood, or more frequently strode, for that rigorous common touch on which Kloone had hoped to pride itself. Ideologically his pedigree was beyond criticism. His grandfather, Keir Yapp, had dropped dead on the march from Jarrow and his mother, while still in her teens, had served as a part-time waitress in the International Brigade before being captured, raped and consigned to a nunnery by Franco’s troops. Her escape in the weekly nightcart, her travels as an itinerant leper through Seville to Gibraltar where she was refused
entry as a health hazard, and her desperate attempt to swim to freedom only to be picked up by a Soviet troopship and transported to Leningrad, all this had lent Elizabeth Hardy Yapp a legendary respect in extreme left-wing circles. Moreover she had spent the first two years of the War denouncing the Government as capitalistic warmongers and with the entry of Russia had used the good offices of the Ministry of Information and her own histrionic gifts to exhort factory workers to defeat Hitler and to elect a Labour Government at the next General Election.

It was as a result of a particularly emotional speech in Swindon that she had met, considered marrying, and had conceived a child by someone called Ernest. Like so much else in her stormy life the attachment had been brief. Spurred into unnatural pugnacity by his mistress’s fiery rhetoric, and possibly by the thought that he might have to spend the rest of his life listening to it, Ernest had done his country no great service – he had been an extremely skilled toolmaker in a reserved occupation – by enlisting and getting himself killed at the first available opportunity.

Miss Yapp had added his death to her list of social grievances and had used the aura still surrounding the name of Yapp in Jarrow to secure a safe Labour seat in Parliament. As ‘Red Beth’ she had represented Mid-Shields with an extremism so unmitigated by practicality that she had never sullied her reputation by being offered a post in Government. Instead she had gone from
strength to strength reviling the leaders of her own party for class treachery and the rank and file of all others as downright capitalists, while ensuring that Walden received the best education invective could buy and otherwise leaving him in the care of a deaf and religiously inclined aunt.

In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that Walden Yapp grew up into a singular young man. In fact it was surprising he grew up at all. Isolated from the ordinary world of children by his aunt’s fear that he might pick up nasty habits from them and fed an intellectual diet compounded of The Book of Revelation and his mother’s inflammatory rhetoric, he had by the age of ten so fused the two into a single doctrine in his own mind that he had been known to sing ‘Abide With Me’ at Labour Party Conferences and ‘The Red Flag’ in the local chapel. But his singularity did not only consist of his unquestioning confusion of religion with politics: in his own way Walden Yapp was a genius. Thanks to his aunt’s determination to keep his thoughts pure and holy she had denied him any reading matter other than the Bible and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Walden had read both from cover to cover so many times that he was capable even at nine of stating without hesitation that a zygote was a fertilized egg or ovum. In short his knowledge was quite literally encyclopaedic and, if organized solely along alphabetical lines, too prodigious for the comfort of his teachers. It also helped to put him in quarantine from other children who didn’t want to know
where the letter A originated or even that an abacus was an early form of computing device. Walden went his own way. When he tired of remembering what anything was he turned to the only other reading matter in the house, a series of railway timetables which had once belonged to his grandfather.

It was here that his genius first showed itself. While other boys experienced the disorientation of puberty, Walden was discovering how best to get from Euston to King’s Cross by way of Peterborough, Crewe, Glasgow and Aberdeen, the best way in his view being that which was the most complicated. The fact that half the stations no longer existed and that lines had been axed was of no importance. It was enough to know that in 1908 he could have travelled the length and breadth of Britain without once having to enquire the time or destination of the next train at any booking office. Better still to lie in bed at night and visualize the effect of altering the points at three strategic junctions at exactly the same moment. According to his calculations it would have been possible to bring the entire network of the LMS, the LNER and the Great Western Railway to a catastrophic halt. It was here, in these extraordinary compounds of useless knowledge with valueless mathematical and spatial computations, that Walden Yapp’s brilliant future was born. Of reality he knew nothing.