The Gropes

Read The Gropes for Free Online

Book: Read The Gropes for Free Online
Authors: Tom Sharpe
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 ofother 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 comprehensiblyhis 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.
    He even forgave him the appalling din of the drums. They had, after all, driven Horace from the house early enough in the morning to avoid the rush hour and provided him with a perfectly legitimate excuse for coming home late in the evening with his morale reinforced by a couple of large Scotches at the Gibbet & Goose, the local pub. And now that he came to think of it, Mrs Wiley’s encounter with the NoiseAbatement Officer and the threat of being prosecuted had been no bad thing either. It had lessened Vera’s sense of authority, as had the scandal of the ‘growing’ whatnot in the lavatory and Mrs Lumsden’s account of her experience there.
    In short, Horace Wiley had come to appreciate Esmond’s destructive gifts, so far removed from his own cautious and fearful existence. His early revulsion at finding the lad who could, to all intents and purposes, be his double lurking about the place was replaced with a new warmth towards the boy, coupled with a deep admiration for his spirit.
    And so it was that when these early signs of rebellion had dissipated themselves and a reformed Esmond instead began to model

Similar Books

Sweet Perdition

Cynthia Rayne

Exiles

Elliot Krieger

Radium Halos

W.J. May