The Gropes (3 page)

The twentieth century eventually caught up with the family, though not in the way that might have been expected. The demands of industry during the
Great War exhausted the last of the coal in the mine which had already had to be evacuated twice because of flooding and roof falls. But in the end, the war did relatively little to affect the lifestyle of the Gropes.

The first catastrophe came with the Spanish influenza which carried off 20 million people across Europe – more than had died in the fearful War itself. By then Rev. Nicholas’s successor had already died of heart failure and had, quite literally, taken the secret of the family treasure with him as the gold was reburied below his body by Adelaide’s daughter. Finally the Spanish flu killed Adelaide, her daughter and her husband, the chief accountant, who in latter days had largely run the estate under his wife and imperious daughter’s direction. Adelaide’s successor as head of the Grope family was a widow, Mrs Eliza Grope, who had returned to the Hall on her husband’s death, deeply grateful to General Ludendorff for having rid her of her husband, Major Grope in his offensive of March 1918.

On taking charge, Eliza soon restored the old Grope ways since the exhausted mine was no longer a source of income. She’d never enjoyed the modern lifestyle of the South with its stifling politeness, its social niceties and need to conform, and she’d particularly objected to her husband’s assumption that he was the head of the household and she was merely a superior sort of servant. Determined to reassert her dominance, she chose as the new Reverend Grope the orphaned
son of a Grope cousin who had been killed in a Zeppelin raid on London. His father, having remarried, no longer wanted the gormless adolescent around and was happy to have Eliza send him to a minor theological college.

Even after the Second World War, and long after Eliza had been succeeded by Myrtle Grope, yet another widow well rid of her partner by the battlefield, the family refused to entirely move with the times. Fields were still turned by horse-drawn ploughs, haystacks retained and cows milked by hand. The bloodhound numbers were reduced to six following an unfortunate incident with one of the bulls, but by and large, had Ursula Grope and Awgard the Pale returned from the twelfth century, they would have been proud to recognise Grope Hall as their own.

It was to this isolated estate and ancient farmhouse that, as the new millennium dawned, Belinda Grope, niece of the now aged Myrtle, brought a young and largely callow youth named Esmond Wiley.

Esmond Wiley’s boyhood had been a disturbed one. This was largely due to his name.

It was hardly his fault, or even that of his father, that his surname was Wiley, though in his darker moods Esmond had been known to wish that Mr Wiley had remained a bachelor. Or had he felt compelled to marry, which was self-evidently the case, that he had remained celibate or, and this was self-evidently not the case, that he had taken precautions not to impregnate his wife. Not that Esmond blamed his father. Mrs Wiley was not a woman to be denied her right to motherhood. A large and unfortunately cheerful woman, with an insatiable appetite for the most mawkish and deplorable romantic fiction, she had acquired an equally insatiable
lust for love. Or to put it another way, she lived in a world in which men, gentlemen of course, proposed marriage passionately on clifftops under a full moon with the waves crashing on the rocks below and were accepted with a mixture of delight and modesty before crushing their maidenly fiancées to their manly breasts.

It has to be said that this was not exactly what Mr Wiley had done. He wasn’t a very manly man in the first place, and being a bank manager in Croydon he had done his level best to resist the slight strain of passion that ran, or rather limped, in the Wiley family. All the same, Mrs Wiley, then Vera Ponson and aged twenty-eight, had persuaded him to propose to her. Worse still, she had insisted on going through the clifftop ritual she had read about so often, and the couple had driven down to Beachy Head when the moon was at its fullest, attired in evening dress which seemed the closest approximation to the satin bustiers and velvet pantaloons referred to so frequently in the romances the future Mrs Wiley favoured. Other things being equal the occasion, or tryst as Vera called it, might yet have fulfilled her wildest dreams. But other things weren’t. The full moon was there somewhere but put in only fitful appearances, hidden for the most part by low clouds. Vera Ponson refused to be disappointed. To her way of thinking those clouds were scudding, and the wind on the clifftop gusted very authentically five hundred feet above a presumably troubled sea. It was too dark to see whether the
sea really was troubled or not and in truth, even if it had been as bright as the full moon might have made it, Mr Wiley, by nature and occupation an exceedingly cautious man, had been disinclined to look. He also suffered from a height phobia. It was a measure of his love for Vera or, more accurately, his desperation to attain those home comforts that his married friends appeared to enjoy and which Vera’s innocent romanticism seemed to promise, that he had allowed himself to go anywhere near the perpendicular cliff face in the first place. He had only remembered on the journey down there that it was Beachy Head from which so many people had hurled themselves to their deaths, and confronted with the ghastly reality of the sheer drop which he could see would be impossible to survive, his fear quadrupled.

It was this terror rather than any real passion that had impelled Mr Wiley to propose to Vera with amazing speed and then clasp her to his palpitating heart. He was helped as well by a sudden gust of wind which had practically swept him off his feet at that very moment. With his bride-to-be in his arms, and a very heavy bride-to-be to boot, he felt far safer and, as if to celebrate their union, the moon, as full and brilliant as Vera had wished, shone through a gap in the clouds and illuminated the couple.

‘Oh my darling, how I have waited for this moment,’ Vera murmured ecstatically.

But so it seemed had two policemen. Alerted by a passing motorist who had seen the car and had phoned the station to report that another pair of lunatics were evidently about to commit suicide, they had crept up on the lovers with the utmost stealth.

‘Now now, it’s going to be all right,’ one of the policemen had said as their flashlights added a new brilliance to the scene.

It had not been all right. Horace Wiley had objected to having to identify himself as a bank manager presently residing at 143 Selhurst Road, Croydon, almost as much as the imputation that he had been about to take his own life or, as the sergeant had rather tactlessly put it, ‘the easy way out’.

In later life, Horace Wiley was inclined to conclude that there had been a prophetic quality about the expression, but at the time he was more concerned with the possible consequences for his career prospects if it ever got out that, again in the words of the police sergeant, he ‘made a habit of driving down to Beachy Head at full moon in fancy dress to propose to strange women’, which was more or less what Vera had explained he had been doing. Mr Wiley wished she’d kept her trap shut, a preference which throughout their married life together proved as worthless as it was now, while Vera had found the suggestion that she was a strange woman so offensive that the sergeant came to regret it himself. And then it began to rain.

In short, from these inauspicious beginnings, the
marriage in St Agnes’s Church chosen for its literary association (Vera had been deeply affected by the poem at school) and the honeymoon on Exmoor (thanks this time to Lorna Doone), a son and heir emerged and was named Esmond. And it was because of the name Esmond, rather than the more innocuous Wiley, that the offspring of Horace and Vera’s union suffered such a tormented boyhood.

Esmond was called Esmond after a character in a particularly virulent love story his mother had been engrossed in shortly before his birth. In Vera’s dazed and drug-addled state following a horribly difficult labour in which Horace Wiley had been of little and no use, his fear of blood being almost equal to his fear of heights, she found some comfort in picturing the fictional Esmond. A he-man in buckskin breeches with his shirt open to the waist, exposing an immensely virile chest and a mane of the blackest locks windswept on an open moor or, more often, standing on a rocky promontory above a wave-tossed sea, he seemed the best model for a boy who she determined should be nothing like his timorous and decidedly lacking-in-romance father.

Exposed so early to such awful literary influences, it was perhaps not surprising that Esmond Wiley took at an early age to an activity best described here as lurking. While other boys ran and shouted and skipped and larked about and generally behaved in a boy-like fashion, almost from the moment he first walked
Esmond only ever lurked about the place in a manner that was both sneaky and melancholic.

From Esmond’s point of view, his behaviour was entirely understandable. It was bad enough to be called Esmond but to see also the image of Vera’s romantic hero littering the house and on sale in every bookshop and newsagent he went into was enough to make even an insensitive boy aware that he could never live up to his mother’s hopes and expectations.

And Esmond was not an insensitive boy. He was an acutely self-conscious one. No child with his legs and ears, the former thin and the latter thick and protruding, could fail to be aware of himself. Nor could he fail to be equally aware of the shortcomings of his mother who brought to child-rearing the same uncritical and sentimentally old-fashioned attitudes she brought to reading.

To say that she doted on Esmond, or even that he was the apple of her eye, would be to fall far short of the frightful adoration to which the poor boy was subjected. Whenever Vera spotted her son she was particularly addicted to announcing, in public and in a loud voice, ‘Look at this divine creature. His name is Esmond. He is a love child, my sweet darling boy, a true love child,’ a term she had picked up from
The Coming of Age of Esmond
, ostensibly by Rosemary Beadefield but actually composed by twelve different writers each of whom had written a chapter.

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.