Ancestral Vices Read Online Free PDF Page A

said Lord Petrefact, who disliked reminders about his own almost as much as Croxley disliked being classed as a plutocrat. ‘Now with the sucking pig we’ll have—’
    ‘Sucking pig?’ said Croxley. ‘We’ve got a firm of frozen-food specialists downstairs and if you think they can rustle up a deep-freeze sucking pig at the drop of a hat . . .’
    ‘Listen Croxley, if I say I want sucking pig I mean I want sucking pig. And anyway they don’t rustle the sucking things. At least to the best of my knowledge they don’t. They snatch the little buggers from their mother’s teats and—’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said Croxley hurriedly, cutting short the terrible explanation he could see coming. ‘Sucking pigs it is.’
    ‘No it isn’t. It’s one, one with an apple between its gums.’
    Croxley shut his eyes. Lord Petrefact’s morbid interest in the details of sucking pigs was almost as unpleasant as the prospect of the dinner. ‘And the dessert after that, sir?’ he asked hopefully.
    ‘Dessert? Certainly not. An eight-course dinner needs eight courses. Now after the roast sucking pig I think we’ll move on to higher things.’
    He paused while Croxley prayed silently. ‘Game pie,’ said Lord Petrefact finally, ‘a thoroughly high game pie. That shall be the
pièce de résistance
.’
    ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ said Croxley. ‘If you ask me, this Yapp will have run for his life by the time you get to the sucking pig—’
    Lord Petrefact interrupted lividly. ‘I’m not getting anywhere near that bloody pig,’ he shouted, ‘you know that as well as I do. My digestion wouldn’t stand it and in any case I’m under doctor’s—’
    ‘Quite so, sir. One game pie.’
    ‘Two,’ said Lord Petrefact. ‘One for you and one for him. Both of them high. I shall enjoy the aroma.’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said Croxley after a brief colloquy with himself in which he considered raising the objection that the deep-freeze artists in the kitchen might find it as difficult to prime their game products to the heights demanded as to rustle up a sucking pig and deciding against it.
    ‘And make sure their tails drop off,’ continued Lord Petrefact.
    ‘Their tails?’
    ‘Their tails. You hang pheasants until their tails drop off.’
    ‘Christ,’ said Croxley, ‘aren’t you getting a bit confused? I shouldn’t have thought pheasants had—’
    ‘Tail feathers, you oaf. They’ve got to be so rotten their tail feathers come away in your hand. Any good chef knows that.’
    ‘If you say so,’ said Croxley, deciding once and for all that he was going to see that the contract caterers forgot all about game pie.
    ‘Right, now how many courses is that?’
    ‘Six,’ said Croxley.
    ‘Four,’ said Lord Petrefact adamantly. ‘Now after the pie I think we’ll have champagne-flavoured zabaglione followed by Welsh rarebit gorgonzola . . .’
    Croxley tried to still his imagination and wrote down the instructions. ‘And where will Professor Yapp be trying to sleep?’ he asked finally.
    ‘In the North wing. Put him in the suite the King of the Belgians used in 1908. That should stir his historical imagination a bit.’
    ‘I doubt if he’ll have much time for his historical imagination after dinner,’ said Croxley, ‘I’d put him nearer the resuscitation team.’
    Lord Petrefact waved his objections away. ‘The trouble with you, Croxley, is that you lack vision.’
    Croxley didn’t but he knew better than to say so.
    ‘Vision, Croxley, that’s the hallmark of a great man.Now here we have this fellow Yapp and we want something from him so . . .’
    ‘What?’ said Croxley.
    ‘What do you mean, what?’
    ‘What on earth could we possibly want from a raving socialist radical like Yapp?’
    ‘Never mind what we want from him,’ said Lord Petrefact, who knew his secretary’s devotion to the family too well to provoke a prolonged argument, ‘the fact is we want something. Now the man without vision would