Ancestral Vices Read Online Free PDF

suppose that the best way of going about it would be to put the request to him in a roundabout fashion. We know he’s an extreme left-winger and he loathes our guts.’
    ‘After that dinner I shouldn’t think he’ll be particularly fond of his own, come to that.’
    ‘That’s beside the point. As I was saying, he regards us as capitalist swine and there’s nothing we can do to disillusion him. So we must act the part and play on his vanity. Is that clear?’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said Croxley for whom nothing was at all clear except that he was almost certainly in for a bout of convulsive indigestion unless he came to an agreement with the caterers as quickly as possible. ‘And now if you don’t mind I’ll go and attend to the arrangements.’
    He hurried from the room while Lord Petrefact pressed the button on his wheelchair and crossed to the window to stare with intense dislike at the garden hisgrandfather had laid out so meticulously. ‘The runt of the litter,’ the old brute had called him. Well, the runt was head of the litter now and nicely poised to shatter the public image of the family which had always despised him. In his own way Lord Petrefact loathed his family almost as fervently as Walden Yapp, though for more personal reasons.

4
    Walden Yapp travelled to Fawcett by hire car. He usually went everywhere by train but Fawcett House was nowhere near a railway station and consultation with Doris, the computer, had merely confirmed that there was no bus or other form of public transport he could use to get there. And Yapp refused to own a private car, partly because he believed the State should own everything, partly because of those conservationist tendencies Lord Petrefact had so rightly diagnosed, but most of all because Doris had pointed out that the money required to run a car could provide enough food and medical aid to keep twenty-four children alive in Bangladesh. On the other hand she countered this argument by demonstrating that if he bought a car he would provide jobs for five British car workers, two Germans, or half a Japanese, depending on what make he chose. After a struggle with his conscience about making five British workers redundant Yapp had chosen not to own a car at all and had donated the money saved to Oxfam, with the sad reflection that it was more likely to keep two administrators behind desks than feed the starving anywhere else.
    But his thoughts as he turned up the drive were not concerned with the underdeveloped world. They werecentred on the gross, vulgar and thoroughly overdeveloped sense of their own importance the Petrefacts had displayed in building the enormous mansion in front of him. Fawcett House was a misnomer. It was a repulsive palace, and to think that there were still people rich enough to live in such a vast establishment disgusted him. He was even more disgusted when he stopped outside the front door and was immediately confronted by a genteel lady in a twin-set who said the charge per visit was two pounds.
    ‘It isn’t,’ said Yapp, ‘I’m here on business.’
    ‘You’ll find the servants’ entrance round the back.’
    ‘With his majesty,’ said Yapp, descending to sarcasm. It was wasted on the twin-set.
    ‘Then you’re fifty years too late. The last time Royalty visited was in 1929.’
    She turned back into the house while Yapp took his borrowed Intourist bag out of the car, cast a disparaging eye on the bent figure of a gardener who was weeding a flower-bed, and finally strode into the house.
    ‘In case I didn’t make myself plain enough . . .’
    ‘You don’t have to try,’ said twin-set.
    ‘I’ve come to see the old bugger himself,’ said Yapp, maintaining his proletarian origins with some violence.
    ‘There’s no need to be vulgar.’
    ‘It would be hard not to be in these surroundings,’ said Yapp looking at the marble pillars and gilt-framed paintings as pointedly as possible. ‘The whole place stinks of agross abuse of wealth.