The Gropes Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    Things might have gone on this way for ever, withEsmond conversing only with the impotent Sackbut and lurking in Croydon corners and never going near Northumberland let alone any of the Gropes, had puberty not had a peculiar impact on the boy.
    At the age of fourteen, Esmond suddenly changed, and in direct contrast to the timidity of his early years took to expressing his feelings with a vehemence that was deafening. In fact, quite literally deafening. The day before Esmond’s fourteenth birthday, Mr Wiley, returning from an enervating day at the bank, was appalled to find the house reverberating to the sound of drums.
    ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he demanded, with a great deal more force than usual.
    ‘It’s Esmond’s birthday and Uncle Albert has given him a set of drums,’ Mrs Wiley replied. ‘I told him I thought Esmond might be artistic and Albert says in his opinion Esmond could be musically talented.’
    ‘He said what?’ Mr Wiley shouted, partly to express his incredulity and also to make himself heard above the din.
    ‘Uncle Albert thinks Esmond is musical and just needs encouraging. He’s given him a set of drums. I think it’s very sweet of him, don’t you?’
    Mr Wiley kept his thoughts about Uncle Albert to himself. Whatever motives Vera’s brother Albert might have had in distributing a set of large drums to an unquestionably highly disturbed adolescent – and from the infernal beat of the things they were verymixed indeed – ‘sweet’ was not the adjective Horace would have applied to Albert. Insane? Yes. Evil? Yes. Diabolical? Yes. But ‘sweet’? A definite no.
    Vera was devoted to her brother, and besides, Albert Ponson was a large and florid man who ran a distinctly dubious business involving supposedly second-hand cars which, in a surprising show of honesty, he advertised as ‘pre-owned’. That the business was in Essex and that, as a sideline, he had a half-share in a pig farm with a DIY abattoir attached, hardly inclined Horace Wiley to object at all strongly to his brother-in-law’s dreadful birthday present. He’d been up to Ponson Place, a sprawling bungalow set back from the road in ten acres of farmland, and the beastly man had insisted on showing him round that appalling slaughterhouse. As a result Horace had fainted at the sight of so much blood and eviscerated carcasses. When he recovered from this terrible visit, he’d come to a definite conclusion: too many of Albert Ponson’s competitors in the used-car business had chosen to retire very hurriedly – or, in the case of one or two more obstinate dealers, to disappear altogether, ostensibly for Australia or South America – for comfort. The fact that Albert had found it advisable to turn his big bungalow into what amounted to a miniature fortress with bullet-proofed and mirror-glazed window glass and steel-lined doors throughout only added to Horace’s fear of him. No, he couldn’t even think of mentioning those damnabledrums. The bloody man was a gangster. He was sure of that.
    In an attempt to escape the reverberations coming from the drums, Horace found it expedient to go to the bank far earlier in the morning than usual and to return home a lot later at night. Vera began to believe that Horace was trying to avoid her and that it was the call of the pub rather than the call of work keeping him out late and indeed there was some truth to her suspicions. Be that as it may, it was left to the neighbours to complain about the savage din issuing – sometimes until two in the morning – from Esmond’s bedroom. Mrs Wiley did her best to fight back but the arrival of the Noise Abatement Officer at the height of one of Esmond’s most frenzied assaults on the drums, and the threat of prosecution if he continued,