Authors: Tom Sharpe
‘It’s Esmond. That’s what’s the matter with me. He’s doing terrible things to my psyche.’
Albert Ponson tried to come to grips with the statement. Being in the pre-used car business he knew about psychology, but psyche was a new one to him.
‘You mean with those drums? Yeah, well, Vera told me about that and all, but –’
‘Not the drums,’ said Horace. ‘And not the piano practice either. It’s him …’ He sighed miserably. ‘You don’t have a family so you wouldn’t know.’
‘No, Belinda and me haven’t been blessed with kids,’ Albert said stiffly. It was evidently a sore point.
‘Blessed? Blessed? You don’t know how lucky you are.’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that myself. I mean, we’ve been trying for years. Something has to be wrong with Belinda’s insides because it sure as hell isn’t me … Anyway, what’s wrong with Esmond? Seems a fine strapping lad to me.’
Horace momentarily forgot his hangover. It had never occurred to him that anyone could regard Esmond as a fine strapping anything, and that ‘lad’ was definitely suspicious.
‘You’re lying,’ he said. ‘Fine he isn’t, and strapping he’s certainly not. He’s the spitting image of me at his age and that’s not something I’d wish on my own worst enemy. I can’t stand him and never want to have to look at his pathetic face again.’
Albert Ponson stared at Horace and tried to come to terms with this extraordinary statement. He had never found his brother-in-law in the least likeable and hadn’t for a moment understood why Vera had married the fellow, but he shared his sister’s simple sentimentality and belief in the crudest of family
values. In his world fathers were supposed to love their sons or at least be proud of them. It was the same with cats and dogs. You liked them because they were yours. To go around saying you detested your own son wasn’t just not nice – it was unnatural.
‘That’s not a nice thing to say, Horace,’ he said finally. ‘Not nice at all. Esmond’s your son. It’s only right and proper he looks like you. It would be bloody odd if he didn’t. I mean to say, if I had a son and he looked like someone else, I wouldn’t be too happy, me being away from home so often, know what I mean?’
Horace thought he did but he kept his thoughts to himself. He had begun to have a most remarkable idea. It required his brother-in-law’s cooperation, though it would have to be unwitting. He would have to act very carefully indeed. Horace Wiley fell back on his experience as a bank manager. For more years than he cared to remember he had lured customers who least required overdrafts into accepting them, while refusing loans to small businesses that desperately did need them.
‘Well, I agree it’s not right to feel the way I do. I know that, but I can’t help myself. He’s always hanging around, imitating me. It’s … it’s like having a doppelgänger.’
‘A doppelgänger?’ said Albert, who had as much trouble with the word as he’d had with psyche, perhaps understandably given that his mind seldom left the
world of buying and selling cars. And he’d certainly never heard of one called a doppelgänger.
‘A double, someone who’s always with you and acts the same way as you do and you can’t get rid of him,’ Horace explained. He paused with a sinister glint in his eyes. ‘Except by killing him.’
‘Blimey,’ said Albert, now thoroughly alarmed. Horace was clearly as mad as a hatter. ‘Are you telling me you want to murder him?’
‘Not want to. Got to. You don’t know what it’s like never being able to get away from someone who’s just like you but isn’t. If only he’d go away for a bit and leave me alone I’d feel a lot safer. I mean, it’s not nice getting this terrible urge to murder your own son. And I’ve got Vera to think of. I’d leave the bank and go away myself if it would do any good, but I’ve got to support her and earn a living and she’s been such a wonderful wife I wouldn’t want to do anything to upset her.’
Albert Ponson considered the statement and found it difficult to reconcile with Horace’s dreadful urge to kill Esmond. ‘Upset’ was putting it mildly. Vera’s reaction would be far more deadly. In fact, 143 Selhurst Road would go down in the annals of British crime history along with Rillington Place and other houses where there’d been multiple horrors. It wouldn’t do Ponson’s Pre-Used Motors much good either.
Seeing Albert weaken, Horace struck again.
‘I’ve thought of how to do it too. I’d have to get
rid of every trace of him of course,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have bits of him in the garden for instance, or under the cellar floor. So I’d have to dissolve his body in acid. I measured the water butt behind the garage and he’d fit in there easily, lanky limbs and all, and I’ve got a customer at the bank in the acid and chemical business who’d let me have forty gallons of nitric acid cheap.’
Albert sat down at the foot of the bed with his head in his hands, only half listening to his brother-in-law’s ravings, and all hope of beating a hasty exit back to the relative sanity of the Ponson bungalow disappeared.
By the time Albert Ponson went downstairs, he was a shaken man. His feelings for his brother-in-law had turned from contempt to detestation and fear. The bloody man had described his plans for disposing of Esmond’s remains with a wealth of detail and relish that had been wholly convincing. Horace Wiley might be a bank manager but he was also on the verge of becoming a homicidal maniac. To add to this impression of lunacy, he had interspersed the description of the acid-bath technique with repeated remarks about loving his wife and worrying about her feelings.
Albert Ponson shared his concerns. The thought of marching into the kitchen and telling Vera that her damned husband had measured the water butt behind
the garage with a view to putting her son in it and adding fifteen gallons of concentrated nitric acid to it made his blood run cold.
‘It’s a big butt but with Esmond in it I don’t think I’ll need more than twenty gallons,’ Horace had said. ‘I can always top it up a bit later when most of the body is dissolved. And since there’s a lid on it, no one would dream of looking for him in there. That would be the last place they’d look, don’t you think?’
Albert Ponson had hardly been able to think at all. The most he could do was mutter, ‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing,’ over and over again. But now, as he stood hesitantly outside the kitchen door, he thought furiously and arrived at a conclusion. Vera wouldn’t like it, but she’d have to lump it. It would be preferable to losing Esmond in an acid butt.
‘I’ve had a good long talk with Horace,’ he told her. ‘And what he needs is complete rest if he’s to avoid a nervous breakdown. And obviously having Esmond around the house all the time is part of the problem.’
‘But he’s not around the house all the time. He’s at school. And anyway, even if he was, Horace isn’t here to be bothered. He’s at the bank. Or the pub. He leaves here at the crack of dawn and then comes home drunk and –’
‘Yes, I know all that,’ Albert interrupted. ‘But that’s because Esmond … that’s one of Horace’s symptoms. He’s suffering from … well, from stress.’
‘Stress? What sort of stress? And what about me?
You don’t think I’m under stress with an alcoholic husband who comes home and tries to kill my only son with a carving knife and –’
‘I know. I know you are,’ Albert interrupted again, desperate not to get into a discussion about Horace’s murderous tendencies. Carving knives were mild compared to water butts filled with nitric acid.
‘The point is that Horace needs …’ He paused and searched for a word. ‘He needs space. He’s got a midlife crisis.’
‘A midlife crisis?’ said Vera doubtfully.
‘Yeah, like … like he’s got the male menopause. Now what’s wrong?’
Vera had snorted in a most unpleasant manner.
‘Male menopause, my foot,’ she said bitterly. ‘He’s had that ever since I married him. He didn’t have to wait till midlife to come up with male menopauses. If you knew what I’ve had to put up with the last sixteen years. If you only knew …’
But Albert didn’t want to know. He wasn’t a squeamish man, or even a faintly sensitive one, but there were some things he definitely didn’t want to hear about and his sister’s sex life was one of them.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘You asked me down here to talk to Horace and sort things out, and that’s what I’m trying to do. And what I’m saying is that Horace is on the verge of a major breakdown. Now, if you want him to lose his job and go on the dole and have him sitting at home in front of the telly –’ He stopped,
an idea suddenly coming into his mind. ‘– that is, if you’ve still got a telly what with all the debts he’s piled up …’
The idea of Horace having debts galvanised Vera just as Albert knew it would. Sentimental she might be but she was still a Ponson and money mattered to her.
‘Oh God,’ she said. This was even worse than she’d thought. ‘Don’t tell me he’s gone and got us into debt as well as everything else. He’s been gambling, hasn’t he? First the drink and then the violence and now this. Oh, Albert, what are we going to do?’
Albert took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He’d known mentioning money and debts would send Vera up the wall. But, as he’d expected, it was making her listen to him a lot more carefully.
‘The first thing is to get him back to work,’ he said. ‘His debts aren’t the main problem, although what possessed him to put all your money into stocks and shares I’ll never know. Never mind that, they say the stock market is on the upturn and once he’s back at work he can get it all sorted out. Now, what he really needs is time and space from Esmond. If not, there’s no saying what the consequences may be.’
‘But the school holidays are coming up at the end of the week and how can I stop my own darling Esmond from getting on Horace’s nerves? He’s such a lovely boy and always wants to be helpful and –’
‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Albert before she could
go into her nauseous sentimental mode. ‘Esmond can come and help me around the garage and give Horace a bit of peace and quiet to get well again …’
Upstairs Horace Wiley listened to the murmur of voices in the kitchen and felt better. That bit about the water butt had done the trick. Even Albert had gone a funny colour when he’d heard that one.
In the Ponsons’ extensive bungalow, a confection of flock wallpaper, gold Dralon sofas and ankle-deep pink carpets, and where every bedroom had both a bathroom and a jacuzzi, the news that the place was shortly to be infested by Esmond Wiley was not entirely welcome.
Belinda Ponson, Albert’s wife, was not a large, loud, effulgent woman like her sister-in-law and she was certainly not a sentimental one. She was best described as quiet and particular – although she had not always been that way – and she was particularly particular about her furnishings. The thought of what an adolescent with muddy shoes and oily hands would do to the flock wallpaper and the Dralon
sofas, not to mention the pink carpet, deeply disturbed her.
‘I’m not having him spoil the decor’, she told Albert, who always had to take his shoes off in the front porch and put on some special slippers before entering the bungalow. ‘I know what boys are like. That sister of yours has spoilt that son of hers something awful and he’s bound to be unhygienic as well. All boys are. What possessed you to invite him without consulting me?’
‘Horace did,’ Albert said tersely. ‘He’s off his rocker.’
‘I don’t care what he’s off. He’s never done you any favours so why have you got to do him any? That’s what I want to know.’
‘Because, like I say, he’s off his trolley, and he’ll stay off it and worse if he has the boy around the house. I don’t want Vera on my hands for the rest of her natural. Do you want her living here and interfering and all?’
There was no need for Belinda to answer.
‘Well, all I can say is I’m not having Esmond bring his girlfriends here and lounging about in dirty jeans and messing my house up.’
Albert helped himself to a large Scotch from a cut-glass decanter with a gold-plated label that said Chivas Regal.
‘He doesn’t wear jeans. He goes around in a blue suit and a tie just like his dad,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s driven Horace bonkers. Says it’s like having another him around the house.’
‘Another him? What are you talking about? I never heard such nonsense in my life.’
‘Like he’s got a dopple … a double. Like he’s a split personality. And seeing Horace is the way he is, I mean the way he looks, it must be bloody horrible to have two of him round the house.’
‘If that’s the case, I don’t want one of him,’ said Belinda. ‘Your sister can keep all three of them.’
‘Three of them? What the hell are you on about?’ Albert demanded. But Belinda had already gone through to the Poggenpohl kitchen to relieve her feelings on the washing machine.
Around her the appurtenances of modern living had their usual soothing, emollient effect. They almost disguised her feelings from herself. The blender, the microwave, the split-level oven with revolving spit, the espresso machine and the stainless-steel sink with the separate spigot from the reverse osmosis water filter, all served to assure her that she had some sort of purpose and meaning in life when life with Albert often suggested the opposite.
Albert could have his swimming bath and his leather-padded bar with its saddled and stirruped stools and Wild West number plates and flags – and even his Yellow Rose of Texas bumper sticker; he could have his barbecues and gas-fired charcoal grills to impress his friends and prove his manliness; in fact, he could have everything he wanted – except her kitchen and her secret thoughts. And her unsatisfied
desire. Although come to think of it, he could have her unsatisfied desire if only he’d satisfy it. No, the kitchen was sacrosanct if it only masked other needs.
Belinda Ponson mused about Esmond Wiley’s coming. If he really was like his father and wore a blue suit and a tie he might be just the antidote to Albert she had been waiting for. Albert was too obvious and too crude. And he’d failed to give her what she wanted above anything else in the world. A daughter. Something she had dreamed of since she was a little girl herself, surrounded by grandmas and aunties and cousins.
Belinda brightened. Perhaps the lad could be something else. Like a toy boy. She knew for a fact that Albert hadn’t been faithful to her over all the years of their marriage and perhaps this was the very moment to break free of the wretched man.