The Gropes Read Online Free Page A

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, themarriage 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 walkedEsmond 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 misunderstoodthe 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