The Gropes Read Online Free Page B

didn’t cross Esmond’s either. He was too busy enduring the jeers, catcalls and whistles of any and everyone who happened to be in the vicinity at the time.
    To have a blowsy mother who takes one out shopping and announces to the world at large, even if that world at large is merely Croydon, that ‘this is Esmond’ is bad enough, but to be known as ‘a love child’ as well is to put iron into the soul and red-hot iron at that. Not that Esmond Wiley had a soul, or if he did, it wasn’t a particularly noticeable one, but the gaggle of neurons, nerve endings, synapses and ganglia that constituted what little soul he might be supposed to have had were so churned up by these repeated and excruciating disclosures that there were times when Esmond wished he was dead. Or that his mother was. Indeed, a normal, healthy child might well, and justifiably, have done something to achieve one or other of these desirable ends. Unfortunately, Esmond Wiley was not a normal, healthy child. There was too much of his father’s caution and timidity in him. Small wonder perhaps that he took to lurking, hoping to avoid notice and forced to endure another of his mother’s public announcements.
    Esmond’s likeness to Horace Wiley was also a distinct handicap. Other fathers might have beendelighted to have a son who so closely resembled them and whose characteristics were almost exact clones of their own. Mr Wiley’s feelings were very different. Over the years of his marriage he had done his utmost to persuade himself that his sole motive for such a rash and disastrous matrimonial investment had been to ensure that the world would be spared the production of any more cautious and timid Wileys with spindly legs and protruding ears. Accordingly, this self-delusive argument went, he had chosen for his wife a tall woman with substantial legs and well-proportioned ears who would bear children (progeny, he called them) of such mixed ancestry that they would be approximately normal. In short, they would be standard products, a choice blend of bravado and timidity, brashness and self-effacement, vulgar sentimentality and cautious good taste who would lead rational and productive lives and wouldn’t feel under any obligation to marry wholly unsuitable wives out of a sense of public duty and eugenics.
    Esmond Wiley made a mockery of his father’s hopes. He resembled Mr Wiley so precisely that there were moments in front of the shaving mirror when Horace had the terrifying illusion that his son was staring back at him. The same large ears, the same small eyes and thin lips, even the same nose, confronted him. Only Horace’s legs were spared this awful symmetry being hidden in striped pyjamas. All else was revealed, grossly apparent.
    And there was something even worse, though the shaving mirror did not show it. Esmond Wiley’s cast of mind, as well as his appearance, was exactly that of his father. Timid, cautious, above all a sad and melancholic lurker and, like his father, possessing a complete aversion to his mother’s taste in reading. In fact, Vera’s attempts to get him to read the books she had been so influenced by, so infatuated by, in her adolescence physically sickened him, and on the few occasions when he couldn’t be found lurking he was often discovered in the bathroom with his head strategically positioned above the bowl.
    In short, there was not a sign of his mother’s cheerful flamboyance, no manifestation of her good-hearted romanticism and not a hint of that passionate self-indulgence and vigour that had played havoc with Mr Wiley’s sensibilities on their honeymoon. Whatever passions and self-indulgences Esmond possessed – and there were days when Mr Wiley doubted the boy had any – were so well hidden that Mr Wiley occasionally wondered if he was autistic.
    At ten and even eleven years, Esmond was a singularly quiet child who communicated, when he spoke at all, only with Sackbut the cat, a neutered (a symbolic act on