Free The Gropes by Tom Sharpe

don’t go around telling them he’s had a nervous breakdown either. The least said the soonest mended.’
    Esmond promised he wouldn’t say anything but he kept his real thoughts to himself.
    They mainly centred round the prospect of livingin the same house as his Aunt Belinda. That morning he’d overheard his father say that, while he disapproved of Uncle Albert’s vulgarity and dodgy second-hand car business, he was at least partly human which wasn’t something that could be said for that fucking termagant of a wife of his. It was about the only time Esmond had heard Horace use that swear word and, having not understood what a termagant was and having had to find its meaning in a dictionary, he wasn’t looking forward to his stay with her.
    Mr Wiley had also called her a harridan, a virago and a shrew. Once again Esmond had recourse to the dictionary and had come away with an even more terrifying impression of Aunt Belinda, made worse by his mother’s agreement that what his father had said was perfectly true. But from his own experience, going on what little he’d seen of his aunt on the very infrequent visits the Ponsons had made to the Wileys, she had seemed quite good-looking, if a bit snooty and quiet.
    All in all, the drive had done nothing to give Esmond any confidence in his future – if he had one, which was starting to seem unlikely. Mrs Wiley’s driving, ever-erratic, had been made positively lethal by the impending loss of her son for however short a time and, less importantly, the conviction that Horace was a murderous and philandering lunatic who would have to be placed in a mental hospital. Vera had come down to the kitchen that morning to find her husbandsharpening carving knives – ‘honing’ would have been a more accurate word – until they had blades as dangerous as old-fashioned cut-throat razors. And then after breakfast – a difficult, largely silent affair – she’d caught him in the bathroom, his face covered in lather and evidently about to shave with the knife that had previously been reserved for Sunday roasts and special occasions. She had dragged it away from him, cutting her hand in the process, and had been horrified by the gleeful expression on his face and insane laughter that came from the bedroom when she had forced him back there and locked the door.
    Having taken the precaution of keeping his door locked as much as possible and of sleeping in the spare bedroom, she had been alarmed to hear Horace pacing the floor nightly and then laughing maniacally. As a result her sleep had been disturbed to the point where she frequently fell asleep at the kitchen table after getting Esmond his breakfast and then hurrying him out of the house with some money for his lunch and orders not to come home until seven in the evening. All this nodding off meant that, to add to her problems, she was unable to read any of her romances in a leisurely fashion or even on a daily basis. She’d scarcely even been able to risk leaving the house to go shopping. Returning home from a quick trip to the corner shop on Thursday, she found that the window cleaner had arrived to do inside and out. To her horror, there stood Horace, still in his pyjamas,standing where the bottom of the man’s ladder had been. Horace had let the ladder fall and now seemed to be closely examining the water butt at the back of the house, oblivious to the window cleaner’s demands that he put the ladder back so he could get down and on with his work.
    ‘For God’s sake, get him to put the ladder back up,’ the window cleaner yelled. ‘I’ve been stuck up here in your bedroom for forty minutes and I’ve got fifteen more houses to do today. That bloody man …’
    Mrs Wiley grabbed Horace and dragged him into the house and up to the bedroom. She unlocked the door, shoved him inside and let the man out. That done, she had made herself what in normal circumstances she’d have called ‘a nice cup of tea’ and tried to