Once he’d left Old Samuel opened a bottle of excellent champagne and toasted the happy couple and an hour later Mr and Mrs Grope went to a large bed in a bedroom at the far end of the house where they thought that their lovemaking couldn’t be overheard. Finally exhausted they went to sleep.
It was another week before Esmond gathered together his courage and decided that although his lady wife seemed to be behaving herself he really must put his scheme into practice. He was in the middle of rehearsing his conversation with Belinda with only the piglets to bear witness to his extreme nervousness when Jeremy found him and asked him if he would come up to his cabin.
‘I haven’t yet given you a wedding present,’ he said when Esmond arrived.
‘But there’s no need to do that, really there isn’t.’
‘Oh but there is, Joe. You’ve been the first person to be a true friend to me ever since I arrived at Grope Hall and started being Old Samuel instead of Young Jeremy.’ He looked sad for a moment before brightening. ‘See that sack with tar all over it in the corner. That’s my present to you. Go on, open it.’
Esmond still hesitated. ‘I’m serious. You don’t have to give me anything. I’ve got everything I want. Well, I will have if everything goes to plan.’
‘I insist, Joe. You’re my best friend. We shook hands on that, remember.’
‘I do indeed and I’ll always be your friend.’
‘Look at your present for me then.’
‘Well, if you insist.’
Esmond crossed the room and after some difficulty managed to unwind the copper wire which held the sack closed. As he did so it fell over and some coins spilt out and lay scattered on the floor. Esmond stared at them in amazement. He had never seen money like this before. He picked one up and examined it. It was a gold sovereign. There was no doubt in his mind and as if to confirm his belief the sack itself was terribly heavy.
‘There must be a fortune here. Where on earth did you find it?’ he gasped.
‘There is. I reckon several million. As for where I found it, can’t you guess?’
Esmond tried to guess. Finally he shook his head. ‘You’re not going to tell me under that great slab you were polishing?’ he said, slumping into a chair.
‘Spot on.’
Esmond gaped at him. ‘But it was so heavy. You can’t have lifted it yourself.’
‘I rigged up a sort of crane from a tractor and fastened a whacking great chain to one end of the slab and winched it up that way while you were having it off with Mrs Grope after the wedding.’
‘But someone must have heard you,’ said Esmond.
‘With the racket you and your missus were making? You’re joking! Anyway, the chapel’s some way from the Hall. After I’d done that it was simple. I just moved our skeleton friend to one side and kept shoving in a metal rod until I felt something. Then I dug down and somehow hauled this sack up. It took me all night and God knows I was shattered. I slept all day and most of the next night.’
‘I’m not surprised. How did you get the sack up here? It weighs a ton.’
‘The tractor again. The tractor with a wheelbarrow tied behind it.’
Esmond stared at him silently in still more amazement mingled with admiration.
Jeremy broke the silence.
‘Well, you’re a very rich man now. You can do what you like, buy what you like, go where you like. You can –’
‘Balls!’ Esmond exploded. ‘I know what I’m going to do, or rather we are. We’re going to go halves. You found the stuff which is more than I could ever have done in a million years though how the hell you knew it was there I can’t even begin to imagine.’
Jeremy laughed. ‘Think of that iron slab and the inscription on it in lousy verse. That told me there was something more than a skeleton with a spade down there, though I didn’t expect it would be a fortune in gold sovereigns.’
‘Which we’re splitting because of our genuine friendship. And now I’d better be getting back to the Hall. I’ve something to say to my new bride.’
Esmond found Belinda in the garden with a large bunch of red roses which she was putting in a bowl.
‘Isn’t it wonderful to be here,’ she said. ‘I loved it as a child when I visited in the summer but it’s even better now I’ve escaped from that dreadful Albert and his horrible bungalow. You’ve no idea how I hated living there.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Esmond who, now that he thought about it, really could imagine how dreadful life with his uncle must have been. Even more alarmingly, the very thought of Belinda in another man’s arms made him feel quite ill. Whatever had come over him?
‘You’re never going back there, Belinda,’ he began, adopting a stern look. ‘You’re going to stay here and you’re going to damned well do as I say from now on. I’ve been thinking about it and I love the peaceful natural life I have here and I’m going to stay and be a farmer but I can’t hold with you slipping me sleeping tablets and telling me what to do and say all the time. I want a proper wife: one who looks after me properly else there’s going to be hell to pay. And what’s more Old Samuel isn’t going to be called Old Samuel any longer. It isn’t even his name. He’s going to be called Jeremy, Young Jeremy for now and then when he’s old, Old Jeremy. And what’s even more, Old Samuel – I mean Young Jeremy – isn’t going to work for us any more because he and I are going to go into partnership. He’s come into some money and we’ve decided that we’re going to go into business breeding bulls as well as running the farm. You’re to have nothing to do with any of it although you can feed the piglets from time to time if you’ve a mind to … And, and …’
‘Well, you’re the boss, my love. You make the decisions.’
Esmond looked at Belinda in astonishment.
‘But you said only the other day that we had to stick to the old traditions and now –’
‘What’s the point of trying to follow an ancient and clearly barbaric tradition? We are equals. It’s as simple as that. If we have a baby girl she can follow the tradition of the past if she so wishes but for my part I rather hope that we have a boy.’
And on that note she carried the bowl of roses into the house.
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Copyright © Tom Sharpe 2009
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First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hutchinson
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Tom Sharpe, The Gropes
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