He continues to cheat and lie and bully not just in his personal life with Helen, where he tells her what to wear, what to eat, when to rest, when to use her phone, when to read, when to work, when to have sex, when to not interfere with his life, whether she can star in the Ambridge panto (spoiler - no Helen, think of Henry!), and on and on; but also in his dealings with others, where he lies about being out at a cricket match so he can appear the hero of the hour, where he lies about his job so that his polish workers get the blame for his mistakes, where he lies about ditches and sluices during the great Ambridge flood, where he hurts hunt saboteurs yet ensures he is seen as the victim (and most of us feel he somehow switched semen samples to escape his now unwanted child with his previous wife)...in fact I wouldn't put it past him to have killed Scruff.
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| Picture from the simply brilliant twitter feed of @ThePlarchers |
And yet
And yet I fear that my initial hope that he would be unmasked as the villain he is at Christmas time (when surely he would finally snap when Helen dared question his choice of bread sauce over cranberry, causing her to have a terrible 'fall' or accidental bump into a kitchen cupboard door) is not going to happen. I suspect that the arrival of his parents, whom he has made clear he is not keen to see, may reveal another darker tale. Maybe we will discover that Rob was a bullied child, made to feel small and useless by a bullying father while a weak mother allowed it to continue and now he lives with the ring of his fathers words in his mind
"Useless boy, never make a cricketer, can't even hit a ball, pathetic"
"Scared of a dog, idiot boy, I might as well have a girl"
"School reports no surprise, fool. Doesn't study enough, no friends, hopeless"
"Will never amount to anything"
"Wet the bed til you were 11, pansy"
"Can't even manage to clear a ditch properly, waste of space"
"Pregnant? Ha! I'd be amazed if it was yours you simpleton, no lead in your weak pencil"
and suddenly the worst thing will happen, we will feel sorry for him! Sorry for Rob!! Helen will see what his parents are like and will faun all over him worse than ever, he will then either a) continue as before with Helen making allowances for his appalling treatment of her or b) (and this would be worse still) he will go for counselling and be cured and become lovely and live in Ambridge with Helen happily every after.
It's a horror story. You read it here first...
