by Tom Sharpe
Mr Flawse, satisfied that he had made his point, cuffed the dog out of the coach and slammed the door. Then he turned to his wife. ‘I think ye’ll agree that there’s more than three-thirds of savage hound in him, my dear,’ he said grimly, ‘or would you care for another closer look?’
Mrs Flawse gave him a very close look indeed and said she would not.
‘Then ye’ll not contradict me on the matter of eugenics, ma’am,’ he said, and shouted to Mr Dodd to drive on. ‘I have made a study of the subject and I’ll not be told I am wrong.’
Mrs Flawse kept her thoughts to herself. They were not nice ones. But they would keep. The carriage drew up at the back door and stopped. Mr Dodd came round through a sea of hounds.
‘Get them out the way, man,’ shouted Mr Flawse above the barks. ‘The wife is afraid of the creatures.’
The next moment Mr Dodd, flailing around him with the horsewhip, had cowed the hounds back across the yard. Mr Flawse got out and held his hand for Mrs Flawse. ‘You’ll not expect a man of my age to carry you across the door-stone,’ he said gallantly, ‘but Dodd will be my proxy. Dodd, carry your mistress.’
‘There’s absolutely no need …’ Mrs Flawse began but Mr Dodd had obeyed orders, and she found herself staring too closely for her peace of mind into his leering face as he clutched her to him and carried her into the house.
‘Thank you, Dodd,’ said Mr Flawse, following them in. ‘Ceremony has been observed. Put her down.’
For a horrid moment Mrs Flawse was clutched even tighter and Dodd’s face came closer to her own, but then he relaxed and set her on her feet in the kitchen. Mrs Flawse adjusted her dress before looking round.
‘I trust it meets with your approbation, my dear.’
It didn’t but Mrs Flawse said nothing. If the outside of Flawse Hall had looked bleak, bare and infinitely forbidding, the kitchen, flagged with great stones, was authentically medieval. True there was a stone sink with a tap above it, which signified running if cold water, and the iron range had been made in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution; there was little else that was even vaguely modern. A bare wooden table stood in the middle of the room with benches on either side, and there were upright wooden seats with backs beside the range.
‘Settles,’ said Mr Flawse when Mrs Flawse looked inquiringly at them. ‘Dodd and the bastard use them of an evening.’
‘The bastard?’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘What bastard?’ But for once it was Mr Flawse’s turn to keep silent.
‘I’ll show ye the rest of the house,’ he said, and led the way out down a passage.
‘If it’s anything like the kitchen …’ Mrs Flawse began but it wasn’t. Where the kitchen had been bleak and bare, the rest of the Hall lived up to her expectations and was packed with fine furniture, tapestries, great portraits and the contributions of many generations and as many marriages. Mrs Flawse breathed a sigh of relief as she stood below the curved staircase and looked around her. In marrying old Mr Flawse she had done more than marry a man in his dotage, she had wedded herself to a fortune in antique furniture and fine silver. And from every wall a Flawse face looked down from old portraits, wigged Flawses, Flawses in uniform and Flawses in fancy waistcoats, but the Flawse face was ever the same. Only in one corner did she find a small dark portrait that was not clearly identifiable as a Flawse.
‘Murkett Flawse, painted posthumously, I’m afraid,’ said the old man. Mrs Flawse studied the portrait more closely.
‘He must have died a peculiar death from the look of him,’ she said. Mr Flawse nodded.
‘Beheaded, ma’am, and I have an idea the executioner had a bad head that morning from over-indulgence the night before and took more chops than were rightly called for.’
Mrs Flawse withdrew from the horrid portrayal of Murkett Flawse’s head, and together they went from room to room. In each there was something to admire and in Mrs Flawse’s case to value. By the time they returned to the entrance hall she was satisfied that she had done well to marry the old fool after all.
‘And this is my inner sanctum,’ said Mr Flawse, opening a door to the left of the entrance. Mrs Flawse went inside. A huge coal fire blazed in the hearth and, in contrast to the rest of the house which had seemed decidedly damp and musty, the study was warm and smelt of book-leather and tobacco. An old cat basked on the carpet in front of the fire and from every wall books gleamed in the firelight. In the centre of the room stood a kneehole desk with a greenshaded lamp and an inkstand of silver. Mrs Flawse went to the lamp to switch it on and found a handle.
‘You’ll need a match,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘we’re not on the electricity.’
‘You’re not …’ Mrs Flawse began and stopped as the full significance of the remark dawned on her. Whatever treasures in the way of old silver and fine furniture Flawse Hall might hold, without electricity it held only transitory attractions for Mrs Flawse. No electricity meant presumably no central heating, and the single tap above the stone sink had signified only cold water. Mrs Flawse, safe from the hounds and in the inner sanctum of her husband’s study, decided the time had come to strike. She sat down heavily in a large high-backed leather chair beside the fire and glared at him.
‘The very idea of bringing me here and expecting me to live in a house without electricity or hot water or any mod cons …’ she began stridently as the old man bent to light a spill from the fire. Mr Flawse turned his face towards her and she saw it was suffused with rage. In his hand the spill burnt lower. Mr Flawse ignored it.
‘Woman,’ he said with a soft and steely emphasis, ‘ye’ll learn never to address me in that tone of voice again.’ He straightened up but Mrs Flawse was not to be cowed.
‘And you’ll learn never to call me “woman” again,’ she said defiantly, ‘and don’t think that you can bully me because you can’t. I’m perfectly capable—’
They were interrupted by the entrance of Mr Dodd bearing a silver tray on which a teapot stood under a cosy. Mr Flawse signalled to him to put it on the low table beside her chair and it was only when Mr Dodd had left the room, closing the door quietly behind him, that the storm broke once again. It did so simultaneously.
‘I said I’m—’ Mrs Flawse began.
‘Woman,’ roared Mr Flawse, ‘I’ll not—’
But their unison silenced them both and they sat glowering at one another by the fire. It was Mrs Flawse who first broke the truce. She did so with guile.
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ she said, ‘we need not argue about it. We can install an electrical generator. You’ll find it will make a tremendous improvement to your life.’
But Mr Flawse shook his head. ‘I have lived without it for ninety years and I’ll die without it.’
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ said Mrs Flawse, ‘but I see no reason why you should take me with you. I am used to hot water and my home comforts and—’
‘Ma’am,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘I have washed in cold water—’
‘Seldom,’ said Mrs Flawse.
‘As I was saying—’
‘We can have Calor gas if you won’t have electricity—’
‘I’ll have no modern contraption …’
They wrangled on until it was time for dinner and in the kitchen Mr Dodd listened with an interested ear while he stirred the stewed mutton in the pot.
‘The auld divil’s bitten off a sight more than he’s teeth in his heid to chew,’ he thought to himself, and tossed a bone to his old collie by the door. ‘And if the mither’s so rigid what’s the lassie like?’ With this on his mind he moved about the kitchen which had seen so many centuries of Flawse womenfolk come and go and where the smells of those centuries which Lockhart pined for still clung. Mr Dodd had no nose for them, that musk of unwashed humanity, of old boots and dirty socks, wet dogs and mangy cats, of soap and polish, fresh milk and warm blood, baked bread and hung pheasant, all those necessities of the harsh life the Flawses had led since the house first was built. He was part of that musk
and shared its ancestry. But now there was a new ingredient come to the home and one he had no mind to like.
Nor after a glum dinner had Mr Flawse when he and Mrs Flawse retired to a cold bedroom and a featherbed redolent of damp and too recently plucked chicken. Outside the wind whistled in the chimneys and from the kitchen there came the faint wail of Mr Dodd’s Northumbrian pipes as he played ‘Edward, Edward’. It seemed an appropriate ballad for the evil hour. Upstairs Mr Flawse knelt by the bed.
‘O Lord—’ he began, only to be interrupted by his wife.
‘There’s no point in your asking forgiveness,’ she said. ‘You’re not coming near me until we’ve first come to an understanding.’
The old man regarded her balefully from the floor, ‘Understanding? What understanding, ma’am?’
‘A clear understanding that you will have this house modernized as quickly as possible and that until such time I shall return to my own home and the comforts to which I have been accustomed. I didn’t marry you to catch my death of pneumonia.’
Mr Flawse lumbered to his feet. ‘And I didn’t marry you,’ he thundered, ‘to have my household arrangements dictated to me by a chit of a woman.’
Mrs Flawse pulled the sheet up round her neck defiantly. ‘And I won’t be shouted at,’ she snapped back. ‘I am not a shit of a woman. I happen to be a respectable …’
A fresh wail of wind in the chimney and the fact that Mr Flawse had picked up a poker from the grate stopped her.
‘Respectable, are ye? And what sort of respectable woman is it that marries an old man for his money?’
‘Money?’ said Mrs Flawse, alarmed at this fresh evidence that the old fool wasn’t such an old fool after all. ‘Who said anything about money?’
‘I did,’ roared Mr Flawse. ‘You proposed and I disposed and if you imagine for one moment that I didn’t know what you were after you’re sadly misguided.’
Mrs Flawse resorted to the stratagem of tears. ‘At least I thought you were a gentleman,’ she whimpered.
‘Aye, you did that. And more fool you,’ said the old man, as livid as his red flannel gown. ‘And tears will get you nowhere. You made it a condition of the bastard’s marrying your numbskull daughter that you were to be my wife. Well, you have made your bed, now you must lie in it.’
‘Not with you,’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘I’d rather die.’
‘And well you may, ma’am, well you may. Is that your last word?’
Mrs Flawse hesitated and made a mental calculation between the threat, the poker and her last word. But there was still stubbornness in her Sandicott soul.
‘Yes,’ she said defiantly.
Mr Flawse hurled the poker into the grate and went to the door. ‘Ye’ll live to rue the day you said that, ma’am,’ he muttered malevolently, and left.
Mrs Flawse lay back exhausted by her defiance and then with a final effort got out of bed and locked the door.
6
Next morning after a fitful night Mrs Flawse came downstairs to find the old man closeted in his sanctum and a note on the kitchen table telling her to make her own breakfast. A large pot of porridge belched glutinously on the stove and having sampled its contents she contented herself with a pot of tea and some bread and marmalade. There was no sign of Mr Dodd. Outside in the yard the grey products of Mr Flawse’s experiments in canine eugenics lolled about in the wintry sunshine. Avoiding them by going out of the kitchen door, Mrs Flawse made her way round the garden. Enclosed by the high wall against the wind and weather, it was not unattractive. Some earlier Flawse had built greenhouses and a kitchen garden and Capability Flawse, whose portrait hung on the landing wall, had created a miniature southern landscape in the half-acre not devoted to vegetables. Stunted trees and sanded paths wound in and out of rockeries and a fountain played in an oval fishpond. In one corner there was a gazebo, a little belvedere of flint and sea shells embedded in cement with a tiny Gothic window paned with coloured glass. Mrs Flawse climbed the steps to the door, found it unlocked and went inside to discover the first signs of comfort at the Hall. Lined with oak panels and faded velvet plush seats the little room had an ornately carved ceiling and a view out across the fell to the reservoir.
Mrs Flawse seated herself there and wondered again at the strangeness of the family into which she had so unwisely married. That it was of ancient lineage she had already gathered and that it had money she still suspected. Flawse Hall might not be an attractive building but it was filled with treasures filched from long-lost colonies by those intrepid younger sons who had risked malaria and scurvy and yellow fever to make their fortunes or meet untimely deaths in far-flung corners of the Empire. Mrs Flawse envied and understood their enterprise. They had gone south and east (and in many cases west) to escape the bleakness and boredom of home. Mrs Flawse yearned to follow their example. Anything would be preferable to the intolerable isolation of the Hall and she was just trying to think of some way of making her own departure when the tall gaunt figure of her husband emerged from the kitchen garden and made its way between the rockeries and miniature trees to the gazebo. Mrs Flawse steeled herself for this encounter. She need not have bothered. The old man was evidently in a genial mood. He strode up the steps and knocked on the door. ‘May I come in?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Flawse.
Mr Flawse stood in the doorway. ‘I see you have found your way to Perkin’s Lookout,’ he said. ‘A charming folly built in 1774 by Perkin Flawse, the family poet. It was here that he wrote his famous “Ode to Coal”, inspired no doubt by the drift mine you see over yonder.’
He pointed through the little window at a mound on the opposite hillside. There was a dark hole beside the mound and some remnants of rusting machinery.
‘“By Nature formed, by Nature felled
’Tis not by Nature now expelled.
But man’s endeavour yet sets free
The charred remains of many a tree
And so by forests long since dead
We boil our eggs and bake our bread.”
‘A fine poet, ma’am, if little recognized,’ continued the old man when he had finished the recitation, ‘but then we Flawses have unsuspected gifts.’
‘So I have discovered,’ said Mrs Flawse with some acerbity.
The old man bowed his head. He, too, had spent a wakeful night wrestling with his conscience and losing hands down.
‘I have come to beg your pardon,’ he said finally. ‘My conduct as your husband was inexcusable. I trust you will accept my humble apologies.’
Mrs Sandicott hesitated. Her former marriage had not disposed her to forfeit her right to grievance too easily. There were advantages to be gained from it, among them power. ‘You called me a shit of a woman,’ she pointed out.
‘A chit, ma’am, a chit,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘It means a young woman.’
‘Not where I come from,’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘It has an altogether different meaning and a very nasty one.’
‘I assure you I meant young, ma’am. The defecatory connotation which you attributed to the word was entirely absent from my intention.’
Mrs Flawse rather doubted that. What she had experienced of his intentions on their honeymoon gave her reason to think otherwise, but she had been prepared to suffer in a good cause. ‘Whatever you intended, you still accused me of marrying you for your money. Now that I won’t take from anyone.’
‘Quite so, ma’am. It was said in the heat of the moment and in the humble consciousness that there had to be a more sufficient reason than my poor self. I retract the remark.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. I married you because you were old and lonely and needed someone to look after you. The thought of money never entered my head.’
‘Quite so,’ said Mr Flawse, accepting these personally insulting attributes with some difficulty, ‘as you say I am old and lonely and I need someone to look after me.’
‘And I can’t be expected to look after anyone with the present lack of amenities in the hou
se. I want electricity and hot baths and television and central heating if I am to stay here.’
Mr Flawse nodded sadly. That it should have come to this. ‘You shall have them, ma’am,’ he said, ‘you shall have them.’
‘I didn’t come here to catch my death of pneumonia. I want them installed at once.’
‘I shall put the matter in hand immediately,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘and now let us adjourn to my study and the warmth of my fire to discuss the matter of my will.’
‘Your will?’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘You did say your “will”?’
‘Indeed I did, ma’am,’ said the old man, and escorted her down the steps of the gazebo and across the stunted garden to the house. There, sitting opposite one another in the great leather armchairs, with a mangy cat basking before the coal fire, they continued their discussion.
‘I will be frank with you,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘My grandson, your son-in-law, Lockhart, is a bastard.’
‘Really?’ said Mrs Flawse, uncertain whether or not to give that word its literal meaning. The old man answered the question.
‘The product of an illicit union between my late daughter and person or persons unknown, and I have made it my life’s work to determine his paternal ancestry and secondly to eradicate those propensities to which by virtue of his being partly a Flawse I have access. I trust you follow my line of reasoning.’
Mrs Flawse didn’t but she nodded obediently.
‘I am, as you may have surmised from a perusal of my library, a firm believer in the congenital inheritance of ancestral characteristics both physical and mental. To paraphrase the great William, there is a paternity that shapes our ends rough-hew them how we will. Paternity, ma’am. Not maternity. The mating of dogs, of which I have considerable experience, is a pointer to this end.’
Mrs Flawse shivered and stared at him. If her ears did not deceive her, she had married a man with perversions beyond belief.
Mr Flawse ignored her stunned look and continued. ‘The female bitch when on heat,’ he said, adding, ‘I trust this somewhat indelicate subject does not offend you?’ and taking Mrs Flawse’s shaking head as an assurance that she wasn’t in the least put out, went on, ‘the female bitch on heat attracts the attention of a pack of males, which pack pursues her up hill and down dale fighting among themselves for the privilege accorded to the fiercest and strongest dog of fecundating her prima nocte. She is thus impregnated by the finest specimen first but to assure conception she is then served by all the other dogs in the pack down to the smallest and weakest. The result is the survival of the species, ma’am, and of the fittest. Darwin said it, ma’am, and Darwin was right. Now I am an hereditarist. The Flawse nose and the Flawse chin are physical proof of the inheritance over the centuries of physical attributes evolved from our Flawse forefathers and it is my firm conviction that we not only inherit physical characteristics by way of paternal ancestry but also mental ones. To put it another way, the dog is father to the man, and a dog’s temperament is determined by his progenitors. But I see that you doubt me.’