The Throwback

by Tom Sharpe

  He paused and studied Mrs Flawse closely; there was certainly doubt on her face. But it was doubt as to the sanity of the man she had married rather than an intellectual doubt of his argument.

  ‘You say,’ continued the old man, ‘as well you may, if inheritance determines temperament what has education to do with what we are? Is that not what you are thinking?’

  Again Mrs Flawse nodded involuntarily. Her own education had been so pasteurized by permissive parents and progressive teachers that she found it impossible to follow his argument at all. Beyond the fact that he seemed obsessed with the sexual habits and reproductive processes of dogs and had openly admitted that in the Flawse family a dog was evidently the father to the man, she had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘The answer is this, ma’am, and here again the dog is our determinant; a dog is a domestic animal not by nature but by social symbiosis. Dog and man, ma’am, live together by virtue of mutual necessity. We hunt together, we eat together, we live together and we sleep together, but above all we educate one another. I have learnt more from the constant companionship of dogs than ever I have from men or books. Carlyle is the exception but I will come to that later. First let me say that a dog can be trained. Up to a point, ma’am, only up to a point. I defy the finest shepherd in the world to take a terrier and turn him into a sheepdog. It can’t be done. A terrier is an earth dog. Your Latin will have acquainted you with that. Terra, earth; terrier, earth dog. And no amount of herding will eradicate his propensity for digging. Train him how you will he will remain a digger of holes at heart. He may not dig but the instinct is there. And so it is with man, ma’am. Which said, it remains only to say that I have done with Lockhart my utmost to eradicate those instincts which we Flawses to our cost possess.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ muttered Mrs Flawse, who knew to her cost those instincts the Flawses possessed. The old man raised an admonitory finger. ‘But, ma’am, lacking a knowledge of his father’s ancestry I have been handicapped. Aye, sorely handicapped. The vein of vice that runs in Lockhart’s paternal line I know not and knowing not can but deduce. My daughter could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a discriminating girl. The manner of her death suffices to prove that. She died, ma’am, behind a dyke giving birth to her son. And she refused to name the father.’

  Mr Flawse paused to savour his frustration and to expel that nagging suspicion that his daughter’s obstinacy in the matter of Lockhart’s paternity was a final gesture of filial generosity designed to spare him the ignominy of incest. While he stared into the depths of the fire as into hell itself, Mrs Flawse contented herself with the realization that Lockhart’s illegitimacy was one more arrow to the bow of her domestic power. The old fool would suffer for the admission. Mrs Flawse had garnered a fresh grievance.

  ‘When I think that my Jessica is married to an illegitimate man, I must say I find your behaviour inexcusable and dishonourable, I do indeed,’ she said, taking advantage of Mr Flawse’s mood of submission. ‘If I had known I would never have given consent to the marriage.’

  Mr Flawse nodded humbly. ‘You must forgive me,’ he said, ‘but needs must when the devil drives and your daughter’s saintliness will dilute the evil of Lockhart’s paternal line.’

  ‘I sincerely hope so,’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘And talking about inheritance, I believe you mentioned remaking your will.’ And so from things theoretical they moved to practicalities. ‘I will send for my solicitor, Mr Bullstrode, and have him draw up the new will. You will be the beneficiary, ma’am. I assure you of that. Within the limits imposed by my obligations to my employees, of course, and with the proviso that on your demise the estate will go to Lockhart and his offspring.’

  Mrs Flawse smiled contentedly. She foresaw a comfortable future. ‘And in the meantime you will see to it that the Hall is modernized?’ she said. And again Mr Flawse nodded.

  ‘In that case I shall stay,’ said Mrs Flawse graciously. This time there was the flicker of a smile on Mr Flawse’s face but it died instantly. There was no point in giving his game away. He would buy time by affecting submission.

  *

  That afternoon Mrs Flawse sat down and wrote to Jessica. It was less a letter than an inventory of her possessions to be forwarded by road haulage to Flawse Hall. When she had finished she gave the letter to Mr Dodd to post in Black Pockrington. It was still unposted that night when she went up to bed. In the kitchen Mr Flawse boiled a kettle and steamed the envelope open and read its contents.

  ‘You can post it,’ he told Mr Dodd as he resealed the envelope. ‘The auld trout has taken the bait. It just remains to play her.’

  *

  And so for the next few month, he did. The amenities of Flawse Hall remained unimproved. The central heating firm was always coming next week and never did. The electricity remained in abeyance and the Post Office refused to connect the telephone except at a cost that even Mrs Flawse found prohibitive. There were hitches everywhere. The arrival of her private possessions was delayed by the inability of the furniture removal van to negotiate the bridge at the bottom of the valley and the refusal of the removal men to carry boxes and trunks half a mile uphill. In the end they unloaded the van and went away, leaving it to Mrs Flawse and Mr Dodd to bring the pieces up one by one, a slow process made slower by Mr Dodd’s other multifarious occupations. It was late spring by the time every knick-knack and gewgaw from 12 Sandicott Crescent had been installed in the drawing-room where they competed in vain with the antique plunder of the Empire. Worst of all, Mrs Flawse’s Rover was dispatched by rail, and thanks to Mr Dodd’s intervention with the stationmaster, in which transaction money passed hands, was rerouted back to East Pursley by way of Glasgow, and delivered to Lockhart and Jessica mechanically inoperable and with a label attached saying ‘Addressee unknown’. Without her car Mrs Flawse was lost. She could accompany Mr Dodd in the dog-cart as far as Black Pockrington, but no one in Pockrington had a telephone and farther he refused to go.

  After three months of discomfort, uncertainty and procrastination on Mr Flawse’s part in the matter of the will, she had had enough. Mrs Flawse delivered her ultimatum.

  ‘You will either do the things you promised to do or I will leave,’ she said.

  ‘But, ma’am, I have done my best,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘The matter is in hand and …’

  ‘It were better it were afoot,’ said Mrs Flawse who had adapted her speech to that of her husband. ‘I mean what I say. Mr Bullstrode, the solicitor, must draw up your will in my favour or I will up sticks and return to where I am appreciated.’

  ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ said the old man, musing on the possible permutations implied in the maxim and thinking of Schopenhauer. ‘As the great Carlyle said—’

  ‘And that’s another thing. I’ll have no more sermonizing. I have heard enough of Mr Carlyle to last me a lifetime. He may be the great man you say he was but enough’s as good as a feast and I’ve had my fill of Heroes and Hero Worship.’

  ‘And is that your last word?’ asked Mr Flawse hopefully.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Flawse, and contradicted herself: ‘I have endured your company and the inconveniences of this house long enough. Mr Bullstrode will put in an appearance within the week or I shall make myself absent.’

  ‘Then Mr Bullstrode will be here tomorrow,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘I give you my word.’

  ‘He’d better be,’ said Mrs Flawse, and flounced out of the room leaving the old man to regret that he had ever urged her to read Samuel Smiles on Self Help.

  *

  That night Mr Dodd was dispatched with a sealed envelope bearing the Flawse crest, a moss trooper pendant, imprinted in wax on the back. It contained precise instructions as to the contents of Mr Flawse’s new will, and when Mrs Flawse came down to breakfast next morning it was to learn that for once her husband had lived up to his word.

  ‘There you are, ma’am,’ said Mr Flawse, handing her Mr Bullstrode’s reply, ‘he will be
here this afternoon to draw up the will.’

  ‘And just as well,’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘I meant what I said.’

  ‘And I mean every word I say, ma’am. The will shall be drawn and I have summoned Lockhart to be present next week when it is to be read.’

  ‘I can see no good reason why he should be present until after your death,’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘That’s the usual time for reading wills.’

  ‘Not this will, ma’am,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘Forewarned is forearmed as the old saying has it. And the boy needs a spur to his flank.’

  He retired to his sanctum leaving Mrs Flawse to puzzle this riddle, and that afternoon Mr Bullstrode arrived at the bridge over The Cut and was admitted by Mr Dodd. For the next three hours there came the sound of muted voices from the study, but though she listened at the keyhole Mrs Flawse could gain nothing from the conversation. She was back in the drawing-room when the solicitor came to pay his respects before leaving.

  ‘One question before you go, Mr Bullstrode,’ she said. ‘I would like your assurance that I am the chief beneficiary of my husband’s will.’

  ‘You may rest assured on that point, Mrs Flawse. You are indeed the chief beneficiary. Let me go further, the conditions of Mr Flawse’s new will leave his entire estate to you until your death.’

  Mrs Flawse sighed with relief. It had been an uphill battle but she had won the first round. All that remained was to insist on modern conveniences being installed in the house. She was sick to death of using the earth closet.

  7

  Lockhart and Jessica were sick, period. The Curse, as Jessica had been brought up to call it, blighted what little physical bond there was between them. Lockhart steadfastly refused to impose his unworthy person on his bleeding angel and, even when not bleeding, his angel refused to insist on her right as his wife to be imposed upon. But if they lived in a state of sexual stalemate, their love grew in the fertile soil of their frustration. In short, they adored one another and loathed the world in which they found themselves. Lockhart no longer spent his days at Sandicott & Partner in Wheedle Street. Mr Treyer, forced to decide whether to implement his threat to resign if Lockhart didn’t leave, a decision thrust upon him by Mr Dodd who hadn’t delivered his letter to Mrs Flawse, finally resorted to more subtle tactics and paid Lockhart his full salary plus a bonus to stay away from the office before he brought ruin to the business by killing a Tax Inspector or alienating all their clients. Lockhart accepted this arrangement without regret. What he had seen of Mr Treyer, VAT men, the contradictions between income and income tax and the wiles and ways of both tax collectors and tax evaders only confirmed his view that the modern world was a sordid and corrupt place. Brought up by his grandfather to believe what he was told and to tell what he believed, the transition to a world in which the opposites held true had had a traumatic effect.

  Left fully paid to his own devices Lockhart had remained at home and learnt to drive.

  ‘It will help to kill time,’ he told Jessica, and had promptly done his best to kill two driving instructors and a great many other road users. More accustomed to the ways of horses and buggies than to the sudden surges and stops of motor cars, Lockhart’s driving consisted of putting his foot flat down on the accelerator before letting out the clutch and then putting his foot flat down on the brake before smashing into whatever stood in his path. The effect of this repeated sequence had been to leave his instructors speechless with panic and in no position to communicate an alternative procedure to their pupil. Having wrecked the front ends of three Driving School cars and the back ends of two parked cars plus a lamp-post, Lockhart had found it difficult to get anyone to instruct him.

  ‘I just don’t understand it,’ he told Jessica. ‘With a horse you climb into the saddle and away she goes. You don’t keep bumping into things. A horse has got more sense.’

  ‘Perhaps if you listened to what the instructors say you’d get on better, darling. I mean they must know what you ought to do.’

  ‘According to the last one,’ said Lockhart, ‘what I ought to do is have my bloody head examined and I wasn’t even bleeding. He was the one with the fractured skull.’

  ‘Yes, dear, but you had just knocked down the lamp-post. You know you had.’

  ‘I don’t know anything of the sort,’ said Lockhart indignantly. ‘The car knocked it down. All I did was to take my foot off the clutch. It wasn’t my fault the car shot off the road like a scalded cat.’

  In the end, by paying one of the instructors danger money and allowing him to sit in the back seat with a crash helmet and two safety belts, Lockhart had got the hang of driving. The fact that the instructor had insisted on Lockhart providing his own vehicle had led him to buy a Land-Rover. It had been the instructor who installed a governor on the accelerator and together they had practised on an abandoned airfield where there were few obstacles and no other cars. Even in these unobstructed circumstances Lockhart had managed to puncture two hangars in ten pieces by driving straight through their corrugated walls at forty miles an hour and it was testimony to the Land-Rover that it took it so well.

  Not so the instructor. He had taken it extremely badly and had only been persuaded to come out again by being offered even more money and half a bottle of Scotch before he got into the back seat. After six weeks Lockhart had overcome his manifest desire to drive at things rather than round them and had graduated to side roads and finally to main ones. By that time the instructor pronounced him ready to take the test. The examiner thought otherwise and demanded to be let out of the car halfway through. But on his third attempt Lockhart had got his licence, largely because the examiner couldn’t face the prospect of having to sit beside him a fourth time. By then the Land-Rover had begun to suffer from metal fatigue and to celebrate the occasion Lockhart traded what remained of it in for a Range Rover which could do a hundred miles an hour on the open road and sixty cross-country. Lockhart proved the latter to his own satisfaction and the frenzied distraction of the Club Secretary by driving the thing at high speed across all eighteen holes of the Pursley Golf Course before plunging through the hedge at the end of Sandicott Crescent and into the garage.

  ‘It’s got four-wheel drive and goes through sand holes like anything,’ he told Jessica, ‘and it’s great on grass. When we go to Northumberland we’ll be able to drive right across the fells.’

  He went back to the showroom to pay for the Range Rover and it was left to Jessica to confront a partially demented Club Secretary who wanted to know what the hell her husband meant by driving a bloody great truck across all eighteen greens to the total destruction of their immaculate and painstakingly preserved surfaces.

  Jessica denied that her husband had done any such thing. ‘He’s very fond of gardening,’ she told the man, ‘and he wouldn’t dream of destroying your greens. And anyway, I didn’t know you grew vegetables on the golf course. I certainly haven’t seen any.’

  Faced by such radiant and disconcerting innocence the Secretary had retired muttering that some maniac had put paid to the Ladies Open, not to mention the Mixed Doubles.

  Mr Flawse’s letter summoning the couple to Flawse Hall to hear the contents of his will therefore came at an opportune moment.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ said Jessica, ‘I’ve been dying to see your home. How marvellous.’

  ‘It rather sounds as if Grandfather were dying anyway,’ said Lockhart, studying the letter. ‘Why does he want to read his will now?’

  ‘He probably just wants you to know how generous he’s going to be,’ said Jessica, who always managed to put a nice interpretation on the nastiest actions.

  Lockhart didn’t. ‘You don’t know Grandpa,’ he said.

  *

  But next morning they left very early in the Range Rover and managed to avoid the morning traffic into London. They were less fortunate at the traffic lights at the entrance to the motorway which happened to be red at the time. Here Lockhart slammed into the back of a Mini before reversing and driving on.
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  ‘Hadn’t you better go back and say you’re sorry?’ asked Jessica.

  But Lockhart wouldn’t hear of it. ‘He shouldn’t have stopped so suddenly,’ he said.

  ‘But the lights were red, darling. They changed just as we came up behind him.’

  ‘Well, the system lacks logic then,’ said Lockhart. ‘There wasn’t anything coming on the other road. I looked.’

  ‘There’s something coming now,’ said Jessica, turning to look out of the back window, ‘and it’s got a blue light flashing on the top. I think it must be the police.’

  Lockhart put his foot hard down on the floor and they were doing a hundred in no time at all. Behind them the police car turned on its siren and went up to a hundred and ten.

  ‘They’re gaining on us, darling,’ said Jessica, ‘we’ll never be able to get away.’