by Tom Sharpe
‘Oh yes we will,’ said Lockhart, and looked in the rear-view mirror. The police car was four hundred yards behind them and coming up fast. Lockhart switched up an overpass on to a side road, squealed round a corner into a country lane and, putting his hunting instincts to good use, charged a five-barred gate and bucketed across a ploughed field. Behind them the police car stopped at the gate and men got out. But by that time Lockhart had negotiated another hedge and had disappeared. Twenty miles and forty hedges farther on he doubled back across the motorway and, proceeding by back roads to the east, drove on.
‘Oh, Lockhart, you’re so manly,’ said Jessica, ‘you think of everything. You really do. But don’t you suppose they’ll have taken our licence number?’
‘Won’t do them much good if they have,’ said Lockhart. ‘I didn’t like the one it had on it when I bought it so I changed it.’
‘You didn’t like it? Why not?’
‘It said PEE 453 P so I had another one made up. It’s much nicer. It’s FLA 123.’
‘But they’ll still be looking for a Range Rover with FLA 123,’ Jessica pointed out, ‘and they’ve got radios and things.’
Lockhart pullet into a lay-by. ‘You really don’t mind us being PEE 453 P?’ he asked. Jessica shook her head.
‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘you are silly.’
‘If you’re quite sure,’ said Lockhart doubtfully, but in the end he got out and changed the number plates back again. When he climbed back into the car Jessica hugged him.
‘Oh, darling,’ she said. ‘I feel so safe with you. I don’t know why it is but you always make things look so simple.’
‘Most things are simple,’ said Lockhart, ‘if you go about them the right way. The trouble is that people never do what’s obvious.’
‘I suppose that’s what it is,’ said Jessica, and relapsed into the romantic dream of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg. With each mile north her feelings, unlike those of her mother before her, grew mistier and more hazy with legend and the wild beauty she longed for.
Beside her, Lockhart’s feelings changed too. He was moving away from London and that low country he so detested and was returning, if only briefly, to those open rolling fells of his boyhood and to the music of guns firing in the distance or close at hand. A feeling of wildness and a strange surge of violence stirred in his blood and Mr Treyer assumed a new monstrosity in his mind, a vast question mark to which there was never any answer. Ask Mr Treyer a question and the answer he gave was no answer at all; it was a balance sheet. On one side there were debits, on the other credits. You paid your money and took your choice, and Lockhart had been left none the wiser. The world he understood had no place for equivocation or those grey areas where everything was fudged and bets were hedges. If you aimed at a grouse it was hit or miss and a miss was as good as a mile. And if you built a drystone wall it stood or fell and in falling proved you wrong. But in the south it was all slipshod and cover-up. He was being paid not to work and other men who did no work were making fortunes out of buying and selling options on cocoa yet to be harvested and copper still unmined. And having made their money by swapping pieces of paper they had it taken away from them by Income Tax officials or had to lie to keep it. Finally there was the Government which in his simple way he had always thought was elected to govern and to maintain the value of the currency. Instead it spent more money than was in the Exchequer and borrowed to make good the deficit. If a man did that he would go bankrupt and rightly so. But governments could borrow, beg, steal or simply print more money and there was no one to say to them Nay. To Lockhart’s arithmetical mind the world he had encountered was one of lunacy where two and two made five, or even eleven, and nothing added up to a true figure. It was not a world for him, with all its lying hypocrisy. ‘Better a thief than a beggar,’ he thought, and drove on.
It was almost dark when they turned off the main road beyond Wark on to the half-metalled track that led to Black Pockrington. Above them a few stars speckled the sky and the headlamps picked out the gates and occasionally the eyes of a night animal, but everything else was dark and bare, a shape against the skyline. Jessica went into raptures.
‘Oh, Lockhart, it’s like another world.’
‘It is another world,’ said Lockhart.
When finally they breasted the rise of Tombstone Law and looked across the valley at the Hall, it was ablaze with lights in every window.
‘Oh, how beautiful!’ said Jessica. ‘Let’s stop here for a moment. I want to savour it so.’
She got out and gazed ecstatically at the house. From its peel tower to its smoking chimneys and the lights gleaming from its windows it was everything she had hoped for. As if to celebrate this fulfilment the moon came out from behind a cloud and glinted on the surface of the reservoir and in the distance there came the baying of the Flawse hounds. The reading matter of Jessica’s retarded adolescence was making itself manifest.
8
It might be said that old Mr Flawse’s reading matter made itself manifest next morning in the hall of the peel tower which his grandfather had restored to more than its former elegance. A contemporary of Sir Walter Scott and a voracious reader of his novels, he had turned what had been a fortified byre for cattle into a banqueting hall with plaster chasing and ornamental crests, while from the rafters there hung the tattered and entirely concocted battle-flags of half a dozen fictitious regiments. Time and moths had lent these standards a gauzelike authenticity while rust had etched a handiwork into the suited armour and armoury that they had never possessed when he had bought them. And armour and arms were everywhere. Helmeted figures stood against the walls and above them, interspersed with the stuffed heads of stags, moose, antelope and bear, and even one tiger, were the swords and battleaxes of bygone wars.
It was in this bellicose setting, with a great fire blazing in the hearth and smoke filtering up among the flags, that Mr Flawse chose to have his will read. Seated before him at a huge oak table were his nearest and supposedly dearest: Lockhart, Mrs Flawse, Jessica in a coma of romance, Mr Bullstrode the solicitor, who was to read the will, two tenant farmers to witness its signature, and Dr Magrew to certify that Mr Flawse was, as he proclaimed, of sound mind.
‘The ceremony must be conducted under the most stringent of legal and jurisprudent conditions,’ Mr Flawse had instructed, and so it was. He might just as well have added that the late and great Thomas Carlyle would lend the weight of his rhetorical authority to the proceedings, and certainly there were strains of the Sage of Ecchilfeccan in the old man’s opening address. His words rang in the rafters and while for legal reasons the will contained few commas, Mr Flawse made good this deficiency by larding his speech with semi-colons.
‘You are gathered here today,’ he announced, raising his coat-tails to the fire, ‘to hear the last will and testament of Edwin Tyndale Flawse; once widowed and twice married; father of the late and partially lamented Clarissa Richardson Flawse; grandfather of her illegitimate offspring, Lockhart Flawse, whose father being unknown, I have out of no greatness of heart but that innate and incontrovertible practicality of mind which congenitally the family Flawse numbers most firmly among its features, adopted as my heir in the male line. But of the consequentiality of that anon; ’tis not of such low bestial matters that I speak; more lofty themes become my song, if song it be that old men sing out of their memories of what might have been; and I am old and near to death.’
He paused for breath and Mrs Flawse stirred expectantly in her seat. Mr Flawse regarded her with a gleaming predatory eye. ‘Aye, ma’am, well may you squirm; your turn for dotage won’t delay; death’s bony finger beckons and we must obey; that black oblivion is our certain destination. Certain beyond all other certainties; the one fixed star in the firmament of man’s experience; all else being loose and circumstantial and incoordinate, we can but set our sextant by that star of non-existence, death, to measure what and where we are. Which I being ninety now see shining br
ighter and more darkly brilliant than before. And so towards the grave we move along the tramlines of our thoughts and deeds, those grooves of character which we, being born with them, are much beholden to and by, but which by virtue of their tiny flaws allow us unintentionally to exercise that little freedom which is man. Aye, is man, is. No animal knows freedom; only man; and that by fault of gene and chemical congeneracy. The rest is all determined by our birth. So like an engine is a man, all steam and fire and pressure building up, he yet must move along predestined lines towards that end which is the end of all of us. Before you stands a semi-skeleton, all bones and skull with but a little spirit to ligature with life these odds and ends. And presently the parchment of my flesh shall break; all spirit flown; and shall my soul awake? I know not nor can ever know till death decides to answer yes or no. Which said I do not dis-esteem myself. I am yet here before you in this hall and you are gathered now to hear my will. My will? A strange word for the dead to claim; their will; when matters of decision are lost to those they leave behind. Their will; the supposition only of a wish. But I forestall that chance by setting forth before you now my will; and will it be in all the many meanings of that word. For I have laid conditions down which you will shortly hear and hearing do or forfeit all that fortune I have left to you.’
The old man paused and looked into their faces before continuing. ‘You wonder why I look?’ he asked. ‘To see one spark of some defiance in your eyes. One spark, that’s all, one spark that yet might tell this partial skeleton to go to hell. Which it would at the least be ironical to conclude was indeed my destination. But I see it not; greed snuffs the candle of your courage out. You, ma’am,’ he pointed a finger at Mrs Flawse, ‘an undernourished vulture has more patience perched upon an upas tree than you with your squat backside on that bench.’
He paused but Mrs Flawse said nothing. Her little eyes narrowed with calculating hatred.
‘Does nothing then provoke you to reply? No, but I know your thoughts; time runneth on; the metronome of heartbeats swings more slow and soon my threnody, a little premature perhaps, will cease. The grave I lie in will give you satisfaction. Let me forestall it for you, ma’am. And now the bastard Flawse. Have you defiance, sir, or did your education din it out of you?’
‘Go to hell,’ said Lockhart.
The old man smiled. ‘Better, better, but prompted all the same. I told you what to say and you obeyed. But here’s a better test.’ Mr Flawse turned and took a battleaxe from the wall and held it out.
‘Take it, bastard,’ he said. ‘Take the axe.’
Lockhart rose and took it.
‘It was the custom of the Norsemen when a man grew old to cleave him headless with an axe,’ continued Mr Flawse, ‘it was the duty of his eldest son. Now having none but you, a ditch-born bastard grandson, take on the onus of this act and—’
‘No,’ said Jessica, rising from her chair and grabbing the axe from Lockhart. ‘I won’t have it. You’ve got no right to put temptation in his way.’
The old man clapped his hands. ‘Bravo. Now that’s more like it. The bitch has better spirit than the dog. A flicker of spirit but spirit all the same. And I salute it. Mr Bullstrode, read the will.’ And, exhausted by his rhetoric, old Mr Flawse sat down. Mr Bullstrode rose theatrically and opened the will.
‘I, Edwin of Tyndale Flawse, being of sound mind and feeble yet sufficient body to sustain my mind, do hereby leave bequeath and devise all my worldly goods chattels property and land to my wife, Mrs Cynthia Flawse, for to have and to hold in trust and in use until her own death demise departure from this place which place being defined more closely is the radius of one mile from Flawse Hall and on condition that she do not sell mortgage rent borrow pledge or pawn a single or multiple of the possessions so bequeathed left and devised and in no way improves alters adds or amends the amenities of the said property possession chattels and house but subsists upon the income alone in recognition of which undertaking she signs herewith this will as being a binding contract to obey its strictures.’
Mr Bullstrode put down the will and looked at Mrs Flawse. ‘Will you so sign?’ he asked, but Mrs Flawse was in a flux of emotions. The old man had lived up to his word after all. He had left her his entire estate. Coming so shortly after being compared to a vulture this act of generosity had thrown her calculating compass off course. She needed time to think. It was denied her.
‘Sign, ma’am,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘or the will becomes null and void in so far as it appertains to you.’
Mrs Flawse took the pen and signed and her signature was witnessed by the two tenant farmers.
‘Continue, Mr Bullstrode,’ said the old man almost gaily, and Mr Bullstrode took up the will again.
‘To my grandson Lockhart Flawse I leave nothing except my name until and unless he shall have produced in physical form the person of his natural father which father shall be proved to the satisfaction of my executor Mr Bullstrode or his successors to be the actual and admitted and undoubted father of the said Lockhart and shall have signed an affidavit to that effect which affidavit having been signed he shall be flogged by the said Lockhart to within an inch of his life. In the event of these aforestated conditions in regard to the proof of his paternity having been met the terms of the will in respect of my wife Cynthia Flawse as stated above her freely given signature shall and will become automatically null and void and the estate property chattels land and possessions pass in toto to my grandson Lockhart Flawse to do with whatsoever he chooses. To my servant Donald Robson Dodd I leave the use of my house and provender meat drink dogs and horse for as long as he shall live and they survive.’
Mr Bullstrode stopped and old Mr Flawse, stepping up to the table, picked up the pen. ‘Am I in sound mind?’ he asked Dr Magrew.
‘Yes,’ said the doctor, ‘I attest that you are in sound mind.’
‘Hear that,’ said Mr Flawse to the two tenant farmers who nodded accordingly. ‘You will witness that I am in sound mind when I sign this will.’
There was a sudden scream from Mrs Flawse. ‘Sound mind? You’re as mad as a hatter. You’ve cheated me. You said you would leave everything to me and now you’ve added a clause saying that I forfeit all right to inherit if … if … if that illegitimate creature finds his father.’
But Mr Flawse ignored her outburst and signed the will. ‘Away with you, woman,’ he said, handing the pen to one of the farmers, ‘I kept my word and you’ll keep mine or lose every penny I’ve left you.’
Mrs Flawse eyed the axe lying on the long table and then sat down defeated. She had been hoodwinked. ‘There’s nothing to say that I have to stay here while you are still alive. I shall leave first thing tomorrow.’
Mr Flawse laughed. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘you have signed a contract to remain here for the rest of your life or redress me for the loss of your presence to the tune of five thousand pounds a year.’
‘I have done nothing of the sort,’ screamed Mrs Flawse. ‘I signed—’
But Mr Bullstrode handed her the will. ‘You will find the clause on page one,’ he said.
Mrs Flawse gaped at him incredulously and then followed his finger down the page. ‘But you didn’t read that out,’ she said as the words swam before her eyes. ‘You didn’t read out “In the event of my wife Cynthia Flawse leaving …” Oh my God!’ And she sank back into her chair. The clause was there in black on white.
‘And now that the thing is signed, sealed and delivered,’ said Mr Flawse as Bullstrode folded the extraordinary document and slipped it into his briefcase, ‘let us drink a health to Death.’
‘To Death?’ said Jessica, still bemused by the bizarre romance of the scene.
Mr Flawse patted her radiant cheek fondly. ‘To Death, my dear, the only thing we have in common,’ he said, ‘and the great leveller! Mr Dodd, the decanter of Northumbrian whisky.’
Mr Dodd disappeared through the door.
‘I didn’t know they made whisky in Northumberland,’ said Jessica, war
ming to the old man, ‘I thought it was Scotch.’
‘There are many things you don’t know and Northumbrian whisky’s among them. It used to be distilled in these parts by the gallon but Dodd’s the only man with a still left. You see these walls? Ten feet thick. There used to be a saying hereabouts, “Six for the Scots and four for the Excise men.” And it would be a canny man who would find the entrance but Dodd knows.’
In proof of this remark Mr Dodd reappeared with a decanter of whisky and a tray of glasses. When the glasses were all filled Mr Flawse rose and the others followed. Only Mrs Flawse remained seated.
‘I refuse to drink to Death,’ she muttered stubbornly. ‘It’s a wicked toast.’
‘Aye, ma’am, and it’s a wicked world,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘but you’ll drink all the same. It’s your only hope.’
Mrs Flawse got unsteadily to her feet and regarded him with loathing.
‘To the Great Certainty,’ said Mr Flawse, and his voice rang among the battle-flags and armour.
Later, after a lunch served in the dining-room, Lockhart and Jessica walked across Flawse Fell. The afternoon sunlight shone down on the coarse grass and a few sheep stirred as they climbed Flawse Rigg.
‘Oh, Lockhart, I wouldn’t have missed today for all the world,’ said Jessica when they reached the top. ‘Your grandfather is the darlingest old man.’
It was not a superlative Lockhart would have applied to his grandfather, and Mrs Flawse, white-faced in her room, would have used its opposite. But neither voiced their opinion. Lockhart because Jessica was his beloved angel and her opinion was not to be disputed and Mrs Flawse because she had no one to voice it to. Meanwhile Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew sat on with Mr Flawse at the mahogany table sipping port and engaged in that philosophical disputation to which their common background made them prone.
‘I did not approve your toast to Death,’ said Dr Magrew. ‘It goes against my Hippocratic oath and besides it’s a contradiction in terms to drink to the health of that by its very nature cannot be called healthy.’