by Tom Sharpe
‘It’s no use,’ he said, ‘I can’t get anyone to employ me at any sort of job and I can’t get social benefits because they won’t admit I exist.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Jessica. ‘If only we could sell all the houses Daddy left me, we could invest the money and live off the income.’
‘Well, we can’t. You heard what the estate agent said. They’re occupied, unfurnished and on long leases and we can’t even raise the rent, let alone sell them.’
‘I think it’s jolly unfair. Why can’t we just tell the tenants to go?’
‘Because the law says they don’t have to move.’
‘Who cares what the law says?’ said Jessica. ‘There’s a law which says unemployed people get free money, but when it comes to paying you they don’t do it, and it isn’t even as if you didn’t want to work. I don’t see why we have to obey a law which hurts us when the Government won’t obey a law which helps us.’
‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,’ Lockhart agreed, and so was born the idea which, nurtured in Lockhart Flawse’s mind, was to turn the quiet backwater of Sandicott Crescent into a maelstrom of misunderstandings.
That night, while Jessica racked her brains for some way to supplement their income, Lockhart left the house and, moving with all the silence and stealth he had acquired in pursuit of game on Flawse Fell, stole through the gorse bushes in the bird sanctuary with a pair of binoculars. He was not bird-watching in its true sense but by the time he returned at midnight the occupants of most of the houses had been observed and Lockhart had gained some little insight into their habits.
He sat up for a while making notes in a pocket book. It was carefully indexed and under P he put ‘Pettigrew, man and wife aged fifty. Put dachshund named Little Willie out at eleven and make milk drink. Go to bed eleven-thirty.’ Under G there was the information that the Grabbles watched television and went to bed at ten-forty-five. Mr and Mrs Raceme in Number 8 did something strange which involved tying Mr Raceme to the bed at nine-fifteen and untying him again at ten. At Number 4 the Misses Musgrove had entertained the Vicar before supper and had read the Church Times and knitted afterwards. Finally, next door to the Flawse house, Colonel Finch-Potter in Number 10 smoked a cigar after a solitary dinner, fulminated loudly at a Labour Party political broadcast on television, and then took a brisk walk with his bull-terrier before retiring.
Lockhart made notes of all these practices and went to bed himself. Something deep and devious was stirring in his mind. What exactly it was he couldn’t say, but the instinct of the hunt was slowly edging its way towards consciousness and with it a barbarity and anger that knew nothing of the law or the social conventions of civilization.
*
Next morning Jessica announced that she was going to get a job.
‘I can type and take shorthand and there’s lots of firms wanting secretaries. I’m going to a bureau. They’re advertising for temporary typists.’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Lockhart. ‘A man should provide for his wife, not the other way round.’
‘I won’t be providing for you. It’s for us, and anyway, I might even find you a job. I’ll tell everyone I work for how clever you are.’
And in spite of Lockhart’s opposition she caught the bus. Left to himself, he spent the day brooding about the house with a sullen look on his face and poking into places he hadn’t been before. One of these was the attic and there in an old tin trunk he discovered the papers of the late Mr Sandicott. Among them he found the architect’s drawings for the interiors of all the houses in the Crescent together with details of plumbing, sewers and electrical connections. Lockhart took them downstairs and studied them carefully. They were extremely informative and by the time Jessica returned with the news that she was starting next day with a cement company, one of whose typists was away with flu, Lockhart had mapped in his head the exact location of all the mod cons the houses in Sandicott Crescent boasted. He greeted Jessica’s news without enthusiasm.
‘If anyone tries anything funny,’ he said, remembering Mr Treyer’s tendencies with temporary typists, ‘I want you to tell me. I’ll kill him.’
‘Oh, Lockhart, darling, you’re so chivalrous,’ said Jessica proudly. ‘Let’s have a kiss and cuddle tonight.’
But Lockhart had other plans for the evening and Jessica went to bed alone. Outside, Lockhart crawled through the undergrowth of the bird sanctuary to the foot of the Racemes’ garden, climbed the fence and installed himself in a cherry tree that overlooked the Racemes’ bedroom. He had decided that Mr Raceme’s peculiar habit of allowing his wife to tie him to their double bed for three-quarters of an hour might provide him with information for future use. But he was disappointed. Mr and Mrs Raceme had supper and watched television before having an early and less restrained night. At eleven their lights went out and Lockhart descended the cherry tree and was making his way back over the fence when the Pettigrews at Number 6 put Little Willie out while they made Ovaltine. Attracted by Lockhart’s passage through the gorse the dachshund dashed down the garden with a series of yelps and stood barking into the darkness. Lockhart moved away but the dog kept up its hullabaloo and presently Mr Pettigrew came down the lawn to investigate.
‘Now, Willie, stop that noise,’ he said. ‘Good dog. There’s nothing there.’
But Willie knew better and, emboldened by his master’s presence, made further rushes in Lockhart’s direction. Finally Mr Pettigrew picked the dog up and carried him back into the house, leaving Lockhart with the resolution to do something about Willie as soon as possible. Barking dogs were a hazard he could do without.
He progressed by way of the Misses Musgrove’s back garden – their lights had gone out promptly at ten – and crossed into the Grabbles’ where the downstairs lights were on and the living-room curtains partly open. Lockhart stationed himself beside the greenhouse and focused his binoculars on the gap in the curtains and was surprised to see Mrs Grabble on the sofa in the arms of someone who was quite clearly not the Mr Grabble he knew. As the couple writhed in ecstasy Lockhart’s binoculars discovered the flushed face of Mr Simplon who lived at Number 5. Mrs Grabble and Mr Simplon? Then where was Mr Grabble and what was Mrs Simplon doing? Lockhart left the greenhouse and slipped across the road to the golf course, past the Rickenshaws at Number 1 and the Ogilvies at Number 3 to the Simplons’ mock-Georgian mansion at Number 5. A light was on upstairs and since the curtains were drawn, the Simplons kept no dog and the garden was well endowed with shrubs, Lockhart ventured down a flowerbed until he was standing beneath the window. He stood as still as he had once stood on Flawse Fell when a rabbit had spotted him, and he was still as motionless when headlights illuminated the front of the house an hour later and Mr Simplon garaged his car. Lights went on in the house and a moment later voices issued from the bedroom, the acrimonious voice of Mrs Simplon and the placatory one of Mr Simplon.
‘Working late at the office, my foot,’ said Mrs Simplon. ‘That’s what you keep telling me. Well, I phoned the office twice this evening and there was no one there.’
‘I was out with Jerry Blond, the architect,’ said Mr Simplon. ‘He wanted me to meet a client from Cyprus who is thinking of building a hotel. If you don’t believe me, phone Blond and see if he doesn’t confirm what I say.’
But Mrs Simplon scorned the idea. ‘I’m not going to advertise the fact that I have my own ideas about what you get up to,’ she said. ‘I’ve got more pride.’
Down in the bushes Lockhart admired her pride and was inspired by her reluctance. If she wasn’t going to advertise what she correctly thought Mr Simplon was getting up to, namely Mrs Grabble, it might be to his own advantage to do it for her. And where was Mr Grabble? Lockhart decided to explore that gentleman’s movements more closely before acting. Evidently there were nights when Mr Grabble stayed away from home. He would have to find out when. In the meantime there was no more to be gained from the Simplons, and leaving them to their quarrel he returned to the golf
course; passing the Lowrys who lived at Number 7 and Mr O’Brain, the gynaecologist, who inhabited the Bauhaus at Number 9 and was already in bed, he found himself at the bottom of the Wilsons’ garden at Number 11. Here the lights were on, though dimly, in the downstairs lounge and the French windows open. Lockhart squatted in a bunker on the seventeenth hole and lifted his binoculars. There were three people in the room sitting round a small table with their fingers touching, and as he watched the table moved. Lockhart eyed it beadily and his keen ear detected the sound of knocking. The Wilsons and their friend were engaged in some strange ritual. Every now and again Mrs Wilson would put a question and the table would rock and knock. So the Wilsons were superstitious.
Lockhart crawled away and presently was adding this and all the other gleanings of the night’s prowl to his notebook. By the time he went to bed, Jessica was fast asleep.
*
And so for the next fortnight Lockhart spent his evenings patrolling the bird sanctuary and the golf course and amassed dossiers on the habits, fads, foibles and indiscretions of all the tenants of the Crescent. By day he pottered about the house and spent a good many hours in his late father-in-law’s workshop with lengths of wire, transistors and a Do-It-Yourself Manual of Radio Construction.
‘I don’t know what you do with yourself all day, darling,’ said Jessica, who had moved from the cement company to a firm of lawyers who specialized in libel actions.
‘I’m making provision for our future,’ said Lockhart.
‘With loudspeakers? What have loudspeakers got to do with our future?’
‘More than you know.’
‘And this transmitter thing. Is that part of our future too?’
‘Our future and the Wilsons’ next door,’ said Lockhart. ‘Where did your mother keep the keys to the houses?’
‘You mean the houses Daddy left me?’
Lockhart nodded and Jessica rummaged in a kitchen drawer. ‘Here they are,’ she said, and hesitated. ‘You’re not thinking of stealing things, are you?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Lockhart firmly, ‘if anything, I intend to add to their possessions.’
‘Oh, well, that’s all right then,’ said Jessica, and handed him the bundle of Yale keys. ‘I wouldn’t want to think you were doing anything that wasn’t legal. Working at Gibling and Gibling I’ve learnt just how easy it is to get into terrible trouble. Did you know that if you write a book and say nasty things in it about somebody they can sue you for thousands of pounds? It’s called libel.’
‘I wish someone would write nasty things about us then,’ said Lockhart. ‘We’ve got to get thousands of pounds if I’m ever going to start looking for my father.’
‘Yes, a libel case would help, wouldn’t it?’ said Jessica dreamily. ‘But you do promise you aren’t doing anything that can get us into trouble, don’t you?’
Lockhart promised. Fervently. What he had in mind was going to get other people into trouble.
*
In the meantime he had to wait. It was three days before the Wilsons went out for the evening and Lockhart was able to slip over the fence into their garden and let himself into Number 11. Under his arm he carried a box. He spent an hour in the attic before returning empty-handed.
‘Jessica, my sweet,’ he said, ‘I want you to go into the workshop and wait five minutes. Then say, “Testing. Testing. Testing,” into that little transmitter. You press the red button first.’
Lockhart slipped back into the Wilsons’ house and climbed to the attic and waited. A short time later the three loudspeakers hidden under the glass-fibre insulation and connected to the receiver concealed in a corner resounded eerily to Jessica’s voice. One loudspeaker was placed over the Wilsons’ main bedroom, a second over the bathroom and a third above the spare room. Lockhart listened and then climbed down and went home.
‘You go up to bed,’ he told Jessica, ‘I shouldn’t be long.’ Then he stationed himself at the front window and waited for the Wilsons to return. They had had a good evening and were in an intensely spiritual state. Lockhart watched the lights come on in their bedroom and bathroom before contributing his share to their belief in the supernatural. Holding his nose between finger and thumb and speaking adenoidally into the microphone he whispered, ‘I speak from beyond the grave. Hear me. There will be a death in your house and you will join me.’ Then he switched the transmitter off and went out into the night the better to observe the result.
It was, to put it mildly, electrifying. Lights flashed on in every room in the house next door and Mrs Wilson, more used to the gentler messages of the ouija board, could be heard screaming hysterically at this authentic voice of doom. Lockhart, squatting in an azalea bush next to the gateway, listened to Mr Wilson trying to pacify his wife, a process made more difficult by his evident alarm and the impossibility of denying that he too had heard there was going to be a death in the house.
‘There’s no use saying you didn’t,’ wailed Mrs Wilson, ‘you heard it as clearly as I did and you were in the bathroom and look at the mess you made on the floor.’
Mr Wilson had to agree that his aim had been put off and, by way of Mrs Wilson’s infallible logic, that the mess was in consequence of his having learnt that death was so close at hand.
‘I told you we should never have started fooling with that damned table-rapping!’ he shouted. ‘Now look what you’ve been and let loose.’
‘That’s right, blame me,’ screamed Mrs Wilson, ‘that’s all you ever do. All I did was ask Mrs Saphegie round to see if she really had psychic gifts and could get answers from our dear departed.’
‘Well, now you bloody know,’ shouted Mr Wilson. ‘And that wasn’t the voice of any of my dear departed, that’s for sure. No one on our side of the family suffered from such an awful nasal condition. Mind you, I don’t suppose being decomposed in a coffin does anything for sinusitis.’
‘There you go again,’ whined Mrs Wilson, ‘one of us going to die and you have to go on about coffins. And don’t hog all the brandy. I want some.’
‘I didn’t know you drank,’ said Mr Wilson.
‘I do now,’ said his wife, and evidently poured herself a stiff one. Lockhart left them consoling themselves somewhat unsuccessfully that at least the terrible prophecy proved that there was life after death. It didn’t seem to comfort Mrs Wilson very much.
*
But while the Wilsons speculated on this imminent question about the afterlife and its existence, Little Willie, the Pettigrews’ dachshund, went still further and found out. At precisely eleven o’clock Mr Pettigrew put him out and just as precisely Lockhart, lurking in the bird sanctuary, tugged on the nylon fishing-line that stretched under the fence and down the lawn. At the end of the line a lump of liver purchased that morning from the butcher pursued its erratic course across the grass. Behind it, for once unwisely soundless, came Willie in hot pursuit. He didn’t come far. As the liver slid past the snare Lockhart had set at the end of the lawn, Willie stopped and, after a brief struggle, gave up both the pursuit and his life. Lockhart buried him under a rose bush at the bottom of his own garden where he would do most good, and having accomplished his first two intentions went to bed in a thoroughly cheerful mood, made all the more lively by the fact that the lights were still on in every room of the Wilsons’ house when he turned over at three in the morning, and from the house there could be heard the sound of drunken sobbing.
10
While Lockhart began to make life uncomfortable for the tenants of his wife’s houses, her mother was doing her damnedest to make life unbearable for Mr Flawse. The weather was not on her side. From a bright spring they passed into a hot summer and Flawse Hall showed itself to advantage. Its thick walls had more functions than the keeping out of the Scots and the keeping in of the whisky; they soothed the summer’s heat. Outside, the hybrid hounds might slobber and loll in the dung-dry dust of the yard; inside, Mr Flawse could sit contentedly upright at his desk poring over the parish registers a
nd ancient enclosure deeds to which he had lately become so addicted. Knowing that in the fullness of time he was about due to join his ancestors he thought it as well to acquaint himself with the faults and failings of his family.
That he looked only on the worst side of things came from his natural pessimism and knowledge of himself. He was therefore surprised to find that the Flawses were not all unconscionably bad. There were Flawse saints as well as Flawse sinners and if, as he expected, the latter predominated there was still a streak of generosity to their actions he could not but admire. The Flawse, one Quentin Flawse, who had murdered, or by the more polite usage of the time done to death in a duel, one Thomas Tidley in consequence of the latter implying at the sheep shearing at Otterburn that the name Flawse derived from the Faas, a notorious family of gipsies known best for their thieving, had yet had the generosity to marry his widow and provide for his children. Then again, Bishop Flawse, burnt at the stake in the reign of Bloody Mary for his apostasy from Rome, had refused the bag of gunpowder which his brother had brought to tie round his neck on the sensible grounds of economy and its better use to fire muskets into the body of damned Papists when the time was ripe. It was this sort of practicality that Mr Flawse most admired in his forebears and showed that to whatever end they came they wasted no time on self-pity but sustained an indomitable will to do unto others as they were having done to them. Thus Headman Flawse, private executioner to the Duke of Durham in the fourteenth century, had, when his time came to lay his own head on the block, gallantly offered to sharpen the axe for his successor, a gesture so generous that it had been granted: to the extinction of the new headman, fifteen bodyguards, twenty-five bystanders and the Duke himself, all of whom lay headless while Headman Flawse put his expertise to private use and escaped on the Duke’s own charger to spend his days as an outlaw among the moss troopers of Redesdale.