by Tom Sharpe
But Dr Magrew, like Mr Bullstrode, had nothing to say. He was silent before this effigy of the past which uttered words in parody of its own complex self. He gaped and as he gaped the old man’s voice rose louder still. It was filled with fury now and Lockhart, wrestling with the remote control, found nothing would abate his voice.
‘It was some damned scoundrel versifying American,’ bawled Mr Flawse, ‘would have it that he’d go with a whimper not a bang. ’Twere better for the creature had he been with Whymper on the Matterhorn and learnt the meaning of a fall. Well, I’ll not do the same. Damn whimpering, sir, and being the world’s whining beggar, cap in hand. I’ve not a forelock left to touch and wouldna raise a finger to it had I one, to wheedle pennies from a foreign swine be he an Arab Sheik or the Emperor of Japan. I’m true-born English to the core and so I will remain. So keep your whimpering for womenfolk and let me have my bang.’
And as if in answer to this request there was a dull explosion in his innards and smoke poured out of his ears. Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew looked on appalled while Lockhart, trying the switches, shouted to Mr Dodd.
‘The fire extinguisher,’ he yelled, ‘for God’s sake get the fire extinguisher!’
But it was no good. Mr Flawse was living up to his promise not to whimper. Flailing round him with his arms and shouting incomprehensible imprecations from his clapper mouth he streaked in his wheelchair across the banqueting hall, gathered a rug over his feet on the way, bounced off an armoured figure and finally, with that practicality he had always admired in his ancestor, shot into the open hearth and burst into flames. By the time Mr Dodd arrived with fire extinguisher he was beyond extinction and had flared up the chimney in a shower of sparks and flames.
‘The man was born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward. Amen,’ said Mr Dodd.
And so in the great hearth old Mr Flawse, the last of his line, finally fizzled out before the eyes of his two closest friends, Jessica, Mr Dodd, and the man he had always called the bastard.
‘Almost a Viking’s funeral,’ said Dr Magrew as the charred remains flaked to ashes and the last transistor melted. It had been made in Japan, he noted, which tended to contradict the old man’s final boast that he was English to the core. He was about to point this interesting anatomical and philosophical observation out to Mr Bullstrode when he was interrupted by a cry from behind him. Lockhart was standing on the oak table among the guttering candles and tears were running down his cheeks. ‘The De’il has pity in him yet,’ thought the doctor but Mr Dodd, recognizing the symptoms, picked up his pipes and squeezed the bag under his arm as Lockhart began his dirge.
‘The last of them all is gan fra’ the Hall
And the Flawse is fled fra’ the fell
But those that are left can aye recall
The tales he used to tell.
Twa deaths he died, twa lives he led,
Twa men he might have been;
The ane spake words he had but read
The ither he didna mean.
And so he struggled his whole life through
And niver in strife he ceased.
And he allus sought what was good and true
Though hissel’ to be half a beast.
’Twas all the truth he iver knew
Since Science and God had fled,
And you couldna shake his firm-held view
That the best of men are dead.
But their words remain to ease our pain
And he’d have us now rejoice
That though he’s gan we can hear again
The sound of his living voice.’
While Mr Dodd squeezed on with his tune, Lockhart jumped down from the table and left the peel tower. Behind him Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew looked at one another in wonderment and for once even Jessica, startled into womanly concern by Lockhart’s tears, lost her sentimental streak and stood dry-eyed. She was about to follow Lockhart out when Mr Dodd stopped her.
‘Let him be by hissel’, hinnie,’ he said. ‘He gan to dree his weird awhile.’
Mr Dodd was only partly right. Lockhart was not dreeing but what came next was certainly weird. As the sun rose over Tombstone Law a thousand loudspeakers planted across the fell boomed forth again. This time the sound was not that of shell and shot but the gigantic voice of Edwin Tyndale Flawse. He was singing ‘The Ballad of Prick ’Em Dry’.
22
As the final echoes of that enormous voice died away and the deafened birds in the pinewoods round the reservoir fluttered back to their perches and tried to resume their morning chorus, Lockhart and Jessica stood on the roof of the peel tower and looked over the battlements at the land that was truly theirs. Lockhart’s tears were gone. They had never been entirely for the conflagration of his grandfather but more for the loss of that terrible innocence which had been the old man’s intellectual legacy to him. And, like some incubus, that innocence had lain heavily upon him, denying him the right to guilt and the true humanity which comes from guilt and innocence. Lockhart had stated it all unconsciously in his lament but now he felt free to be his divided self, a man of lusts as well as loves, of ingenuity minded with compassion, of fear as well as mindless bravery, in short a man like other men. All this his grandfather’s obsession with heroes and hero-worship had denied him but, in the flames that had consumed Mr Flawse, Lockhart had been born anew, his own man, never mind his ancestry or who and what his father might have been and done.
And so while Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew drove off down the road to Hexham and Mr Dodd with brush and dust-pan swept the ashes of his late master from the grate and, separating those foreign parts which had been the components of old Mr Flawse’s posthumous animation, deposited the rest in the cucumber frame, Lockhart and Jessica stood together and were content to be themselves.
*
The same could hardly be said for Mr Mirkin or the Excise men now back in Hexham. Mr Mirkin in particular was not himself and no longer beside himself. He had no self to be beside. The Senior Collector of Taxes Supertax Division (sub-department, Evasion of) was back in hospital outwardly unscathed but suffering internally the simultaneous after-effects of extremely low-frequency waves. His condition baffled the doctors who could make neither head nor tail of his symptoms. At one end he fluttered; at the other end he wowed. The combination was one they had never previously encountered and it was only with the arrival of Dr Magrew, who suggested plastering his plastered legs together to stop them oscillating, that Mr Mirkin could be kept in bed. Even so he wowed, his most insistent wow being to have his Schedule D, a demand that led to some confusion with the vitamin. In the end he was gagged and his head encased in lead-filled icebags to stop it vibrating.
‘He’s clean off his rocker,’ said Dr Magrew gratuitously as the Senior Collector bounced on the bed. ‘The best and safest place for him would be a padded cell. Besides, it would keep the rumble down.’
‘His stomach doesn’t seem to be capable of keeping anything down,’ said a consultant, ‘and its rumble is quite revolting.’
To make the diagnosis even more difficult Mr Mirkin, unable to hear, refused to answer questions, even those concerned with his name and address, and when the gag was removed he simply wowed the louder. In the maternity ward near by his wowing led to complaints and the demand that he be transferred out of earshot. Dr Magrew agreed at once and signed a committal order to the local mental hospital on the perfectly sensible grounds that a man whose extremities were so clearly at odds with one another, and who seemed to have lost his memory, was suffering from incurably split personality. And so with that anonymity that was entirely in keeping with his profession as a tax collector, Mr Mirkin, now a mere digit himself, was taken at public expense and registered under Schedule D in the most padded and soundless of cells.
Meanwhile, the Excise men and the head VAT man were too taken up with their own loss of hearing to consider with any enthusiasm a return visit to Flawse Hall. They spent their time writing notes to one another and to
their solicitors concerning the actions for damages which they were bringing against the Ministry of Defence for failing to draw their attention to the fact that they were, on the night of the raid, entering an artillery range. The case was a prolonged one made longer still by the army’s adamant denial that they fired at night and by the need for all cross-examination of the Excise men to be done in longhand.
*
Meanwhile, life at Flawse Hall resumed its quiet routine. There too things had changed. The cucumbers in the frames grew larger than Mr Dodd had ever known them to and Jessica expanded likewise. And all summer long the bees in the straw hives buzzed over the heather and young rabbits gambolled outside warrens. Even the foxes, sensing the changed atmosphere, returned, and for the first time in many a year curlews called over Flawse Fell. Life was returning and Lockhart had given up his previous desire to shoot things. This was partly thanks to Jessica but much more to Miss Deyntry who had taken Jessica under her wing and while instilling a dislike of bloodsports had also knocked the sentimentality out of her. Morning sickness had helped and all talk of storks had ended. Jessica had broadened out into a homely woman with a sharp tongue in her head and the Sandicott strain had reasserted itself. It was a practical strain that placed some value on comfort and the Hall had been transformed. The windows had been replaced and central heating installed to cut out the damp and the draughts but Jessica still stuck to open fires in the main rooms. And Mr Dodd still mined coal from the drift mine, though rather more easily than before. As a result of Lockhart’s sonic warfare strange things had happened in the mine.
‘The roof has fallen in some places,’ Mr Dodd reported, ‘but it’s the seam itself that puzzles me. The coal has crumbled and there’s an afful amount of dust down there.’
Lockhart went to inspect and spent several hours examining this strange occurrence. The coal had certainly crumbled and coal dust was thick everywhere. He emerged blackened but elated.
‘It could be we’ve hit upon a new method of mining,’ he said. ‘If sonic waves can break windows and shatter glass, I can see no reason why they shouldn’t be used underground to more purpose.’
‘You’ll not expect me to be down there with some infernal whistle, I trust,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘I dinna want to go out of my mind in the interest of science and there’s a number of sheep and bullocks that canna rightly be called undemented yet.’
But Lockhart reassured him. ‘If I’m right there will be no need for any man to risk his life and health down a coal mine ever again. One would simply install a self-propelling machine that emitted the right frequency and it would be followed by a sort of enormous vacuum cleaner to suck the dust out afterwards.’
‘Aye, well I dare say there’s something to be said for the idea,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘It’s all there in the Bible had we but known it. I’ve always wondered how Joshua could bring down the walls of Jericho with a wee bit of a horn.’
Lockhart went back to his laboratory and began work on his sonic coal extractor.
*
And so the summer passed peacefully and the Hall once again became the centre of social life in the Middle Marches. Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew still came to dinner but so did Miss Deyntry and there were other neighbours whom Jessica invited. But it was late November when the snow lay in thick drifts against the dry-stone walls that she gave birth to a son. Outside the wind whistled and the sheep huddled in their stone shelters; inside all was warmth and comfort.
‘We’ll name him after his grandfather,’ said Lockhart as Jessica nursed the baby.
‘But we don’t know who he is, darling,’ said Jessica. Lockhart said nothing. It was true that they still had no idea who his father was and he had been thinking of his own grandfather when he spoke. ‘We’ll leave the christening until the spring when the roads are clear and we can have everyone over for the ceremony.’ So for the time being the new-born Flawse remained almost anonymous and as bureaucratically non-existent as his father while Lockhart spent much of his time in Perkin’s Lookout. The little folly perched on the corner of the high wall served as his study where he could sit and look through its stained-glass window at the miniature garden created by Capability Flawse. There at his desk he wrote his verse. Like his life it had changed and was more mellow and there one spring morning when the sun shone down out of a cloudless sky and the cool wind blew round the outside wall and not into the garden, he set to work on a song to his son.
Gan, hinny, play the livelong day
And let your ways be bonnie.
I wouldna have the warld to say
I left ye only money.
For I was left no father’s name
And canna now renew it,
But face and name are aye the same
And by his ways I knew it.
Some legions came, they say, fra’ Spain
While ithers marched from Rome
But like the Wall their ways remain
And make in us a home.
So dinna fash yoursel’, sweet son,
The name ye bear be Flawse.
’Tis so the same with everyone
And no man has nie flaws.
We’re Flawse or Faas but niver fause
I pledge my word by God.
For so the ballad is my source
And my true name is Dodd.
Down below in a warm sunlit corner of the miniature garden Mr Dodd, as happy as a skylark, sat by the pram of Edwin Tyndale Flawse and played his pipes or sang his songs while his grandson lay and chuckled with sheer delight.
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Epub ISBN 9781446474716
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Published by Arrow Books in 2002
10
Copyright © Tom Sharpe 1978
Tom Sharpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
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First published in Great Britain in 1978 by
Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.
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ISBN 9780099435525