The Throwback (2 page)

‘He could have an accident,’ Mr Bullstrode pointed out.

But the old man shook his head. ‘’Tis too much to be hoped for. Dodd’s seen to it he knows how to handle himself in an emergency. You’ll have heard the saying that a poacher makes the best gamekeeper?’ Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew had. ‘Well, Dodd’s the reverse. He’s a gamekeeper who would make the best poacher,’ continued Mr Flawse, ‘which is what he has made of the bastard. There’s not a bird nor beast safe within twenty miles when he’s abroad.’

‘Talking of abroad,’ said Mr Bullstrode, not wishing as a solicitor to be privy to Lockhart’s illegal activities, ‘where would you like to go?’

‘Somewhere south of Suez,’ said Mr Flawse whose memory for Kipling was not what it had been. ‘I’ll leave the rest to you.’

Three weeks later Lockhart and his grandfather left Flawse Hall in the ancient brougham Mr Flawse used for his more formal means of transport. As with everything else modern he eschewed the motor car. Mr Dodd sat up front at the reins, and behind was tied the cabin trunk Mr Flawse had last used in 1910 on a voyage to Calcutta. As the horses clattered down the metalled track from the Hall, Lockhart was in a state of high expectation. It was his first journey into the world of his grandfather’s memories and his own imagination. From Hexham they took the train to Newcastle and from Newcastle to London and Southampton, Mr Flawse all the way complaining that the London North-Eastern Railway wasn’t what it had been forty years before and Lockhart astonished to discover that not all women had partial beards and varicose veins. By the time they reached the ship old Mr Flawse was exhausted to the point of twice supposing, thanks to the complexion of two ticket collectors, that he was already back in Calcutta. It was with the greatest difficulty and the least examination of his passport that he was helped up the gangway and down to his cabin.

‘I shall dine here in the stateroom,’ he told the steward. ‘The boy will sup aloft.’

The steward looked at the ‘boy’ and decided not to argue that the cabin was not strictly a stateroom, nor that dinners in cabins were things of the past.

‘We’ve got one of the old sort in Number 19,’ he told
the stewardess afterwards, ‘and when I say old I mean old. Wouldn’t surprise me if he sailed on the
Titanic
.’

‘I thought they all drowned,’ said the stewardess, but the steward knew better. ‘Not all. That old sod’s a survivor if ever I saw one and his ruddy grandson’s like something out of the Ark and I don’t mean something cuddly.’

That evening as the
Ludlow Castle
sailed down the Solent, old Mr Flawse dined in his stateroom, and it was Lockhart, dressed conspicuously in tails and white tie which had once belonged to a larger uncle, who made his way up to the First Class Dining Saloon and was conducted to a table at which sat Mrs Sandicott and her daughter Jessica. For a moment, stunned by Jessica’s beauty, he hesitated, then bowed and sat down.

Lockhart Flawse had not fallen in love at first sight. He had plunged.

And Jessica followed suit. One look at this tall, broad-shouldered young man who bowed and Jessica knew she was in love. But if with the young couple it was love at first sight, with Mrs Sandicott it was calculation at second. Lockhart’s appearance in white tie and tails and his general air of incoherent embarrassment had a profound effect upon her, and when during the meal he managed to stammer that his grandfather was dining in their stateroom Mrs Sandicott’s suburban soul thrilled to the sound.

‘Your stateroom?’ she asked. ‘You did say your stateroom?’

‘Yes,’ mumbled Lockhart, ‘you see he’s ninety and the journey from the Hall fatigued him.’

‘The Hall,’ murmured Mrs Sandicott and looked significantly at her daughter.

‘Flawse Hall,’ said Lockhart. ‘It’s the family seat.’

Once again Mrs Sandicott’s depths were stirred. The circles in which she moved did not have family seats and here, in the shape of this angular and large youth whose accent, acquired from old Mr Flawse, went back to the late nineteenth century, she perceived those social attributes to which she had long aspired.

‘And your grandfather is really ninety?’ Lockhart nodded. ‘It’s amazing that such an elderly man should be taking a cruise at his time of life,’ continued Mrs Sandicott. ‘Doesn’t his poor wife miss him?’

‘I really don’t know. My grandmother died in 1935,’ said Lockhart, and Mrs Sandicott’s hopes rose even higher. By the end of the meal she had winkled the story of Lockhart’s life from him, and with each new piece of information Mrs Sandicott’s conviction grew that at long, long last she was on the brink of an opportunity too good to be missed. She was particularly impressed by Lockhart’s admission that he had been educated by private tutors. Mrs Sandicott’s world most certainly did not include people who had their sons educated by tutors. At best they sent them to public schools. And so, as coffee was served, Mrs Sandicott was positively purring. She knew now that she had not been wrong to come on the cruise and when finally Lockhart rose and lifted her chair back for her and then for Jessica, she went down to her cabin with her daughter in a state of social ecstasy.

‘What a very nice young man,’ she said. ‘Such charming manners and so well brought up.’

Jessica said nothing. She did not want to spoil the savour of her feelings by revealing them. She had been overwhelmed by Lockhart but in a different way to her mother. If Lockhart represented a social world to which Mrs Sandicott aspired, to Jessica he was the very soul of romance. And romance was all in all to her. She had
listened to his description of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg, and had garnished each word with a new significance that came from the romantic novels with which she had filled the emptiness of her adolescence. It was an emptiness that amounted to vacuity.

At eighteen Jessica Sandicott was endowed with physical charms beyond her control and an innocence of mind that was both the fault and despair of her mother. To be more precise, her innocence resulted from the late Mr Sandicott’s will in which he had left all twelve houses in Sandicott Crescent ‘to my darling daughter, Jessica, on her reaching the age of maturity’. To his wife he bequeathed Sandicott & Partner, Chartered Accountants and Tax Consultants, of Wheedle Street in the City of London. But the late Mr Sandicott’s will had bequeathed more than these tangible assets. It had left Mrs Sandicott with a sense of grievance and the conviction that her husband’s premature death at the age of forty-five was proof positive that she had married no gentleman, the proof of his ungentlemanliness lying in his failure to depart this world at least ten years earlier when she was still at a reasonably remarriageable age, or, failing that, to have left her his entire fortune. From this misfortune Mrs Sandicott had formed two resolutions. The first was that her next husband would be a very rich man with a life expectancy of as few years as possible and preferably
with a terminal illness; the second to see that Jessica reached the age of maturity as slowly as a religious education could delay. So far she had failed in her first objective and only partly succeeded in her second.

Jessica had been to several convents, and the plural was indicative of her mother’s partial failure. At the first she had developed a religious fervour of such pronounced proportions that she had decided to become a nun and subtract her own worldly possessions by adding them to those of the Order. Mrs Sandicott had removed her precipitately to a less persuasive convent and for a time things looked distinctly brighter. Unfortunately, so did several nuns. Jessica’s angelic face and innocence of soul had so combined that four nuns fell madly in love with her and the Mother Superior, to save their souls, had requested that Jessica’s disturbing influence be removed. Mrs Sandicott’s self-evident argument that she wasn’t to blame for her daughter’s attractions and that if anyone ought to be expelled it was the lesbian nuns cut no ice with the Mother Superior.

‘I do not blame the child. She was made to be loved,’ she said with suspicious emotion and in direct contradiction to Mrs Sandicott’s views on the subject. ‘She will make some good man a wonderful wife.’

‘Knowing men rather more intimately than I hope you do,’ riposted Mrs Sandicott, ‘she will marry the first scoundrel who asks her.’

It was a fatefully accurate prediction. To protect her daughter from temptation and to maintain her own
financial income from the rents of the houses in Sandicott Crescent, Mrs Sandicott had confined Jessica to her home and a correspondence course in typing. By the time Jessica reached eighteen it was still impossible to say of her that she had reached the age of maturity. If anything she had regressed and while Mrs Sandicott supervised the running of Sandicott & Partner, the partner being a Mr Treyer, Jessica sank back into a literary slough of romantic novels populated entirely by splendid young men. In short she lived in a world of her imagination, the fecundity of which was proven one morning when she announced that she was in love with the milkman and intended to marry him. Mrs Sandicott studied the milkman next day and decided that the time had come for desperate measures. By no stretch of her own imagination could she visualize the milkman as an eligible young man. Her arguments to this effect, backed by the fact that the milkman was forty-nine, married and the father of six children, and hadn’t been consulted by his bride-to-be in any case, failed to influence Jessica.

‘I shall sacrifice myself to his happiness,’ she said. Mrs Sandicott determined otherwise and promptly booked two tickets on the
Ludlow Castle
in the conviction that whatever else the ship might have to offer in the way of possible husbands for her daughter, they couldn’t be less eligible than the milkman. Besides, she had herself to think of, and cruise liners were notoriously happy hunting-grounds for middle-aged widows with an eye to the main chance. That Mrs Sandicott’s own eye was
fastened on an ancient and potentially terminal old man with money only made the prospect of the voyage the more desirable. And Lockhart’s appearance had heralded the mainest chance of all, an eligible and evidently half-witted young man for her idiot daughter and in his stateroom a gentleman of ninety with an enormous estate in Northumberland. That night Mrs Sandicott went to sleep a cheerful woman. In the bunk above Jessica sighed and murmured the magical words, ‘Lockhart Flawse of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg.’ They formed a litany of Flawse to the religion of romance.

On the boat-deck Lockhart leant on the rail and stared out over the sea, his heart filled with feelings as turbulent as the white wake of the ship. He had met the most wonderful girl in the world and for the very first time he realized that women were not simply unprepossessing creatures who cooked meals, swept floors and, having made beds, made strange noises in them late at night. There was more to them than that but what that something more was Lockhart could only guess.

His knowledge of sex was limited to the discovery, made while gutting rabbits, that bucks had balls and does didn’t. There appeared to be some connection between these anatomical differences that accounted for ladies having babies and men not. On the one occasion he had attempted to explore the difference further by asking the
tutor in Urdu how Mizriat begat Ludin in Genesis 10:13 he had received a clout across the ear that had temporarily deafened him and had given him the permanent impression that such questions were better left unasked. On the other hand he was aware that there was such a thing as marriage and that out of marriage came families. One of his distant Flawse cousins had married a farmer from Elsdon and had subsequently raised four children. The housekeeper had told him as much and no more, except that it had been a shotgun marriage which had merely deepened the mystery, shotguns in Lockhart’s experience being reserved for putting things to death rather than bringing them to life.

To make matters even more incomprehensible, the only occasions on which his grandfather had permitted him to visit his relatives had been to their burials. Mr Flawse enjoyed funerals immensely. They reinforced his belief that he was hardier than any other Flawse and that death was the only certainty. ‘In any uncertain world we can take consolation in the verity, the eternal verity, that death comes to us all in the end,’ he would tell a bereaved widow to terrible effect. And afterwards, in the jaunting-cart he used for such outings, he would expatiate glowingly to Lockhart on the merits of death as preserver of moral values. ‘Without it we would have nothing to stop us from behaving like cannibals. But put the fear of death up a man and it has a wondrously purgative effect.’

And so Lockhart had continued in ignorance of the facts of life while acquiring extensive knowledge of those
of death. It was left to his bodily functions and his feelings to guide him in quite contrary directions in the matter of sex. Lacking a mother and loathing most of his grandfather’s housekeepers, his feelings for women were decidedly negative. On the more positive side he got a great deal of pleasure from nocturnal emissions. But their significance escaped him. He didn’t have wet dreams in the presence of women and he didn’t have women at all.

And so leaning on the guard rail staring down at the white foam in the moonlight Lockhart expressed his new feelings in images he knew best. He longed to spend the rest of his life shooting things and laying them at Jessica Sandicott’s feet. With this exalted notion of love Lockhart went down to the cabin where old Mr Flawse, clad in a red flannel nightgown, was snoring noisily, and climbed into bed.

If Mrs Sandicott’s expectations had been aroused by Lockhart’s appearance at dinner they were confirmed by old Mr Flawse at breakfast. Dressed in a suit that had been out of fashion as far back as 1925, he cut a swathe through subservient waiters with an arrogance far older than his suit and, taking his place with a ‘Good morning to you, ma’am,’ surveyed the menu with disgust.

‘I want porridge,’ he told the headwaiter who hovered nervously, ‘and none of your half-boiled mush. Oats, man, oats.’