The Throwback (7 page)

‘Cholera?’ said Mrs Flawse, somewhat alarmed.

‘The epidemic of 1842 or thereabouts,’ said the old man, ‘wiped out nine-tenths of the population. You’ll find them buried in the graveyard. A terrible thing, the cholera, but without it I doubt we Flawses would be where we are today.’

He gave a nasty chuckle that found no echo in his wife. She had not the least desire to be where she was today.

‘We bought the land around for a song,’ continued Mr Flawse. ‘Dead Man’s Moor they call it now.’

In the distance there came the sound of an explosion.

‘That’ll be the artillery wasting good taxpayers’ money on the firing-range. You’ll get used to the noise. It’s either that or they’re blasting over Tombstone Law in the quarries.’

Mrs Flawse hugged her travelling rug to her. The very names were filled with dread.

‘And when are we getting to Flawse Hall?’ she asked, to drive away her fear. The old man consulted a large gold Hunter.

‘About another half an hour,’ he said, ‘by half past four.’

Mrs Flawse stared out of the window even more intently, looking for the houses of neighbours, but there were none to be seen, only the unbroken expanse of open
moor and the occasional outcrop of rock that topped the hills. As they drove on the wind rose. Finally they came to another gated wall and Mr Dodd climbed down again.

‘The Hall is over yonder. You’ll not get a better view,’ said the old man as they drove through. Mrs Flawse wiped the mist from the window and peered out. What she could see of the home she had set such store by had nothing to recommend it now. Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg lived up to its name. A large grey granite building with a tower at one end, it reminded her of Dartmoor Prison in a miniature way. The high stone wall that surrounded three sides of the house had the same air of deliberate containment as that of the prison and the gated archway in the wall was large and ominous. A few stunted and wind-bent trees huddled beside the wall and far away to the west she caught sight of dark pinewoods.

‘That’s the reservoir over there,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘Ye’ll see the dam below.’

Mrs Flawse saw the dam. It was built of blocks of granite that filled the valley and from its base there ran a stone-sided stream that followed the valley floor, passed under a gated bridge, wound on another quarter of a mile and disappeared into a dark hole in the hillside. All in all the prospect ahead was as grim as nature and nineteenth-century waterworks could make it. Even the iron gate on to the little bridge was spiked and locked. Again Mr Dodd had to climb down and open it before
the carriage moved through. Mr Flawse looked up the hill proudly and rubbed his hands with glee. ‘It’s good to be home again,’ he said as the horses began the slow ascent to the house.

Mrs Flawse could see nothing good about it. ‘What’s that tower at the end?’ she asked.

‘That’s the old peel tower. Much restored by my grandfather but the house is structurally much as it was in the sixteenth century.’

Mrs Flawse had few doubts about that. ‘A peel tower?’ she murmured.

‘A refuge for man and beast when the Scots raided. The walls are ten feet thick and it took more than a passel of marauding Scotsmen or moss troopers to break their way in where they weren’t wanted.’

‘And what are moss troopers?’ Mrs Flawse enquired.

‘They aren’t any more, ma’am,’ said the old man, ‘but they were in the old days. Border raiders and cattle thieves from Redesdale and North Tynedale. The king’s writ didn’t run in the Middle Marches until well into the seventeenth century and, some say, later. It would have taken a brave law officer to come into those wild parts much before 1700.’

‘But why moss troopers?’ Mrs Flawse continued, to take her mind off the looming granite house.

‘Because they rode the moss and built their strongholds of great oak trunks and covered them with moss to hide them away and stop them being fired. It must have
been a difficult thing to find them in among the bogs and swamps. Aye, and it needed a courageous man with no fear of death in his heart.’

‘I should have thought that anyone who chose to live up here must have had a positive longing for death,’ said Mrs Flawse.

But the old man was not to be diverted by the Great Certainty from the great past. ‘You may well say so, ma’am, but we Flawses have been here since God alone knows when and there were Flawses with Percy at the Battle of Otterburn so celebrated in song.’

As if to emphasize the point another shell exploded to the west on the firing-range and as its boom died away there came another even more sinister sound. Dogs were baying.

‘My God, what on earth is that?’ said Mrs Flawse, now thoroughly alarmed.

Mr Flawse beamed. ‘The Flawse Pack, ma’am,’ he said, and rapped on the window with his silver-headed stick. Mr Dodd peered down between his legs and for the first time Mrs Flawse saw that he had a cast in one eye. Upside-down, it gave his face a terrible leering look. ‘Dodd, we’ll gan in the yard. Mrs Flawse would like to see the hounds.’

Mr Dodd’s topsy-turvy smile was horrible to behold. So too were the hounds when he climbed down and opened the heavy wooden gates under the archway. They swarmed out in a great seething mass and surrounded the brougham. Mrs Flawse stared down at them
in horror. ‘What sort of hounds are they? They’re certainly not foxhounds,’ she said, to the old man’s delight.

‘Those are Flawse hounds,’ he said as one great beast leapt up and slobbered at the window with lolling tongue. ‘Bred than myself from the finest stock. The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces as the great Swinburne has it, and ye’ll not find hounds that’ll spring so fierce on anything’s traces as these beasts. Two-thirds Pyrenean mountain dog for their ferocity and size. One-third Labrador for the keenness of scent and the ability to swim and retrieve. And finally one-third greyhound for their speed. What do ye make of that, ma’am?’

‘Four-thirds,’ said Mrs Flawse, ‘which is an absurdity. You can’t make four-thirds of anything.’

‘Can ye not?’ said Mr Flawse, the gleam in his eye turning from pride to irritation that he should be so disproved. ‘Then we’ll have one in for your inspection.’

He opened the door and one of the great hybrids vaulted in and slavered in his face before turning its oral attentions to its new mistress.

‘Take the horrid thing away. Get off, you brute,’ shouted Mrs Flawse, ‘stop that at once. Oh my God …’

Mr Flawse, satisfied that he had made his point, cuffed the dog out of the coach and slammed the door. Then he turned to his wife. ‘I think ye’ll agree that there’s more than three-thirds of savage hound in him, my dear,’ he said grimly, ‘or would you care for another closer look?’

Mrs Flawse gave him a very close look indeed and said she would not.

‘Then ye’ll not contradict me on the matter of eugenics, ma’am,’ he said, and shouted to Mr Dodd to drive on. ‘I have made a study of the subject and I’ll not be told I am wrong.’

Mrs Flawse kept her thoughts to herself. They were not nice ones. But they would keep. The carriage drew up at the back door and stopped. Mr Dodd came round through a sea of hounds.

‘Get them out the way, man,’ shouted Mr Flawse above the barks. ‘The wife is afraid of the creatures.’

The next moment Mr Dodd, flailing around him with the horsewhip, had cowed the hounds back across the yard. Mr Flawse got out and held his hand for Mrs Flawse. ‘You’ll not expect a man of my age to carry you across the door-stone,’ he said gallantly, ‘but Dodd will be my proxy. Dodd, carry your mistress.’

‘There’s absolutely no need …’ Mrs Flawse began but Mr Dodd had obeyed orders, and she found herself staring too closely for her peace of mind into his leering face as he clutched her to him and carried her into the house.

‘Thank you, Dodd,’ said Mr Flawse, following them in. ‘Ceremony has been observed. Put her down.’

For a horrid moment Mrs Flawse was clutched even tighter and Dodd’s face came closer to her own, but then he relaxed and set her on her feet in the kitchen. Mrs Flawse adjusted her dress before looking round.

‘I trust it meets with your approbation, my dear.’

It didn’t but Mrs Flawse said nothing. If the outside
of Flawse Hall had looked bleak, bare and infinitely forbidding, the kitchen, flagged with great stones, was authentically medieval. True there was a stone sink with a tap above it, which signified running if cold water, and the iron range had been made in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution; there was little else that was even vaguely modern. A bare wooden table stood in the middle of the room with benches on either side, and there were upright wooden seats with backs beside the range.

‘Settles,’ said Mr Flawse when Mrs Flawse looked inquiringly at them. ‘Dodd and the bastard use them of an evening.’

‘The bastard?’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘What bastard?’ But for once it was Mr Flawse’s turn to keep silent.

‘I’ll show ye the rest of the house,’ he said, and led the way out down a passage.

‘If it’s anything like the kitchen …’ Mrs Flawse began but it wasn’t. Where the kitchen had been bleak and bare, the rest of the Hall lived up to her expectations and was packed with fine furniture, tapestries, great portraits and the contributions of many generations and as many marriages. Mrs Flawse breathed a sigh of relief as she stood below the curved staircase and looked around her. In marrying old Mr Flawse she had done more than marry a man in his dotage, she had wedded herself to a fortune in antique furniture and fine silver. And from every wall a Flawse face looked down from old portraits, wigged Flawses, Flawses in uniform and Flawses
in fancy waistcoats, but the Flawse face was ever the same. Only in one corner did she find a small dark portrait that was not clearly identifiable as a Flawse.

‘Murkett Flawse, painted posthumously, I’m afraid,’ said the old man. Mrs Flawse studied the portrait more closely.

‘He must have died a peculiar death from the look of him,’ she said. Mr Flawse nodded.

‘Beheaded, ma’am, and I have an idea the executioner had a bad head that morning from over-indulgence the night before and took more chops than were rightly called for.’

Mrs Flawse withdrew from the horrid portrayal of Murkett Flawse’s head, and together they went from room to room. In each there was something to admire and in Mrs Flawse’s case to value. By the time they returned to the entrance hall she was satisfied that she had done well to marry the old fool after all.

‘And this is my inner sanctum,’ said Mr Flawse, opening a door to the left of the entrance. Mrs Flawse went inside. A huge coal fire blazed in the hearth and, in contrast to the rest of the house which had seemed decidedly damp and musty, the study was warm and smelt of book-leather and tobacco. An old cat basked on the carpet in front of the fire and from every wall books gleamed in the firelight. In the centre of the room stood a kneehole desk with a greenshaded lamp and an inkstand of silver. Mrs Flawse went to the lamp to switch it on and found a handle.

‘You’ll need a match,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘we’re not on the electricity.’

‘You’re not …’ Mrs Flawse began and stopped as the full significance of the remark dawned on her. Whatever treasures in the way of old silver and fine furniture Flawse Hall might hold, without electricity it held only transitory attractions for Mrs Flawse. No electricity meant presumably no central heating, and the single tap above the stone sink had signified only cold water. Mrs Flawse, safe from the hounds and in the inner sanctum of her husband’s study, decided the time had come to strike. She sat down heavily in a large high-backed leather chair beside the fire and glared at him.

‘The very idea of bringing me here and expecting me to live in a house without electricity or hot water or any mod cons …’ she began stridently as the old man bent to light a spill from the fire. Mr Flawse turned his face towards her and she saw it was suffused with rage. In his hand the spill burnt lower. Mr Flawse ignored it.

‘Woman,’ he said with a soft and steely emphasis, ‘ye’ll learn never to address me in that tone of voice again.’ He straightened up but Mrs Flawse was not to be cowed.

‘And you’ll learn never to call me “woman” again,’ she said defiantly, ‘and don’t think that you can bully me because you can’t. I’m perfectly capable—’

They were interrupted by the entrance of Mr Dodd bearing a silver tray on which a teapot stood under a cosy. Mr Flawse signalled to him to put it on the low
table beside her chair and it was only when Mr Dodd had left the room, closing the door quietly behind him, that the storm broke once again. It did so simultaneously.

‘I said I’m—’ Mrs Flawse began.

‘Woman,’ roared Mr Flawse, ‘I’ll not—’

But their unison silenced them both and they sat glowering at one another by the fire. It was Mrs Flawse who first broke the truce. She did so with guile.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ she said, ‘we need not argue about it. We can install an electrical generator. You’ll find it will make a tremendous improvement to your life.’

But Mr Flawse shook his head. ‘I have lived without it for ninety years and I’ll die without it.’

‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ said Mrs Flawse, ‘but I see no reason why you should take me with you. I am used to hot water and my home comforts and—’

‘Ma’am,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘I have washed in cold water—’

‘Seldom,’ said Mrs Flawse.

‘As I was saying—’

‘We can have Calor gas if you won’t have electricity—’

‘I’ll have no modern contraption …’

They wrangled on until it was time for dinner and in the kitchen Mr Dodd listened with an interested ear while he stirred the stewed mutton in the pot.

‘The auld divil’s bitten off a sight more than he’s teeth in his heid to chew,’ he thought to himself, and tossed a
bone to his old collie by the door. ‘And if the mither’s so rigid what’s the lassie like?’ With this on his mind he moved about the kitchen which had seen so many centuries of Flawse womenfolk come and go and where the smells of those centuries which Lockhart pined for still clung. Mr Dodd had no nose for them, that musk of unwashed humanity, of old boots and dirty socks, wet dogs and mangy cats, of soap and polish, fresh milk and warm blood, baked bread and hung pheasant, all those necessities of the harsh life the Flawses had led since the house first was built. He was part of that musk and shared its ancestry. But now there was a new ingredient come to the home and one he had no mind to like.