The Throwback (8 page)

Nor after a glum dinner had Mr Flawse when he and Mrs Flawse retired to a cold bedroom and a featherbed redolent of damp and too recently plucked chicken. Outside the wind whistled in the chimneys and from the kitchen there came the faint wail of Mr Dodd’s Northumbrian pipes as he played ‘Edward, Edward’. It seemed an appropriate ballad for the evil hour. Upstairs Mr Flawse knelt by the bed.

‘O Lord—’ he began, only to be interrupted by his wife.

‘There’s no point in your asking forgiveness,’ she said. ‘You’re not coming near me until we’ve first come to an understanding.’

The old man regarded her balefully from the floor, ‘Understanding? What understanding, ma’am?’

‘A clear understanding that you will have this house modernized as quickly as possible and that until such time I shall return to my own home and the comforts to which I have been accustomed. I didn’t marry you to catch my death of pneumonia.’

Mr Flawse lumbered to his feet. ‘And I didn’t marry you,’ he thundered, ‘to have my household arrangements dictated to me by a chit of a woman.’

Mrs Flawse pulled the sheet up round her neck defiantly. ‘And I won’t be shouted at,’ she snapped back. ‘I am not a shit of a woman. I happen to be a respectable …’

A fresh wail of wind in the chimney and the fact that Mr Flawse had picked up a poker from the grate stopped her.

‘Respectable, are ye? And what sort of respectable woman is it that marries an old man for his money?’

‘Money?’ said Mrs Flawse, alarmed at this fresh evidence that the old fool wasn’t such an old fool after all. ‘Who said anything about money?’

‘I did,’ roared Mr Flawse. ‘You proposed and I disposed and if you imagine for one moment that I didn’t know what you were after you’re sadly misguided.’

Mrs Flawse resorted to the stratagem of tears. ‘At least I thought you were a gentleman,’ she whimpered.

‘Aye, you did that. And more fool you,’ said the old man, as livid as his red flannel gown. ‘And tears will get you nowhere. You made it a condition of the bastard’s marrying your numbskull daughter that you were to be
my wife. Well, you have made your bed, now you must lie in it.’

‘Not with you,’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘I’d rather die.’

‘And well you may, ma’am, well you may. Is that your last word?’

Mrs Flawse hesitated and made a mental calculation between the threat, the poker and her last word. But there was still stubbornness in her Sandicott soul.

‘Yes,’ she said defiantly.

Mr Flawse hurled the poker into the grate and went to the door. ‘Ye’ll live to rue the day you said that, ma’am,’ he muttered malevolently, and left.

Mrs Flawse lay back exhausted by her defiance and then with a final effort got out of bed and locked the door.

Next morning after a fitful night Mrs Flawse came downstairs to find the old man closeted in his sanctum and a note on the kitchen table telling her to make her own breakfast. A large pot of porridge belched glutinously on the stove and having sampled its contents she contented herself with a pot of tea and some bread and marmalade. There was no sign of Mr Dodd. Outside in the yard the grey products of Mr Flawse’s experiments in canine eugenics lolled about in the wintry sunshine. Avoiding them by going out of the kitchen door, Mrs Flawse made her way round the garden. Enclosed by the high wall against the wind and weather, it was not unattractive. Some earlier Flawse had built greenhouses and a kitchen garden and Capability Flawse, whose portrait hung on the landing wall, had created a miniature southern landscape in the half-acre not devoted to vegetables. Stunted trees and sanded paths wound in and out of rockeries and a fountain played in an oval fishpond. In one corner there was a gazebo, a little belvedere of flint and sea shells embedded in cement with a tiny Gothic window paned with coloured glass. Mrs Flawse climbed the steps to the door, found it unlocked and went inside to discover the first signs of comfort at the
Hall. Lined with oak panels and faded velvet plush seats the little room had an ornately carved ceiling and a view out across the fell to the reservoir.

Mrs Flawse seated herself there and wondered again at the strangeness of the family into which she had so unwisely married. That it was of ancient lineage she had already gathered and that it had money she still suspected. Flawse Hall might not be an attractive building but it was filled with treasures filched from long-lost colonies by those intrepid younger sons who had risked malaria and scurvy and yellow fever to make their fortunes or meet untimely deaths in far-flung corners of the Empire. Mrs Flawse envied and understood their enterprise. They had gone south and east (and in many cases west) to escape the bleakness and boredom of home. Mrs Flawse yearned to follow their example. Anything would be preferable to the intolerable isolation of the Hall and she was just trying to think of some way of making her own departure when the tall gaunt figure of her husband emerged from the kitchen garden and made its way between the rockeries and miniature trees to the gazebo. Mrs Flawse steeled herself for this encounter. She need not have bothered. The old man was evidently in a genial mood. He strode up the steps and knocked on the door. ‘May I come in?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Flawse.

Mr Flawse stood in the doorway. ‘I see you have found your way to Perkin’s Lookout,’ he said. ‘A charming folly built in 1774 by Perkin Flawse, the family poet. It was
here that he wrote his famous “Ode to Coal”, inspired no doubt by the drift mine you see over yonder.’

He pointed through the little window at a mound on the opposite hillside. There was a dark hole beside the mound and some remnants of rusting machinery.

‘“By Nature formed, by Nature felled

’Tis not by Nature now expelled.

But man’s endeavour yet sets free

The charred remains of many a tree

And so by forests long since dead

We boil our eggs and bake our bread.”

‘A fine poet, ma’am, if little recognized,’ continued the old man when he had finished the recitation, ‘but then we Flawses have unsuspected gifts.’

‘So I have discovered,’ said Mrs Flawse with some acerbity.

The old man bowed his head. He, too, had spent a wakeful night wrestling with his conscience and losing hands down.

‘I have come to beg your pardon,’ he said finally. ‘My conduct as your husband was inexcusable. I trust you will accept my humble apologies.’

Mrs Sandicott hesitated. Her former marriage had not disposed her to forfeit her right to grievance too easily. There were advantages to be gained from it, among them power. ‘You called me a shit of a woman,’ she pointed out.

‘A chit, ma’am, a chit,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘It means a young woman.’

‘Not where I come from,’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘It has an altogether different meaning and a very nasty one.’

‘I assure you I meant young, ma’am. The defecatory connotation which you attributed to the word was entirely absent from my intention.’

Mrs Flawse rather doubted that. What she had experienced of his intentions on their honeymoon gave her reason to think otherwise, but she had been prepared to suffer in a good cause. ‘Whatever you intended, you still accused me of marrying you for your money. Now that I won’t take from anyone.’

‘Quite so, ma’am. It was said in the heat of the moment and in the humble consciousness that there had to be a more sufficient reason than my poor self. I retract the remark.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. I married you because you were old and lonely and needed someone to look after you. The thought of money never entered my head.’

‘Quite so,’ said Mr Flawse, accepting these personally insulting attributes with some difficulty, ‘as you say I am old and lonely and I need someone to look after me.’

‘And I can’t be expected to look after anyone with the present lack of amenities in the house. I want electricity and hot baths and television and central heating if I am to stay here.’

Mr Flawse nodded sadly. That it should have come to
this. ‘You shall have them, ma’am,’ he said, ‘you shall have them.’

‘I didn’t come here to catch my death of pneumonia. I want them installed at once.’

‘I shall put the matter in hand immediately,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘and now let us adjourn to my study and the warmth of my fire to discuss the matter of my will.’

‘Your will?’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘You did say your “will”?’

‘Indeed I did, ma’am,’ said the old man, and escorted her down the steps of the gazebo and across the stunted garden to the house. There, sitting opposite one another in the great leather armchairs, with a mangy cat basking before the coal fire, they continued their discussion.

‘I will be frank with you,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘My grandson, your son-in-law, Lockhart, is a bastard.’

‘Really?’ said Mrs Flawse, uncertain whether or not to give that word its literal meaning. The old man answered the question.

‘The product of an illicit union between my late daughter and person or persons unknown, and I have made it my life’s work to determine his paternal ancestry and secondly to eradicate those propensities to which by virtue of his being partly a Flawse I have access. I trust you follow my line of reasoning.’

Mrs Flawse didn’t but she nodded obediently.

‘I am, as you may have surmised from a perusal of my library, a firm believer in the congenital inheritance of ancestral characteristics both physical and mental. To paraphrase the great William, there is a paternity that
shapes our ends rough-hew them how we will. Paternity, ma’am. Not maternity. The mating of dogs, of which I have considerable experience, is a pointer to this end.’

Mrs Flawse shivered and stared at him. If her ears did not deceive her, she had married a man with perversions beyond belief.

Mr Flawse ignored her stunned look and continued. ‘The female bitch when on heat,’ he said, adding, ‘I trust this somewhat indelicate subject does not offend you?’ and taking Mrs Flawse’s shaking head as an assurance that she wasn’t in the least put out, went on, ‘the female bitch on heat attracts the attention of a pack of males, which pack pursues her up hill and down dale fighting among themselves for the privilege accorded to the fiercest and strongest dog of fecundating her
prima nocte
. She is thus impregnated by the finest specimen first but to assure conception she is then served by all the other dogs in the pack down to the smallest and weakest. The result is the survival of the species, ma’am, and of the fittest. Darwin said it, ma’am, and Darwin was right. Now I am an hereditarist. The Flawse nose and the Flawse chin are physical proof of the inheritance over the centuries of physical attributes evolved from our Flawse forefathers and it is my firm conviction that we not only inherit physical characteristics by way of paternal ancestry but also mental ones. To put it another way, the dog is father to the man, and a dog’s temperament is determined by his progenitors. But I see that you doubt me.’

He paused and studied Mrs Flawse closely; there was
certainly doubt on her face. But it was doubt as to the sanity of the man she had married rather than an intellectual doubt of his argument.

‘You say,’ continued the old man, ‘as well you may, if inheritance determines temperament what has education to do with what we are? Is that not what you are thinking?’

Again Mrs Flawse nodded involuntarily. Her own education had been so pasteurized by permissive parents and progressive teachers that she found it impossible to follow his argument at all. Beyond the fact that he seemed obsessed with the sexual habits and reproductive processes of dogs and had openly admitted that in the Flawse family a dog was evidently the father to the man, she had no idea what he was talking about.

‘The answer is this, ma’am, and here again the dog is our determinant; a dog is a domestic animal not by nature but by social symbiosis. Dog and man, ma’am, live together by virtue of mutual necessity. We hunt together, we eat together, we live together and we sleep together, but above all we educate one another. I have learnt more from the constant companionship of dogs than ever I have from men or books. Carlyle is the exception but I will come to that later. First let me say that a dog can be trained. Up to a point, ma’am, only up to a point. I defy the finest shepherd in the world to take a terrier and turn him into a sheepdog. It can’t be done. A terrier is an earth dog. Your Latin will have acquainted you with that. Terra, earth; terrier, earth dog. And no
amount of herding will eradicate his propensity for digging. Train him how you will he will remain a digger of holes at heart. He may not dig but the instinct is there. And so it is with man, ma’am. Which said, it remains only to say that I have done with Lockhart my utmost to eradicate those instincts which we Flawses to our cost possess.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ muttered Mrs Flawse, who knew to her cost those instincts the Flawses possessed. The old man raised an admonitory finger. ‘But, ma’am, lacking a knowledge of his father’s ancestry I have been handicapped. Aye, sorely handicapped. The vein of vice that runs in Lockhart’s paternal line I know not and knowing not can but deduce. My daughter could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a discriminating girl. The manner of her death suffices to prove that. She died, ma’am, behind a dyke giving birth to her son. And she refused to name the father.’

Mr Flawse paused to savour his frustration and to expel that nagging suspicion that his daughter’s obstinacy in the matter of Lockhart’s paternity was a final gesture of filial generosity designed to spare him the ignominy of incest. While he stared into the depths of the fire as into hell itself, Mrs Flawse contented herself with the realization that Lockhart’s illegitimacy was one more arrow to the bow of her domestic power. The old fool would suffer for the admission. Mrs Flawse had garnered a fresh grievance.

‘When I think that my Jessica is married to an
illegitimate man, I must say I find your behaviour inexcusable and dishonourable, I do indeed,’ she said, taking advantage of Mr Flawse’s mood of submission. ‘If I had known I would never have given consent to the marriage.’

Mr Flawse nodded humbly. ‘You must forgive me,’ he said, ‘but needs must when the devil drives and your daughter’s saintliness will dilute the evil of Lockhart’s paternal line.’