Old Mr Flawse thrilled to the account just as he thrilled to the verse that sang in the blood of the Flawse balladeers. Minstrel Flawse was renowned for his songs and Mr Flawse found himself almost unconsciously saying aloud the first stanza of ‘The Ballad of Prick ’Em Dry’ which the Minstrel was supposed by some authorities to have composed beneath the gibbet at Elsdon on the occasion of his hanging, drawing and quartering for misguidedly climbing into bed with Sir Oswald Capheughton’s wife, Lady Fleur, when that noble lord was not only in it but in her at the same time. Minstrel Flawse’s introduction of himself into Sir Oswald had met with that reaction known as dog-knotting on the part of all concerned, and it had taken the combined efforts of seven manservants to prise Sir Oswald from Lady Fleur and the sole resources of the local barber and surgeon to sever the connection between Sir Oswald and his Minstrel. The Eunuch Flawse had gone to his subsequent dismemberment relatively cheerfully and with a song in his heart.
I gan noo wha ma organ’s gan
When oft I lay abed
So rither hang me upside doon
Than by ma empty head.
I should ha’ knoon ’twas never Fleur
That smelt so mooch of sweat
For she was iver sweet and pure
And iver her purse was wet.
But old Sir Oswald allus stank
Of horse and hound and dung
And when I chose to breech his rank
Was barrel to my bung.
So hang me noo fra’ Elsdon Tree
And draw ma innards out
That all the warld around may see
What I have done without.
But ere ye come to draw ma heart
Na do it all so quick
But prise the arse of Oswald ’part
And bring me back ma prick.
So prick ’em wet or prick ’em dry
’Tis all the same to me
I canna wait for him to die
Afore I have a pee.
Mr Flawse found the poem heartening, if crude. He knew exactly how the Minstrel had felt: his prostate had lately been giving him trouble. But it was the dour gaiety of the ballads that gave him the greatest pleasure. The Flawses might have, and indeed had, been thieves and robbers, cut-throats and moss troopers, even saints and bishops, but whatever their calling they had laughed the devil to scorn and made a mockery of misfortune, and their religion had been less Christian than that of personal honour. To call a Flawse a liar was to die or to defend yourself to the death and a Flawse who flinched in the face of adversity was an outcast without hame or name, as the old saying had it.
But there was more to old Mr Flawse’s ancestral interest than mere curiosity concerning his own relations. There was still the great question mark that haunted his nights as to the paternity of Lockhart. And behind it lay the horrifying feeling that Lockhart was as much his son as his grandson. It was with this in mind that he added the flagellant clause to the will in part-recognition that if his suspicions were true he deserved to be flogged within an inch of his life and more properly a yard beyond. The question had to be answered, if not in his own lifetime, in that of Lockhart and as he worked his way through ancient deeds and documents Mr Flawse continued to consider possible candidates. They all had this in common: that at the time of Lockhart’s conception, which Mr Flawse calculated to be eight months before his birth, they had lived within riding distance of the Hall and had been between the ages of sixteen and sixty. He refused to believe that his daughter, whatever her vices, would willingly have taken to herself an old man. Much more likely the father had been in his twenties. Beside each name Mr Flawse put the age of the candidate, the colour of his eyes and hair, his features, height and, where possible, his cephalic index. Since the latter required the suspect to submit to Mr Flawse measuring his head both back to front and from side to side with a pair of unnecessarily pointed calipers, not everyone was willing to undergo the operation and those who didn’t had registered against their names the letters VS, which signified Very Suspicious. Over the years the old man had collected an immense amount of anthropologically interesting information, but none of it fitted Lockhart’s features. They were Flawsian in every particular from the Roman nose to the ice blue eyes and the flaxen hair and thus increased the old man’s sense of guilt and his determination to absolve himself even at the risk of failing and going down in the family history as Incest Flawse. So absorbed was he in his studies that he failed to notice the change that had occurred in his wife.
Mrs Flawse had, as part of her plan for his early death, decided to play the role of dutiful wife. Far from repulsing his advances she positively encouraged him to strain his heart by sleeping with her. Mr Flawse’s prostate redressed the balance and prevented him from rising to these frequent occasions. Mrs Flawse took to bringing him his early-morning cup of tea in bed, having first laced it with powdered paracetamol tablets which she had once read affected the kidneys adversely. Mr Flawse didn’t drink tea in bed, but, not to hurt her feelings, emptied his cup into the chamber pot with the result that Mrs Flawse’s hopes were aroused quite fortuitously by the colour of the contents when she emptied it later in the day. The fact that the potion contained tea leaves, and that she was too fastidious to examine it closely, led her to the vain hope that there was something seriously amiss with his bladder. Finally she put him on an even higher cholesterol diet than usual. Mr Flawse had eggs for breakfast, fried eggs with lamb chops for lunch, pork for dinner and zabaglione for dessert, and an eggnog before retiring. Mr Flawse thrived on eggs.
Mrs Flawse, following Professor Yudkin’s advice in reverse, added sugar to her list of dietetic poisons and having pressed Mr Flawse to another egg or some more pork crackling, served sweets, cakes and biscuits that consisted almost entirely of sugar. Mr Flawse’s energy increased enormously and when not sitting in his study he strode across the fell with renewed vigour. Mrs Flawse watched his progress in despair and her own increased weight with alarm. It was all very well trying to poison the old man by overindulgence but she had to share the same diet and it didn’t agree with her. Finally, in a last desperate effort, she encouraged him to hit the port bottle. Mr Flawse followed her advice cheerfully and felt all the better for it. Mrs Flawse fortified the port decanter with brandy and Mr Flawse, whose nose for a fine wine was acute, recognized the addition and congratulated her on her ingenuity. ‘Gives it more body,’ he declared. ‘I wonder I hadn’t thought of it before. Definitely more body.’
Mrs Flawse silently cursed but had to agree. Port with more than its normal quota of brandy did have more body. On the other hand so did she, and her dresses were beginning to look as though they belonged to another woman. Mr Flawse found her greater girth a source of amusement and made uncalled-for remarks to Mr Dodd about breasts, bottoms and bitches being all the better for bed when broad. And all the while Mrs Flawse was conscious that Mr Dodd kept his uncast eye upon her. She found it unnerving and Mr Dodd’s collie had a nasty habit of snarling whenever she passed too close.
‘I wish you’d keep the creature out of the kitchen,’ she told Mr Dodd irritably.
‘Aye and me with her I dare say,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘You’d be hard put to it to keep yourself warm without my going down the drift mine for coal. If you dinna want me in the kitchen, you’ll have to gan dig it yoursel’.’
Mrs Flawse had no intention of going down the drift mine to dig coal and said so.
‘Then the dawg stays,’ said Mr Dodd.
Mrs Flawse promised herself to see that the collie didn’t, but Mr Dodd’s habit of feeding the beast himself prevented her from putting ground glass in the dog’s food. All in all it was a trying summer for Mrs Flawse and she found herself uncharacteristically yearning for the bleak winter ahead. She would have more opportunity for making things uncomfortable at the Hall.
*
Lockhart had already succeeded at Sandicott Crescent. Having dispatched Little Willie, the Pettigrews’ dachshund, to that afterlife about wh
ich the Wilsons now had no doubts, he was able to move more easily about the gardens and the bird sanctuary on his solitary expeditions. Mr Grabble, whose wife he had seen in Mr Simplon’s arms, was the European manager for a firm of electronics engineers and regularly went abroad. It was during his absences that Mrs Grabble and Mr Simplon kept what Lockhart called their trysts. Mr Simplon left his car two streets away and walked to the Grabble house; when he had finished trysting he went back to the car and drove home to Mrs Simplon at Number 5. Further investigation revealed that Mr Grabble had left an emergency number in Amsterdam where he could always be reached should need arise. Lockhart discovered this by the simple expedient of unlocking the front door to Number 2 with the late Mr Sandicott’s key and consulting the Grabbles’ bureau and telephone directory. Accordingly, on a hot afternoon in June, he went to the trouble of sending a telegram to Mr Grabble in Amsterdam recommending him to return home at once as his wife was dangerously ill, too ill in fact to be moved from the house. Having signed it in the name of a fictitious doctor, Lockhart quietly shinned a telegraph pole in the bird sanctuary and neatly severed the line to the Grabbles’ house. After that he went home and had tea before going out as dusk fell and making his way to the corner of the road in which Mr Simplon left his car. The car was there.
It was not there twenty-five minutes later when Mr Grabble, driving with more reckless concern for his wife than her behaviour justified and less for other road users, hurtled through East Pursley and into Sandicott Crescent. It was not there when Mr Simplon, naked and covering his previously private parts with both hands, scampered down the Grabbles’ drive and shot frenziedly round the corner. It was sitting in the Simplons’ garage where Lockhart had parked with a cheerful toot of the horn to alert Mrs Simplon that her husband was home, before crossing to the golf course and making his way sedately back to Jessica at Number 12. Behind him Numbers 5 and 2 were a holocaust of domestic understanding. The discovery that his wife, far from being dangerously ill, was copulating ardently with a neighbour he had never much liked anyway, and that he had been brought anxiously all the way back from Amsterdam to have this ugly fact thrust under his unsuspecting nose, was too much for Mr Grabble’s temper. His shouts and Mrs Grabble’s screams, as he used first his umbrella, and then, having broken it, an Anglepoise lamp that stood on the bedside table, to express his feelings, could be heard far down the street. They were particularly audible next door where the Misses Musgrove were entertaining the Vicar and his wife to dinner. They were also audible to Mrs Simplon. The fact that her husband, having just driven into the garage, figured so largely in Mr Grabble’s invective provoked her to investigate how he could possibly be in two places at the same time. Mr Grabble’s commentary supplied a third occupation, that of Mrs Grabble. Mrs Simplon emerged from the front door at the very same moment as the Vicar, driven as much by the Misses Musgrove’s curiosity as by any desire to interfere in a domestic disaster, came out of Number 4. His collision with a naked Mr Simplon, who had taken his courage in both hands and was scampering back to his own house, had at least the merit of explaining exactly what and whom her husband had been doing in the Grabble house. Not that she needed much telling. Mr Grabble was singularly lucid on the subject. The Revd Truster was less well informed. He had never met Mr Grabble in the flesh and naturally supposed that the naked man cowering on the ground at his feet was a sinner, and a wife-beater, come to repentance.
‘My dear man,’ said the Vicar, ‘this is no way to conduct your domestic life.’
Mr Simplon was fully aware of the fact. He stared frantically up at the Revd Truster and clutched his scrotum. Over the road his wife went indoors and slammed the front door.
‘Your wife may have done all the things you say she’s done but to beat a woman is the act of a cad.’
Mr Simplon thoroughly agreed but was spared the need to explain that he had never so much as laid a finger on Mrs Simplon by the crash of breaking French windows and the emergence of a large and very heavy piece of Waterford glass. Mrs Grabble, in fear for her life, was fighting back to some effect. Mr Simplon took the opportunity to get to his feet and rush across the road to Number 5, a progress that took him past the Ogilvies, the Misses Musgrove and the Pettigrews, none of whom he knew at all intimately but who now knew him by rather more than the cut of his coat. As he stood under the mock-Georgian portico of his front door and beat on the Cupid-head knocker with one hand while pressing the bell with his elbow at the same time, Mr Simplon knew that his reputation as a consultant engineer was at an end. So was Mrs Simplon’s tolerance. Her husband’s constant absences and lame excuses had combined with her own sexual frustration to leave her a bitter woman. She had emerged to save what she could of her marriage but at the sight of her husband cowering naked in front of a clergyman had decided to end it. And not with a whimper.
‘You can stay out there till hell freezes over,’ she shouted through the letter box at her nearest, ‘but if you think I’m letting you into my home ever again you’ve got another think coming.’
Mr Simplon had had enough thoughts coming without this additional one and he particularly disliked the use of the possessive adjective. ‘What do you mean “my home”?’ he yelled, momentarily forgetting his other lost possessions. ‘I’ve as much right—’
‘Not any more,’ screamed Mrs Simplon, adding an extra sting to the statement by squirting the contents of an aerosol can of de-icing fluid, which Mr Simplon kept on a shelf in the hall for quite other purposes, through the letter box on to those shrivelled organs Mrs Grabble had recently found so attractive. The screams that followed this remarkable initiative were music to her ears. They were certainly music to Lockhart, who had last heard their like at a pig-killing without use of a humane killer. He sat in the kitchen with Jessica and smiled over his Ovaltine.
‘I wonder what can be going on,’ said Jessica anxiously. ‘It sounds as if someone is dying. Hadn’t you better go and investigate? I mean, perhaps you could do something.’
Lockhart shook his head. ‘Strong fences make good neighbours,’ he said complacently, a maxim that was in some dispute at the far end of the Crescent. There Mr Simplon’s screams and Mr Grabble’s denunciations and Mrs Grabble’s absurd denials had been joined by the siren of a police car. The Pettigrews, already in communication with the police following the loss of Little Willie, had phoned again. This time the police took their complaint more seriously and, with that fine discrimination for anything vaguely homosexual, had taken both the Revd Truster and Mr Simplon into custody, the former on the grounds that he was soliciting and the latter for indecent exposure, a charge Mr Simplon, who had been playing the garden sprinkler rather erratically on his inflamed penis when they arrived, was incapable of finding words to deny. It was left to the Revd Truster to explain as best he could that far from soliciting Mr Simplon’s sexual favours, such as they remained, he was simply doing his utmost to prevent him actually castrating himself with the revolving sprinkler. It didn’t sound a likely explanation to the Duty Sergeant, and Mr Simplon’s inability to specify with any precision what he had got on his private parts to cause him to act in this peculiar manner didn’t help matters.
‘Put the sods in separate cells,’ said the Duty Sergeant, and the Revd Truster and Mr Simplon were dragged away.
With their going Sandicott Crescent resumed its interrupted routine. Mrs Simplon went unrepentantly to bed alone. Mr and Mrs Grabble went to bed separately and shouted abuse at one another. The Misses Musgrove did their best to console Mrs Truster who kept repeating hysterically that her husband wasn’t queer.
‘No, dear, of course he isn’t,’ they said in unison and without the slightest notion what Mrs Truster actually meant. ‘He was taken queer when the policemen came but then who wouldn’t be.’
Mrs Truster’s attempt to explain by saying he wasn’t gay either brought them no nearer to understanding what she was talking about.
But there were other less innocent reactions to the events
of the evening. Mr and Mrs Raceme had been exhilarated by the sound of beating and for once forgetful of the curtains in the bedroom had allowed Lockhart a full view of their particular perversion. He had watched with interest first Mr Raceme tying his wife to the bed and beating her lightly with a cane and then allowing her to repeat the performance on himself. He went home and added the details to their dossier and finally to round the evening off had gone into the garage and promised the Wilsons next door an imminent death to such effect that once again their lights remained on all night. All in all, he thought, as he climbed into bed beside his radiant angel, Jessica, it had been a most rewarding and informative day, and if he could keep the impetus of his campaign up the For Sale boards would shortly be in evidence in Sandicott Crescent. He cuddled up to Jessica and presently they were engaged in that chaste love-making that characterized their marriage.
11
It was Jessica, returning from her work as a temporary typist next day, who brought a further development.
‘You’ll never guess who lives in Green End,’ she said excitedly.
‘I never will,’ Lockhart agreed with that apparent and literal frankness that masked the devious depths of his mind. Green End was not his concern, and lay a mile away beyond the golf course in West Pursley, an even more substantial suburb with larger houses, larger gardens and older trees.
‘Genevieve Goldring,’ said Jessica.
‘Never heard of her,’ said Lockhart, swishing the air with a riding crop he had constructed out of a length of garden hose bound with twine and thonged at the end with a number of leather strips.
‘You must have,’ said Jessica, ‘she’s just the most wonderful writer there ever was. I’ve got dozens of her books and they’re ever so interesting.’
But Lockhart had his mind on other things, and whether or not to splice the leather strips with lead shot.