The Throwback

‘Lady,’ said Lockhart irritably.

  ‘Lady what?’

  ‘Don’t call my wife a woman. She is a lady, a radiant, beautiful, angelic—’

  Dr Mannet forgot himself. More particularly he forgot Lockhart’s propensity for violence. ‘Never mind all that,’ he snapped. ‘Any woman who can bring herself to live with a man who openly admits a preference for fucking sheep has got to be an angel, never mind the radiant or beautiful …’

  ‘I mind,’ said Lockhart and brought the outburst to a sudden end.

  Dr Mannet remembered himself. ‘All right, given that Mrs Flawse is a lady it is nevertheless true that as a lady she naturally produces an ovum every month and this ovum descends her Fallopian tubes and unless it is fertilized it passes out in the form of …’

  He ground to a halt. Lockhart had gone Aztec again.

  ‘What do you mean fertilized?’ he snarled.

  Dr Mannet tried to think of some way of explaining the process of fertilizing an ovum without causing further offence. ‘What you do,’ he said, with an unnatural calm, ‘is you put your pen— Jesus … your John Willie into her vagina and … Dear God.’ He gave up in despair and rose from his chair.

  So did Lockhart. ‘There you go again,’ he shouted. ‘First you talk about dunging my wife and now you’re on about shoving my John Willie—’

  ‘Dung?’ screamed the doctor, backing into a corner. ‘Who said anything about dung?’

  ‘Dung’s fertilizer,’ bawled Lockhart. ‘Dig it and dung it. That is what we do in our kitchen garden and if you think …’

  But Dr Mannet was past thought. All he wanted to do was obey his instincts and get the hell out of his consulting-room before this sheep-obsessed maniac laid hands on him again. ‘Nurse, nurse,’ he screamed as Lockhart strode towards him. ‘For God’s sake …’ But Lockhart’s fury had abated.

  ‘Call yourself a doctor,’ he snapped, and went out of the door. Dr Mannet sank back into his chair and called his partner. By the time he had prescribed himself thirty milligrams of Valium washed down with vodka and was able to put his words into coherent order he was determined to strike Mr and Mrs Flawse off his books for ever.

  ‘Don’t let either of them into the waiting-room ever again,’ he told the nurse. ‘On pain of death.’

  ‘But isn’t there something we can do for poor Mrs Flawse?’ said the nurse. ‘She seemed such a sweet girl.’

  ‘My advice to her would be to get a divorce as quickly as possible,’ said Dr Mannet fervently. ‘Failing that, a hysterectomy would be the only thing. The thought of that man breeding …’

  *

  Outside in the street Lockhart slowy unclenched his jaw and fists. Coming at the end of a day in which he had been confined to an otherwise empty office with nothing whatsoever to do, the doctor’s advice had been the last straw. He loathed London, Mr Treyer, Dr Mannet, East Pursley and everything about this insane rotten world into which he had been launched by his marriage. Every single thing about it conflicted absolutely with what he had been brought up to believe. In place of thrift there were expense-account lunches and rates of inflationary interest that were downright usury; instead of courage and beauty he found arrant cowardice in men – the doctor’s squeals for help had made him too contemptible to hit – and in every building he saw only ugliness and a sordid obeisance to utility; and finally to cap it all there was this omnipresent concern with something called sex which grubby little cowards like Dr Mannet wanted to substitute for love. Lockhart walked along the street thinking of his love for Jessica. It was pure and holy and wonderful. He saw himself as her protector and the notion that he must hurt her to prove himself a dutiful husband was utterly repellent to him. He passed a newsagent’s shop on whose racks were magazines displaying largely nude girls, dressed in the briefest of briefs or plastic macintoshes, and his gorge rose with disgust at their supposed appeal. The world was rotten and corrupt and he longed to be back on Flawse Fell with his rifle in his hands and some identifiable target between his sights while his darling Jessica sat in the stone-flagged kitchen by the black iron range waiting for him to come home with their supper. And with that longing there came the determination to make it come true.

  One of these days he would take on the whole rotten world and impose his will on it, come hell or high water, and then people would learn what it meant to cross Lockhart Flawse. In the meantime he had to get home. For a moment he thought of catching the bus but it was only six miles to Sandicott Crescent and Lockhart was used to covering thirty in a day across the grassy fells of the Border country. With rage against everyone except Jessica and his grandfather and Mr Dodd, Lockhart strode off down the street.

  5

  At Flawse Hall the ex-Mrs Sandicott shared none of Lockhart’s feelings. She would have given anything, most specifically strychnine, to old Mr Flawse, to be back in the cosy confines of Sandicott Crescent and the company of her acquaintances. Instead she was trapped in a large cold house on an empty wasteland, where the snow lay deep and the wind howled incessantly, with a horrid old man and his even more horrid gamekeeper-cum-handyman, Mr Dodd. Her husband’s horridness had manifested itself almost as soon as they had taken their seats on the train from Southampton, and with each mile north it had increased while Mrs Flawse’s conviction that she had made a terrible mistake grew into a certainty.

  Old Mr Flawse on land had none of that old-world charm that had so affected her at sea. From being an eccentric and outspoken old man in his dotage, he had relapsed into an eccentric and outspoken old man with more faculties at his command than his age warranted. Porters scurried with their luggage, ticket collectors cringed, and even hardened taxi-drivers notorious for their rudeness when given an inadequate tip held their tongues while Mr Flawse disputed the fare and grudgingly gave them an extra penny. Mrs Flawse had been left speechless by his authority which flaunted a disregard for every tenet of her suburban creed and treated the world as his oyster.

  Since Mrs Flawse had already been treated, almost literally, as his sexual oyster to be prised open on their honeymoon, she should not have been surprised. It had been bad enough to discover on their first night that Mr Flawse wore a red flannel nightgown with an odour all his own and that he failed three times to distinguish between the washbasin and the lavatory bowl. Mrs Flawse had put these failings down to his age and deficient eyesight and sense of smell. She had been similarly dismayed when he knelt by the bed and implored the good Lord to forgive him in advance the carnal excesses he was about to inflict ‘upon this the person of my wedded wife’. Little suspecting what he had in mind, Mrs Flawse found this prayer rather complimentary. It confirmed her belief that she was still at fifty-six an attractive woman and that her husband was a deeply religious man. Ten minutes later she knew better. Whatever the good Lord might feel about the matter of forgiveness, Mrs Flawse’s feelings were implacable. She would never forgive or forget the old man’s carnal excesses, and any notion that he was at all religious had gone by the board. Smelling like an old fox, Mr Flawse had behaved like a young one, and had roamed about her body with as little discrimination between points of entry, or as she more delicately put it, ‘her orifices’, as he did between the washbasin and the toilet and with much the same intent. Feeling like a cross between a sexual colander and a cesspit, Mrs Flawse had endured the ordeal by consoling herself that such goings-on, and the old man had indeed gone on and on and on, must end abruptly in his having either a heart attack or a hernia. Mr Flawse obliged her on neither count and when she awoke next morning it was to find him sitting up smoking a foul old pipe and regarding her with undisguised relish. For the rest of the voyage Mrs Flawse had waddled the deck by day and straddled the bed by night in the dwindling hope that the wages of his sin would leave her shortly a rich and well-endowed widow.

  And so she had travelled north with him determined to see the ordeal out to the end and not to be deterred by his behaviour. By the time they reached Hexham her determination had begun to sag. The gr
ey stone town depressed her and she was only briefly revived by the spectacle outside the station of an immaculate brougham drawn by two black horses with a gaitered and tunicked Mr Dodd holding the door open for her. Mrs Flawse climbed in and felt better. This was what she called riding in style and smacked of a world far removed from anything she had known before, an aristocratic world with uniformed servants and smart equipages. But as the carriage rattled through the streets of the little market town Mrs Flawse began to have second thoughts. The carriage bounced and wobbled and shook and when after crossing the Tyne they took the road to Wark by way of Chollerford she was well into her third and fourth thoughts about the advantages of broughams. Outside the country varied by the mile. At times they passed along roads lined with trees and at others climbed bleak hills where the snow still lay in drifts against drystone walls. And all the time the carriage swayed and bounced horribly while beside her Mr Flawse was savouring her discomfort.

  ‘A splendid prospect,’ he commented as they crossed a particularly unpleasant piece of open ground without a tree in sight. Mrs Flawse kept her thoughts to herself. Let the old man relish her misery while there was breath left in him but once she was firmly ensconced in Flawse Hall he would learn just how uncomfortable she could make his remaining days. There would be no more sex for one thing. Mrs Flawse had determined on that, and being a vigorous woman, was capable of giving as good as she got. And so the two of them sat side by side contemplating the other’s discomfiture. It was Mrs Flawse who got the first shock. Shortly after Wark they turned down a half-metalled track that led along a nicely wooded valley towards a large and handsome house set in a spacious garden. Mrs Flawse’s hopes rose prematurely.

  ‘Is that the Hall?’ she asked as they rattled towards the gates.

  ‘It is not,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘That’s the Cleydons.’

  For a moment his spirits seemed to sink. Young Cleydon had been an early candidate for Lockhart’s paternity and only the certainty that he had been in Australia during the months that covered Lockhart’s conception had saved him from being flogged within an inch of his life.

  ‘It seems a nice house,’ said Mrs Flawse, noting her husband’s change of mood.

  ‘Aye, ’tis better than the occupants, God rot their souls,’ said the old man. Mrs Flawse added the Cleydons to the imaginary list of neighbours he disliked whose friendship she would cultivate. That the list seemed likely to be imaginary dawned on her a short time later. Past the house the road wound out of the woods and climbed the steep bank of a bare hillside; a mile beyond the rise they came to the first of many gates in drystone walls. Mr Dodd climbed down and opened the gate. Then he led the carriage through and shut it. Mrs Flawse searched the horizon for a sign of her new home but there was not a house in sight. Here and there a few dirty sheep showed up against the snow but for the rest there was emptiness. Mrs Flawse shivered.

  ‘We’ve another ten miles yet,’ said Mr Flawse cheerfully. For the next hour they bumped along the broken road with nothing more enchanting to view than an abandoned farmhouse standing within a garden wall and surrounded by fireweed and stinging nettles. Finally they arrived at another gate and beyond it Mrs Flawse could see a church standing on a knoll and around it several houses.

  ‘That’s Black Pockrington,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘You’ll do your shopping there.’

  ‘There?’ said Mrs Flawse tartly. ‘I most certainly won’t. It doesn’t look big enough to have shops.’

  ‘It has a wee store and the cholera explains its size.’

  ‘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 …’