The Throwback (13 page)

‘I was out with Jerry Blond, the architect,’ said Mr Simplon. ‘He wanted me to meet a client from Cyprus who is thinking of building a hotel. If you don’t believe me, phone Blond and see if he doesn’t confirm what I say.’

But Mrs Simplon scorned the idea. ‘I’m not going to advertise the fact that I have my own ideas about what you get up to,’ she said. ‘I’ve got more pride.’

Down in the bushes Lockhart admired her pride and was inspired by her reluctance. If she wasn’t going to advertise what she correctly thought Mr Simplon was getting up to, namely Mrs Grabble, it might be to his own advantage to do it for her. And where was Mr Grabble? Lockhart decided to explore that gentleman’s movements more closely before acting. Evidently there were nights when Mr Grabble stayed away from home. He would have to find out when. In the meantime there was no more to be gained from the Simplons, and leaving them to their quarrel he returned to the golf course; passing the Lowrys who lived at Number 7 and Mr O’Brain, the gynaecologist, who inhabited the Bauhaus
at Number 9 and was already in bed, he found himself at the bottom of the Wilsons’ garden at Number 11. Here the lights were on, though dimly, in the downstairs lounge and the French windows open. Lockhart squatted in a bunker on the seventeenth hole and lifted his binoculars. There were three people in the room sitting round a small table with their fingers touching, and as he watched the table moved. Lockhart eyed it beadily and his keen ear detected the sound of knocking. The Wilsons and their friend were engaged in some strange ritual. Every now and again Mrs Wilson would put a question and the table would rock and knock. So the Wilsons were superstitious.

Lockhart crawled away and presently was adding this and all the other gleanings of the night’s prowl to his notebook. By the time he went to bed, Jessica was fast asleep.

And so for the next fortnight Lockhart spent his evenings patrolling the bird sanctuary and the golf course and amassed dossiers on the habits, fads, foibles and indiscretions of all the tenants of the Crescent. By day he pottered about the house and spent a good many hours in his late father-in-law’s workshop with lengths of wire, transistors and a Do-It-Yourself
Manual of Radio Construction
.

‘I don’t know what you do with yourself all day,
darling,’ said Jessica, who had moved from the cement company to a firm of lawyers who specialized in libel actions.

‘I’m making provision for our future,’ said Lockhart.

‘With loudspeakers? What have loudspeakers got to do with our future?’

‘More than you know.’

‘And this transmitter thing. Is that part of our future too?’

‘Our future and the Wilsons’ next door,’ said Lockhart. ‘Where did your mother keep the keys to the houses?’

‘You mean the houses Daddy left me?’

Lockhart nodded and Jessica rummaged in a kitchen drawer. ‘Here they are,’ she said, and hesitated. ‘You’re not thinking of stealing things, are you?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Lockhart firmly, ‘if anything, I intend to add to their possessions.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all right then,’ said Jessica, and handed him the bundle of Yale keys. ‘I wouldn’t want to think you were doing anything that wasn’t legal. Working at Gibling and Gibling I’ve learnt just how easy it is to get into terrible trouble. Did you know that if you write a book and say nasty things in it about somebody they can sue you for thousands of pounds? It’s called libel.’

‘I wish someone would write nasty things about us then,’ said Lockhart. ‘We’ve got to get thousands of pounds if I’m ever going to start looking for my father.’

‘Yes, a libel case would help, wouldn’t it?’ said Jessica dreamily. ‘But you do promise you aren’t doing anything that can get us into trouble, don’t you?’

Lockhart promised. Fervently. What he had in mind was going to get other people into trouble.

In the meantime he had to wait. It was three days before the Wilsons went out for the evening and Lockhart was able to slip over the fence into their garden and let himself into Number 11. Under his arm he carried a box. He spent an hour in the attic before returning empty-handed.

‘Jessica, my sweet,’ he said, ‘I want you to go into the workshop and wait five minutes. Then say, “Testing. Testing. Testing,” into that little transmitter. You press the red button first.’

Lockhart slipped back into the Wilsons’ house and climbed to the attic and waited. A short time later the three loudspeakers hidden under the glass-fibre insulation and connected to the receiver concealed in a corner resounded eerily to Jessica’s voice. One loudspeaker was placed over the Wilsons’ main bedroom, a second over the bathroom and a third above the spare room. Lockhart listened and then climbed down and went home.

‘You go up to bed,’ he told Jessica, ‘I shouldn’t be long.’ Then he stationed himself at the front window and waited for the Wilsons to return. They had had a good evening and were in an intensely spiritual state. Lockhart
watched the lights come on in their bedroom and bathroom before contributing his share to their belief in the supernatural. Holding his nose between finger and thumb and speaking adenoidally into the microphone he whispered, ‘I speak from beyond the grave. Hear me. There will be a death in your house and you will join me.’ Then he switched the transmitter off and went out into the night the better to observe the result.

It was, to put it mildly, electrifying. Lights flashed on in every room in the house next door and Mrs Wilson, more used to the gentler messages of the ouija board, could be heard screaming hysterically at this authentic voice of doom. Lockhart, squatting in an azalea bush next to the gateway, listened to Mr Wilson trying to pacify his wife, a process made more difficult by his evident alarm and the impossibility of denying that he too had heard there was going to be a death in the house.

‘There’s no use saying you didn’t,’ wailed Mrs Wilson, ‘you heard it as clearly as I did and you were in the bathroom and look at the mess you made on the floor.’

Mr Wilson had to agree that his aim had been put off and, by way of Mrs Wilson’s infallible logic, that the mess was in consequence of his having learnt that death was so close at hand.

‘I told you we should never have started fooling with that damned table-rapping!’ he shouted. ‘Now look what you’ve been and let loose.’

‘That’s right, blame me,’ screamed Mrs Wilson, ‘that’s all you ever do. All I did was ask Mrs Saphegie round to
see if she really had psychic gifts and could get answers from our dear departed.’

‘Well, now you bloody know,’ shouted Mr Wilson. ‘And that wasn’t the voice of any of my dear departed, that’s for sure. No one on our side of the family suffered from such an awful nasal condition. Mind you, I don’t suppose being decomposed in a coffin does anything for sinusitis.’

‘There you go again,’ whined Mrs Wilson, ‘one of us going to die and you have to go on about coffins. And don’t hog all the brandy. I want some.’

‘I didn’t know you drank,’ said Mr Wilson.

‘I do now,’ said his wife, and evidently poured herself a stiff one. Lockhart left them consoling themselves somewhat unsuccessfully that at least the terrible prophecy proved that there was life after death. It didn’t seem to comfort Mrs Wilson very much.

But while the Wilsons speculated on this imminent question about the afterlife and its existence, Little Willie, the Pettigrews’ dachshund, went still further and found out. At precisely eleven o’clock Mr Pettigrew put him out and just as precisely Lockhart, lurking in the bird sanctuary, tugged on the nylon fishing-line that stretched under the fence and down the lawn. At the end of the line a lump of liver purchased that morning from the butcher pursued its erratic course across the grass. Behind it, for once unwisely soundless, came Willie
in hot pursuit. He didn’t come far. As the liver slid past the snare Lockhart had set at the end of the lawn, Willie stopped and, after a brief struggle, gave up both the pursuit and his life. Lockhart buried him under a rose bush at the bottom of his own garden where he would do most good, and having accomplished his first two intentions went to bed in a thoroughly cheerful mood, made all the more lively by the fact that the lights were still on in every room of the Wilsons’ house when he turned over at three in the morning, and from the house there could be heard the sound of drunken sobbing.

While Lockhart began to make life uncomfortable for the tenants of his wife’s houses, her mother was doing her damnedest to make life unbearable for Mr Flawse. The weather was not on her side. From a bright spring they passed into a hot summer and Flawse Hall showed itself to advantage. Its thick walls had more functions than the keeping out of the Scots and the keeping in of the whisky; they soothed the summer’s heat. Outside, the hybrid hounds might slobber and loll in the dung-dry dust of the yard; inside, Mr Flawse could sit contentedly upright at his desk poring over the parish registers and ancient enclosure deeds to which he had lately become so addicted. Knowing that in the fullness of time he was about due to join his ancestors he thought it as well to acquaint himself with the faults and failings of his family.

That he looked only on the worst side of things came from his natural pessimism and knowledge of himself. He was therefore surprised to find that the Flawses were not all unconscionably bad. There were Flawse saints as well as Flawse sinners and if, as he expected, the latter predominated there was still a streak of generosity to their actions he could not but admire. The Flawse, one Quentin Flawse, who had murdered, or by the more
polite usage of the time done to death in a duel, one Thomas Tidley in consequence of the latter implying at the sheep shearing at Otterburn that the name Flawse derived from the Faas, a notorious family of gipsies known best for their thieving, had yet had the generosity to marry his widow and provide for his children. Then again, Bishop Flawse, burnt at the stake in the reign of Bloody Mary for his apostasy from Rome, had refused the bag of gunpowder which his brother had brought to tie round his neck on the sensible grounds of economy and its better use to fire muskets into the body of damned Papists when the time was ripe. It was this sort of practicality that Mr Flawse most admired in his forebears and showed that to whatever end they came they wasted no time on self-pity but sustained an indomitable will to do unto others as they were having done to them. Thus Headman Flawse, private executioner to the Duke of Durham in the fourteenth century, had, when his time came to lay his own head on the block, gallantly offered to sharpen the axe for his successor, a gesture so generous that it had been granted: to the extinction of the new headman, fifteen bodyguards, twenty-five bystanders and the Duke himself, all of whom lay headless while Headman Flawse put his expertise to private use and escaped on the Duke’s own charger to spend his days as an outlaw among the moss troopers of Redesdale.

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.