The Throwback (26 page)

Mr Dodd was hustled upstairs by Lockhart and told
to change the tapes. The late Mr Flawse’s repertoire of imprecations was getting monotonous. Even Mrs Flawse complained.

‘That’s the twenty-fifth time he’s told Dr Magrew to get out of the house,’ she shouted through her bedroom door. ‘Why doesn’t the wretched man go? Can’t he see he’s not wanted?’

Mr Dodd changed the cassette to one labelled ‘Heaven and Hell, Possible Existence of’. Not that there was any possibility in his own mind of doubting the existence of the latter. What was going on in the cellar was proof positive that Hell existed. It was Heaven he wanted to be convinced about, and he was just listening to the old man’s deathbed argument borrowed in part from Carlyle about the unseen mysteries of the Divine Spirit when he caught the sound of steps on the stairs. He glanced out the door and saw Dr Magrew coming up. Mr Dodd slammed the door and promptly switched the cassette back to the previous one. It was marked ‘Magrew and Bullstrode, Opinions of’. Unfortunately, he chose Mr Bullstrode’s side and a moment later Dr Magrew was privileged to hear his dear friend, the solicitor, described by his dear friend, Mr Flawse, as litigious spawn of a syphilitic whore who should never have been born but having been should have been gelded at birth before he could milk the likes of Mr Flawse of their wealth by consistently bad advice. This opinion had at least the merit of stopping the doctor in his tracks. He had always valued Mr Flawse’s judgement and was interested to hear
more. Meanwhile, Mr Dodd had gone to the window and looked out. The snow had thawed sufficiently to let the doctor’s car through to the bridge. Now he had to think of some means of denying him access to his departed patient. He was saved by Lockhart who emerged from the cellar with the tray on which stood the remnants of Mr Taglioni’s lunch.

‘Ah, Dr Magrew,’ he called out, shutting the cellar door firmly behind him, ‘how good of you to come. Grandfather is very much better this morning.’

‘So I can hear,’ said the doctor as Mr Dodd tried to change the cassette and Mr Taglioni, revivified by his lunch, burst into a foul imitation of Caruso. ‘Quite remarkably better by the sound of it.’

From her bedroom Mrs Flawse demanded to know if that damned doctor was back again.

‘If he tells Dr Magrew to get out of the house just one more time,’ she wailed, ‘I think I’ll go off my head.’

Dr Magrew hesitated between so many injunctions. From the bedroom Mr Flawse had switched to politics and was berating the Baldwin government of 1935 for its pusillanimity while at the same time someone in the cellar was bawling about Bella bella carissima. Lockhart shook his head.

‘Come down and have a drink,’ he said. ‘Grandfather’s in an odd frame of mind.’

Certainly Dr Magrew was. In the course of separating Mr Dodd from the taxidermist Lockhart had, to put it mildly, been bloodied, and the presence in a coffee cup
on the tray of what from Dr Magrew’s experience he could have sworn to be a human appendix dropped there absent-mindedly by Mr Taglioni left him badly in need of a drink. He staggered down the staircase eagerly and presently was gulping down Mr Dodd’s special distilled Northumbrian whisky by the tumbler.

‘You know,’ he said when he felt a little better, ‘I had no idea your grandfather had such a low opinion of Mr Bullstrode.’

‘You don’t think that could just be the result of his concussion? The fall affected his mind as you said yourself.’

Down below, Mr Taglioni, left to himself, had hit the crusted port again and with it Verdi. Dr Magrew stared at the floor.

‘Am I imagining things,’ he asked, ‘but is there someone singing in your cellar?’

Lockhart shook his head. ‘I can’t hear anything,’ he said firmly.

‘Christ,’ said the doctor, looking wildly round, ‘you really can’t?’

‘Only Grandfather shouting upstairs.’

‘I can hear that too,’ said Dr Magrew. ‘But …’ He stared demoniacally at the floor. ‘Well, if you say so. By the way, do you always wear a scarf over your face in the house?’

Lockhart took it off with a sanguine hand. From the cellar came a fresh burst of Neapolitan.

‘I think I had better be gone,’ said the doctor, staggering
to his feet. ‘I’m delighted your grandfather is making such good progress. I’ll call again when I feel a little better myself.’

Lockhart escorted him to the door and was seeing him out when the taxidermist struck again.

‘The eyes,’ he shouted, ‘my God, I forgot to bring his eyes. Now what are we going to do?’

There was no doubting what Dr Magrew was going to do. He took one last demented look at the house and trundled off at a run down the drive to his car. Houses in which he saw human appendixes in otherwise empty coffee cups and people announced that they had forgotten to bring their eyes were not for him. He was going home to consult a fellow practitioner.

Behind him Lockhart turned blandly back into the Hall and calmed the distraught Mr Taglioni.

‘I’ll bring some,’ he said, ‘don’t worry. I’ll fetch a pair.’

‘Where am I?’ wailed the taxidermist. ‘What is happening to me?’

Upstairs Mrs Flawse knew exactly where she was but had no idea what was happening to her. She peered out of the window in time to see the persistent Dr Magrew running to his car and then Lockhart appeared and walked to the peel tower. When he returned he was carrying the eyes of the tiger his grandfather had shot in India on his trip there in 1910. He thought they would do rather well. Old Mr Flawse had always been a ferocious man-eater.

All that day and the next and the one following Mr Taglioni continued his gruesome task while Lockhart cooked and Mr Dodd sat in his shed and stared resentfully at the cucumber frames. In her bedroom Mrs Flawse had stood all she could of her blasted husband’s voice echoing from across the landing about Heaven and Hell and guilt, sin and damnation. If the old fool would either die or stop repeating himself she wouldn’t have minded but he went on and on and on, and by the third night Mrs Flawse was prepared to brave snow, sleet and storm and even heights to escape. She tied her sheets together and then tore her blankets into strips and knotted them to the sheets and the sheets to the bed and finally, donning her warmest clothes, she clambered out of the window and slid rather than climbed to the ground. The night was dark and the snow melted and against the black background of mud and moor she was invisible. She slushed off down the drive towards the bridge and had just crossed it and was trying to undo the gates when behind her she heard the sound that had welcomed her to Flawse Hall, the baying of hounds. They were still in the yard but a light shone in the window that had been her bedroom and the light had been off when she left.

She turned from the gate and ran or rather stumbled alongside The Cut in a desperate attempt to reach the hillside by the tunnel, and as she ran she heard the creak of the wooden gates to the yard and the louder baying of the hounds. The Flawse pack was on the scent again. Mrs Flawse fled on into the darkness, tripped and fell, got up, tripped again and this time fell into The Cut. It wasn’t deep but the cold was intense. She tried to climb the far bank but slipped back, and giving up, waded on knee-deep in the icy water towards the dark shadow of the hill and the darker hole of the great tunnel. It loomed larger and more awful with each uncertain step she took. Mrs Flawse hesitated. The black hole ahead spoke to her of Hades, the baying pack behind of Pluto, no gay cartoon of Disneyland, but rather that dread god of the infernal regions at whose altar of mere wealth she had unconsciously worshipped. Mrs Flawse was not an educated woman but she knew enough to tell that she was caught between the devil and, by way of taps, toilets and sewers provided by the Gateshead and Newcastle Waterworks, the deep blue sea. And then as she hesitated the baying hounds were halted in their tracks and against the skyline she could see in silhouette a figure on a horse thrashing about him with a whip.

‘Get back, ye scum,’ shouted Lockhart, ‘back to your kennels, ye scavengers of hell.’

His voice drifting with the wind reached Mrs Flawse and for once she felt grateful to her son-in-law. A moment later she knew better. Addressing Mr Dodd as
he had addressed the hounds, Lockhart cursed the man for his stupidity.

‘Have you forgotten the will, you damned old fool?’ he demanded. ‘Let the old bitch but go one mile beyond the radius of the Hall and she will forfeit the estate. So let her run and be damned.’

‘I hadna thought of that,’ said Mr Dodd contritely, and turned his horse to follow the pack back to Flawse Hall while Lockhart rode behind. Mrs Flawse no longer hesitated. She too had forgotten the clause in the will. She would not run and be damned. With a desperate effort she scrambled from The Cut and stumbled back to the Hall. Once there she had not the strength to climb the sheets to her bedroom but tried the door. It was unlocked. She went inside and stood shivering in the darkness. A door was open to the kitchen and a light shone beneath the cellar door. Mrs Flawse needed a drink, a strong drink to warm her blood. She stepped quietly to the cellar door and opened it. A moment later her screams echoed and re-echoed through the house for there before her very eyes, naked and with an enormous scar from groin to gullet, sat old Mr Flawse on a bare wood table stained with blood and his eyes were the eyes of a tiger. Behind him stood Mr Taglioni with a piece of cotton waste which he appeared to be stuffing into her husband’s skull and while he worked he hummed a tune from
The Barber of Seville
. Mrs Flawse took one look and having screamed passed out. It was Lockhart who carried her gibbering dementedly back to
her room and dropped her on the bed. Then he hauled up the sheets and blankets and knotted her to the bedstead.

‘Ye’ll go no more a-wandering by the light of the moon,’ he said cheerfully, and went out locking the door. It was true. When Mr Dodd took her breakfast up he found Mrs Flawse staring dementedly at the ceiling, gibbering to herself.

Down in the cellar Mr Taglioni gibbered too. Mrs Flawse’s eruption and hysteria in the cellar had completed his demoralization. It had been bad enough to stuff a dead man but to have his work interrupted in the middle of the night by a wailing widow had been too much for him.

‘Take me home,’ he pleaded with Lockhart, ‘take me home.’

‘Not before you’ve finished,’ said Lockhart implacably. ‘He’s got to speak and wave his hands.’

Mr Taglioni looked up at the masked face.

‘Taxidermy’s one thing. Marionettes another,’ he said. ‘You wanted him stuffed, you got him stuffed. Now you say I got to make him speak. What you want? Miracles? You better ask God for those.’

‘I’m not asking anyone. I’m telling,’ said Lockhart and produced the loudspeaker. ‘You put that where his larynx is …’

‘Was,’ said Mr Taglioni, ‘I no leave nothing inside.’

‘Was then,’ continued Lockhart, ‘and then I want this
receiver put in his head.’ He showed Mr Taglioni the miniature receiver. Mr Taglioni was adamant.

‘No room. His head is stuffed with cotton wool.’

‘Well, take some out and put this in and leave space for the batteries. And while you’re about it I want his jaw to move. I’ve an electric motor here. Look, I’ll show you.’

For the rest of the morning, the late Mr Flawse was wired for sound and by the time they had finished it was possible to hear his heart beat when a switch was pulled. Even his eyes, now those of the tiger, swivelled in his head at the touch of a button on the remote control. About the only thing he couldn’t do was walk or lie down flat. For the rest he looked rather healthier than he had done of late and certainly sounded as articulate.

‘Right,’ said Lockhart when they had tested him out, ‘now you can drink your fill.’

‘Who?’ said Mr Taglioni, by this time thoroughly confused. ‘Him or me?’

‘You,’ said Lockhart and left him to his own devices and the contents of the wine cellar. He went upstairs to find that Mr Dodd was also drunk. The sound of his master’s voice issuing from that fearful effigy in the cellar had been too much even for his sturdy soul and he was halfway through a bottle of his own Northumbrian brew. Lockhart took the whisky from him.

‘I’ll need your help to get the old man to bed,’ he said,
‘he’s stiff in the hip joints and needs levering round corners.’

Mr Dodd demurred but eventually between them they got Mr Flawse, clad in his red flannel nightgown, into bed where he sat up bellowing and calling on the Almighty to save his soul.

‘You’ve got to admit he’s very realistic,’ said Lockhart. ‘It is just a pity we didn’t think of taping his utterances earlier.’

‘It’s more a pity we ever thought of taping them at all,’ said Mr Dodd drunkenly, ‘and I wish his jaw wouldna go up and down like that. It puts me in mind of a goldfish with asthma.’

‘But the eyes are about right,’ said Lockhart. ‘I got them from the tiger.’

‘Ye dinna have to tell me,’ said Mr Dodd, and surprisingly broke into Blake. ‘Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. What demented hand and eye framed thy awful circuitry?’

‘I did,’ said Lockhart proudly, ‘and I’m fixing him a wheelchair so that he can move about the house on his own and I’ll direct it by remote control. That way no one will suspect he isn’t still alive and I’ll have time to see if this Mr Boscombe in Arizona is my father.’

‘Boscombe? A Mr Boscombe?’ said Mr Dodd. ‘And for why would you be thinking he was your father?’

‘He wrote a great many letters to my mother,’ said Lockhart, and explained how he had got them.

‘Ye’ll be wasting your time ganning after the man,’
said Mr Dodd. ‘Miss Deyntry was right. I recall the little man and he was a poor wee thing that your mither had no time for. You had best look closer home.’

‘He’s the only lead I’ve got,’ said Lockhart, ‘unless you can suggest a more likely candidate.’

Mr Dodd shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you this though. The auld bitch has got wind of what ye’re up to and knows the old man is dead. If ye gan off to America she’ll find a way out of the house to alert Mr Bullstrode. Ye saw what she did the other night. The woman’s desperate dangerous and there’s the Italian down below is a witness to the deed. Ye hadna thought of that.’