The Throwback (3 page)

‘Yes, sir, and what to follow?’

‘A double ration of eggs and bacon. And find some kidneys,’ said Mr Flawse to the prognostic delight of Mrs Sandicott, who knew all there was to know about cholesterol. ‘And by double I mean double. Four eggs and a dozen rashers. Then toast and marmalade and two large pots of tea. And the same goes for the boy.’

The waiter hurried away with this lethal order and Mr Flawse looked over his glasses at Mrs Sandicott and Jessica.

‘Your daughter, ma’am?’ he enquired.

‘My only daughter,’ murmured Mrs Sandicott.

‘My compliments to you,’ said Mr Flawse without making it clear whether he was praising Mrs Sandicott for her daughter’s beauty or her singularity. Mrs Sandicott blushed her acknowledgement. Mr Flawse’s old-world manners were almost as enchanting to her as his age. For the rest of the meal there was silence broken only by the old man’s denunciation of the tea as weaker than well-water and his insistence on a proper pot of breakfast tea you could stand your spoon up in. But if Mr Flawse appeared to be concentrating on his bacon and eggs and tea that contained enough tannin to scour its way through a blocked sewer-pipe, his actual thoughts were elsewhere and moved along lines very similar to those of Mrs Sandicott though with a rather different emphasis. In the course of his long life he had learnt to smell a snob a mile off and Mrs Sandicott’s deference suited him well. She would, he considered, make an excellent housekeeper. Better still, there was her
daughter. She was clearly a gormless girl, and just as clearly an ideal match for his gormless grandson. Mr Flawse observed Lockhart out of the corner of a watery eye and recognized the symptoms of love.

‘Sheep’s eyes,’ he muttered aloud to himself to the confusion of the hovering waiter, who apologized for their not being on the menu.

‘And who said they were?’ snapped Mr Flawse, and dismissed the man with a wave of a mottled hand.

Mrs Sandicott absorbed all these details of behaviour and calculated Mr Flawse to be exactly the man she had been waiting for, a nonagenarian with an enormous estate, and therefore an enormous bank account, and an appetite for just those items on the menu best suited to kill him off almost immediately. It was therefore with no affectation of gratitude that she accepted his offer of a stroll round the deck after breakfast. Mr Flawse dismissed Lockhart and Jessica to go and play deck quoits, and presently he and Mrs Sandicott were lapping the promenade deck at a pace that took her breath away. By the time they had covered the old man’s statutory two miles, Mrs Sandicott’s breath had been taken away for other reasons. Mr Flawse was not a man to mince his words.

‘Let me make myself plain,’ he said unnecessarily as they took their seats in deckchairs, ‘I am not overgiven to delaying my thoughts. You have a daughter of marriageable age and I have a grandson who ought to be married. Am I right?’

Mrs Sandicott adjusted the blanket round her knees
and said with some show of delicacy that she supposed so.

‘I am so, ma’am,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘I know it and you know it. In truth we both know it. Now, I am an old man and at my age I cannot expect a sufficient future to see my grandson settled according to his station. In short, ma’am, as the great Milton expressed it, “in me there’s no delay”. You take my meaning?’

Mrs Sandicott took it and denied it simultaneously. ‘You’re quite remarkably fit for your time of life, Mr Flawse,’ she said encouragingly.

‘That’s as may be, but the Great Certainty looms,’ said Mr Flawse, ‘and ’tis equally certain that my grandson is a nincompoop who will in a short time, being my only heir, be a rich nincompoop.’

He allowed Mrs Sandicott to savour the prospect for a moment or two. ‘And being a nincompoop he needs a wife who has her head screwed on the right way.’

He paused again and it was on the tip of Mrs Sandicott’s tongue to remark that Jessica’s head, if screwed on at all, had been screwed on against the thread, but she restrained her words.

‘I suppose you could say that,’ she said.

‘I can and I do,’ continued Mr Flawse. ‘It has ever been a Flawse trait, ma’am, in choosing our womenfolk, to take cognizance of their mothers, and I have no hesitation in saying that you have a shrewd head for business, Mrs Sandicott, ma’am.’

‘It’s very kind of you to say so, Mr Flawse,’ Mrs
Sandicott simpered, ‘and since my poor husband died I have had to be the breadwinner. Sandicott & Partner are chartered accountants and I have run the business.’

‘Exactly,’ said Mr Flawse. ‘I have a nose for these things and it would be a comfort to know that my grandson was in good hands.’ He stopped. Mrs Sandicott waited expectantly.

‘And what hands did you have in mind, Mr Flawse?’ she asked finally, but Mr Flawse had decided the time had come to feign sleep. With his nose above the blanket and his eyes closed he snored softly. He had baited the trap. There was no point in watching over it and presently Mrs Sandicott stole quietly away with mixed feelings. On the one hand she had not come on the cruise to find a husband for her daughter; she had come to avoid one. On the other, if Mr Flawse’s words meant anything he was looking for a wife for his grandson. For one wild moment Mrs Sandicott considered Lockhart for herself and instantly rejected him. It was Jessica or no one, and the loss of Jessica would mean the loss of the rent of the twelve houses in Sandicott Crescent. If only the old fool had proposed to her she would have seen things in a different light.

‘Two birds with one stone,’ she murmured to herself at the thought of a double killing. It was worth calculating about. And so, as the two young lovers gambolled on the sun-deck, Mrs Sandicott ensconced herself in a corner of the First Class Lounge and calculated. Through the window she could keep an eye on the blanketed figure of
Mr Flawse recumbent in the deckchair. Every now and again his knees twitched. Mr Flawse had given way to those sexual excesses of the imagination which were the bane of his nonconformist conscience, and for the first time Mrs Sandicott figured in them largely.

Imagination played a large part in the love that blossomed between Lockhart and Jessica. Having plunged they sported like water babies in the swimming pool or frolicked at deck tennis and as each day passed, and the ship steamed slowly south into equatorial waters, their passion grew inarticulately. Not entirely inarticulately but when they spoke during the day their words were matter of fact. It was only at night, when the older generation danced the quickstep to the ship’s band and they were left alone to stare down at the white water swirling from the ship’s side and invest one another with those qualities their different upbringings had extolled, that they spoke their feelings. Even then it was by way of other people and other places that they told one another what they felt. Lockhart talked of Mr Dodd and how at night he and the gamekeeper would sit at the settle in the stone-flagged kitchen with the black iron range glowing between them while the wind howled in the chimney outside and Mr Dodd’s pipes wailed inside. And of how he and Mr Dodd would herd the sheep or stalk game in the wooded valley known as Slimeburn where Mr Dodd dug coal from a drift mine that had first been worked in 1805. Finally there were the fishing
expeditions on the great reservoir fringed with pine that stood a mile from Flawse Hall. Jessica saw it all so clearly through a mist of Mazo de la Roche and Brontë and every romantic novel she had ever read. Lockhart was the young gallant come to sweep her off her feet and carry her from the boredom of her life in East Pursley and away from her mother’s cynicism to the ever-ever land of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg where the wind blew fierce and the snow lay thick outside but all within was warm with old wood and dogs and the swirl of Mr Dodd’s Northumbrian pipes and old Mr Flawse sitting at the oval mahogany dining-table disputing by candlelight questions of great moment with his two friends, Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode. In the tapestry woven from Lockhart’s words she created a picture of a past which she dearly longed to make her future.

Lockhart’s mind worked more practically. To him Jessica was an angel of radiant beauty for whom he would lay down, if not his own life, at least that of anything which moved within range of his most powerful rifle.

But while the young people were only implicitly in love, the old were more outspoken. Mr Flawse, having baited the trap for another housekeeper, waited for Mrs Sandicott’s response. It came later than he had expected. Mrs Sandicott was not a woman to be hustled and she had calculated with care. Of one thing she was certain. If Mr Flawse wanted Jessica for his daughter-in-law he
must take her mother for his wife. She broached the subject with due care and by way of the mention of property.

‘If Jessica were to marry,’ she said one evening after dinner, ‘I would be without a home.’

Mr Flawse signalled his delight at the news by ordering another brandy. ‘How so, ma’am?’ he enquired.

‘Because my poor dear late husband left all twelve houses in Sandicott Crescent, including our own, to our daughter and I would never live with the young married couple.’

Mr Flawse sympathized. He had lived long enough with Lockhart to know the hazards of sharing a house with the brute. ‘There is always Flawse Hall, ma’am. You would be very welcome there.’

‘As what? A temporary guest or were you thinking of a more permanent arrangement?’

Mr Flawse hesitated. There was an inflexion in Mrs Sandicott’s voice which suggested that the permanent arrangement he had in mind might not be at all to her liking. ‘There need be nothing temporary about your being a guest, ma’am. You could stay as long as you liked.’

Mrs Sandicott’s eyes glinted with suburban steel. ‘And what precisely would the neighbours make of that, Mr Flawse?’

Mr Flawse hesitated again. The fact that his nearest neighbours were six miles off at Black Pockrington, and that he didn’t give a tuppenny damn what they thought,
presented a prospect that had lost him too many housekeepers already and was unlikely to appeal to Mrs Sandicott.

‘I think they would understand,’ he prevaricated. But Mrs Sandicott was not to be fobbed off with understandings. ‘I have my reputation to think of,’ she said. ‘I would never consent to staying alone in a house with a man without there being some legal status to my being there.’

‘Legal status, ma’am?’ said Mr Flawse and took a swig of brandy to steady his nerves. The bloody woman was proposing to him.

‘I think you know what I mean,’ said Mrs Sandicott.

Mr Flawse said nothing. The ultimatum was too clear.

‘And so if the young couple are to be married,’ she continued remorselessly, ‘and I repeat “if”, then I think we should consider our own futures.’

Mr Flawse did and found it an uncertain one. Mrs Sandicott was not a wholly unattractive woman. Already in his dozing fantasies he had stripped her naked and found her plump body very much to his taste. On the other hand wives had disadvantages. They tended to be domineering and while a domineering housekeeper could be sacked a wife couldn’t, and Mrs Sandicott for all her deference seemed to be a strong-minded woman. To spend the rest of his life with a strong-minded woman was more than he had bargained for, but if it meant getting the bastard Lockhart off his hands it might be worth the risk. Besides there was always the isolation of Flawse Hall to tame the strongest-minded woman and he
would have an ally in Mr Dodd. Yes, definitely an ally in Mr Dodd and Mr Dodd was not without resource. And finally if he couldn’t sack a wife nor could the wife leave like a housekeeper. Mr Flawse smiled into his brandy and nodded.

‘Mrs Sandicott,’ he said with unaccustomed familiarity, ‘am I right in supposing that it would not come averse to you to change your name to Mrs Flawse?’

Mrs Sandicott beamed her assent. ‘It would make me very happy, Mr Flawse,’ she said, and took his mottled hand.

‘Then allow me to make you happy, ma’am,’ said the old man, with the private thought that once he’d got her up to Flawse Hall she’d get her fill of happiness one way or another. As if to celebrate this forthcoming union of the two families the ship’s band struck up a foxtrot. When it had finished Mr Flawse returned to more practical matters.

‘I must warn you that Lockhart will need employment,’ he said. ‘I had always intended to keep him to manage the estate he will one day inherit but if your daughter has twelve houses …’

Mrs Sandicott came to his rescue. ‘The houses are all let and at rents fixed by the Rent Tribunal on long leases,’ she said, ‘but dear Lockhart could always join my late husband’s firm. I understand he is clever with figures.’

‘He has had an excellent grounding in arithmetic. I have no hesitation in saying so.’

‘Then he should do very well at Sandicott & Partner, Chartered Accountants and Tax Consultants,’ said Mrs Sandicott.

Mr Flawse congratulated himself on his foresight. ‘Then that is settled,’ he said. ‘There remains simply the question of the wedding.’

‘Weddings,’ said Mrs Sandicott, emphasizing the plural. ‘I had always hoped that Jessica would have a church wedding.’

Mr Flawse shook his head. ‘At my age, ma’am, there would be something incongruous about a church wedding to be so closely followed by a funeral. I would prefer a more cheerful venue. Mind you, I disapprove of register offices.’

‘Oh, so do I,’ Mrs Sandicott agreed, ‘they are so unromantic.’

But there was nothing unromantic about the old man’s reluctance to see Lockhart married in a register office. It had dawned on him that without a birth certificate it might be impossible to marry the swine off at all. And besides there was still the fact of his illegitimacy to be concealed.

‘I see no reason why the Captain shouldn’t marry us,’ he said finally. Mrs Sandicott thrilled at the notion. It combined speed and no time for second thoughts with an eccentricity that was almost aristocratic. She could boast about it to her friends.

‘Then I’ll see the Captain about it in the morning,’
said Mr Flawse, and it was left to Mrs Sandicott to break the news to the young couple.

She found them on the boat-deck whispering together. For a moment she stood and listened. They so seldom spoke in her presence that she was curious to know what they did say to one another in her absence. What she heard was both reassuring and disturbing.