The Throwback (32 page)

As they finally disappeared from view Lockhart turned the amplifiers off and the bombardment ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Not that Mr Mirkin or the fleeing Excise men either knew or cared. They were in a soundless world in any case and by the time they reached their cars on the road and were able to voice their shattered feelings they were unable to get them heard. Only sight, smell, touch and fright remained and they stared back in wonderment at Flawse Hall. It was still incredibly standing and apparently unscathed by the bombardment. Nor were there any craters to be seen and the smoke that should have obscured their view was quite extraordinarily absent. But at least the pain had gone too and the Excise men were about to climb back into their cars and leave the scene of this frightful experience when a figure appeared climbing the road from the bottom of the valley. It was Lockhart; across his shoulder like a sack with wooden legs hung Mr Mirkin.

‘You’ve left this thing behind,’ he said, and dumped the ex-Senior Collector of Taxes across the bonnet of the leading car. The Excise men saw his lips move but heard nothing. Had they heard they would have agreed that Mr Mirkin was a thing. He was certainly not a human being. Gibbering soundlessly and foaming at various
orifices he had passed beyond the bounds of sanity and would clearly never be the same again. They managed to get him into the boot of one of the cars (his vibrating legs prevented his occupying a seat in the car itself) and drove off into the silent night.

Behind them Lockhart walked happily back to the Hall. His experiment in surrogate and purely sonic warfare had worked splendidly, so splendidly in fact that as he approached the house he saw that most of the windows were broken. He would have them repaired next day and in the meantime there was something to celebrate. He went into the peel tower and lit the fire in the great hearth. As it blazed up he told Mr Dodd to fetch the whisky and went himself into the house to invite Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew to join him and Jessica in drinking a toast. He had some difficulty making his invitation plain to them but their sleep had been so completely interrupted that they dressed and followed him to the banqueting hall. Mr Dodd was already there with the whisky and his pipes, and standing in a little group beneath the battle-flags and the swords they raised their glasses.

‘What are we going to drink to this time?’ asked Jessica, and it was Mr Dodd who supplied the answer.

‘To the Devil himself,’ he said.

‘The Devil?’ said Jessica. ‘Why the Devil?’

‘Why aye, hinnie,’ said Mr Dodd, ‘’tis clear you dinna ken your Robbie Burns. Do ye not ken his poem “The De’il’s Awa Wi’ The Excise Man”?’

‘In that case, to the De’il,’ said Lockhart, and they drank.

And they danced by the light of the fire while Mr Dodd played on his pipes and sang:

‘There’s threesome reels, and foursome reels,

There’s hornpipes and strathspeys, man;

But the one best dance e’er cam to our lan’,

Was – the De’il’s awa wi’ the Excise Man.’

They danced and drank and drank and danced and then, exhausted, sat round the long table while Jessica made them ham and eggs. When they had finished Lockhart stood up and told Mr Dodd to fetch the man.

‘It wouldna be kind to let him miss this great occasion,’ he said. Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew, too drunk to disagree, nodded. ‘He would have appreciated seeing those scoundrels run,’ said Lockhart, ‘it would have appealed to his sense of humour.’ As dawn broke over Flawse Fell Mr Dodd flung open the gates of the peel tower and old Mr Flawse, seated in a wheelchair and manifestly self-propelled, rolled into the room and took his accustomed place at the end of the table. Mr Dodd shut the doors and handed Lockhart the remote control. He twiddled with the switches and once again the room rang with the voice of old Mr Flawse. Lockhart had been
editing the tapes and compiling fresh speeches and it was these that the old man now uttered.

‘Let us dispute, my friends, as once we did before the man with the sickle got the better of me. I take it you’ve both brought your reasons with you just as I’ve brought mine.’

Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode found the question difficult to answer. They were both very drunk and in any case recent events had moved so fast that they had tended to forget that old Mr Flawse, if stuffed, still seemed to have a mind of his own. They sat and stared speechlessly at this animated
memento mori
. Lockhart, assuming that they were still partially deaf, turned the volume up and Mr Flawse’s voice filled the room.

‘I care not what argument you use, Magrew,’ he yelled, ‘I’ll not have it that ye can change a nation’s or a man’s character by meddling with his environment and social circumstance. We are what we are by virtue of the precedence of birth and long-established custom, that great conglomerate of our ancestral heritage congenital and practical. The two are intertwined. What judges once pronounced we now apply; ’tis common law; and what by chemistry committed shapes our cells becomes the common man. An Englishman is yet an Englishman though centuries apart. Do you not agree, Mr Bullstrode, sir?’

Mr Bullstrode nodded. He was powerless to speak.

‘And yet,’ continued Mr Flawse at ten watts per channel, ‘and yet we have the paradox that what’s called
English differs century by century as well. A strange yet constant inconsistency this is that leaves the men the same and yet divides their conduct and opinions from themselves. In Cromwell’s day it was religious controversy led in the field; a century and Chatham’s day the conquest of an Empire and the loss of America but faith had fled the field before a clockwork model of the universe and Frenchmen dideroting on encyclopediae. Ye ken what Sully said? That Englishmen take their pleasures sadly after the fashion of their country. A century later Voltaire, that idol
persifleur
of France, would have it that we by and large have a most serious and gloomy temperament. So where’s the influence of all ideas between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century on Englishmen? Not that I mind what Frenchmen say of us; their observations have ill-accorded with mine own; or of my reading come to that. ’Tis Merrie England all the time to me and what have the French to equal Sterne or Smollett or yet a Surtees? I’ve still to see a Frenchman Jorrocks ride to hounds. With them it’s wit and badinage that’s aye the joke. With us ’tis ever action and that war between our words and what we be which they across the Channel have named hypocrisy. And what we be is all mixed up with alien blood and refugees from tyranny like a bag pudding boiled within this pot we call the British Isles. ’Twas ever thus; ’twill ever be a ragamuffin race of scoundrels born of pirates on the run. What say you to that, Magrew, you who have some acquaintanceship with Hume?’

But Dr Magrew, like Mr Bullstrode, had nothing to say. He was silent before this effigy of the past which uttered words in parody of its own complex self. He gaped and as he gaped the old man’s voice rose louder still. It was filled with fury now and Lockhart, wrestling with the remote control, found nothing would abate his voice.

‘It was some damned scoundrel versifying American,’ bawled Mr Flawse, ‘would have it that he’d go with a whimper not a bang. ’Twere better for the creature had he been with Whymper on the Matterhorn and learnt the meaning of a fall. Well, I’ll not do the same. Damn whimpering, sir, and being the world’s whining beggar, cap in hand. I’ve not a forelock left to touch and wouldna raise a finger to it had I one, to wheedle pennies from a foreign swine be he an Arab Sheik or the Emperor of Japan. I’m true-born English to the core and so I will remain. So keep your whimpering for womenfolk and let me have my bang.’

And as if in answer to this request there was a dull explosion in his innards and smoke poured out of his ears. Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew looked on appalled while Lockhart, trying the switches, shouted to Mr Dodd.

‘The fire extinguisher,’ he yelled, ‘for God’s sake get the fire extinguisher!’

But it was no good. Mr Flawse was living up to his promise not to whimper. Flailing round him with his arms and shouting incomprehensible imprecations from his clapper mouth he streaked in his wheelchair across
the banqueting hall, gathered a rug over his feet on the way, bounced off an armoured figure and finally, with that practicality he had always admired in his ancestor, shot into the open hearth and burst into flames. By the time Mr Dodd arrived with fire extinguisher he was beyond extinction and had flared up the chimney in a shower of sparks and flames.

‘The man was born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward. Amen,’ said Mr Dodd.

And so in the great hearth old Mr Flawse, the last of his line, finally fizzled out before the eyes of his two closest friends, Jessica, Mr Dodd, and the man he had always called the bastard.

‘Almost a Viking’s funeral,’ said Dr Magrew as the charred remains flaked to ashes and the last transistor melted. It had been made in Japan, he noted, which tended to contradict the old man’s final boast that he was English to the core. He was about to point this interesting anatomical and philosophical observation out to Mr Bullstrode when he was interrupted by a cry from behind him. Lockhart was standing on the oak table among the guttering candles and tears were running down his cheeks. ‘The De’il has pity in him yet,’ thought the doctor but Mr Dodd, recognizing the symptoms, picked up his pipes and squeezed the bag under his arm as Lockhart began his dirge.

‘The last of them all is gan fra’ the Hall

And the Flawse is fled fra’ the fell

But those that are left can aye recall

The tales he used to tell.

Twa deaths he died, twa lives he led,

Twa men he might have been;

The ane spake words he had but read

The ither he didna mean.

And so he struggled his whole life through

And niver in strife he ceased.

And he allus sought what was good and true

Though hissel’ to be half a beast.

’Twas all the truth he iver knew

Since Science and God had fled,

And you couldna shake his firm-held view

That the best of men are dead.

But their words remain to ease our pain

And he’d have us now rejoice

That though he’s gan we can hear again

The sound of his living voice.’

While Mr Dodd squeezed on with his tune, Lockhart jumped down from the table and left the peel tower. Behind him Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew looked at one another in wonderment and for once even Jessica, startled into womanly concern by Lockhart’s tears, lost her sentimental streak and stood dry-eyed. She was about to follow Lockhart out when Mr Dodd stopped her.

‘Let him be by hissel’, hinnie,’ he said. ‘He gan to dree his weird awhile.’

Mr Dodd was only partly right. Lockhart was not dreeing but what came next was certainly weird. As the sun rose over Tombstone Law a thousand loudspeakers planted across the fell boomed forth again. This time the sound was not that of shell and shot but the gigantic voice of Edwin Tyndale Flawse. He was singing ‘The Ballad of Prick ’Em Dry’.

As the final echoes of that enormous voice died away and the deafened birds in the pinewoods round the reservoir fluttered back to their perches and tried to resume their morning chorus, Lockhart and Jessica stood on the roof of the peel tower and looked over the battlements at the land that was truly theirs. Lockhart’s tears were gone. They had never been entirely for the conflagration of his grandfather but more for the loss of that terrible innocence which had been the old man’s intellectual legacy to him. And, like some incubus, that innocence had lain heavily upon him, denying him the right to guilt and the true humanity which comes from guilt and innocence. Lockhart had stated it all unconsciously in his lament but now he felt free to be his divided self, a man of lusts as well as loves, of ingenuity minded with compassion, of fear as well as mindless bravery, in short a man like other men. All this his grandfather’s obsession with heroes and hero-worship had denied him but, in the flames that had consumed Mr Flawse, Lockhart had been born anew, his own man, never mind his ancestry or who and what his father might have been and done.

And so while Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew drove off
down the road to Hexham and Mr Dodd with brush and dust-pan swept the ashes of his late master from the grate and, separating those foreign parts which had been the components of old Mr Flawse’s posthumous animation, deposited the rest in the cucumber frame, Lockhart and Jessica stood together and were content to be themselves.

The same could hardly be said for Mr Mirkin or the Excise men now back in Hexham. Mr Mirkin in particular was not himself and no longer beside himself. He had no self to be beside. The Senior Collector of Taxes Supertax Division (sub-department, Evasion of) was back in hospital outwardly unscathed but suffering internally the simultaneous after-effects of extremely low-frequency waves. His condition baffled the doctors who could make neither head nor tail of his symptoms. At one end he fluttered; at the other end he wowed. The combination was one they had never previously encountered and it was only with the arrival of Dr Magrew, who suggested plastering his plastered legs together to stop them oscillating, that Mr Mirkin could be kept in bed. Even so he wowed, his most insistent wow being to have his Schedule D, a demand that led to some confusion with the vitamin. In the end he was gagged and his head encased in lead-filled icebags to stop it vibrating.

‘He’s clean off his rocker,’ said Dr Magrew gratuitously as the Senior Collector bounced on the bed. ‘The
best and safest place for him would be a padded cell. Besides, it would keep the rumble down.’

‘His stomach doesn’t seem to be capable of keeping anything down,’ said a consultant, ‘and its rumble is quite revolting.’

To make the diagnosis even more difficult Mr Mirkin, unable to hear, refused to answer questions, even those concerned with his name and address, and when the gag was removed he simply wowed the louder. In the maternity ward near by his wowing led to complaints and the demand that he be transferred out of earshot. Dr Magrew agreed at once and signed a committal order to the local mental hospital on the perfectly sensible grounds that a man whose extremities were so clearly at odds with one another, and who seemed to have lost his memory, was suffering from incurably split personality. And so with that anonymity that was entirely in keeping with his profession as a tax collector, Mr Mirkin, now a mere digit himself, was taken at public expense and registered under Schedule D in the most padded and soundless of cells.