The Throwback

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘The defendants have no objections,’ said Mr Widdershins, and the court adjourned once again.

  Later that afternoon two experts on graphology and typography testified that the manuscript of Song of the Heart had been written, typed and produced by precisely the same machine as King’s Closet and Maid of the Moors, both books written by Miss Goldring. Mr Fescue continued his cross-examination of the defendant.

  ‘Having established beyond all possible doubt that you wrote Song of the Heart,’ he said, ‘is it not also true that you were and are acquainted with the plaintiff, Mr Lockhart Flawse?’

  Miss Goldring began a violent denial but Mr Fescue stopped her. ‘Before you commit perjury,’ he said, ‘I would ask you to consider the evidence given under oath by Mr Flawse that you invited him into your house and plied him with crême de menthe.’

  In the witness box Miss Goldring stared at him with starting eyes. ‘How did you know that?’ she asked.

  Mr Fescue smiled and looked to the judge and jury. ‘Because Mr Flawse told me under oath yesterday,’ he said gaily.

  But Miss Goldring shook her head. ‘About the crême de menthe,’ she said weakly.

  ‘Because the plaintiff also told me, though in private,’ said Mr Fescue. ‘You do, I take it, drink crême de menthe?’

  Miss Goldring nodded miserably.

  ‘Yes or no,’ said Mr Fescue fiercely.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Goldring. Below her Mr Widdershins and Mr Shortstead both covered their eyes with their hands. Mr Fescue resumed his rout. ‘Is it not also true that the carpet in your bedroom is blue flecked with gold, that your bed is heart-shaped, that beside it stands a mauve pleated lampshade, that your cat’s name is Pinky? Are these facts not all true?’

  There was no doubting their veracity. The look on Miss Goldring’s face spoke for her. But Mr Fescue had the coup de grâce ready.

  ‘And finally is it not a fact that you possess a chow named Bloggs for the sole purpose of preventing anyone you wish to keep out from entering your house without your permission and presence?’ Again there was no need for an answer. Mr Fescue had his facts right: he had heard them from Lockhart who in turn had them from Jessica.

  ‘So that,’ continued Mr Fescue, ‘without your permission Mr Flawse could not have been able to testify in a signed affidavit that when you invited him into the house you did so of your own free will and with the intention of seducing him and having failed of that purpose you set out deliberately and with malice aforethought to destroy his marriage, reputation and means of livelihood by portraying him in a novel as a thief, a pervert and a murderer. Is that not also true?’

  ‘No,’ shrieked Miss Goldring, ‘no, it isn’t. I never invited him in. I never …’ She hesitated catastrophically. She had invited a number of young men to share her bed but …

  ‘I have no more questions of this witness,’ said Mr Fescue, and sat down.

  In his summing-up Mr Justice Plummery maintained that ferocious impartiality for which he was famous. Miss Goldring’s evidence and behaviour in and out of the witness box had left no doubt in his mind that she was a liar, a prostitute in both the literary and sexual meanings of the word, and that she had maliciously set out to do what Mr Fescue had maintained. The jury retired for two minutes and found the libel proved. It was left to the judge to estimate the damages both personal and financial to the plaintiff as being of the order, due consideration being given to the level of inflation which presently and for the foreseeable future stood and would continue to stand at eighteen per cent, of one million pounds sterling, and that furthermore he was sending papers of the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions with the hope that the defendant would be charged with perjury. Miss Genevieve Goldring fainted and was not helped to her feet by Mr Shortstead.

  *

  That afternoon there was jubilation in the offices of Mr Gibling and Mr Gibling.

  ‘A million with costs. A million. The highest damages ever awarded in a libel case. And with costs. Dear God, let them appeal, please let them appeal,’ said Mr Gibling the elder.

  But Miss Goldring was past appealing. Mr Shortstead’s insurance had communicated with him immediately following the award and had made it clear that they intended to sue both him and Miss Goldring for every penny they were being asked to pay.

  And at Number 12 Sandicott Crescent Lockhart and Jessica had no qualms.

  ‘Beastly woman,’ said Jessica, ‘and to think I used to love her books. And they were all lies.’

  Lockhart nodded. ‘And now we can start to sell the houses too,’ he said. ‘After so much unfortunate publicity we can’t possibly stay in this neighbourhood.’

  Next day the For Sale sign boards began to go up Sandicott Crescent and Lockhart, feeling himself financially secure, decided to open the letters Miss Deyntry had given him.

  16

  He did so with due ceremony and in the dim consciousness that he was tempting fate. ‘Paper and ink will do you no good,’ the old gipsy had told him and while her prediction had not been borne out by the paper and ink of Miss Goldring’s novel, Lockhart harking back to her words felt that they applied more to these letters to his dead mother than to anything else. He had received them from Miss Deyntry in the hour of the gipsy’s forecast and he felt that this was no coincidence. He would have been hard put to explain why but there lurked in his mind the vestigial superstitions of his ancestors and a time when a Romany’s warning was taken seriously. And in other respects she had been right. Three deaths there had been and if she had rather underestimated there was still the fact that she had been precise about the unfilled grave. The remains of the late Mrs Simplon had needed no grave. And what about the hanged man on a tree? Certainly the Superintendent had hung from a tree but not in the manner of the old woman’s sinister prediction. Finally there was the matter of his gift. ‘Till ye come to your gift again.’ Possibly that referred to the million pounds’ damages from the libel suit. But again Lockhart doubted it. She had meant another kind of gift than money.

  Nevertheless, Lockhart took courage and opened the letters one by one, starting with the first which was dated the year of his birth and came from South Africa and ending with the last dated 1964 and addressed from Arizona. His father, if father the writer was, had been a travelling man and Lockhart soon realized why. Miss Deyntry had been right. Grosvenor K. Boscombe had been a mining engineer and his work had taken him across the globe in search of precious metals, oil, gas and coal, anything in fact that the millennia had covered and modern mining methods could discover. Possibly he was a mining engineer and a highly successful one at that. His last letter from Dry Bones, Arizona, in which he announced his marriage to a Miss Phoebe Tarrent, also indicated that he had struck it rich in natural gas. But whatever his success as a mining engineer, Grosvenor K. Boscombe had little talent for writing letters. There was no glimmer of that passion or sentiment Lockhart had expected, and certainly no suggestion that Mr Boscombe had done anything to qualify as Lockhart’s long-lost father. Mr Boscombe stuck to the occupational hazards of his profession and spoke of his boredom. He described sunsets over the Namibian, Saudi Arabian, Libyan and Saharan deserts in almost identical terms in letters years apart. By the time he had ploughed his way through all the letters, Lockhart had crossed correspondentially most of the major deserts of the world, a laborious process made more so by virtue of Mr Boscombe’s inability to spell any word with more than four syllables correctly or even consistently. Thus Saudi Arabia went through half a dozen permutations from Sordy Rabier to Sourday Ayrabbia. The only word the man could spell was ‘Bore’ and it was appropriate. Grosvenor K. Boscombe was boring wherever he went and apart from regarding the world as a gigantic pin cushion into which it was his profession to push immensely long hollow pins, his only moment of even approximate passion came when he and the boys, whoever they were, punctured some underground pressure point and ‘then she fare blue’. The phrase recurred less frequently than the sunsets, and dry holes pre
dominated over gushers but she blue farely often all the same and his strike at Dry Bones, Arizona, put Mr Boscombe in his own words ‘up amung the lucky ones with mor greenbacks than a man wuld nede to carpit the moon’. Lockhart interpreted that as meaning his possible father was rich and unimaginative. Lockhart knew exactly what he intended to do with his money and carpeting the moon didn’t enter his list of priorities. He meant to find his father and do old Mrs Flawse out of any part of the estate, and if Boscombe was his father, he was going to thrash him within an inch of his life in accordance with his grandfather’s will.

  Having read all the letters, he allowed Jessica to read them too.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to have had a very interesting life,’ she said. ‘The only things he talks about are deserts and sunsets and dogs.’

  ‘Dogs?’ said Lockhart. ‘I missed that bit.’

  ‘It’s at the end of each letter. “Please rember me to yure father and the dawgs it sure was a priv ledge nowing youall. Ever thyne, Gros.” And there’s another bit here about “just luving dawgs”.’

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ said Lockhart, ‘his loving dogs. I mean if he is my father it shows we’ve got something in common. I’ve never had much time for sunsets. Dogs are another kettle of fish.’

  On the carpet in front of the fire Colonel Finch-Potter’s ex-bull-terrier snoozed contentedly. Adopted by Lockhart he had, unlike his master, recovered from the effects of his night of passion and while the Colonel fought legal battles and wrote to his MP to get himself released from the mental hospital to which he had been committed, his pet settled cheerfully into his new home. Lockhart looked at him with gratitude. The bull-terrier had played a very considerable part in clearing Sandicott Crescent of unwanted tenants and Lockhart had appropriately renamed him Bouncer.

  ‘I suppose we could always tempt this Boscombe man over here by offering him some extra-special sort of pedigree dog,’ he pondered aloud.

  ‘Why do you have to tempt him over?’ said Jessica. ‘We can afford to fly to America to see him ourselves with all the money we’ve got.’

  ‘All the money isn’t going to buy me a birth certificate and without one I can’t get a passport,’ said Lockhart who had never forgotten his experience of non-entity at the National Insurance office and besides, he meant to put this disadvantage to good use in other matters. If the State was not prepared to contribute to his well-being when in need, he saw no need to contribute one penny by way of taxes to the State. There were virtues to nonexistence after all.

  *

  And as the winter months rolled by the money rolled in, Messrs Shortstead’s insurance company paid one million pounds into Lockhart’s bank account in the City and money rolled into Jessica’s account at East Pursley and the For Sale notices came down and new occupiers moved in. Lockhart had timed his campaign of eviction with financial precision. Property values were up and not one of the houses went for less than fifty thousand pounds. By Christmas Jessica’s account stood at £478,000 and her standing with the bank manager even higher. He offered her financial advice and suggested she should invest the money. Lockhart told her not to do anything so foolish. He had plans for that money and they had nothing to do with stocks and shares and even less to do with Capital Gains Tax which the bank manager was at pains to point out she would inevitably have to pay. Lockhart smiled confidently and went on footling about in the workshop in the garden. It helped to pass the time while the houses were sold and besides, ever since his success as a radio mechanic in the Wilsons’ attic, he had become quite an expert and had bought all the necessary ingredients for a hi-fi system which he then constructed. In fact he went in for gadgetry with all his grandfather’s enthusiasm for breeding hounds and in no time at all Number 12 was wired for sound so that Lockhart, moving from room to room, could, by the mere manipulation of a pocket tuner, switch one loudspeaker off and another one on and generally accompany himself musically wherever he went. On tape recorders he went hog wild and indulged his fancy from minute ones with batteries to vast ones with specially constructed drums a yard wide that held a tape that would play continuously for twenty-four hours and then reverse themselves and start all over again ad infinitum.

  And in just the same way as he could play his tapes all day he could record as long and in whatever room he happened to be. Every so often he would find himself breaking out into song, strange songs of blood and battle and feuds over cattle which were as surprising to him as they were out of place in Sandicott Crescent and seemed to spring spontaneously from some inner source beyond his comprehension. Words reverberated in his head and increasingly he found himself speaking aloud a barely intelligible dialect that bore but little resemblance even to the broadest brogue of the North Tyne. And rhyme came with the words and behind it all a wild music swirled like the wind haunting the chimney on a stormy night. There was no compassion in that music, no pity or mercy, any more than there was in the wind or other natural phenomena, only harsh and naked beauty which took him by force out of the real world in which he moved into another world in which he had his being. His being? It was a strange notion, that one had one’s being in much the same way as his grand-uncle, an apostate from the ethical religion of self-help and hero-worship which his grandfather espoused, had the living of St Bede’s Church at Angoe.

  But Lockhart’s mind dwelt less on these subtleties than on the practical problems facing him and the words and the wild music came out only occasionally when he was not feeling himself. And here it had to be admitted he was increasingly feeling himself in ways which his grandfather, a devotee of that Fouler whose great work, Usage and Self-Abusage, was the old man’s guide in matters of masturbation, would have deplored. The strain of not imposing himself upon his angelic Jessica had begun to tell and sexual fantasies began to fester in his mind as he tinkered in his workshop with a soldering iron. They had the same ancestral and almost archetypal quality as the primeval forests that had flickered in Bouncer’s mind under the influence of LSD and with them came guilt. There were even moments when he considered assuaging his desire in Jessica but Lockhart thrust the idea from him and used the sheepskin buffer on the electric drill instead. It was not a satisfactory remedy but it sufficed for the present. One day when he was master of Flawse Hall, and owner of five thousand acres, he would raise a family, but not till then. In the meantime he and Jessica would live chaste lives and resort to the electric drill and manual methods. Lockhart’s reasoning was primitive but it stemmed from the feeling that he had yet to master his fate and until that moment came he was impure.

  *

  It came sooner than he expected. In late December the phone rang. It was Mr Bullstrode calling from Hexham.

  ‘My boy,’ he said in sombre tones. ‘I have bad news. Your father, I mean your grandfather, is dangerously ill. Dr Magrew sees little hope of his recovering. I think you should come at once.’

  Lockhart, with death in his heart for old Mrs Flawse, drove north in his new car, a three-litre Rover, leaving Jessica in tears.

  ‘Is there nothing I can do to help?’ she asked, but Lockhart shook his head. If his grandfather was dying thanks to anything old Mrs Flawse had done, he did not want the presence of her daughter to hinder his plans for the old witch. But when he drove over the track to the gated bridge below the Hall it was to learn from Mr Dodd that the man had fallen, if not of his own volition at least unassisted by his wife who had been in the kitchen garden at the time. Mr Dodd could vouch for that.

  ‘No banana skins?’ said Lockhart.

  ‘None,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘He slipped in his study and hit his head on the coal scuttle. I heard him fall and carried him upstairs.’

  Lockhart went up the stairs and, brushing Mrs Flawse’s lamentations aside with a ‘Hush, woman’, went into his grandfather’s bedroom. The old man was lying in bed and beside him sat Dr Magrew feeling Mr Flawse’s pulse.

  ‘His heart’s strong enough. It’s his head I’m worried about. He should be X-rayed for a fracture
but I dare not move him over the broken road,’ he said. ‘We must trust to the good Lord and the strength of his constitution.’

  As if to give a demonstration of that strength old Mr Flawse opened an evil eye and damned Dr Magrew for a scoundrel and a horse thief before shutting it and sinking back into a coma. Lockhart and Dr Magrew and Mr Dodd went downstairs.

  ‘He could go at any moment,’ said the doctor, ‘and then again he may linger for months.’

  ‘It is a hope much to be desired,’ said Mr Dodd, looking significantly at Lockhart, ‘he canna die before the father’s found.’ Lockhart nodded. The same thought was in his mind. And that night after Dr Magrew had left with the promise to return in the morning, Lockhart and Mr Dodd sat in the kitchen without Mrs Flawse and conferred.

  ‘The first thing to see to is that woman doesna go near him,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘She’d stifle the man with a pillow had she but half the chance.’

  ‘Gan lock her door,’ said Lockhart, ‘we’ll feed her through the keyhole.’

  Mr Dodd disappeared and returned a few minutes later to say that the bitch was chained in her kennel.

  ‘Now then,’ said Lockhart, ‘he mustn’t die.’

  ‘’Tis in the lap of the gods,’ said Mr Dodd, ‘you heard the doctor.’

  ‘I heard him and I still say he mustn’t die.’

  A bellow of oaths from upstairs indicated that Mr Flawse was living up to their hopes.

  ‘He does that every now and then. Shouts and abominates the likes of all around.’

  ‘Does he indeed?’ said Lockhart. ‘You put me in mind of an idea.’

  *

  And the next morning before Dr Magrew arrived he was up and away over the broken road and down through Hexham to Newcastle. He spent the day in radio and hi-fi shops and returned with a carload of equipment.