Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

For a horrid moment Mrs Flawse was clutched even tighter and Dodd's face came closer to her own, but then he relaxed and set her on her feet in the kitchen. Mrs Flawse adjusted her dress before looking round.

'I trust it meets with your approbation, my dear.'

It didn't but Mrs Flawse said nothing. If the outside of Flawse Hall had looked bleak, bare and infinitely forbidding, the kitchen, flagged with great stones, was authentically medieval. True there was a stone sink with a tap above it, which signified running if cold water, and the iron range had been made in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution; there was little else that was even vaguely modern. A bare wooden table stood in the middle of the room with benches on either side, and there were upright wooden seats with backs beside the range.

'Settles,' said Mr Flawse when Mrs Flawse looked inquiringly at them. 'Dodd and the bastard use them of an evening.'

'The bastard?' said Mrs Flawse. 'What bastard?' But for once it was Mr Flawse's turn to keep silent.

'I'll show ye the rest of the house,' he said and led the way out down a passage.

'If it's anything like the kitchen…' Mrs Flawse began but it wasn't. Where the kitchen had been bleak and bare, the rest of the Hall lived up to her expectations and was packed with fine furniture, tapestries, great portraits and the contributions of many generations and as many marriages. Mrs Flawse breathed a sigh of relief as she stood below the curved staircase and looked around her. In marrying old Mr Flawse she had done more than marry a man in his dotage, she had wedded herself to a fortune in antique furniture and fine silver. And from every wall a Flawse face looked down from old portraits, wigged Flawses, Flawses in uniform and Flawses in fancy waistcoats, but the Flawse face was ever the same. Only in one corner did she find a small dark portrait that was not clearly identifiable as a Flawse.

'Murkett Flawse, painted posthumously, I'm afraid, 5said the old man. Mrs Flawse studied the portrait more closely.;

'He must have died a peculiar death from the look of him,'-she said. Mr Flawse nodded.

'Beheaded, ma'am, and I have an idea the executioner had a bad head that morning from over-indulgence the night before and took more chops than were rightly called for.'

Mrs Flawse withdrew from the horrid portrayal of Murkett Flawse's head, and together they went from room to room. In each there was something to admire and in Mrs Flawse's case to value. By the time they returned to the entrance hall she was satisfied that she had done well to marry the old fool after all.

'And this is my inner sanctum," said Mr Flawse opening a door to the left of the entrance. Mrs Flawse went inside. A huge coal fire blazed in the hearth and, in contrast to the rest of the house which had seemed decidedly damp and musty, the study was warm and smelt of book-leather and tobacco. An old cat basked on the carpet in front of the fire and from every wall books gleamed in the firelight. In the centre of the room stood a kneehole desk with a greenshaded lamp and an inkstand of silver. Mrs Flawse went to the lamp to switch it on and found a

handle. 'You'll need a match,' said Mr Flawse, 'we're not on the

electricity.'

'You're not…' Mrs Flawse began and stopped as the full significance of the remark dawned on her. Whatever treasures in the way of old silver and fine furniture Flawse Hall might hold, without electricity it held only transitory attractions for Mrs Flawse. No electricity meant presumably no central heating, and the single tap above the stone sink had signified only cold water. Mrs Flawse, safe from the hounds and in the inner sanctum of her husband's study, decided the time had come to strike. She sat down heavily in a large high-backed leather chair beside the fire and glared at him.

'The very idea of bringing me here and expecting me to live in a house without electricity or hot water or any mod cons…' she began stridently as the old man bent to light a spill from the fire. Mr Flawse turned his face towards her and she saw it was suffused with rage. In his hand the spill burnt lower. Mr Flawse ignored it.

'Woman,' he said with a soft and steely emphasis, 'ye'll learn never to address me in that tone of voice again.' He straightened up but Mrs Flawse was not to be cowed.

'And you'll learn never to call me "woman" again,' she said defiantly, 'and don't think that you can bully me because you can't. I'm perfectly capable…'

They were interrupted by the entrance of Mr Dodd bearing a silver tray on which a teapot stood under a cosy. Mr Flawse signalled to him to put it on the low table beside her chair and it was only when Mr Dodd had left the room closing the door quietly behind him that the storm broke once again. It did so simultaneously.

'I said I'm-' Mrs Flawse began.

'Woman,' roared Mr Flawse, 'I'll not-'

But their unison silenced them both and they sat glowering at one another by the fire. It was Mrs Flawse who first broke the truce. She did so with guile.

'It's perfectly simple,' she said, 'we need not argue about it. We can install an electrical generator. You'll find it will make a tremendous improvement to your life.'

But Mr Flawse shook his head. 'I have lived without it for ninety years and I'll die without it.'

'I shouldn't be at all surprised,' said Mrs Flawse, 'but I see no reason why you should take me with you. I am used to hot water and my home comforts and-'

'Ma'am,' said Mr Flawse, 'I have washed in cold water…'

'Seldom,' said Mrs Flawse.

'As I was saying…'

'We can have Calor gas if you won't have electricity…'

' I'll have no modern contraption…'

They wrangled on until it was time for dinner and in the kitchen Mr Dodd listened with an interested ear while he stirred the stewed mutton in the pot.

'The auld divil's bitten off a sight more than he's teeth in his heid to chew,' he thought to himself, and tossed a bone to his old collie by the door. 'And if the mither's so rigid what's the lassie like?' With this on his mind he moved about the kitchen which had seen so many centuries of Flawse womenfolk come and go and where the smells of those centuries which Lockhart pined for still clung. Mr Dodd had no nose for them, that musk

of unwashed humanity, of old boots and dirty socks, wet dogs and mangy cats, of soap and polish, fresh milk and warm blood, baked bread and hung pheasant, all those necessities of the harsh life the Flawses had led since the house first was built. He was part of that musk and shared its ancestry. But now there was a new ingredient come to the house and one he had no mind to like.

Nor after a glum dinner had Mr Flawse when he and Mrs Flawse retired to a cold bedroom and a featherbed redolent of damp and too recently plucked chicken. Outside the wind whistled in the chimneys and from the kitchen there came the faint wail of Mr Dodd's Northumbrian pipes as he played 'Edward, Edward'. It seemed an appropriate ballad for the evil hour. Upstairs Mr Flawse knelt by the bed.

'Oh Lord…,' he began, only to be interrupted by his wife.

'There's no point in your asking forgiveness,' she said. 'You're not coming near me until we've first come to an understanding.'

The old man regarded her balefully from the floor. 'Understanding? What understanding, ma'am?'

'A clear understanding that you will have this house modernized as quickly as possible and that until such time I shall return to my own home and the comforts to which I have been accustomed. I didn't marry you to catch my death of pneumonia.'

Mr Flawse lumbered to his feet. 'And I didn't marry you,' he thundered, 'to have my household arrangements dictated to me by a chit of a woman.'

Mrs Flawse pulled the sheet up round her neck defiantly. 'And I won't be shouted at,' she snapped back. 'I am not a shit of a woman. I happen to be a respectable…'