Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

Lockhart crawled away and presently was adding this and all the other gleanings of the night's prowl to his notebook. By the time he went to bed, Jessica was fast asleep.

And so for the next fortnight Lockhart spent his evenings patrolling the bird sanctuary and the golf course and amassed dossiers on the habits, fads, foibles and indiscretions of all the tenants of the Crescent. By day he pottered about the house and spent a good many hours in his late father-in-law's workshop with lengths of wire, transistors and a Do-It-Yourself Manual of Radio Construction.

'I don't know what you do with yourself all day, darling,' said Jessica, who had moved from the cement company to a firm of lawyers who specialized in libel actions.

'I'm making provision for our future,' said Lockhart.

'With loudspeakers? What have loudspeakers got to do with our future?"

'More than you know.'

'And this transmitter thing. Is that part of our future too?'

'Our future and the Wilsons' next door,' said Lockhart. 'Where did your mother keep the keys to the houses?'

'You mean the houses daddy left me?'

Lockhart nodded and Jessica rummaged in a kitchen drawer.

'Here they are,' she said and hesitated. 'You're not thinking of stealing things, are you?'

'Certainly not,' said Lockhart firmly, 'if anything 1 intend to add to their possessions.'

'Oh, well, that's all right then,' said Jessica and handed him the bundle of Yale keys. 'I wouldn't want to think you were doing anything that wasn't legal. Working at Gibling and Gib-ling I've learnt just how easy it is to get into terrible trouble. Did you know that if you write a book and say nasty things in it about somebody they can sue you for thousands of pounds? It's called libel.'

'I wish someone would write nasty things about us then,' said Lockhart. 'We've got to get thousands of pounds if I'm ever going to start looking for my father.'

'Yes, a libel case would help, wouldn't it?' said Jessica dreamily. 'But you do promise you aren't doing anything that can get us into trouble, don't you?'

Lockhart promised. Fervently. What he had in mind was going to get other people into trouble.

In the meantime he had to wait. It was three days before the Wilsons went out for the evening and Lockhart was able to slip over the fence into their garden and let himself into Number 11. Under his arm he carried a box. He spent an hour in the attic before returning empty-handed.

'Jessica, my sweet,' he said, 'I want you to go into the workshop and wait five minutes. Then say "Testing. Testing. Testing" into that little transmitter. You press the red button first.'

Lockhart slipped back into the Wilsons' house and climbed to the attic and waited. A short time later the three loudspeakers hidden under the glass-fibre insulation and connected to the receiver concealed in a corner resounded eerily to Jessica's voice. One loudspeaker was placed over the Wilsons' main bedroom, a second over the bathroom and a third above the spare room. Lockhart listened and then climbed down and went home.

'You go up to bed,' he told Jessica, 'I shouldn't be long.' Then he stationed himself at the front window and waited for the Wilsons to return. They had had a good evening and were in an intensely spiritual state. Lochart watched the lights come on in their bedroom and bathroom before contributing his share to their belief in the supernatural. Holding his nose between finger and thumb and speaking adenoidally into the microphone he whispered, 'I speak from beyond the grave. Hear me. There will be a death in your house and you will join me.' Then he switched the transmitter off and went out into the night the better to observe the result.

It was, to put it mildly, electrifying. Lights flashed on in every room in the house next door and Mrs Wilson, more used to the gentler messages of the ouija board, could be heard screaming hysterically at this authentic voice of doom. Lockhart, squatting in an azalea bush next to the gateway, listened to Mr Wilson trying to pacify his wife, a process made more difficult by his evident alarm and the impossibility of denying that he too had heard there was going to be a death in the house.

'There's no use saying you didn't,' wailed Mrs Wilson, 'you heard it as clearly as I did and you were in the bathroom and look at the mess you made on the floor.'

Mr Wilson had to agree that his aim had been put off and, by way of Mrs Wilson's infallible logic, that the mess was in consequence of his having learnt that death was so close at hand.

'I told you we should never have started fooling with that damned table-rapping!' he shouted. 'Now look what you've been and let loose.'

'That's right, blame me,' screamed Mrs Wilson, 'that's all you ever do. All I did was ask Mrs Saphegie round to see if she really had psychic gifts and could get answers from our dear departed.'

'Well, now you bloody know,' shouted Mr Wilson. 'And that wasn't the voice of any of my dear departed, that's for sure. No one on our side of the family suffered from such an awful nasal condition. Mind you, I don't suppose being decomposed in a coffin does anything for sinusitis.'

'There you go again,' whined Mrs Wilson, 'one of us going to die and you have to go on about coffins. And don't hog all the brandy. I want some.'

'I didn't know you drank,' said Mr Wilson. 'I do now,' said his wife and evidently poured herself a stiff one. Lockhart left them consoling themselves somewhat unsuccessfully that at least the terrible prophecy proved that there was life after death. It didn't seem to comfort Mrs Wilson very much;

But while the Wilsons speculated on this imminent question about the afterlife and its existence, Little Willie, the Pet-tigrews' dachshund, went still further and found out. At precisely eleven o'clock Mr Pettigrew put him out and just as precisely Lockhart, lurking in the bird sanctuary, tugged on the nylon fishing-line that stretched under the fence and down the lawn. At the end of the line a lump of liver purchased that morning from the butcher pursued its erratic course across the grass. Behind it, for once unwisely soundless, came Willie in hot pursuit. He didn't come far. As the liver slid past the snare Lockhart had set at the end of the lawn, Willie stopped and, after a brief struggle, gave up both the pursuit and his life. Lockhart buried him under a rose bush at the bottom of his own garden where he would do most good and having accomplished his first two intentions went to bed in a thoroughly cheerful mood, made all the more lively by the fact that the lights were still on in every room of the Wilsons' house when he turned over at three in the morning, and from the house there could be heard the sound of drunken sobbing.

While Lockhart began to make life uncomfortable for the tenants of his wife's-houses, her mother was doing her damnedest to make life unbearable for Mr Flawse. The weather was not on her side. From a bright spring they passed into a hot summer and Flawse Hall showed itself to advantage. Its thick walls had more functions than the keeping out of the Scots and the keeping in of the whisky; they soothed the summer's heat. Outside, the hybrid hounds might slobber and loll in the dung-dry dust of the yard; inside, Mr Flawse could sit contentedly upright at his desk poring over the parish registers and ancient enclosure deeds to which he had lately become so addicted. Knowing that in the fullness of time he was about due to join his ancestors he thought it as well to acquaint himself with the faults and failings of his family.

That he looked only on the worst side of things came from his natural pessimism and knowledge of himself. He was therefore surprised to find that the Flawses were not all unconscionably bad. There were Flawse saints as well as Flawse sinners and if as he expected the latter predominated there was still a streak of generosity to their actions he could not but admire. The Flawse, one Quentin Flawse, who had murdered, or by the more polite usage of the time done to death in a duel, one Thomas Tidley in consequence of the latter implying at the sheep shearing at Otterburn that the name Flawse derived from the Faas, a notorious family of gipsies known best for their thieving, had yet had the generosity to marry his widow and provide for his children. Then again Bishop Flawse, burnt at the stake in the reign of Bloody Mary for his apostasy from Rome, had refused the bag of gunpowder which his brother had brought to tie round his neck on the sensible grounds of economy and its better use to fire muskets into the body of damned Papists when the time was ripe. It was this sort of practicality that Mr Flawse most admired in his forebears and showed that to whatever end they came they wasted no time on self-pity but sustained an indomitable will to do unto others as they were having done to them. Thus Headman Flawse, private executioner to the Duke of Durham in the fourteenth century, had, when his time came to lay his own head on the block, gallantly offered to sharpen the axe for his successor, a gesture so generous that it had been granted: to the extinction of the new headman, fifteen bodyguards, twenty-five bystanders and the Duke himself, all of whom lay headless while Headman Flawse put his expertise to private use and escaped on the Duke's own charger to spend his days as an outlaw among the moss troopers of Redesdale.