Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

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 creme 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 creme de menthe,' she said weakly.

'Because the plaintiff also told me, though in private,' said Mr Fescue. 'You do, I take it, drink creme 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 grace 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 insurers 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 sign boards For Sale began to go up in Sandicott Crescent and Lockhart, feeling himself financially secure, decided to open the letters Miss Deyntry had given him.

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 bad 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 Police 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 from the first which was dated the year of his birth and came from South Africa and ended 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. Bos-combe 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 millenniums 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 the Sahara deserts in almost identical terms in letters years apart. By the time he had ploughed his way through all the letters Lockhart had crossed corresponden-tially 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 predominated 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