Tom Sharpe - The Throwback

'I've got to go to Hatfield,' he said, 'and there's a Mr Stop-pard coming in at twelve-thirty. I'll be back by two so all I want you to do is to take him out and give him an expense-account lunch until I get back. That should be easy enough. Just buy him lunch. Right?'

'Buy him lunch?' said Lockhart. 'Who pays?'

'The firm pays, you fool. I said an expense-account lunch,

didn't I?' He went away dejectedly but with the feeling that

Lockhart could hardly make a total cock-up of a lunch with one

of the firm's oldest clients. Mr Stoppard was a reticent man at

the best of times and, being a gourmet, seldom spoke during a

meal. When Mr Treyer returned Mr Stoppard was voluble to a

degree. Mr Treyer tried to appease him and having finally got

rid of him sent for Lockhart.

'What in the name of heaven made you take that bloody man to a fish and chip shop?' he asked trying to control his blood pressure.

'Well, you said it was an expense-account lunch and we'd got to pay and I thought there was no point in wasting money so-'

'Thought?' yelled Mr Treyer letting his blood pressure go to hell and gone. 'Thought? And wasting money? What the hell do you think an expense-account lunch is for if it isn't to waste money? The meal is tax-deductible.'

'You mean the more a lunch costs the less we pay?' said Lockhart.

'Yes,' sighed Mr Treyer, 'that is precisely what I mean. Now the next time…'

The next time Lockhart took a Leicester shoe manufacturer to the Savoy Grill and wined and dined him to the tune of one hundred and fifty pounds, only to refuse to pay more than five when the bill was presented. It had taken the combined efforts of the shoe manufacturer and Mr Treyer, hastily summoned from a bout of flu, to persuade Lockhart to pay the one hundred and forty-five pounds' difference and make good the damage done to three tables and four waiters in the altercation that had ensued. After that Mr Treyer wrote to Mrs Flawse threatening to resign unless Lockhart was removed from the firm, and while waiting for a reply he barred Lockhart from leaving his office except to relieve himself.

But if Lockhart, to put it as mildly as modern parlance will allow, was having a job adjustment problem in Wheedle Street, his marriage proceeded as sweetly as it had started. And as chastely. What was lacking was not love – Lockhart and Jessica were passionlessly in love – but sex. The anatomical differences between males and females he had detected while gutting rabbits proved accurate in humans. He had balls and Jessica didn't. Jessica had breasts, large ones at that, and he didn't – or only of the most rudimentary kind. To further complicate matters, when they went to bed at night and lay in one another's arms he had an erection and Jessica didn't. The fact that he also had what are crudely termed 'lovers' balls' and spent part of the night in agony he was too brave and gentlemanly to mention. They simply lay in one another's arms and kissed. What happened after that he had no idea and Jessica had no idea either. Her mother's determination to retard her age of maturity had succeeded as completely as had Mr Flawse's equal determination that his grandson should inherit none of his mother's sexual vices. To compound this ignorance Lockhart's education, grounded in the most ancient of classical virtues, complemented Jessica's taste for the sickliest of historical romances in which sex was never mentioned. Taken together this fearful combination led them to idealize one another to the extent that it was impossible for Lockhart to conceive of doing anything more positive than worship Jessica and for Jessica to conceive at all. In brief, their marriage was never consummated and when after six weeks Jessica had her period rather more publicly than before, Lockhart's first impulse was to phone for an ambulance. Jessica in some distress managed to deter him.

'It happens once a month,' she said clutching a sanitary napkin to her with one hand while holding the phone down with the other.

'It doesn't,' said Lockhart, 'I've never bled like that in my life.'

'To girls,' said Jessica, 'not to boys.' 'I still say you ought to see a doctor,' insisted Lockhart. 'But it's been going on for ever so long.' 'All the more reason for seeing the doctor. It's obviously something chronic'

'Well, if you insist,' said Jessica. Lockhart did. And so one morning when Lockhart had gone to his lonely vigil in the office, Jessica visited the doctor.

'My husband is worried about my bleeding,' she said. 'I told him not to be silly but he would insist.'

'Your husband?' said the doctor five minutes later, having discovered that Mrs Flawse was still a virgin. 'You did say "your husband"?'

'Yes,' said Jessica proudly, 'his name is Lockhart. I think that's a wonderful name, don't you?'

Dr Mannet considered the name, Jessica's manifest attractions, and the possibility that Mr Flawse, far from having a locked heart, must have a padlocked penis not to have been driven sexually berserk by the proximity of such a beautiful wife. Having run through this sequence he assumed the air of a counsellor and leant on the desk to conceal his own physical reaction.

Tell me, Mrs Flawse,' he said with an urgency that was impelled by the almost certain feeling that he was about to have a spontaneous emission, 'has your husband never…' He stopped and shuddered violently in his chair. Dr Mannet had. 'I mean,' he began again when the convulsion was over, 'well… let me put it this way, have you refused to let him… er… touch you?'

'Of course not,' said Jessica who had watched the doctor's throes with some concern, 'we're always kissing and cuddling.'

'Kissing and cuddling,' said Dr Mannet with a whimper, 'Just kissing and… er… cuddling? Nothing more?'

'More?' said Jessica. 'What more?'

Dr Mannet looked despairingly into her angelic face. In a long career as a General Practitioner he had never been faced by such a beautiful woman who did not know that there was more to marriage than kissing and cuddling.

'You don't do anything else in bed?'

'Well, we go to sleep of course,' said Jessica.

'Dear Lord,' murmured the doctor, 'you go to sleep! And you do absolutely nothing else?'

'Lockhart snores,' said Jessica, thinking hard, 'but I can't think of anything else in particular.'

Across the desk Dr Mannet could and did his damnedest not to.

'And has no one ever explained where babies come from?' he asked, lapsing into that nursery whimsy that seemed to emanate from Mrs Flawse.

'Storks,' said Jessica bluntly.

'Stalks?' echoed the doctor, whose own stalk was playing him up again.

'Or herons. I forget which. They bring them in their beaks.'

'Beaks?' gurgled the doctor, now definitely back in the nursery.

'In little cradles of cloth,' continued Jessica, oblivious of the effect she was having. 'They have these little cradles of cloth and they carry them in their beaks. Surely you've seen pictures of them. And their mummies are ever so pleased. Is something the matter?'

But Dr Mannet was holding his head in his hands and staring at a prescription pad. He had shot his bolt again.

'Mrs Flawse, dear Mrs Flawse,' he whimpered when the crisis was past, 'if you'll just leave your telephone number… Better still, would you mind if I had a word with your husband, Lock-prick…'

'Hart,' said Jessica, 'Lockhart. You want him to come and see you?'

Dr Mannet nodded feebly. He had always previously disapproved of the permissive society but just at that moment he had to admit that there were things to be said in its favour.

'Just ask him to come and see me, will you? Excuse me for not rising. You know the way out.'

Jessica went out and made an appointment for Lockhart. In the consulting-room Dr Mannet worked feverishly on his trousers and donned a white lab coat to cover the havoc Jessica had provoked.