The Throwback

Chapter thirteen

But on at least two points the old man was wrong. Lockhart was leaving nothing to providence. While Mrs Flawse cowered in the darkness of the banqueting hall and wondered at the remarkable insight he had shown into the workings of her own mind and hands, Lockhart climbed the stone turret to the first storey and then by way of wooden ladders up on to the battlements. There he found Mr Dodd casting his one good eye over the landscape with a fondness for its bleak and forbidding aspect that was somehow in keeping with his own character. A rugged man in a dark and rugged world, Mr Dodd was a servant without servility. He had no brief for fawning or the notion that the world owed him a living. He owed his living to hard work and a provoked cunning that was as far removed from Mrs Flawse's calculation as Sandicott Crescent was from Flawse Fell. And if any man had dared despise him for a servant he would have told him to his face that in his case the servant was master to the man before demonstrating with his fists the simple truth that he was a match for any man, be he master, servant or drunken braggart. In short Mr Dodd was his own man and went his own way. That his own way was that of old Mr Flawse sprang from their mutual disrespect. If Mr Dodd allowed the old man to call him Dodd, he did so in the knowledge that Mr Flawse was dependent on him and that for all his authority and theoretical intelligence he knew less about the real world and its ways than did Mr Dodd. It was thus with an air of condescension that he lay on his side in the drift mine and hewed coal from a two-foot seam and carried scuttles of it to the old man's study to keep him warm. It was with the same certainty of his own worth and superiority in all things that he and his dog herded sheep on the fells and saw to the lambing in the snow. He was there to protect them and he was there to protect Mr Flawse and if he fleeced the one of wool, he fed and housed himself upon the other and let no one come between them.

'You'll have scared the wits out of the woman,' he said when Lockhart climbed on to the roof, 'but it will not last. She'll have your inheritance if you do not act swift.'

'That's what I've come to ask you, Mr Dodd,' said Lockhart. 'Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew could remember none of my mother's friends. She must have had some.' 'Aye, she did,' said Mr Dodd stirring on the parapet. 'Then can you tell me who they were? I've got to start the search for my father somewhere."

Mr Dodd said nothing for some moments. 'You might inquire of Miss Deyntry down over Farspring way,' he said at last. 'She was a good friend of your mother's. You'll find her at Divet Hall. She maybe could tell you something to your advantage. I canna think of anyone else.'

Lockhart climbed down the ladder and out of the peel tower. He went round to say goodbye to his grandfather but as he passed the study window he stopped. The old man was sitting by the fire and his cheeks were streaked with tears. Lockhart shook his head sadly. The time was not ripe for farewells. Instead he let himself out the gate and strode off along the path that ied to the dam. As he crossed it he looked back at the

house. The light was still burning in the study and his mother-in-law's bedroom was bright but otherwise Flawse Hall was in darkness. He went on into the pinewoods and turned off the path along the rocky shore. A light wind had risen and the water of the reservoir lapped on the stones at his feet. Lockhart picked a pebble up and hurled it out into the darkness. It fell with a plop and disappeared as completely as his own father had disappeared, and with as little chance of his ever finding it or him again. But he would try, and following the shoreline for another two miles he reached the old Roman military road that ran north. He crossed it on to more open country and the dark pinewoods round the reservoir dwindled behind him. Ahead lay Britherton Law and eighteen miles of empty countryside. He would have to sleep out but there was a long-abandoned farmhouse with hay in the byre. He would stay the night there and in the morning drop down into Farspring Valley to Divet Hall. And as he walked his mind filled with strange words that came from some hidden corner of himself that he had always known about but previously ignored. They came in snatches of song and rhyme and spoke of things he had never experienced. Lockhart let them come and did not bother to inquire the why or wherefore of their coming. It was enough to be alone at night striding across his own country again. At midnight he came to the farm called Hetchester and passing through the gap in the wall where the gate had hung made his bed in the hay in the old byre. The hay smelt musty and old but he was comfortable and in a short while fast asleep.

He was up again at dawn and on his way but it was half past seven before he crossed the Farspring Knowe and looked down into the wooded valley. Divet Hall stood a mile away and smoke was coming from a chimney. Miss Deyntry was up and about surrounded by dogs, cats, horses, parrots and a tame fox she had once waded through a pack of hounds to rescue while its vixen mother was being torn to pieces. In middle age Miss Deyntry disapproved of bloodsports as heartily as she had once pursued them in her wild youth. She also disapproved of the human species and was known for her misanthropy, a reversal of opinions that was generally explained by her having three times been jilted. Whatever the cause, she was known as a woman with a sharp tongue and people tended to avoid her. The only ones who didn't were tramps and the few wandering gipsies who still followed the ancient ways. Known as muggers in the past because they made pots and mugs during the winter and sold them in the summer, there were a few caravans left in the country and autumn would find them camped in the meadow behind Divet Hall. There was a caravan there now as Lockhart loped sideways down the steep hillside and their dog began to bark. Before long Miss Deyntry's menagerie had followed suit. Lockhart opened the gates to a cacophony of dogs but he was as mindless of them as he was of almost everything else and he walked past them and knocked on the door. After an interval Miss Deyntry appeared. Dressed in a smock she had designed without regard for appreciation but solely for convenience (it was fitted with pockets all down the front), she was more ornamental than attractive. She was also brusque.

'Who are you?' she asked as soon as she had taken stock of Lockhart and noted with imperceptible approval the straw in his hair and his unshaven chin. Miss Deyntry disapproved of too much cleanliness.

'Lockhart Flawse,' said Lockhart as bluntly as she had put the question. Miss Deyntry looked at him with more interest.

'So you're Lockhart Flawse,' she said and opened the door wider. 'Well, don't just stand there, boy. Come in. You look as if you could do with some breakfast.'

Lockhart followed her down the passage to the kitchen which was filled with the smell of home-cured bacon. Miss Deyntry sliced some thick rashers and put them in the pan.

'Slept out, I see,' she said. 'Heard you'd been and married. Walked out on her, eh?'

'Good Lord, no,' said Lockhart. 'I just felt like sleeping out last night. I've come to ask you a question.'

'Question? What question? Don't answer most people's questions. Don't know that I'll answer yours,' said Miss Deyntry staccato.

'Who was my father?' said Lockhart, who had learnt from Mr Dodd not to waste time on preliminaries. Even Miss Deyntry was taken by surprise.

'Your father? You're asking me who your father was?'-

'Yes,' said Lockhart.

Miss Deyntry prodded a rasher. 'You don't know?' she said after a pause.

'Wouldn't be asking if I did.'-

'Blunt too,' she commented, again with approval. 'And why do you think I know who your father was?'

'Mr Dodd said so.'

Miss Deyntry looked up from the pan. 'Oh, Mr Dodd did, did he now?'

'Aye, he said you were her friend. She'd be likely telling

you.'

But Miss Deyntry shook her head 'She'd as soon have confessed to the priest at Chiphunt Castle, and he being a Papist and a Highlander to boot while she and your grandfather were ever godless Unitarians; it's as likely as spaniels laying eggs,' said Miss Deyntry, breaking eggs on the edge of the iron pan and dropping them into the fat.

'Unitarians?' said Lockhart. 'I never knew my grandfather was a Unitarian.'

'I doubt he does himself,' said Miss Deyntry, 'but he's forever reading Emerson and Darwin and the windbags of Chelsea and the ingredients of Unitarianism are all there, mix them in proper proportions.'

'So you don't know who my father was?' said Lockhart not wishing to be drawn into theology before he had had his fill of bacon and eggs. Miss Deyntry added mushrooms.

'I did not say that,' she said, 'I said she did not tell me. I have a mind who he was.'

'Who?' said Lockhart,

'I said I had a mind. I didna say I'd tell. There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip as no better than I should know and I would not want to cast aspersions.'

She brought two plates across to the table and ladled eggs and bacon and mushrooms onto them. 'Eat and let me think,' she said and picked up her knife and fork. They ate in silence and drank from large cups of hot tea noisily. Miss Deyntry poured hers into a saucer and supped it that way. When they had finished and wiped their mouths, she got up and left the room, returning a few minutes later with a wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. 'You'll not have known Miss Johnson,' she said laying the

box on the table. Lockhart shook his head. 'She was the postmistress over Ryal Bank, and when I say postmistress I don't mean she had a wee shop. She carried the mail herself on an old bicycle and lived in a cottage before you reach the village. She gave me this before she died.' Lockhart looked at the box curiously. 'The box is nothing,' said Miss Deyntry, 'It's what's in it that is pertinent. The old woman was a sentimental body though you'd not have thought it to hear her. She kept cats and when she had finished her round of a summer day she'd sit out beside her door in the sun with the cats and kittens around her. One day a shepherd called with his dog and the dog took a mind to kill one of these kittens. Miss Johnson never moved an eyelid. She just looked at the man and said, "Ye should feed your dawg." That was Miss Johnson. So you wouldn't credit her with o'ermuch sentiment.'

Lockhart laughed and Miss Deyntry studied him. 'You're afful like your mither. She had a bray like that but there's something more besides.' She pushed the box towards him and opened the lid. Inside, wrapped neatly in an elastic band, was a pile of envelopes.

'Take them,' she said but kept her hand on the box. 'I promised the old woman I'd never let the box fall into anyone else's hands but she said nothing of the contents.'

Lockhart picked the bundle out and looked at the envelopes. They were all addressed to Miss C. R. Flawse, c/o The Postmistress, Ryal Bank, Northumberland, and they were still sealed.

'She wouldn't open them,' Miss Deyntry explained. 'She was an honest old soul and it would have been against her religion to meddle with the Royal Mail.'

'But why didn't my mother have them sent to Black Pockrington and Flawse Hall?' Lockhart asked. 'Why have them care of The Postmistress, Ryal Bank?'

'And have your grandfather lay his hands on them and know what she was doing? Are ye so soft in the head? The old devil was so jealous of her he'd never have hesitated to censor them. No, your mother was too canny for him there.'

Lockhart looked at the postmark of one letter and saw that it came from America and was dated 1961.

'This was sent five years after she died. Why didn't Miss Johnson send it back?'

'It would have meant opening it to find the return address and she would never have done that,' said Miss Deyntry. 'I told you the Royal Mail was a sacred trust to her. Besides she did not care to have your mother's only friend to know that she was dead. "Better to live in hope than abide in sorrow," she used to say and she knew what she was talking about. The man she was affianced to went missing at Ypres but she would never admit that he was dead. Love and life eternal she believed in, more power to the old woman. I would that I believed in either but I have not the faith.'

'I suppose I have the right to open them,' said Lockhart. Miss Deyntry nodded.

'She did not leave you much else except your looks but I doubt you'll find your father's name in any of them.' 'I may get a clue.'

But Miss Deyntry would not have it. 'You'll not. I can tell you that now. You would be better advised to ask the old Romany woman in the caravan who claims she can tell fortunes. Your father never wrote a letter in his life.' Lockhart looked at her suspiciously.

'You seem very sure of your facts,' he said, but Miss Deyntry was not to be drawn. 'You can at least tell me why you…'

'Begone with you,' she said rising from the table. ' 'Tis too much like looking at Clarissa to have you sitting there moping over letters from the long-dead past. Go ask the spaewife who your father was. She'll more likely tell you than I will.' 'Spaewife?' said Lockhart.

'The fortune-teller woman,' said Miss Deyntry, 'who would have it that she is a descendant of old Elspeth Faas of the old stories.' She led the way down the passage to the door and Lockhart followed with the bundle of letters and thanked her.

'Don't thank me,' she said gruffly. 'Thanks are words and I've had my fill of them. If you ever want help, come and ask me for it. That's the sort of thanks I can appreciate, being of some use. The rest is blathering. Now go and ask the old woman for your fortune. And don't forget to cross her palm with silver.'

Lockhart nodded and went round the back of the house into the meadow and presently he was squatting on his haunches some twenty yards from the caravan saying nothing but waiting, by some ancient instinct of etiquette, to be spoken to. The gipsies' dog barked and was silent. Smoke filtered up into the still morning air from the open fire and bees hummed in the honeysuckle of Miss Deyntry's garden wall. The Romanies went about their business as if Lockhart didn't exist but after half an hour an old woman came down the steps of the caravan towards him. She had a brown wind-burnt face and her skin was as wrinkled as the bark of an old oak. She squatted down in front of Lockhart and held out her hand.

'Ye'11 cross my loof with silver,' she said. Lockhart reached in his pocket and brought out a ten-pence piece but the woman would not touch it. 'Na silver there,' she said. 'I have no other silver,' said Lockhart. 'Then better still gold,' said the old woman. Lockhart tried to think of something gold and finally remembered his fountain pen. He took it out and uncovered the nib. 'It's all the gold I have.'

The gipsy's hand with standing veins like ivy took the pen and held it. 'You have the gift,' she said and as she said it the pen seemed to take on a life of its own and twitched and swung in her fingers like a water diviner's dowsing rod or hazel twig. Lockhart stared as it writhed and the gold nib pointed straight at him. 'Ye have the gift of words, aye, and a tongue for a song. The pen a compass point will be and yet ye'll get its message wrong.' She turned the pen away but the nib swung round again to him. Then she handed it back to him.

'Is there anything else you see?' asked Lockhart. The gipsy did not take his hand but stared at the ground between them.

'A death, twa deaths and maybe more. Three open graves and one unfilled. I see a hanged man on a tree and more that have been killed. No more. Be gone.' 'Nothing about my father?' asked Lockhart. 'Your father is it? Ye search him out and search him long. And all the time you'll find his name in song. I'll not say more.' Lockhart put the pen back in his pocket and took out a pound note. The old woman spat on the ground as she took it. 'Paper,' she muttered, 'it would be paper as paper's wood but paper and ink will do you no good till ye come to your gift again.' And with that she was up and away back to the caravan while Lockhart, hardly knowing that he was doing it, crossed the air where she had been with his two fingers. Then he too turned and set off down the valley towards the old military road and Hexham. That night he was back in Sandicott Crescent. He found Jessica in a state of alarm.

'The police have been,' she said as soon as he entered the house, 'they wanted to know if we'd seen or heard anything unusual lately.'

'What did you tell them?'

'The truth,' said Jessica. 'That we'd heard people screaming and Mr O'Brain's house explode and windows breaking and everything.'

'Did they ask about me?' said Lockhart.

'No,' said Jessica, 'I just said you were away at work.'

'They didn't search the house then?'

Jessica shook her head and looked at him fearfully. 'What has been going on, Lockhart? The Crescent used to be such a nice quiet place and now everything seems to have gone haywire. Did you know that someone cut the telephone wire to the Racemes' house?'

'I did,' said Lockhart both answering her question and stating the fact.

'It's all most peculiar, and they've had to put the Misses Musgrove in a mental home.'

'Well, that's one more house you can sell,' said Lockhart, 'and I don't suppose Mr O'Brain will be coming back.'

'Mr and Mrs Raceme aren't either. I had a letter from him this morning to say that they were moving.' Lockhart rubbed his hands happily. "That only leaves the Colonel and the Pettigrews on this side of the street. What about the Grabbles and Mrs Simplon?'

'Mr Grabble has kicked his wife out and Mrs Simplon came round to ask if I'd accept no rent until her divorce comes through.'

'I hope you told her no,' said Lockhart.

'I said I'd have to ask you.'

'The answer is no. She can clear out with the others.'

Jessica looked at him uncertainly but decided not to ask any questions. Lockhart was her husband, and besides, there was a look on his face that did not invite questions. All the same she went to bed troubled that night. Beside her Lockhart slept as soundly as a child. He had already made up his mind to deal with Colonel Finch-Potter next, but first there was the problem of the bull-terrier to be overcome. Lockhart was fond of bull-terriers. His grandfather kept several at the Hall and like the Colonel's dog they were amiable beasts unless aroused. Lockhart decided to arouse the bull-terrier again but in the meantime he had a vigil to keep on Number 10. The quantity of contraceptives deposited in the sewer below the Colonel's outlet suggested that the old bachelor had private habits that were amenable to use.

And so for the next week Lockhart sat in a darkened room that overlooked Number 10 and watched from seven till midnight. It was on the Friday that he saw the Colonel's ancient Humber drive up and a woman step out and enter the house with him. She was rather younger than Colonel Finch-Potter and more gaudily dressed than most of the women who came to Sandicott Crescent. Ten minutes later a light shone in the Colonel's bedroom and Lockhart had a better look at the woman. She came into the category his grandfather had described as Scarlet Women. Then the Colonel drew the curtains. A few minutes later the kitchen door opened and the bull-terrier was hustled out into the garden. The Colonel evidently objected to its presence in the house at the same time as his Scarlet Woman.

Lockhart went downstairs and across to the fence and whistled quietly and the bull-terrier waddled over. Lockhart reached through and patted it and the bull-terrier wagged what there was of its tail. And so while the Colonel made love to his lady friend upstairs, Lockhart made friends with the dog in the garden. He was still sitting stroking the dog at midnight when the front door opened and the couple came out and got into the Humber. Lockhart noted the time and made his plans accordingly.

Next day he travelled to London and hung around Soho. He sat in coffee bars and even strip shows which disgusted him and finally by dint of striking up acquaintance with a sickly young man he managed to buy what he had come to look for. He came home with several tiny tablets in his pocket and hid them in the garage. Then he waited until the following Wednesday before making his next move. On Wednesdays Colonel Finch-Potter played eighteen holes of golf and was absent all morning. Lockhart slipped next door into Number 10 carrying a tin of oven cleaner. The label on the tin advised the use of rubber gloves. Lockhart wore them. For two reasons; one that he had no intention of leaving fingerprints in the house with so many police in the vicinity; two because what he had come to do had nothing whatsoever to do with oven cleaning. The bull-terrier welcomed him amiably and together they went upstairs to the Colonel's bedroom and through the drawers of his dressing-table until Lockhart found what he was after. Then with a pat on the head of the dog he slipped out of the house and back over the fence.

That night, to while away the time, he blew all the lights in the Pettigrews' house. His procedure was quite simple. Using a piece of nylon cord he attached some stiff wire from a coat-hanger to the end and lobbed it over the twin electric cables that led from the post into the house. There was a flash and the Pettigrews spent the night in darkness. Lockhart spent it telling Jessica the story of the old gipsy woman and Miss Deyntry.

'But haven't you looked at the letters?' Jessica asked.

Lockhart hadn't. The gipsy's prophecy had driven all thought of them out of his mind and besides her final prophecy that paper was wood and paper and ink would do no good till he came to his gift again had startled him superstitiously. What had she meant by his gift of tongue and song and three graves open and one unfilled? And a hanged man on a tree? All auguries of some frightening future. Lockhart's mind was too engrossed in the present and the gift he foresaw was to come from the sale of all twelve houses in Sandicott Crescent, which he had already calculated would gross Jessica over six hundred thousand pounds at present-day prices.

'But we'll have to pay taxes on them, won't we?' said Jessica when he explained that she would shortly be a rich woman. 'And anyway we don't know that everyone is going to leave…'

She left the question open but Lockhart didn't answer it. He knew.

'Least said soonest mended,' he said cryptically and waited for his preparations for Colonel Finch-Potter's self-eviction to take effect.

'I still think you should see what is inside those letters,' Jessica said as they went to bed that night. 'They might contain proof of your father's identity.'

'There's time enough for that,' said Lockhart. 'What's in those letters will keep.'

What was in the French letter that Colonel Finch-Potter nudged over his penis at half past eight the following night had certainly kept. He was vaguely aware that the contraceptive felt more slippery than usual when he took it out of the box but the full effect of the oven cleaner made itself felt when he had got it three-quarters on and was nursing the rubber ring right down to achieve maximum protection from syphilis. The next moment all fear of that contagious disease had fled his mind and far from trying to get the thing on he was struggling to get the fucking thing off as quickly as possible and before irremediable damage had been done. He was unsuccessful. Not only was the contraceptive slippery but the oven cleaner was living up to its maker's claim to be able to remove grease baked on to the interior of a stove like lightning. With a scream of agony Colonel Finch-Potter gave up his manual efforts to get the contraceptive off before what felt like galloping leprosy took its fearful toll and dashed towards the bathroom in search of a pair of scissors. Behind him the Scarlet Woman watched with growing apprehension and when, after demonically hurling the contents of the medicine cabinet on to the floor, the Colonel still screaming found his nail scissors she intervened.

'No, no, you mustn't,' she cried in the mistaken belief that the Colonel's guilt had got the better of him and that he was about to castrate himself, 'for my sake you mustn't.' She dragged the scissors from his hand while the Colonel had he been able to speak would have explained that for her sake he must. Instead, gyrating like some demented dervish, he dragged at the contraceptive and its contents with a mania that suggested he was trying to disembowel himself. Next door but one the Pettigrews, now quite accustomed to things that went bump in the night, ignored his pleas for help before he burst. That they were mingled with the screams of the Scarlet Woman didn't surprise

them in the least. After the Racemes' disgusting display of perversion they were prepared for anything. Not so the police at the end of the road. As their car screeched to a halt outside Number 10 and they were bundled out to the scene of the latest crime they were met by the bull-terrier.

It was not the amiable beast it had been previously; it was not even the ferocious beast that had bitten Mr O'Brain and clung to him up his lattice-work; it was an entirely new species of beast, one filled to the brim with LSD by Lockhart and harbouring psychedelic vision of primeval ferocity in which policemen were panthers and even fence posts held a menace. Certainly the bull-terrier did. Gnashing its teeth, it bit the first three policemen out of the Panda car before they could get back into it, then the gatepost, broke a tooth on the Colonel's Humber, sank its fangs into the police car's front radial tyre to such effect that it was knocked off its own feet by the blow-out while simultaneously rendering their escape impossible, and went snarling off into the night in search of fresh victims.

It found them aplenty. Mr and Mrs Lowry had taken to sleeping downstairs since the explosion of Mr O'Brain's Bauhaus next door and the new explosion of the blown-out tyre brought them into the garden. Colonel Finch-Potter's illuminated bull-terrier found them there and, having bitten them both to the bone and driven them back into the house, had severed three rose bushes at the stem with total disregard for their thorns. If anything it felt provoked by creatures that bit back and was in no mood to trifle when the ambulance summoned by Jessica finally arrived. The bull-terrier had once travelled in that ambulance with Mr O'Brain and residual memories flickered in its flaming head. It regarded that ambulance as an offence against Nature and with all the impulsion of a dwarf rhinoceros put its head down and charged across the road. In the mistaken belief that it was the Pettigrews at Number 6 who needed their attention the ambulance men had stopped outside their house. They didn't stop long. The pink-eyed creature that knocked the first attendant over, bit the second and hurled itself at the throat of the third, fortunately missing and disappearing over the man's shoulder, drove them to take shelter in their vehicle, and ignoring the plight of Mr and Mrs Lowry, three policemen and the Colonel whose screams had somewhat subsided as he slashed at his penis with a breadknife in the kitchen, the ambulance men drove themselves as rapidly as possible to hospital.

They should have waited. Mr Pettigrew had just opened the front door and was explaining that for once he didn't know who was making such a fuss in the Crescent to the ambulance man who had rung the bell when something shot between his legs and up the stairs. Mr Pettigrew misguidedly shut the door, for once acting with a degree of social conscience he hadn't intended. For the next twenty minutes Colonel Finch-Potter's bull-terrier ravaged the"Pettigrew house. What it saw in tass-elled lampshades and velvet curtains, not to mention fur-belowed dressing-tables and the mahogany legs of the Pettigrews' dining suite, it alone knew, but they had evidently taken on some new and fearful meaning for it. Acting with impeccable good taste and unbelievable savagery it tore its way through these furnishings and dug holes in a Persian rug in search of some psychedelic bone while the Pettigrews cowered in the cupboard under the stairs. Finally it leapt at its own reflection in the french windows and crashed through into the night. After that its howls could be heard horrifically from the bird sanctuary. Colonel Finch-Potter's howls had long since ceased. He lay on the kitchen floor with a cheese-grater and worked assiduously and with consummate courage on the thing that had been his penis. That the corrosive contraceptive had long since disintegrated under the striations of the breadknife he neither knew nor cared. It was sufficient to know that the rubber ring remained and that his penis had swollen to three times its normal size. It was in an insane effort to grate it down from a phallic gargoyle to something more precise that the Colonel worked. And besides, the pain of the cheese-grater was positively homeopathic compared to oven cleaner and came as something of a relief albeit a minor one. Behind him garnished in suspender belt and bra the Scarlet Woman had hysterics in a kitchen chair and it was her shrieks that finally drove the three policemen in the patrol car to their duty. Bloody and bowed they broke the front door down in a wild rush provoked as much by fear of the bull-terrier as by any desire to enter the house. Once in they were in half a dozen minds whether to stay or go. The sight of a puce-faced old gentleman sitting naked on the kitchen floor using a cheese-grater on what looked like a pumpkin with high blood pressure while a woman wearing only a suspender belt shrieked and gibbered and in between whiles helped herself to a bottle of neat brandy, was not one to reassure them as to anyone's sanity. Finally to add to the pandemonium and panic the lights failed and the house was plunged into darkness. So were all the other houses in Sandicott Crescent. Lockhart, under cover of the concentration of police and ambulance men on Number 6 and 10, had slipped on to the golf course and hooked his patent fuseblower over the main power lines. By the time he got back to the house even Jessica was in a state of shock.

'Oh, Lockhart, darling,' she wailed, 'what on earth is happening to us?'

'Nothing,' said Lockhart, 'it's happening to them.' In the pitch darkness of the kitchen Jessica shuddered in his arms.

'Them?' she said. 'Who's them?'

'Them's the warld that is not us,' he said involuntarily slipping into the brogue of his native fells, 'For arl that's them the good Lord curse. And if ma prayer he doesna heed, It's up to me to do the deed.'

'Oh, Lockhart, you are wonderful,' said Jessica, 'I didn't know you could recite poetry.'