The Throwback

Chapter seven

Lockhart and Jessica were sick, period. The Curse, as Jessica had been brought up to call it, blighted what little physical bond there was between them. Lockhart steadfastly refused to impose his unworthy person on his bleeding angel and, even when not bleeding, his angel refused to insist on her right as his wife to be imposed upon. But if they lived in a state of sexual stalemate, their love grew in the fertile soil of their frustration. In short, they adored one another and loathed the world in which they found themselves. Lockhart no longer spent his days at Sandicott & Partner in Wheedle Street. Mr Treyer, forced to decide whether to implement his threat to resign if Lockhart didn't leave, a decision thrust upon him by Mr Dodd who hadn't delivered his letter to Mrs Flawse, finally resorted to more subtle tactics and paid Lockhart his full salary plus a bonus to stay away from the office before he brought ruin to the business by killing a Tax Inspector or alienating all their clients. Lockhart accepted this arrangement without regret. What he had seen of Mr Treyer, VAT men, the contradictions between income and income tax and the wiles and ways of both tax collectors and tax evaders, only confirmed his view that the modern world was a sordid and corrupt place. Brought up by his grandfather to believe what he was told and to tell what he believed, the transition to a world in which the opposites held true had had a traumatic effect.

Left fully paid to his own devices Lockhart had remained at home and learnt to drive.

'It will help to kill time,' he told Jessica, and had promptly done his best to kill two driving instructors and a great many other road users. More accustomed to the ways of horses and buggies than to the sudden surges and stops of motor cars, Lockhart's driving consisted of putting his foot flat down on the accelerator before letting out the clutch and then putting his foot flat down on the brake before smashing into whatever stood in his path. The effect of this repeated sequence had been to leave his instructors speechless with panic and in no position to communicate an alternative procedure to their pupil. Having wrecked the front ends of three Driving School cars and the back ends of two parked cars plus a lamp-post, Lockhart had found it difficult to get anyone to instruct him.

"I just don't understand it,^! he told Jessica. 'With a horse you climb into the saddle and away she goes. You don't keep bumping into things. A horse has got more sense.'

'Perhaps if you listened to what the instructors say you'd get on better, darling. I mean they must know what you ought to do.'

'According to the last one,' said Lockhart, 'what I ought to do is have my bloody head examined and I wasn't even bleeding. He was the one with the fractured skull.'

'Yes, dear, but you had just knocked down the lamp-post. You know you had.'

'I don't know anything of the sort,' said Lockhart indignantly. 'The car knocked it down. All I did was to take my foot off the clutch. It wasn't my fault the car shot off the road like a scalded cat.'-

In the end, by paying one of the instructors danger money and allowing him to sit in the back seat with a crash helmet and two safety belts, Lockhart had got the hang of driving. The fact that the instructor had insisted on Lockhart providing his own vehicle had led him to buy a Land-Rover. It had been the instructor who installed a governor on the accelerator and together they had practised on an abandoned airfield where there were few obstacles and no other cars. Even in these unobstructed circumstances Lockhart had managed to puncture two hangars in ten places by driving straight through their corrugated walls at forty miles an hour and it was testimony to the Land-Rover that it took so well.

Not so the instructor. He had taken it extremely badly and had only been persuaded to come out again by being offered even more money and half a bottle of Scotch before he got into the back seat. After six weeks Lockhart had overcome his manifest desire to drive at things rather than round them and had graduated to side roads and finally to main ones. By that time the instructor pronounced him ready to take the test. The examiner thought otherwise and demanded to be let out of the car half-way through. But on his third attempt Lockhart had got his licence, largely because the examiner couldn't face the prospect of having to sit beside him a fourth time. By then the Land-

Rover had begun to suffer from metal fatigue and to celebrate the occasion Lockhart traded what remained of it in for a Range Rover which could do a hundred miles an hour on the open road and sixty cross-country. Lockhart proved the latter to his own satisfaction and the frenzied distraction of the Club Secretary by driving the thing at high speed across all eighteen holes of the Pursley Golf Course before plunging through the hedge at the end of Sandicott Crescent and into the garage.

'It's got four-wheel drive and goes through sand holes like anything,' he told Jessica, 'and it's great on grass. When we go to Northumberland we'll be able to drive right across the fells.'

He went back to the showroom to pay for the Range-Rover and it was left to Jessica to confront a partially demented Club Secretary who wanted to know what the hell her husband meant by driving a bloody great truck across all eighteen greens to the total destruction of their immaculate and painstakingly preserved surfaces.

Jessica denied that her husband had done any such thing. 'He's very fond of gardening,' she told the man, 'and he wouldn't dream of destroying your greens. And anyway I didn't know you grew vegetables on the golf course. I certainly haven't seen any.'

Faced by such radiant and disconcerting innocence the Secretary had retired muttering that some maniac had put paid to the Ladies Open, not to mention the Mixed Doubles.

Mr Flawse's letter summoning the couple to Flawse Hall to hear the contents of his will therefore came at an opportune moment.

'Oh, darling,' said Jessica, 'I've been dying to see your home. How marvellous.'

'It rather sounds as if grandfather were dying anyway,' said Lockhart studying the letter. 'Why does he want to read his will now?'

'He probably just wants you to know how generous he's going to be,' said Jessica, who always managed to put a nice interpretation on the nastiest actions. Lockhart didn't. 'You don't know grandpa,' he said.

But next morning they left very early in the Range-Rover and managed to avoid the morning traffic into London. They were less fortunate at the traffic lights at the entrance to the motorway which happened to be red at the time. Here Lockhart slammed into the back of a Mini before reversing and driving on.

'Hadn't you better go back and say you're sorry?' asked Jes-sica.

But Lockhart wouldn't hear of it. 'He shouldn't have stopped so suddenly,' he said.

'But the lights were red, darling. They changed just as we came up behind him.'

'Well, the system lacks logic then,' said Lockhart. 'There wasn't anything coming on the other road. I looked.'

'There's something coming now,' said Jessica, turning to look out of the back window, 'and it's got a blue light flashing on the top. I think it must be the police.'

Lockhart put his foot hard down on the floor and they were doing a hundred in no time at all, Behind them the police car turned on its siren and went up to a hundred and ten.

'They're gaining on us, darling,' said Jessica, 'we'll never be able to get away."

'Oh yes we will,' said Lockhart, and looked in the rear-view mirror. The police car was four hundred yards behind them and coming up fast. Lockhart switched up an overpass on to a side road, squealed round a corner into a country lane and putting his hunting instincts to good use charged a five-barred gate and bucketed across a ploughed field Behind them the police car stopped at the gate and men got out. But by that time Lockhart had negotiated another hedge and had disappeared. Twenty miles and forty hedges farther on he doubled back across the motorway and, proceeding by back roads to the east, drove on.

'Oh, Lockhart, you're so manly,' said Jessica, 'you think of everything. You really do. But don't you suppose they'll have taken our licence number?'

'Won't do them much good if they have," said Lockhart. "I didn't like the one it had on it when I bought it so I changed it.'

'You didn't like it? Why not?'

'It said PEE 453 P so I had another one made up. It's much nicer. It's FLA 123.'

'But they'll still be looking for a Range-Rover with FLA 123,' Jessica pointed out, 'and they've got radios and things.'Lockhart pulled into a lay-by. 'You really don't mind us being PEE 453 P?' he asked. Jessica shook her head.

'Of course not,' she said, 'you are silly.'

'If you're quite sure,' said Lockhart doubtfully, but in the end he got out and changed the number plates back again. When he climbed back into the car Jessica hugged him.

'Oh darling,' she said. 'I feel so safe with you. I don't know why it is but you always make things look so simple.'

'Most things are simple,' said Lockhart, 'if you go about them the right way. The trouble is that people never do what's obvious.'

'I suppose that's what it is,' said Jessica, and relapsed into the romantic dream of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg. With each mile north her feelings, unlike those of her mother before her, grew mistier and more hazy with legend and the wild beauty she longed for.

Beside her Lockhart's feelings changed too. He was moving away from London and that low country he so detested and was returning, if only briefly, to those open rolling fells of his boyhood and to the music of guns firing in the distance or close at hand. A feeling of wildness and a strange surge of violence stirred in his blood and Mr Treyer assumed a new monstrosity in his mind, a vast question-mark to which there was never any answer. Ask Mr Treyer a question and the answer he gave was no answer at all; it was a balance sheet. On one side there were debits, on the other credits. You paid your money and took your choice, and Lockhart had been left none the wiser. The world he understood had no place for equivocation or those grey areas where everything was fudged and bets were hedged. If you aimed at a grouse it was hit or miss and a miss was as good as a mile. And if you built a dry-stone wall it stood or fell and in falling proved you wrong. But in the south it was all slipshod and cover-up. He was being paid not to work and other men who did no work were making fortunes out of buying and selling options on cocoa yet to be harvested and copper still unmined. And having made their money by swapping pieces of paper they had it taken away from them by Income Tax officials or had to lie to keep it. Finally there was the Government which in his simple way he had always thought was elected to govern and to maintain the value of the currency.

Instead it spent more money than was in the Exchequer and borrowed to make good the deficit. If a man did that he would go bankrupt and rightly so. But governments could borrow, beg, steal or simply print more money and there was no one to say them Nay. To Lockhart's arithmetical mind the world he had encountered was one of lunacy where two and two made five, or even eleven, and nothing added up to a true figure. It was not a world for him, with all its lying hypocrisy. 'Better a thief than a beggar,' he thought and drove on.

It was almost dark when they turned off the main road beyond Wark on to the half-metalled track that led to Black Pockrington. Above them a few stars speckled the sky and the headlamps picked out the gates and occasionally the eyes of a night animal, but everything else was dark and bare, a shape against the skyline. Jessica went into raptures.

'Oh, Lockhart, it's like another world.'

'It is another world,-' said Lockhart.

When finally they breasted the rise of Tombstone Law and looked across the valley at the Hall, it was ablaze with lights in every window.

'Oh how beautiful!' said Jessica, 'Let's stop here for a moment. I want to savour it so.'

She got out and gazed ecstatically at the house. From its peel tower to its smoking chimneys and the lights gleaming from its windows it was everything she had hoped for. As if to celebrate this fulfilment the moon came out from behind a cloud and glinted on the surface of the reservoir and in the distance there came the baying of the Flawse hounds. The reading matter of Jessica's retarded adolescence was making itself manifest.