"I'll think about it,' Mr Flawse said finally.
That night a heavy fall of snow decided him, and Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode came down to breakfast to find him in a more amenable mood.
'I'll leave the arrangements to you, Bullstrode,' he said as he finished his coffee and lit a blackened pipe. 'And the bastard will go with me.'
'He'll need a birth certificate to get a passport,'1 said the solicitor, 'and…'
'Born in a ditch and die in a dyke. I'll only register him when I know who his father is,' said Mr Flawse glowering.
'Quite,' said Mr Bullstrode who didn't want to go into the question of horsewhipping so early in the morning. 'I suppose we could still have him put on your passport.'
'Not as his father,' snarled Mr Flawse, the depths of whose feelings for his grandson were partly to be explained by the terrible suspicion that he himself might not altogether be devoid of responsibility for Lockhart's conception. The memory of one drunken encounter with a housekeeper who had seemed on recollection to have been younger and more resistant than her daytime appearance had led him to expect still haunted his conscience. 'Not as his father.'
'As his grandfather,' said Mr Bullstrode. 'I'll need a photograph.'
Mr Flawse went through to his study, rummaged in a bureau drawer and returned with one of Lockhart aged ten. Mr Bull-strode studied it dubiously.
'He's changed a lot since then,' he said.
'Not to my knowledge,' said Mr Flawse, 'and I should know. He was ever a gormless lout.'
'Aye, and for all practical purposes a non-existent one,' said Dr Magrew. 'You know he's not registered on the National Health system, and if he's ever taken ill I can foresee considerable difficulties in the matter of obtaining treatment.'
'He's never known a day's illness in his life,' Mr Flawse retorted. 'A healthier brute it would be difficult to find.'
'He could have an accident,' Mr Bullstrode pointed out.
But the old man shook his head.' 'Tis too much to be hoped for. Dodd's seen to it he knows how to handle himself in an emergency. You'll have heard the saying that a poacher makes the best gamekeeper?' Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew had. 'Well, Dodd's the reverse. He's a gamekeeper who would make the best poacher,' continued Mr Flawse, 'which is what he has made of the bastard. There's not a bird nor beast safe within twenty miles when he's abroad.'
'Talking of abroad,' said Mr Bullstrode, not wishing as a solicitor to be privy to Lockhart's illegal activities, 'where would you like to go?'
'Somewhere South of Suez,' said Mr Flawse whose memory for Kipling was not what it had been. TU leave the rest to you.'
Three weeks later Lockhart and his grandfather left Flawse Hall in the ancient brougham Mr Flawse used for his more formal means of transport. As with everything else modern he eschewed the motor car. Mr Dodd sat up front at the reins, and behind was tied the cabin trunk Mr Flawse had last used in 1910 on a voyage to Calcutta. As the horses clattered down the metalled track from the Hall, Lockhart was in a state of high expectation. It was his first journey into the world of his grandfather's memories and his own imagination. From Hexham they took the train to Newcastle and from Newcastle to London and Southampton, Mr Flawse all the way complaining that the London North-Eastern Railway wasn't what it had been forty years before and Lockhart astonished to discover that not all women had partial beards and varicose veins. By the time they reached the ship old Mr Flawse was exhausted to the point of twice supposing, thanks to the complexion of two ticket collectors, that he was already back in Calcutta. It was with the greatest difficulty and the least examination of his passport that he was helped up the gangway and down to his cabin.
'I shall dine here in the stateroom,' he told the steward. 'The boy will sup aloft.'
The steward looked at the 'boy' and decided not to argue that the cabin was not strictly a stateroom, nor that dinners in cabins were things of the past.
'We've got one of the old sort in Number 19,' he told the stewardess afterwards, 'and when I say old I mean old. Wouldn't surprise me if he sailed on the Titanic'
'I thought they all drowned,' said the stewardess, but the steward knew better. 'Not all. That old sod's a survivor if ever I saw one and his ruddy grandson's like something out of the Ark and I don't mean something cuddly.'
That evening as the Ludlow Castle sailed down the Solent, old Mr Flawse dined in his stateroom, and it was Lockhart, dressed conspicuously in tails and white tie which had once belonged to a larger uncle, who made his way up to the First Class Dining Saloon and was conducted to a table at which sat Mrs Sandicott and her daughter Jessica. For a moment, stunned by Jessica's beauty, he hesitated, then bowed and sat down.
Lockhart Flawse had not fallen in love at first sight. He had plunged.
Chapter two
And Jessica followed suit. One look at this tall, broad-shouldered young man who bowed and Jessica knew she was in love. But if with the young couple it was love at first sight, with Mrs Sandicott it was calculation at second. Lockhart's appearance in white tie and tails and his general air of incoherent embarrassment had a profound effect upon her, and when during the meal he managed to stammer that his grandfather was dining in their stateroom Mrs Sandicott's suburban soul thrilled to the sound.
'Your stateroom?' she asked. 'You did say your stateroom?'
'Yes,' mumbled Lockhart, 'you see he's ninety and the journey from the Hall fatigued him.'
'The Hall,' murmured Mrs Sandicott and looked significantly at her daughter.
'Flawse Hall,' said Lockhart. 'It's the family seat.'
Once again Mrs Sandicott's depths were stirred. The circles in which she moved did not have family seats and here, in the shape of this angular and large youth whose accent, acquired from old Mr Flawse, went back to the late nineteenth century, she perceived those social attributes to which she had long aspired.
'And your grandfather is really ninety?' Lockhart nodded. 'It's amazing that such an elderly man should be taking a cruise at his time of life,' continued Mrs Sandicott. 'Doesn't his poor wife miss him?'
'I really don't know. My grandmother died in nineteen thirty-five,' said Lockhart, and Mrs Sandicott's hopes rose even higher. By the end of the meal she had winkled the story of Lockhart's life from him, and with each new piece of information Mrs Sandicott's conviction grew that at long, long last she was on the brink of an opportunity too good to be missed. She was particularly impressed by Lockhart's admission that he had been educated by private tutors. Mrs Sandicott's world most certainly did not include people who had their sons educated by tutors. At best they sent them to Public Schools. And so, as coffee was served, Mrs Sandicott was positively purring. She knew now that she had not been wrong to come on the cruise and when finally Lockhart rose and lifted her chair back for her and then for Jessica, she went down to her cabin with her daughter in a state of social ecstasy.
'What a very nice young man,r she said, 'Such charming manners and so well brought up.'
Jessica said nothing. She did not want to spoil the savour of her feelings by revealing them. She had been overwhelmed by Lockhart but in a different way to her mother. If Lockhart represented a social world to which Mrs Sandicott aspired, to Jessica he was the very soul of romance. And romance was all in all to her. She had listened to his description of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg, and had garnished each word with a new significance that came from the romantic novels with which she had filled the emptiness of her adolescence. It was an emptiness that amounted to vacuity.