'But isn't there something we can do for poor Mrs Flawse?' said the nurse 'She seemed such a sweet girl.'
'My advice to her would be to get a divorce as quickly as possible,' said Dr Mannet fervently. 'Failing that, a hysterectomy would be the only thing. The thought of that man breeding…'
Outside in the street Lockhart slowly unclenched his jaw and fists. Coming at the end of a day in which he had been confined to an otherwise empty office with nothing whatsoever to do, the doctor's advice had been the last straw. He loathed London, Mr Treyer, Dr Mannet, East Pursley and everything about this insane rotten world into which he had been launched by his marriage. Every single thing about it conflicted absolutely with what he had been brought up to believe. In place of thrift there were expense-account lunches and rates of inflationary interest that were downright usury, instead of courage and beauty he found arrant cowardice in men – the doctor's squeals for help had made him too contemptible to hit – and in every building he saw only ugliness and a sordid obeisance to utility; and finally to cap it all there was this omnipresent concern with something called sex which grubby little cowards like Dr Mannet wanted to substitute for love. Lockhart walked along the street thinking of his love for Jessica. It was pure and holy and wonderful. He saw himself as her protector and the notion that he must hurt her to prove himself a dutiful husband was utterly repellent to him. He passed a newsagent's shop on whose racks were magazines displaying largely nude girls, dressed in the briefest of briefs or plastic macintoshes, and his gorge rose with disgust at their supposed appeal. The world was rotten and corrupt and he longed to be back on Flawse Fell with his rifle in his hands and some identifiable target between his sights while his darling Jessica sat in the stone-flagged kitchen by the black iron range waiting for him to come home with their supper. And with that longing there came the determination to make it come true.
One of these days he would take on the whole rotten world and impose his will on it, come hell or high water, and then
people would learn what it meant to cross Lockhart Flawse. In the meantime he had to get home. For a moment he thought of catching the bus but it was only six miles to Sandicott Crescent and Lockhart was used to covering thirty in a day across the grassy fells of the Border country. With rage against everyone except Jessica and his grandfather and Mr Dodd, Lockhart strode off down the street.
Chapter five
At Flawse Hall the ex-Mrs Sandicott shared none of Lockhart's feelings. She would have given anything, most specifically strychnine, to old Mr Flawse, to be back in the cosy confines of Sandicott Crescent and the company of her acquaintances. Instead she was trapped in a large cold house on an empty wasteland, where the snow lay deep and the wind howled incessantly, with a horrid old man and his even more horrid gamekeeper-cum-handyman, Mr Dodd. Her husband's horridness had manifested itself almost as soon as they had taken their seats on the train from Southampton, and with each mile north it had increased while Mrs Flawse's conviction that she had made a terrible mistake grew into a certainty.
Old Mr Flawse on land had none of that old-world charm that had so affected her at sea. From being an eccentric and outspoken old man in his dotage, he had relapsed into an eccentric and outspoken old man with more faculties at his command than his age warranted. Porters scurried with their luggage, ticket collectors cringed, and even hardened taxi-drivers notorious for their rudeness when given an inadequate tip held their tongues while Mr Flawse disputed the fare and grudgingly gave them an extra penny. Mrs Flawse had been left speechless by his authority which flaunted a disregard for every tenet of her suburban creed and treated the world as his oyster.
Since Mrs Flawse had already been treated, almost literally, as his sexual oyster to be prised open on their honeymoon, she should not have been surprised. It had been bad enough to discover on their first night that Mr Flawse wore a red flannel nightgown with an odour all his own and that he failed three times to distinguish between the washbasin and the lavatory bowl. Mrs Flawse had put these failings down to his age and deficient eyesight and sense of smell. She had been similarly dismayed when he knelt by the bed and implored the good Lord to forgive him in advance the carnal excesses he was about to inflict 'upon this the person of my wedded wife'. Little suspecting what he had in mind, Mrs Flawse found this prayer rather complimentary. It confirmed her belief that she was still at fifty-six an attractive woman and that her husband was a deeply religious man. Ten minutes later she knew better. Whatever the good Lord might feel about the matter of forgiveness, Mrs Flawse's feelings were implacable. She would never forgive or forget the old man's carnal excesses and any notion that he was at all religious had gone by the board. Smelling like a old fox, Mr Flawse had behaved like a young one, and had roamed about her body with as little discrimination between points of entry, or as she more delicately put it, 'her orifices', as he did between the washbasin and the toilet and with much the same-intent. Feeling like a cross between a sexual colander and a cesspit, Mrs Flawse had endured the ordeal by consoling herself that such goings-on, and the old man had indeed gone on and on and on, must end abruptly in his having either a heart attack or a hernia. Mr Flawse obliged her on neither count and when she awoke next morning it was to find him sitting up smoking a foul old pipe and regarding her with undisguised relish. For the rest of the voyage Mrs Flawse had waddled the deck by day and straddled the bed by night in the dwindling hope that the wages of his sin would leave her shortly a rich and well-endowed widow.
And so she had travelled north with him determined to see the ordeal out to the end and not to be deterred by his behaviour. By the time they reached Hexham her determination had begun to sag. The grey stone town depressed her and she was only briefly revived by the spectacle outside the station of an immaculate brougham drawn by two black horses with a gaitered and tunicked Mr Dodd holding the door open for her. Mrs Flawse climbed in and felt better. This was what she called riding in style and smacked of a world far removed from anything she had known before, an aristocratic world with uniformed servants and smart equipages. But as the carriage rattled through the streets of the little market town Mrs Flawse began to have second thoughts. The carriage bounced and wobbled and shook and when after crossing the Tyne they took the road to Wark by way of Chollerford she was well into her third and fourth thoughts about the advantages of broughams. Outside the country varied by the mile. At times they passed along roads lined with trees and at others climbed bleak hills where the snow still lay in drifts against dry-stone walls. And all the time the carriage swayed and bounced horribly while beside her Mr Flawse was savouring her discomfort.
'A splendid prospect,' he commented as they crossed a particularly unpleasant piece of open ground without a tree in sight. Mrs Flawse kept her thoughts to herself. Let the old man relish her misery while there was breath left in him but once she was firmly ensconced in Flawse Hall he would learn just how uncomfortable she could make his remaining days. There would be no more sex for one thing. Mrs Flawse had determined on that, and being a vigorous woman, was capable of giving as good as she got. And so the two of them sat side by side contemplating the other's discomfiture. It was Mrs Flawse who got the first shock. Shortly after Wark they turned down a half-metalled track that led along a nicely wooded valley towards a large and handsome house set in a spacious garden. Mrs Flawse's hopes rose prematurely.
'Is that the Hall?' she asked as they rattled towards the gates.