At eighteen Jessica Sandicott was endowed with physical charms beyond her control and an innocence of mind that was both the fault and despair of her mother. To be more precise, her innocence resulted from the late Mr Sandicott's will in which he had left all twelve houses in Sandicott Crescent 'to my darling daughter, Jessica, on her reaching the age of maturity'. To his wife he bequeathed Sandicott & Partner, Chartered Accountants and Tax Consultants, of Wheedle Street in the City of London. But the late Mr Sandicott's will had bequeathed more than these tangible assets. It had left Mrs Sandicott with a sense of grievance and the conviction that her husband's premature death at the age of forty-five was proof positive that she had married no gentleman, the proof of his ungentlemanliness lying in his failure to depart this world at least ten years earlier when she was still at a reasonably remarriageable age, or, failing that, to have left her his entire fortune. From this misfortune Mrs Sandicott had formed two resolutions. The first was that her next husband would be a very rich man with a life expectancy of as few years as possible and preferably with a terminal illness; the second to see that Jessica reached the age of maturity as slowly as a religious education could delay. So far she had failed in her first objective and only partly succeeded in her second.
Jessica had been to several convents, and the plural was indicative of her mother's partial failure. At the first she had developed a religious fervour of such pronounced proportions that she had decided to become a nun and subtract her own worldly possessions by adding them to those of the Order. Mrs Sandicott had removed her precipitately to a less persuasive convent and for a time things looked distinctly brighter. Unfortunately, so did several nuns. Jessica's angelic face and innocence of soul had so combined that four nuns fell madly in love with her and the Mother Superior, to save their souls, had requested that Jessica's disturbing influence be removed. Mrs Sandicott's self-evident argument that she wasn't to blame for her daughter's attractions and that if anyone ought to be expelled it was the lesbian nuns cut no ice with the Mother Superior.
'I do not blame the child. She was made to be loved,' she said with suspicious emotion and in direct contradiction to Mrs Sandicott's views on the subject. 'She will make some good man a wonderful wife.'
'Knowing men rather more intimately than I hope you do,' riposted Mrs Sandicott, 'she will marry the first scoundrel who asks her,"
It was a fatefully accurate prediction. To protect her daughter from temptation and to maintain her own financial income from the rents of the houses in Sandicott Crescent, Mrs Sandicott had confined Jessica to her home and a correspondence course in typing. By the time Jessica reached eighteen it was still impossible to say of her that she had reached the age of maturity. If anything she had regressed and while Mrs Sandicott supervised the running of Sandicott & Partner, the partner being a Mr Treyer, Jessica sank back into a literary slough of romantic novels populated entirely by splendid young men. In short she lived in a world of her imagination, the fecundity of which was proven one morning when she announced that she was in love with the milkman and intended to marry him. Mrs Sandicott studied the milkman next day and decided that the time had come for desperate measures. By no stretch of her own imagination could she visualize the milkman as an eligible young man. Her arguments to this effect, backed by the fact that the milkman was forty-nine, married and the father of six children, and hadn't been consulted by his bride-to-be in any case, failed to influence Jessica.
'I shall sacrifice myself to his happiness,' she said. Mrs Sandicott determined otherwise and promptly booked two tickets on the Ludlow Castle in the conviction that whatever else the ship might have to offer in the way of possible husbands for her daughter, they couldn't be less eligible than the milkman. Besides, she had herself to think of, and cruise liners were notoriously happy hunting-grounds for middle-aged widows with an eye to the main chance. That Mrs Sandicott's own eye was fastened on an ancient and potentially terminal old man with money only made the prospect of the voyage the more desirable. And Lockhart's appearance had heralded the mainest chance of all, an eligible and evidently half-witted young man for her idiot daughter and in his stateroom a gentleman of ninety with an enormous estate in Northumberland. That night Mrs Sandicott went to sleep a cheerful woman. In the bunk above Jessica sighed and murmured the magical words, 'Lock-hart Flawse of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg.' They formed a litany of Flawse to the religion of romance.
On the boat-deck Lockhart leant on the rail and stared out over the sea, his heart filled with feelings as turbulent as the white wake of the ship. He had met the most wonderful girl in the world and for the very first time he realized that women were not simply unprepossessing creatures who cooked meals, swept floors and, having made beds, made strange noises in them late at night. There was more to them than that but what that something more was Lockhart could only guess.
His knowledge of sex was limited to the discovery, made while gutting rabbits, that bucks had balls and does didn't. There appeared to be some connection between these anatomical differences that accounted for ladies having babies and men not. On the one occasion he had attempted to explore the difference further by asking the tutor in Urdu how Mizriat begat Ludin in Genesis 10:13 he had received a clout across the ear that had temporarily deafened him and had given him the permanent impression that such questions were better left unasked. On the other hand he was aware that there was such a thing as marriage and that out of marriage came families. One of his distant Flawse cousins had married a farmer from Elsdon and had subsequently raised four children. The housekeeper had told him as much and no more, except that it had been a shotgun marriage which had merely deepened the mystery, shotguns in Lockhart's experience being reserved for putting things to death rather than bringing them to life.
To make matters even more incomprehensible, the only occasions on which his grandfather had permitted him to visit his relatives, had been to their burials. Mr Flawse enjoyed funerals immensely. They reinforced his belief that he was hardier than any other Flawse and that death was the only certainty. 'In any uncertain world we can take consolation in the verity, the eternal verity, that death comes to us all in the end,' he would tell a bereaved widow to terrible effect. And afterwards, in the jaunt-ing-cart he used for such outings, he would expatiate glowingly to Lockhart on the merits of death as preserver of moral values. 'Without it we would have nothing to stop us from behaving like cannibals. But put the fear of death up a man and it has a wondrously purgative effect."
And so Lockhart had continued in ignorance of the facts of life while acquiring extensive knowledge of those of death. It was left to his bodily functions and his feelings to guide him in quite contrary directions in the matter of sex. Lacking a mother and loathing most of his grandfather's housekeepers, his feelings for women were decidedly negative. On the more positive side he got a great deal of pleasure from nocturnal emissions. But their significance escaped him. He didn't have wet dreams in the presence of women and he didn't have women at all.
And so leaning on the guard rail staring down at the white foam in the moonlight Lockhart expressed his new feelings in images he knew best. He longed to spend the rest of his life shooting things and laying them at Jessica Sandicott's feet. With this exalted notion of love Lockhart went down to the cabin where old Mr Flawse, clad in a red flannel nightgown, was snoring noisily, and climbed into bed.