'Oh, darling, you're so romantic,' said Jessica, 'you really are.'
Mrs Sandicott wasn't. She emerged from the shadows and bore down on them. 'That's quite enough of that,' she said as they staggered apart. 'When you're married you can do whatever you like but no daughter of mine is going to indulge in obscene acts on the boat-deck of a liner. Besides, someone might see you.'
Jessica and Lockhart stared at her in amazement. It was Jessica who spoke first.
'When we're married? You really did say that, mummy?'
'I said exactly that,' said Mrs Sandicott. 'Lockhart's grandfather and I have decided that you should…'
She was interrupted by Lockhart who, with a gesture of chivalry that so endeared him to Jessica, knelt at his future mother-in-law's feet and reached out towards her. Mrs Sandicott recoiled abruptly. Lockhart's posture combined with Jessica's recent suggestion was more than she could stomach.
'Don't you dare touch me,! she squawked and backed away. Lockhart hastened to his feet.
'I only meant…" he began but Mrs Sandicott didn't want to know.
'Never mind that now. It's time you both went to bed,' she said firmly. 'We can discuss arrangements for the wedding in the morning."
'Oh, mummy…'
'And don't call me "mummy",' said Mrs Sandicott. 'After what I've just heard I'm not at all sure I am your mother.'
She and Jessica left Lockhart standing bemused on the boat-deck. He was going to get married to the most beautiful girl in the world. For a moment he looked round for a gun to fire to announce his happiness but there was nothing. In the end he unhooked a lifebelt from the rail and hurled it high over the side into the water and gave a shout of joyful triumph. Then he too went down to his cabin oblivious of the fact that he had just alerted the bridge to the presence of 'Man Overboard' and that in the wake of the liner the lifebelt bobbed frantically and its warning beacon glowed.
As the engines went full astern and a boat was lowered, Lockhart sat on the edge of his bunk listening to his grandfather's instructions. He was to marry Jessica Sandicott, he was to live in Sandicott Crescent, East Pursley, and start work at Sandicott & Partner.
'That's marvellous,' he said when Mr Flawse finished, I couldn't have wished for anything better.'
'I could,' said Mr Flawse, struggling into his nightgown. 'I've got to marry the bitch to get rid of you.'
'The bitch?' said Lockhart. 'But I thought…,'
'The mother, you dunderhead,' said Mr Flawse and knelt on the floor. 'Oh Lord, Thou knowest that I have been afflicted for ninety years by the carnal necessities of women,' he cried. 'Make these my final years beneficent with the peace that passes all understanding and by Thy great mercy lead me in the paths of righteousness to the father of this my bastard grandson, that I may yet flog the swine within an inch of his life. Amen.'
On this cheerful note he got into bed and left Lockhart to undress in the darkness, wondering what the carnal necessities of women were.
Next morning the Captain of the Ludlow Castle, who had spent half the night searching for the Man Overboard and the other half ordering the crew to check the occupants of all cabins to ascertain if anyone had indeed fallen over the side, was confronted by the apparition of Mr Flawse dressed in a morning suit and grey topper.
'Married? You want me to marry you?' said the Captain when Mr Flawse had made known his request.
'I want you to conduct the ceremony,' said Mr Flawse. 'I have neither the desire to marry you nor you to marry me. Truth be told, I don't want to marry the damned woman either, but needs must when the devil drives.'
The Captain eyed him uncertainly. Mr Flawse's language, like his costume, not to mention his advanced age, argued a senility that called for the services of the ship's doctor rather than his own.
'Are you sure you know your own mind on this matter?'- he asked when Mr Flawse had further explained that not only was the marriage to be between himself and Mrs Sandicott but between his grandson and Mrs Sandicott's daughter. Mr Flawse bristled. 'I know my own mind, sir, rather better than it would. appear you know your own duty. As Master of this vessel you are empowered by law to conduct marriages and funerals. Is that not so?'
The Captain conceded that it was, with the private reservation that in Mr Flawse's case his wedding and burial at sea were likely to follow rather too closely for comfort.
'But wouldn't it be better if you were to wait until we reach Capetown?' he asked. 'Shipboard romances tend to be very transitory affairs in my experience.'
'In your experience,' said Mr Flawse, 'I dare say they do. In mine they don't. By the time you reach four-score years and ten any romance is in the nature of things bound to be a transitory affair.'-
'I see that,' said the Captain. 'And how does Mrs Sandicott feel about the matter?'
'She wants me to make an honest woman of her. An impossible task in my opinion but so be it,' said Mr Flawse. 'That's what she wants and that's what she will get.'-
Further argument merely resulted in Mr Flawse losing his temper and the Captain submitting. 'If the old fool wants the wedding,' he told the Purser later, 'I'm damned if I can stop him. For all I know he'll institute an action under Maritime Law if I refuse.'
And so it was as the ship sailed towards the Cape of Good Hope that Lockhart Flawse and Jessica Sandicott became Mr and Mrs Flawse while Mrs Sandicott achieved her long ambition of marrying a very rich old man with but a short time to live. Mr Flawse for his part consoled himself with the thought that whatever disadvantages the ex-Mrs Sandicott might display as a wife, he had rid himself once and for all of a bastard grandson while acquiring a housekeeper who need never be paid and would never be able to give notice. As if to emphasize this latter point he refused to leave the ship while she lay in Capetown, and it was left to Jessica and Lockhart to spend their honeymoon chastely climbing Table Mountain and admiring one another from the top. When the ship set out on the return voyage only their names and their cabins had changed. Mrs Sandicott found herself closeted with old Mr Flawse and prey to those sexual excesses which had previously been reserved for his former housekeepers and of late for his imagination. And in her old cabin Jessica and Lockhart lay in one another's arms as ignorant of any further purpose in their marriage as their singular upbringings had left them. For another eleven days the ship sailed north and by the time the two married couples disembarked at Southampton, it could be said that, apart from old Mr Flawse, whose excesses had taken some toll of his strength and who had to be carried down the gangway in a wheelchair, they were all entering upon a new life.
Chapter four
If the world of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg, Northumberland, had played a large part in persuading Jessica that Lockhart was the hero she wanted to marry, the world of Sandicott Crescent, East Pursley, Surrey, had played no part in Lockhart's choice at all. Used as he was to the open moors of the Border country where the curlews, until he shot them, cried, Sandicott Crescent, a cul-de-sac of twelve substantial houses set in substantial gardens and occupied by substantial tenants with substantial incomes, was a world apart from anything he knew. Built in the thirties as an investment by the foresighted if late Mr Sandicott, the twelve houses were bordered to the south by the Pursley Golf Course and to the north by the bird sanctuary, a stretch of gorse and birch whose proper purpose was less to preserve bird life than to maintain the property values of Mr Sandicott's investment. In short it was an enclave of large houses with mature gardens. Each house was as different in style and similar in comfort as the ingenuity of architects could make it. Pseudo-Tudor prevailed, with an admixture of Stockbroker Spanish Colonial, distinguished by green glazed tiles, and one British Bauhaus with a flat roof, small square windows and the occasional porthole to add a nautical air. And everywhere trees and bushes, lawns and rockeries, rose bushes and ramblers were carefully clipped and trimmed to indicate the cultivation of their owners and the selectness of the district. All in all, Sandicott Crescent was the height of suburbia, the apex of that architectural triangle which marked the highest point of the topographical chart of middle-class ambition. The result was that the rates were enormous and the rents fixed. Mr Sandicott for all his prudence had not foreseen the Rent Act and Capital Gains Tax. Under the former there was no way of evicting tenants or increasing the rent they paid to a financially profitable sum; under the latter the sale of a house earned more for the Exchequer than it did for the owner; together the Rent Act and the tax nullified all Mr Sandicott's provisions for his daughter's future. Finally, and most aggravatingly of all, from Mrs Sandicott's point of view, the inhabitants of the Crescent took plenty of exercise, ate sensible diets and generally refused to oblige her by dying.