The Throwback by Tom Sharpe

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 wasused 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.

5
    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 beenleft 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