The Throwback Read online

  ‘For all I know there may well have been half a dozen bloody letters of the 5th and all of them referring to some vital piece of information I know nothing about,’ he shouted at Lockhart who promptly suggested that he try the 6th instead. Mr Treyer regarded him with starting eyes.

  ‘Which since you burnt those too is a bloody useless suggestion,’ he bawled.

  ‘Well, you told me it was our business to protect our clients’ interests and to be positive,’ said Lockhart, ‘and that’s what I was doing.’

  ‘How the hell can we protect clients’ interests when we don’t know what they are?’ Mr Treyer demanded.

  ‘But we do,’ said Lockhart. ‘It’s all there in their files. I mean, take Mr Gypsum, the architect. I was looking in his file the other day and he made £80,000 the year before last and all he paid in income tax was £1,758. The rest went in expenses. Let me see. He spent £16,000 in the Bahamas in May and …’

  ‘Stop!’ yelled Mr Treyer, on the verge of apoplexy. ‘I don’t want to hear what he spent … Dear Christ!’

  ‘Well, that’s what he said he did,’ objected Lockhart. ‘It’s there in his letter to you. £16,000 in four days. Whatever do you think he did with all that money in only four days?’

  Mr Treyer leant forward and clutched his head with a hand. To be lumbered with a mentally deficient creature with a photographic memory who went around burning Her Majesty’s official correspondence with a disregard that bordered on the insane was shortening his life.

  ‘Look,’ he said as patiently as he could, ‘from now on I don’t want you to go anywhere near those files, you or anyone else, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lockhart. ‘What I don’t understand is why the richer you are the less tax you pay. There’s Gypsum earning a whacking £80,000 and paying £1,758.40 while Mrs Ponsonby who only got £6,315.32 in income had to shell out £2,472. I mean …’

  ‘Shut up,’ screamed Mr Treyer, ‘I don’t want to hear any more of your questions and I don’t want to catch you within ten yards of a filing cabinet. Is that clear?’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Lockhart.

  ‘I do say so,’ said Mr Treyer. ‘If I so much as see you glancing towards the files … Oh, get out.’

  Lockhart got out and Mr Treyer tried to restore his shattered nerves by taking a pink pill and a paper cup of whisky. Two days later he had cause to regret his instructions. A series of terrible screams from the room which contained the Value Added Tax records sent him scurrying through to find an officer of the Customs and Excise VAT department trying to extricate his fingers from the drawer of a filing cabinet which Lockhart had slammed shut just as he was reaching for a file.

  ‘Well, you told me not to let anyone go near those files,’ Lockhart explained as the VAT man was led away to have four broken fingers attended to by a doctor. Mr Treyer stared at him frenziedly and tried to think of an adequate phrase to describe his detestation.

  ‘I mean,’ continued Lockhart, ‘if he had laid a hand on Mr Fixstein’s VAT records …’

  ‘Laid a hand!’ screamed Mr Treyer almost as loudly as the VAT man. ‘The poor sod won’t have a hand to lay after what you’ve just been and done to him. And what’s worse we’ll have a hundred Excise men descend on us tonight and go through our books with a fine-tooth comb.’ He paused and tried to think of a way out of the ghastly mess. ‘Now you just go through and apologize and tell him it was an accident and perhaps …’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Lockhart. ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘I know it bloody wasn’t,’ yelled Mr Treyer. ‘I suppose if he had stuck his fucking head inside you’d have done the same.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Lockhart.

  ‘I don’t. Still, it’s a relief to know …’ Mr Treyer began but Lockhart ended what little relief he had known.

  ‘I would have kicked the door shut,’ he said.

  ‘Christ,’ said Mr Treyer, ‘it’s like living with a murderer.’

  That night the staff at Sandicott & Partner worked late transferring records to a Rent-A-Van to be taken to a barn in the country until the VAT storm was over. And next day Lockhart was taken off all accounting and given an office of his own.

  ‘From now on you will stay in there and if there is anything I think I can trust you not to make a hash of I’ll give it to you,’ said Mr Treyer. Lockhart sat at his desk and waited but it was four days before Mr Treyer could think of anything for him to do.

  ‘I’ve got to go to Hatfield,’ he said, ‘and there’s a Mr Stoppard coming in at twelve-thirty. I’ll be back by two so all I want you to do is to take him out and give him an expense-account lunch until I get back. That should be easy enough. Just buy him lunch. Right?’

  ‘Buy him lunch?’ said Lockhart. ‘Who pays?’

  ‘The firm pays, you fool. I said an expense-account lunch, didn’t I?’ He went away dejectedly but with the feeling that Lockhart could hardly make a total cock-up of a lunch with one of the firm’s oldest clients. Mr Stoppard was a reticent man at the best of times and, being a gourmet, seldom spoke during a meal. When Mr Treyer returned Mr Stoppard was voluble to a degree. Mr Treyer tried to appease him and having finally got rid of him sent for Lockhart.

  ‘What in the name of heaven made you take that bloody man to a fish and chip shop?’ he asked, trying to control his blood pressure.

  ‘Well, you said it was an expense-account lunch and we’d got to pay and I thought there was no point in wasting money so—’

  ‘Thought?’ yelled Mr Treyer, letting his blood pressure go to hell and gone. ‘Thought? And wasting money? What the hell do you think an expense-account lunch is for if it isn’t to waste money? The meal is tax-deductible.’

  ‘You mean the more a lunch costs the less we pay?’ said Lockhart.

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Mr Treyer, ‘that is precisely what I mean. Now the next time …’

  The next time Lockhart took a Leicester shoe manufacturer to the Savoy Grill and wined and dined him to the tune of £150, only to refuse to pay more than £5 when the bill was presented. It had taken the combined efforts of the shoe manufacturer and Mr Treyer, hastily summoned from a bout of flu, to persuade Lockhart to pay the £145 difference and make good the damage done to three tables and four waiters in the altercation that had ensued. After that Mr Treyer wrote to Mrs Flawse threatening to resign unless Lockhart was removed from the firm, and while waiting for a reply he barred Lockhart from leaving his office except to relieve himself.

  *

  But if Lockhart, to put it as mildly as modern parlance will allow, was having a job adjustment problem in Wheedle Street, his marriage proceeded as sweetly as it had started. And as chastely. What was lacking was not love – Lockhart and Jessica were passionlessly in love – but sex. The anatomical differences between males and females he had detected while gutting rabbits proved accurate in humans. He had balls and Jessica didn’t. Jessica had breasts, large ones at that, and he didn’t – or only of the most rudimentary kind. To complicate matters further, when they went to bed at night and lay in one another’s arms he had an erection and Jessica didn’t. The fact that he also had what are crudely termed ‘lovers’ balls’ and spent part of the night in agony he was too brave and gentlemanly to mention. They simply lay in one another’s arms and kissed. What happened after that he had no idea and Jessica had no idea either. Her mother’s determination to retard her age of maturity had succeeded as completely as had Mr Flawse’s equal determination that his grandson should inherit none of his mother’s sexual vices. To compound this ignorance Lockhart’s education, grounded in the most ancient of classical virtues, complemented Jessica’s taste for the sickliest of historical romances in which sex was never mentioned. Taken together, this fearful combination led them to idealize one another to the extent that it was impossible for Lockhart to conceive of doing anything more positive than worship Jessica and for Jessica to conceive at all. In brief, their marriage was never consummated and when after six weeks Jessica had he
r period rather more publicly than before, Lockhart’s first impulse was to phone for an ambulance. Jessica in some distress managed to deter him.

  ‘It happens once a month,’ she said, clutching a sanitary napkin to her with one hand while holding the phone down with the other.

  ‘It doesn’t,’ said Lockhart, ‘I’ve never bled like that in my life.’

  ‘To girls,’ said Jessica, ‘not to boys.’

  ‘I still say you ought to see a doctor,’ insisted Lockhart.

  ‘But it’s been going on for ever so long.’

  ‘All the more reason for seeing the doctor. It’s obviously something chronic.’

  ‘Well, if you insist,’ said Jessica. Lockhart did. And so one morning when Lockhart had gone to his lonely vigil in the office, Jessica visited the doctor.

  ‘My husband is worried about my bleeding,’ she said. ‘I told him not to be silly but he would insist.’

  ‘Your husband?’ said the doctor five minutes later, having discovered that Mrs Flawse was still a virgin. ‘You did say “your husband”?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jessica proudly, ‘his name is Lockhart. I think that’s a wonderful name, don’t you?’

  Dr Mannet considered the name, Jessica’s manifest attractions, and the possibility that Mr Flawse, far from having a locked heart, must have a padlocked penis not to have been driven sexually berserk by the proximity of such a beautiful wife. Having run through this sequence he assumed the air of a counsellor and leant on the desk to conceal his own physical reaction.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs Flawse,’ he said with an urgency that was impelled by the almost certain feeling that he was about to have a spontaneous emission, ‘has your husband never …’ He stopped and shuddered violently in his chair. Dr Mannet had. ‘I mean,’ he began again when the convulsion was over, ‘well … let me put it this way, have you refused to let him … er … touch you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Jessica who had watched the doctor’s throes with some concern, ‘we’re always kissing and cuddling.’

  ‘Kissing and cuddling,’ said Dr Mannet with a whimper. ‘Just kissing and … er … cuddling? Nothing more?’

  ‘More?’ said Jessica. ‘What more?’

  Dr Mannet looked despairingly into her angelic face. In a long career as a General Practitioner he had never been faced by such a beautiful woman who did not know that there was more to marriage than kissing and cuddling.

  ‘You don’t do anything else in bed?’

  ‘Well, we go to sleep, of course,’ said Jessica.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ murmured the doctor, ‘you go to sleep! And you do absolutely nothing else?’

  ‘Lockhart snores,’ said Jessica, thinking hard, ‘but I can’t think of anything else in particular.’

  Across the desk Dr Mannet could and did his damnedest not to.

  ‘And has no one ever explained where babies come from?’ he asked, lapsing into that nursery whimsy that seemed to emanate from Mrs Flawse.

  ‘Storks,’ said Jessica bluntly.

  ‘Stalks?’ echoed the doctor, whose own stalk was playing him up again.

  ‘Or herons. I forget which. They bring them in their beaks.’

  ‘Beaks?’ gurgled the doctor, now definitely back in the nursery.

  ‘In little cradles of cloth,’ continued Jessica, oblivious of the effect she was having. ‘They have these little cradles of cloth and they carry them in their beaks. Surely you’ve seen pictures of them. And their mummies are ever so pleased. Is something the matter?’

  But Dr Mannet was holding his head in his hands and staring at a prescription pad. He had shot his bolt again.

  ‘Mrs Flawse, dear Mrs Flawse,’ he whimpered when the crisis was past, ‘if you’ll just leave your telephone number … Better still, would you mind if I had a word with your husband, Lockprick …’

  ‘Hart,’ said Jessica, ‘Lockhart. You want him to come and see you?’

  Dr Mannet nodded feebly. He had always previously disapproved of the permissive society but just at that moment he had to admit that there were things to be said in its favour.

  ‘Just ask him to come and see me, will you? Excuse me for not rising. You know the way out.’

  Jessica went out and made an appointment for Lockhart. In the consulting-room Dr Mannet worked feverishly on his trousers and donned a white lab coat to cover the havoc Jessica had provoked.

  *

  But if Mrs Flawse had been a disturbing if pleasurable patient, her husband was even more disturbing and definitely not pleasurable. From the start he had eyed the doctor with dangerous suspicion brought on by Jessica’s account of Dr Mannet’s poking and prodding and general gynaecological curiosity. By the time Dr Mannet had spoken for five minutes the suspicion had gone and the danger doubled.

  ‘Are you suggesting,’ said Lockhart, with a grimness that made one of the more awful Aztec gods look positively amiable, ‘that I should intrude what you have chosen to call my penis into the person of my wife and that this intrusion should take place through the orifice between her legs?’

  Dr Mannet nodded. ‘More or less,’ he muttered, ‘though I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’

  ‘Which orifice,’ continued Lockhart more ferociously than ever, ‘being too small, will then split and cause her pain and suffering and …’

  ‘Only temporarily,’ said Dr Mannet, ‘and if you object I can always make a slight incision myself.’

  ‘Object?’ snarled Lockhart and grabbed the doctor by the tie. ‘If you think for one moment I’m going to let you touch my wife with your foul John Willie—’

  ‘Not my John Willie, Mr Flawse,’ gurgled the strangulated doctor, ‘with a scalpel.’

  It was an unwise suggestion. As Lockhart’s grip tightened Dr Mannet turned from puce to purple and was passing to black when Lockhart released his grip and hurled him back into his chair.

  ‘You come near my wife with a scalpel,’ he said, ‘and I’ll gut you like a dead rabbit and have your balls for breakfast.’

  Dr Mannet tried to get his voice back while considering this awful end. ‘Mr Flawse,’ he whispered finally, ‘if you will just bear with me a moment. The purpose of what I call your penis and what you prefer to regard as your John Willie is not solely to pass water. I hope I make myself plain.’

  ‘You do,’ said Lockhart. ‘Very plain, not to say downright ugly.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ continued the doctor. ‘Now in the course of your adolescence you must at one time or another have noticed that your pen— John Willie gave you pleasurable sensations.’

  ‘I suppose you could say that,’ said Lockhart grudgingly. ‘At night.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said the doctor. ‘At night you had wet dreams.’

  Lockhart admitted that he had had dreams and that the results had sometimes been wet.

  ‘Good,’ said the doctor, ‘now we’re getting somewhere. And in those dreams were you not conscious of an overwhelming desire for women?’

  ‘No,’ said Lockhart, ‘I most certainly wasn’t.’

  Dr Mannet shook his head carefully to rid himself of the feeling that he was dealing with some violent and wholly unconscious homosexual who having turned nasty once might turn murderous a second time. He trod warily.

  ‘Would you mind telling me what you did dream about?’

  Lockhart consulted his memory for a moment. ‘Sheep,’ he said finally.

  ‘Sheep?’ said Dr Mannet faintly. ‘You had wet dreams about sheep?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about the wet part,’ said Lockhart, ‘but I certainly dreamt about sheep a lot.’

  ‘And did you do anything to these sheep you dreamt about?’

  ‘Shot them,’ said Lockhart bluntly.

  Dr Mannet’s sense of unreality grew alarmingly. ‘You shot sheep in your sleep,’ he said with involuntary alliteration. ‘Is that what you’re slaying … saying?’

  ‘I shot them anyway,’ said Lockhart. ‘Wasn’t anything much else to shoot so I
took to potting them at fifteen hundred yards.’

  ‘Potting them?’ said the doctor, slipping paediatrically. ‘You potted sheep at fifteen hundred yards? Isn’t that a bit difficult?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to aim up and off a bit, but at that range they’ve got a running chance.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose they do,’ said the doctor, who wished he had. ‘And having potted them you then had spontaneous emissions about them?’

  Lockhart studied him with concern now mixed with his disgust. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘First you fiddle with my wife and then you ask me here and start talking about fucking sheep …’

  Dr Mannet seized on the expression. ‘Ah,’ he said, heading for bestiality, ‘so having shot sheep you fucked them?’

  ‘Did I?’ said Lockhart, who had picked up the six-letter word from Mr Treyer, who used it frequently in its seven-letter variety when speaking to or about Lockhart. It was usually suffixed by idiot.

  ‘Well, you should know,’ said Dr Mannet.

  ‘I may have done,’ said Lockhart, who didn’t. ‘Anyway, afterwards we had them for dinner.’

  Dr Mannet shuddered. Much more of these appalling revelations and he would be in need of therapy himself.

  ‘Mr Flawse,’ he said, determined to change the subject, ‘what you did or did not do with sheep is beside the point. Your wife consulted me because she said you were concerned about her menstrual discharge …’

  ‘I was concerned about her bleeding,’ said Lockhart.

  ‘Quite so, her monthly period. We call it menstruation.’

  ‘I call it bloody horrible,’ said Lockhart. ‘And worrying.’

  So did Dr Mannet but he took pains not to say so. ‘Now the facts are simply these. Every woman—’