The throwback [antikvár]

Chapter one It could be said of Lockhart Flawse when he carried his bride, Jessica, née Sandicott, across the threshold of 12 Sandicott Crescent, East Pursley, Surrey, that he was entering into married life with as little preparedness for its hazards and happiness as he had entered the world at five past seven on Monday, 6 September 1956, promptly killing his mother in the process. Since Miss Flawse had steadfastly refused to name his father even on the stinging nettles that composed her deathbed and had spent the hour of his delivery and her departure alternately wailing and shouting 'Great Scotľ, it had devolved upon his grand-father to name the infant Lockhart after the great Scott's bio-grapher and, at some risk to his own reputation, to allow Lockhart to assume the surname Flawse for the time being. From that moment Lockhart had been allowed to assume nothing, not even a birth certificate. Old Mr Flawse had seen to that. If his daughter had been so obviously devoid of social discretion as to give birth to a bastard under a dry-stone wall while out cub-hunting, which dry-stone wall her horse had, more sensibly than she, refused, Mr Flawse was determined to ensure that his grandson grew up with none of his mother's faults. He had succeeded. At eighteen Lockhart knew as little about sex as his mother had known or cared about con-traception. His life had been spent under the care of several housekeepers and later half a dozen tutors, the former chosen for their willingness to endure the bed and board of old Mr Flawse, and the latter for their other-worldliness. Since Flawse Hall was situated on Flawse Feil close under Flawse Rigg some seventeen miles from the nearest town and on the bleakest expanse of moorland north of the Roman Wall, only the most desperate of housekeepers and other-worldly of tutors accepted the situation for long. There were other rigours than the natural. Mr Flawse was an extremely irritable man and the succession of tutors who had provided Lockhart with the most particular of generál educations had done so under the strict proviso that Ovid was not to be included among the classics and that literatúre was to be dispensed with entirely.