Free The Throwback by Tom Sharpe

fresh milk and warm blood, baked bread and hung pheasant, all those necessities of the harsh life the Flawses had led since the house first was built. He was part of that musk and shared its ancestry. But now there was a new ingredient come to the home and one he had no mind to like.
    Nor after a glum dinner had Mr Flawse when he and Mrs Flawse retired to a cold bedroom and a featherbed redolent of damp and too recently plucked chicken. Outside the wind whistled in the chimneys and from the kitchen there came the faint wail of Mr Dodd’s Northumbrian pipes as he played ‘Edward, Edward’. It seemed an appropriate ballad for the evil hour. Upstairs Mr Flawse knelt by the bed.
    ‘O Lord—’ he began, only to be interrupted by his wife.
    ‘There’s no point in your asking forgiveness,’ she said. ‘You’re not coming near me until we’ve first come to an understanding.’
    The old man regarded her balefully from the floor, ‘Understanding? What understanding, ma’am?’
    ‘A clear understanding that you will have this house modernized as quickly as possible and that until such time I shall return to my own home and the comforts to which I have been accustomed. I didn’t marry you to catch my death of pneumonia.’
    Mr Flawse lumbered to his feet. ‘And I didn’t marry you,’ he thundered, ‘to have my household arrangements dictated to me by a chit of a woman.’
    Mrs Flawse pulled the sheet up round her neck defiantly. ‘And I won’t be shouted at,’ she snapped back. ‘I am not a shit of a woman. I happen to be a respectable …’
    A fresh wail of wind in the chimney and the fact that Mr Flawse had picked up a poker from the grate stopped her.
    ‘Respectable, are ye? And what sort of respectable woman is it that marries an old man for his money?’
    ‘Money?’ said Mrs Flawse, alarmed at this fresh evidence that the old fool wasn’t such an old fool after all. ‘Who said anything about money?’
    ‘I did,’ roared Mr Flawse. ‘You proposed and I disposed and if you imagine for one moment that I didn’t know what you were after you’re sadly misguided.’
    Mrs Flawse resorted to the stratagem of tears. ‘At least I thought you were a gentleman,’ she whimpered.
    ‘Aye, you did that. And more fool you,’ said the old man, as livid as his red flannel gown. ‘And tears will get you nowhere. You made it a condition of the bastard’s marrying your numbskull daughter that you were to bemy wife. Well, you have made your bed, now you must lie in it.’
    ‘Not with you,’ said Mrs Flawse. ‘I’d rather die.’
    ‘And well you may, ma’am, well you may. Is that your last word?’
    Mrs Flawse hesitated and made a mental calculation between the threat, the poker and her last word. But there was still stubbornness in her Sandicott soul.
    ‘Yes,’ she said defiantly.
    Mr Flawse hurled the poker into the grate and went to the door. ‘Ye’ll live to rue the day you said that, ma’am,’ he muttered malevolently, and left.
    Mrs Flawse lay back exhausted by her defiance and then with a final effort got out of bed and locked the door.

6
    Next morning after a fitful night Mrs Flawse came downstairs to find the old man closeted in his sanctum and a note on the kitchen table telling her to make her own breakfast. A large pot of porridge belched glutinously on the stove and having sampled its contents she contented herself with a pot of tea and some bread and marmalade. There was no sign of Mr Dodd. Outside in the yard the grey products of Mr Flawse’s experiments in canine eugenics lolled about in the wintry sunshine. Avoiding them by going out of the kitchen door, Mrs Flawse made her way round the garden. Enclosed by the high wall against the wind and weather, it was not unattractive. Some earlier Flawse had built greenhouses and a kitchen garden and Capability Flawse, whose portrait hung on the landing wall, had created a miniature southern landscape in the half-acre not devoted to vegetables.