The Throwback by Tom Sharpe

Author:Tom Sharpe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Humorous Stories, Fiction:Humour, Mystery & Detective, Satire, Fiction, England, Modern fiction, Landlord and tenant, Landownes, General, Landowners
ISBN: 9780099435525
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1978-05-31T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

But on at least two points the old man was wrong. Lockhart was leaving nothing to providence. While Mrs Flawse cowered in the darkness of the banqueting hall and wondered at the remarkable insight he had shown into the workings of her own mind and hands, Lockhart climbed the stone turret to the first storey and then by way of wooden ladders up on to the battlements. There he found Mr Dodd casting his one good eye over the landscape with a fondness for its bleak and forbidding aspect that was somehow in keeping with his own character. A rugged man in a dark and rugged world, Mr Dodd was a servant without servility. He had no brief for fawning or the notion that the world owed him a living. He owed his living to hard work and a provoked cunning that was as far removed from Mrs Flawse's calculation as Sandicott Crescent was from Flawse Fell. And if any man had dared despise him for a servant he would have told him to his face that in his case the servant was master to the man before demonstrating with his fists the simple truth that he was a match for any man, be he master, servant or drunken braggart. In short Mr Dodd was his own man and went his own way. That his own way was that of old Mr Flawse sprang from their mutual disrespect. If Mr Dodd allowed the old man to call him Dodd, he did so in the knowledge that Mr Flawse was dependent on him and that for all his authority and theoretical intelligence he knew less about the real world and its ways than did Mr Dodd. It was thus with an air of condescension that he lay on his side in the drift mine and hewed coal from a two-foot seam and carried scuttles of it to the old man's study to keep him warm. It was with the same certainty of his own worth and superiority in all things that he and his dog herded sheep on the fells and saw to the lambing in the snow. He was there to protect them and he was there to protect Mr Flawse and if he fleeced the one of wool, he fed and housed himself upon the other and let no one come between them.

'You'll have scared the wits out of the woman,' he said when Lockhart climbed on to the roof, 'but it will not last. She'll have your inheritance if you do not act swift.'

'That's what I've come to ask you, Mr Dodd,' said Lockhart. 'Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew could remember none of my mother's friends. She must have had some.' 'Aye, she did,' said Mr Dodd stirring on the parapet. 'Then can you tell me who they were? I've got to start the search for my father somewhere."

Mr Dodd said nothing for some moments. 'You might inquire of Miss Deyntry down over Farspring way,' he said at last.

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