The Throwback Read Free

and when finally Lockhart rose and lifted her chair back for her and then for Jessica, she went down to her cabin with her daughter in a state of social ecstasy.
    ‘What a very nice young man,’ she said. ‘Such charming manners and so well brought up.’
    Jessica said nothing. She did not want to spoil the savour of her feelings by revealing them. She had been overwhelmed by Lockhart but in a different way to her mother. If Lockhart represented a social world to which Mrs Sandicott aspired, to Jessica he was the very soul of romance. And romance was all in all to her. She hadlistened to his description of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg, and had garnished each word with a new significance that came from the romantic novels with which she had filled the emptiness of her adolescence. It was an emptiness that amounted to vacuity.
*
    At eighteen Jessica Sandicott was endowed with physical charms beyond her control and an innocence of mind that was both the fault and despair of her mother. To be more precise, her innocence resulted from the late Mr Sandicott’s will in which he had left all twelve houses in Sandicott Crescent ‘to my darling daughter, Jessica, on her reaching the age of maturity’. To his wife he bequeathed Sandicott & Partner, Chartered Accountants and Tax Consultants, of Wheedle Street in the City of London. But the late Mr Sandicott’s will had bequeathed more than these tangible assets. It had left Mrs Sandicott with a sense of grievance and the conviction that her husband’s premature death at the age of forty-five was proof positive that she had married no gentleman, the proof of his ungentlemanliness lying in his failure to depart this world at least ten years earlier when she was still at a reasonably remarriageable age, or, failing that, to have left her his entire fortune. From this misfortune Mrs Sandicott had formed two resolutions. The first was that her next husband would be a very rich man with a life expectancy of as few years as possible and preferablywith a terminal illness; the second to see that Jessica reached the age of maturity as slowly as a religious education could delay. So far she had failed in her first objective and only partly succeeded in her second.
    Jessica had been to several convents, and the plural was indicative of her mother’s partial failure. At the first she had developed a religious fervour of such pronounced proportions that she had decided to become a nun and subtract her own worldly possessions by adding them to those of the Order. Mrs Sandicott had removed her precipitately to a less persuasive convent and for a time things looked distinctly brighter. Unfortunately, so did several nuns. Jessica’s angelic face and innocence of soul had so combined that four nuns fell madly in love with her and the Mother Superior, to save their souls, had requested that Jessica’s disturbing influence be removed. Mrs Sandicott’s self-evident argument that she wasn’t to blame for her daughter’s attractions and that if anyone ought to be expelled it was the lesbian nuns cut no ice with the Mother Superior.
    ‘I do not blame the child. She was made to be loved,’ she said with suspicious emotion and in direct contradiction to Mrs Sandicott’s views on the subject. ‘She will make some good man a wonderful wife.’
    ‘Knowing men rather more intimately than I hope you do,’ riposted Mrs Sandicott, ‘she will marry the first scoundrel who asks her.’
    It was a fatefully accurate prediction. To protect her daughter from temptation and to maintain her ownfinancial income from the rents of the houses in Sandicott Crescent, Mrs Sandicott had confined Jessica to her home and a correspondence course in typing. By the time Jessica reached eighteen it was still impossible to say of her that she had reached the age of maturity. If anything she had regressed and while Mrs Sandicott supervised the running of Sandicott & Partner, the partner being a Mr