Read The Throwback for Free Online Page B

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 pressurego 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 provedaccurate 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 her 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