The Possessions of a Lady

by Jonathan Gash

  But Vyna Dill, in fashion? Viktor Who?

  'How come you know so much fashion stuff, love?'

  'You sent me on a course to the V & A Museum, South Kensington, on materials in antiques.'

  'Er, aye.' I'd forgetten. I'd wanted to get rid of Lydia for a while because of Janie Markham. 'To educate us in fashion.'

  We made the street market with half an hour to spare. I was past concealment.

  23

  Aldridge market is long and thin, fifty stalls petering out between shops. We parked in a place marked Deputy Mayor ONLY. I nicked a 'Disabled' sticker from another car ('Lovejoy! How dare you! Such wanton ...!')

  'Who in the market, love?'

  'It was verbal only, no names, no note.'

  'Look,' I said. 'Pretend you're not with me.'

  She muttered, but obeyed. I walked down the crowded market. No shops names I recognised, no decent antiques, no Maerklin tinner. I saw Lydia at a haberdashery, ignored her, drifted on, felt my chest. Eleven o'clock came. Nil.

  Only one thing to do. I did a despondent shrug, asked a few stallholders if they'd any antiques, the usual. Still nil. There's a market clock, the only antique in the place, but too solidly stuck to be nicked.

  Then, moving off, I saw it. On one of the stalls was a photo of the Lepanto, my tinner, propped against some Wellingtons. It definitely hadn't been there minutes before. I pushed through, looking.

  'Is that for sale?' I asked the stallholder.

  'Eh? No, mate. Young lassie left it, said her brother would come for it. That you?'

  'Er, aye. Ta.' I gave him a note, took the picture. 'Sure it was her?'

  'Blondie, a bit of all right.' He grinned. 'Got your work cut out, the boys after her, eh?'

  'True, right enough.' I did a lot of grinning. On the reverse, Sold today. M/CTM. tomorrow.

  The tinner had been flogged, then. M/C is Manchester. TM, though? I went through the market, saw Lydia look sharply at the photo in my hand as I passed. Then I ran to the council offices cursing. Vyna would be watching to see I'd got the message. Nobody.

  Lydia had arranged to meet me in Aldridge library, if all failed. I went into a tavern facing. The barman glanced at my photo, smiled.

  'Lot of them about today.'

  I feigned surprise. 'Bought it off a barrow.'

  'Girl had one just like it, waiting here for her brother. Aussie. I'm good with accents.' Vyna, lurking here, peering.

  'I collect old pictures. She still about?'

  'No. Notice dolly-birds go for older men?'

  It took time, but I got it out of him. She'd been with a flashy older bloke. No, the barman hadn't caught his name. He ended up being suspicious. I told Lydia all this when we met up. I got a newspaper. It seemed that somebody was dead, half a column inch, a fill-in by a tired stringer. Foul play was not suspected. The deceased ran a film enthusiasts' shop. That was all the world could manage for Spoolie, requiescat in pace. We left Aldridge.

  Manchester, not a million miles from where I was born. Odd, but the wayward lass had travelled north-west. Map the trek, it pointed to Lancashire. Hadn't she just been there, though?

  'She could've just asked Tinker. He'd have gone north like a lamb. So why this obliquity?' I wasn't sure of the word, but it sounded sly.

  'Lovejoy,' Lydia said. 'I am fatigued. Can we sleep in a decent hotel?' She caught my stare and quickly corrected, 'Hotels, near Piccadilly Square. We can walk to the museum.'

  'Museum?' I pulled the old motor to the verge.

  'Manchester Textile Museum,' said this wonder. 'The message on the photo.'

  'Right.' I pretended to have known all along. 'Sorry. Thought I saw somebody I knew.' And drove north.

  •••

  Here's a tip: Never go back, never ever cubed. Old schools, old loves. Never.

  That old girlfriend you once loved to distraction. Should you ring her after all these years, suggest you meet, hoping for the same old passion? Don't do it.

  Or you're now maybe a respectable housewife, remembering that bloke, some past holiday. And you've accidentally (ho, ho, ho) kept his address. Temptation nudges, you're at a loose end. Children off to school, you can't settle. Why not phone, casual, oh good heavens, I must have dialled the wrong number, can it really be you? Then it's, 'Well, I will be near the Haymarket tomorrow . . .' And your heart's a steam-hammer as you put the phone down and what'll you wear and where is the Haymarket, how long before the family get home . . . Exciting stuff? Don't do it. It'll end in tears.

  Please, I don't mean don't have a fling. I'm all for love. Wherever it flourishes, let it be. But that's love. It's not nostalgia. Nostalgia's fine in its bottle, but don't ever take the cork out.

  Example: this housewife. Married eight years, thirty-two. Sees a gorgeous actress. Hey! I was at school with her! She broods. Is she missing out on life? Recalls a bloke she once knew. Out comes that old address book (ho, ho, ho), arranges to meet him, lunch at the Royal Academy, posh nosh should-auld-acquaintance-be-forgot. An enjoyable encounter is had by all three. For, horrors, the uncomprehending Adrian brings his missus, who (of course she would be, the cow) is an attractive expert on Tiepolo . . . See? Catastrophe. Will our housewife ever sleep again? Unlikely. Her ghastly error was mistaking nostalgia for passion, and uncorking nostalgia.

  Example Two, though, is happier: this housewife, and all that. Married, etc., sees actress. Hey! School, broods, missing out on life, etc. Thinks, sod this for a game of soldiers. Joins a library/rambling/study/music club. And guess what? Shares cars, club outings. Friendship blooms, a bloke she fancies. Soon it's passionate rejoicing with dot-dot-dot and waves on the sand and heavenly violins. She isn't past it at all! High marks for cool.

  Just before you dash off a vitriolic letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury saying I'm advocating unbridled promiscuity, I'm not. I'm saying be honest. If you're going for it, go with care. Let a thousand fragrant flowers bloom, sure, but don't talk yourself into something that isn't. Love is not nostalgia. Why not? Because nostalgia's nostalgia. Love is love.

  The implication is never go back. Your school's changed. Streets have gone. That lovely girl's now a hateful woman. The scraggy little specky lass you scorned is now a famed beauty. The yokel you laughed at owns the county.

  It's the same in antiques. There's a current move to send every antique back. Where to? Why, to its roots! The Elgin Marbles, Leonardo's works, Egyptian artefacts, Russian ikons, French Impressionists to Paris . . . Politicians, noble as ever, jump on the bandwagon, hoping they're creating an impression, which of course they unerringly manage.

  It's gaining ground, this back-to-roots. I mistrust people yelling that their idea's justice, right. Political rectitude has a foul record. I don't know the rights and wrongs of things, because I'm basically thick, but should antiques go home?

  Sometimes, yes. Like, the Israelis pinched whatever they wanted between 1968 and the early Seventies, and then gave them back to Egypt. Good. I'm glad the tombstones they nicked from Sinai in 1956 are going home too. Those funereal lamps, vases, steles are worth a mint, but back they've gone, those 1,000 crates of Sinai Peninsula antiquities. Gold stars to all concerned. Mamluk, Nabatean, Roman artefacts, the lot, representing from about 4000 b. c. to the Middle Ages. Some regarded those antiques as sheer loot. Others pretended it was legitimate archaeology aimed at finding proof (they failed, incidentally) of those tiresome blokes wandering the Sinai Desert for those yawnsome forty years. There are two dozen peaks that Moses might have strolled up, the day he did the deal, but so?

  It's not always clear-cut. Is Holy Mother Russia of the Czars the same country as Russia now? If not, can contemporary Russia claim all the Faberge eggs, so famed, so craved? If Faberge'd stayed in St Petersburg they might well have executed him. How can we say where his original loyalty should lie? I can understand the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art cleverly settling out of court, after that terribly bitter legal joust, and reluctantly sending back the Lydian Hoard of
priceless gold and silver artefacts to Turkey. Receivers of nicked goods don't want legal precedent hanging round their gallery's neck, right? Turkey is stubborn these days, has its sights firmly set on those wealthy New York galleries that display looted relics. And everybody knows where they were ripped from their moorings in South Turkey.

  There's an International Convention, to prove that comedy isn't dead. The hilarious Hague Convention of 1954 ('for the Protection of Cultural Property') is a laugh a minute. Occupying powers must, it avows, protect antiquities and not sell, steal, loot, remove, pinch, or allow to be nicked, any and all. Good, eh? So nobody must do what is currently happening in Thailand, Cambodia, South America, the USA, Russia, the former Soviets, South-East Asia, the Middle East, Central America, Italy, Cyprus . . . Stop it, everybody.

  Political nostalgia is the enemy of common sense. The priceless Dead Sea Scrolls belong(ed) to Jordan, but the Rockefeller Museum hasn't given them back. Fine to argue that the Elgin Marbles should 'go back' to Greece, but they were bought originally from Turkey. And legitimately paid for. Return them, to corrode like the ones left in situ? It's a problem. God knows what the answer is, except He doesn't.

  If we all stopped secretly paying tomb robbers to nick antiques, there'd be no argument.

  As long as money is the prize, everybody's in there. Not long since, headlines blazed Four Countries Tussle For Priam's Treasure] because the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was a lying rat. He whipped priceless chalices, breastplates, death-masks, from ancient Troy in western Turkey in 1873, and gave King Priam's treasure to Berlin, Prussia. He said he'd paid the Ottomans 50,000 francs. In 1945, the 9,000 priceless gold antiques were entombed in concrete beneath Berlin's Zoo station, and got collared by the Soviets. Greece lays no claim. Turkey does. Germany does. Russia does, and has them. They could settle in an afternoon over a cup of tea, but no. That would be a precedent, then where would loot be? Loot gives theft a bad name.

  Glad that's settled. Where was I? Saying never go back to your past.

  So I did.

  24

  A trouble shared is a trouble halved, they say. In antiques, a trouble shared is a trouble doubled. If it's with Lydia, quadrupled.

  My part of the North is stolid, grimy, impervious to analysis. The South regards it as uncouth, inescapably grim, always raining, a subnation of crude comics whose intellect is par with amoebae and whose wit is lavatorial. The North, to some, is football hooligans and brash shabby girls squabbling in slums between murky mill walls.

  That's one view. It's wrong.

  Lydia's opinion was expressed as we thundered up Trinity Street past the railway station of my home town some miles from Manchester. It was dark.

  'Lovejoy, how depressing. Can't we find somewhere else?'

  'I'm looking for a place to hide this crate.'

  'Why don't we simply park it in Manchester? That's where we've to meet this wretched girl.'

  Left then right, and into Nile Street. Jesus, but they'd obliterated the dark satanic mills' great chimneys. They'd shifted the station clock tower, but this? Most of the houses were gone. In the bleak neons the area seemed utterly stark.

  'Thank God. Still there.'

  The derelict garages where we played football were intact, rickety doors askew. I picked the padlock, old habits dying hard. I drove the Braithwaite in. Lydia squealed.

  'Lovejoy! Something's squeaking!'

  'Probably you, love.' I'd had enough. 'Places have mice.'

  We went out into the night. I padlocked the door after me. I could get to Manchester early, meet Vyna Dill, have a parents-want-you showdown, then suss out some local antiques.

  We started walking, Lydia working up to cut out. If she didn't, I'd ditch her.

  'This town, Lovejoy. It's the Mass Observation place, isn't it?'

  Here comes the second view.

  Back in the Thirties, some academic Yanks searched the world for 'the archetypal slum'. They found one, perfect. They trumpeted their achievement, got a 'research' fortune. They developed this technique. Get people to write in about themselves, year after endless year. They compiled a masterpiece, tell the world 'about slum life'.

  It's all nonsense. I was nearly adult when I came across it in a library one wet afternoon. They meant my home town! I asked my Gran. She sniffed, 'They asked me and Gramp. They couldn't understand us not having stamp money for a fortnightly letter.'

  'See?' I explained this to Lydia as we walked. 'The research is worthless. Only the affluent could afford to write in.'

  'It's still not very savoury, Lovejoy.'

  For just a second I paused. She too halted.

  'Yes? What, Lovejoy?'

  We were plodding in drizzle. Some countries would pay God for a single day of our wet. It was no use. Lydia saw only gaunt factories, skeletal rafters where streets were being obliterated. Terraced houses clung together begrimed, barely a window lit. Her opinion was a predetermined vision. But where Lydia saw ugliness, I saw only beauty. It's as people view a woman. Lydia thinks Aureole a slut, and I don't.

  'Nothing.' We resumed. 'Mind your footing.' The pavement was tilted where an excavator's great wheels had crushed the flagstones.

  'Imagine, Lovejoy! People must have lived here before they started redevelopment!'

  Not they. We, me. Not scores, thousands. The area was the size of ten football pitches. I said nothing more, just walked on, her arm linked with mine, into the bright lighting of Bradshawgate. Very soon, there will be a northern archaeology boom bigger than anything since the Egyptology explosion of the twentieth century. Back then, every museum worth a groat had to have a mummy and a slice of Pharaoh's hieroglyphics. Yet before long, they'll go berserk with aerial photography, topographical surveys of fantastic precision—to pinpoint our streets, mills, sawyers' yards, all our industries that progress couldn't get rid of fast enough.

  So dig out your great-grannies' baubles, your grandads' bowls, pipes, clogs. Better yet, look them out now, while your Nellie's not slung them in a mad-mood spring-clean. Write down everything you can remember, their workplace stories, their boring tales, dances, songs, what they paid for food. You'll weep tears of regret otherwise, and regret is the most useless human emotion.

  An hour later, I was in the Man and Scythe. Lydia, in the Swan. I didn't sleep, just sat listening to the dialect from the taproom below. Even if I couldn't have Lydia, selfish cow, I was in a state of bliss once-removed. Home. Mistake, but here I was.

  Come morning, I'd get shot of Lydia. Lovely, but now a liability, a thousand leagues away while I lay alone. I'd not had a bird for years. Well, less than that, but I couldn't help thinking of Lizbet among all those blossoms in East Anglia's fair land.

  Yet in a way I was crazy over Lydia, estranged as we were. I once knew a middle-aged actress, pretty famous, and said ta when leaving. She fell about.

  'Silly!' she laughed. 'I was forty before I realised that it's not how you look when you say your lines that matters. It's how you say your lines when you say your lines.'

  'Oh?' I'd responded, puzzled. She was voluptuous, dreamy, worn out.

  'It's what a woman does, not how she looks. Don't tell other women. They'd hate me for saying it.'

  This particular night, God, but I believed her.

  The only remedy for woman-hunger is an antique, and vice versa. The ideal is both together. Try to do without women, you starve. Do without antiques, you die anyway. I'd discovered that when Amy took me in hand.

  Dreams are worse than dreams. My mind seized its chance, surrendered to memory. I was in a great house, long ago doing my first robbery of my first antique.

  Once, there was childhood. Nowadays, there's no such thing. It went out with innocence.

  Amy was a thin little lass in my class. It was those days before nuns grew legs, hips, and handbags, when you could understand adverts, when drugs were teaspoons of medicine for Grampa's chest. Girls dutifully went backwards at dances, and sober lads danced forwards. In clogs, we
lads marched into school with Sister St Union playing the March of the Slaves from Aida. The little girls threw non-existent flowers from nonexistent baskets, tripping lightly through nonexistent forest glades. School, my infant mind instantly registered on my first day, was pretence. My first morning, a grey-haired old teacher, Miss Best, told me she'd taught my mother and my grandma, same school. I didn't believe her, because I was four years old, and Ma and Gran were, I'd supposed, older. Pretence!

  We evolved. Morality being morality, sex was a threat to the authorities. Segregated at seven, in case any of us matured early and went ape, we got Miss Smith. She thrashed desks with a cane, thundering, 'Do you want to starve without a job? Then learn! Came teens, we dispersed to earn our crusts. My first slurpy astonished kiss came complete with Amy's instructions ('Lips together, now suck'). My very first robbery also came complete with instructions.

  Thirteen years old, give or take, Amy met me coming out of the pictures. She'd been smoking, jauntily going to the bad. She now looked smiley and mischievous. She asked if I'd help her to 'carry something.'

  'We have to get it first,' was her tale. 'From Scout Hey.'

  'Is it okay to?' Cowards know when something's not right. Moorland was fearsome wilderness, without streets, foundries, civilisation.

  'Course it is!' she said. 'My uncle said I am to. He's in Africa.'

  'Whereabouts in Africa?'

  She said crossly, ‘I don't know. Stop picking!'

  She promised to teach me how to suck tongues. My doubts evaporated.

  We went up the moorland road. Houses petered out, and lights. Back then, you didn't mind walking an hour to somewhere. She chatted. I went, 'Oh, aye.' There was a shifty moonlight.

  Scout Hey was a sombre house, grey stones, an overgrown garden within tilted iron railings. Stones had fallen from the drystone walls. Nearby, a disused chapel. Amy stumbled ahead to search near the door. I recognised pretence, all my schooling.