Faces in the Pool

by Jonathan Gash

  This narked me. We keep Woody’s caff secret from punters. Paltry’s treachery was a dead liberty. Now even the Sloven Oven was unsafe. She made to sit in Lear’s chair. I stopped her.

  ‘That’s for friends.’

  She appraised Chloe. ‘What are you staring at?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Chloe has superb logic. ‘I’m blind.’

  Laura didn’t even blink. ‘Tough.’ She turned to me, suddenly a hell of a lot harder. ‘Well, Lovejoy? Prison or money?’

  The Sloven Oven’s clientele held its collective breath at the world’s most sacred word, money.

  ‘You must do a test first.’

  ‘Headache, Lovejoy?’ Chloe said, rummaging in her handbag. ‘Lear said you’ve a zinger coming on. Paracetamol?’

  ‘I’ll be OK, love.’ I stood and told Chloe and Lear so-long and ta for the nosh. Laura looked puzzled at my double farewell but followed me out.

  ‘My limo will be along in a moment, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Cars can’t come down this alley.’ It was no-entry.

  ‘Rules do not apply to money.’

  A saloon motor the size of an Alp glided up and parked, Ellen Jaynor at the wheel. A smirking traffic warden touched his cap.

  Laura saw my hesitation. ‘In, Lovejoy. You’ve no choice.’

  I got in, leant back and closed my eyes. Julius Caesar, no less, invented the world’s first off-street parking laws, but not for the moneyed, I supposed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  honest: genuine (of an antique, trade slang)

  Sitting on a newspaper stops travel sickness, but no luck in the limo.

  ‘Do a successful test, we’ll pay you well.’

  ‘And if I fail?’

  She smiled. Ellen smiled. I distrust smiles. A university recently tested women’s intuition. Men spotted false smiles better by a whopping seventy-two per cent.

  ‘Then it’s back to prison, Lovejoy.’ They laughed. Laughs can’t be trusted either.

  We floated to the Donkey & Buskin, a quiet tavern near the estuary. We went to an upstairs room. Old Mr Smethirst was there.

  ‘Wotcher, Lovejoy,’ he said. ‘I guessed it might be you.’ He gestured to the table. ‘Best I could get, son. Will they do?’

  ‘Dunno yet, Smethie.’

  ‘Seven items, as you instructed, lady.’ Smethie was all anxious.

  ‘Get out,’ Laura commanded. He obeyed.

  So Laura must be new money. People who get a massive windfall cloak uncertainty with bullying. The most obvious giveaway, though, is they are deliberately rude.

  Remember a certain prime minister? His millionairess wife was ‘a true socialist’, her phrase, who sat down before the Queen at a banquet. The PM was worse, and plonked himself into the Queen’s place. Her Maj smilingly showed no umbrage, and the festival went swimmingly. Except the entire nation squirmed. My knees itched. For the first time, suspicions surfaced that the ‘golden couple’ might actually be prats. I’m not being political here, just felt the same when Smethie got the heave-ho. As old as my dad, so why treat him like dirt?

  Laura inspected the antiques. I seriously didn’t like her. Two wrongs don’t make a right, three wrongs make a blight, four make a fright. And it wasn’t even teatime.

  She told me to get started. A kulak from the bar below brought tea and biscuits. The two women poured for themselves. I felt I’d seen them before. I’m good with faces.

  ‘They are from Gimbert’s auction, Lovejoy. Identify each one.’

  The collection needed only a glance before I hopped it, downstairs and out. Once there, I didn’t know what to do. Old Smethie had gone. I sat on the wall. Feet sounded on the gravel. Ellen and Laura appeared, spitting feathers.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Laura. I can stand anything except bad manners and dirty forks. And you.’

  ‘I’ll have you in gaol.’

  ‘Then get on with it, missus. I’m sick of the sight of you.’

  Silence for a second. Ellen Jaynor asked, ‘Do you want a drink, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Sod off, missus. I’m well narked.’

  A motor arrived and students raced shouting into the pub.

  ‘Are the antiques worthless, then?’

  I said, ‘The poster’s not worth much, say a week’s holiday.’

  It had been an old music-hall bill. You still see some on forgotten hoardings. It showed a stout Victorian lady entertainer.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘A tip, missus: fame isn’t value. It’s public whim.’ Or was whim the same as fame? I felt so tired. ‘The poster lady. She was a fat, drunken tart. All London laughed at her. She is the most talked-about corpse on earth.’

  They were all attention. ‘Dr Crippen is the most visited effigy in Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks. Cora Crippen’s posters aren’t worth much.’

  ‘Would you have bid for it?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘I’m broke,’ I said with bitterness. ‘A six-sheet sized poster of Jane Russell’s 1943 film The Outlaw would be worth something. Christie’s sold the only surviving one for the price of a house.’

  They glanced at each other, Laura making notes.

  ‘Look, missus. Those priceless antiques were dross.’ I wanted to go. I had a life to lead.

  ‘And the wall mask?’

  ‘It isn’t antique. And any forger can do Clarice Cliff.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Laura asked quietly. She was learning.

  ‘The orange colour’s too thin, and Clarice Cliff’s glaze is honey-coloured, not grey. She painted with a loaded brush. Some idiot will still buy it.’

  ‘Examine the rest, Lovejoy.’

  ‘No.’ Not one had made me feel strange, so they were all modern or forgeries. ‘I’d rather have gaol than you.’

  I started walking. Laura spoke loudly after me. ‘Would you marry again, Lovejoy?’

  A couple at one of the trestles had been bored. Now they focused.

  ‘I have a proposal.’

  Did she mean a proposition? ‘Are you going to kneel?’

  Laura linked her arm through mine and walked me to an arbour overhung with Lancelot floribundas. Out of earshot of the couple, I noticed. I watched the two women warily, like I concentrate on stage magicians when I try to spot dwarves and mirrors.

  ‘What if marriage was necessary for you to carry out the perfect antiques scam?’ Laura was polite now. Money makes saints of us all.

  Wearily I shook my headache. ‘You’ve had your laugh, missus. I’m going home.’

  ‘Don’t you want to own millions, Lovejoy?’ Women are cunning. They use logic just when you think you’ve got them. ‘Whatever we make on the antiques, you keep.’

  ‘Marriage?’ I wondered if I’d heard wrong. ‘Me?’

  ‘Once the robbery is done, the marriage will be dissolved instantly.’

  Marriage and robbery? ‘It’s against the law.’

  ‘Lawyers can do anything.’

  A man has only one marriage in him, but a woman can use marriages as stepping-stones across life’s river.

  ‘Who to?’

  Laura’s colour heightened. ‘Me. Divorce follows the very next day.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a false wedding.’

  ‘Never heard of a marriage of convenience, Lovejoy? There is no risk.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Money does.’ Laura was all confidence. ‘It will bring my ex out from hiding. He’s gone to ground, but will emerge if he learns I’m to marry a divvy. That means you.’

  Ellen chipped in. ‘Still unsure? Railways use the law to ban innocent trainspotters. Parliament legally arrested a poet for reading a few names. People are suing the TV weather girl for predicting rain last Good Friday. Law,’ said this paragon of social order, ‘does what money tells it.’

  Money was a big plus. I know I’m pathetic. I still couldn’t see honesty in those smiles.

  I found myself being walked to the car past the staring cou
ple. Life was safer in gaol than outside. I’ve often found that.

  A point here: I live for antiques. The world to me has only three groups. First – and most hated – are auctioneers. They are rich because they charge us Value Added Tax, and commission which they decide. Second – and poorest – are dealers, who scrape a living hunting old tat and dream of finding a Gainsborough for ten pence. Every year, half of us go bankrupt or get gaoled. But all dealers know, or know of, each other. Third come the millions known as the ‘honest old public’, though there’s no such thing. Money and greed banish truth and trust.

  I’m one of the second lot – broke, a scrounger, but always full of dazzling dreams.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  bobbins: rubbish, worthless (Cockney slang)

  The limo dropped me in the lane. I called ta, glad to see the back of them.

  A For Sale notice? My cottage was boarded up.

  The place is ramshackle pargeted walls and a rusty gate. My Austin Ruby corrodes in undergrowth with sublime indignity.

  ‘Lovejoy, you are despicable!’ a lovely voice said.

  It could only be Lydia, my apprentice. I don’t know what mellifluous means, but her voice is.

  ‘Sorry, love.’ I, an innocent, get imprisoned, abducted by marriage-crazed madwomen, and I tell Lydia sorry. Have you ever noticed how often we blokes say sorry? I blame TV soaps.

  ‘I resign, Lovejoy! Do you hear?’

  ‘Got an aspirin?’

  ‘You have no consideration!’ she blazed. I sat on my half-built wall. Then, quieter, ‘Is your head bad? What have you been up to?’

  See? I’m at Death’s door, so she demands what have I done wrong. It’s their minds.

  She marched off. Pause. Her footfalls dopplered back and a flask unscrewed. A hand came in sight with a Royal Doulton cup. Standards don’t fall where Lydia lightly trippeth, that’s for sure. Two tablets felt my palm.

  ‘Ta, love. You’re a saint.’

  ‘Have you been divvying? Lovejoy, you are your own worst enemy!’

  ‘The women made me.’ Adam’s defence hasn’t had much success since that apple business in Eden, but there you go.

  ‘What women?’ Even Lydia’s snarls are delectable.

  To Lydia, all females are rivals – why, nobody knows, but they’re out there.

  ‘Ask Mr Smethirst. You know him, that Spurgeon Baptist.’

  ‘Those two old women in the motor?’

  My spirits flickered optimistically. Laura and Ellen weren’t old, but Lydia was on a roll.

  ‘The one who proposed to me.’

  ‘Who what?’ in a shriek.

  Whimpering, I tried to shut out her noise. She moved into view. Glorious figure, hair drawn into a bun, spectacles, Coggeshall lace blouse, elegant suit, high heels, good enough to eat without a spoon. Her syntax is meticulous, her punctuation precise, and her antiques work unfailing. Morals of a nun, beauty of a tart and bright as a diamond. I’d marry her if I wasn’t a bum.

  ‘Gawd, Lyd,’ I whined. ‘Shut your frigging noise.’

  ‘Lydia, please,’ she said, frosty. ‘And mind your language in public.’

  In a remote garden among non-existent crowds? ‘Sorry.’ (Another sorry, note.)

  My cottage door opened and out stepped Mortimer. ‘Good day, Miss Lydia.’ Like the bishop was in for sherry.

  ‘Good day, Mortimer.’

  They’re a right pair, not that they are. He’s my illegitimate son. She helped me inside. Mortimer hauled the divan down and I collapsed.

  ‘How long has Lovejoy been poorly, Miss Lydia?’

  ‘He divvied for some women. One proposed.’

  They talked over me like I wasn’t there. Edible Lydia and a teenage Beau Brummel. How had he opened the door if the bailiffs nailed it shut?

  ‘Could you both please go away?’

  Somebody took my shoes off. Lydia held my face and trickled tea into me. The world closed.

  Twenty past eight, I woke into a one-candlepower gloaming. Mortimer sat reading by the light of a Norfolk lantern – a stub burning in a perforated cup, our version of the Roman oil domestic lamp. I moved inchwise and was astonished. My head felt OK.

  ‘Better, Lovejoy? Ramps tea, with hindberry leaves and sage. Don’t worry. I didn’t include feverfew.’ I vaguely remembered my gran stuffing a chicken with sage. Mortimer knows birds and folklore, so is easily ignored. ‘You have no right to make yourself ill.’

  Mortimer riles me as much as Lydia. ‘Everybody tells me off, yet I’m the one who suffers. Is there anything to eat?’

  ‘Miss Lydia says no food until tomorrow.’

  ‘Why are women against eating?’ I felt something on my head and pulled off a circlet of leaves.

  ‘It’s rue, for headache. You may know it as herb-of-grace.’

  Never heard of either. I swung my legs off the divan and stood experimentally. ‘Ta for the, er, fronds, Mortimer.’

  He indicated a chipped mug. I swigged. Bitter. I looked at him. He looked back, this monosyllabic in-control lad.

  Mortimer Goldhorn’s mother Colette and me made multo smiles, then Mortimer was born. Arthur Goldhorn, his mum’s husband, was Lord of the Manor of Saffron Fields, large estates with a river, canal, some hamlets and a mansion. The title is Mortimer’s now. It’s one of those monikers everybody says they ignore, but in the Eastern Hundreds people still give way to him. An agent leases his lands, while Mortimer lives alone in a hut among dense foliage. You’d not find it with a bloodhound. He is also the world’s only other divvy except me – a triumph of heredity over environment, I suppose. Colette frolics in Monte Carlo among gilded youths. She never visits.

  How to cope with offspring you never knew you had?

  ‘Laura’, Mortimer said, ‘lately won the National Lottery and became a multi-millionairess. She did law for an antiques complex in Wolverhampton. Droz told Laura about you, Lovejoy.’

  Droz, a con artist, sells titles – Princess This or That – to Dutch ladies off the Hook of Holland ferry. He sold the zoo’s zedonk, a zebra-donkey cross (ze…donk, get it?). Why the blazes zoos don’t lock their animals up at night instead of letting them make illicit smiles in the lantern-lit hay I’ll never know. The poor striped donkey always looks miserable, but it’s the only one of its kind. Droz also sold St Edmundsbury’s town hall bronze gates. I admire Droz. Nothing he sells ever changes hands, the hallmark of a classic con artist. Like, the princesses never get their parchment scrolls, the zedonk’s still in the zoo, and the bronze gates never existed in the first place. See? It’s genius.

  Point here: I’m not praising crooks. Droz only does what you, me, and the Government do. A lovely woman once told me, ‘Women do what they can get away with.’ It shook me, because I’d sort of hoped women were almost nearly partly possibly trustworthy. But it’s everybody’s nature to get away with whatever they can. Look at Lichtenstein. In March 2003, their Prince Hans Adam (we crooks still admire him for antiques trader frauds) insisted he become an absolute monarch. Check the date. And unbelievably he did. Even George the Third wasn’t that. Put not your trust in princes, someone once said, but he was on the scaffold.

  Facts, except in antiques, are always mad. Example: the universe consists ‘precisely of four per cent atoms, plus ninety-six per cent unknown entities.’ And physics is a ‘precision science’. Ever heard such twaddle? If you know four per cent of your way to our village shop and don’t know the remaining ninety-six per cent, then I reckon you’re lost – or have I missed something here? And the longest-running court drama in Los Angeles concerns AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. Learned lawyers grapple over this non-existent, non-toy non-sense while Planet Earth rots. There’s one glim of light.

  It’s antiques.

  Antiques are the only known synonym for love. The proof? Leonardo da Vinci was illegitimate, couldn’t draw feet for toffee (check those terrible feet), never finished a single sculpture, wrote backwards, and left his mere fifteen paintings half-done, but we’re
still daft about him. See? Antiques are simply love. I think people should ignore the news, and think of antiques.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Mortimer said.

  ‘Sorry.’ I must have been thinking aloud.

  The antiques trade isn’t Boolean astromathematics, but it’s preferable to real life.

  ‘What’s Droz got to do with us?’

  ‘He told Mrs Ellen Jaynor that a divvy wasn’t just in fairy tales. He brought her to me.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘She was disappointed at my age.’

  Looking for a marriageable divvy for Laura? ‘I’ll kill them.’

  ‘Mrs Jaynor knew Dad.’

  Arthur respected Mortimer and let him live wild. I’d still fix the Jaynor bitch. I felt responsible for this newly legitimised offspring.

  ‘The rotten cow is up to something.’

  ‘Please do not speak in those terms, Lovejoy.’ Lydia entered. ‘I have Mr Droz.’

  We’d get on faster if we cut a few corners. Like, I always wonder why the Italians don’t knock off their terminal vowels and save on printers’ bills. Same as Lydia, to whom everybody has to be Mister This, Missus That. She drives her motor like she talks, ten miles an hour with tyres squeaking on every kerbstone.

  ‘Wotcher, Lovejoy.’

  He’s a Mockney, as folk call a sham Cockney. Tall and languid, elegantly suited, hair permed – permed, and him an ex-footballer, can you imagine? He lusted after Lydia.

  For some reason I scare Drozzie. It was to do with his friend’s death. Accidents happen, and I mean that most sincerely.

  ‘About that Laura.’ I thought, God, am I engaged?

  His eyes flicked to Mortimer, but the lad had gone like a frigging ghost.

  ‘I worked for Laura’s husband, Ted Moon, in Brum. I did it to lie low.’ He snickered. ‘Get it? Lie low?’

  ‘Forget cheating. Who’re we dealing with, Droz?’

  ‘Not cheating, Lovejoy!’ Con men get really barbary if you tell it as it is. ‘I don’t cheat. I educate.’

  ‘So everybody is Saint Alban? Aye, right.’

  ‘Ted Moon worked in thirdies,’ Droz said gloomily. Confidence tricksters, like antiques dealers, deal in thirds, meaning they buy at one-third of an antique’s value. So (important tip, this) divide any dealer’s price by three, and that’s the most he paid for the antique he’s trying to flog you.