The Lies of Fair Ladies

by Jonathan Gash

  Her brow unfurrowed. "I see! Ignore each other's presence!" She blocked all the traffic. Lucky we were in dozy old East Anglia, where motor horns never parp.

  "That's it. Buy the tole. Leg it to that teacher's.”

  "Leg?"

  "Proceed in an orderly manner. Good luck."

  She was still firing worried, but terribly thrilled, questions after me as I walked down to the auction. I don't understand some people.

  The auction went like a dream. I bid for Lot 18, the lovely tole tray. One bloke made the running, your friend and mine Acker Kirwin. Just when he thought the lot was going to be knocked down to him, I did my bid. The auctioneer today was Irving, a dour Fifer with a dehydrated sepulchral voice. A tip: Don't bid early.

  Enter late, keep your nerve. Think for a sec, and you'll guess why. It daunts the opposition. They realize that you've judged it just that wee bit better than they have.

  On cue, Luna's mellifluous but shaky voice quavered, "Yes, please." Good girl, I thought, and left smiling to myself, but frowning in apparent distress to show others I was upset. Now all it needed was for her to get to that schoolteacher and buy his "coffeepot" and we'd be in business. I'd owe her the money, of course, and pay her out of the profits.

  Nine

  Something was nagging. I alighted from the lorry and called so-long to the driver—pleasant Ipswich chap, kept ferrets—and set out to walk the last two miles to Prammie Joe's hideout. I mean, those surnames. Hopkins is common, right? Clark's common. Godbolt? A bit uncommon. Maybe I’d heard them together in some pantomime, a play. Old poets, the sort you have to learn incomprehensible snatches of at school? What are the chances of any three names coming together? I was imagining things. With a moniker like Lovejoy, I have a thing about names.

  The day was waning smartish. I found myself walking quietly. The path narrowed, then split off the lane proper and became an old track down to Prammie Joe's creek. You get these sudden deflections in East Anglia, usually where the Romans built a temple, like at places called Mile End, so marching legionaries could chuck votive offerings to some god for the success of their campaign. Or where Middle Ages improvers built a footbridge near an old watersplash, so making the old crossing redundant.

  I walked quieter still. I've had practice, one way and another. The path—it was hard to find, nearing the undergrowth where the muddiness began—narrowed further. Occasional cows must come this way, judging from the state of the ground underfoot. The hedge was tattered, losing the battle not to become a thicket. I supposed vaguely that gravel was anciently cast into the river here, to make the bed firm enough for wagons. Our roads have always been abysmal. Forget the engravings of rollicking coaches bristling with ruddy-countenanced passengers waving bottles. When Emperor Charles VI visited Petworth, the fifty miles from London were a nightmare—Sussex stalwarts were hired to walk alongside, propping the coach upright. The emperor was only upended twelve times.

  There was a faint hum. Hum? Up and down, like a pub singer trying for his key before launching into his gala melody. Rasping, sort of. I cracked a twig, hissing and sucking my finger when stabbed by a hawthorn. The humming ignored me. I know little about countryside, but I do know its sounds go silent when interrupted. Except some.

  I stepped through the hedge gap. Prammie had made it oblique, from cunning. Stand alongside the tangle, you've to face the way you've come even to see it. You step through, take three paces or so, and you are in this overgrown field with blackthorn and reeds. Your only way is down, towards the creek. And that constant, terrible humming sound.

  From Prammie Joe's shack. I saw the shack when my feet felt suddenly cold. My shoes were water sogged. I could see the hut door. Open? I'd never seen it open without Prammie Joe here.

  "Prammie?" Nothing. The hum continued. "It's Lovejoy."

  The humming rose and fell. Zzzzz. A sleeping giant. Always inhaling? A faint blur hung about the doorway. Dark, shifting, a feeble shadow trying to become something definite.

  And an aroma. No, a smell. Not smell, even. A stench. A stench of something having . . .

  "Joe? It's me. Lovejoy."

  Something came at my face. I brushed it away. It came again, troubling me. I brushed it off. A bluebottle. Flies. The hanging shadow was a cloud of buzzing blowflies. Which breed—

  "Joe!" I screamed. "For Christ's sake, Prammie!"

  Maggots breed in soldiers' shot legs, in cattle wounds. I drew breath, moaning, took my jacket off, covered my head with it, ran at the hut, paused a second and stepped in, gagged, saw Joe's face one heaving mass of maggots and bluebottles that actually dripped, dripped onto the wood floor beside him, things squirming in his eye sockets. I turned and ran, retching, swiping madly at the bluebottles that followed. Some were even in my jacket. I waved it round my head fifty yards up the field. My hands were shaking. I felt my eyes streaming. I was going "Argh, argh ..." I tried not to, but spewed and retched and wept. I was pathetic, disgusting. I found two blowflies buzzing in my sleeve, stamped one to death like a madman and chased the other round the universe until I collapsed, sobbing, on the marshy ground. When I’m a prat, I go for gold.

  As penance, I made myself walk home, nearly getting myself killed by every night joyrider. After the pubs closed it was a nightmare. Hardly any pavements in East Anglia.

  Two o'clock in the morning I reached my cottage. All night long I heard buzzing, buzzing. I didn't sleep. Fault is everybody's for everything, people say nowadays. It didn't feel like it. It felt like mine.

  Came dawn, bluetits were tapping for their bloody nuts, the robin was flirting for his cheese, the hedgehog wondering what had gone into me. I shut them all out. Let them get on with it. I'd had enough Nature.

  "Morning, Lovejoy."

  Luna was an atrocious call on my resources this early after a non-night night.

  "Notice anything?" she asked, shy with hidden glee.

  "Rain coming?" The tide turns our weather to the opposite of its dawn doings. I wondered for a ghastly moment what bluebottles do in bad weather.

  "No, silly. Electricity! Water! Phone! They're coming!"

  There was a van in the garden. Boiler-suited blokes were milling, unloading ladders.

  "Your television license is paid, Lovejoy." She was especially thrilled at this, hugging herself. "A TV set will be here soon. And radio." Radio? Joan Vervain really would be pleased. We could shag during hubby Del's radio show.

  "Who paid?"

  "Why, we did!" She drew me aside as boiler suits marched in.

  A horrible feeling was growing within me.

  "Where did we get the gelt, love? Money," I explained, to smooth her forehead.

  “I had the most extraordinary stroke of luck, Lovejoy!" She drew me to the divan and sat us down, breathless with delight. "No sooner had I bought the troll tray than a gentleman offered me a good profit. I sold it there and then!"

  Carefully I didn't strangle her. "Don't tell me. You only made one bid, and Acker—the rival bidder—folded?"

  "Yes! Wasn't I clever?"

  "You silly bitch."

  She gasped thunderstruck. "But that's what we do! Buy and sell!''

  It's called the lop. Only happens at antiques auctions. When somebody does the shuff—that is, what me and Luna had planned, one partner displacing another to confuse bidders—a cunning opponent does the lop. This means he stops bidding, allowing the shuffer to win the item. No sooner is it knocked down to her than the lopper's colleague pants up and says, "Missus, did you get Lot 18? Parking is such hell in Penny Lane. Will you sell? I'll give you a good . . ." Et predictable cetera. Duckeggs get lopped. I don't.

  She listened, stricken. Well she might. She'd lost us a beautiful tole tray. Tole's manufacturing process is beautiful, combining art and science. The French did it wonderfully in the eighteenth century.

  "Tole, not troll. You take sheet iron." I described it from the pit of a terrible memory. "They discovered a heat-resist varnish and paint. You put many coats of pai
nt on your iron. Then black it by holding it in smoke from a torch dipped in pine resin. Any resin for that matter. Fakers use teak oil on pine twigs."

  "Lovejoy?" Luna said, ten miles off.

  "Smooth it with brick dust. Many layers of varnish. Then you paint in colored varnishes. The earlier the date, to 1740, the more beautiful. They copied Sevres. You get pots, food-warmers, a million household wares in tole."

  She blotted my face with a hankie. "Please don't cry, Lovejoy. We'll find another one. I'll go to Sotheby's."

  "I'm not. Silly mare." I struck her hand away. She took no notice. They never do.

  "Where do these two TVs go, lady?"

  A bloke was standing on the porch between two large cases.

  She bridled. "I only ordered one television."

  "Two, lady. Paid outright. Is there an aerial?"

  "I only ordered one ..." And so forth.

  Prammie Joe had been killed, head bashed in. Had a cord been round his throat? Some sort of wire? Country folk have wire like city folk have rubber bands, plenty and all lengths. Snares, traps, hay, fencing, those rural things.

  Luna's car. In silence I went out, was unsurprised to see her keys in the ignition. She'd wisely left her motor by my hedge, where wagons used to rest when clambering uphill from the river crossing below. I got in and headed for town.

  Hereabouts in Ruritania, so to speak, you can't help knowing people who live up to their umbilicus in fens, marshes, rivers. But

  knowing isn't quite the same as a mere nodding acquaintance. I mean, everybody on earth "knows'' antiques. But not everybody knows antiques. See the difference? Or we'd all own Christie's and have a British Museum in the yard.

  There were quite a few possibilities for help. One was Brad, boat repairer down on the estuary, early flintlocks. Except nothing had moved much in Brad's direction since the Tower of London clearing sale. There was Fesk Dynson, on the canals. Lockkeeper. Painting is his life. He worships oils, any Victorian. Not changed much there, either. Antique furnishings I'd already learned about the hard way—or Prammie Joe had. No mega moves in silver, local furniture, collectibles, or I'd have heard from our silver man, Big Frank from Suffolk. No major scam recently, except the great clandestine smuggle to the Continent after that massive crisp job in Norfolk. In a crisp job, you fake copies of all the antiques in your decaying mansion house. You replace the genuine antiques with the fakes. You then burn the manor house to a crisp. You get insurance money for (a) the manor; (b) the burnt antiques. Naturally, you also (c) sell the antiques abroad where the prying eyes of the constabulary never go. Plus, you are relieved of that massive expense, namely your poor old Queen Anne building. You buy a villa in the sun, a pool and a blonde, and live stinkingly richly happy ever after. That was six months since.

  No. I'd have to explore Prammie Joe's death through the waterways of this fair kingdom, and trust to luck. There's only one true waterways man in antiques. Rye Benedict, at ye olde mill by ye stream.

  He was in, working the machinery for a group of schoolchildren, telling the three who listened how the millstones worked. The other thirty were smoking behind the river wall or groping each other on the embankments. Education, hard at the learning curve.

  "Wotcher, Miss Brewer." Therla once taught in our village school, but the kids had run her a merry dance and she'd retired in hysterics. She was fetching, desirable. Why did I never have teachers like her? I'd been taught by amorphous cylinders of black cloth called Sister Hyacinth for my first six years. They had no legs. Miss Brewer had legs, and morphology.

  "Hello, Lovejoy." Some kids paused, looked across, sniggered. My name elicits this response. "Interested in water machinery?"

  Therla Brewer is ever hopeful that somebody keen will take her next lesson.

  "No, love. You?"

  “The school's Outdoor Activity Interaction Expression. Two O.A.I.E. sessions a week.'' She gazed about, dispiritedly trying to convince herself they were all enthused. "Design of waterways last week. The Stour. One boy tumbled in. Saved by an ocean barge, thank heavens."

  "Amen," I said piously, bored. "Rye be long, will he?"

  We stood listening. Rye's really quite good, giving out water heights, great sailing barges from the Thames, the current mania for petrol engines. The antiques dealer in me smiled approval. Like I keep saying, passion rules where antiques hold sway.

  Therla eventually herded her brood out, after begging Rye to come to give her children an hour's lecture on sailing vessels. The duckegg agreed. Therla has means of persuasion.

  "Hello, Lovejoy." Rye looked tired as he came back from seeing Therla's mob off. He's one of these men people call clean-shaven, as if he somehow deserves a knighthood for using a razor of a morning.

  "Tell me. Rye." I paused. Hang on. Tell what about?

  I gaped because he'd recoiled in sudden alarm, stepped back so swiftly I had to reach, pull him away from the great millstones. You can lock the colossal disks by means of a lever. I gave him what for. "You stupid burke. Rye!" I yelled, mad as hell. "You nearly went into the damned things! You're always on about safety, you pillock!"

  He'd gone white as a sheet. "I thought you meant—"

  "What?" The barmy conversation was concluded when he shook his head in mute denial. We walked to his office for a brew.

  The walls were covered with maps, levels of water tables, canal widths, cross sections of every river in East Anglia. This old watermill's a hobby. The council give him a pittance to maintain the great quiet engine. Why him? Because he owns the garden center and plant nursery on the river. His family's from Wenham, big landowners. To them that hath shall be given. Some deserving pauper like me should have Rye's job. Makes you sick, but I’m not jealous.

  "I'm after advice. Rye." I saw his guarded look disappear when I asked if he knew about some big shed, warehouse, anything new on the rivers.

  "Nothing that isn't filled with container loads from the Hook of Holland, Lovejoy. It's rivalry time since the Channel Tunnel thing."

  "Any new stream? A dam? Canal being drained? Workings reopened like they did at Dedham's Stour? You know, the ones Constable painted by that teashop?"

  That gleam of caution came and went. I put it down to my fatigue over Prammie Joe. I was seeing things. And I’d selected Rye practically at random, hadn't I? Well, hadn't I? Near enough, yes. Except Rye was the only waterman as learned about tides and rivers as Prammie Joe.

  We talked a while. He praised our three consecutive bad winters. Nothing improved the Eastern Hundreds' water table like snow and hard frosts. He waxed enthusiasm. I concurred, wondering what the hell I was doing there.

  "Ta, Rye," I said, bored sick. "Think of anything, eh?"

  He was too casual. "What's the interest?"

  "Oh, some old, er, canal tokens are on sale at Wittwoode's auction. Sometimes a batch comes ahead of a rush."

  The relief on his face was a pleasure to see. He came to the car.

  "Special edition motor, Lovejoy! Business booming?"

  "Not bad," I said modestly. "Want to make an offer?"

  "I’ll soon have enough for something really special."

  I drove away, thinking there was something I'd missed. Like a fool I'd forgotten what Prammie had told me when we were laughing about his loading up the stuff at Cornish Place.

  He'd rescued a schoolboy. From a place . . . Therla said something about nearly losing a boy. From drowning? In the Stour? But her lad had been rescued by an ocean-going barge, not a small pram propelled by an old ex-convict laid horizontal in the thwarts. His last journey, had Prammie Joe told me? A week ago, had Therla said?

  Luna was at the cottage, fuming with the electricity, gas, water, TV men. I beckoned, pulled her in.

  "Luna, love." I drove away immediately. Movement distracts women; any sort will do. "I want you to—"

  "What on earth?" She gaped round. "Leaving all those men in the cottage? They could steal—"

  "We've nothing to steal," I shot cruelly. "You
gave it away."

  "There's the schoolteacher's coffeepot," she said, stung. "I've made the men some coffee in it."

  My headache started skull-splitting. "You did what?"

  "I had to pay a fortune, unfortunately, but you said—"

  She was insane. I gave up. "Ipswich, Luna. East Anglian Daily Times. You're a reporter from London asking about a schoolboy rescued from the river Stour last week. Okay? You're thinking of a national feature, local bravery, hazards of the eastern rivers. Tell them anything. But find out."

  "Won't they be busy with their next issue? Only, reporters are always in such a rush.”

  “They won't be today, love," I said bitterly. "They will be tomorrow."

  Fraud rules. It rules because everybody loves deception. Who has never felt that sneaky twinge of admiration, hearing of some nerk who tricked a gullible bank out of millions? Don't let's fool ourselves. We love it. The most secret twinge of all we reserve for ourselves—regret that we didn't dare do it. Imagine the ecstasy when, shacked up with the birds in Bahia's sunlight, you dream of old Fanshawe opening the vaults on Monday morning to find your cocky little note saying ta-ta. It's your dream, my dream, everybody's dream. No good being offended by my accusation. We all admire Robin Hood. In moral terms, he's a common thief. Legally, a rascally felon. But to us? He's superb, a riot, applauded down the centuries. Because he got away with it!

  Come what may, fraud rules. Who leads in the Great Fraud Handicap Stakes? Well, bankers are front-runners (sorry about the pun). Lawyers are contenders. Clerics closing on the bend, charity workers. Civil servants are also-rans, left standing by local government councilors. The fraud field is a cavalry charge. Politicians as fraudsters are the rule rather than the exception. Antique dealers are total. Consider them auctioneers minus respectability. For me, auctioneers are the pits. They defraud under false colors, priests who poison the chalice.

  I went for a walk round the village, not to think so much as to not think. That's the way. Let learning in by osmosis. Suddenly you'll realize that you knew all the time, but didn't want to let on to yourself. Perhaps the truth reveals the treachery of a friend. Perhaps that flash of understanding proves that the ultimate nerk is none other than your very own self. I found myself watching Leone's nags.