Spend Game

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Right, lads.’ I questioned Tinker with a nod. ‘What’s the game?’

  He looked at me, puzzled. ‘Should I have taken it to Val’s?’

  ‘I told you, Lovejoy,’ Moll said. ‘My treen.’

  I stepped across and flicked the canvas aside. It was crammed with antiques from floor to ceiling. I’d never seen so many antiques on the road all at once. I thought, Moll hasn’t bought two lorryloads in one morning, that’s for sure. She came beside me, smiling eagerly and pointing.

  ‘That was from Corporal. And that from Big Frank. And Jenny Bateman on North Hill sold us that table –’

  ‘Wait,’ I told her. I went to the other van. It was packed, too.

  It was definitely one of those days. I took her to one side while the blokes loafed and swilled on the grass.

  ‘You bought all this, Moll?’

  ‘Yes.’ She searched my face. ‘You said.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘You told me, Lovejoy. Until I ran out of cheques.’

  I closed my eyes and leaned on the van’s nearside.

  ‘You know how much this lot’ll cost?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She rummaged in her handbag and brought out the stubby remains of a chequebook. I nearly fainted again. ‘I’ve kept a list.’

  ‘You’ll be paying till you’re ninety, love.’

  She laughed at that. ‘Oh, Lovejoy. Don’t worry. I’m really quite wealthy. Now. What are we going to do with it?’

  An ache was splitting my forehead. ‘It’s yours, Moll.’

  I explained I’d wanted her to make a profit. ‘The expenses money you gave me, well, I spent on a porcelain. The accident smashed it. So I really owed it you back.’

  She stared at me, her eyes filling.

  ‘Oh, Lovejoy. How absolutely sweet. I thought it was for your ordinary business.’

  As if my ordinary business came in lorryloads, I thought sardonically. There was nothing for it. Taking it all to Val’s cran would set tongues – and worse – wagging. So it had to be here. I unlocked the door and waved to Tinker. He came up, sensing some uncertainty.

  ‘It’s all right, isn’t it, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Sure, Tinker.’

  He shrugged. ‘She said you’d given her two hours to buy all the wooden antiques in town. Here.’ He plucked at my sleeve and whispered. ‘Where the hell did we get the gelt?’

  ‘That’s taken care of,’ I said.

  ‘Thank gawd for that.’ He took my bottle absently and emptied it down his throat. ‘Did we get everything on your list?’

  ‘Oh.’ I made my reply in a studied voice. ‘I think so. I’ll have to check.’

  ‘Great.’ He whistled to the vannies. ‘Shell it inside, lads.’

  The vannies rose and did their stuff, all three eyeing Moll with unconcealed lust as they carried the things in. Tinker supervised, sitting contentedly on the beer crate. I got hold of Moll.

  ‘What list?’ I demanded softly.

  She giggled. I’d never seen anybody so pleased with herself. ‘I got confused about the codes and forgot the passwords. I pretended I was your partner. So they would bring the prices down.’

  I wouldn’t let go. ‘What list?’

  ‘I had an old shopping list. I made them think you’d given me a list. We went into twelve shops. I knew they might cheat me, but all the dealers seemed very careful when I mentioned you.’

  I’d never heard of anything like this in my life. And a bloody novice at that.

  ‘Why the furniture? Treen’s small kitchen stuff.’

  She said brightly, ‘But it’s wood, Lovejoy. You said wood.’

  And then I forgave her everything. Because a vannie carried past into the cottage a brilliant scintillating pre-Empire carver chair of genuine Sheraton design. I gasped. It was from Jason’s place in the Arcade.

  ‘That was very expensive,’ Moll chatted happily. ‘The stupid man took such a long time making up his mind to sell. I really had to act quite cross . . .’

  The vannies unloaded piece after piece. She must have gone through town like a vacuum cleaner. There were walking sticks, minute stamp boxes, carved Bible rests, tobacco jars, pipes and racks galore, letter cases, drinking-glass cups, Pembroke tables, Sven’s crummy fake stool, Chinese screens and lacquered trays, a serpentine silver-table with a pierced gallery (a sort of raised rim) unbelievably intact and at least eighteenth-century mahogany, wall plaques, polescreens, a sixteenth-century egg-tempera religious painting on a wood panel, a Canterbury . . . They were finished in an hour. Moll asked me how much to give them. Tinker told her that traditionally it’s two pints each. She said how much is that, please? We waved them off a few minutes later.

  ‘Let’s go and look at it all, darling.’

  Oho, I thought. Darling’s back. She was delighted. I went inside gingerly. There was hardly room left to swing a cat. We’d be lucky to find the sink.

  ‘Wasn’t it fortunate, Tinker knowing the price of two pints?’ she said.

  ‘A real fluke,’ I agreed gravely.

  We’d hardly started making a genuine list when Maslow’s bulk filled the doorway. You can imagine how I felt.

  I won’t go into details about his suspicions, or what he said. His reason for calling was to ask where I’d suddenly got enough money to drain our town of antiques, and so quickly after Nodge died at my hands. Just shows what a nasty-minded bloke he is.

  Worse, he was not pleased finding Moll in my cottage. I guessed that his sinister little eyes would be sure to spot indications of her residence. He took Moll outside. I didn’t interfere. They talked in the garden for nearly an hour while I got on with the job.

  Eventually I heard his car go. Moll came in and paused on the threshold. I waited, not looking up. but pretending to be examining a dumb-waiter. (Tip: these started about 1750 and genuine early ones must have three trays. If the bottom one is fretworked it will be invariably three-ply wood.) I spun it out, waiting for her to say she was going home and start packing. Then I heard her fill a kettle in the kitchen alcove. I relaxed and carried on.

  ‘We’d better have a meal, Lovejoy,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘I rather think it’s been one of those days.’

  Chapter 14

  WE WENT TO sleep that night thinking different things but in the same sort of way. I’d said yet again I wanted no bother with Tom. Moll pointed out there’s strength in numbers. I said, fine, but would the Maslow brood see our relationship in those practical terms? Moll asked innocently what kind of relationship did I have in mind exactly, which made us both go quiet. Women are always one move ahead.

  She told me the next morning I’d talked a lot in my sleep. Twice I’d seemed to be having nightmares. I answered lightly it was probably something I ate. She said sharply it was nothing of the kind.

  The whole valley of the Bures river was layered in mist. It was still early, before seven. A watery sun managed to throw straight slivers of shadows through the erect elms and beeches of the northern end. Some cowbells tinkled nearby. Now and again a splash came from the river. The birds seemed late today, for some reason. Probably all gathered at my cottage shrieking their silly heads off for their cheese. Well, they could wait. Moll and I had driven as far as the village church and doubled back on the unpopulated bank. The mist filled the river hollow between its rims of trees so we could only vaguely see the roofs opposite, not the houses themselves. One car started up. Otherwise the only noise was Moll and me walking the bankside in the long grass.

  We headed downstream. The river has low patches of reeds and some overhangs of trees and bushes. Here and there anglers had spread reeds to fish from. A big swan rose once nearby, frightening us as it held its wings and hissed. Moll said it had a nest on some low muddy recess next to the river. I used to think swans were placid.

  I spotted the tavern first. We got ourselves orientated, lining up opposite the chimneys which poked from the mist arid working out where the patch of nettles and that small sand hill would be. We fo
und Chase’s fishing spot with no trouble.

  Moll had fetched a flask and some nosh. I sat dangling my bare feet in the water reading Gordon’s file. Moll said we should keep an eye out for the shape of the hill as it became visible when the mist cleared. ‘First impressions are always best,’ she instructed.

  I drew breath to say, oho, are they, but didn’t. Gordon’s file held some diagrams of a tunnel, section by section. They were labelled SCRATTON/MOUNT ST MARY. His own notes on lined paper in a round schoolboyish hand filled about eight pages. Then there was this newspaper cutting.

  In 1847, the railway boom was on. Steam power had come to propel the Industrial Revolution as vigorously as watermill power had brought the world hurtling out of the Dark Ages a millennium previously. And even dozy East Anglia was caught up in the great drive to communicate and join in the motion. Any centre of population or industry had to have a railway. Profits at first promised to be enormous. The only thing needed was a pair of iron rails and a few wooden sleepers. And men.

  The newspaper cutting was of the grand opening ceremony of the Mount St Mary tunnel. They had dug it out before the railway progressed this far. Even the Romans did this, having construction units begin viaducts or aqueducts in bits along their length rather than simply having the road or canal extend from its growing tip as a twig does. The tunnel was completed ahead of time. A ceremony was planned at which two engineers would crank a small decorated bogie northwards. On it, seated in elegant style, would be one of our esteemed local councillors in his regalia. Jonathan Chase, no less. As the town’s mayor-elect he would wear the ancient seal and important chain of office and be the first official traveller through the tunnel. To symbolize the occasion, some artistic enthusiast hit on the idea of levelling contributions from the railway companies and having this dignitary carry an appropriate gift to the small hamlet of Mount St Mary. So this is what they did, on a terrible rainy day. I read on while Moll sketched the river bank.

  A band played. Crowds attended for the festive occasion. Morris dancers danced. Schools were unleashed. Speeches were made about the prosperity to come, about joining the great onward concourse of Mankind and suchlike jazz. Then the decorated carriage rolled up, pumped by two workmen, and Chase’s ancestor stepped up to claim his mobile throne to enormous acclaim and the waving of streamers. The band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’, and (I hated this bit) the little iron carriage trundled into the long tunnel.

  It had rained for days. The river was higher than it had ever been in recorded memory. Farmers were grumbling about harvests. The brave tunnellers had had to cope with landslips, soaks, springing waters. Several times extra shoring was needed. The local clays were given to unpredictable shifts when the water table rose, and four men died in the bricking alone. One had died of drowning when the tunnel was about halfway and was being driven through the course of an old lined well. It had been easily blocked and covered in, of course, but it served as yet another bad omen. The newspaper report said labourers had spoken for weeks about the running slurries which had necessitated sleepers being relaid several times during the finishing phase. Another ominous hint of coming tragedy was a monstrous crack which had appeared the Saturday before the ceremony.

  Anybody but the Victorians would have chucked it in. But this much-maligned race was made of sterner stuff. Dangers existed to be faced down. Tragedy was there simply to be endured. Whether from a horde of charging fiends or a mountain cracking over you, the Victorian’s task was merely to do one’s duty, preferably with a casual smile playing around one’s lips and a touch to the hat in farewell. You’ll have guessed it’s not my scene.

  The year before, 1846, was the Great Railway Panic, when 272 Acts zipped through Parliament and the iron horses really hit the road. Everybody on earth seemed to be inventing patented gadgets to do with railways, from Footwarmers For Ladies in Railway Coaches While Travelling to winches for raising counterweighted engines up inclines. A company whose tunnel opened late or – worse – not at all was utterly doomed in the scramble. And those stoic Victorians knew Duty when they saw it. Example had to be given to the lower social orders. Courage was the main necessity of life. Inevitably the omens were written off. Mankind was omnipotent, after all. There was no question of postponement, in some namby-pamby manner. God so clearly was an Englishman, especially if you sorted other upstart contenders out first.

  So the iron carriage rumbled fatefully into the hill. The tunnel walls dripped. The echoes beat and reverberated. The two workmen’s steady breathing was the only other sound. Behind, the band’s playing faded. The cheering was cut off. Up ahead the hoop of daylight showed where the assembled crowds were waiting. Chase probably kept his gaze on the distant light. Maybe he mouthed the words of his forthcoming speech.

  People afterwards estimated the carriage was at about the midpoint of the tunnel when the hill slipped. Just slipped. Maybe it was the weight of hillside waters held from drainage by the clay subsoil. Maybe some fault in building. Or maybe the bands and the crowds set up a growing flux of sound waves which established a tremor in the tunnel. But the hill slid sideways, slowly and with a fearsome whooing sound which quietened the spectators and the music.

  The people ran, clutching children and heading away from the sight of trees and mounds of earth slithering down towards the river below. A small group was trapped and almost asphyxiated. Bandsmen dug with bare hands and clawed them free of the muddy deluge. Not a life was lost; except that deep in the earth three men were entombed.

  Teams of workmen attacked the hill within minutes.

  Strings of paniered horses were fetched. The men worked with that berserk fury rescuers always find, spurred on by feeble tapping signals from deep inside the Mount. The trouble seemed to be that nobody knew precisely which way the mountain had slipped. The tapping sounds emerged at a vent-hole, a cylindrical aperture tunnellers drive upwards to give themselves air while digging deeper into a hillside. Mercifully the vent-holes had not been covered in before the ceremony, but the landslip had either deformed them or severed them across. Rescuers hacking then-way in along these vent-holes were obstructed by solid walls of dark clay. They had no means of guessing how long the new geological fault was.

  A day passed. Then the now indescribable figure of the Right Honourable Jonathan Chase was seen clambering up the hillside towards the clusters of rescuers. He was identified as the dignitary only after being washed, and he was demented. Half out of his mind, he babbled how it was his duty to try to climb the nearest vent-hole and lead the rescuers in. He remembered starting struggling up some vent-hole but got lost. Everywhere there seemed solid clay and seas of mud. Twice he found himself drowning when the mud level rose sharply. He could remember nothing further until suddenly he was rolling downhill in the open air and two waiting children had screamed at the macabre sight.

  Teams tried to backtrack for three days, led by the desperate Chase. They opened up all seven vent-holes and started tunnelling through the clay obstructing each one, though no clear place was detected where Chase could have escaped from. The conclusion was that the land had made several further surreptitious slips in the meantime. There was no clue to the route he took and he, poor man, was too overwrought to remember.

  ‘Coffee?’

  I jumped a mile at Moll’s words. My feet were wrinkled from being immersed in the river too long. The Mount was just coming through the mist above us.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘You can read it after.’

  The tunnel simply was no more. Eventually, after the inquest, the terrain around Mount St Mary was regarded as unsuitable for tunnelling. A different coastwards route would be sought at a later date, and that was that. The tunnel mouths were covered in, and traces of the disaster vanished with age.

  Sipping Moll’s hot coffee, I went back to the beginning. Chase had been presented with a cased gift for the Mount St Mary officials. The cutting stated that it was a ‘munificent
mechanical device’ manufactured with ‘consummate artistry’ by George Adams and Francis Higgins. The company had contributed a sum equal to one full day’s wage for every labouring man employed on the tunnel. The object, the reporter said, was a mechanical contrivance ‘moving in all its parts and being of precious metal much admired’. As a ‘humorous counterpoint’, he narrated, certain workmen had donated with much improvised ceremonial a railway passenger’s ‘permissive token or pass’ to Jonathan Chase. The listening spectators had been considerably amused by this levity. Chase took it in good part, announcing he was thereby legitimately entitled to travel as the very first passenger.

  I took out the disc. The account explained the ‘No 1’ and the existence of a pass for a nonexistent railway.

  We watched the hillside emerge across the river into the pale morning sun. Moll took the clipping and started to read.

  She asked questions here and there, but all I could think of was George W. Adams, maker of silver spoons. He worked from 1840 onwards in partnership with a wealthy lady called Mary Chawner. Francis Higgins was more famous. He was always at international exhibitions. You have to go a long way before you find more beautiful floral decorative cutlery than his. How odd that two spoonmakers were asked to make a ‘mechanical contrivance’, in precious metal. Maybe they were closer to the booming centre of industry and more familiar with engines. My eyes were fixed on the hill. The thought of a unique creation in silver lying preserved in pristine condition in there was breathtaking. It was miraculous. And made by two of the most fashionable silversmiths in an age of silversmithing brilliance. Preserved in a presentation casket in all its perfect loveliness. And priceless, almost.

  Now, I’m no railway enthusiast. And modellers like Bert and Gordon really give me a bit of a pain when they’re on about their subject. But even the most humdrum of clockwork models brings heady prices at famous London auctions nowadays. It’s an area of neo-antiques you can’t ignore, not any more. My mouth watered, but my heart screamed fear from my boots. Somebody had to go into the hill to find the contrivance. Deep inside.