The Grace in Older Women Read online

  'May I tell him, dearest?' Ashley asked humbly.

  Roberta sighed a negative sigh. 'No, Ashley. We cannot be sure of his sympathies. He is a beast, an animal.'

  'Here, missus,' I said, narked. 'It's you that needs me, remember. You've only to say, I'll be off like a cork from a bottle.'

  'We are so near success, Lovejoy,' she whispered through a mouthful of cream and cake. 'We simply cannot let you spread malicious lies. Our crusade will save the whole earth.'

  'And who are you against that?' Ashley ground out.

  'Nobody,' I admitted. 'But you insisted I join in. Is the deal on or off?'

  'Yes, Lovejoy.' Ashley hesitated. And Roberta smiled.

  Her eyes were somewhat ovoid, I noticed, but electric and malicious. She was thrilled. I was a mouse caught in the cheesebox. No guesses who was the cat.

  'You may tell him, Ashley,' she said, radiant.

  The spoon rose, pierced her delicious mouth, was closed upon by those lips, withdrawn slowly from that heaven within - the tongue with a parting lick.

  'Mr. Sheehan has kindly allowed us to overbid you on Whistlejack, Lovejoy,' Ashley said. God, he was pompous. He swelled a few times, deflated, rising and falling on his heels, hands behind his back.

  'We have the rights on a possible . . .' he baulked on the word robbery ‘. . . transfer of ownership.'

  'Not you, Lovejoy,' gloated Roberta.

  The spoon did its fascinating dip, scoop, penetration, tilt, withdrawal. It's staggering what a woman can do even though she's unaware of the effect she has on a man.

  ‘We paid Mr. Sheehan a large sum an hour ago.'

  'Ashley.' Roberta whispered to him. I couldn't catch it. She was watching me, eyes glittering with eagerness. Maybe she was feeling poorly now the fuss was over.

  'Yes, dearest.' He faced me. 'Lovejoy. This is your last warning. Stay in line. You may go. Report here no later than nine o'clock Tuesday evening.'

  'Very well.'

  He saw me out of the side door. I went without a backward glance, my mistake, because I'd gone a few yards in the gathering darkness when I paused. I listened, but no sound.

  Then I was felled by a blow, something hard. Feet scuffed. I tried to run but blundered into somebody, got cuffed down. Fists belted me. Something hard whacked me across the shoulders and back. My leg got bludgeoned. I held my arms over my head, staggering. I couldn't see, but somehow I was on gravel.

  'Get the bugger a few more,' somebody grunted. Nick's voice.

  I kicked out, but the blows only rained harder and voices cursed me. I eeled away, running, them running beside me clobbering and thumping as I ran. I hit a tree, bush, something anyway. I started shouting, yelling for help.

  'Quieten the bastard,' somebody bawled, louder than me.

  The battering continued in a way I won't describe, if that's all right. God knows how far I got, tottering about that bloody spread of dark lawns while the blokes - there must have been four -cudgelled me. Then I was on the road, astonishingly solid underfoot, jarring my teeth. A car's headlights showed, and the beating lessened. I ran, still yelling, but the car cruised by and I was running away, the blokes with Nick yelling imprecations and laughing their heads off.

  Wheezing and aching, I found a thicket and crawled in for a minute. One of my teeth was loose. My lip was bleeding, and my scalp cut. I thought my ribs were broken. I'd be lucky to last the night. I felt coma supervene.

  When I woke it was daylight. I was stiff as hell. A fallow deer was looking at me. A tractor clattered by, its engine roaring, digging tool raised like a praying mantis. If this was having Obverse Zodiac, give me my old birthday every time.

  Time to go home. I'd been warned. They were in with Big John Sheehan more than I was. And I was still to do their bidding. Hey-ho. BJS, letting some stranger overbid me, when he'd given his word? It wasn't like Sheehan, but I daren't question it.

  Except, I thought, the stakes were suddenly much higher. Assault and battery now, even though it was only me they'd battered. I'd been silly. High time I worked a few things out.

  Events proved I was as daft as ever, though, because I killed somebody towards nightfall. And me being me, it had to be a friend.

  13

  The water was down to a trickle when I made the cottage and tried to have a wash. The Water Board restless at non-payment. The garden barrel was overflowing, so I made do with that and my fabled desert trick - paraffin in a tin can sunk into the grass, a pan of water balanced above. The tea tastes of paraffin, but you can't have everything. I cleaned myself up. No clean shirts, but I found a new singlet somebody'd given me last Christmas, still in its plastic wrapper and 'Love, Always, My Darling!!!' from somebody or other. I wondered who she was, but Christmas was some time back. Soap's a nuisance. It's either worn down to the size of a toffee so you can't raise a lather, or solid and hard so you can't raise a lather. You'd think they'd get organized. I had a wash in a lukewarm splash, bum, balls, armpits, cleaned my face carefully so's not to set my lips off on another bleed, and I was good as new.

  Breakfast was difficult. All I found was a piece of cheese going deeper yellow at the edges. The electricity was off, my minuscule fridge trickling water across my flagged floor. Still, tea was something. No eggs, no bacon, no bread, no butter. I gave up searching. Why do I bother being hopeful?

  Moving the divan, I lifted the trapdoor and got a candle. Down into my pit of wonders. It's a gungy cellar, no vintage wines or anything, just shelves and boxes of cuttings from newspapers with a file or two. It holds my gleanings: records of antiques auctions, notes I made on the hoof, suppositions when heavy rollers like Big John Sheehan are hard at it. And historical bits, slices of antique lore. I sat and sipped my mug of non-tea tea and perused what little I'd got on Charles Edward Stuart.

  'Bonnie Prince Charlie' disappoints. Grandiose romantic ballads and sentiments kindle loyalty to myth. Look underneath for the true story. Sadly, the famed 'Highland Laddie', as the ladies of Edinburgh called him in 1745 when squealing for locks of his hair at his riotous parties at Holyrood, dissolves into something unpleasing. The totally false fable is well known: born a true-blue Scot, this handsome cultured lad struggled for justice against those evil sordid swine the Hanovarian Georges who, by treachery and deceit, duped everybody out of everything. Unfairly defeated, the lad born to be king escaped with the help of various ladies and (cue songs and sobs) went over the sea to Skye and exile. And what caused his lonesome romantic languishment overseas, far from his native soil? Why, what else but the usual treachery, betrayal, perfidy, plus anything else that sounds romantic.

  It's codswallop. Sorry.

  The truth is a real pig. I honestly find it sad, the ultimate put-down. I've nothing against Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart - aka Bonnie Prince Charlie - being born an Italian in Rome. Nor against his mum being a Pole. Far from it. But there's something really naff about a bloke who simply got plastered day in day out, lived stuporose, festering his life away. It's as if history tricks us into believing its opposite. Sadly, 'Bonnie Charlie' was really a fat lazy wife-beating drunk, with a . . . fistula, great sores on his legs, insupportable in stench . . .' He rigged up a complicated series of bells, cords, balanced chairs and alarms surrounding his wife Louise's bed, to sound off should any would-be lover come night-stealing to her. (The paranoia wasn't new; he'd done the same to his mistress, the delectable Clementina Walkinshaw, with whom he lived as Count and Countess Johnson when he converted to Protestantism - though they fought like cat and dog in the cafes of the Bois de Bologne.) Flying into uncontrollable tempers at the least thing, this obese sot used to whale Louise something rotten, screaming drunken abuse about betrayal and being unfaithful, trying to strangle her while she screamed the place down and servants pulled him off. He had sticky fingers, kept the 12,000 livres his sick dad sent him to visit him in Rome; Charlie spent it, and didn't go. Bloated, sores, pimpled, vile in rage, stinking, he was the slob of the century.
You've got to feel sorry for him. And his birds.

  Actually, he didn't like women much. You get blokes like that. God knows why, when women are pleasant, have a sense of humour, smile more, give you paradise. Of course, they're often a pest, forever telling you off for not tidying up, saying pull yourself together. But that's a small price to pay for ecstasy. Charlie, though, reckoned them 'wicked and impenetrable'. His answer was to clobber them senseless with a stick when he was blotto on hooch, which was usually. But occasionally he did try - like, writing now and then to a former mistress Madame de Talmond in her Paris pad (all 'cats and chamber pots’), but such spells were rare. His brother, Henry the papist Cardinal in Rome despaired of Charlie's use of 'the nasty bottle'. Charlie flitted about the continent incognito as Smith, Douglas, Johnson, the Count of Albany, et cetera, while marriage brokers tried hard to match him up with various unwilling minor princesses. No success - Princess Marie-Louise Ferdinande had hysterics at the idea - until the impetuous, but stony broke, Princess Louise Maximiliana (with 'excellent teeth', vigilant fixers urged) tied the knot in a proxy wedding in Paris. The turquoise wedding ring had Charlie's cameo on it - what wouldn't I give for it. She was pretty, with a good plump figure, and cheery. At first. Except she didn't become pregnant. Charlie, on form, blamed her as month followed month and still she didn't give him an heir. He became morose, got endlessly sloshed in the theatre, and went back to the usual carousel of booze and beatings. It's all chronicled by diplomats, casual observers, and London's unceasing spies. I feel really sorry for Louise. She was an attractive lass, intelligent and bright, interested in art and literature. Naturally, she didn't see why she should play abigail to a snoring soak. She was at least as royal as him. So she acquired admirers. While Charlie blundered about drunk, fixing up his elaborate lover-traps of wobbly chairs and sliding bells, she made bizarre escape dashes in coaches. It became a lunatic comic opera, one particularly rollicking night gallop ending with Charlie kicking at a convent door bawling drunken threats while Louise cowered inside. He even took out a contract on one of Louise's lovers, murder for 1,000 gold sequins. Like all his plans, it didn't work. (Typically, he welshed on the payment.) Henry the Cardinal York yanked Louise to a Rome convent, under papal protection, as London's hawk-eyed agents reported, 'out of reach of any dabbler'. But Louise was equal to this confinement, and enjoyed security from the repellent Charlie while secretly enjoying her lover Alfieri. It ended in tears. Charlie had a reconciliation with Charlotte, his daughter by Clementina Walkinshaw, before he popped his clogs. She died of cancer soon after her dad. Afterwards, the legend even fails itself. Henry, Cardinal York, the last real Pretender, was dislodged by Napoleon. This once-powerful Vatican Eminence became, at seventy-five, a refugee scuttling frantically ahead of Bonaparte's armies after his cardinal's palace was ransacked. King George III kindly gave him a pension for life.

  Whereupon Henry returned to Rome and lived in offensive opulence. He forgot his former holy vows somewhat in personal pleasures, styling himself 'Henry the Ninth' with six-horse coaches and liveried servants, courtesy of handouts drawn on Coutts, the London bankers, paid by Great Britain's kindly King George. Go to Canova's grand marble monument in St Peter's in Rome to see the end of the story. It was compassionately ordered in 1819 by the future George IV. See what I mean, myths being their own opposite?

  Oh, I make excuses for Charlie. His dad, James VIII (Scotland) and III (England), lived on handouts from Italian monarchs - not easy. Charlie's mum, the Polish Princess Clementina Sobieska, was demented by James's womanizing. They had terrible rows - James accused her of infamous tyranny, called her a hypocrite because she finally hopped it while he was carousing with Lady Inverness et al. Poor Little Charlie.

  It gets you down. Legends ought to be romantic.

  I checked my appearance in the cracked mirror, ignored the symbolism, replaced the trapdoor, and went to the pub, wondering where the heck my planning talents had gone.

  Vasco was in the Marquis of Granby, a stroke of luck. He's a discouraging dealer from Aldeburgh and is a mine of forgery fact and fiction. A rough hunched bloke, he always looks just back from bear hunting.

  'Wotch, Vasco.' I shook my head with reluctance at Marion. She smiled, drew me an ale, mouthed that I could owe her.

  'Wish they'd do that for me, Lovejoy,' Vasco said glumly.

  'Jacobites?' I asked, toasting Marion.

  'Good or dud?'

  'Either, preferably the former.'

  'Christ,' he said, turning to look at me. Until then he'd only watched me in the bar mirror. 'Into money?'

  'Clients have. Remember those Stuart glasses I engraved?'

  'Mmmh. Rose with two buds on one, Amen verse on the other?'

  'Remember where they went?' I'd actually sent them to the coast by Tinker to a collector. These two engravings are the commonest on genuine crystal Jacobite glasses. The rose is England, the two buds the Old and Young Pretenders. Verses that end with Amen are the ones to go for. 'I hated doing them. They were genuine old drinking glasses. Made them something they weren't.'

  'Don't be daft, Lovejoy. Their value upped six thousand per cent. Dutch bloke bought them outright.'

  'What else's sold lately?'

  'Jacobite?' He shrugged. 'Sod all. A pendant, lock of Charlie's hair, ha-ha-ha. One of his dud poems about Drinking not Thinking, but the parchment didn't look right. Too yellow, probably Doothie's work. He's gone mad on bloody saffron. Somebody ought to have a word with him. Give us all a bad name.'

  'Well, he's getting on.'

  'He should age parchment like you do. That dehydration.'

  That made me anxious. The trick is to make it feel friable. Any chemistry book tells you how. 'Shush, Vasco. What else?'

  He thought. 'The only other Jacobite was a little table, triangular. Opened out on lopers to a six-sider. Had a drawer. Supposedly from Holyrood Castle.'

  'That's rare,' I said, awed. 'What wood?'

  'Walnut, lovely turned stretchers, three legs. Went for nine thousand quid to some Columbian importer.'

  Which made me swallow, because that too was one of mine. Corinth had sold it for me on commission. Montgomery, her sniffer, told me it'd gone for four thousand. I'd got twenty-five per cent. My debtors heard the glad tidings and came a-running. Of all the antique tables - and there's a maddening variety - the triangular-to-hexagon table is without doubt the most useless. It's small, a triangular flat top on three turned walnut legs. The surface unfolds in three flaps to form a hexagon, the flaps supported on lopers (that is, slides). Three rods, stretchers, connect the legs for strength. Lovely, and a devil to make properly, but rare. I’d made a drawer beneath one side - only one, because the table's triangular so you can't have three; there isn't room. Lovely but useless, nothing but trouble. It needs intensive care when you use it. Must have driven maids-of-all out of their minds in case it toppled when they served.

  'Corinth's lately interested in Jacobites,' Vasco said.

  Come to think of it, she'd commissioned the triangular table from me. I'd been glad. Forgery does wonders when you're starving.

  I no longer cared now. 'Who's interested in Whistlejack?’

  'The big Stubbs painting? Everybody, Lovejoy. But that priory's security's like a bullion bank.'

  'Hard, eh?'

  'The lads tried last Christmas. Got nowhere. Alarms, radar, heat-seekers. It's a pig.' He sounded grieved, as a baulked antique dealer will when proud possessors guard their antiques from robbers. 'A special gallery to itself.'

  'Tough indeed, Vasco.' I had a grim thought. If it was so difficult, why did Ashley and Roberta Battishall want me? Surely not to help them actually nick the damned thing? I went cold. I managed to swallow with the help of my ale. 'Look, Vasco.' I lowered my voice further as a crowd came in on a gust of laughter. Scouse Oliver was among them, a pleasant dealer eager to make a fortune before he was thirty. He'd done it by robbery with violence, and now was trying antiques. He gets off on technicalities.

/>   'Corinth doing anything at Fenstone?'

  Vasco snorted. 'Middle Snoring, Lovejoy? I'm sick to death of the bloody place.' He wagged a hand to Marion, who came across to refill. 'I had four offers of antiques, turned up to collect, and they'd already gone.'

  My groan was heartfelt, not acted. 'That's terrible.'

  He almost wept in self-pity. 'That Dame Millicent should keep her farm going without dabbling in antiques.'

  'Aye.' Fervently I blessed my instincts. Jubilation made me add something I immediately wished I hadn't. 'Tryer said the same thing. Must have been the same woman. Big landowner beyond Fenstone proper?'

  He eyed me in a way I didn't like. 'Tryer? The Sex Museum nut with that ugly cow whatshername?'

  'Chemise, aye.' I felt something was wrong, wanted to get away.

  I’d missed some vibe, and I wasn't sure what. 'He was getting ready to leave when I bumped into him.'

  ‘That so.’ His eyes in the bar mirror were looking.

  Getting out smiling, cheerily waving to Scouse Oliver and his pals, a merry carefree soul, was the hardest thing I've ever done. I'd promised to return the Misses Dewhurst's old Morris Minor, but instead decided to drive to Juliana Witherspoon, hardworking spinster of Fenstone and pillar of the Church. I got a yard. The Americans were crowded on the pavement outside, listening to Gwena, our town guide.

  ‘. . . Queen Boadicea's wild Iceni tribesmen stormed the town,' she was saying. 'And on this very spot crucified the Romans - '

  'Lovejoy!' Hilda cried, joyously enveloping me. 'Vernon! Look who's here!' She rounded on Gwena, who was suddenly guilty. 'You said he'd gone abroad, young lady!'

  'No, Hilda.' I surfaced for breath and beamed. Gwena hates me because her older sister Tarlene lends me a groat now and again. But what's charity for? It's holy, for Christ's sake. I vaguely recalled, didn't this lot owe me breakfast? 'No, Hilda love. They tried to hire me for, er, the Amsterdam antiques meeting. But I insisted on staying. To see you.'