The Sin Within Her Smile Read online

  My feet wouldn’t move. To my horror they turned me round. I almost exploded at their treachery. Just when my mind gets its priorities straight, something betrays me. But my willpower was still under control. I opened my mouth to say go to hell.

  ‘Have what?’ I heard me say. I thought, that’s not right.

  ‘True, Lovejoy. We’ve got all three fragments, better than the Derbyshire find. It’s yours, if you’ll go.’

  Slowly I drew a breath. Mrs. Farahar had risen, as if to pour coffee, and moved behind her husband and Raddie. She looked at me above their heads, and slo-o-o-owly cupped a breast in her palm, laid her fingers on her mouth, and silently blew. She poured, strolled gracefully back. Women think they can have everything they want. My mind sneered at her crude attempt to bribe me, with my will of steel.

  ‘It’s a deal,’ I croaked.

  Farahar gave a curt nod. ‘Right, Lovejoy. You can have the silver thing.’ He smiled.

  ‘Deal!’ I said, to my fury. Everbody except me was smiling.

  Syndicates puzzle me. Whether for diamonds, silver, dollar bonds, or an antique dealers’ auction ring, a syndicate is simply a way of ganging up on the rest of us. Greed always ends in betrayal, being uncontrollable. Think of it. You simply can’t call a mob of malicious murderous hoods a syndicate, and expect it to be a collective St Cuthbert. Here were Gee Omen with his Continental diamond connection, Simon Doussy, lovely Valerie Arden, Colonel and Vana Farahar, Raddie, Sty too, for all I knew, plus lesser mortals, all in on something highly illegal. Why didn’t they go for some legit antiques? Anybody can drop a line to the Vatican Commission for Cultural Heritage, spiritual overseer of 97,200 churches (chuck in Sicily, that’s one every two and a quarter square miles) and legitimately buy the 10,130 of them up for sale. Okay, so you promise to use the holy basilicas, chapels, shrines, for ‘culture’ (the Vatican’s word, not mine). But sold churches change overnight into gyms, pop discos, boutiques. And their antiques vanish. My law is that syndicates start with sin. Don’t ever forget.

  Farahar, in uniform with five bands of ribbons, drove me.

  He stopped by a flat expanse of nothing. In the distance, a few buildings. We were at some sort of perimeter, wire mesh between us and the boring terrain beyond. East Anglia is flat as a model’s bodice. Somebody had concreted the whole pancake.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he said.

  He talked about his origins. Arkansas, but ‘Welsh way back. Grandparents emigrated, hard grafters, Lovejoy.’ He almost dashed away a manly tear.

  We got out of the car and strolled beside the fence. It was a mile high, electrified. Then I saw a falconer, and knew. Military air force bases hire falconers to keep away birds, which have an unpatriotic habit of getting sucked into aircraft engines and bringing them to a bad end.

  ‘That why you got yourself posted here?’

  ‘Sure is.’ His eyes were glowing. I thought, hello, here we go. Crusaders are ten a penny, all harping on conquering something somehow. ‘I’m back at my roots.’

  If you say so, I thought. I only bothered to listen in hope of learning how to reach the delectable Vana.

  ‘I promised my old folks to one day repossess the land of my fathers. They were driven out by persecution.’

  ‘Great!’ I said heartily. ‘Well, Colonel, I’ll be off.’

  He ignored that. ‘My expertise is geologies. I’ve solved the world’s greatest mystery.’

  Oh aye, I thought. Which? The Holy Grail, Stonehenge? I was so excited I yawned.

  ‘Where,’ said this goon, ‘did Stonehenge come from?’ Everybody knows. ‘It’s a mystery.’ I was innocent as a lamb. ‘Lovejoy,’ he said portentously, 'I’ve found out.'

  ‘Good heavens!’ I’d nearly nodded off.

  He was gratified. ‘They came from South Wales!’

  ‘No!’ God give me strength. Master of the bleedin’ obvious.

  ‘It’s true! The standing stones are of a particular composition. Stonehenge has thirty-four so-called foreign stones. Of them, twenty-nine are dolerite, that people call bluestones. The other four are rhyolite boulders, with one sandstone. The significance?’ ‘What, Colonel?’

  ‘Dolerite exists in Devon, Cornwall, North Wales, too. But the Stonehenge stones are conclusive. They’re from the Preseli ridge, South Wales!’

  ‘That’s stupendous!’ I cried. You have to humour nutters, when they’re paying you a priceless Romano-Celtic silver, plus Vana. He’d obviously read H. H. Thomas’s monograph.

  ‘I knew you’d be astonished, Lovejoy.’ He went grim. There was a shrill whine, and three jet planes streaked across the grey skies. Thunder rolled up their wakes, thumping my eardrums until I felt like screaming. The bloody old fool was looking up in rapture. Another wave of American war planes shrieked overhead, battering us.

  Quiet returned. He was transported. ‘Wasn’t that the most beautiful sight in the goddamned world? War on the wing!’ He hummed a tune. My hearing crept warily back into my head. ‘They gave me the clue to Stonehenge, Lovejoy!’

  ‘They? The planes?’

  ‘Sure did. Contour analytics. There are two peaks in the Preseli range of South Wales, ten miles inland from Fishguard. Foel Dry- garn and'Foel Feddau. Between them stands Carnmenyn, a hill with a group of cairns. That’s where they came from, Lovejoy.’

  ‘But the effort, early man cutting those monoliths - ’

  ‘They had to, Lovejoy.’ He’d stopped now, oblivious. ‘Primitive man stood watching on Drygarn Fawr. All around him was winter, ice, snow. No food, only the cold. The sun had gone. Then, suddenly, the sun would rise at last - a direction of 110 degrees - behind Darren! Winter had ended!’ There were tears in his eyes. I felt ashamed. Barmy or not, he believed. ‘Spring arose, summer! Life returned to the earth!’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then, Lovejoy, one evening, those ancient watchers would climb the same mountain. The sun died behind Freni Fawr’s grim mass. And their souls chilled, for winter had come, to grip the world in ice. Midsummer solstice too, sun rising behind Corngefallt, would be a morning of huge significance.’

  ‘Colonel,’ I prompted. .‘It seems to me - ’

  ‘No, Lovejoy. It cannot seem, not nowadays. We are protected from starvation. We know the sun will rise. We have the technology. Ancient Man hadn’t. He just prayed that tomorrow the sun would return, and not plunge the earth in midwinter forever.’ ‘Stonehenge?’

  ‘Was a calendar, Lovejoy. It was built with stones, from the most magic part of the world known to Ancient Man. The place where the mountains were a kind of solar calendar.’

  ‘They shifted them?’ His was one theory. Others said the ice shoved them to Salisbury. Pick any idea from a million.

  ‘The stones came from Wales, the place of magic. My homeland.’ He sniffed, overcome. I yawned, also overcome.

  ‘Great,’ I said in. ‘You’ve cracked it. Write to the Royal Geographical Society.’

  ‘No.’ He started us towards the motor. ‘Do you know, in a research report on UK’s tourist attractions - amenities, info, presentation - guess which came last? Go on, I thought. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Not ... ?’

  ‘Stonehenge! The greatest source of clues to the dawn of Homo sapiens - scorned by its custodians!’ He set his face grimly. ‘I see you’re a man of sentiment, Lovejoy,’ he told me, which I already knew. ‘I must do more than write a report. I must do something.’ ‘What exactly?’ I couldn’t see what he was driving at.

  ‘It requires money, Lovejoy. But it is already begun.’

  ‘Well, er, good luck.’ Flint-eyed sex-charged Vana was married to this visionary?

  ‘I won’t need it, Lovejoy.’ He swung in, fired the engine. ‘All I need is for you to obey orders. Then all else follows.’

  In a war picture, I’d have snapped, ‘Roger!’ As it was, I didn’t say a word. He drove me about ten miles, where Luke’s charabanc waited on a village green. I said ta, climbed aboard. Luke gave me a don’t-abscond-again look. Meg starte
d a passionate lecture on responsibility. I was asleep in seconds.

  The coach stopped. Phillida dropped little Arthur on me. I blinked awake. They’d all disembarked. We were near a rugby ground. A rim of tall greyish hills, few trees. God, countryside.

  A greyish horse cropped the grass, between the shafts of a gypsy caravan. Not original, a repro made by Dealing in Manchester. It looked tough. I wanted evidence that the bloody thing would crumple within a furlong. Worse, another caravan stood beyond it, a black horse noshing. Colourful, acrylic paint for God’s sake. And two more beyond.

  Luke and Meg were looking at a map. I got out to negotiate deliverance, carrying Arthur.

  One caravan was predominantly blue. One had a pinkish front. Green, yellow. Blokes in blue, birds in the pink? Well, the quicker we departed the sooner - ‘... Lovejoy will drive last. I’ll head group conferences, as psychiatric nurse.’

  ‘You’re off your frigging head, Meg,’ I said, then went red. I’d best watch how I phrased things. Barmy, loony, dimwit, idiocy, cretinoidal, the normal vocabulary of the know-all, must be shelved among these, er, folk. ‘Me? Drive a horse?’

  ‘It simply follows the others.’ Meg was exasperated.

  ‘Good.’ Which meant I could scarper and the psychiatric nurse carry the can.

  I went and kicked the caravan wheels. Luke turned aside with a chin-jerk of exasperation.

  ‘Get aboard, Lovejoy,’ he said. ‘Me first, blue caravan, Humphrey and Boris. It’s where you’ll sleep. Then yellow with Mr. Lloyd, driven by Ifor.’ He indicated Preacher. ‘Meg’s green, with the old lady. Last, Lovejoy’s pink-top with Rita, Phillida and the babe.’ I drew breath but the swine got there first. ‘Rita knows horses.’

  ‘Luke,’ I said, really depressed. ‘There must be some way - ’ ‘Say goodbye to the lady, Lovejoy, and we’ll get started.’

  Beside our charabanc stood a Rolls, Valerie Arden smiling beside it. I went to her. No driver. She was stunning.

  ‘Just came to say a fond farewell, Lovejoy.’

  Why more women don’t wear amber I can’t say. Expense? It is definitely out of fashion, which proves fashion’s ignorance. Her colours don’t sound right - a fitted wash-grey suit, tight high neck, skirt - with deep-red burnite amber necklace, matching brooch and rings. Glorious. My mouth watered. I’d never seen so much burnite. It is rare, hard red amber exported from Burma. She even wore a comb of it, and a bossed catch on her grey sealskin clutch bag. Its hardness is only 3.0, but when you’re carving (use stainless steel) it generates so much electricity that your forearms go into spasm. I once went to Doc Lancaster thinking I’d got polio. He chucked me out, laughing, callous sod.

  ‘Pinites succinifer amber,’ I said. ‘Will you marry me?’

  She laughed. ‘We shall get together. You met dear Vana and Franklin?’

  ‘Aye. If I stay with this mob, I get an antique.’

  ‘Don’t call Vana that,’ she said sweetly. ‘You will be rewarded. I promise.’ She had her hand on my arm, quickly bussed my face. ‘I’ll be at the rehabilitation unit in Mynydd Mai.’ She drove off.

  First time I heard that name. I wasn’t to forget it.

  The horses were gigantic things. Pulse, Ash, Cotton, and Barley, stupid names. I sat wobbling nervously on the caravan’s seat. I could hear Rita and Phillida chatting inside, Arthur wisely talking to himself. I took the reins, pushed the brake like Luke did.

  He flipped the reins once. I saw Preacher flick his, praying away, then Meg. Timidly, I flapped mine. My horse started with a jerk, following the green-topped caravan docilely enough. It felt odd, rolling slowly along with iron tyres making a racket beneath. We trundled out on to the roadway.

  For those not in the know, a horse can be very hypnotic. They seem just mobile scenery, trotting past your garden. You call out, ‘Afternoon, love,’ to the pretty rider, and keep out of the beast’s way. You might give it an apple. Finito.

  But driving - if that’s the word - a horse is mesmerizing. It’s also silly. You hold these leather strips. The horse’s ears occasionally flick forward. Its head goes up and down. The hooves are another gripping diversion, going clop-de-clop-clop-de-clop. Its bum moves. Its tail swishes, but for no reason. And that, said Alice, is that.

  Worse, after a century of this tedium, I glanced back - and we’d only gone four hundred yards'. I could still see the tall rugby posts. I groaned in agony. We clopped another couple of years, travelled twenty feet. Dolly’d never catch up.

  ‘You all right, Lovejoy?’ Meg called back sternly.

  ‘Yes, Meg.’ I thought of Doussy’s notebook that Liffy’d given me, and took it out.

  Going plod-plod after a while becomes fascinating. I found myself trying to remember that rhyme, all the months of the year, one word each. Snowy was January. Then Blowy? I vaguely recalled April as Showery, May being Flowery. And the old poet had written them in threes, season by season. My cousin Glenice used it as a skip chant when she was five. ‘Hoppy, Croppy ..

  ‘Lovejoy?’ Luke was shaking me. ‘You dropped off, booy. Take care.’

  My caravan had skewed across the road, the horse was chewing a hedge. ‘Sorry. Didn’t notice.’

  He waved a couple of cars past. ‘You dropped this notebook.’ ‘Ta.’ We hoofed off, me determined to stay awake. I knocked on the door behind me. >

  ‘Didn’t want to wake Arthur, Phillida,’ I said. ‘A word?’

  ‘Yes!’ She knelt. The drifting scenery showed only fields and whatnot, and the road ahead. ‘Arthur’s flat out.’

  I drew her beside me and closed the door. She relished the view. ‘Love, where’re you from?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve all only just met, Lovejoy. Isn’t it exciting?’ ‘Delirious. You’re not from one . . . clinic?’ I hesitated, what with the stigma of mental illness.

  ‘No.’ She wasn’t embarrassed. ‘My doctor said this was a splendid chance. I’m just nervous, Lovejoy.’

  We talked of infants. I made her laugh with tales of my babysitting. But after a mile or so I had to say it. ‘How long you been a fork-lifter, Phillida?’ ‘A what?’ She looked at me all smiley.

  ‘Fork-lifter.’ I pointed two fingers downwards as if into a pocket. ‘Subtle-monger. Big dipper. Howffer. Pickpocket. Knitter. Knit- man.’ Knitter, for knit one, purl one, drop one.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, you mean this? I found it.’

  ‘Ta.’ I took the notebook back, put it into my pocket the side she was sitting. It’s safer. Your pocket furthest away from the dipper’s the one to watch. She was dynamite. I’d employ her any day of the week. She was also a regular, good explanations if rumbled.

  She said, untroubled, ‘This trip’s just what Arthur needs! Fresh air, new people. He’s taking interest. Creatures in the fields, countryside, people, birds!’

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘One long whirl. Do you know the others?’

  ‘Only Rita. The thin man was in our psychotherapy.’

  Words like that chill my spine. I wanted her to say they were safe, wouldn’t go ape with a hatchet.

  ‘Boris has problems, though. He’s on tablets.’

  God Almighty. I eyed the caravans in front, wondering if the loon

  sorry, bloke - was peering through some pinhole planning a chain- saw massacre. I prayed he’d keep taking the tablets. But what’s a nutter’s promise worth?

  ‘And ... ?’ I tilted my head back at the door.

  ‘Rita? She’s asleep.’ Phillida was cheery. I liked her, at least one normal in the pack. ‘There’s nothing wrong with us, Lovejoy. Rita’s just sad.’

  Sad I could cope with. Phillida was easy, Humphrey no bother, and Luke was sane with his country lore. I wanted a mobile phone.

  One odd thing. When flicking through the notebook, an address had caught my eye. I recognized the name, Polkahorn, of that Polkahorn rugby ground. It was the first address. I thumbed, found the last. Mynydd Mai. Valerie Arden had said Minnith. There was an address in Polkahorn, Tippett Antiques, and the word church
.

  Desultory chat for a quarter of a mile’s numbing trundle, and Arthur erupted with a scream of fury. Phillida went in. I wondered how we cooked. Was it all kitted out, stoves and things? We’d streaked past a tavern. I was getting famished. Was there some way of contacting Luke? Short of dropping off and walking to him, no.

  The book had one name that stood alone. Dolaucothy. I tried saying it softly to myself. Odd name. Welsh? It wasn’t local. Or were the other addresses antique dealers on route?

  What had Meg said, when rowing with Imogen at the dance school? Something about Imogen not wanting Meg to go. I couldn’t remember. My Gran’s trick was to try not to remember - aha!

  ‘Flowy!’ I exclaimed, delighted. ‘Snowy, Flowy, Blowy! Then it’s Showery, Flowery.’ Five out of twelve wasn’t bad.

  Gripped by the excitement, the horse broke wind with a growling noise that even little Arthur would have admired.

  Horses, being horses, want a quiet life. Give them a tailboard to follow, they plod on for ever. I jumped down and walked alongside. The nag didn’t mind. I climbed up. It didn’t mind. I sang, whistled, and got back clip-clop. I told it various things. I shouted abuse. I told it to stop, hurry up, slow down, gallop. The dumb beast plodded on, our wheels grinding beneath. We were now passing various cottages, Polkahorn outskirts.

  And in a window stood two brass candlesticks. A woman was looking out. I leapt, ran to tell Luke my horse was limping. All waggons stopped.

  ‘Limping? Near or off? Hind or fore?’ He came to see the animal, bent and picked up a hoof.

  ‘I’ll get it some water,’ I offered helpfully, hurried to the cottage door. It opened, a pleasant housewife with what my old Gran would call Celtic colouring - raven-black hair, azure eyes. I told her our horse needed a drink. She let me enter.

  ‘Heavens!’ I said. ‘Those candlesticks! My granny’s!’

  ‘Are they indeed!’ She brought a pail, smiling.

  Try to choose between a woman and antiques. I mean, a woman has a sin within her smile. But so do antiques. Find one, you’ve found sin. The trouble is I go red easily.