The Rich And The Profane Page 12

  ‘Gesso?’ my voice quavered.

  This priory had been hurriedly abandoned, a landlubber Marie Celeste. It hadn’t just been closed for the hols.

  For a sickly hour I trudged the priory, knocking on doors, peering in windows, trying handles. I scaled more drainpipes than the parson preached about. I called out my hellos and anybody-theres like a fool. I even went round to where there’d been some sheep. Gone, the pen open. Tyre tracks indented the soil, showing where they’d been loaded. Market? Transferred to another farm?

  The nuns, I knew, spun the wool that the monks sheared off the sheep, and made it into cardigans. I knew this because I’d made some hand carders for their history gala. I’d sent them over with some schoolchildren who’d asked for help on a history project. I’d also made them a Lancashire spinning wheel, but had run out of heartwood. I’d got them woad seeds, and showed the children how to make the most beauteous dyes on earth - blues, yellows, greens. They hadn’t paid me, but you can’t really take umbrage about mere gelt when people are reworking ancient beauty, can you?

  The dye vats were cold, a residue of soggy wool, the cauldrons gone.

  It was starting to drizzle. I sat on a wall. Empty is as empty does. The place was vacated. Nobody was coming home, not to Albansham Priory.

  ‘Well, Lovejoy,’ I said aloud. ‘Time to clear off.’

  And didn’t, just sat there getting soaked, trying hard to move. My feet wouldn’t do as they were told.

  Behind, on the rising hillside behind me, there was a faint sound. Plop, bubble, plop. I hated, still hate, that sound. I found myself trying out different tunes in time with its gurgling. ‘Marching To Pretoria’ almost slotted in, but missed out after a few bars. I tried ‘Goodbye’, no luck, then ‘White Cliffs Of Dover’, but had most success with ‘Abide With Me’. I rose humming, nervous, and walked towards the hot pool.

  Once, I’d been up there and thought it a waste of time. Like most pools, springs, wells, they are venerated by locals, especially in East Anglia’s remoter spots. Folk leave garlands and wreaths of flowers at most wells in south Britain anyway. But the few hot ones that we have - in Bath, in Wltshire - are especially holy, heaven knows why. The Romans got organized. Bath, for instance, became a major tourist town two thousand years ago. Me, I leave wells alone. Stop and drink if you’ve a need to, then scarper. I help our village schoolchilden to ‘dress’ the oldest well, but it makes me feel uneasy. I’m always glad when it’s over.

  The hot pool was plopping away. I stood looking down. It’s actually like a boil on the greensward, a hot splurging pustule. No more than ten feet wide, it has a freshet that starts there and dribbles away down the slope. Children sometimes find things in the water - coins, bits of bone, the odd tooth, a single claw with scales still attached. Like I said, such ancient relics still show their original colour, as if they’d been dropped in the hot slime only minutes before. One was the vertebrae of some small extinct dinosaur creature. It isn’t stain from the hot mud, because the hues fade within days of exposure to modern air. It’s as if deep down there’s a subterranean chasm filled with silent creatures, gazing somnolently at each other in a kind of archeological purgatory, waiting to be raised to life. It’s eerie.

  Attempts to fill in these hot pools always fail. The hot pool continues plopping away, unaffected. It simply engulfs whatever’s offered.

  The view was feeble. Distantly, the church, Aldeburgh way. Undulating farmland with a copse or two, trees where the woods began. Flatter fields a mile north where, gulp, Florida’s many mounts were presumably champing. Nearer, the priory, windows shuttered or blanked out. Not a chimney smoking.

  Time I reported to Florida. Still I didn’t budge.

  A yard away, I saw what I didn’t want to see. I’d actually stepped over it, ignored the silvery shiny thing. I made my feet take a step.

  Gesso’s pencil torch was bent in the middle. I don’t know if you’ve ever used one of these, out at night on one of your burlary jaunts or maybe creeping home late after some love tryst. If so, you’ll know how tough they are. Not mere plastic for Gesso, no. Solid metal, with one of those tiny pointed bulbs. It had a clip, to latch it to your pocket. The bulb was shattered, soil clagged inside its cavity.

  Without doubt, Gesso’s. He’d painted two black rings round it, Halford’s matt black anti-rust paint, so it didn’t slip in his gloved palm. I made myself pick it up. I saw a groove gouged in the earth where it must have scraped savagely along. The line led directly to the hot pool. A large rounded flintstone - the only stone we’ve got in the Eastern Hundreds - stopped the groove. A mark showed where the torch had scraped the surface of the flint cobble before almost snapping from the force of whatever was being dragged—

  ‘What’s your fucking game, mate?’

  I jumped a mile. ‘Eh?’

  A security man was standing a few yards off. He was ready for trouble, with his London accent. He could have made three of me. I grinned, instant yokel.

  ‘Sorry, booy,’ I said. ‘Juss seein’ if the sheep be gone.’ ‘You see any, you stupid get? Sod off. No sheep here.’

  ‘Roighyt, booy.’ I walked down the slope. He came with me, disappointed. ‘When be the old prior be cornin’ back?’ ‘Mind your own fucking business and clear off.’

  Which was how I left Gesso’s last glimpse of light and life, coward that I am. The security guard ballocked me all the way to the motor. I said a cheery so-long and drove off to meet Florida. I felt Gesso’s reproachful flashlight in my pocket, and even stopped the car.

  ‘Look,’ I told the windscreen angrily. I could hardly see for my stupid eyes watering. ‘What can I do? If I go to the police, what evidence is there? Gesso’s just scarpered, that’s all. He often does. And Marie wouldn’t harm a fly.’

  I blotted my eyes, yelled out, ‘Everybody leave me alone, for God’s sake!’

  Margaret’s wheels I left by the war memorial just in time to get abused by Florida for being late again, and by Margaret coming up in Paula’s massive truck, furious with me for stealing her motor. Honestly, women get my goat. Some days, you wonder if it’s all women do, tell blokes off for nothing. OK, so I’d nicked Margaret’s car. What was it, for heaven’s sake, a crime?

  YOU ALWAYS GRUMBLE, Lovejoy,’

  Florida fumed, driving fast. ‘A point-to-point meeting is exciting. You’re like a child!’

  ‘I’ve already seen your horse,’ I said, but you can’t be reasonable.

  ‘Once! Horses are for life, you stupid...’ Et county cetera.

  Forlornly I looked out of the car window. Horses mean countryside, and I’d had quite enough of it, ta for nowt. Fields appeared. Woods, farms, a river. Civilization receded. Out here was religion, every shade of pale and dark, and we all know what horrors that breeds. I could cope better with Florida if only she’d keep her cars for more than a week at a time. Whenever we meet, it’s new. I can’t keep track.

  ‘Where do all your old motors go, love?’

  ‘This horse is a darling!’ she cried. ‘Hand off my knee, please.’

  My hand had moved, quite innocently. I folded my arms. Why the aggro? Florida epitomized the sixteenth-century saying ‘Woman is in church a saint, in the street an angel, in kitchens a devil, in bed an ape’. Now, no knees.

  ‘And you can stop sulking,’ she scolded. ‘You’re only happy over some stupid old pot or piece of wood. Get real, Lovejoy. Get a life.’ Her phrases mean I’m wrong and Florida is right.

  We drove to her wretched point-to-point. It was two miles from Albansham, close by where Florida lives in a fourteenth-century house. She’s restored her mansion to resemble a condensed housing estate. I’ve only been there once, when her husband the ex-policeman was out of the country. I wasn’t allowed in. Me and Florida made use of a summer house (hers) down by a pleasant river (also hers). Even her nine-acre grounds have been flattened. I said nothing as we drove into the fields. They seemed rimmed by tents, pavilions, horseboxes in rows. Horse-inclined
ladies congregated round the car. Horses were everywhere. A pretty girl leant in, screaming.

  ‘Bobbinella’s entered the second race!’ she shrieked. ‘Simply super!’

  ‘And Leaper!’ others howled.

  I got out saying how happy I was at this fantastic news. A lass - I could only see one man, and he looked about as much a part of this scene as me - collared me. She was holding the reins of a horse so huge it didn’t matter any more.

  ‘Are you Jocasta?’ she demanded.

  ‘No. Lovejoy. How do, love.’

  ‘No,’ she said impatiently. ‘Are you Jocasta’s owner? I’ve Mulish and Peterloo to see to, and it’s a two o’clock start.’

  The horse sidled towards me, friendly. I sidled away. Horses are all right, but being pals with two tons of brisk muscle is unwise. I have enough trouble with bluetits.

  Florida struggled against a tide of women all wanting decisions. The field was laid out with fences and hedges,

  even a watersplash. The place was knee deep in nags. I was the only living thing here without a fetlock. I’d been in the clubhouse once before, so I signalled Florida that I’d call in the pavilion for some tea. She nodded suspiciously, tapped her watch, spread a hand. I mimed eager agreement, back in five minutes to share in her ecstatic equestrian frolicking, and headed for the last vestige of sanity among these barbarians.

  A girl trotted beside me. She wore jodhpurs, riding boots, a velvet crash helmet, carried a whip. Riding horses is warfare, and looks it.

  ‘Lovejoy? He wants you!’ She almost fainted with pleasure. The lone man was standing by the judges’ table surrounded by admiring ladies in elegant dresses. If I’d been that lucky I wouldn’t have bothered watching me.

  ‘Right, love. I’ll talk to him in a sec. Er, good luck with Jocasta.’

  ‘Mine’s Robber King,’ she said.

  ‘Well, never mind. Horses are all the same.’

  Inside the pavilion I scrounged some tea and toast and cream scones from the waitresses. They, of course, gave me verbals. ‘The minute we get straight you disrupt everything, and leave those Chorley cakes alone...’ Beats me how I survive, forever getting my hands slapped. If it isn’t Florida’s knees it’s their measly Chorley cakes. Though some people don’t survive, of course, like a certain friend whose damaged pencil torch was burning my pocket. The waitresses shooed me out, laughing and scolding. I drifted, hands filled with purloined grub.

  There was a club room. Photographs of horses - honest, somebody had wasted their time actually taking snaps of the beasts - and cases of trophies round the walls. Nobody in, fire burning in the hearth. I stood, peered, gazed, I began to think at last, and to remember. As we’d driven into the point-to-point fields, I’d smelled woodsmoke out there. It had a definite tang that ordinary fires haven’t. For a long time I stared at a glass case. It contained a wooden object labelled early hunting horn, prob. fruitwood. Beside it were two old biscuit tins, one shaped like a toy aeroplane, the second like a Rolls-Royce, presents for our first club gymkhana somebody had written, exclamation marks all across the card, very humorous.

  It’s hard to believe, but the fastest-soaring prices are for collectables, not real antiques as such. Maniacs, like birds, flock so. It’s a sort of modern sickness, because who cares when these items aren’t proper antiques? Answer: collectors care, by the million. I looked closer.

  Biscuits used to come in small tin boxes pressed to resemble anything from buses to planes, tanks to golf-club cases. The two in the display were a Dutch mandarin-red monoplane, complete with propeller. Everybody in the antiques trade (including me) brags to have seen one of these, but I hadn’t until now. The English one was Crawford’s Rolls-Royce. Miraculously, both had their original box. given in their wrapped box!!! a handwritten card announced jovially, to miss wenstone and mrs hawksworth!!! Some details of nags, with yellowed newspaper cuttings, were on a faded card. If Florida knew the value of these two biscuit tins, she could rush out and buy another couple of motor cars instantly.

  The absurdity of collecting would make you laugh, if it didn’t drive you close to tears. Everybody wants these biscuit boxes, the rarer the better. A French bloke called Nicholas Appert’s the man who’s given credit for starting to store food long term. He did it for Napoleon’s soldiery. Industries swiftly shelled off Appert’s bottle-and-cork methods and turned to metal boxes. After 1810, food was never the same again. This doesn’t mean that the oldest are the costliest, not by a mile. The better the Victorian industrial processes, the pricier the antique tin today. So Benjamin George’s posh transfer-printed tins, then the French offset lithography designs (neatly stolen by our Mr Barclay’s patent in the 1870s) brought in every shape you can imagine. They compete at expensive international auction houses: Huntley & Palmer’s, Peek Frean & Co, Macfarlane, Lang & Co, all the biscuit people. There are hundreds of designs.

  Anybody could nick these from this shaky display cabinet and make a mint. I should have done Gesso a good turn, brought him here instead of getting him killed.

  ‘Can I come in?’ I turned to look. It was that staring bloke.

  God, he was a scruff. And I’d thought I was shopsoiled. At least I wash all over every morning. Even if it’s in cold water from my garden well I do a dawn bum-balls-armpit soap and rinse, teeth, gargle, plus hair every three days. This geezer looked like some tatty vagrant, hair a-straggle, shabby jeans, shoes well on the way to being slippers, faded soiled coat. Yet he was the one being adored out there by clusters of gorgeous women. Is this justice?

  ‘You a barker?’ I said through a mouthful. ‘Freddy Foxheath send you?’

  ‘Barker?’ He considered the word. ‘You mean, like on a fairground?’

  Thick, as well as gungey. ‘Not that sort. A sniffer of antiques.’

  ‘No, I’m not a barker. I’m Jonno Rant.’

  ‘How do.’ I nodded, affable. ‘Lovejoy.’

  ‘I know.’ He moved in, sat on the arm of a couch. I realized waitresses were peering in through the door, giggling and whispering, clearly worshipping the leather he lolled on. I smarted. They’d slung me out of their posh tearoom but were desperate to grovel to this apparition. ‘And you’re under arrest.’

  ‘Who says?’ I didn’t panic, because lots of people try arresting me.

  ‘Me. Two lawyers. Three policemen. And my bodyguard. They’re waiting outside, in unmarked cars.’

  Which stopped me. He didn’t look a diplomat. His name caused me sudden anxiety. I didn’t know why.

  ‘At all the exits.’ He smiled. ‘When you’re ready, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Why?’ Quickly I finished my grub. Speed was called for.

  A waitress came and asked if he wanted tea. He said coffee, didn’t even say please. She fled with a whimper of ecstasy. Things like this make you bitter. Some women wouldn’t recognize tact if it slapped them in the face. She’d completely ignored me.

  ‘Why, Lovejoy? Because you’re not Jonno Rant.’ He was amused. ‘And I am.’

  Seemed reasonable enough, I was just about to say, when the name registered. Rant? Jonno Rant? Hadn’t I spoken his name lately? But why on earth would I want to do that? I’d never heard of him.

  ‘Couldn’t we agree that you’re you and I’m me, and leave it at that?’

  ‘Not when you’ve made illegal contracts for me.’

  Had I? Then I remembered. Whoops, Maureen Jolly in the tavern, her mate Patty, when I was on the cadge. I’d promised her an interview. This yokel, then, was the great impressario? Vague primordial memories trickled in. He’d been a pop star once, turned to promoting West End musicals. And him a grown man.

  ‘You took money, Lovejoy, and made verbal contracts in my name. Naughty.’

  ‘Ah.’ I beamed, advanced smiling with my hand outstretched. He didn’t shake. ‘I think I can explain, er, Jonno. It’s a simple misunderstanding. That lady’s very sick, mentally disturbed. To please her...’

  I gave him the full monty. He listened, took his coff
ee with a smile the lass almost fainted at.

  ‘You simply don’t realize, Lovejoy, do you?’ He sipped, causing the growing mob of waitresses peering in to swoon and scream. ‘You’ve upset me, and seven great production houses in a multi-million business. Your fraud must be fully exposed.’

  Multi-million business? I thought in wonder. What, for a few songs? He was deranged, certifiable. Time for exit, pursued by bear.

  ‘Look, mate,’ I begged, summoning lies. ‘Will you give me half an hour? I won’t run away.’

  ‘You can’t bargain,’ he said reasonably. God, I hate reasonable people. They make you sound thick as a plank. ‘You can’t leave, Lovejoy. You’re going to a police cell. A con man’s promises aren’t worth the paper. Also, I have two journalists and a photographer here. They want the scoop.’ He nodded, as if I doubted him. ‘Publicity’s the name of the game, Lovejoy. Showbiz needs it. I’ll be in every national tomorrow morning, free of charge. Bliss.’

  This was a problem for Florida. I find that women are the ones you need when in this sort of scrape. They’re born with luck and cunning, and we’re not.

  ‘Can I shout Mrs..I’d forgotten Florida’s surname ‘... Florida? She’s boss of the cavalry. I came with her.’

  He shook his head, stood with an air of finality. He was enjoying himself. I put my hand in my pocket for a scrap of paper, thinking to leave Florida a note, and touched Gesso’s torch. I turned quickly to face the trophy case.

  ‘Can I ask, Lovejoy,’ he said, ‘why the tears? I can’t believe this kind of incident is unfamiliar to you.’

  ‘Shut your stupid teeth, pillock.’ I stayed put. ‘I’m just reading about these interesting things, so shut it.’