Faces in the Pool Read online

  ‘Every six years?’ I marvelled. ‘Bet they forget when it’s due.’

  ‘Silly. It’s famous.’

  I doubted that. A six-year flower show must be different from the Nottingham Goose Fair and All Hallows E’en, because they’re engrained in the national consciousness. Some become immersed, like our old Martinmas, which blends with Armistice Day. You can tell when a ‘day’ or an ‘eve’ has made it because folk say a date’s nickname, like New Year’s Day instead of January First. I said all this. Fee ignored every word.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful, Lovejoy?’

  The cathedral truly is stunning. If you’re new to cathedrals, go and see Lincoln. Its Chapter House is enough to amaze. That tracery in stone, those dazzling surfaces. I was ready for its vibes, for hadn’t we seen those high outlines across the Fens, at the crossing of Fosse Way and Ermine Street, those prehistoric tracks? My wariness vanished at Lincoln Cathedral.

  Feeling distinctly queer in the ancient place, I went wobbly near a small exhibition stand. Clammy, I found a pew as Fionuella moved swiftly into the floral throng. You couldn’t see the cathedral’s interior for flower stalls.

  A middle-aged lady was seated nearby. ‘The scent setting you back?’ she said.

  ‘Er, it isn’t that, love. It’s that stand, I think.’

  ‘Lincoln is better than York Minster.’ (Tip: Lincolnshire folk always run York Minster down.)

  I’d had enough urban warfare. Lincoln Cathedral’s lighting is crap. York’s is better.

  ‘You a visitor?’ When I nodded, she said bitterly, ‘They turned my stand down.’

  ‘Your stand? Flowers?’

  ‘I wanted to do King Stephen and Maud.’

  ‘The Period of Anarchy? Don’t flowers stand for peace?’

  Our land has had its ups and downs. One of the downest was after 1135, when King Stephen was crowned. Grandson of the Conqueror, if I’ve got it right, he was opposed by Maud. This empress invaded us and marauded against Stephen. It’s a period so grim our collective mind wants to forget.

  ‘So why reject my display?’ she demanded. I wanted an aspirin, not a scrap. ‘Look at Scunthorpe!’

  I racked my brains for Scunthorpe’s part in our civil wars. Were they pro-Stephen? I have a map in my cottage.

  ‘Their flower club has stands everywhere!’ She made her voice a simpering whine, mocking. ‘Byzantine cones depicting spring, can you believe? Lincoln’s club is the same. Ingrates!’

  I thought, Wars over flowers?

  ‘So bo-o-oring. And Grimsby’s flower stand is rubbish. Henry the Eighth. How dull is that?’

  Well, no. Henry did wonders for London’s sewers, and was the last monarch I’d call dull. Several queens and his sons would agree. I noticed a lady looking down from a gallery. In shadow, she seemed fixed on me, but the light was poor. I wondered if somebody was standing with her, but I get shadows wrong.

  Mercifully, my unexpected companion lowered her voice.

  ‘I never take sides,’ she confided. ‘But King Stephen was too weak for his own good. Letting Maud go? What was that all about? She was a right bitch.’

  Now, this was a thousand years ago. I went, ‘Mmmh.’ My peace shattered, I was looking about for escape when the lady said something vital. ‘You feel the same about Stand 149.’

  The reason I’d tottered was a battering from antique vibes emanating from Stand 149, between the Guilds’ Chapel and St Anne’s. I eyed her, wondering if she too was a divvy.

  ‘Foreigners aren’t eligible. I’m glad you hate it too.’ She was fuming. ‘They butted in with seven days to go. And got given Stand 149. I’d been shortlisted. It’s horrible, little bits of glassy stuff with scraggy flowers. Call themselves the Overseas Flower Fans of Lincoln.’

  The vehement lady pressed her hand on my leg, perhaps only for emphasis. I realised how attractive flower arranging could be.

  ‘Can you do that?’ I asked. ‘Butt in?’

  ‘Of course not!’ The Guilds’ Chapel was on the way to St Hugh’s Choir. That was the direction Fee had taken, scurrying through the crowd. Looking for one particular stand, like say 149?

  ‘Flowers deserve symbolism, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I agreed. ‘Blossoms, after all.’

  ‘There! If you can see it, why can’t they? The foreigners made a donation. Lincoln Cathedral is corrupt. They’ll do anything for a clipped shilling.’

  ‘I’ve heard that.’ I glanced up at the gallery. The staring woman – did I know her? – had moved. There was that deep shadow again. Perhaps another flower enthusiast, or a cathedral guide? ‘What was your display, love?’

  ‘It was exquisite. Amaranthus purpureus is so difficult. The symbolism was perfect.’ Her eyes filled. ‘Love-Lies-Bleeding, and the Indian Prince’s Feather variant. My husband, Rich, does me a beautiful folio. My third rejection.’

  I worked it out. ‘Three sixes? Eighteen years?’

  She found a hankie, sniffing. ‘A Derbyshire lady got the foreigners in. She’s the deacon’s bit of skirt.’

  ‘Foreigners.’ Stand 149. Anything to do with Fionuella?

  ‘A flighty mare from Ceylon vamped the deacon. And bribery. They called Stand 149 The Future is in God’s Safe Hands.’

  ‘Sadism.’

  The woman in the gallery was still looking down. My task was now more identifiable. It stood in Stand 149. My chatty friend’s hand kneaded my knee in her anguish, but duty called.

  ‘Would you mind if I look at its, er, symbolism with you?’

  ‘I’d love to!’

  Two sincere flower arrangers together, we headed for Stand 149. A verger stepped up.

  ‘No, sir, Mally. Please follow the arrows, south aisle.’

  ‘It’s all one way,’ Mally explained.

  We hurried past the displays as quickly as the throngs allowed. I suddenly felt desperate. We were heading away from 149, that verger and his bloody arrows. Then somebody screamed, the voice oddly familiar. I looked up and the woman in the gallery fell. It was like slow motion.

  People screamed. I don’t think back over horrors. They are too difficult. I fled alone into a small chantry and sat, shivering. It was Blaise’s chapel, patron saint of woolcombers. The walls were covered with murals by Duncan Grant, only finished in 1958, so not antiques. Oil on fibreboard. They could easily be nicked by evil night-stealing footpads, though the thought honestly didn’t cross my mind. I was shaking and remember retching. Visitors try to identify the famed Bloomsbury Set who were his models, like was it Virginia Wolfe’s face or not?

  The sight of that falling girl’s look of despair wouldn’t leave however hard I tried. I sat trembling from fright. I imagined she caught a glimpse of me as she tumbled, knowing in that final moment that I hadn’t saved her. Me, no use to anyone. I retched into a hankie.

  Eventually, looking through the grille, I recognised the visceral tomb of Queen Eleanor of Castile. Properly Leonor de Castilla, she was our King Edward the First’s missus and rode with him to war. Queen Eleanor was loyal. Fables tell how she saved his life in a dagger fight at Acre. A tough bird. His grief, when she died up the road at Cross O’Cliff Hill, is the reason we have so many crosses as place-names. Everywhere her bier’s procession paused for the night, a cross was erected – hence Charing Cross. Thoughts of death among these lovely flowers made me feel I had malaria back again.

  Further down the cathedral was where the imaginary ‘Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln’ had a shrine. He was dreamt up by hysterical people who took it into their heads to blame Lincoln’s Jews for ritually crucifying some poor Christian lad in 1255. Bollocks, of course. The goons rampaged, wantonly destroying Jews’ homes in the usual daft epidemic. Thinking didn’t stop my shaking. I tried to work out what I was doing, sweat dripping down my chin. A kindly cleric looked in.

  ‘Shaken, are we, sir?’ he asked. ‘Terrible accident. The young lady fell from the cross gallery at the north-east transept. We have a tea shop here. If you go�
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  Tea solves most things, my gran said. Once, I shot back that tea didn’t, and she clouted me for giving cheek, with, ‘Don’t answer back.’ She’d only meant tea gave you a moment to face up. Over the next hour, my trembling diminished. Weak as a kitten, I pulled myself together. To face up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  tom: jewellery (tomfoolery, fr. Cockney rh. slang)

  Mally was easy to find among the folk milling near the west doors. I needed her now.

  Mrs Mally Winthrip was Lincoln born and bred. I said she was being marvellous, and how lucky I was to be with her when it happened.

  ‘That poor woman. Why do you think she did it? She had a camera. Maybe she…’

  ‘Leant out to take photos? Yes. Accidental.’

  She eyed me. ‘You don’t suppose…?’

  ‘Deliberately? No, impossible. She…’

  She wasn’t like that. I held it back. Tansy had so much to live for. The winter refuge at Mehala Bay for misfits. Because Tansy was a saint, who did not shirk. Others shirked, did, do, will. Like me.

  ‘Because women don’t. In a cathedral?’

  If Tansy could have afforded a camera, she would have sold it and made nourishing beef stock to make vol-au-vents.

  Also, I could have told Mally that I’d sent Tinker to fetch Tansy to Lincoln, nearer a cache of priceless antiques owned by foreigners who left deaths as their spoor.

  ‘You and I share similar convictions, Mally.’

  She coloured a little. ‘The accident has lost me any chance now, to show my Period of Anarchy display.’

  I steeled myself. ‘Pity I never got a decent look at Stand 149.’

  ‘Oh,’ said this wondrous woman, ‘We can get in. I’m on our Structures Committee.’

  ‘Are we allowed?’

  ‘I have the bleep code.’

  As if conscience niggled, I hesitated, then pressed her hand. ‘I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble, Mally. But the cathedral must go on.’

  Corny, but it persuaded Mally. ‘After all, our city has withstood far worse.’ Her lips thinned. ‘Like that bitch Empress Maud.’

  ‘I often think that, Mally.’

  We were admitted with astonishing ease. A verger allowed us to walk right up to Stand 149. I felt the familiar ache in every muscle that serious antiques give. Police were flocked round yellow tape across the north aisle where poor Tansy had…I grabbed hold of Mally’s arm to steady myself and gazed at the display.

  ‘Isn’t it ghastly, Lovejoy? The minds of people who made this up… Brains like ragbags.’

  Blood-stained brains, the minds of killers. ‘They’ve killed the very best of living things,’ I said brokenly.

  Mally stared, eyes wide. ‘Lovejoy! You’re actually…’ She found me a tissue and we were let out into the bright day by the same verger. ‘I’m so sorry, Lovejoy. I was thoughtless. You are even more upset by the display than I am. How sensitive!’

  I showed a stiff-upper-lip bravery. I quite like praise. ‘I’m like that.’

  ‘Though men are the most sensitive poets, aren’t they?’

  We sat on a bench where the shops began. ‘I hate to see wrong done, Mally. Living things are friends.’ I didn’t mean flowers.

  ‘You poor dear!’ she crooned. ‘Relax, Lovejoy. Take your time.’

  My forehead in her neck. ‘I’ll have to wait another six years. Heartbreaking.’

  ‘No, Mally. I’ll make it quicker. I promise.’

  ‘How? The show only lasts a few days.’ She sounded doubtful, and I hadn’t a clue what to do.

  ‘Heaven is on our side, Mally.’

  Donna da Silfa’s group did Stand 149 for me to spot and approve. How many other watchers were also there, and who they were, I had no way of knowing. International buyers maybe? Auctioneers?

  ‘Er,’ I managed to get out.

  From a floral point of view the display was dud, zilch, null. Mally kept up a whine about this pattern, that Hogarth curve, colour balances. For me Stand 149 was the dawn of a new world. Only one in four flowers was real. The rest were artificial, man-made.

  ‘You’re as upset as I am. It’s a scandal.’

  My voice was strangled. ‘I haven’t the words, love.’

  My resolve grew back. Whoever had flung Tansy off would pay dearly. I would be peaceable about it. Some things can’t be shelved simply because it’s nice when troubles go away. That morning in Lincoln I came to my senses. No more flowers. Whatever happened now, I’d have to stay focussed.

  I had a goodbye meal with Mally. Then we parted, and I bought some paper and coloured pencils. No trace of Fionuella. Odd, that. I shelved thoughts of her, for Stand 149’s display was everything Donna da Silfa had promised.

  Sketching in the hotel room with a thick B4 pencil, I outlined the antiques, lettering them as I went. It was the most breathtaking show of antiques I’d ever seen. The flowers were simply the Faces’ admission ticket. I made notes on the scale of it all.

  This was my job, I realised: to prove the antiques were genuine and worth what they hoped. I’d never seen anything like them. Nobody else ever had, either.

  The memory caused a toxic delirium.

  Divvying is always grim – malaise, sickness, even rigors. TV antiques-show presenters pretend they have the gift, but they are simply forging career moves to encourage another series. To Mally the stand must have looked strange.

  A pair of neat corner cupboards, but straight out of Ince and Mayhew’s 1752 book, originals beyond rarity. Those masters designed them to blot up the angles in a lady’s parlour. These ecoinears would each buy a house. I’d only ever seen one such pristine pair, and they had been heavily restored. Those on Stand 149 were exactly as they’d left the hands of those geniuses. Ladies overseas had nurtured them through generations. Sketching them took an hour.

  With them stood a so-called roundabout, the famous ‘burgomaster chair’. If you see one now, it’s sure to be a machine-tooled replica. The stand’s was 1695, give or take, Dutch East Indies pattern. Their cane-bottomed seats seem strange (sitting, you get sticky in the tropics). Unbelievably heavy. Move one, it’s hernia time. Lavish scrolly carving. You could hide a herd in the acanthus foliage on the six – six – knees. The four Indian Raj variants were beautifully light, all ivory, so you could blow them away with a breath. Exquisite.

  No more furniture, just those. I felt as if I had come across a Rembrandt or a Gainsborough in a garage sale.

  A footfall creaked the floorboards in the corridor outside my room.

  As if those weren’t enough, the artificial flowers hammered the final nail in. I’d never seen such a mass of rare gems. I needed serious advice on those, for the gemstones were the blossoms. I could only list them.

  We assume diamonds reached Man when little Erasmus Jacobs found his 21.7 carat ‘shiny stone’ in 1866, and mighty South Africa’s great diamond boom started, leading right up to the recent 603-carat ‘Lesotho Promise’ found by the eagle-eyed Miss Agnes in the Letseng, the world’s highest diamond mine. Yet Indian diamonds were known to the Ancients. In a priceless Japanese Satsuma bowl were flowers with diamonds in the Ceylon-cut. This old cut was wasteful. The modern brilliant-cut is one of the most economical. And one calyx showed a giant rare blue, exactly like the Hope Diamond.

  Rarer still was the alexandrite got from the fatal Ekaterinburg District. See one before you buy any other jewel. It spoils you for all the rest.

  A faint draught touched my nape. Somebody was now in the room. I kept on drawing. I was on a roll. Alexandrite has tricks of startling beauty. By day, it’s mostly greenish. In candlelight it turns a startling blood red. Its colours seem uncontrollable. I knew a rich lady once, a beautiful Hollywood actress who lived in Endsleigh Gardens (and if you think The Contessa, you’ve got her). She thought her ring was an odd emerald, until I showed it to her by lantern light. You must sell your whole estate to buy a two-carat stone.

  Tanzanite, unbelievably in a genuine Regency pen
dant, was supposed to have been ‘discovered’ in Tanzania in 1967, but one large blue on display was in a Regency scroll setting. The USA political embargo business in the 1980s bled prices to death.

  I heard a faint tap of a heel.

  ‘Who was the silly cunt’, I said quietly without turning, ‘who cleaned the tanzanite with ultrasound?’

  Silence.

  ‘If it was you, love,’ I went on, ‘I’ll spank your bottom. Only ignorant sods use ultrasound.’

  ‘Hand-cleaning costs the earth even in Zimbabwe, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Didn’t you have the sense to look it up? Tanzanite is simply blue zoisite. It goes muddy and is permanently ruined in ultrasound cleaners.’

  ‘Isn’t it time you saw sense, Lovejoy?’ Lydia said, exasperated.

  ‘Wotcher, Lyd. Time you got here.’ Turning, I put my face into her belly. She leapt away with a cry.

  ‘Lovejoy! In a public building!’ Lydia would always be Lydia.

  ‘Tansy got killed.’

  ‘That’s the reason I hurried here, Lovejoy.’ She would bollock me any second. I braced myself. ‘To make sure you do nothing outrageous. Tinker told me of the poor girl’s accident.’

  ‘The sod didn’t show. I told him to bring Tansy here.’

  ‘Language, please. Leave it to the police, Lovejoy. Tansy fell photographing the flowers. The police say so.’

  Yeah, right. Strapped for a groat to feed her multitudes, Tansy buys the most expensive camera then falls to her death so her people can starve? I looked at Lydia’s blue eyes with all the innocence I could muster.

  ‘You’re right, Lyd. I’m just upset.’

  ‘There you are, then!’ She looked at my drawings. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yes. I thought’, I invented quickly, ‘I’d illustrate a new edition of my antiques book.’

  ‘Good idea. Time you settled to some real work.’

  ‘You know, Lyd,’ I said, ‘you’re absolutely right.’

  ‘Lydia, please.’