The Sin Within Her Smile Read online

  ‘You’re being unfair, Lovejoy!’ et loony cetera.

  I was desperate. Dolly and Hilda joined in with amateur sociotherapy, but salvation arrived in the shape of Mr. Arden, debonair but harassed.

  ‘Lovejoy? Carl Arden. My wife wants you, immediately.’ Orders, from a stranger, in my own local? ‘Say when I’ve to start, mate. I’ll be along. As it is . . .’ I indicated my company, secretly working out my fastest exit. ‘Tomorrow, nine-ish?’

  ‘Now, Lovejoy. A day is twenty-four hours.’ He glanced at a watch that could have bought the parish. ‘Start forthwith, or the cheque gets cancelled.’

  ‘Lovejoy,’ Dolly and Hilda said in mournful reproach.

  ‘That’s me.’ I rose amid jeers and hilarity. Once a serf, always. I followed Carl Arden, my hands clasped in jaunty boxer style, but heavy of heart. Jessina smiled wanly. The last thing I saw as the pub door swung to was her pretty mouth giving a silent repetition, Sorry, Lovejoy.

  His approaching Rolls meant nothing to me, because all motors don’t. If it’s moving, it’s posh and the owner’s got gelt. I stood waiting.

  ‘In, Lovejoy.’ Valerie clearly had the whip hand.

  ‘Ta.’ The warmth was scented with affluence. If slavery included driving this thing at least I’d not catch a chill. My old Ruby’s like a wind tunnel.

  We moved through East Anglian blackness. I nodded off when we hit the lonely hedgerows near Adamswell. People often come to the valley because it’s beautiful, but beauty doesn’t count if you’re stuck out in the countryside. Fields and forests do nothing for me. Give me a crowded huddle of houses any time.

  Probably we made a left turn up through the Pennies. Don’t laugh at the name. An ancient queen of ours, dying, once scoured the land for a lovely young lass with brains enough to take her place as bed- mate for the King. The only girl woman enough was little Alice Perrers, a humble tile-maker’s daughter from Little Penny in ‘Silly Suffolk’. The royal lady possessed of such ferocious devotion was our well-loved Queen Philippa, her husband that violent but strangely endearing King Edward III, a mediaeval ball of fire. Young Alice must have been rather special. The King’s riotous troubles - Church, Parliament, Rome’s Vatican, wars, would-be assassins - were only part of Alice’s problems. She also had to mother the King’s demonic offspring - John of Gaunt, the Black

  Prince, others. No doves among that little lot. Yet Alice of Little Penny village became our adored ‘Lady of the Sun’. I’d have given almost anything to - ‘Lovejoy. We’re here.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I woke blearily, only wanting to sleep.

  At his order I alighted. He immediately drove off. I waited patiently, but the car’s lights dwindled. Silence. My sleepy mind went? Maybe he had to park at a neighbour’s? I looked about. I was on the drive of a great house, old-new phoney, trees sparing lawns, a fountain splashing somewhere. Balustraded terrace, leaded windows, plastic olde worlde lanterns, nooky doorways, trellised roses. ‘Mrs. Arden?’ I cleared my throat. Louder. Nobody.

  The sough of the night breeze made me shiver. The house was on a rise. A passing motor swished by, pulled by its cones of headlights. A few windows were lit but the curtains were drawn.

  See what I mean about countryside? God knows where the nearest tavern was. I couldn’t see any crystal cluster of gold lights that gives villages away in this dark land. Arden had told me nothing, the aloof swine.

  The front door opened. A woman stood in silhouette. ‘Why didn’t you knock, Lovejoy?’ I’ll bet she’d been behind the door tapping her foot with impatience.

  ‘If I had you’d have counted to ten before opening it.’

  She laughed at that, really laughed. ‘How did you know?’ ‘Women do. Like they allow phones at least three rings.’

  ‘Come in. What else do women do, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  She sighed. ‘Yes, you’re he, right enough.’

  Aye, I’m him, I thought. I’m from the slummy world of split infinitives and no epigrams. We walked along a plush corridor hall into a vast living room. Was this where I was to be enslaved? I stood like a spare tool. She wafted to a monster chaise longue and sank in a flurry of silk. She looked ready for bed, if you believe those fifties glamorous Hollywood spectaculars, like I do. I glanced at the armchairs but didn’t sit. Slavery doesn’t come alone.

  ‘Light.’ A cigarette was between her lips, dangling there in paradise.

  ‘Yes, miss.’ Straight out of infant school, I struggled with a gold lighter the size of a domino. She watched me, sighed, took the damned thing and gamely lit her fag.

  ‘That bitch Deirdre’s just rung, Lovejoy. Offered me the bid plus, if I’d pass you on to her.’

  Was I expected to dance with joy, that my serfdom was now worth even more? And what did Deirdre Divine, whoever she was, also want me for? I was fed up. I was knackered.

  ‘Where are they, missus?’

  ‘Where are what?’ She honestly did look blank.

  ‘The antiques. The ones you want me to divvy.’ She dragged smoke in, held it, her eyelashes looking twice as long in the pose, exhaled. Breathing does wonders for their shape. I shoved my gaze about the room for safety. Kulaks do not ogle their betters. ‘Stands to reason, love. You only bid so I’d divvy your antiques.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘And the profit you’ll make will be worth well over two thousand, or you wouldn’t have bothered.’

  ‘Can you really do it, Lovejoy?’ Her eyes glittered. My heart sank. I knew what was coming.

  Her eyes lit from within. I’m not kidding. They truly did take on a luminescence. It’s not a trick they can turn on any time, more a sort of luscious understanding of chance favouring them. Infants do it, smiling without a change of expression, showing a burst of love. I’ve tried doing it in the mirror, and failed. But some shinings are different. Not all are pretty. This radiance was one of the least bonny. I’d seen it before, all too often. It’s known as greed. There ought to be a word for a woman’s combination of lust, greed, the ecstasy of craving ... Grust, leed? I shivered.

  ‘This pendant cost a fortune, Lovejoy. Worth it, yes or no?’ ‘Gunge.’ It was an old-looking tumbaga god of pre-Columbian design, on a gold chain. I’ll tell you it’s dark secret in a sec.

  Speechless, she tried to unfasten the catch at her nape, angrily gestured me to do it. I walked over and obeyed. She dipped deliberately, making my breathing suddenly engorge at the proffered view. I dropped it beside her and moved away. I was in enough trouble without tumbling into her cleavage. Carl would leap out of the tapestries with the local peelers. ‘Fake, dud, sham.’

  She finally erupted, ‘I have Government assay reports - ’

  ‘In triplicate? Cross-checked by Queen Mary College down Mile End Road?’ I’d have sneered but don’t know how. ‘Then you can sell it to some deluded clown.’

  She would have risen, had me horsewhipped, but the hour was late and her plans all awry. ‘Walk home, Lovejoy.’ She stabbed out her cigarette like it was me.

  ‘Can I go?’

  That silenced her. She eyed me, gazed at the pendant. It was a genuine pectoral disc, casting back light of that unmilked lustre only true gold shows. A beautiful piece. Her eyes lifted, their gleam different now she believed me.

  ‘Lovejoy. You don’t care, do you?’

  ‘For tat, lady? Who does?’ I stood my ground, but ached to leave. I’d find a barn to kip until morning, out of this house of bondage. ‘Everything’s got value - except money.'

  ‘So I’m a deluded clown, Lovejoy.’ A flat statement.

  ‘Lady, you’re worse. You’re a pest. You want locking up.’

  More quadruple think. Then she smiled, surprising me. It was like watching sunrise. ‘Lovejoy, bring a drink, fourth room off the landing.’

  ‘Er, what?’ Did she mean for me, or for somebody abed?

  With a faint tut of disbelief she wafted from the room without answering. It took me twenty minutes of di
thering to work out she might mean white wine, but I couldn’t get the bloody bottle open so took her some whisky.

  The rest you know.

  The bedroom could have bought and sold me, which in a way it had. I woke with a mild headache, thinking that women stop you thinking of antiques, forgery, the essentials of life. I remembered her command to ride on to detumescence.

  Was I to start work now, seven in the morning, daylight seeping through? Or had I already done half my stint?

  She lay humped beside me. I love morning women, all tousled. I love winter women, bundled in thick coats with shell-like faces, or in bed with their hair spreading. A bruise was on her cheek. I went red. It isn’t my hallmark, but it hadn’t been there last night.

  Slavery’s funny stuff. Nobody believes it still exists, yet everyone knows it does. Take your great ancient slave revolts, for instance. They didn’t want to abolish slavery. They were simply takeover bids. Like Vadius Pollion. He was a freed slave who got rich. Did he show compassion for his pals, slaves who hadn’t yet made it? Not on your life - he fattened the eels in his eel pools on live slaves he chucked in to drown and be eaten. Typical. Even slavery’s theorists are phoney. Take Karl Marx. An inveterate snob, he kept his own peasant slavewoman unpaid and penniless, fathered little Henry Frederick on her, then airily pretended the baby was his pal Engel’s by-blow. See? People pretend that unpleasant things don’t exist, but they do.

  Like forgery.

  This elegant lady sleeping beside me knew about forgery, like she knew about bossing her peasants, husband Carl included. Not a servant to be seen. But a household this size needed at least five, and she wasn’t the kind to rush about basting the carrots before the guests arrived. And Carl the Compliant, humbly zooming off while his missus ravished a serf, must own at least (a) another dwelling, plus (b) a team of abject helots, and (c) bulging moneybags to maintain the whole lunatic charade

  Forgery, and the tumbaga pendant. This lovely lady was a crook.

  The ancient peoples were more skilled than we credit. Like in jewellery. Tumbaga is an alloy of gold with copper - about four parts to one. The primitive Amerindian folk knew, long before Columbus, how to create beautiful effects in tumbaga. Imagine their delight. They dig up a mess of lode, crudely smelt it, and it looks like utter crud. Then they shape it to, say, a disc five inches across, like Mrs. Arden’s ‘pectoral’ (think of a decorative breast jewel in miniature). It still looks like disappointing dross even if it is flecked with gold. So the ancient goldsmith does a brilliant piece of craftsmanship. He does depletion gilding.

  Say it like that, it sounds as if he covers the top layer to hide the patchy grot, right? Wrong. He collects some plant juices that contain oxalic acid. (We forgers nowadays use strawberries or rhubarb.) He steeps the pectoral in the liquid. The thing begins to look worse, covered with filthy dark scales. But this ancient gold worker doesn’t despair, knowing it is merely the surface copper changing. He heats the jewel, and hammers it gently. He does it again and again. And something truly wondrous happens The gold is left there alone on the surface, gleaming and pure!

  It’s not like electroplating, where you add a gold layer. It’s not like gold plating, where you cover a rubbishy object with slim gold sheet. No, depletion gilding rids your masterpiece of the undesired muck - in this case, copper. It leaves pure gold.

  The importance of this to the forger? Nothing new is added! So any tests you do on a piece of jewellery will prove it to be as ancient as the original alloy. Get it? However sophisticated your tests are, down to millionths, your fake will be proved genuine. That’s why this ancient technique is coming into its own again. I’ve shown three amateur goldsmiths how to do it. Five years ago, nobody was interested.

  If you don’t trust your own depletion gilding, you can use Mother Nature, a well-known crook. Make your piece of jewellery from some tumbaga, then simply bury it. The soil will corrode out the alloying metal from the superficial layer, letting you dig it up later and polish it to show only the pure surface gold. And all as genuine as the original metal in the alloy - and as ancient. Better still, the

  ‘sinker’, as we call this technique, alters modem solder. The soldering is displaced by your gold, so no amount of eagle-eyed ‘expert’ examination will reveal your con trick.

  Isn’t art wonderful? The answer’s yes - if you pay a hundred quid, say, for a small rough chunk of Columbian alloyed ore dug up last Tuesday and sell it this week as an ancient gold pectoral for ninety thousand. It’s not quite so wonderful if you’re the buyer, because you’ve paid a fortune for a laugh. The trouble is that posh books have a way of giving these processes grand names: ‘surface enrichment’ and, inevitably, Frenchify it to mise en couleur.

  Her hand slid onto me, taking my breath and sanity away at a stroke, so to speak. I looked. She’d been watching me all this time. Women are sly.

  ‘I never saw a man’s brain work before, Lovejoy. It explains ... your passion.’

  ‘I can’t afford it.’

  ‘A slave doesn’t pay, Lovejoy. Seeing you thinking is like watching fireworks. I ought to make you remember your ... position here.’ She smiled, raised the bedclothes to inspect her handiwork. ‘Duty calls.’

  Another of my laws is that a woman never pays up front. It’s why they carry purses, so they can prolong the delicious agony, the wrenching act of forking out for something they have decided to grab. I should have remembered that law, too, but didn’t until death came as a reminder.

  An hour later I’d had a bath, dressed, and discovered two other benefits of slavery. The first was a bountiful breakfast, served by Evans, a pleasant lass who’d have been gorgeous if she’d had a diet of her own grub instead of serving it to passing strangers. Too slim by a mile, but able to swish among the porcelain without catastrophe. I liked her. The mistress of the house dazzled in cream print, everything matching, her composed features brilliantly smooth. Nothing fake about the diamond hair slide or the immense Singhalese ruby ring.

  The second was Mrs. Arden’s next command. She observed me noshing the meal, chin on her linked fingers. She made no attempt to disguise her languid air of the woman'roused from bedded love.

  No messages from Carl, late of this address. She just watched, occasionally beckoned peasants to replenish my plate, more toast, mushrooms, be sharp about it. Odd, but women like evidence of a man’s appetite - make that plural, appetites. I can’t understand why, but it’s a global truth, like leaves being green. A woman in our village, Connie, who I babysit for, used to strive might and main to switch the light on when we made smiles just to search my face, exclaiming with relish and clasping me afterwards as if I’d given her a year’s holiday. See? You’d think they’d have something better to do. It’s no good asking. I asked Connie about it once. She just called me stupid. Where was I? Mrs. Arden’s imperial imperatives.

  ‘Ta, love.’ I leant back, declined another fry-up.

  ‘Lovejoy? What do you like doing best? Not that,’ she put in quickly, ‘a set task, work. Until evening.’

  ‘Well, run errands, sit for babbies. I’m good at them.’ I glanced about. The spotless breakfast room was the size of a hangar. I said lamely, ‘Sweep up.’

  ‘Antiques?’ she suggested.

  I brightened. ‘Antiques aren’t a job, missus.’

  ‘What are they?’ It was sheer curiosity.

  ‘Life, love.’

  ‘Both? Or did you mean love in the vocative case?’

  God Almighty, declension country at breakfast? ‘Both.’ I really didn’t know. Still don’t.

  ‘Then you can check Carl’s collection.’ She saw my face light up. ‘It’s no good, Lovejoy. There are sophisticated alarms.’

  That narked me. I honestly hadn’t thought of stealing a single antique. I said, ‘Antiques are robberies that everybody swore could never happen.’

  She stayed snooty. ‘Evans will show you to the library. Lunch at one precisely, tea at four. My husband requires details of your
mortgage debts before dinner, seven thirty.’ She rose with that smooth motion women do. I got up, all clumsy angles trying to be suave. ‘Er, debts?’

  ‘Yes.’ She hesitated as if about to say more, but moved to the French windows. Evans leapt forward with a lace shawl.

  ‘Er.’ I knocked over a chair. ‘What debts? I’ve got none.’

  ‘That you owe on your cottage, whereby you defraud building societies in Ipswich, St Edmundsbury, Lavenham. And all your fake IOUs.’

  ‘Missus?’ I called, not knowing how much I was supposed to reveal in front of the serfs. ‘I didn’t think I was going to get ... ‘ ‘Paid, Lovejoy?’ Mrs. Arden turned, lovely against the cold morning sunlight streaming from the garden. ‘Consider it an advance.’

  I wallowed, helpless. I wish women would explain things. ‘Advance on what?’

  ‘Services to be rendered. Show Lovejoy the collection.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Evans actually bobbed a curtsey as her boss swept past. Luscious legs, I noticed. In the press of bedroom events I’d not had time to get really going at my own pace and direction. Maybe her lady’s hunger was sexual repletion from the rude and licentious plebian masses? It happens. I mean, look nearer home. In our village, at Elaine, Margaret, Josie, Betty the teacher, Connie, others. Why, only last week Olivia, our curate’s wife, invited - ‘This way, Lovejoy.’

  I followed. She’d got good legs, too, but I’d gone off her. Never called me sir. I felt peeved. I suppose one villein can always spot another. Still, by the end of the long corridor I was trying to chat her up and got cold-shouldered. Women should be more trusting, but they aren’t.

  By nine that night I was in the Antiques Arcade just before closing time, having earned my freedom by enduring painfully polite meals, including a moribund nosh with Carl making county-set dullisms at a repro mahogany table as long as my garden. I’d given him a list of all my debts. He’d pocketed it without a glance. His antiques were porcelain duds and fakes, the product of greed gone wrong. I was blunt.

  As the hire car dropped me off by the war memorial, I was worried sick, and desperate to find Imogen, the one person who might know what was going on.