The Sleepers of Erin Read online

  We drove to the strand to watch the Howth lights and walked the dark streets. She was in the mood for reminiscing and talked of her childhood abroad, the dresses she hated and how shivering cold she’d been at school. I made her laugh once by telling her to teach me that Gaelic turf-cutter’s song Gerald had sung while at the turf diggings. She fell about, helpless. I had to hold her up.

  ‘Gerald? Him? Oh, Lovejoy, darling! Gerald hasn’t a word of the Gaelic. He makes everything up. Everything. All the time. Don’t you understand anything at all?’

  So Gerald was a non-Gaelic Gael as well as a nonpoetic poet.

  I mused, for her sad soul’s sake, ‘What else is he not? Better tell me now before our partnership really gets under way.’

  She laughed at that so much she cried.

  We walked over the little river and into somebody’s garden. She was on their steps while I dithered at the gate.

  ‘Come in, Lovejoy.’

  Keys clinked. The door opened and she was silhouetted there, looking down the steps at me as the hallway light came on.

  ‘Er, is it all right, Shinny?’

  ‘There’s nobody here, darling. It’s my cousin Maureen’s. She’s away for three days.’

  I went up the steps. ‘Caitlin’s side of the family? Sean’s? Patrick’s?’

  ‘Mary’s. You know, Mrs Heindrick’s head maid.’

  And there was I assuming Gerald always knew where to be by a kind of instinct.

  ‘Tell her not to mix the porcelain styles in future,’ I said severely. ‘I was saying to Jason only the other day that Meissen Augsburg would have been ideal—’

  ‘Lovejoy!’ the bandsaw said, but I was already putting my torc in the kitchen’s sugar tin, shoving it deep in the sugar. I found some plaster to stick its lid on tight.

  ‘Safety, mavourneen,’ I said. ‘In case we sleep heavy, alannah.’

  She rounded on me and hauled me close. ‘Lovejoy,’ she said fiercely. ‘If you start your silly rubbish tonight I’ll—’

  She was pulling my jacket off, then my shirt, then handing me along the corridor.

  ‘Mind my arm, mavourneen.’

  ‘One more word out of you,’ she said in fury. ‘One word, that’s all.’

  She slammed me into a bedroom on the first floor where an electric fire already burned. She swung me round to face her and kicked the door shut with a thud that shook the whole house.

  ‘Ready?’ she said, arms akimbo.

  ‘I think so,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘Right,’ she said, shelling her coat. ‘Get ’em off.’

  Once, during the night, I thought I heard a familiar whining scooter engine, but Shinny’s lovely cool breast was in my hand still, so I wrapped my legs over her and went back to sleep.

  She was gone.

  You will have experienced those moments of disorientation when you wake up assuming you are at home or somewhere, and suddenly every single sense screams different! different! and for a sick moment you feel utterly scared and lost. It was like that, opening my eyes into bright ten o’clock daylight with strangeness all around and the big double bed crumpled and . . . and . . .

  And Shinny gone.

  I shot up, heart banging, dashed into every room thinking of the Gardai and the Fraud Squad and Interpol and Sherlock Holmes, but there was only this envelope.

  I thought, This is bloody rubbish. She can’t have left, just when we’d become lifelong partners. The note was on the back of a shopping list.

  Darling Lovejoy,

  I’m gone with Gerald. I can hear you saying as you read this that women always settle for what they can get. Maybe we are really like that. I don’t know. I do wish I could have got you for keeps, but you will never be the sort.

  Gerald wishes you good luck and says to tell you we’ll do the sleepers proud. Last night’s paper is in the kitchen. Gerald said not to show it you till now.

  All my love, darling,

  Shinny.

  The paper had a front page chunk about a gentleman and his wife being seriously injured while involved in an amateur archaeological excavation in the west. The wedge grave had fallen in, the floor crumbling under their weight. In fact, there was doubt whether they would even survive. Gardai were making extensive enquiries. Two local men were missing, with some of the torcs. The Heindricks were highly respected pillars of the community, and there were lessons for us all in the sad events surrounding the accident. Poor them. I didn’t bother reading the rest, and thought of Shinny.

  Of course I should have spotted it. Gerald was in partnership with Joe – maybe always had been. He, Joe and Joxer had been in collusion all the time. And of course Shinny. They had all gone along with the Heindricks as a team within a team, to con the conners. I should have known. An Irish poet in East Anglia would have been coals to Newcastle, but a Dublin-trained nurse could arrive, work at a hospital and serve as go-between for Joxer and Gerald. A plan cool enough for Jason, the Heindricks and me to have missed the truth completely. No wonder Gerald didn’t much care how deep his arrows went. And Shinny had the strength to leave me high and dry. As I’d said, I couldn’t imagine Joe doing anything else but antiques con tricks. Once a sleeper man always a sleeper man. They could manage without me. Of all, I was superfluous. Tears came to my eyes. Honestly. Tears. Me. At my age.

  And Shinny, lovely eyes sad across the gold candle flames, had said it too: You can’t beat an Irishman in a shilling race.

  I’d been had. I’d been done.

  Shinny and her team had conned me, conned the Heindricks, and played us all off against each other. Last night’s love had been farewell, a kiss before flying.

  Worse, I was broke. Not a bean.

  Except . . .

  Chapter 28

  You won’t believe this, but all morning I mooned about the place touching the bed and looking for traces of her and suchlike daftness. Love is a hell of a thing. I felt I would never smile again. I went to find the sugar tin in the kitchen. Gone. Good old Shinny had snatched it as she ran.

  The trouble is, I thought, watching the children cross the road towards the school, love has to be made or you’ve got none. Like antiques. And ‘made’ means made, formed, laboriously worked into being in that creative act that is the terrible and utter act of loving.

  You can’t do it alone. Try, and all you achieve is a longing, a feeling, desire, hope, fondness. Certainly, to love somebody she has to be there to be loved. I was heartbroken.

  Well, almost.

  I made some tepid tea, drank it as a kind of St Giles bowl, and watched the women go past with their prams towards the shops near the green where the buses turn at the top of the road.

  There wasn’t a crust in the house, not a penny. Shinny had taken every groat. Not that I’d had much. And Shinny had paid for last night’s supper in the posh restaurant by St Stephen’s Green. Still, it showed she was thinking of her present and future comfort, which is practically every bird’s full-time occupation.

  About midday I brewed up again, worse even than before, thinking. I was a long way from Dublin’s centre, and me with not even the bus fare. The train from the level crossing would cost a mint because fares always do. Stay here and starve to death? Or move about in hope?

  Nothing else for it.

  I heaved a sigh, rose and went back into the bedroom. The gold torc, glowing with its ancient splendour, was still underneath the bed where I’d slipped it after lofting it from the sugar tin during the night. Loving Shinny to exhaustion had been a pleasurable duty to protect the torc.

  The rare eighteenth-century old flat iron which I’d substituted for it in the sugar tin wasn’t to be sneezed at. The rarer ones – Abraham Darby of Coalbrookdale, incidentally, as that one had been – are almost priceless now, real collector’s items. I was very, very narked that Shinny had taken it, thieving bitch. Even if she’d thought the tin contained a gold repro, it was still me she was stealing from. Well, all right, it still belonged to the householder Maur
een, but I felt annoyed with Shinny. I could have nicked the flat iron instead of her. That’s women for you.

  I slipped the torc into my pocket. As long as I gave the whole coat to the archaeologist, he’d be able to spectrograph his way to the undeniable truth – that in my hand was the original gold torc. It had been easy to pick it out simply by its vibes, even while Gerald watched me and I gaped innocently at the toffee shop. Of course, sad that Gerald and Shinny had only umpteen reproductions, but gold’s worth its own weight. They wouldn’t starve. Just get a nasty shock when they found everybody laughed at the claim that at least one of their torcs was genuine. Still, people shouldn’t go trying to defraud friends.

  To equal things up, I decided to look round the house. There was a small Henry oil on the wall, faded from stupid placing on the wall facing the window where the sunlight would hit. It was suffering from craquelure because of coal fires in the same room. Careless old Maureen.

  The painting came free of its frame quite well without a scratch. I borrowed a pillowcase and folded it over the painting. (Tip: never wrap a painted canvas up with string directly. Fingers are kindest and therefore best for carrying.) Then I borrowed a small white-metal ‘bronze’, 1911 or so when they were all the rage and everybody wanted one of those stalwart heroes leading a prancing nag for the mantelpiece.

  Patricia Harvest, the plump lustful sexpot from Goldhanger, like all antique dealers, couldn’t tell whitemetal from dandruff, so I’d get at least half the fare home from her. She was sure to be in the main hotel where the antiques fair was being held. After all, I’d promised to meet her there without dreaming I would actually turn up. In fact, thinking of her winning ways made me feel quite warm inside again.

  Finally, I borrowed a small carriage clock from the kitchen. No longer going, but walnut-cased clocks, especially those with typical Belgo-French corner pillars, are highly sought nowadays even though they aren’t much before 1870. Funny how fashions go in collecting. It fitted neatly in my pocket.

  I found the right hotel sixth go. Bloody telephones, never any use.

  Mrs Patricia Harvest was in suite 108, bless her greedy little heart.

  ‘Pat?’ I said, all casual. ‘Lovejoy here, darlin’. As promised.’

  ‘Patricia,’ she corrected. ‘Lovejoy?’ She was already breathing hard. ‘Darling! At last! I’ve been waiting and waiting. Where are you?’

  ‘That’s me at the door now,’ I said prophetically. ‘Be prepared to (a) pay for a taxi at the hotel, (b) rape me in your circular bed, and (c) make a fortune with me at that antiques fair. Okay?’

  ‘Oooh, darling,’ she said, practically groaning.

  Before departing with my loot, I totted up my expectations on a scrap of paper lying around. When I turned it over I realized it was Shinny’s farewell letter. I hadn’t meant to be so casual about it all, still busy being heartbroken for life, but the trouble with heartbreak is it’s not much use. Yet that thieving swine Gerald had nicked all my gold torcs. I felt like strangling him, but hunting the bastard down might leave me full of arrows in some desolate bog. It was either revenge, or immediate solace in Pat Harvest’s sexy wealth.

  What was it I’d said? Sooner or later someone has to chuck in the sponge on vengeance and settle for forgiveness. Otherwise we’re all at war for ever and life’s nothing but a succession of holocausts.

  But why should that somebody be me?

  Then I thought of Sal, Joxer, the two duckeggs off the motorway bridge, Jason and his oppo, how close I’d come to it. And suddenly there were reasons it had to be me. Wait for all the other idle sods in the universe to walk away from revenge and you wait for ever. Besides, I remembered the ugly thunk of Gerald’s arrows as they hit the castle rider. I might even win the torc back, but there’s no pockets in shrouds.

  And there were other antiques waiting, to get to know and to love.

  Patricia would be delighted to see me. She always was, being so clueless about antiques. And I’d let her see my latest purchases, a valuable Henry oil, and an original Celtic torc, for a consideration. She’d agree, of course. Patricia’s considerations were famous and very, very considerate.

  The trouble with Paul Henry as an artist was that he copied his own Irish paintings, which causes a bit of turmoil when connoisseurs glimpse one of his. There’s always this row about provenance, too, though I’d have to play that one off the cuff. But nobody achieved that green like him, and those white cottages – always too stark when you look too closely at the brushwork – melt into the lovely landscape when you step back.

  I wondered if anybody had tried to forge them yet. Maybe Pat – sorry, Patricia – was still friendly with that faker in Goldhanger and we could do a deal. I’d have to watch his technique, though. Him and his lunatic use of yellow ochre and umbers. In this game you can’t be too careful . . .

  I slammed the door and stepped out, whistling, heartbreak forgotten.