The Tartan Ringers Read online

  Headache. God, it was terrible. The interior was suffocating, the watery sun blinding. I felt old, drained, weary. There were three objects left on the table. The caravan’s floor was littered with junk. Francie was sitting with her little girl watching me.

  ‘You talk to yourself,’ the little girl said.

  ‘Shut your teeth and brew up.’ I didn’t need criticism from a neonate.

  ‘Are those genuine, Lovejoy?’ Francie asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Pulling myself together I priced them. ‘This tatty watercolour’s not much to look at, Francie, but it’s worth a bit.’ No known artist admittedly, and a crudely drawn row of Georgian shops. ‘Mid-eighteenth century. He’s painted the three balls on the pawnbroker’s sign blue. They didn’t change to brassy gold until modern times.’

  The little girl said, ‘Mam said you’ll mend my doggie bell.’

  I tried to sip the tea but it was scalding. Francie remembered, quickly rose to cool it by pouring it into a bowl.

  The doggie bell was a bell-shaped silver fox’s head. ‘It’s a cup, sweetheart. Posh people drink from them before, er, going riding.’ Ritual drinks are still taken when the unspeakable pursue the inedible. These marvellously embellished cups are the best thing that ever came from fox hunting. ‘Don’t let anybody stick a clapper in it, for Gawd’s sake.’ The AB and GB initials were probably the Burrows, a rare husband-and-wife team of silversmiths in old London. Francie would have the sense to look them up. The trouble is that nowadays people make them into ‘nice’ things. I’ve seen a silver beagle-head stirrup cup, 1780 or so, made – with great skill – into an egg timer. Cleverdaft, my old granny used to call such folk. Leave beauty alone, I always say. Sometimes.

  ‘Is the dolly’s house yours too?’ It was a white porcelain cottage, two storeys. Coloured porcelain flowers adorned it. Antique dealers the world over call them Rockingham, but you never see these little white cottages marked.

  ‘No. Daddy found it. Mam’ll sell it.’

  Daddy is Dan, nice bloke if you like swarthy and tough. He does a motorbike act, Wall of Death.

  ‘Tell Daddy to ask a lot of money, love. It’s a pastille burner.’ I showed her the recess which led to the cottage’s hexagonal chimney. ‘You put a perfume cone underneath, and the chimney smokes a lovely scent all day long. Mam will light it for you. People called them Staffordshire fumiers. This is a lovely one, 1830.’

  ‘Is Staffordshire near Penrith, or Edinburgh?’

  ‘Er, that way on, love.’

  ‘We’re going there.’

  Those were the three. Betty and I chatted while Francie sorted the crud. A few good collectibles lay among the discards – fairly recent wooden household implements people call treen (cheap but soaring); a few Edwardian photos but none of the most highly sought kind (military, industrial, fashion and streets); a recently made pair of miniature wainscot chairs six inches tall (very fashionable to collect these small repros).

  ‘You did well, Francie. Got any grub?’

  She made me some nosh, then walked me to the war memorial with Betty. She’d worked out 10 per cent of my estimates and insisted on giving me a part of it.

  ‘I’ll post the rest, Lovejoy. Buy an overcoat.’

  ‘Er, good idea.’ It was coming on to rain. I left them there, crossing among the traffic. They stood side by side. Betty had a little yellow umbrella up. I acted the goat a bit, turning and waving umpteen times till she was laughing. It was fooling about that saved me.

  The traffic had become a sullen and glistening queue like it always does in drizzle. I was moving across the traffic lights, on red, when I did another half-step back, turned to wave. It happened all in a second. The nearest car’s engine boomed. Its side edged my calves and tipped me over. I heard Francie yelp. My trouser leg tore. Its tyres squealing, the bloody saloon streaked across against the red light and swung down East Hill.

  ‘Here,’ I yelled indignantly. ‘See that silly sod?’

  The lights changed to green. The traffic moved. Witnesses dispersed in the worsening weather. I grinned back at Francie. ‘I’m all right, love,’ I called cheerily. ‘Lucky, eh?’

  If I hadn’t been fooling about to make Betty laugh I’d have been . . . Keeping up a brave smile for Francie’s benefit, I made the opposite pavement and walked on before looking across the road to where Francie and Betty stood by the war memorial. I waved once, then the museum cut them off from sight. Only then did I start the shakes and lose my idiot grin. Luck’s great stuff, but it’s not stuff you can depend on.

  Chapter 6

  EVERYBODY LUSTS, BUT differently. And it seems to me that lust’s main function is the pursuit of what you haven’t got. So nuns in their lonesome beds may not all crave similarly. Likewise, me and Jo were panting after different prey when we met at the Tudor Halt. I was super-consciously nervous about having luckily stayed alive. Tonight I’d be the perfect lady’s man.

  She was especially pretty, wearing a dark silk shawl and a late Victorian Neapolitan mosaic brooch, neat and minute. Her hair was ringletty, her face oval. Her lovely eyes had dark lashes ten feet long. She glanced about, amused.

  ‘You chose this place because of some antique, Lovejoy. I know you. And I’ve lost sleep achieving this Regency look.’

  ‘It’s not. Honest.’

  We bickered all through supper. Lovely candlelit grub in the nooky old joint, with a beautiful woman shimmering opposite. You can’t spend your time better, almost. I enjoyed her company even though I was sussing out the other diners, checking that Karl’s waitresses hadn’t transmuted into thinly disguised Mafiosi. Jo explained what the meal was – posh grub comes hidden under sauce – but knows me well enough to gloss over the grue. Finally I got Karl to bring me a cigar so they’d bring me one of the antique smoker’s companions. Jo laughed and clapped her hands.

  ‘I knew it, Lovejoy!’

  Found out. My face was red. This restaurant has an entire dozen of these lovely creations. Tonight I’d drawn the silver figure of a frog leaning on a toadstool. Remove the frog’s head and there’s a spirit reservoir. Decorative holes sprout spills for lighting your cigar with a grand flourish. Antique dealers often advertise them as ‘silver ornaments, incomplete’, thinking they’ve bits missing. Wrong. Buy them even though they’re little more than a century old, which isn’t much. You can still talk them off a dealer for an average week’s wage.

  Jo and I left the nosh-house holding hands. Karl’s an old Hanover man whose wry good night was as good as a body search. For six years he’s refused to sell me the smokers’ companions. But one day . . .

  ‘You love those old things, Lovejoy, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Same reason as I love you older women.’

  ‘Cheek.’

  She came in for a coffee, and told me enough about her friend Shona. Enough for me to find her, I mean.

  ‘You think it’s worth phoning her, love?’

  ‘It would only worry her, Lovejoy. And her bureau was probably insured . . .’

  Shona McGunn, I listed mentally. Teacher. Near Dubneath, Caithness. Single. House owner, etcetera.

  Jo stayed a long, long while. I was on my very best super-romantic behaviour, really gallant. As the fire died into embers and pitch night began I suffered fantasies about noises outside. Twice I got up to peer nervously into the darkness. Once, too, Jo laughed when something scratched in my thatched roof, probably a bat or some night creature. Jo’s jokey question if my cottage was haunted didn’t help either. I’m thankful my garden’s an obstacle course of weeds and brambles.

  Hiding my nervousness, I became frantically adoring and, I prayed, adorable. That night I really earned survival. I was the world’s most ardent lover. I became a raconteur, the wittiest humourist, sensitive and worshipping. And, it turned out, the most wide-awake sleeper. Not a bloody wink all the dark hours from worry while Jo softly breathed. All right I’m a coward, but that car business . . . Anyway, cowards last longer, even if knackered.
/>   ‘Lovejoy,’ Jo whispered as the curtain gained its grey dawn rims. ‘I must go. Will you see me tonight?’

  ‘Anything you say, er, darling,’ I said fervently. After all, maybe I owed her my life, having used her as a night shield against the predators. ‘Er, sorry about those, er, marks.’ Her arms wore bruised fingerprints.

  ‘Silly. I’ll come at nine,’ she said mistily. ‘We must talk seriously. About us. And Bob.’

  This sounded bad news. ‘Of course, love,’ I said sincerely.

  Cautiously I saw her off into the palish world. I waited until the milk float clattered along the lane, then, calming in the comparative safety of dawn, I fried some bread for breakfast.

  That evening, ostentatiously carrying no suitcase, I caught Jacko’s rickety lorry into town.

  Once, I saw a famous comedian die – not meaning he got no laughs, but as in death – on the stage. The newspapers trumpeted that he’d ‘gone as he would have wished’. Never. Death is the worst option, and I was going to give it up for Lent. The police would only ballock me if I asked their help because they always do. Flight was the best policy, and where else but to pretty Shona McGunn? And the prospect of that treasure mine of antiques.

  An hour of flitting from alleyway to ginnel in town, from doorway to cranny, and I left the place underneath a friendly driver’s tarpaulin bucketing along the A604. He dropped me off at a Sudbury tavern where I stayed until closing time. I stole a white towel during my sojourn there, and was down on the bypass by midnight among the wind-blown rubbish cutting letters from the towel with a penknife. When held, a passing motorist could see the name FRANCIE quite clearly. Then, soaked to the skin, I crouched miserably in the shelter of the hedge and waited with my improvised sigh. God, I was tired.

  The fairground cavalcade came through three hours after midnight. Clapped out, I creaked erect, and held up my sign against the driving rain. The seventh vehicle was Francie’s. I was among friends.

  ‘Fairs are creatures of habit,’ Francie told me as she drove northwards through worsening weather. Husband Dan was driving the big wagon which carried his Wall of Death sideshow. Little Betty was asleep in a specially made bunk in Francie’s vehicle. She handled it with reflex skill, towing her caravan. Unless there was a hold-up along the Great North Road somewhere, they’d be pitching in Penrith in time to catch the early evening crowds. The fair did the same every year.

  ‘Penrith’s always worth two evenings,’ she explained. ‘We call pitches two-ers, fourers, sixers, according to how many days.’ She’d put the heater full on to dry me out. ‘I guessed you were in trouble, Lovejoy. Dan was all for seeking that saloon car that tried to run you down when I told him. He was mad at me, not taking its number.’

  Not imagination, then. I cheered up. Even a murder risk becomes easier to cope with when you know it’s really there. ‘Look, sunshine. I can’t exactly pay for the ride, but I’m good value. Any ideas how I can fund this excursion?’

  She was a full minute replying. ‘I’ll think of a way, Lovejoy.’

  I took a further minute. ‘Ta, love,’ I said.

  That day I slogged harder than I’d ever done. Illusion’s my main problem. In fact it’s the one main problem for us all, because illusion does us down. It’s true: blokes are narked that their bosses turn out to have feet of clay. Birds go sour realizing their lover isn’t exactly the handsome film star they’d imagined. Sometimes an illusion becomes an essential part of life; I’ve told you about Lily loving Patrick. She pretends that his womanlike behaviour is just a passing phase. Illusion. It catches you out.

  My own illusion in joining the fairground was multiple wrongth. I’d assumed that a travelling fair is jolly, colourful, gay – wrong. It’s a million laughs a minute – mistake. Being with Francie meant free journeying . . . Oh dear. Very wrong.

  We hit the pitch mid-afternoon, a big grassy field rimmed by hedges. I was woken by Betty shaking me and saying to come and help. The fair had to be up by seven. After only a cup of tea I slogged with a gorilla called Big Chas and his mate Ern erecting broadwalks and canvases, hauling generators and winching struts and wooden walls. I fetched and carried. Francie wrapped my hands in oily cloths to keep me going. As the fairground took shape I began to peter out so they put me on netting the dodgem cars. God did great making mankind, but He was all thumbs when He came to antique dealers. I felt useless.

  By seven o’clock parts of the fairground were in action. Customers were strolling among us. Lights came on as generators throbbed. The sideshows were first off, rifle stands, darts for goldfish, chestnuts, hot dogs, an eastern fantasy show with burning torches and seductively moving bellies, quoits for ringing mystery prizes, the whole gamut. Then children’s carousels, opening hopefully to tinny organolium music nineish. Dodgems, the caterpillar, the Giant Wheel, and the Great Cavalry Ride (wooden horses) began about eleven.

  ‘Bylaws make us close at midnight,’ Big Chas rumbled when I scraped enough breath to ask if we ever packed in for slumber. He was grinning at me with poisonous good cheer, the moron. He and Ern were pestilentially happy, singing hymns while we worked. ‘Quite a decent crowd, Lovejoy, eh?’

  Meek with exhaustion and self-pity, I reeled obediently on, toting dat barge and liftin’ dat bale among the fairground’s bright pandemonium. Once Betty brought me a bowl of mushy peas when I was half way up a perilous wooden structure trying to bolt some huge planks to something else, God knows what, among a tangle of great wet ropes. The din of these music engines sounds positively melodious from a distance, but you try dangling among their pipes screwing bits together and you’re deafened and blinded. That Big Chas and Ern were alongside happily warbling Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos did little to ease my bitterness.

  Oddly, you miss hell when it stops. I was spread on a rain-soaked canvas a million miles up in the night sky near Andromeda when silence struck so suddenly I nearly slid off from shock. Blearily I looked around. Our Zoom Star had stopped careering through its demented ellipse. Whole banks of bulbs plunged painfully into dark. Quietness returned to the land. Thank God for bylaws.

  ‘Finish that rope and we’re done, Lovejoy,’ Ern called up, flashing a krypton lamp and warbling, ‘Lead, kindly light, amid th’ encircling gloom.’ Bloody maniac.

  A few minutes later I clambered down. Betty was standing there, neat and prim under her frilly yellow umbrella. ‘It’s dinner time. I came for you, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

  She pulled my hand. I stumbled down the trampled lanes between the booths to Francie’s caravan. It seemed full of steam. Dan was wolfing a Matterhorn of spaghetti, his elbows flying. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite see how he managed his with that enormous moustache. We said hello. Francie dished up for me, and a littler mound for Betty who prattled all during dinner, telling Dan and Francie how well I’d done.

  ‘Lovejoy’s trouble should soon be over, Dan,’ Francie said. ‘He’ll sleep in the wagon.’

  ‘What job’ll you do, Lovejoy?’ Dan managed between yards of spaghetti. I was narked. Had I been resting?

  ‘I shouldn’t put him selling tickets,’ Betty said. ‘He swears all the time.’

  ‘Shut it, you,’ I said coldly.

  ‘Big Chas said he’s not much use,’ the little pest reported.

  ‘I’m the world’s greatest antique dealer,’ I informed her.

  ‘You’re hiding from the bobbies. Daddy said.’

  Dan thought all this was hilarious, the nut, and fell about laughing. ‘Do the Wall of Death with me!’ Another roll in the aisles. I quite like Dan, ever since he got me that tricycle for Three-Wheel, but you can go off people.

  ‘Stop it all of you,’ from Francie.

  So, amid Death Riders and Sky Bursters, I was relegated to collecting pennies rolled down a groove in a wooden peg.

  Big Chas and Ern laughed themselves stuporose when they heard I was second string on the roll-a-penny. Dan kept guffawing as he did his bikes. Ashamed, tr
ying to look like a gruff-voiced lumberjack, I helped with the boards on his Wall of Death.

  At noon I thought, Sod it, slipped away and phoned Tinker at the White Hart, cascading coins into the greedy slot. Mercifully he’d managed to get only slightly paralytic in the first hour. His cough quivered the receiver. I held it a mile away till his voice recovered.

  ‘Where the hell you been, Lovejoy? Everybody’s asking.’

  ‘Who?’ I badly wanted to know. That was half the point of being with this wagon train to Utah or wherever.

  ‘Helen. Margaret. That Customs bloke’s bird with the big tits. Jill, the slag. Three-Wheel Archie. Liz Sandwell, wouldn’t mind stuffin’ her. That poofy bleeder’s tart Lily.’ He means Patrick. ‘And yon Scotch bint, arse and legs.’

  ‘Charmingly put, Tinker.’ Very little wheat in all this chaff. ‘What’d Archie want?’

  ‘Dunno. Wouldn’t say.’ He waxed indignant. ‘Interrupted our dominoes down the George, the berk.’

  Archie dicing with death there. ‘Dutchie back yet?’

  ‘Nar. Don’t like his neffie barker, that Dobson.’

  ‘Yeh, yeh.’ Tinker’s likes and dislikes can get you down. I thought a minute, the delay costing another fortune in the coin box. I heard a gust of renewed hubbub as the taproom door swung. Voices shouted hello, one falsetto. That’d be Patrick making his entrance.

  ‘Tinker. Tell Archie I say to pass the message on. I’ll ring the Spread Eagle after midnight.’ I added with brutal calm, ‘And get going or it’s no beer money.’

  That set him coughing from worry so I hung up. Leaving the phone, I had an idea. Why not look around for antiques where I was, treat it like an antiques sweep through the countryside? That at least might pay my way and rescue me from the dreaded roll-a-penny.