The Sin Within Her Smile Read online

  ‘Morning, Lovejoy.’ Doc Lancaster slid in opposite. My low spirits nose-dived.

  He’s not actually a bad sort, more misguided. He’s one of those tallish, cool Englishmen you see in the tropics, never fazed by aboriginal dialects, droughts, or the tumbu fly. Dry of wit, his main flaw is that he’s hooked on health. Like I say, mania comes in many a guise. No wonder the caff went quiet. I saw two dealers surreptiously extinguish their cigarettes. Joe Chance, a wandering dealer who lived on the knock (suddenly appearing at your door with money ‘for any old thing you’d like to sell, lady ... ’) even covered his meal, a mishmash of eggs, grease-riddled bacon and charred sausages in a sea of congealing lard. It looked delicious. Nessie Packard, a recklessly obese treen dealer, gave Doc a smug greeting over her pious slice of wheat toast. He returned a smiley nod. He’s up to everybody’s game, knows full well she moves on to gins and massive chocolate creams for elevenses.

  ‘Morning, Doc. No, sorry.’ I said it all in one from habit. ‘Sunday’s trip, Lovejoy. Biggest contributor goes.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ I eyed him. ‘Won’t take long, will it?’

  ‘Shouldn’t. Wales isn’t far, cross-country.’

  That made me gag. ‘Me? Wales?'

  ‘You’ll love it. An air-conditioned charabanc.’

  ‘It’s two hundred miles, for God’s - ’

  ‘It’s four hours, Lovejoy. Sleep in luxury, then home. It’s not the North Pole. You can’t let the charity down now.’ He saw my plate come, the tea, Lisa stand waiting, felt the terrible pause. ‘Don’t you have an unhealthy intake about now, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Yes, well.’ I felt my face redden. ‘I’ve taken your advice, Doc. Eating, er, polystyrenes. I’ll go jogging if my leg mends ...’

  He sighed, nodded to Lisa. I whaled into the grub, offering him half a slice in token politeness. He refused it, thank God. I was starving. ‘One other thing, Lovejoy.’

  That froze me. Offhand remarks spell doom, from gentlemen concerned with the Common Good.

  ‘What?’ I felt shaky. Usually I’m only like this after heavy-duty wassailing. Maybe Sty’s had unsettled me, because a charabanc jaunt was no threat. You get these feelings. It was probably hunger.

  ‘Will you phone in, say how it goes, Lovejoy?’ I realized with astonishment that he was embarrassed. I’d never seen a mortified doctor before and must have gaped. ‘No reason, just that I like to take an interest.’

  Should I take pecuniary advantage of a doctor suddenly discountenanced? Conscience dealt with, I summoned Lisa and told her double eggs, bacon, fried bread, eight more slices of toast. ‘Proper butter, Woody,’ I called. ‘Your waitress shorts me with maggy ann.’ He made a rude gesture, coughing flakes of cheroot into congealing beans. ‘Well,’ I told Doc, ‘Woody keeps proper butter for the Plod, only gives us margarine. It’s not... ’ I brightened. A word came to my rescue, ‘'democratic. You want me to phone, right?’

  ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘Okay, then.’ I honestly couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Then my mind went, Aha! Sly old Doc had a bet on! Doc Davis in Dedham was his rival. They went to international matches at Twickenham, bet on all that rah-rah stuff. If Doc Lancaster got the bent word from me before even the trip had finished . .. ! The cunning swine. He soared in my estimation. Maybe medical schools did teach something useful after all.

  ‘You’ll find the team pretty friendly, Lovejoy.’ Doc rose, leaving some notes floating on the table’s spillages. I snaffled them, a frog with a fly.

  ‘You coming too, then?’ I gave back, narked. Charities charge everybody else for their own piety.

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’ve the practice. Hope your leg mends.’ He smiled at my blank expression. ‘To go jogging like you said.’

  ‘Oh, ta.’ I grimaced at an imaginary twinge. Trust him to pick me up on a casual remark, malevolent sod.

  He left with a wave at Lisa, who looked after him through the window. I could tell she’d like to make smiles there. Strange, but you don’t usually think of birds having carnal lusts the same as us, do you? She plonked the vast Woody’s special down and stood waiting. Blithely I pulled out the notes and with a flourish peeled ... No I didn’t. I slo-o-o-owly removed one and handed it to her, gaping as it left my hand. It was of a denomination I didn’t normally see. Now, whatever inflation’s done, you can get all Woody’s culinary efforts on one plate for less than a fiver, easy, repeats thrown in. So why did the notes Doc Lancaster had dropped on me each outweigh that? For a breakfast? Even I couldn’t nosh my way thorugh a fraction of this gelt. I thought, came to no conclusion except that I was unhappy.

  Like I said, time to find Imogen. She’s a dancer, and as unemployed as dancers always seem to be. First, I’d find out about Wales, where certain people wanted me to go. The library called.

  Our local library’s the pits, so I got a lift to Ipswich. I asked for Wales, including language.

  ‘Welsh under Foreign,' the assistant said airily. I knew I was in for a high old time.

  ‘Welsh is the only language that isn't foreign, love,’ I told her, but she was too learned to suffer learning.

  There seemed to be two distinct kinds of books. One claimed that Wales did everything in all history - America’s Declaration of Independence, explored the planet, Thomas Jefferson was Welsh, so was Montezuma, King Arthur, his Round Table, everybody else that mattered. The other kind claimed that Wales actually didn’t do everything but would have - but for bad luck/oppression/paganism/ Methodists/poor weather, etc. In five minutes I was fed up. I persevered.

  And learnt that the Welsh are great genealogists, their families extending to the ninth degree of kindred. I come from close Lancashire folk, but even we only reach the fourth. And the Welsh claim descent from every king you ever heard of, Welsh or not. If he wasn’t Welsh, well, he probably was anyhow. All Welsh are descended from princes, Egyptians, God-knows-who. But no popes. Wales was founded by the Trojans fleeing from Troy (yes, that one), ancient Phoenicians, et aristocratic cetera.

  Wales’s 8,000 square miles, I read, inspired the world’s greatest musicians. Wales has a trillion breathtaking world records. Prince Madoc of Wales discovered America in ad 1170, and the Daughters of the American Revolution have erected a plaque to tell his arrival in Mobile Bay, Alabama. The Mandan Indians spoke Welsh to prove it, but are now extinct. Dylan Thomas wrote sourly of the Land of My Fathers, ‘My fathers can bloody well keep it!’ Yet it was in Wales that the first steam train, Trevithick’s, rumbled out of Merthyr at a giddy five miles an hour or so in 1804. Sickeningly, a Welsh squire holds the record for shooting ‘sporting’ animals - over 5,100 ‘rabbits, etc.’ in a ‘standard’ seven-hour shoot. God knows what he did on a ‘good’ day.

  They truly did colonize. They failed in Brazil, but pulled it off in Patagonia. There, their Welsh-speaking colony in 1865 gave women the vote. They lost a gunfight with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who quarrelsomely arrived for reasons best not gone into. The purplish dragon of Rome’s banners is really the red dragon of Wales. Endemic slavery hung about longer than anywhere else. Wells are not holy in Wales, whereas elsewhere they are dressed in flowers on May Sunday - you hang a thread or pluck of wool on the nearby alders, for the luck. Wales actually has cursing wells. God, I thought, reading on in alarm, I’ve to watch my step.

  Differences were everywhere. Poetry’s inflexible mediaeval Rules of Twenty-Four Metres has decided if poems are any good. And Good Queen Bess, the Virgin Queen, was delivered of a healthy babe near Llangollen, a terrible secret. Less secret is that Queen Elizabeth the Second is actually one of the Gorsedd of Bards of the Isle of Britain, robes and all.

  Merlin the Magician is Welsh. As are all known religions. I flicked the pages faster, because Welsh religions are unknowable. I mean, Baptists, Methodists of (reputedly) a good dozen stripes, chapels of over forty persuasions, Welsh Anglicans, Reform sects, Nonconformists doing battle with Unitarians. My head spun. And they all persecuted t
he poor old Quakers. I gave up, like I’d already done with Welsh politics. I honestly did try to plough through the records of a Swansea by-election, but every bloke seemed to have his own party.

  The language, though, underpins our own. English dissected reveals tons of Welsh, even though it was bad-mouthed as the Victorians rushed to anglicize it. It happened to all lingos and dialects, home and overseas, suppressing mostly by derision and school punishments. I remember getting thumped myself for talking dialect, what I’d thought was English, my first day at school. School is there to clout you, in Wales as elsewhere.

  Tiring, I concluded that Welsh traditional law, of the ancient Prince Hywel Dda, was beyond comprehension. I also learnt that the flamboyant Prime Minister Lloyd George was actually a sly old coot who sold knighthoods (£10,000) and peerages (£100,000) on a sliding scale, and got stocks and shares by means not yet fully understood. His (beloved) English mistress and (maltreated) Welsh wife had a lot to put up with. An old manuscript told me that if you could build a house in twenty-four hours on common land, the plot became yours forever, free.

  That was it. Ancient Celtic folklore was founded on fairy tales, fantasy for storytellers. The Romans obliterated it in Anglesey. Harmless enough when a Victorian lady invented a ‘traditional’ fancy costume. I find it rather pretty, and no reason to march on Rome, if you follow. There are some really curious facts, though. How come that the dark-haired Welsh called the blond Vikings Y Cenhedloedd Duon. The Black Nations?

  The library assistant shook me awake. I blundered out, knowing enough about Wales - so I thought. They seemed a rum lot, but who isn’t? Wales seemed bland enough. Four Sunday hours on a charabanc, then home by evensong, same day if I wanted. Easy. Uneasy.

  Having no motor’s inconvenient even with Dolly’s mobility. I phoned her at the voluntary library, arranged to meet her twoish. I found Tinker forlorn outside the Woodman and said I had to go to Imogen’s. He was censorious, hating postponing the next tavern. ‘We’ve to earn some credit at Postern’s. Viewing’s today?’ ‘Word’s got about, Lovejoy, about them IOUs.’

  ‘Here.’ I pulled out Doc Lancaster’s bounty and gave him three. ‘Don’t forget to eat.’ How he survives on only beer beats me. Logically he should be dead. He gaped. ‘Lovejoy. What you done? Maudie Laud’s - ’

  ‘It’s safe coinery, Tinker. Doc Lancaster paid me in advance, wants the nod on this Sunday.’

  Tinker cackled so much he set himself coughing, hawked up phlegm, spat between two prams. It hit a dog between its ears. It snarled, mystified, went on its way in a state of mistrust. He blotted his rheumy old eyes on his sleeve. ‘Doc got a bet on, eh?’

  ‘Meet at the Three Cups. We’ll show folk we’ve got gelt.’

  ‘That Imogen should cover up. She’s not decent.’

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ I promised. I never do. She’d think I was off my head. I conducted him into the Trinity Walk alleyway, and climbed the Dance Academy’s grotty staircase. I could hear clapping, Imogen’s exhortations, tinny piano music, and feel the quivering boards. Gingerly I knocked.

  A glass partition separates the office - a chair, desk, battered cabinet, phone - from the exercise floor. It’s the entire Academy, apart from a corridor with old metal lockers and loos. No showers, no baths. It’s pretty spartan. A score or so women in leotards - Tinker’s state of undress - were leaping and clapping to Imogen’s calls while a diminutive lady with a bun and a lace blouse played on the old upright. I’d got Im the piano cheap.

  A bonny red-haired girl was on the phone in a temper. ‘I’ll call you back,’ she was saying. She saw me. ‘They’ve arrived at last. Where is it?’ She looked beyond me.

  ‘There’s only me. How long’ll Imogen be?’ She observed me with a knowing sneer, as if she’d expected her dance teacher to be mixing with lowlifes.

  We waited in silence. I watched the dancers. They were naff. Some were old, others smart and crisp of movement. Imogen was as slender as ever, cheering them on. I suppose every dance teacher has to pretend that terrible heartiness. I hummed the melody, wondering why the angry lass looked familiar. I’m dynamite with faces.

  The music laboured to an end, the dancers making it within a couple of bars. Im came in.

  ‘Lovejoy! How very nice to see you!’

  ‘Wotch, Im. Only called on the off chance.’

  ‘Look,’ Miss Charm snapped, rising. ‘I can’t hang about - ’ ‘Meg, please,’ Imogen begged. I felt awkward and dithered. ‘Just think - ’

  ‘I’ve already thought.’ The girl swung out.

  Im rushed, calling downstairs, ‘You’ll phone, promise?’

  ‘I might!’ and she was gone. I looked askance at Im as she returned to dry her nape, head sideways on like they do.

  ‘Sorry about that, Lovejoy.’

  ‘It’s okay, Im.’ Meg the Morose was probably some friend’s daughter passing through. None of my business, but curiosity drives you mad. ‘Love, will you be free any time? I’ve something on my mind.’

  ‘I heard, Lovejoy.’ She was faintly amused, but I could see that Meg’s stormy exit had depressed her. She was normally a lot bounder. ‘Your slavery. I don’t trust Mrs. Arden.’

  ‘It was grim,’ I said nobly. ‘I was the last to hear.’

  ‘Don’t sulk, Lovejoy.’ The first of the women came out of the changing corridor, flinging on coats, dropping handbags and bits of gear. ‘Here’s impossible. Where?’

  ‘The Three Cups.’

  ‘See you there. Give me a few minutes.’

  ‘Right. Ta, Im.’ I left among the departing women. They asked if I was joining the class. I said maybe, soon as my leg mended. I limped to show a football injury. They sympathized, said dancing was great. I ducked away from these lunatics into Lord Benton’s Walk.

  Which was how I came to spy on Meg, who was speaking angrily to Simon Doussy. They were in a small alcove in the wall of old St Nicholas’s church. It’s still used by snoggers of an evening. I’ve used it myself, when the bird was worried about being seen. I halted, stared unconvincingly into a florist’s window, watching their reflection.

  The odd thing was, I knew her from somewhere. And she’d expected me to come with someone, which was really odd. Somebody else, bringing ‘it’? She’d looked behind me, so the package was precious, because only then do delivery people go in pairs. The second oddity was that her manner had definitely changed when she’d heard my name.

  Doussy persuaded her to get into a car at the corner of Wyre Street. I was by then eeling through the alleyway towards the Three Cups. I’d wondered if Meg was one of Sty’s Vestals. I’d ask Imogen.

  Tinker was in the Three Cups when I arrived. Unfortunately, so was somebody else.

  The Three Cups is the place I told you about, plumb in the town centre. I like it. There’s an old Saxon church opposite - successfully vandalized by our council into a folksy museum with Tudor-type music plinking and goonish wax models that schoolchildren sketch in ‘real living history’ class. We’re progressive, acres of car parks replacing superb ancient architecture to prove it. The tavern’s old as our hills - older in fact, because we had a recent earthquake, ‘recent’ being the 1880s. Tinker likes the Three Cups because it’s got beer.

  But some folk are much less admirable. One of them’s Gee Omen, diamond merchant extraordinaire to his glitzy friends, pillock to those like me who hate him.

  Two years ago, he gave me a lift home from Corby where I’d advised some women wanting to sell pottery for an old people’s home. They’d got hold of nine Bellarmines. I said I’d help. Daft me. Bellarmines are nicknamed ‘greybeards’. They’re ugly stoneware, crude salt-glazed things you wouldn’t shake a stick at. Except they’re highly sought by collectors. Bellarmine was a dour cardinal well hated in good Queen Bess’s time. People imagined his gruesome phizog in the moulded face mask. They’re only bottles, hold from a pint to a gallon. These Northants ladies had the rare ‘pottle’ bottle - half-gallon - so made a killing when I’d
divvied them as genuine.

  I’d been waiting at the bus stop when Gee Omen stopped his vast silvery motor. Accepting lifts is a kindness that I rarely bestow. I hardly knew the bloke, just seen him around at exhibitions of Victorian jewellery. I find you have to pay a fare. During the journey to East Anglia he wore me down asking about Continental ferries, truckers on the A12 trunk road, the night shifters who’ll deliver antiques illegally anywhere, all that. I finally started to close up. The sod chucked me out for not being more forthcoming. That, I didn’t mind. But something happened that put me off Gee Omen for life.

  We were at this roundabout on the Cambridge outskirts, Gee narked at my reticence. I could tell he was in a temper. In the darkness a hedgehog slowly started across the road, rocking to and fro. Gee drove straight over it, even as I said, ‘Mind that...!’ And the bugger laughed, ‘Three points!’ smacking the wheel in self-congratulation. I didn’t speak another word, merely said my thanks. I watched his motor go, and knew hatred.

  Seeing him chatting, buying friends with drinks from his manyfold wad, my heart remembered the stone in its centre. I didn’t smile. He greeted me like a long-lost brother. I just signalled Mary the barmaid for a drink in the taproom.

  ‘Mary, darlin’!’ Omen called. ‘Lovejoy’s swill’s on me!’

  I gave Mary the bent eye, Just you dare. She quickly pushed the glass into the taproom. Tinker followed me shamefacedly.

  ‘What’s good old Gee on about, then?’

  ‘Ferreting, Lovejoy.’ Tinker coughed up a great gob of phlegm and dribbled it into an empty glass. Everybody went queasy. I wanted to apologize but, cowardly, didn't say a thing. ‘On about some tom.’ Tom is jewellery.

  ‘He’ll have a hard time. Mrs. Arden’s blotted it up.’

  ‘He’s milking the museums.’

  During the past decade, museums and galleries had suffered from

  Government cutbacks. They began to sell ‘excess items’. Sensible folk like me created uproar, to no avail. They went on selling. And they did it stupidly. Like, if they had three Roman bronzes from Camulodunum - Rome’s first-ever colony in Albion, the Isle of Britain - they’d flog off two, to anyone sweet of tongue. Such persuaders were mostly Gee Omen. He gave the trustees a written promise to sell them back to the museums on demand. Then he lit out for the Continent with the country’s heirlooms. This deception the trade calls ‘swearing’.