The Possessions of a Lady

by Jonathan Gash

  'No sign. He must just have stashed Mayor Tom's antiques, then scarpered.'

  'Mayor Tom knew Stella had nothing but trash, so he donated what antiques he could. He loves Stella, see, Tinker.'

  'Oh, aye.'

  I might have been talking about the weather.

  'Stella's husband Terence decided to scupper her auction. Nicked Mayor Tom's stuff, hid them in the old house. Maybe he was going to return them afterwards!'

  'Honest?' Tinker savoured the strange word, brought out a soiled pasty from his greatcoat pocket, picked something off it, offered me a bite. I declined. I like pasties, but there's a limit. 'Nar. He'll be as crooked as the rest of us.'

  'As the rest of them, Dill,' Cradhead corrected, from among the jostling mob.

  'Where'd you spring from, Cradhead?'

  'Just passing, Lovejoy. A splendid do, what?'

  I shrugged, making it obvious. I didn't want any dealers, or Derry, thinking I was Plod-friendly.

  'Where is Tinker's lorryload going, Lovejoy?'

  'Eh? Oh, it's Wanda's. Did she say, Tinker?'

  'What load's that, son?' Tinker did a coughing fit. Cradhead winced, wrote him off.

  'I take it that you will be around for a few days, Lovejoy? Questions I want cleared up.'

  'Of course. I've relatives to see.'

  Briony Finch came to interrupt, breathless.

  'Oh, Lovejoy! You were wonderful!' She looked starry-eyed at Cradhead. 'Wasn't he wonderful?'

  'Absolutely, Briony,' Cradhead replied gravely. Briony? I didn't even know they'd met.

  'I took longer than I expected. Hope I didn't delay the fashion show.'

  'They've worked so hard, poor lambs!' from Briony.

  I waved to Old Alice. 'Excuse me, please. An old neighbour. Any way I can help, Craddie, just ask.'

  He smiled. I hate his smiles. They're horrible, though you'd never know that if you didn't mistrust him.

  'Thank you, Lovejoy. You'll keep to our arrangement? I paid up front, remember.'

  'Right right.' I watched him go, and was enveloped in Old Alice's crowd of well-wishers. They'd saved some grub for me in a nosh tent.

  'Pasties, eccles cakes, chorleys, chips, mushy peas,' Old Alice fluttered. 'Everything you like!'

  'Ta, love.' I beckoned Tinker to come along. 'First sense I've heard.'

  Staying with this lot, and then going to the fashion show with the crowd, might buy me a few hours before perdition finally struck. With Old Alice's crack geriatric charity team, I was free to think. As we sat and prattled, I set my mind free.

  Teachers teach a prevailing opinion that we'd still be back in the Dark Ages were it not for aluminium. It's the chemical-element theory of civilisation. It's rubbish.

  France's Napoleon III begged his scientists to discover some way of making the pure metal from bauxite. By 1886 electrolysis had aluminium on the market. Eastman Kodak cameras of 1915, motor car bodies. Then aeroplanes, engines, airships like the R100. That's the theory: no aluminium, no mass travel, no modern civilisation.

  It's a naff theory, the goon's guess, and misses the point. Take away people, you've got nothing. Okay, there'd be bricks and mortar left, machinery and other marvellous residues. Things, but no people. No people? It's too high a price to pay. Stuff aluminium.

  So with doom approaching, I noshed with Old Alice's cronies the stodge of childhood, and was content. Let it come. I'd stand by folk. Unless I could wriggle out from under.

  36

  My reverie about the good old times—were there ever such?—was doomed as the last frantic TV crews poured in. Keystone Kops, destroying anything. Bongs went, crowds dashed screaming. I recognised the signs. Fashion was going to happen. Hours late, but fashion, like royalty, has that right.

  Sadly, I thanked Old Alice. She told me, eyes glistening, to look after myself.

  'Are those men chasing you, Lovejoy?' She actually pointed with her arm out.

  'No, love. Just old friends.'

  Derry and his oppo, Bonch, were standing staring. Another couple of dozen, we could have tableaued a biologic Stonehenge. Cradhead was talking amiably with Mayor Tom. Stella had joined them. I bussed the old lady, beckoned Tinker. He left the ale tent.

  'Tinker. That lorry.'

  'We going to make the dash, son? I'll decoy, 'f you like.'

  Friends weaken selfishness, I find.

  'Ta, Tinker, but no. Look. When the modern dresses start, hitch it to yon purple caravan. It should be dusk by then. Everybody'll be gawping at the parading models coming down the covered gangways.'

  'Then?' He sounded dubious.

  'Somebody's planning to nick the Victorian dresses. We'll do it before they can.'

  'Who? How? What for, Lovejoy?'

  How much to tell him? 'I'll be at the fashion show. The Victorian frocks parade first. Then they'll go back into Amy's purple trailer. It'll be quiet outside. Inside will be pandemonium.'

  'And I make off?'

  'Tow Amy's caravan away, with the Victorian dresses in. It'll be easy.' I hesitated. Things never are, around me. 'Well, maybe.'

  'What if. . .?'

  'Shut it, Tinker.'

  Try to do right by everybody, and I get lip from Joe Soap. It's a life and a half, this. They announced the fashion show. I left him and went into the chapel. People made way, friends everywhere, not a killer in sight. My seat was alongside the catwalk. The main stage was a-glitter, the antiques and dealers gone. The unsaleable dross was cleared away.

  The place was in hubbub. No Aureole. Roger though, Carmel, Tubb beyond her making mystic signs at the remnants of holiness on the walls. Pews had made a miraculous reappearance, but too few. Folk were sitting in the aisles, already enraptured at the thought of seeing dresses, when clothes are in every shop in every street. It beats me.

  Faye was on stage, really bonny. No Nicola. Cradhead was seated almost directly facing. I didn't like that. Derry and Bonch had vanished.

  Thekla was also up there. I didn't like that, either. She saw me, swiftly scribbled a note, gave it to a girl I was starting to recognise. Thekla pointed me out, her expression one of concern. I'd seen it on the faces of gunners taking aim. She could keep her neffie old message, whatever it said. Rodney, in a luminous suit, was being admired.

  Amy tore through a cluster of people in the wings, trailing material in a panic. Still frantic, when she'd had weeks? The girl with the note slid along the rows.

  'Wotcher, Vyna.'

  She bent, smiling. 'Love letter from Thekla. With her fondest, Lovejoy.'

  'I'll bet.' I put the note away unread. She was miffed.

  'It's time we came to an arrangement, Lovejoy. We could sing dollar music'

  'Too late, love. You've missed what chances were going.'

  She slid away, prettier still now she was white hot with anger. I resigned my cerebral cortex to oblivion as TV crews rolled cameras about, making everybody shift. They live for disruption, even give each other annual awards for it. Loony. I'd almost nodded off when Nicola whispered into my ear from the row behind. No disturbance. She'd never get a job in television.

  'I've come to my senses, Lovejoy. I understand.'

  'You do?' I turned to look. She was so bashful, her eyes lowered. 'Why?' I thought I'd given up whys. But if she'd worked out why Spoolie got done, I needed to know.

  She whispered. 'Sweet, Lovejoy.' True. 'You drove all that way, to rescue me from that dreadful Florsston.'

  'Er, look, love . . .' I turned away.

  'Don't speak, darling,' she whispered. This in a horde. 'It's dawned on me. My place is with you. I've been blind. I'll make it up to you, Lovejoy.'

  Appalled, I listened to her terrifying litany. Apologies, promises, flowed from her lips into my earhole. I thought, No, no, a thousand times no. I wanted to start tunnelling, flee to the fells.

  Rodney meanwhile had begun the show up there, to thumping music. Strobe lighting, searchbeams, silvery colours from rolling panels. He strutted, sang. I watched,
numb. Screens lowered slowly. Old movie scenes of carriages, seemingly in heavy rain, showed in back projection as that stultifying noise pounded on.

  The crowd went wild, stamping feet as Rodney waggled and high-stepped. I wondered why the heck anybody in his right mind would want to do it. TV crews tracked his every wriggle. Monitors glowed, one jauntily suspended from a crucifix that had seen better—though not crazier—days.

  He finally froze, staring at the floor, arm raised, legs apart, breathing heavily as if he'd just given his all for art. Maybe he had.

  'Luvvers, bruvvers! Achievers, reevers!' He got a roar of approval. Fashion students climbed on tables, pew ends, dangled from walls. 'Can you out there see me in here!’ he cried. Roars. Was it some code? I was mystified.

  People were driving cars up to the chapel's entrances, to provide vantage points.

  Rodney posed in camp petulance, fist on hip, and pouted, 'Because if you can't— the show won't happen, see!’ which got the biggest cheer of all. God knows whose cars they were, but their roofs were getting danced on, the sound of distant impis.

  'Now a delectational exquisitorial display that is theeee fashion durbar of the entire galactic yeeeeear! I got sick of the howls. Mind you, it's hysteria that caesars and presidents—add fashion—have survived on through centuries.

  'We begin with exquatiously modelled Belle Époque dresses!' He began a rhythmic swaying, as if suddenly mutated into female, stepping to the crashing music. Couldn't they simply pin the dresses up on a stand without all this?

  'And who,' Rodney carolled, trotting and twisting, 'brought all the way from Manchester this glor-yerss display, but our— my — your —very own Amy!’

  Bedlam. Amy walked on, pretending humility. All phoney. She curtseyed. Manchester was ten miles; he made it sound like Amy'd dragged it from the Yukon by sledge. Her eyes locked mine, moved quickly away to where her fashioneer's heart lay, the mass of admirers. She bowed herself off. It brought the house down. Rodney wept copious tears for a beat.

  'Now!' he shrieked, leaving praise to mere mortals. 'For your utteracious delectation, the Grand Parade of Dresses of Centuries A-gone! Your narrator-ess,’ he squealed, making a joke out of gender, 'is Faye, the Gay Way of Today! He handed over to her. She advanced, taking over the microphone. Rodney couldn't bear to, but went.

  Faye began to speak in a neutral tone as the spotlights fixed the catwalk.

  'First, a particularly fine long ball dress, severe for modern taste but avant-garde before the twentieth century. Modelled by Clementine, it shows . . .'

  The music changed to wrong melodies from the Fifties, Thirties, inappropriate World War Two songs, with 1920 decade numbers. Models danced on, doing the Yam, the Charleston, miming some startlingly ectopic Great War ballads, then WW2 Lili Marlene. They even had early Beatles tunes, film scores.

  These last had me looking at my knees, but evasion doesn't work. I felt Spoolie's spirit gazing sorrowfully in. He'd want to know what I'd done about him, who was going to pay. Spoolie had been robbed.

  The Casablanca theme made me feel worse. Cradhead's steady gaze was on me. I glared. He didn't look away, the swine. No chortles.

  Meanwhile, the thin girls swaggered down the catwalk, swirling, wrong for the old dresses they wore. When I watch 'period' dramas, the actresses stride, like if they're wearing jeans. You watch, see if I'm not right. Nil out of ten. They ought to take shorter paces, moving within the compass of the hem. Daft, when they could look really authentic. Somebody tell them.

  Then my mind registered the dresses' jewellery as two more models frolicked on, followed by a file of six more. Okay, lovely lasses, blonde, raven, brunette, and bonny with it. But the jewellery.

  It was so deafening, so blinding, that it all but blanked out the girls themselves as they carried those precious items past and back, glowing with a radiance I could feel. I stared, open-mouthed. I even started counting. One, five, six. Then ten, twelve. I strove to see closer. Were the pinkos in their original settings? You can change diamonds' colour by irradiation— electrons, neutrons, deutrons, alpha particles, protons, the 'heavy' particles from linear accelerators—with or without heat. But you need the naked gem to muck about. And these looked mounted just as they'd been in Victoria's day. I almost fainted from relief.

  One dazzled me so I actually moaned aloud. There was (still is) a precious aigrette called the Jika of Nadir Shah. Aigrettes are named from the egret. Think of a small feather made of jewels for ladies' hats. English and French, especially, in and out of fashion these 400 years, they quiver as the ladies wearing them dance in the ballroom. Trembiants are another form, taking off flowers on little springs of silver, set sometimes into slim miniature 'vases' made of precious metal. Semi-precious stones are commoner in aigrettes than diamonds, that El Supremo of gems. Maybe it's because 'hair furniture'—as Amy quaintly introduced the aigrette—was easily stolen by fast-running thieves in the crowded cities of the past?

  This was a copy of the famous Jika. Nadir Shah was a great Middle East eighteenth-century warrior. Jewellers are raised on historic pieces, like aspiring footballers have footballing heroes. This aigrette has a massive emerald in the middle, and five smaller emeralds, the whole done as a feather. They say it's a hefty 781 carats. It was the fashion in Victoria's day to copy famous jewels in cheap materials—silver-plated steel instead of gold, cheap gemstones instead of rubies. And the once cheapo pink 'fancy rose' diamonds, instead of the priceless colourless 'white' gems.

  The girl twirled, flounced, wearing some dress I didn't even see, so seared was I by the rose-pink diamonds in her aigrette. An exact copy of the Jika, but with pinkos substituting for the original's emeralds. Once, the 'taint' of pink colour destroyed a diamond's value, to the Victorians. Yellow diamonds, even blue, were regarded as debris. Once mere curios, they now lurk undetected in cheap discarded Victorian costume jewellery. I've never yet had the luck to find one, though I know a dealer who bought a box of old Edwardian neckties and almost amazed himself into a heart attack by becoming the proud possessor of a pink diamond tiepin. He bought two new cars and a new house. They're out there.

  God plays tricks like this. Gifts are sometimes snatched back. As the pounding beat marched the aigrette girl off and brought on another, I remembered a forgery. I must have painted seven, eight, of the famous lost Van Gogh Vase with Cornflowers and Poppies, guessing the colours, copying the layout from black-and-white book illustrations. Then calamity struck. Somebody actually found the original, sold it for a fortune in a New York international fair. I'd plunged into poverty that very day, and had to go on the knocker, touting door-to-door.

  The fashion show was brilliantly exciting. There were sixteen pieces of pinko jewellery, two yellows, and one, possibly two, with blues I wasn't close enough to see well. I was in a fever. Good old Australia. I realised I worshipped fashion after all.

  'And now,' Faye announced as the music sank to a mere million decibels, 'Modern days! The Northern Fashion Durbar is . . . here!’

  Thump, thump, went the drums. Searchlights swung. Dancers emerged, the audience clapped. It was so thrilling that I upped and left, making a plea in mime to Faye that I was thirsty, would be back. I was almost tempted. She wore lemon yellow, a colour I particularly like, very simple, better than the creatures in their big moment.

  Outside, I was surprised to see it was dusk. The noise receded as I went to sit on the drystone wall. The fair was packing up. The ice cream vans were gone. The stalls and side shows were already trundling out. A cold wind blew.

  In the distance I could see the road's orange neon lights strung seawards, a reflection of the Irish Sea where the Ribble estuary cuts land away. Christ's Croft, these lands were called in the old days, Windmill Land beyond, once crammed with whirling giants. Now, no busy ports were left, the canals silent stretches where anglers counted themselves lucky to bring out a single fish.

  'Lovejoy? I'm ready to do it.'

  'Wotcher, Tinker. Give them time to g
et the old dresses back into Amy's purple caravan, then go.'

  A fortune here, a fortune there, sooner or later they added up to real money. What could I do?

  'Where're the Plods, Tinker?' No sign of the police on the dwindling fairground.

  'Them?' He spat with scorn. 'They've swarmed inside to see the lassies, randy sods.' He grew censorious. 'Is that why we pay our taxes?'

  You have to cut Tinker short when he's indignant, or he goes on all day. 'They're guarding the fashioneers' designs. In case they get stolen, like the Emanuels’.’

  I listened. Rodney was compering. Lights flickered from inside the chapel, darkening the night sky further. Faye must be reporting in to her newspapers, Wanda and Bertie totting up. 'Did Manchester send guards of their own?' I didn't want any commissionaires baulking me at the last minute.

  'Nary a sign, Lovejoy. I looked.'

  'Give that Rodney ten minutes, then do it.'

  'Him.' Tinker hawked up more contempt. 'A right screamer. Ought to be locked up.'

  'Tinker,' I said wearily. I felt heartbroken at the night-laden countryside, and didn't know why. 'Shut it. Last time of telling. Did you leave the Braithwaite where I said?'

  'Aye. On the moorside by the saint's well.'

  'Okay. Check you've got the trailer properly hitched when the Victoriana's inside.'

  'Awreet, Lovejoy,' he said. 'Keep your hair on.'

  Sometimes friends make me sick. As bad as enemies.

  'You not coming in the lorry, Lovejoy?' he asked.

  'Drive it on your own. Meet me at Brannan Hey.'

  Wanda had done well for Briony. She deserved a good slice. It would be enough for Briony to settle her sister's debts and buy her emporium. I sighed. It could have been worse. Soon, Wanda would come demanding my services as her private divvy. At least I'd saved the charity auction from being a penniless fiasco. I would come out of this with Mayor Tom's antiques, that I hadn't yet seen but which were safely sealed in Tinker's lorry. Fair's fair. Charity at last being its own reward.

  'Why're you not coming, Lovejoy?' Tinker asked.