Faces in the Pool

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Sunderland? Lincoln?’ Not Derby?

  ‘Ask any motor persons for Mr Gentry.’

  ‘What do I want from Gentry?’ I felt ill.

  ‘A proper explanation, Lovejoy. Please ask that precise query.’

  ‘Right.’ This, note, was me taking orders from my sprog, whose feathers were still damp. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Lincoln. It’s their flower show.’

  ‘Do I nick some daisies?’

  ‘Please leave tonight. I shall inform Miss Lydia. You do not have time to go back to Mehala Bay.’

  ‘Very well.’ (This, note, was me taking…etc.)

  ‘Travel alone, please. You have sufficient finance, I see.’

  ‘Very well.’ I went to pay. When I turned, he’d left. I asked the counter lady which way he’d gone.

  ‘Sarcasm,’ she told me frostily, ‘is the lowest form of wit.’

  One day I must find out who said that first and what the hell it means. I went home via the bus and looked up how to get to Sunderland. Somnell House could wait. But this time I took a precaution. Time I put me first.

  I phoned the Welcome Sailor on East Hill, and told Tinker to go to Mehala Bay.

  ‘In secret and fast.’

  ‘Where are you going, Lovejoy?’ asked the loyal old soak.

  ‘Me? Motor racing in Sunderland.’

  ‘Christ Almighty.’ His cough sounded like a distant avalanche. I held the phone away from my ear against contagion.

  ‘Then we’re flower arranging in Lincoln Cathedral. Bring Tansy.’

  ‘Lovejoy,’ he whimpered, ‘I’ve no gelt. Where’ll I get the train fare? I’ve not had a beer for—’

  Try to help people, you get exploited. I put the phone down and went for some grub. I had a long journey.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  zlotnik: unit of any country’s legal currency

  The Formula One in Sunderland was about as secret as UN corruption. I was dazzled on the platform by posters.

  ‘Is that today, mate?’ I asked a geezer in an anorak. He was admiring a huge motor racing advert.

  ‘No,’ he said wistfully. ‘Practising. At Blaydon Fields. I’ve to go to work.’ And as I went to the ticket barrier, he added, ‘Sunderland deserves its own motor circuit.’

  I agreed. ‘The council should do something.’

  The Fields turned out to be mayhem, throngs ogling pieces of metal, and cars that looked like they were melting. All this, to drive cars in a circle? I get depressed by mankind’s idiocy. There’s a group in Mexico who, at a cost of millions, will race 1,500 miles above Planet Earth. These X-racers will zoom round and round in the Bright Blue Yonder, boring us all witless. Why?

  Back on Earth, I pretended interest among these deranged saddos.

  ‘Trouble?’ I asked one lot.

  ‘You wouldn’t chuckle,’ a bloke said morosely. He wore an orange overall hung about with spanners, his four assistants all equally unmerry. ‘The practice cancelled.’

  Motors stood on asphalt surfaces in the paddock. There simply was no circuit, but I went along in the cause of solidarity. Sundry pantechnicons loomed, cables strewn everywhere.

  ‘It’s the weather. The suppliers are late.’

  ‘Terrible.’ I kept up a litany of sympathy.

  They talked gloomily of engines, when not one engine looked fit to go.

  ‘Anybody seen Gentry?’

  They were impressed. ‘Do you know Gentry? Manager’s tent.’

  Gentry was among effete snobbery in a marquee, being served with canapés and cocktails. He broke off and came towards me.

  ‘Ah, he’s here!’ I felt riff-raff among the nobs.

  ‘What am I here for, Gent?’ I kept my voice down.

  ‘To advise, Lovejoy.’ He was really pleased to see me. ‘About the profit you’ll win us ex-pats.’

  Suddenly I felt weary. Everybody expected me to haul money in over the transoms when I’d no net. Ellen Jaynor, Laura, Donna da Silfa and her lost Faces, Dr Castell and Penny, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Pete wanted his travelling fairground saved, and now I was responsible for dud engines littering Sunderland. It was too much.

  ‘Is that all, Gentry? I resign. Ta-ra.’

  He grasped my arm. ‘Shouldn’t do that, Lovejoy, old chap. Not good for your health. Think of Paltry.’

  What was that? ‘Eh?’

  ‘Paltry put his foot in it. D’you recognise anybody here? He overheard a chat, and put the wad on us.’

  ‘Put the wad on’ means to blackmail. ‘You?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘You did Paltry?’

  He sighed. ‘Joint decision.’

  Everybody was talking world championships. One man stood out. I’d last seen him giving testimony to a baffled plod near Paltry’s body. A bloke next to him had the frigging nerve to give me a wink. Dressed to the nines, London tweeds, a gold watch that could have settled the National Debt. He was the straw man. I’d told Liza, the local reporter, to find out where he was from. She’d drawn a blank. Now here he was, among the racing elite.

  ‘It was me put Penny Castell on to you for that mask thing her husband wanted from Eastwold College.’ Gentry chuckled. ‘Good value, is Penny. You’ll have already found that out, eh, Lovejoy?’

  What was worth killing a sad transvestite and old Smethie for? Couldn’t these loony expatriates simply sell their fucking antiques and head for the hills?

  ‘I still want out.’

  ‘Don’t even think of it, Lovejoy. Tomorrow you cross the Pennines to complete the job. We all go together.’ He rubbed his fingers, meaning money.

  ‘No deal.’ I tried to speak like an aggressive Yank out of a Dashiell Hammett novel. It came out a bleat.

  ‘I’d hate to have you erased, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  He smiled in surprise. ‘Why, yes.’

  The witness raised his glass as I left the marquee and Gentry rejoined him. They had a good laugh. I heard them across the paddock.

  * * *

  Only an ill wind blows nobody some good. People say that. I got a lift back to the railway station – red-brick arches, so similar to that in my home town, probably the same Victorian builders – and caught the train to Derby. I could reach Somnell House later, without more murderers telling me what I had to do.

  Like Penny, I always decide sex on my own. It’s not true, but I felt good thinking it. I prayed Fionuella would still be in Derby.

  Many towns vanish without telling me. It happened to Derby. Familiar shops were now kebab fast-fooders, a library a rush-nosher, an outfitter’s a tat shop. The one good thing about Derby was Fionuella, a let’s-pretend ‘Irish’ madam whose Genuine Antiques Emporium fronted her working house.

  She never closes. The special house was her main income. Her girls specialised in sex machines. Its income was massive. Fionuella pays taxes based on phoney accounts.

  I knocked and was admitted on the buzzer. She was at her desk among a load of dud antiques. Dud, except for one drab little cup that shone like a beacon.

  She didn’t even look up from her ledger. For a second I wondered if it was a pose, as if she had been expecting me. But how could she?

  ‘Fifty an hour, sor,’ she intoned. ‘Sure to God indeed.’ Lustrous black hair and London Blue eyes, and as Oirish as Lucrezia Borgia.

  ‘That much?’ I said.

  She penned numbers. Double-entry system, exactly as the city of Florence invented in the Middle Ages. A creature of habit, Fionuella.

  ‘All night is two hundred, sor, beggorah.’

  ‘Can I choose the girl? I’ll have you, Fee.’

  She’d got contact lenses. Her face lit and she engulfed me in her cleavage.

  ‘Lovejoy!’ Her accent was gone. She’s as Cockney as the Bells of Bow. ‘You really want a girl? I’ve new Balkan grumble. I’ve got a city councillor coming at eight.’ She smiled elfishly. ‘Going to apologise, Lovejoy?’

  Two years before, I’d divvied a collection of Davenpor
t glass. John Davenport’s porcelain was long out of favour, but he did one thing that beams through all history. August 1806, with the nation barely recovered from the death of naval hero Nelson, this potter patented a new way of engraving glass. It’s simply a picture scraped in a coating of ground-glass paste stained with Aleppo-gall ink, and the glass fired at low heat after wiping the paste away. A kid can do it. Or any careful forger.

  Fionuella had seduced a high clergyman (think a Church of England bishop, and you’re there) out of his Davenport glassware collection. I’d travelled to Derby, divvied it for her as authentic, and she sold it for a gillion, buying a boutique which she changed into a brothel. She promised me a few groats, and never paid. Narked, I’d stayed away, until now. I looked about for Davenport pieces.

  ‘I’m waiting, you bastard.’

  Had she got the right end of the stick? She had defrauded me. When I’m desperate, my true character shows through.

  ‘Sorry, Fee.’

  She re-engulfed me in that crevasse. A fake mystic topaz brooch added insult to injury by pricking my cheek. It didn’t half hurt.

  ‘Then I forgive you, Lovejoy.’ She forgave me?

  ‘Ta, love.’ I came up for oxygen. She uses enough cosmetics to camouflage a frigate.

  ‘Look, Lovejoy.’ Demure now, changeable as the seasons. ‘I’ll let you in to number 18. I have the top flat.’

  ‘You live in the er…?’

  She smiled modestly. ‘The girls don’t have the skill, ignorant cunts. No fucking sense. I have to drill them on the bloody sex robots. One girl almost lost it on the Montreal Machine. Christ Almighty, all she had to do was stand in it. She went mad. No control. Even Sandy laughed at their antics.’

  Sex robotics are the rage. You can hire every known automated – indeed automatic – device. And they aren’t all in houses of ill repute. Retail shops sell them.

  ‘Right, love. Finish your accounts. Can I look round?’

  ‘You and antiques, Lovejoy!’

  She bent over the ledger. She doesn’t use computer accounting. I wandered as she grappled with the two sets of books. One was for VAT, the other falling a logarithm short of the Inland Revenue’s expectations.

  The antique that drew me stood on a 1930s pottery sheep. The cup looked for all the world like a small pewter dish. I licked my finger and tasted the inside. My mouth turned bitter. Unmistakable.

  ‘Got anything good, love?’ I said, flannelling.

  ‘Shush, Lovejoy. Nearly finished.’

  The slate-grey cup slotted neatly into its case. Unseen, I slipped my belt through the handle, so my jacket covered the little thing. Hands in pockets, I wandered, then told Fee I’d drift round to number 18 – you never use the word ‘brothel’ in the trade.

  ‘OK if I have a drink there first, Fee?’

  ‘Sure, Lovejoy. Tell them you’re my dick for tonight and not to charge you. I price drinks worse than terrible.’

  ‘Thanks, Fee.’

  ‘Love you indeed sor,’ she said mechanically.

  Carefully seguing from her shop so as not to reveal my cased cup, I left. It was worth half her premises, and maybe more with provenance.

  In a small hotel I told reception girl my car was stolen. Cash settled her anxiety. Alone in my room, I examined the cup. Fee should have had it valued.

  Back in the harsh sailing days crews lived atrocious lives. Sea battles, foul weather, invading practically everywhere on earth, and they endured maggoty ship’s rations. Captains did somewhat better. Rum was the source of cheap calories. Naturally, constipation was the enemy.

  The antimony cup was born.

  Captains bought cups made of antimony. Antimony pills were purgative. Drink a swig of wine from an antimony cup, and constipation ended. This cup was antimony, the fitted leather case genuine 1750. A ship’s captain’s purgative cup enabled a skipper to last out long voyages. The cup could be used again and again.

  An antique like this would buy a house in the right hands. Or, I thought with a wry smile, the wrong. I reckoned Fionuella owed me, and I held a fortune in the antimony cup. Maybe I could pass it off as Nelson’s own?

  Fionuella had kept my share of her patent Davenport collection of glassware, so I was simply evening things up. I had no qualms. Comforted by this morality, I went round to number 18.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  to put the wad on: to blackmail

  Next morning, I offered Fionuella a fortune – I hoped to make a lot from secretly selling her (read my) eighteenthcentury antimony cup – to drive me to Lincoln. She accepted with alacrity. She had regular clients there. And I sincerely honestly don’t hint at a Lincoln clergyman, or the iniquitous bilge written about cathedral staff in the Church Times.

  She drove. I looked at her, suddenly realising I didn’t know her at all. Like I said, I’d known Fionuella two years in passing. She hadn’t been wary then, yet here she was vigilant as a badger. Was I the only duckegg thick enough to trust her?

  Another thing: I’d no idea she knew Sandy and Mel. See how your mind leads you down cul-de-sacs?

  We stopped after an hour, she wanting to call at a farmers’ market. Chatting about prices, vegetables, she was surprisingly expert.

  ‘We’ll have a bite here, Lovejoy,’ she said. ‘I’ll get some provisions, in case.’

  ‘In case of what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Got to eat.’

  Was I just lucky to be abducted by a gorgeous madam? It could have been known killers. Had she been too willing to accept this Lincoln trip? We stocked up with emergency rations, in case of ‘nothing’. We ordered tea, sea bass, vegetables and a slab of Impossible Cake. I noshed while she went to phone her working house, something forgotten.

  ‘World War One cake,’ she said, smiling. ‘My gran taught me. No dairy produce, no butter or margarine, no lard, no flour.’

  A cake with nothing in it? I gazed at it admiringly. Heavy as lead. ‘Can I have some more?’

  She laughed, relaxed now. ‘You’re a gannet, Lovejoy.’

  If I hadn’t known her so well, I’d have said she gazed at me with cynicism, but I’m wiser than that. Double-shrewd, that’s me. I wish I hadn’t thought that now.

  ‘Do you still see Femmy? The Audubon prints. You left me for her, remember?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  Women remember things. Honestly, it was not my fault. It had been Fionuella’s. She’d thrown everything she could lay hands on. I left at a run. She’d cut my chin with a Woolworth vase.

  Femmy was inordinately rich, meaning she spent whatever, whenever and wherever she liked, had four businesses, and a husband who owned banks near Lisbon. Or Cadiz? Somewhere there. I’d been invited to join in a cruise on the River Douro, but hopped off near Salamanca when her sister wanted to join in our night-time activities. I never did get the Audubons. Lucky I’m not bitter. I could remember Femmy’s antiques, and that she’d had a boob job the size of Scafell Pike. Yes, I’d liked Femmy.

  Fee waved her hand before my eyes. ‘Come back, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Sorry. I was thinking of Scafell.’

  She smiled with fondness. ‘You’re sentimental, Lovejoy. I like that. Time to go.’

  We arrived in sunny Lincoln after two hours and booked in as Mr and Mrs Voce. She flashed her plastic card.

  ‘Fee,’ I began as she unpacked. I noticed she had two suitcases and a heavy shopping bag. No antiques, though. ‘Why here?’

  ‘You had a job on here. Didn’t you say that?’

  Couldn’t remember what I said. Passion rubs things out.

  Her stare seemed absent and cold as a frog. My thought recurred about how little we know people.

  ‘I’ve really loved your company, Fee, together again.’

  Suddenly she embraced me, and wept buckets. Real sobbing. My shirt got wet. What are you supposed to do when a woman weeps for nothing? I’d assumed her mad careering meant we were OK. Instead, she cried like her heart would break. Memory’s to blame, I often think.
I couldn’t remember Fee ever weeping. Fee in a temper, of course. Fee chucking things, sure. But Fee sad and sorrowing? Never in a million years.

  Except in Lincoln?

  Over supper I listened to the diners. This flower thing seemed a big occasion. Flower arrangements were everywhere, flower videos showing in lounges. The place was crowded by ladies worrying their husbands would crush their displays unloading the van, all that.

  ‘Big do, eh?’ I asked the waitress.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ She was thrilled. ‘My aunt’s come in all the way from Spalding.’

  The head waiter came over. ‘Are you in a flower club, sir?’

  ‘Ah, no. Just here for the, er, daffodils.’

  ‘Good,’ he said doubtfully. Fee did that matronising smile with which women show they’re making allowances for men’s stupidity.

  ‘We’ve to be up early, Lovejoy,’ she said after we’d spent time in the bar. I was sick of the damned flowers. ‘Best to say nothing to anyone. Understood?’

  ‘What if people ask me?’

  ‘Tell them about daffodils,’ she said with sarcasm.

  She didn’t use to be sarcastic, either. Which raised the question: why did I feel part of her plan, not vice versa? Was it my animal appeal? I put on a show of being happy, then slipped off to a payphone. I managed to reach Tinker, thank God.

  ‘Mehala Bay?’ he croaked. ‘Gawd, Lovejoy. Them cold estuaries kill me. My rheumatics—’

  ‘Tinker. Get pedalling.’

  Fee and I were very close that night. I was jubilant, though she wept more buckets as dawn came. She rose clear of eye and firm of lip, and we left at nine.

  Daffodil time.

  Flowers aren’t much of a mystery, though women go mad for them. Our village has a team. They compete against neighbouring flower guilds and win (or lose) cups. But where is the art? Whole books are written about how to stick them in a pot. Truly. It’s all my eye and Betty Martin. Flower plus pot plus water, leave the coloured end sticking out, OK? Life is busy breathing so get on with it.

  But if you’re a flowerer, Lincoln’s your jaunt. Don’t miss it. I knew I’d be bored sick until I could clear off. Ted Moon and the Faces would be here somewhere. Find the link, then collect my money.