The Sin Within Her Smile

by Jonathan Gash

  Women stop you thinking of antiques, forgery, the essentials of life. She proved it, giving me a smiling clout.

  ‘Get to the orgasm, Lovejoy,’ she said, breathless.

  They nark you as well. ‘It’s your fault, not mine.’

  ‘Who’s the slave here?’ she demanded.

  She had a point. The slave’s always me. I obeyed the selfish cow.

  This trouble started with me helping friends, all women. It’s how a scruffy penniless antiques dealer gets in such a mess. I would have escaped, only she soared me to ecstasy.

  There’s nothing to be ashamed of in wanting women and antiques, which is how I landed up being sold in this slave auction.

  Shame comes into it. I was scared I’d go cheap and everybody would laugh at how Lovejoy was auctioned off for nowt. In Rome, slaves ascending the auction block must have borrowed a comb, tried to look presentable. Shame is powerful stuff. I’d had my usual bath, done my teeth twice, reamed every pore. I’d put new cardboard in my shoes, and sewn two buttons on my jacket. For me, I was beautiful, but still felt a prat. When they called my name I shuffled forward and stood red-faced to a chorus of jeers. Sweat was neutralizing all my dawn scrubbing. Slaves are ashamed, sure, but they’re also angry. Remember that, for this story’s sake.

  That morning, Jessina Mosston’d caught me in my workshop - a tatty garage in undergrowth. I was faking a Turner painting, Venice with the Salute, and swearing at his genius. Life’s hell for a forger. The trouble is, you can’t tell whether Turner did two, three, or twenty-seven glazes. I was forging Turner’s famous secret ‘dirty white’ sky (Payne’s Grey in turpentine with a drop of Venice turpentine oil; don’t tell).

  Jessina hove in. ‘Lovejoy, darling!’ I leapt a mile. She stood appraising the painting, head aslant. ‘It’s like nothing on earth.’ ‘Ignorant cow.’

  She sighed. ‘Your charm won’t sell you tonight, Lovejoy.’

  My brush wavered. Well it might, because Turner would have used his fingers to paint the foreground waterscape. I’d already guessed wrong over rose madder. I was broke, so a trip to London’s Tate Gallery to see the original was out.

  ‘Tonight? What’s tonight?’

  ‘The charity auction, Lovejoy. You’ve not forgotten?’

  Me and Jessina had made smiles often once. Now, she’d gone up market, worked the yuppie circuits, clubs, leisure centres, all that. Like many rejects, I’m not to remember that she’d actually enjoyed lust in the dust with a nerk like me. Her husband is big medicine in posh motor franchises.

  ‘No, course not,’ I countered quickly. ‘Only, er, what - ’

  She smiled sweetly. ‘You are Slave For A Day.’

  That stumped me. ‘Slave?’

  ‘Auction of promises, Lovejoy.’ She wore a clipboard and an air of exasperation, the hallmarks of the do-gooder. ‘You could have drawn Chauffeur For An Afternoon.’

  ‘You’re barmy. My motor doesn’t go.’

  She laughed with the woman’s impassive hilarity. ‘An evening babysitting - ’

  I brightened. ‘I’ll promise that, love!’

  ‘You already babysit for half the village. It’d upset the mothers’ rota. Slave For A Day is ideal.’

  I eyed her with distaste. ‘What’s it mean?’

  ‘Cut the grass, make tea, park the car! Heaven’s sake! ‘What charity, anyway?’ I could discover conscience.

  ‘Haven for the mentally ill.’

  Conscience gets a rough time. ‘What are you promising?’ I demanded. These sharks get the awards while others slog our guts out. It’s charity’s cunning way.

  ‘Timothy’s giving a new fitted kitchen.’ He’s her husband. ‘You’ve so far donated nothing.’

  See? Nasty with it. ‘I mean you, not your bloke.’

  ‘I’m organizing!’ she said, snappish now I’d sussed her. ‘It’s been weeks of work ... ’ et hypocritical cetera.

  ‘Oh, aye.’ Somebody’s slave? I’m at everybody’s beck and call as it is. ‘Swap you jobs?’

  ‘Seven thirty, Lovejoy!’ She swished angrily out.

  You can’t help wondering about women. I watched her lovely shape cross the tangled garden. They’re mad at me all the blinking time. There isn’t one that can say hello without ballocking me about my life style. Even Michelle the post girl plays hell about women who sometimes stay over.

  Turner called. My smile returned. I went to examine his - well, my - use of Naples yellow. It’s a kind of law with me, that antiques really bring no problems at all. People are the problem. I make hundreds of these laws up about antiques. I only wish I’d remember some, maybe keep out of trouble.

  Blotto, the stout bloke next to me in the village hall, is our village cricket team’s useless left-arm bowler. I read his auction list. ‘You are Gardening For Three Hours. She’s put me down for a whole

  day!’

  Blotto heaved his huge girth round. His mates were in the row behind. ‘Lovejoy’ll get some biddie wants a rave up, booys.’

  They fell about, more merriment at my expense. I glanced round the hall, bored out of my skull. Over a hundred people were in. The lads were making joke bids to our curate, Elton George, who’d drawn the auctioneer’s straw. Elton’s pace was funereal. A whole hour and so far he’d only done twenty-three. A proper auctioneer would have rattled us back to the boozer like a Gatling.

  A scatter of applause greeted A Week’s Dog-Walking, to filth the footpaths, five measly quid. Elton was ecstatic.

  ‘Thank you!’ he piped. ‘Magnificent! Now item twenty-four: Trim Your Hedge.’ He blinked his bottled eyes, mirth coming. ‘Shears not provided! Only the labourer is worthy of his hire!’ He snuffled, got a grip as ingrates and sycophants rolled in the aisles at such drollery.

  The list was pathetic. Not a single antique. I mean, Deliver A Dawn Breakfast? Wash Your Car? Not one was worth a light. The daftest was Do Your Week’s Ironing. Honest to God. Clothes only crumple anyway, so why iron at all? Yet all over the hall people were bidding for an afternoon’s typing, a freezer meal for four, a haircut (male) or wash-and-set (female). I could have been down at the White Hart hearing from Tinker if he’d managed to get the badly cleaned antique warming pan I’d sent him after in Beccles. (Tip: when cleaning old copper the traditional way - sea salt wetted with vinegar - don’t let it run; the horrible streaks are murder.) I was hoping to snaffle it for a dud IOU.

  The hall held unusual affluence. Undistributed wealth is never boring, but I like to see the rich threatened. Posh folk desperate to be seen, councillors with dwindling majorities, politicians wanting tit for tat, golf club hopefuls with desperate wives were all gasping for their pink gins. Is it wealth that makes me feel sardonic? Am I jealous? Mrs. Frances Bledsoe was in, I saw with annoyance. And her writer husband, Meredith, who’d inherited half of Suffolk to struggle by on. She avoided my eye, for sexual reasons in her past. And her friend, bonny in a black velvet dress that had cost about my mortgage. She’d glanced at us serfs but looked away when I’d looked. Women are good at that. They are also good at what she did next, saying something quietly to her velvet-hatted pal. Do women ever admit having made illicit love, or not? I don’t know, but expect it’s the worst.

  ‘And now, Do Your Weekend Shopping! Bids, anyone?’ Elton mopped his brow. Even his gavel sounded apologetic.

  Chatting absently with Blotto’s mate Fez, who works down the harbour, I suddenly came to. Fez had named an unimaginable sum of money, the sort people pay for Canalettos and jumbo jets.

  ‘Eh?’ I asked.

  Fez grinned. He’s like a cartoon mouse, all buck teeth in a chirpy wrinkled visage, wiry as all sea-coasters.

  ‘Straight up, Lovejoy,’ He was in to bid for Groom Your
Dog If Docile because he has this lame greyhound called Bottlebank that hates him but sires valuable champions. Fez is covered in scars. ‘It’s moored off the Deben estuary.’

  ‘He paid that for a boat?'

  ‘Lovely lines on her, though,’ Fez said wistfully, as though morphology justified spending a king’s ransom.

  Which made me look at the tall elegant gentleman just in. I’d passed him as I’d arrived. He’d been in the gloaming having a smoke, leaning on an opalescent Rolls. A woman in his motor was reading a magazine under soft lighting. I’d wanted her to look up and smile, but they never do what you want.

  He didn’t look a sailor. Your actual nautical is tanned, hard to rouse on any subject except sea tides and gaff-rigging. This landlubber was tightly strung. You could almost hear the quivering tension in the man. He wouldn’t sit down, though Hepsibah Smith, our gorgeous choir mistress, currently on teas, tried to entice him to a Chorley cake and some Earl Grey. I’ve wanted her for years.

  Some loon bought Prune Your Roses, and then it was my turn.

  ‘Goo it, Lovejoy, booy!’ Blotto yelled, leading the catcalls. I went red-faced to be auctioned off.

  ‘Slave For A Day,’ Elton squeaked, wondering whether to gavel again, finally thought it too fascist. ‘Lovejoy’s handiwork is well known ... ’ The double meaning struck him and he coloured. ‘And his popularity is, ah, equally, ah, well known.’ More stammered doublethink.

  How do you face an audience? I stared at the clock over the entrance, but people’s amused features kept swimming into view. I swore to get even with Jessina.

  ‘Five pence,’ Doc Lancaster called.

  Well. Riot city in the old village tonight. Everybody rolled in the aisles. I might have known. Doc Lancaster would make me walk a letter miles away, Mount Bures or somewhere. He makes people take exercise and eat fibre foods, the maniac.

  ‘No bid!’ a football club wag called. ‘He’s shopsoiled!’ Pandemonium. The whole place rocked. I was red with shame.

  ‘Doc’ll have you on his owl’ rowing machine, Lovejoy!’

  ‘Nurse Prentiss’d have Lovejoy on her rowing machine any owl’ toime!’ from witty Fez. Uproar.

  No more bids seemed likely. I gave Elton a curt nod and made to step down. Then it happened.

  ‘Ten pounds,’ a woman called. The hullabuloo ceased.

  ‘Twenty,’ Frances Bledsoe’s black velvet friend said,

  ‘Thirty.’ I strained to see, finally saw. The rival woman was the pale blue pastel one I’d seen in the Rolls. Her elegant bloke glared into space.

  ‘A hundred,’ after a quick nudge from Frances.

  ‘Two hundred,’ from the blue pastel lady.

  The hall’s silence was chipped into shards by Elton’s strangled repetitions. I thought, what the hell is happening? My domestic skill isn’t worth a groat. I mouthed the question to Frances herself, but she stared straight through me. The bids climbed.

  Five hundred quid came and went. A thousand. Then guineas. I was out of breath. If these birds wanted me to do their gardening, their grass must be like rain forest - unless they wanted me for something else. But I can’t do anything else, except babysit.

  The bidding ended when Frances’s pal, her face white and set, gave in. She maintained her minuscule but fraudulent smile, acknowledging the pastel woman’s victory. Elton knocked me down for two thousand guineas, an unbelievable sum.

  ‘Arden,’ the lady called, easing our curate’s panic.

  The hall broke into excited speculation, people standing to see Mrs. Arden. The jokes now fell flat. Suddenly there was less humour to go round.

  One strange thing happened. Jessina, she of the charitable urge, caught my sleeve. She looked flushed with monetary success, but said a really odd thing: ‘I’m sorry, Lovejoy.’

  *’S awreet, love,’ I mumbled, and moved on by. I could have throttled her. I sat, Blotto staring at me.

  ‘What you got that dried flowers ha’n’t, Lovejoy?’

  Indeed, I wondered, as Elton resuscitated the auction with Mrs. Camden's Basket of Assorted Marmalades, indeed, what

  The White Hart taproom was seething. Nothing excites like money, does it? Well, nearly nothing. I entered feeling I’d run a marathon.

  ‘Lovejoy. Bless you.’ Cyril Darwin’s wife, Hilda, isn’t a local dealer, but adds to local bafflement. She is starlet pretty without the malice, and every male in East Anglia would give a Rembrandt to land her - antique dealers excepted, of course.

  ‘Eh?’ She only speaks when Cyril’s given her a message.

  ‘Your gift, Lovejoy! To the mentally ill!’ Worse than I’d thought. I got ready to flee from yet more charity. ‘So generous, Lovejoy! I’ve misjudged you!’

  ‘Please.’ I basked in her admiration. I don’t get much. ‘It’s nothing,’ I added, hoping to God I was right.

  ‘No, Lovejoy. Will you have a drink?’ She left her table. My progress towards the bar became untrammelled. ‘You must be giving Mrs. Arden an absolute monster of a present!’ The dealers snickered. I gave them the bent eye past Hilda’s glorious shape. ‘For her to bid guineas, as auctions used to be!’

  ‘Don’t, love.’ I went all noble. ‘Charity is silent.’

  Hilda’s eyes filled. ‘Beautiful, Lovejoy! Considering.’

  Chris Mannering passed us, slapping my back. ‘Put in a word with the Ardens, eh?’

  Dog-eared Harry Bateman, following Chris, hoping for crumbs, added congrats. Lily, Harry’s wife, signalled to come over but I grinned as if I’d misunderstood. She’s crazy for Patrick which is barmy because Patrick only loves Patrick. All have glossy cards claiming they’re antiques experts, valuers, accredited, registered, and suchlike. Doldrum Townsend was in, I observed, chatting up Jessina Mosston. He was a parliamentary candidate once, and true to his genes has a penchant for bribery. He’s bribed his way into more birds than the parson preached about. His seduction technique is to ask, ‘What if I paid for a Mediterranean holiday? Go

  with who you like ... ‘ It’s astonishing the success Doldrum gets, and who with. Makes you wonder which of them, Doldrum or the lady, believes they’ve pulled it off. Both?,

  My eyes stopped roaming the saloon. These women’s hanging remarks worry me sick. ‘Considering what?’ .

  ‘Well, Mrs. Arden’s reputation.’ Hilda spotted Laura Gilleard, a jolly plump girl who’d joined the Antiques Arcade with pretensions of Regency furniture on the strength of knowing a Derby jockey’s cousin. I still haven’t worked it out. ‘Cooee! Laura! Coffee, Jackson’s, elevenish ... Ouch!’

  My hand relaxed on her wrist. ‘Considering what?'

  ‘That hurt, Lovejoy! Mrs. Arden’s terrible, that’s all.’ She inspected her arm. ‘You gave me a Chinese burn.’

  Everybody seemed to know the Ardens but me. This was unlikely and maddening. I’d do Tinker. He’s my barker, my warning bell. He was probably kippered in The Ship on East Hill.

  ‘Why?’ I waved back to Dolly, just entering. She is bonny, once catwalked for a London fashion house. She loves me, which is a bit galling, but I like her. She’s wholesome, sees that you get bran and vitamins, and is given to checking your teeth. It gets on my nerves. The Sunday before, she’d got us both up and nearly to Holy Communion before I woke up enough to ask what the hell she thought she was playing at. She was astonished. It was my patron saint’s day. I hadn’t known I’d got one. That’s all there is to say about Dolly. Oh, she has a marriage somewhere.

  A few of the lads were making her blush with lewd comments. She looked gorgeous in her fitted yellow suit. I beckoned her over to save her death from embarrassment.

  ‘Hilda Darwin, Dolly. Dolly, Hilda.’

  ‘How do you do? Good evening, Lovejoy.’ Dolly’s never out of breath, but looks about to be. ‘Tinker bid, but they wouldn’t accept your IOU.’

  ‘Bloody nerve.’

  ‘Please don’t be upset. The copper pan is in your cottage.’

  ‘They wouldn’t yet you got it?’


  ‘Tinker telephoned.’ She set her lips in a prim line to show anger. ‘I had to speak quite sharply to the manager.’

  The dealers were craning to listen and look. Between Dolly and

  Hilda, lust was spoilt for choice. Dolly is more voluptuous, pearls dangling from her prominent curves. Hilda is more your elfin winsomeness.

  ‘Well done, Dolly!’ I exclaimed. The Dollys of this world always make you talk like Thackeray. ‘Would you care for a drink, my dear?’ See what I mean? I never call anyone my dear.

  ‘Thank you. Tea, please. Do they have Ceylon Amber?’

  Even Hilda stared at that. I pretended to order tea and biscuits to an uncomprehending Eric, our barman, and led the two to near the fireplace. Dolly lives in terror of draughts. I was trying to avoid Tania Pope, an aggressive girl engaged to Big Frank from Suffolk. He’s our local English silver dealer and bigamist, on the verge of notching up his tenth - I think - missus. She was livid because I’d declined to be Frank’s best man again, again.

  ‘Hilda’s telling me about Mrs. Arden,’ I told Dolly.

  ‘I am fully aware of Mrs. Arden’s character, Lovejoy,’ Dolly said in reproof. ‘Reverend Elton informed me.’

  ‘Two thousand guineas.’ I was narked she was taking my sale price so coolly. I’d never been worth that. We slaves have our pride.

  ‘I honestly don’t know which is preferable, Deirdre Divine or Valerie Arden.’

  ‘Who?’ Tania Pope was zooming up, I saw with dismay.

  Hilda nodded. ‘The other lady, in wrong black velvet.’ She digressed at a chance of venom, saying to Dolly, ‘The sales at Willie Griffs?’

  ‘No. January’s cheap sales at Borrowdale’s.’

  They settled on a quiet exchange of denigration as Tania surged wrathfully from the throng.

  ‘Lovejoy! You must be best man!’

  ‘No, love.’ I tried reason. ‘I must not be.’

  ‘You’re spoiling it!’ The taproom hushed at her wail.

  See what I mean? She’s marrying Big Frank, a multiple bigamist, so I’m in the wrong? Their minds are definitely odd, no question. ‘No, Tania. Big Frank’s nine previous wives are the obstacle. And law.’