The Possessions of a Lady (27 page)

Dreams are worse than dreams. My mind seized its chance,
surrendered to memory. I was in a great house, long ago doing my first robbery
of my first antique.

Once, there was childhood. Nowadays, there's no such thing. It
went out with innocence.

Amy was a thin little lass in my class. It was those days before
nuns grew legs, hips, and handbags, when you could understand adverts, when
drugs were teaspoons of medicine for Grampa's chest. Girls dutifully went
backwards at dances, and sober lads danced forwards. In clogs, we lads marched
into school with Sister St Union playing the
March of the Slaves
from
Aida
.
The little girls threw non-existent flowers from nonexistent baskets, tripping
lightly through nonexistent forest glades. School, my infant mind instantly
registered on my first day, was pretence. My first morning, a grey-haired old
teacher, Miss Best, told me she'd taught my mother and my grandma, same school.
I didn't believe her, because I was four years old, and Ma and Gran were, I'd
supposed, older. Pretence!

We evolved. Morality being morality, sex was a threat to the
authorities. Segregated at seven, in case any of us matured early and went ape,
we got Miss Smith. She thrashed desks with a cane, thundering, 'Do you want to
starve without a job? Then
learn!
Came
teens, we dispersed to earn our crusts. My first slurpy astonished kiss came
complete with Amy's instructions ('Lips together, now suck'). My very first
robbery also came complete with instructions.

Thirteen years old, give or take, Amy met me coming out of the
pictures. She'd been smoking, jauntily going to the bad. She now looked smiley
and mischievous. She asked if I'd help her to 'carry something.'

'We have to get it first,' was her tale. 'From Scout Hey.'

'Is it okay to?' Cowards know when something's not right. Moorland
was fearsome wilderness, without streets, foundries, civilisation.

'Course it is!' she said. 'My uncle said I am to. He's in Africa.'

'Whereabouts in Africa?'

She said crossly, ‘I don't know. Stop picking!'

She promised to teach me how to suck tongues. My doubts
evaporated.

We went up the moorland road. Houses petered out, and lights. Back
then, you didn't mind walking an hour to somewhere. She chatted. I went, 'Oh,
aye.' There was a shifty moonlight.

Scout Hey was a sombre house, grey stones, an overgrown garden
within tilted iron railings. Stones had fallen from the drystone walls. Nearby,
a disused chapel. Amy stumbled ahead to search near the door. I recognised
pretence, all my schooling.

'He's forgotten to leave the key. Climb up the drainpipe.'

I obeyed. It's no mystery why the truly imperious monarchs in
history have all been female. Good Queen Bess, Catherine the Great, Victoria,
Cleopatra, Amy.

'You took your time!' She came in, shut the door behind her. 'It's
somewhere downstairs.'

'Don't you know?'

'Stop picking!'

The painting was on a wall. I managed to get it down. In an unlit
house you can see more by shafts of moonlight than you can outside in open
moonshine. Artists took 300 years to learn this trick of contrasts. I learned
it in seconds. The painting was of a small boy standing watching his mother
play a foreign-shaped piano in a tiled room. I felt suddenly ill. I tottered
into the hall carrying the picture. It felt hot, burning my chest.

'What's the matter?' Amy whispered. 'You're shivering.'

This was her uncle's. Why was she whispering?

'Nowt.'

I stepped away, went to the door. And recovered, quick as that. I
looked back at Amy.

'Come
on!
’ She was
narked, but I was wary.

'That painting made me poorly.'

'How can it?' she whisper-cried, stamping. The hall echoed. 'Carry
it!'

'All the way to Great Lever?'

She finally admitted, 'To the open market.'

I went to the picture, instantly felt sick and dizzy. I stepped
away. Ten paces, right as rain. It was the old painting. I was feeling
something special, new.

'I can't. It sends me funny.' Tongue suck or no tongue suck, I
could never carry it. 'I'll leave it outside. You can find it tomorrow.'

She argued, but cowardice ruled. I carried the painting out,
reeling with instantaneous sickness, and erected a lean-to of fallen stones
against the jungled garden's drystone walling to hide the painting. It took a
hell of time. My hands and knees were raw.

We walked off the moorland in silence, Amy furious with me. I was
ashamed. I didn't know what had happened, told myself the painting must have
had some chemical on it. In my heart I knew it wasn't any such thing.

About three days later, I was playing street football when Amy
came running.

'You're wanted!' she commanded. 'At the station.'

'What for?'

'Somebody wants to give you something.'

A man was waiting for us. The way things have altered, a man
nowadays chatting to teenagers in a station concourse would be arrested. Back
then trust hadn't yet died.

'Lo, Amy,' he said. 'This him?'

He was the first man I'd ever seen with a beard. He looked unkempt,
bedraggled. He wouldn't get admitted if he knocked at my Auntie Agnes's. She
would call him Feckless And Footloose, to her a hanging offence.

'This is Lovejoy,' Amy said.

The man seemed good humoured. He inspected me. 'A titch,' he
remarked affably. 'Thought you'd be older.'

'I'm nearly fifteen,' I lied.

'Ta for helping with the picture. You still poorly.'

'Never been poorly.'

'Course not,' he said quickly. 'Just want to pay you.'

He gave me a grubby brown envelope. I said ta. He said ta.

'You ever sick in the art gallery, son?' he asked.

'Never been in.'

'Things in the museum make you feel queer?'

I shuffled on the spot. 'Aye. Some.'

'Like what?'

'Roman things,' I admitted, watching him truculendy for the first insulting
sign of laughter. 'Two pictures. That funny desk.'

A few lads passing saw me and shouted me to play footer. I started
off.

'Listen, son,' he said quickly. 'Ever you're stuck for a job, ask
after me with Amy's auntie. Awreet? Not posh, but honest.' The antique dealer's
slogan.

He called after me. 'Just ask for Tinker, son. Tinker Dill.'

He tried to explain what being a divvy was, failed miserably. I
often wonder what would have happened if he had been less perceptive.

That night I gave Gran my envelope. She drew out a five-pound
note, awed. Then she was furious.

'Tinker's feckless and footloose,' she sniffed, proving where
Auntie Agnes had got it from. 'A rag-and-bone man.'

Later, there was trouble over some furniture that went missing
from some mill-owner's mansion. I left town. Later, I returned to find my world
gone. I followed a girl I liked to East Anglia, where I got a job in an
auctioneer's. Within a week I was dealing for myself.

There Tinker bumped into me, taking a load of antiques to the
Continent through Harwich. He became my barker. From that nothing beginning I
rose to extreme penury. It was called the antiques game. I've often thought of
Amy.

The hotel room was lovely and ancient, beams, bed, whatever. But
an empty bed's for getting out of.

Nothing for it. I couldn't go on like this. I'd not last another
day. So long, Lydia. Hello Amy. It was barely eleven o'clock at night. Middle
of the afternoon, with my sidereal clock. I was out of the tavern like a
ferret.

25

For a second I stood in the drizzle of Churchgate, wondering
whether to get a taxi, the Braithwaite, a lift. Then I walked it in minutes.
Home towns shrink. Returning once before, I remember staring round at our
two-up two-down loo-in-the-yard terraced, and thinking, Is this it?

Right onto Chorley Old Road, I could virtually see Sally Up Steps
in the street lamps. Facing the ancient hostelry was Amy's Excellency Antiques
among terraced houses, shops trying to look special, factories masquerading now
as supermarts.

Except the Braithwaite was parked outside Amy's.

My pace slowed. The Braithwaite was unique. Nobody could possibly
know where I'd only just shelved it. And who'd nick a valuable old tourer, just
to abandon it? Amy didn't even know I was here. Lydia didn't know about Amy.
Tinker, though, knew me, my old haunts, and Amy. So Tinker was in town. And
Roadie?

A metal grille thing barred Amy's glass-fronted shop porch. I rang
her bell. I looked at the huge old motor. It looked at me. I still had its keys
in my pocket. I banged on the door. It opened.

'Amy? Hello.' I stood and shuffled, embarrassed.

She stared, stared more. Then, 'You're gone years, and I get
hello?'

'Just passing,' I said, red.

'You'd best come in.' I entered the warmth, expecting some huge
bloke to rise and thump me. 'Sit you down.'

Minuscule room, coal fire in a grate, hob, oven, tiles by Mason's
showing horses on the chimney breast under the cornish, a one-piece iron
Lancashire fireplace, six feet by six, gleaming copper and black-grey iron.
Say, 1840. Any dealer would give . . .

'Stop valuing my grate, Lovejoy.'

'I was doing nothing of the kind!' I said, narked. 'Just having a
warm.'

'You're never cold. And you like the wet.'

'You always pick me up wrong.' No sign of Tinker. Did she know the
Braithwaite was outside?

She laughed then. 'You don't change, Lovejoy. More theories about
women than the parson preached about.'

'You have. Changed.' We sat, Darby and Joan by the hob. 'You're
bonnier.'

No longer the scrawny Olive Oyl stick-legged lass. Rounder,
waisted, smart. Old friends, new enemies. I ought to've asked Gran what it
meant. My remark coloured her face.

'What do you want, Lovejoy?' she asked.

'Nothing,' I said indignantly. 'Just thought I'd call . . .' I
petered out. She clasped her knees the way she used to.

'I've two children now. Chet's a good man,' she put in quickly.
'Works on the motorways.'

My remaining muscles relaxed. She carefully didn't smile. A small
stack of little leather boxes was on the TV. Cufflinks? Medals?

'You're still dealing, then?' I asked outright.

She too relaxed. 'After you, how could I not?'

'What in?'

Amy examined me candidly. I don't like women doing that. It makes
me think they're not going to believe me.

'Don't, Lovejoy.' Barely in the door, and twice she'd told me stop
it, don't. 'You've looked me up. You know I'm a syndicator. And in what.'

'Look, Amy.' I went into frowning aggression. 'I'm making a
respectable visit. If you can't take me at face value, I'm very sad.'

She leaned forward and poured tea. (Incidental note: these old
hobs, the kettle is always hot.) I finished my rant.

'You're at Man and Scythe, Lovejoy,' she said, like I'd not
spoken. This town. 'And her?'

'Dealer. It's her motor. She's staying,' I added pointedly, 'at
the Swan.'

'Tinker's at the Pack Horse.'

She sounded indifferent, but Amy can be sly. Secrecy was unknown.
Like, everybody born here knew that it was one of my ancestors who opened the
town gates to Prince Rupert's army in our Great Civil War allowing the
Royalists to massacre us wholesale. Gran always pretended it was long forgot.

'The town's full of collectors,' I said. I'd passed several shops,
each devoted to a collecting theme.

'It's the North, Lovejoy.' She sounded defiant. 'Fashion's moving
in our direction. We're people with good guesses.'

That was Amy's way, the oblique remark that stirs you to reach out
and grab. Just for once, I'd like somebody to give me something. Take that lass
Cecile. About 1926, she was playing, when her dad came home. 'Guess what I've
got in my car!' he cried to the four kiddies. 'It starts with C. Whoever
guesses right can keep it!' Cecile won. 'Cezanne!' she yelps. Which was how Les
Baigneuses got Cecile de Rothschild hooked on collecting. Okay, she was mostly
unhappy, got treated like dirt by her bossy pal Greta Garbo. But, she always
had a few coppers to spend on her mania. I don't honestly believe she murdered
Garbo's friend Georges. And I don't think Garbo did it either. No, honest, I
really don't. (Though why did Cecile hide Garbo in her flat in rue Faubourg St
Honore after the body was found?) The point is, collecting afflicts where it
will, and is a disease for life.

'The town's into medals?' The nearest I could get to fashion. Amy
was as quick as ever. I passed two medal collectors' shops.'