The Possessions of a Lady (36 page)

34

The scene was from a crazy
Wuthering
Heights
, with frivolity. Me and Wanda arrived in her horizontal motor,
eeled out vertical, breathed again.

Not yet nine o'clock, a blustery wind trying to extinguish a
fitful sun under scudding cloud. Children gay as garlands practised country
dances. Fifers rehearsed with that where's-the-beer look marching bands have.
Drummers paradiddled with the ribald competitiveness of their kind. Television
crews were in, trying to outdo each other's smart-aleck sulks. A few radio
mouthers were being ashamed, jealously admiring the TV technicians'
braggadocio. Helpers putting trestle tables in the wrong places were laughing explosively
at their mistakes. The whole forecourt was given over to preparations for the
great day.

Further along, Wanda's pantechnicons stood in a sloping field. I
was thankful. No sign of Tinker and the big motor, thank heavens. I was uneasy.
Good news, bad omen.

There must have been about four hundred people milling about, with
more arriving every second. Some nerk was barking scratchy incoherence, his
tannoy cutting out every other sentence. Bunting was being tacked up. Banners
flapped on poles, gangers erecting marquees. Refreshment tents had burgeoned on
the two fields. The nearest paddock was covered in fashion college
pantechnicons, gay folk idling or sprinting hysterically according to status.
Cries of dismay rent the morning air. Why are women frantic when getting ready?
I mean, they've only to put a frock on and that's it. Amy'd said there'd be
over three hundred dresses at her fashion show, but they had hours yet.

'Worse than Portobello Road on a bad day.'

'Better.' Wanda was enjoying the excitement.

A team of diminutive girls danced past, harassed mothers trying to
keep up. Behind me, I could feel the derelict mansion staring down. It was
probably wondering what the hell. Stella showed in the main doorway of the
chapel where the auction would be held. She smiled, waved, issuing decisions to
a chatter of helpers, calling up to men on ladders, hurry that painting.

The poor charred mansion was being ignored. Its crumbling walls
were perhaps two furlongs from the encroaching housing estate. Greeting
half-familiar faces, I ran the gaunt manse's image through my mind. The estate
children had probably roamed the ruin, like some sort of adventure playground,
the more delicious for being forbidden. I kept my eyes off it. It was agony.

'Good morning, Lovejoy! Isn't this thrilling?'

'Wotcher, Briony. Aye, smashing.'

She smiled on us both, but Wanda got less than a tithe. 'And we're
partners, Lovejoy! Your friend Amy is fashion convenor!'

Partners? 'It seems so.' I flapped a hand. 'Who'd think so many
people did nothing but make frocks.'

'Shoes. Accessories.' Briony went down her printed programme with
a finger in reproof. 'Cosmetics. Jewellery. Materials. Sportswear . . .' I
switched off. Did people keep telling me this because they wanted a convert?
She took my arm. 'Come. Show me Mrs. Entwistle's antiques. How do they compare
with my sister's?'

'Later, perhaps.' Wanda smoothly amputated Briony. 'Lovejoy has
work at the commo van. We'll not be long.'

'See you inside, Briony,' I said. I've never had the knack of
cutting women, or the nerve. It's best left to other women.

Leaving Briony in the maelstrom, we joined the mob. Tubb was
there, talking to a couple of dealers, still posing, flexing his lats or
whatever. He yelled a hello. Carmel was seated at a trestle table in the
thronged yard, speaking earnestly with a girl. I looked closer. No specs, mousy
now instead of blonde.

'Lovejoy!'

'Aureole?' She looked desperate. She must have read her Bronte
this windswept moorland morning. I shied away, putting Wanda between us. 'Look,
love.' I struggled for excuses. 'That amber. It wasn't my fault your flat got
untidy.'

She gaped. I gaped. Astonishment ruled.

'What are you on about, Lovejoy?' she cried. 'For Christ's
sake
.' She looked imploringly at Wanda,
gave her up, turned to me. 'Lovejoy. Please. I didn't mean what I said. Honest
to God. Setting Dinsdale on you was a
joke
.
I'll do anything. Just say it's all right. I'm begging you, Lovejoy.'

Her words came in a torrent. Folk started looking.

Mystified, I shook my head, nodded, anything to shut her up. She
looked like she'd not slept for a month.

Wanda cut it. 'Listen, madam.' She hauled me aside and planted
herself before the frenzied Aureole. A morris team belled up and started
concertinas and uillean pipes around us. Wanda deliberately made it the cutting
Continental ma-
dam
, not our mellower
madam, which meant she knew all about Aureole's agency. 'Piss off, or my
gangers'!! lose you in some folly. Un-der-stood?'

Our country has follies—beautifully built towers, facades, castles
even, as phoney as the previous three centuries could make them. They were to
create an image of Arcadian artistry. Now in a state of neglect, every so often
one totters into mounds of rubble. Stories abound, though, of hoods who
deliberately make such wobbling uninhabitable towers fall— upon unfortunate
opponents. It was quite a threat. Aureole sobbed and moved off heartbroken into
the crowd.

'Avoid her in future.' Wanda asked if I understood. I said I did
when I didn't.

Wanda went to speak to her commo van. The bloody woman never
stopped yakking into electronics. Even on our makeshift straw she'd had three
miniature phones. Enough to address the College of Cardinals in mid org.
Casually I took in the distant view of the old mansion while pretending to
admire the stalls springing up all about. I watched a carousel being assembled,
heard its first faltering gasps as it worked itself up to wheeze-and-parp
music.

'Thought you'd be here, Lovejoy. Everything set?'

'Wotcher, Tinker.' I scanned the multiplying mob. 'Mrs. Finch's
items will be moved in soon for the viewing, then there's nothing more to do
except get a box lorry. A three-tonner, no smaller. Park it on the road side of
that carousel, where there's space.'

'Right, Lovejoy.' He grinned, a miscellany of teeth and gaps.
'Shag her all right, did you?'

'We shared experiences,' I corrected sternly. I've never betrayed
a woman's confidence yet. 'Roadie about?'

'Not seen hide nor hair, since he tumbled that we've sussed him.
I'll kill the little bleeder.' Roadie was twice Tinker's size. 'But Vyna's
here.' He was peeved. 'I've spoke. She said, what's all the fuss, like she was
never missing at all. Little cow.'

'Was that her talking to Carmel?'

Tinker was surprised. 'You seen her afore, Lovejoy?'

'She pretended to be a schoolteacher in the Manchester museum.
Checking I was following the trail as planned.' Yet now I was here, she ignored
me. 'Any more thoughts, Tinker?'

'On who sparked you in the archway? Nar.' He was agitated. 'See,
Lovejoy, Roadie's not got the nous. He's lucky to get dressed of a morning.
Vyna's a different kettle. I asked her. She said who's Lovejoy, pretending she
knows nothing.'

'Roadie learned from you that I'd be waiting in the archway, and
told Vyna.' We'd gone over this. Except, Vyna was everywhere, leading me on.

'She could do it, Lovejoy. She's got the bottle. Sorry.'

A fashion shoal came by. One cried out, 'Fashion back to classics,
oh world!' to helpless laughter. The girls were bonny, but looked clemmed. A
wild-eyed youth grabbed me. He was all earrings.

'The model Amy's given me has no tits,' he shrilled.

'Er, good.' Praise indeed, among skeletons.

'No! How can she wear the S-bend? I've reinvented it! My
crinolette in heliotrope watered silk! She's got no arse either!'

Good? Bad? He swooned. Worried, I sat him on the ground.

'I know the problem,' I said. The S-bend dress lifted a Victorian
lady's bust to achieve an emphatic S figure, but you had to have something to
start with. 'Er, wait here, mate. I'll straighten it out . . .' Wrong image.
'Sort it out. Okay?'

'And the shoes!' he wailed. 'My re-creations are exact. Amy's
girls have yards of horrible toes!'

Victorian hostesses wore silk shoes you couldn't fit a modern
ten-year-old girl into. Cinderella's prince would have had a hell of a time.
But these things also weren't my fault. Me and Tinker left him forlorn.

'Why, Tinker?' I asked. I faced up the slope, to where the old
mansion's charred rafters scagged the sky. 'What've I done? Why have me
blammed?' A fair question.

'It's not something back then. It's because of what you are now.'

I still didn't get it. 'Being a divvy? No, Tinker. That doesn't
wash.'

A couple of rousters panted past hauling some fairground organ. We
helped for a few minutes, shoved the wheeled thing into position between a
black-pea booth whose cauldron was gushing aromatic steam. The most appetising
scent on earth. The organ was sadly new, and therefore pointless.

'It doesn't wash,' I resumed quickly before Tinker got his breath
back. 'If anybody wanted a divvy, they could've called me. If I like folk, I'll
divvy their antiques.' We separated to let a band straggle past, a riotous
rehearsal on the hoof. 'They didn't need to make up that missing-lass
pantomime. Was it that simple?'

Tinker was heartbroken, almost leading me to doom. 'Simple's
always best. Every time you okayed an antique find— like those fire tigers,
remember?—and sent me after them, Roadie must have told Vyna. She got somebody
to snaffle it, or did it herself. She's helped somebody to clear thousands.'

'Easy, keeping me on the trail.' I looked at the sky as if
questioning rain. Other folk reflexed the same, the county's pastime. 'Whatever
it is must be here.'

'Some wanted you to stay in East Anglia.' His rheumy old eyes
streamed. He barked a cough, momentarily quelling the carousel's flutes and an
organoleum's tune. 'Aureole and me didn't want you to come.'

That made me stare. The enemy wanted me north, and the saints
didn't?

'Don't you see?' He was a figure of sorrow. Holman Hunt should
have painted him, a
Light of the World
in tat. 'They got you here, where you'd divvy some antiques. Then they'd nick
them.'

'But why try to ... ?'

'Because they're scrapping among themselves. That's the twist,
Lovejoy. They torched you because they thought you'd sussed their plan. One lot
now wants you topped, in case you spoil their theft, Roadie must be with them.
The other lot wants you to walk away safe. That's it.'

'Two bad lots, one with hearts of gold?'

A six-year-old tugged at me, ordered me to tie her dancing shoes.
I stooped, laced them, asked if she remembered her steps. She said, 'Mind your
own business, Lovejoy.' I said she was a cheeky little devil. She said she
could cheek me all she liked because she was my second cousin. I said, 'Oh,
that's all right, then,' and rose, sighing. Definition of home.

'It's the only explanation, Lovejoy.'

'But I've not seen any antiques here. It's junk. Stella's
husband's offed the only worthwhile ones.'

'I'm right, Lovejoy.' Somebody called my name. Wanda signalled
that I was needed by the beautiful people, and got her nod. The mob surged. The
tannoy did its white noise. Music pounded, frolickers rehearsed frolicking. I
shoved through to Amy.

She was even bonnier, vivacious. It was her day.

'One thing, Amy,' I said, smiling at her two children. 'How about
we postpone the fashion parade?'

'
What
, Lovejoy?' she screamed.
People in earshot laughed, shook heads. One said, 'Honestly. That Lovejoy!'

'Leave it clear for antiques.' I explained that I was becoming
more uneasy as the crowds grew. Amy said my wish was crazy. The world wanted
its fashion durbar, and was going to get it. I said okay, fine, hadn't thought,
right.

'The Victorian dresses are ready, Lovejoy. I want you to say a few
words before we start. There won't be time before the walk.'

'Walk where?'

'Catwalk.' She strove for patience. 'Before the dress parade.
Victorian garments first, of course,
fin
de siècle
, that we borrowed. I explained it the other evening.' She ran a
hand through her hair. I knew that gesture. It was to stop herself from taking a
swipe at me. ‘I
knew
you weren't
listening, Lovejoy.'

'I'll do it. What do you want me to say?'

'Oh, hello and thanks to all. A fashion journalist will do the
walk talk.'

Anybody I know? Could only be Faye. 'Can I see the, er, old
frocks?' My big moment.

'Of course. We'll have to hurry.' She had only half a day, but
like I say, women getting ready.

We went through the poor and huddled masses. Caravans, trailers,
every type of wheeled home you could imagine, now crammed the slope, spilled
into the fields. Vestals were howling at men who were laying a board gangway,
green canvas canopy cloistering against the elements. One girl was having
hysterics, shredding cloth with savage ripping movements. A scene from a
graduate school sci-fi, only no-one would believe it. I thought, All this, for
frocks? Nothing wrong with hysteria that a little quiet embarrassment wouldn't
cure.