The Sleepers of Erin (15 page)

The whispering with my name in it woke me about nine that evening. Everybody was in the parlour, telly was on and little Eileen was snoring with her dewy head thrown back on my arm. Gerald and Donald were chatting competitively, Gerald about pararhyming techniques and Donald giving him a long tale of a dud carburettor. The old couple were reminiscing. Odd that a whisper in such family pandemonium can wake you. I suppose it’s wavelength or something.

‘Ask him,’ Caitlin was urging.

‘Not yet,’ from Shinny.

‘What?’ I whispered, as if I didn’t know.

‘There! He’s awake!’ Caitlin ran upstairs to bring out the stuff.

Wherever a doctor goes, people automatically start hauling out their shirts or unhooking brassieres to show him their operation. Being an antique dealer’s just the same – out come da Vincis and Gainsboroughs and the gunge. The big joke is that priceless antiques actually are there, sometimes and somewhere.

‘Here!’ Caitlin returned breathless, holding a small clipped leather case in the palm of her hand.

Grannie snorted. ‘Them’s old earrings.’

‘Whist, Mam! Let him speak.’

Caitlin unclipped the case, only big as a Swan matchbox, and honestly it really gets to you. I’d never seen an original complete set before, though you come across singles. They lay in their velvet lining, two large thin gold rings and two genuine pearls on slender S-shaped stems with their stud loops. All four, perfect. Marvellous. I felt dizzy. Of course, women would never wear them nowadays.

‘Breast rings. Those are breast jewels.’

‘Glory be!’ Caitlin cried. Grannie thought it was scandalous, though I expect the old devil had known all along.

Women of the 1890s had their nipples lacerated and perforated just like they have ears pierced nowadays. The gold rings were inserted through the nipple exactly like gold ‘sleeper’ rings for an earlobe. The jewels, most often diamonds, rubies or pearls (
never
baroque pearls, though, for obvious reasons) were mounted on either gold rings or on S-shaped gold stalks for passing through the nipple laceration site. The jewel either lies in the nipple’s recessed tip, sits on the teat or is pendulated from the nipple’s corona.

‘But I’ve never come across any woman wearing them.’

‘See, Mam! Told you they weren’t earrings!’

If Caitlin and Shinny were fascinated, Donald was awed. ‘Didn’t it hurt, Lovejoy?’ He prodded the gold rings with a large oily finger.

‘Like hell, apparently, at first. The women’s magazines of the last century are full of details—’

‘Yes, well.’ Shinny swept the case back into Caitlin’s hands. ‘There’s such a thing as being too nosey.’

It’s always like an outpatient clinic. They brought out a pewter dish next. You have to smile at some antiques. Pewter’s a lovely metal, only now coming back into welldeserved popularity. If you were starting a collection of antique pewter, though, I’d go straight for ‘pewter specials’, as they’re called in the trade, meaning pewter items a little different from the average. Caitlin’s dish was essentially a plate, but nearly two inches thick. You can always tell these rare and highly sought hotwater dishes because they are lightweight for their thickness, and they have two hinged pewter loops at the edge, the sort you pass straps through for carrying.

‘For carrying,’ I explained, ‘though women used their apron ribbons often as not. The plate got hellish hot because . . .’ I ran a finger slowly round the top edge, found the crack and flipped upwards. A tiny trapdoor popped up, revealing the dish’s hollow interior. ‘You pour scalding hot water in here.’

They hadn’t realized about the hole. Caitlin asked about its value. I don’t give valuations in money – however accurate you are, it’s wrong tomorrow. Usually prices keep going on up and up, but you can go catastrophically wrong. Remember when the bottom fell out of the Old Master market in the London auction scene, July 1981? And the same happened to the mediaeval silver coinage market all over the collecting world in the late 1970s following the discoveries of immense coin hoards on the Continent and in England? No, I give valuations in terms of time. The easiest way is to express an antique’s money value as a proportion of the national average wage, because this tells whether your selling price gives a real or merely a numerical (and therefore false in inflation-riddled years) profit.

‘Your cased nipple set’s very rare. The pewter dish is about the same price actually at any local auction, but only because people don’t recognize the nipple jewels for what they are.’ I looked about for a point of reference for them. ‘All your furniture could be bought new for what you should get from the two antiques.’

That set us all going for the rest of the evening. We talked into the early hours, the old folks bleating about things they’d used in youth which were now called ‘antiques’ and cost the earth in junkshops, and me waxing on household collectibles. It became quite a ceilidhe, a couple of neighbours joining us about midnight. They brought some bottled stout and two old pictures which had puzzled them for years. One was an English sandpainting done about 1837 or so, the heyday of that art (you arrange grains of sand of different colours into a picture, glueing them down to glass or fine-textured linen). The usual subjects are churches, landscapes and nature scenes. It’s a vastly underrated art, highly skilled at best. An authentic picture, like Caitlin’s neighbours’, currently fetches only the average week’s wage, or less. A gross underprice. The other picture was an aerophane - an early collage done by assembling fine silk-gauze colours into a scene, thread by painstaking thread. Nowadays, when embroidery and textile societies are all the rage, pictures such as these are at a peak price and a ‘signed’ one will buy you a good month’s happy unemployment or even longer.

As the fire died and little Eileen snored, we nattered on. The rain pattered on the windows and the wind whistled, but we were cosy and safe and friendly. Everybody was smiling and talking. Nobody was daft enough to suggest banishing the little one, either. I was glad because it’s always better for people to sleep on each other than on their lonesome, and that goes for infants too.

The reason I’m dwelling on this particular evening in Donald’s house at Drogheda is that I began to feel I was trying to repay them in the only way I knew for poor Joxer’s loss. After all, he was from their family, distant relative or not. Also, it was peaceful.

The shambles and holocaust began the very next day.

Next morning we really hit the road. North-west, away from the direction I wanted. The trouble with Ireland is the same as with England – for a townie like me there’s just too much countryside. It’s all green and boring and completely lacking in antique shops. I notched up another stray fact, though, under the stress of being torn from Donald’s safe inglenook: Ireland’s short on trees, really smoothish and bald. Weird fact, that.

I directed Gerald towards Ardee to make anybody following think we were hurtling for Ulster. Once through there, I’d simply nick the van, ditching Gerald and Shinny, and lam down the main N52 which transects Eire obliquely from Dundalk to the bottom of Lough Derg. A stone’s throw to Limerick, and I’d be within an hour of my destination. Great. Better still, I’d be travelling light – by which I mean without help, which is always an advantage.

Caitlin had given Shinny two cushions and some blankets. ‘Isn’t it the world’s worst deathtrap!’ Caitlin exclaimed as we emerged that morning.

‘It is,’ I said, eyeing the van. ‘Hey, Gerald. What’s that glass thing on the roof?’ There was this glass cockpit-like dome up there, partly concealed by lashed tarpaulins. I’d not noticed it before.

‘That’s my other motor-car, Lovejoy.’

Well, if he didn’t want to tell me it was his own sarcastic business. I shrugged and entered the van. You don’t kiss ‘so long’ in Eire like you do in England so I just said be seeing you and thanks and all that through the holes in the van wall. Caitlin said whist man and little Eileen clenched a hand in farewell. Donald strapped a long thin case to the van’s roofing, probably Gerald’s fishing tackle. Maybe it would lend the van some support, like a truss. Gerald folded a million or so joints in his anglepoise limbs, and we were off in a lessening drizzle.

‘What was all that whirring, Lovejoy?’ Shinny asked as the van trundled precariously down the slope towards the main road.

‘Eh?’

‘Early this morning.’

‘Mind your own business,’ I said sharpish, but suspected she knew all right from the way she was smiling in that irritating way.

I’d been up early. Donald had an outhouse-cumworkshop with a giant metalworker lathe, easy to somebody like me used to a homemade treadle. Unable to find any other wooden dowelling, I’d raided Caitlin’s parlour curtains and nicked the curtain rod, replacing it with wool from Grannie’s knitting to keep the curtain droopily in place. I’d slept downstairs on the couch so there was nobody to see as I slipped across to the outhouse and cut the dowel into four-inch sections. The electric lathe was unbelievably fast. My eight-foot length of dowel just made 24 lace bobbins of rather reduced Buckinghamshire style, with a three-quarter-inch recess for winding thread. Naturally, I’d have liked to make up the lot with a quartet of Devonshire dump bobbins, but they would have to wait. I like using walnut or proper fruitwood for these thicker ones and for doing the Midland ringed bobbins, but it wasn’t my fault Caitlin’s curtain rods were punk. As well, Eileen should have had a little apron of black sateen or velveteen (
never
white for lacework) and maybe an easel and lace-worker’s cushion. Those too I would have to send over, once I made it safely home. Lace is definitely in since that hot 1981 August sun went to the bidders’ heads and Sotheby’s great lace auction started the stampede. The year before you couldn’t give Honiton lace berthas away. Now, a tatty quartet of Victorian Bedfordshire lace cushion covers will bring a Troy ounce of pure gold. It’s a mad world. I gave the set of lace bobbins to Grandad, swearing him on the honour of the regiment to give them to Caitlin for Eileen only when Gerald’s lunatic van made it out of sight.

Caitlin had given us a good fat-riddled breakfast, a detail Sinead pointed out when I suggested we might stop for a look round Ardee. These places look grand cities on a map, but are hardly even towns.

‘Coffee, then?’

‘I’ve got a flask,’ she said calmly.

‘Ah,’ Gerald sang out. ‘If it’s thinking to escape this terrible woman in the streets of Ardee y’are, Lovejoy, you’re a terrible dreamer.’

‘Nothing of the kind,’ I lied, mad as hell that he’d spotted my plan. Where’s all the trustfulness of the shores of Erin? Sinead was giving me one of her sweetest smiles, getting me madder still.

‘Left, Gerald.’

Gerald swung us round a bewildered milkman’s float on to the N52. ‘But what can you expect when she’s never once accepted my proposal, the heartless creature!’

Clinging on for dear life as we slid sideways into the thin traffic of the main road’s south-westerly flow, I glanced at Sinead. She was still smiling and winked at me.

‘We’re sort of cousins, Lovejoy,’ she yelled in the din. ‘Proposal’s his game.’

‘She says we’ll only have runts in our litter.’ Gerald bawled the confidence, ignoring the road and turning completely round to enter the discussion.

‘The road!’ I screamed.

Horns sounded, tyres screeched. A white Ford saloon rocked past on the outside, the driver fighting the wheel. I lost sight of it as we swung on a vaguely straighter course. More horns, a shout, then an ugly crunch of metal on stonework. We’d actually caused some poor sod to crash. Gerald, the bloody maniac, was expounding his virtues in a howled litany.

‘I may not have many punts in the bank, Lovejoy,’ he was going on, ‘but I’m a born survivor. And once I get going, ah, what lovely poetry I’ll be writing! I’ll be on a pedestal like Billie Shakespeare, God rest the sainted man’s sweet soul.’

I was trying to see back to where the white Ford was angled into somebody’s wall but the road bent the ghastly scene from view.

Sinead reached across and patted my hand. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ she said. ‘Gerald has his own way.’

‘Never mind us. We might have just killed somebody.’ My face felt prickly and drained.

‘Is it the white saloon you’re meaning, Lovejoy?’ Gerald shouted. ‘You mustn’t be troubled about him, for heaven’s sake. Sure now, he shouldn’t have been hiding the night away down the hillside outside Donald’s like a black-hearted heathen.’

I thought this over for a second or two while the van swayed hectically on down the main N52, drew breath to speak and thought better of it. Sinead leaned over.

‘We’re nearing Kells,’ she yelled. ‘Where your old picture-book comes from.’

‘Ignore the silly bitch!’ Gerald screeched over his shoulder. ‘She’s a vicious tongue in her head. Tell me, Lovejoy. Is it Milton’s attitude to blank verse that grabs you, or his rationalized deism? I’ve been dying to ask.’

I thought, Christ, but Shinny saved me. ‘Lovejoy doesn’t subscribe to the notion of generative discourse, dear,’ she pronounced.

‘Ah, I quite understand!’ Gerald howled. ‘I’m a silent man misself! Y’know I stand on Milton somewhere outside Professor Milner’s sociological meritocracy ideas, though it’s not at all a bad effort for a Yank from America.’ He turned round and nodded seriously as though I’d disagreed. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Lovejoy: how does Goldmann’s genetic structuralism fit in . . .’

I closed my eyes and ears to the racket and the yelling. Sinead said we would do a roadside stop for coffee beyond Delvin and work out the route. Gerald kept on bawling theories of Milton. The van bucketed on southwest down the road. Thinking back, the bloke fighting so desperately for control of the white Ford had looked very like that Johno Storr bloke, but I couldn’t be sure.

‘. . . And what of Hill’s Third Culture theory?’ Gerald was demanding of the world at the roadside. ‘How far can you construct poetic analyses on a synthesis of that kind? Considering Saurat’s repetitive Miltonic study in 1924 . . .’

We had stopped in a lay-by for Caitlin’s coffee. Gerald had a couple of bottles of that black stout but I can’t touch it to save my life. Shinny pored over the map with me. I kept trying to smile and nod politely at Gerald, who kept rabbiting on about poetry, but I’d have cheerfully throttled the noisy berk. At the back of my mind was that episode with the crashed white Ford. It
had
been an accident, due to Gerald’s stupid carelessness . . . hadn’t it?