The Grace in Older Women (4 page)

'Return to the sympathy," the barrister bawled.

'Look!’ I was narked. He was making a mint, standing there showing
off. It was me sinking into destitution. 'Any nerk knows that some chemicals
change colour when heated. They knew it back in 1829, when that sympathy was
first painted.'

'Lovejoy,' the magistrate queried. 'A blank painting?'

'Yes, guv'nor.' I didn't mind him. I was getting fond of the silly
old sod. 'Dissolve zaffer ore in aqua regia acid. Dilute it four times, and
paint on a blank surface. You see nothing, right? But heat it, and you see a
luscious sea-green colour. Let the paper cool down, it vanishes again.' One of
the lawyers was scribbling, taking it all down. I smiled, knowing an embryonic
crook when I see one. 'Warm it again, the green painting reappears. Use zaffer
in spirits of nitre, though, it'll do the same in red. Combine the two, you get
other colours.'

‘A sympathy is a painting that emerges only when heated?' he summarized.
'Thank you, Lovejoy.’

'Not at all. The ones ladies of olden times loved were landscapes,
bare of trees or flowers. A lady feeling particularly low would bring out her
plain landscape painting, place it by the fire, and watch the spring grass and
trees cover the scene in foliage and flowers. Her own springtime!'

'So you persuaded my client to a criminal act,' the barrister
denounced in phoney rage, 'to acquire this sympathy!'

'Yes.'

That stopped him. 'You admit it?'

'Yes. I wanted to make several forgeries of it.'

'Forgeries?'
three of them said
together.

‘Courts make me fed up. I did eleven.' I shrugged. 'Make one sympathy,
you might as well do several. The price of frames is frigging criminal, though.
You lawyers should check the framers on East Hill.'

They shut me up, dunno why, demanded times, dates, where I'd seen
Packo Orange selling his own forgeries - he did a nice one of a John Constable,
Landscape Noon
, but from the opposite
view. I waxed eloquent, telling them Packo was straight as a die, but the Law
had it in for him whatever anybody said.

Out, after four wasted hours. I left the back way, so avoiding Den
and so, I believed, keeping out of the way of that magistrate, him and his
frigging furled brolly. I'd had enough law to last me for one day, if not two.

Addie caught me up as I reached the Arcade, and told me in
breathless excitement that she'd almost practically virtually nearly managed to
buy the colander but been outbid by some idiot in a bowler hat.

'Did you get the name, Addie?' I knew she took everything down at
auctions, who bid for what, prices.

'Yes.' She eyed me with smiling calculation. 'Lovejoy! You want
something I have!'

'I can always ask one of the whifflers,' I told her airily.

'What will you do for me, darling?' she said, coming all
little-girl winsome.

'Forget it,' I said, narked. Then realized my voice hadn't managed
to say anything at all. 'Forget it.'

She ran the tips of her fingers along my shredding lapel, looking
up. 'You don't really mean that, do you, darling?'

A motor horn sounded three peremptory blasts. Hubby, revving
angrily across by the other kerb. God, he'd a glare that would melt glaciers.

'Give it me, Addie.' Any woman can pull any bloke, whatever they
pretend. And a woman with valuable information about antiques could pull me any
time she wanted.

'The priory, Lovejoy. Eight, tomorrow,' she said softly, then
sprang back. Wearily I waited while she did the purity scenario. 'Certainly
not, Lovejoy!' she cried, stamping for her hubby's benefit. 'A partnership? Out
of the question, and that is final!'

She marched to the car and embarked. It pulled away, him smirking
as they glided past the war memorial.

Eight, the priory. I joined Tinker at the tavern ten minutes
later. He handed me a letter. Familiar handwriting, Juliana Witherspoon (Miss)
had struck again. I was about to chuck it away when Tinker restrained me.

'Best look, son,' he croaked. 'It's threats.'

He'd read it without opening the envelope. I wish I knew how he
does it.

         
Dear Lovejoy,

                  
Kindly
respond, or I shall take grievous action. Your
                                     
         
assignations with a lady are known to
me. I shall expose your
            
         
perfidious nature to her relatives.
Six o'clock, please, at the
                         
town
library, tomorrow.

                  
I remain,

                  
Yours
faithfully,

                  
Juliana
Witherspoon (Miss)

Threats
and
please? So
courtesy was hanging on by a thread even yet. Well, Beth's Bilston enamels
still beckoned, and she'd kill me if I let J. W. (Miss) run amok with her glad
tidings.

4

Tonietta, when I finally found her, was pushing her cart through
the shopping precinct and ready for a fight. Mind you, I've never seen Tonietta
tranquil. She's always girding for Armageddon. This time she was readying to
scream the town down over somebody pinching her pitch.

‘You fucking frigging shitting bastards I'll marmalize the lot of
you. . . !' et Tonietta cetera. From there, her invective goes downhill. Take
it on trust: Tonietta is dynamite, abusive, and usually wrong about everything
except tortoise-shell. She hates her two sisters, both carnivores, and I have
teethmarks to prove it. She doesn't speak to her mother. On rare occasions,
she'll communicate with the world through her dad, a pleasant patient man who
tries to cobble his family together using birthdays as excuses, but failing
often. He's a museum archivist.

Patiently I waited her rage out. Long wait. Nobody had pinched her
pitch, of course; there were only three other barrows in the square. One I knew
vaguely, Connor, a seller of hot potatoes with cheese fillings. Another was
Lucille, the fish lass from Lowestoft, looking the part under red-and-white
striped awnings and straw boater, neat pinny. And Gravity Woodward, a morose
globe-hater who takes racing bets on commission while disguised as a tree that
speaks morose hatred in a little square of greenery encouraging you to throw
coppers in the charity fountain. The flyers - sudden sellers who whirlwind
through markets offering discount fruit on its last legs and who hadn't a legit
hawker's licence between them - weren't in today.

Tonietta fired off one last salvo at Lucille and set up her cart
by simply halting and opening the top. It lets down into a small counter. She
smiled beatifically.

‘Hello, Lovejoy. You know Jox is looking for you?'

'Aye.' I eyed her wares. Trinkets, some tortoise-shell.

You go a long way to get more lovely material to work with than
tortoise-shell. Some major antiques were made of it. Like, Henry IV of France
was nursed in a cradle made of a tortoise's inverted shell, one complete thing.
Some writers claim that the ancient Greeks and Romans manufactured musical
instruments from sea turtle carapaces. I've even done a fake one myself, a lyre
from dried cracked old shell, copying the musical shape from a vase in the British
Museum and selling the final instrument for Jellbone's missus after he got done
for robbing two Bavarian antique dealers of a valuable Cozens watercolour in
Coggeshall.

‘I’ve some pale shell, Lovejoy.'

Dealers call pale tortoise-shell antiques 'blondies'. It is highly
prized. The shell itself is sold by the pound, best from the Caribbean but
sometimes the Far East. White shell - I think it a sort of dusky amber colour -
costs ten times as much as the so-called 'black', which is grubby brown to near
black. The horrible thing is the way it's collected. The islanders catch a
turtle while it's laying its eggs, turn it on its back, then do one of two
ghastly things. They light a fire on its living belly, or they lever it into a
cauldron of boiling water so it can thrash and bleat and flail . . .

'Sit down for fuck's sake, Lovejoy.' Tonietta abused me roundly,
giving me her folded stool. She rammed my head between my knees so I could
recover. 'You're always like this dying on me you squeamish bastard I'm sick of
the frigging sight of you you pillock that's three pounds twelve shillings and
elevenpence,' she continued brightly to a lady with a little girl. Tonietta
talks in old coinage, before the Great Decimal Deception conned us and made the
Treasury rich. She meant three sixty-five, give or take. 'Original genuine
tortoise-shell pendant, in silver plate. I've some beautiful combs . . .'

The poor turtles are sometimes dissected free of their shell while
still alive, then, bleeding and naked, are chucked back into the shark-infested
waters where, in time, they grow another shell but of poor quality. It's an
industry. On the lovely wave-washed moonlight shores of the tropical islands,
you get served turtle steaks cooked in the poor thing's carapace. A turtle dies
slow. It dies slowest, they say, in Madagascar, where they can keep a sea
turtle alive during the very act of dissection so it can actually scent its own
turtle soup cooking . . .

'What's the matter with Lovejoy?' the little girl asked.

'Drunk, love,' Tonietta said smoothly, crouching to be friendly
while the tot's mother paid for the pendant.

'Lovejoy? She's telling porkies, isn't she?’

'He'll be better when he's sober.' Tonietta straightened, less
friendly.

'Lovejoy drinks when one of his aunties tells him off,' the mite
foghorned. 'Your aunties don't stay long, do they, Lovejoy?'

'Not usually, Brenda.' I babysit for Brenda and her cousin Henry.
They're from the village.

'I liked your last auntie. She has a dog,' Brenda said,
loudly confiding to the world. 'She's married to the vicar but bounces in bed—‘

'Thank you! 1 Brenda's scarlet-faced mother shrilled quickly,
grabbing her change and dragging away Brenda Blabbermouth, who complained she
wanted to stay and see me be sick.

'You better?' Tonietta can be kind when things were going her way.
'I'll get you a coffee.'

'No, ta. I'm okay.'

For a while I pulled myself together, watching the passers-by
shop. The precinct forms the centre of our town square. For a kingdom's most
ancient recorded town, the square is brand new. Paved, a few covered ways, two
arcades, a fountain, shops abutting, stalls and itinerant barrows, buskers here
and there, it's pleasant. There's even a caff, trying to look continental with
white plastic tables and chairs in clusters. Pigeons, of course, lending
droppings, ectoparasites, and authenticity to the scene. A girl from the music
school was playing a violin with intense preoccupation, some Purcell air I
think, a cap on the flagging by her feet.

'What pale shell, Tonietta?'

'This.'

And she pulled out a small fan, a tiny thing. It beat a chime in
my middle that practically put me on my feet again better than any pick-me-up.
It folded, had fewer than a dozen sticks to it, and was mounted with traces of
gold. Definitely the real thing, but sadly broken, five of the blades badly
fractured, almost as if somebody had trod on the lovely creation. Late
seventeenth century, rare. No carefully sculpted holes in it that would have
been the giveaway sign of the 'quizzer', the quizzing fan that allowed a lady
to conceal her face with gracious modesty but peep at everybody. Of course, a
turtle carapace has thirteen great scales, with littler scales towards the
edge, so you are limited by size. This was genuine, not merely workbench
sweepings held together by melted gelatine.

'Who's the duckegg that danced on it?' I hadn't touched it.

'I have this new feller, Lovejoy.' Unabashed, she did a brisk
sale, a plastic comb. 'He's a driver, Hook of Holland ferries. He stood up,
sudden.

'This is English.’ I held my hand like a child does playing
cowboys with imaginary pistols. Four inches, tip of the middle finger to where
your thumb forms the pistol hammer at your index finger's palmar crease. 'The
blades were only four inches long. Then they lengthened to nine, end of the
first George's reign. They went giant in the 1740s, up to two feet, but then
folk saw sense. Nine to eleven inches became a sort of norm.’

'Real shell, then?’

She was thrilled, but kept on serving. Connor brought her over a
huge steaming spud. My belly rumbled a begging plaint but he shuffled away
without offering me a mouthful.

'Aye.' I touched it then, at least as thrilled as her. 'Sorry,
pal, 1 1 told it in sincere apology, and looked at its venation against the
daylight. You could hardly see the pallor of veins in it. 'You're beautiful, a
darling. You deserve the very best.' A tortoise-shell fan this old was beyond
belief.

'Will you mend it, Lovejoy?'

'Aye. It'll take awhile.

‘I’ll bring it. Got to have it photographed first.'