Every Last Cent

11

I BELIEVE THAT women love a scrap. For what reason? Nobody knows. I used to know this placid woman. Placid, that is, until one day something went wrong at work, heralding a terrible fight next morning. 'Sorry, love,' I sympathized. Eyes shining, best dress on, she swung joyously from my cottage that Monday dawn, the songs of angels on her lips. And that evening arrived home blissfully replete. She'd had the ghastliest fight. Somebody else had got her comeuppance and retreated in tears. See? They love it.

It's the same with my understanding of people – lack of it, I mean. Some folk don't accept the obvious. 'Oh, it's raining!' this bird Nia once exclaimed, halting at the door. 'I said it would,' I pointed out. She rounded on me. 'Oh, you!' she spat, furious. 'Weather isn't my fault,' I told her, because it isn't. No good. She blamed me because she got wet.

Which brings me to Quaker, seeing I was in trouble and didn't know why.

First, I called at a shop in Long Wyre Street and got a small silver cup. Cost me the earth. Engraving was extra. I also bought – my next four days' meals – a silver trophy depicting a kite, the sort you fly on windy days with a string. I caught the bus, and eventually reached Quaker's house by the Quay, where the theatre is.

'Quaker? You in?' I knocked.

He is always in, seeing he's in a wheelchair and won't go out.

'That you, Lovejoy?'

I entered diffidently, hoping Maud wasn't home. She was, and came all a-bustle. She bakes cakes for church bazaars, orphanages, supports starving donkeys. Her father's a bitter brigadier, retired from lack of wars. (You'll see why in a sec.)

'Wotcher, Quake. Thought I'd bring your award, seeing you were too damned idle to collect it yourself.'

'Lovejoy! What a treat!' Maud engulfed me, flour leaving her mark on me like an exotic printing device. 'It's been so long! Cake and tea any moment!'

Here came Quaker, trundling in his wheelchair. Specky, stout, wheezing, he shoves the wheels. He's only thirty-one. Won't see a doctor, won't accept that he can't walk, run, jump, swim, sing, dance, fly, or any of the above.

'You just caught me, mate,' he said, his face rapturous. 'I was just off out. I'm in the sculling finals!'

'Don't miss the start because of me, Quake,' I called, but he'd pumped himself quickly into his room.

'Lovejoy,' Maud murmured.

'Shhh,' I said. Do lame folk hear better, or is that blindness? I needed Quaker's help, couldn't risk wives' whispers, though I like Maud.

'I'm going shopping at two, Lovejoy. Meet me in the Corn Market.'

'I'm in trouble, love. Quaker can help me.'

'Help me, Lovejoy,' she whispered huskily.

Quaker rolled back into view. I sprang away, hoping he wouldn't notice Maud's new flour imprint on me.

'They'll wait half an hour,' he said happily. 'Just give us time for a chat.'

'Who's your opponent this time, Quake?'

His face clouded. 'A bloke called Matterheim. Dolomite champion. He's in the Olympics.'

'Christ, Quake,' I breathed, anxious. 'You'll have your work cut out.'

He spun with extraordinary dexterity. 'He's odds on favourite.'

Into his room we went, Maud dashing to the kitchen to bring sustenance.

Not everybody gets to see Quaker's private room. It's vast, a specially extended part of his bungalow. You can see rowing boats on the Stour, canoes and things, sculling past this long picture window. Big as any classroom. At the far end, a glass wall. Seated in the conservatory through there, in the adjoining bungalow, sat the brigadier, Maud's dad, looking at me with sardonic eyes. I'm not quite sure what sardonic means, but if any geezer on earth's sardonic it's Brigadier Hedge. He acknowledged me with a nod, which from him is like a tournament. He wants his beloved daughter Maud to leave Quaker and get a life. She says no because Quaker needs her. Brig says Quaker's off his trolley, she should cut her losses. She says no. Joining the dots in the argument can wear you out. It sends me mental.

All round Quaker's walls are shelves covered with trophies, cups, bowls, vases, silverware, gold chalices. All sham. There's hardly an inch of wall that isn't stuck with plaques, shields, crests, ornaments that Quaker has not won hang-gliding, sprinting, shooting, swimming, high-diving. There are Olympic medals from the 1985 Mogadishu Winter Olympics for downhill slaloms and ski jumping. Quaker led our triumphant assault on Russian dominance of the downhill cycling races in the 1989 Honolulu Olympics. He collared the trophy for architectural Millennium designs. In fact, it's increasingly difficult to think up a new frigging sport or championship every blinking time I come.

He's done none of it. He's a dreamer whose dreams mean more to him than reality.

Hence my pathetic purchase of my kite trophy. Best I could do in such a rush.

'What is it, Lovejoy?' Quaker asked, spinning to face me.

Behind him, the brigadier rolled his eyes. I looked away. I always feel embarrassed at this stage.

'I feel a fraud, Quake,' I said. 'I've never ever won a thing.'

'No, no. It's okay.' Shining eyes on my parcel.

I unwrapped it, stood there like a duckegg with my glittering phoney cup and the silver kite model.

'It's your award, Quake. Eastern Hundreds Kite-flying Champion. They asked me to accept it for you at the National Awards Centre.'

He smacked his forehead.

'God, I clean forgot! Thanks, pal. You got me out of a real mess!'

I donated the award. He received it, eyes moist.

'Sorry, Lovejoy. It's just that I remember how Bushido looked after the match. Japan always held the title until I beat him in the playoffs.'

He sniffed a bit. I welled up myself. It's not often you meet a dynamic champ who is decently sympathetic about the chap he's defeated.

'Was Bushido there?' he asked sadly.

'Yes,' I invented. Well, I'd invented the championship, so I'd a right to invent who turned up. 'He looked pretty down. Said he'd give you a run for your money, next world championships.'

'You know, Lovejoy,' he said seriously, fondling his cup and the trophy, 'I admire that.

Taking defeat on the chin.'

'So do I,' I said fervently. I know defeat.

The brigadier couldn't hear behind the glass wall, but guessed the conversation. His headshake was graphic.

Maud entered at a sprint with a tray of edibles, thank God, all her own making. She was defloured, so to speak, in a clean pinafore and gave a smiling wave to her dad who nodded and returned to his newspaper. We settled down facing the river. Folk walk along the riverbank footpath into town. They pretend not to look in Maud's window, sometimes. They must wonder at Quaker's array of trophies and guess which sporting over-achiever lives there.

'How marvellous of you to bring Quaker's new award, Lovejoy!'

'No bother, love.'

Maud's grub is legendary. She cooks from Mrs Beeton's All About Cookery for the homeless of Suffolk. It's a wonder they don't all die from clogged arteries because it's heavy suety stuff. Or maybe that's the Council's plan? Some charity buys the raw ingredients for her. I like Maud. She and I started making smiles soon after Quaker took to his wheelchair, but I got worried. Anyhow by then I'd met Georgina from Stoke.

There you go.

The whole point of this is that Quaker doesn't even do sports that he can do. Doesn't shoot, no Paralympics, doesn't sketch or study ornithology. He just accepts awards.

It's all myth.

In fact, even The Day Quaker's Legs Got Crushed In That Accident is also a fable, invented for reasons nobody knows. There is no paraplegia. Quaker is as fit as a flea.

He could jump up and ramble his riverbank with the best of them.

We all deceive ourselves. Which raises the question of his missus.

This is Maud: thirty-six, palish hair, blue of eye, shapely if a bit dumpy. Nice legs, and what the county set call 'good bones', though I should think that all bones are pretty decent things to have around. Features pleasant, smile animated and alert. A bright compassionate woman is Maud Quaker.

She knows Quaker's a fraud, and told me about him when we were resting after having tired ourselves.

'Quaker's not to be blamed, Lovejoy,' she explained along the pillow. We were in my cottage, my chair propping the door because the lock needed mending.

'Why not?' I'd asked, mystified. 'He's a total con.'

'We all deceive ourselves. You. Me. My dad. Government. Why only blame Quaker?'

'Because he sponges on you,' I said, offended.

'So do you, Lovejoy.'

She pointed out that she paid for my food. She lent me her motor. She kept on about it until I got narked.

'At least I do a job,' I said heatedly.

'So does Quaker,' she'd said to my surprise. 'And he doesn't just scrounge off women and faint when he looks at silly old antiques.'

'What job?' I challenged. 'The idle bugger just sits in his wheelchair making up imaginary bloody trophies while I'm slogging in muck and bullets.'

I don't usually get narked, especially with blokes who've thought up a good scam. I too am an idleback. People who live in glass houses and all that.

It was then that she started to speak about Quaker really for the first time. Reluctantly, both of us naked as a grape, she told me in whispers. Afterwards she seemed scared, and swore me to secrecy. I promised, hand on her heart. And kept silent for ever and ever. Until now.

'Quaker's the conduit for the raj,' she'd said.

'Eh?'

My mind wearily chugged its synapses into action. Nerve ends groped. Electrons flickered.

'He can't be,' I got out. In fact, I almost laughed.

'He is, Lovejoy,' she said firmly, blue eyes looking at me that day in my divan bed. 'So take back what you said about him.'

'Quaker? He's the raj's brainpiece?'

Then I did it, made her mad. I really did laugh, rolling in the aisles at the thought that Quaker, that deluded bloke who lived a total sham, actually was the pivot for a – no, the – biggest club of investors in antiques.

I'd heard of women's devotion to dud blokes, of course. In fact I'd had plenty myself, but that was no fault of mine.

'Quaker?' I rolled in the aisles. 'He wouldn't know what the raj is.'

'No?' she spat. 'There are nine of them. Quaker knows. Who do you think he's seeing now, while you pleasure his wife?' She spoke with bitterness. 'And how come a foolish woman like me puts up with a neurotic like Quaker? Do you think I'd stay with him a minute, if he was only what he seems?'

'Stop it, love,' I said, wiping my eyes. 'You don't have to convince me. I like Quaker.

And you know I worship you.' I propped myself up on an elbow, looking down. 'I take it back, doowerlink.'

She gazed up at me, took a deep breath as she reached some decision.

'You want convincing, Lovejoy? Then listen: the raj decides which antiques to buy. And who can steal which antiques. And who's allowed to get away with it. Who can rob museums and who can't. Big John Sheehan's one.'

My smile faded. Women don't know these things as a rule. She must have read some article in one of those antiques glossies that get names, dates, and antiques wrong.

'Bet you Quaker's never even heard of the raj.'

'No? Ask me, Lovejoy.' She waited. I stared. She was deadly serious. 'That trio of motor car dealers who stole those two Constable oil sketches? They tried to sell them last New Year in a hotel. They were caught, weren't they?'

I turned my head to align with her face, see directly into her. She looked sincere. But birds defending their blokes always are.

'Ask me about any antiques crime, Lovejoy. Including your theft from that place by the Minories.'

'Here, nark it.' I did my best indignation, but it didn't wash. Her triumphant gaze saw she'd hurt me. 'Nobody knows I did that!'

'You stole a sixteenth-century linenfold-patterned jointed chest. It was Thursday night.

Tinker your oppo didn't bring the motor on time, so you had to leave the chest in the monastery garden until Colin Service went for it.'

Suddenly I wasn't laughing. Nobody knew about Colin. He's an ambulance driver, uses the health authority's wagons to collect stolen antiques.

'You're guessing,' I said feebly.

'Am I? Then I won't know that you complained to your dipper about the way the muntin to the left of the chest's lock had been damaged. You swore blind you didn't do it. You whined that Colin must have done it, collecting the chest from the herb garden before the rush hour.'

I think I paled. If I didn't, I should have. A dipper's a contact man, the one who checks up after you've done a job. He decides if you've obeyed right, so that you get paid.

Antiques are stolen to order nowadays. The raj tells the dipper. The dipper tells you.

You do the steal, and that is that. A muntin is the straight vertical piece of wood between panels in a joinery chest front. Before that came in, in ancient times, everything was made of plain planking. That's why so few of the old pre-Elizabethan boarded chests survive. I gaped, partly because I didn't know that Maud knew a single antiques term.

'How the hell?'

'How the hell could I know that, Lovejoy?' Her voice didn't even waver. 'The same way I know about the Ashmolean Museum's cat snatch. Remember that? The whole country was aghast. New Year's Eve celebrations. Fireworks. Dancing in the streets of Oxford.

Students in fancy dress.'

'You saw it in the papers.' Feebler and feebler.

'He used a smoke bomb. Single-handed, shifted nine roof slates to cut a hole. Dropped through with a nautical rope ladder. Let off the bomb, wafted the clouds with a battery-driven fan. He visited no other room. Cut the Cezanne from the frame. Left his holdall, scalpel, gloves behind. And danced off amid the crowds.'

No laughs now.

'The raj told him to penetrate the Ashmolean Museum through the new Sackler Library building site, because the University of Oxford can never – and I quote, Lovejoy –"make up its mind about agreeing with its benefactors". The raj deducted twenty per cent of his thiever's fee because he dropped his gloves.'

Now I was gaping. The nine slates hadn't been in the papers, nor the nautical rope ladder.

'The painting?' I croaked.

'Auvers-sur-Oise, by Paul Cezanne. The only Cezanne the Ashmolean had. He ignored the Leonardo da Vinci because the raj ordered him to. And the Picasso. You want measurements? Dates? Anything else?' She smiled, power to womenfolk.

For a second I had a terrible urge to scarper, clear off and never see her again. I must have looked shaken because her eyes took on that hard glaze when a woman sees a man's terror. I'm not a coward, honest, but the raj tops people for eavesdropping.

Actually kills. I could name names. All dealers could. Maud smiled.

'Lovejoy. Why d'you think he's in a wheelchair? There's more technology in it than the parson preached about. Everything he says is recorded. He has transmitters to spare.

Get the joke?'

'No.' I didn't get any joke.

'His phoney cups, trophies, all his fake awards. People laugh at him. The joke's on them, because nothing they own is secure. Any instant, he could simply advise the raj, and somebody would lose every penny piece. I mean you, the British Museum, America's Metropolitan, anywhere that owns anything.'

I sank back, laid my tired head on the pillow. She came over me, smiling down, her breast in view.

'Are we being broadcast?' I bleated, frightened.

'No, darling.' Her face clouded slightly, then cleared. 'No. Impossible. Quaker wouldn't do that.'

What man wouldn't keep track of his missus, though, if she kept sneaking out to see a scrounging ape like me? My throat dried. Quaker could say the word and I'd get found in a ditch, victim of some hit-and-run. Nobody would know. I'd be forgotten in an hour, that old Lovejoy, serve him right.

'Come on, darling,' she said, smiling as her confidence returned. 'You're forgiven. I know you're Quaker's friend. The only one he's got, truth to tell.'

Thank God for that, I thought but did not say.

'Course I am,' I said instead. 'I always am. Always will be.'

I said it for a gillion hidden cameras and tape recorders in my fertile and terrified mind.

We joined, Maud and I, and made smiles. My smile was weak, but no less heartfelt.

'Tea, Lovejoy?' Maud asked, teapot poised, as Quaker smiled fondly and decided where his new trophies would go. 'Scone or cake?'

Ten of each was the right answer. 'Please.'

Quaker laughed. I kept my eyes off his electronically loaded wheelchair. Probably emitting signals to Planet Mongo, where menacing minds were judging every syllable. I felt weak so fell on Maud's grub. I love a bird like her.

'Wish I could eat like you, Lovejoy,' Quaker said wistfully. He slapped his protruberant belly. 'In training, see.'

'Ever think of retiring, mate?' I asked, mouth full.

'No.' He looked sad. 'I know what people say about me, Lovejoy.' I hoped I didn't look stricken with terror. Even Maud froze for an instant. 'That it's an addiction, me striving to achieve things when most blokes just have on hobby.' He sighed at his dazzling array of awards.

'Well,' I said heartily, 'they expect it.'

'True,' he agreed eagerly. 'Today, there'll be TV cameras all along the river to watch me scull. Interviews after. That Frenchman has a reputation.'

His opponent had been a Bavarian minutes ago. He'd forgotten. Too much on his mind, cluttered up with antique robberies? I wondered for a second whether there was a way of finding out where all his information was kept.

'Next week I'm boxing.'

'You're fighting again?'

'Lovejoy,' he said gravely, the light of lions in his eyes. 'I couldn't let the Lonsdale Belt go to Czechoslovakia.'

'But you might get clobbered.'

He smiled nobly. 'Then I'll go down fighting.'

We made similar merry chat until it was time to go. I said ta for Maud's grub. He never shakes hands, says that's for Americans and other foreigners. Nor do I, come to think.

'Oh, Quake,' I said, clumsily bringing in my panic as I rose to leave. It was the reason I'd come, after all. 'I hope you don't think less of me.' It was awkward. I shifted from foot to foot. 'Over my, er, lad. They're saying,' I explained for the recording devices Maud had told me about, 'that this lad Mortimer from Saffron Fields is my son. He's causing trouble, telling tourists which antiques are genuine and which aren't.'

'Your what?' he said, playing astonished well enough for the Old Vic.

'Your what?' Maud exclaimed, with hatred.

'It's said,' I amended. 'He's fifteen.'

'Good heavens!' Quaker almost offered his hand in congratulation. Maud did no such thing.

'Who is she, Lovejoy?' she asked in a voice of sleet.

'Only, I have no friends as such.' I almost moved myself to tears. 'Not ones I could trust.'

'It's all right, Lovejoy,' Quaker said. 'We understand.'

'He's not poor or anything. I'd like to think somebody like you might look out for him if... he needed anything. His mother frolics full-time in Sohor. His dad – who brought him up – is dead. He might need somebody.'

'Tell him we will, Lovejoy,' Quaker said. 'You're our friend. If a cripple and a cook from the soup kitchen will do?'

'Ta, wack.' I was really – I mean really really – moved, and retreated as Maud showed me out. They could have said go to hell, but hadn't.

'Lovejoy,' Maud said urgently on her doorstep.

'Shhh,' I whispered, though what good's whispering when modern sound booms might be concealed in every twig? I added in a voice of thunder, 'Tell Quake good luck with the, er, boat.'

'Friday, Lovejoy,' Maud whispered, bussing me so-long. I left, exhausted.

To find the brigadier waiting for me at the bus stop.

'Isn't it time, Lovejoy,' he said without preamble, 'that you made an honest woman of Maud?'

People in the queue turned to look. He has a delivery like a Shakespearean herald: now hear this, oh world. I went red.

'Sorry, Brig,' I apologized. 'She's married.'

'That doesn't stop people these days, Lovejoy. And from what I hear—'

'Brig,' I said, broken. 'Ask Maud. If I were you I'd just fall into line.'

'She's living with a dud,' he boomed. 'He's not even a genuine dud. He's a sham dud, for heaven's sake. All that let's-pretend lameness, when he actually floats off in his punt at all hours. I reckon he's got another woman anyway, so where's the harm?' He eyed me wistfully. 'I'd like a son-in-law like you, Lovejoy. No mockery. And something would keep happening.'

'The bus is here.' It wasn't.

'I wish the silly bugger really was lame,' he said sadly. 'You see, Lovejoy, my world has changed. If there are floods in Mozambique, or a new miracle genetic rice gives some coolie the bellyache, then my generation's very existence is up the creek. Our Defence Weapon Procurement makes a trivial mistake, another chunk of my life shreds. A passenger plane crashes, and more of my generation becomes penniless. It's true, Lovejoy. It's that serious. I'm closer to the edge every time I open The Times.'

Seemed a bit pessimistic to me. I said so. And what could a penniless antique dealer do to straighten earth's calamities?

'You know the theory, how mankind started?' For a second he seemed deeply moved, but how could that be, him a stalwart brigadier and all?

'Which one?' I'd heard dozens, each as unbelievable as the next.

'Three million years ago, primitive australopithecines living in the rain forests divided.

One branch stayed vegetarian and are still monkeys. The others became carnivorous and learned to make war. They're us, Lovejoy. Man. Just remember that's all we are.'

He looked sad. I blurted out, 'Cheer up, Brig. Anything I can do, I will.'

'Thank you, Lovejoy. See me Friday, then. No later. Chin chin.'

I thought of saying toodle-pip, but he'd had enough disappointment in one visit. He looked a tired old man weighed down by desperation. How could I help a rich man like him, for heaven's sake?

'Tara, Brig.' I caught the bus. Things to do.