Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER THREE

« ^ »

The Drum and Fife is a posh roadhouse, a cut above spit-and-saw-dust. To my dismay the place was heaving when I parked in its ancient flagged courtyard. I was too fed up to try anywhere else, and went to undo the passion wagon’s rear door.

The lady stepped out, tutting because I’d no umbrella for her. I’d have used it for me, if I’d had one.

“Does it never stop raining?” She drew her collar round her.

“God left the taps running when he built East Anglia.”

“Well?” She gazed at the tavern. “What are we waiting for?”

“Your, er, gentleman.” He hadn’t emerged. “Worn out, is he?”

She smiled in the exotic coloured lights that taverns string about themselves these days. “Jervis left,” she said, and walked among the gleaming wet carapaces of the motors.

I scrambled to lock up and ran after her, hunched, through the worsening downpour. Why is it that hotels and suchlike spend a king’s ransom on their fronts, yet their rear view is all drainpipes, steaming windows looking into horrible kitchens, rusty tubes?

Naturally, my ‘nice secluded lounge’ was thronged. Upstairs rollicked to the thump of some band. People dressed to the nines stood about chatting. You’d never seen so many carnations. A couple snogged in the coffee alcove with the abandoned passion reserved for strangers at a chance meeting. This wore hallmarks of a wedding.

“Sorry, missus,” I said, catching my streamliner up in the foyer as she stood looking about where to go. “We picked a bad night.”

“No night’s bad, Lovejoy,” she said, smiling. “Days are hell.”

Her eyebrows demanded action, so I found us a place in an inglenook, a phoney iron grate with a cold fire. I looked my disgust. Spinning tin reflectors and a threepenny red bulb in plastic, pubs think they’re Designer of the Year.

“Get me a martini, Lovejoy. No lemon.”

Bloody nerve. I nodded obediently, signalled with exotic mouthings to a puzzled wedding guest in the crowd. I’d complain about waiter service when it was time to go. She should get her own frigging drink. I was hired to drive the blinking love truck, not flunkey drinks for her.

I gauged her as a crowd of youngsters tore whooping through the foyer. Balloons ballooned, streamers streamed, dresses flounced.

Upstairs, cymbals crashed and an announcer bellowed something inane to prolonged applause. God, but weddings have a lot to answer for.

She looked different in the tavern’s subdued lighting. Lovely, yes, but harder than her voice had suggested. I’d only seen her in rainy darkness before. Now, she was thirty, give or take a yard. Small but gorgeous. And so confident you could only admire her. Legs you could eat, figure you couldn’t leave alone no matter how you tried. Skin alabaster perfection. Hair a delight—

“You approve, Lovejoy?” she asked.

Sarcasm makes me go red. I must have been staring.

“What d’you want, missus?” The description I’d been looking for: lush, but hard.

“Get me a cushion,” she said, extracting a cigarette from a handbag worth the whole Drum and Fife and expecting somebody to leap forward and light it. A bloke did, smiling eagerly.

She jerked a plume of smoke slowly, pursing her mouth in a way that almost stopped the show, and ignored him. He went his way, dazedly delighted to have been spurned by so gorgeous a creature. Aren’t we daft?

“Get your own frigging cushion,” I heard myself say, and thought, oh, God. Now a bad report to Gazza.

She looked at me—actually at, as opposed to including me in the scenery. She did the woman’s no-smile hilarity, the appraising gaze that makes you feel a prat.

“I meant, er, what do you want, lady?”

Driving Gazza’s Tryste vehicles can be a real pain. He has three of the damned things. They’re known among us by a crude double nickname—the first word rhymes with truck. You can land right in the mire. Reason: the course of true love does not run smooth. Whoever said that knew a thing or two. The last time I’d driven for Gazza was to a beach near Brancaster. The lovers inside had had a terrible fight—the woman a black eye, bleeding nose, the bloke scratched to blazes. Both had appealed to me in yells and screams to judge the rightness of their separate causes. The police wahwahs had come. A right shambles, me declining any knowledge of the battling lovers. Luckily, Gazza has an understanding with the chief constable, so all was smooth bribery and corruption. Gazza blamed me and didn’t pay me, the swine. Tonight’s success was my attempt to show new-found efficiency, and I needed the money.

“What happened in the barn, Lovejoy. I’m intrigued.” A direct order. Tell, or else.

“It’s like this,” I began.

“Excuse me, sir. Madam.” A real professionoil suaved up, three trainee slickers in tow. “Mr Prendergast, manager. Do I have the honour of addressing one Lovejoy?”

“One has.”

Jodie Danglass smilingly raised her glass to me from a stool in the long bar. I pulled an ugly thank-you-for-nothing grimace at her, for bubbling me to this yak. She’s pretty, new to the antique trade, with thrilling legs. She talks crudities in her sleep. I mean, she looks as if she might sometimes possibly do that.

Prendergast smiled, ’tache, dark pinstripes, teeth a-dazzle. I smiled back, scenting fraud. It’s the one thing I’m good at, being one myself.

“The Drum and Fife welcomes you! Could I offer your lady and your good self a complementary drink, sir?”

“No, ta. We’re just going.”

Fraudsters have to do the driving. I was interested to see how he’d put screws on me.

He twisted with a smirk. “Could you value the antique painting on display in the foyer? Naturally, the D and F would recompense you. Perhaps a complementary sojourn…”

“There is no antique painting in the foyer.”

He gyrated, darting his assistants a quirky tight-mouthed smile. I’d said something he hated. “Did one pause to look?”

“One didn’t need to.” If there’d been an antique painting in the foyer, it would have pulled me like a magnet. It’s the way we divvies are. Folk only believe you if you put on an act. That’s why police look menacing, bank managers dress sterile, judges pretend deep thoughts. Everybody goes by appearances. I should have remembered that, too.

I sighed, made my excuses to Diana. The foyer was only a step. The painting was beautiful, a Turner watercolour of Venice. Scratched, rubbed, the paper’s surface scarified just right. The colours were exactly his, the dark-tinted paper brilliant.

“Lovely.” You can’t help admiring class. I felt smiling.

Prendergast blossomed, beaming. “There, sir! Thank you! I knew that you would authenticate—”

“No, Mr Prendergast. It’s nice but naughty. Fake. But done clever. She used the right watercolours, see? She had the paper made specially—”

“Fake?” He reeled. Minions rushed to support him, but I was fed up and moved away. What do folk want, for Christ’s sake? He’d thought the painting miraculous—all in a second it’s ugly? Like everybody else these days, blinded by money. Disgusting. I felt sick.

“Come on, love.” I grabbed Diana’s arm and hustled her through the departing bride and groom’s mob. Confetti snowed from balconies. People screeched and hollered. Delight was everywhere. It can really get you down.

Somebody had glee-painted my van and tied balloons all over it. Didn’t Tarried—Just Got Married!!! in pink clung to grammar and my van’s sides. Joy abounding’s pretty depressing stuff. Sometimes I wish it would bound off somewhere else. I rammed Diana into the cabin, climbed after.

“Budge up, love.” I fired the engine and we moved off to a clatter of tins tipsy nerks had tied to the rear bumper.

“Who’s this she, Lovejoy?” And when I looked at her blankly in the dashboard glow, “You said she.”

“The faker? Oh, aye. Looks like Fanny’s work. Runs a children’s society. Husband’s a parson. She’s a friend.”

Her lips went thin. “Friend? And you betrayed her, for a night’s free stay in a tavern?”

Women are born judges—of everyone else, never themselves. Ever noticed that?

“It was either her, or Turner.”

We drove in silence for a few miles, during which I got wetter still by pausing to remove the tins. I got us on to the trunk road. I was dying to get shut of Diana.

“You didn’t look at the painting, Lovejoy.” Women never let things drop, do they? “When we arrived, you just pushed into the lounge.”

“I never said I did look. In fact, I said the opposite.”

She was getting me narked. I should have returned her and the van hours ago. The evening was becoming supportive psychotherapy.

“You betray friends, yet you won’t betray Turner, who’s dead?”

“Dead?” That did it. Deliberately I slowed the van. I always start going faster in a temper and police radars skulk everywhere after nine o’clock. “Ever seen a Turner painting, love?”

“Several. A friend of mine has at least two —”

“You’ve seen the greatest paintings in the history of the universe, and have the frigging nerve to say Turner’s dead?” I should have chucked her out there and then, fifty miles an hour. If I’d any sense, I would have. “You silly ignorant bitch.”

“What did you —?”

I closed my mind to her. I was too tired. “Tell Gazza, love. And your influential friends. And your famous Jervis bloke. But let me be.”

Fame is shame. I suddenly realized I’d recognized her paramour, the mighty Jervis. He’d triggered off that sense of something shameful, so he must be famous. Fame really is shame. Aren’t the most famous football teams simply the ones who’ve kicked everything over the grass, season after season? Aren’t Olympic champions merely the ones on the biggest dose of corticosteroids? The most famous politicians the crookedest? Except in antiques, where fame measures beauty and true human love, fame is shame.

Now, here’s the really odd thing about that night. She didn’t mention the argument to Gazza Gaunt at all. Not a word. I reached the bypass, pulled in, transferred her to the waiting limo, and saw her off without a single cross look.

More amazing still, I reached Gazza’s depot and signed off about ten-thirty with no trouble. He was pleased, because cleaning ladies come to repair love’s ravages in his Tryste vehicles, eleven to midnight. And I got a bonus.

“Bonus?” They’re usually what other folk extort from me. An incoming bonus was a novelty. “For me? You sure?”

Gazza laughed, slapped my back. He’s a great back-slapper, is Gazza. He has a brother who clubs non-payers and uncooperative workers, so I didn’t mind this sign of approval.

“Double bunce, Lovejoy. You really created an impression on that lady.”

Here was the odd thing. Gentleman Jervis had been very definitely miffed at my harbour detour. And the bird Diana had taken the hump when I was rude. So a bonus? Really weird. Gazza’s never given a bonus in his life. Extracted a few, yes.

Doubtfully I inspected the notes. Strangerer and strangerer. I must have done something right, but what? Like a nerk, I forgot this vital question, pocketed the wodge and went on my way tiredly rejoicing.

This particular night, rejoicing meant Almira. She has a grand manor house in Birch near the church, and this quiet little cottage by the sea inlet. Mansion for august familial propriety, nook for nooky so to speak. Says her husband runs a chartered bank’s investment company or some such.

Dinner was planned for seven-thirty, then passion till dawn. Arrangements don’t have the accuracy they used to, I sometimes find. I think it’s mainly because women don’t get their act together. I was starving, could have eaten a horse. I got the bus down the estuary to Burnhanger, and walked into a flak storm. Luckily, Almira accepted my explanation that the taxi I’d got from town had run over a badger, and that I’d insisted on taking the poor injured animal to the vet’s at Lexton. Naturally, I’d had to stay with the creature until I knew it was going to live. I was so moved by my tale I welled up. Finally she forgave me, and said I was just a lovely, sweet thing. Back on the right lines, thank God, I had the grub. In my honour she’d come off her perennial staples—whittled carrot and a lettuce-wrapped nut—and cooked food instead.

The passion began about one in the morning, and lasted to six-forty-five a.m. That’s when she gets up to feed her bloody horses and bully the serfs.

She barely had time to make my breakfast before she had to streak off in her Jaguar. And even then she forgot my fried bread. Women really nark me. All night to work out the right breakfast, and still she gets it wrong. Can you believe it? Typical, that. It’s time women learned to get organized. Probably comes from having nothing to do all day. I slept on, the sleep of the just.