Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER NINETEEN

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About sexual emblems.

They have a fascinating history. The antiques that have filtered down to us oftener than not go unnoticed. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that sexual antiques get shunned. Women, as with everything else on earth, hold the key.

In every age, every fashion, sexual artefacts flourished. They do now, except we won’t admit it. My favourites are nipple jewels. Not merely studs in the nipple’s eye, but lovely pendants with question-mark supports for pierced nipples. All the rage late in Victoria’s reign, the ancient world’s fashion came round again. Breast lassies, some with erotic tails of hair, tiny whips, even fine blades, offered all kinds of fetishes for the woman who preferred to mount her own performance, so to speak. Merkins were natural, in an age of wigs, though very few survive. These flattish wigs made for the pubis —smallpox tended to denude your genital hair—mostly human hair in kid leather, were desirable enhancers. They came adorned with every kind of jewellery, including gold stitchery. Belly jewels, implanted precious stones actually surfacing through the skin, spectacular ornaments for the genitalia, they’ve all had their day.

Because more boy babes died than girls in those past days, women outnumbered us. Superstitions ran rife about conception, a must for a woman to hold up her head. The more she produced, the better. With ineffable logic, they decided that the greater the arousal, the more certain the chance of fruition. They invented with ingenuity and skill. They called in seductive lady helpers of great beauty, who’d excite to passion—using any devices they could think up—then escape from between as husband and wife came together, to coin a phrase, with an almost audible clang. Hence the toy phalluses, images, statuettes, paintings, erotic prints from the Far East, precious gems (of course of the right birthstone significance, because you wouldn’t want your rival to benefit simply because you’d used emerald instead of ruby, right?). I’ve even seen one locket, made for some Victorian lady, which contained the beautifully carved miniature male genitalia of sapphire on one leaf, and the female sculpted of amethyst on the other. Conjures up the charming image of a demure lady praying in church, fingering her locket, which, being firmly closed, made the male and female jewels inside the locket unite in the most intimate manner. Presumably she was born in February, her lover in September—and note that astrological stones aren’t quite those of the calendar months. Semiprecious stones became a means of communication. Diamond, emerald, amethyst and ruby look rather rum in a linear gold mount, but they spell DEAR to the observant swain. I’ve seen a fairly modern platinum-mounted one of feldspar, a gap, then chrysoberyl, then kunzite—the gap standing for “unknown’. Incidentally, if you see kunzite—violet pink of different colour depths as you rotate it—in a brooch for its name, then the gem’s really not a genuine antique, for G.F. Kunz was an American at the end of Victoria’s reign…

Where was I? The gold-lettered pendant on Lilian’s gold chain. Husbands give their ladies depictive jewellery showing occupations. Gerald was a SAPAR man. There’s only two grades in SAPAR’s organization: A for the admin, legal, research lot; H for the self-effacing, but ruthless, hunters.

Escaping, that’s where I was. On the run from H for Hunter Gerald, the clever swine.

First, nick a motor. Fifth car I tried, I got in, started up with ease. Reasonably modern, so it wouldn’t conk out and embarrass me. Hot-wiring a motor at a somnolent night town’s traffic lights attracts attention.

Knowing what theft is exactly, is Man’s dilemma. I thought this abstruse quandary as I guided my new possession from the hotel car park and zoomed back the way we’d come.

Stealing a car, possibly to save my life, was not theological or moral theft. The Church teaches that stealing bread to save your starving children isn’t. As the lights on the south-east road lit my reflection in the windscreen, I worried in case the Church didn’t teach any such thing. If it doesn’t, it ought. Naturally I felt sorry for the lady whose dawn would be clouded by her missing Peugeot, but I didn’t choose to be here, driving wrong-handed into gathering night rain. Everything simply wasn’t my fault. She looked quite smart, did Madame Jeanne Deheque in her photo snap, with her deliberate hair and long eyelashes. No credit cards, maps, nothing to help a stray escaper, the thoughtless cow. Typical woman.

The memory of the service station on the main road was fresh in my mind. No passport, no knowing where I could find refuge. But I was pretty sure I could find the town, the car park, the cafe where Marimee had grilled me. From there, it would be easy to trek back to Almira’s house and the chalet by the lake. Thence filch my passport, and home. No speeding—French cops are death to dashers. I was the sedate motorist. Enough petrol to last a lifetime. I settled down to a steady night drive.

Gerald had been pretty cool, all right. His cover, a travel agent looking for time-share accommodation, bonny homely wife along picking up the odd antique for the business premises. No wonder he spent hours on the phone. No wonder they exchanged glances when their casual hitchhiker knew an Astley Cooper chair and all of its off-key names. But a SAPAR hunter? Gulp.

The Mounties get their man. Sherlock Holmes wins out. In antiques scammery, the SAPAR hunter’s the one to avoid. Whispers tell how two or three of them—there’s only ten, would you believe—have actually killed thieves who proved reluctant to disgorge the booty, before politely restoring the stolen antique to its grateful legitimate owners.

Nowadays, antiques are the big—read mega-galactic—new currency. Drugs and arms sales are still joint leaders, but only just. Antique fraud is closing fast on the rails. Greed is powered by everybody—terrorists, politicians, Customs and Excise, Inland Revenue taxmen, governments, international auction houses, you, me. Most of all, though, it’s the absence of honesty. We all have eyes to love the delectable antiques they see, but they’re paid eyes. Paid but loving. And that means hired, because money cancels love. We pretend it can’t, but it does.

Since every antique worth the name’s on the hit list, the world clearly needs seekers after stolen antiques. Scotland Yard’s Fine Art and Antiques Squad is largely impotent. Oh, statistics emerge now and then, to claim that three per cent of stolen antiques get recovered, but who knows? Answer: nobody. Even I get blamed for the world’s pandemic of antiques theft, for God’s sake. That’s really scraping the barrel for the lees of logic. You want the truth? Great Britain alone has 16,000 lovely Anglican churches—and lets one get battered, robbed, pillaged, every four hours! It can’t be me alone, right? You see, crime pays. Less than twenty per cent of our police forces have art and antiques fraud squads, so what chance has holiness? (Incidentally, that “squads” is a laugh—they’re mostly one bloke each in a dusty nook; Scotland Yard’s entire mob is two.)

People place some reliance (note how carefully I worded that?) on the Art Loss Register. Others swear by LaserNet. I swear at both. You pay a fee to see if anybody’s reported as stolen that antique you want to buy. They collect records of antique thefts. Auction houses joke along with their Thesaurus system. Why joke? Well, you just try matching any ten catalogue descriptions with the objects they purport to describe, and you’ll finish up in tears of laughter, or worse. It’s hit or miss. Like the Council for the Prevention of Art Theft, they’re new and blundersome losers against impossible odds.

But SAPAR is different. For a start, it’s not listed in any antiques glossy. No list of subscribers, in no phone book. Its employees are practically ghosts. I know antique dealers who’ve been in the business quarter of a century who believe there’s no such incognito mob. If it hadn’t been for an utter fluke—making love to a SAPAR hunter’s missus on the hoof—I’d never have spotted Gerald. Having his wife along with him for cover, and giving me a lucky lift, was possibly the one mistake he’d made in his life as a hunter. I just hoped I’d shaken him off.

Three-forty in the morning, I made the lane past Almira’s country house. I drove on, collected my wits, had a prophylactic pee against a tree, put the car off the verge in the wood, and walked silently to the gate and down towards the house.

You can never return. Nobody ever can. It’s one of my infallible rules. Call in at your old school, see the playing fields where you scored that super goal… Mistake: the place is a housing estate. Visit your old church? Hopeless: it’s derelict, tramps lighting fires in the vestry. Detour through your old neighbourhood, all heartaching nostalgia? Don’t: it’s a biscuit factory. Slink, like now, through a French grove towards the holiday home of a lady you awoke night after day for yet more unbridled lust? Error cubed. Even if it’s to nick your own passport, get the hell out. Returning is wrong.

My other infallible mistake is to disregard my own rules.

The house seemed still. A high-powered motor stood on the moonlit forecourt. So good old Paulie was here, doubtless boring somebody stiff as usual. No other cars. Was Almira’s at Marc the Nark’s cottage, watched over by his pair of hounds? I stared at the place for a few minutes, dithering.

The way in, which I’d planned during my drive, was through the rear. The ground sloped up towards the road above at quite a steep angle. It was as if the house was sunk into the earth that side, leaving the front standing free. Split levels always help burglars. They’re easier to climb, which means less of a drop if you have to escape fast.

No balconies, though, except one looking south towards the lake, so it wasn’t all beer and skittles. Drainpipes, rough stone with crevices. I used the old drainpiper’s trick of filling my pockets with a variety of stones from the ground. Find a space where the mortar’s missing, you can slot a stone in to serve as a mini-foothold. I smiled as I started up. “Swarmers“, as the antiques trade calls cat burglars, are mostly slick. Some I know would have already done the job and been at the Dover crossing by now. The roof over the main bedroom was only ten feet up. But being cowardly does no harm.

Quiet, careful, I climbed. My belt I’d removed and tied round my neck for a good handhold if I came across any hooks. I must say, when I’m scared I’m quite good. I honestly think I could have made quite a decent living at burgling.

The roof astonished me by being more of a problem than the wall. Can you credit it? Up there, spread-eagled on a slope of tiles formed like a rough earthenware sea, I found myself baffled, thinking, what the hell do I do now?

Then I remembered the fanlight. It had figured largely in my daring plan. Never closed, it showed the night sky to anyone gazing obliquely up from the bed. I’d learned that. I began edging across towards the moon’s reflection that defined the window. Odd, I could smell cigarette smoke. I halted.

Was somebody kipping, or not kipping at all, in Almira’s bedroom? Having a smoke? I heard, definitely heard, a man clear his throat. A resounding yes! I was stymied.

Choice reared its aggravating head. If the bloke inside was Paul the wimp, it would hardly matter. I could simply walk in, scavenge my passport and off out of it. He was a drink of water, and I’m not. But what if I walked confidently in to find some mauler waiting for me on, say, Marimee’s orders? Did Paul smoke? Oh, Christ. I’d forgotten.

Within arm’s reach of the louvre window, and nowhere to go. Daft to slither across to silhouette my head against the moonlit sky. Bedrooms? Three others, I knew. What the hell was the bloke doing sleeping in Almira’s bed when the other guest bedrooms were all free? Surely they were?

And the light came on, blinding me. I almost yelped with fright and cringed, terrified reflexes trying to shrink me into invisibility on the roof. I could be seen by anyone in the woods above the house.

“Katta.”

Paul’s voice. Katta? Who the…? Katta? Cissie’s Continental maid. No good staying baffled. I had to risk something, or stay treed for good on Almira’s damned tiles. Two silent shifts, and I slo-o-o-owly peered over the edge. Obliquely, safer now the bedroom was brighter lit than my heavenly space, I looked down. Onto Paul and Katta.

He was in paradise. I’ve been there, and knew instantly a million things I’d only ever guessed at. Until now. Katta’s vast naked form was kneeling beside him. Him supine, she hugely tumescent, working away, her head raising and lowering like a feeding animal’s. His hand was on her nape, his other cupping her pendulously swinging breast. His neck muscles were straining taut as he arched, striving towards the bliss that is oblivion. She was laughing. How she managed to, God knows. Her hands were on his hips, pinning him to the bed. It was a rape, a gift, Katta’s enormous fatness rocking flabbily over the recumbent man. I’ve made it sound repellent, I suppose, but it was beautiful. Poets should have been there. Was it the contrast, her spreading flesh and his lean length? Or the fascinating incongruity of Katta’s unbelievable mass seeming to chew him into docility? Or her shaking with laughter while he soared towards detumescence—?

A car door slammed nearby, and another. Footsteps scrunged gravel, and voices spoke casually down on the forecourt.

And I hadn’t heard a thing, so engrossed by the lovely scene on the bed. I froze, couldn’t for the life of me look away.

“… have six or seven of them staking it out,” a bloke’s voice pontificated.

“If that’s enough. You know what he’s like, Jervis,” Almira countered. “I have the key.”

“Not really,” Jervis said. A good try at wry humour. “You two should be able to advise!”

“Don’t be offensive.” Jingle of keys, sound of a lock. “Always the politician, Jay.”

“It has its advantages, my dear.”

Katta heard the door, quickly lifted her head, mechanically wiped her mouth using the back of her hand. She rose with the strange nimbleness of the gross, evaded Paul’s agonized, stretching hand, and trotted from my sight. Paul groaned, covered himself, put the bedside light off. I ducked away. God, I felt his deprivation, poor sod. Robbed, a second from ecstasy.

And that was everything. I thought for quite a few moments, up there on the moonlit tiles.

You see, I’d glimpsed Katta’s face as she’d lifted her mouth, spitting away joy unbounded, and it was wrong. Her face wasn’t right. Oh, it was Katta, sure. But her expression should have been anxiety, worry at being discovered, what the neighbours would think, et familiar cetera.

It hadn’t been any of those. It had been utter shock, almost fear.

The sort of revelation that tells all, especially about whom she’s suddenly so scared of walking in through the door.

When she’d heard the last of Almira’s sentence and Jervis’s rejoinder as they’d opened the front door, she’d been halfway across the carpet. And her swift fright had instantly evaporated. She’d even turned, given Paul a charming rueful smile, blowing his tormented features a kiss from a mouth suddenly formed into an exaggerated tantalizing pout. Katta had slipped out of the room much calmer than she’d shot away from their love-bed. So she’d been frightened to death of someone finding her and Paul—then suddenly not given a damn when the intruders were merely Almira and Jervis. How come?

It took me quite a while to escape from there, passportless. I didn’t care. I was almost pleased with life, as I made it back to the car and drove back to the trunk-road service station, to wait for the golden pair to come.

They captured me while I was having some grub in the self-service. The swine didn’t let me finish it, either.