The Possessions of a Lady (4 page)

Back to cadging grub.

'Stop nagging.' I eyed the counter, but Aureole doesn't take
hints.

'Some women keep asking if you're a link.' She smiled, strolled.
'Any time, Lovejoy. No fee to you.'

'It's supposed to be random,' I shot back, 'and a fixed fee.’

'You mean that tourist girl?' Aureole asked, stung. 'She was
trying to get away. Anyway, it was only once.'

With no idea who she meant, I let it go. Alf returned with enough
to pay.

'Here, Lovejoy,' he said, indignant. 'That's a frigging banquet.'

'You offered.' I can be as indignant as Alf any day. 'Anyway,
you'll win from Gumbo any minute.'

We watched as Gumbo mournfully trailed the customer to the exit,
reducing his price every yard. The door closed. Alf yelped gleefully and went
to collect his winnings. Aureole rolled her eyes heavenward, buttering the
toast.

'What girl, love?' I asked suddenly.

'
What
what girl?'

'The one you mentioned. Getting away?'

'Oh, some overseas lass. I'm not good on accents. South African
sounds New Zealand, Aussie sounds Zimbabwe, y'know?'

'Tell me, Aureole.'

'No.' She moved, no destination. 'Marmalade?'

'Yes, please.' A calorie is a calorie, not to be sneezed at. 'Who
was she, love?'

She halted, eyed me. 'Deal, Lovejoy? No fee, and you can have the
pick of my antiques?'

'Any seven items?' I bargained. Outside, thunder rolled.

'Any three, Lovejoy. And six chain dates.'

'Three. Lend me the fare home, to shell this tat.'

'Done, Lovejoy. First time you've ever looked smart.' She slipped
me a note as Alf returned gloating. Her features were impassive, but inside she
was laughing. 'Come round tonight and I'll tell all.'

'Eightish okay?'

'Right.' She went to lay up the tea tray.

The girl could be Tinker's lost relative Vyna. I didn't want to
knuckle under to Aureole's blandishments, but what can you do?

Alf plonked himself down opposite, all jubilation.

'Right, Lovejoy! About this Bowie knife.'

Oh, God. I'd forgotten. Quickly I invented, 'It's highly engraved,
Alf. . .'

Easy to fib, but all I could see was the precious, genuine antique
on Aureole's stall. I'd just made the antiques deal of a lifetime. My heart
sang.

4

As Alf and me fenced lies, I vanished back in time. Outside the
Antiques Centre, thunder rumbled closer.

People nowadays think that we invented sexual oddity. Wrong.
Establishments near Bury Street in Regency London's St James's were busily
proving that two centuries back. The women's flagellation club met in
fashionable Jermyn Street, Piccadilly, Thursday nights. It allowed in only a
dozen women. They drew lots to decide batting order. Six would strip. The
chairwoman dished out rods, and they would flagellate the passives. Magazine
accounts of the time say 1792 was a hit year (sorry about the pun). Lectures on
eroticism preceded every club (sorry) session. The aim (I'm getting embarrassed
about these puns, but can't keep them out) was to gratify, expiate, and turn
milk-white skin to red.

The culmination, that century's diligent observers reported, came
in Theresa Berkley's flagellation house in Portland Place. Theresa was a game
girl. She had ambition. True blue capitalist, she reasoned that it was wrong to
restrict this thrill to women. Also, why use only stiff Jermyn Street rods?
Serious thinking was required here. Madam Berkley therefore set up her own
code. Green birch wands, kept whippy in warm water, were always available.
Leather cat-o'-nine tails, adorned with needles and fine wire nails, also
proved popular. Slender canes from Long Acre's furniture makers, green nettles,
coach-harness thongs, broom faggots, God knows what else, were ready for males
and females alike. Remember, it was the age when sin was front-page stuff,
notions of guilt and torment were the rage, life one enormous religious
porridge.

Theresa's establishment flourished.

One problem, though. La Berkley saw that a support was necessary.
Thrashing clients to ecstasy had a certain transcendental quality, but proved
messy. Bed laundry cost, as the clients became bloodily replete. Her business
expenses ate profit. Luckily, Georgian London was inventive, and proved equal
to the task. Why not, some unknown artisan suggested, create a flagellation
frame? Custom-built, faced with kid leather, covered with a single replaceable
sheet. Adjustable, on a rachet with mahogany stretchers, you could thrash from
any angle. Make sure there was space for the weapon, for different types of
stroke, and Bob's your uncle. No beds needed! Cheap quick turnover, strong,
eminently re-usable, desirable . . .

The famed Berkley Horse was born.

Theresa ordered a set, and life's rich pageant rolled on just that
little bit richer for the Berkley Flogging Establishment of Portland Place.

See one, you can't mistake it, unless you're as daft as the
average dealer. It reminds you of an easel, a leather-covered wooden support
about sixty-five inches tall. Later models extend or shrink with wooden holding
pegs that screw in. There's an arched space for your head, and two rectangular
openings for your belly and knees, slots for your feet. Three pairs of ornate
brass rings for binding your head, chest, calves. That's it.

And Aureole had one on her stall, pristine, so genuine it chimed
in my chest. God knows who'd made it. The great furniture makers of that golden
age had lived only a stone's throw beyond Piccadilly. Tom Chippendale, eldest
son of his immortal dad, was beavering away nearby at 60 St Martin's Lane,
though plummeting downhill to bankruptcy ... I felt my divvy's malaise as
Aureole's Berkley Horse clanged in me. Chippendale? I moaned inwardly.

The recent boom in erotica has taken antiques by storm. Dealers
are crazy for sexy implements, paintings, working models, sexy tobacciana. It's
a queer world, but you just can't ignore a 'push,' as the trade calls
inexplicable surges, because it's where money suddenly goes. A few years ago it
was Georgian silver. Then the Impressionists. Then the Moderns, until those
international sales when modern paintings didn't hook in the floating money. Antiques
is an exciting landscape dotted with smoking ruins showing where dealers came
to grief.

My mouth watered. Aureole was using the Berkley Horse as a stand.
She'd pinned some repro brooches to the leather, silly cow. Damaging a genuine
antique ought to be punishable by poverty, and serve her right.

It isn't just antiques, though. City of London companies were
floated for dafter things than colours daubed on canvas, or for clay shaped by
a potter's hands. It's an odd fact that if a stock exchange demands money for
some loony enterprise it's taken seriously. Old does not mean honest. It can
also mean tricky. 'A Wheel of Perpetual Motion' had ancient investors flocking,
as did that well-known, 'Undertaking Which Shall In Due Time Be Revealed . .
.'—and you had to pay up beforehand. Don't laugh; 1,000 investors raced to buy
on the same morning, the old report laconically states, that the perpetrator
'disappeared in the afternoon'. Imagine stockjobbers—the word came in about
1688—actually having the nerve to trade in a company that merely promised, for
heaven's sake, to teach gentlemen Latin, conic sections, and 'the art of
playing the theorbo'. But trade they did, folk fighting in the streets for a
chance to lose their gelt. Even the patented steam-operated gentleman's boot
remover seems somehow sane.

'Lovejoy.' He was suddenly there, six minions in support. Not so
mini, these minions. Pale, I quickly went into a fawning stoop.

This bloke—I mean esteemed gentleman—is a life-threatening
enterprise called Big John Sheehan. He's one of these quiet Ulstermen who put
the fear of God in you just saying hello. Our ancient saying, 'Ulster for
soldiers,' is true, true.

Big John's always impeccably dressed, shoes glittering, gaberdine
overcoat, black bowler. He once made a henchman walk home, just for having
dirty shoes. From Shrewsbury, over a hundred miles.

'How do, John. Congratulations.' I did my cower.

To my astonishment, his eyes filled. He removed his bowler,
cleared his throat to disguise emotion. He glared, checking that nobody was
jeering. Luckily, we weren't.

'Thank you, Lovejoy. It's a stout heart that remembers loyal
anniversaries.'

Christ, I thought in panic, now what? I'd only meant his nephew getting
a job in antiques at last, God preserve innocent antiques from duckeggs. Loyal
anniversaries? I looked desperately at his blokes, all smiling granite, no
help.

'It's only right, John.' It had better be.

'Lovejoy.' The world stilled even stiller. 'You did well getting
Shaver in. You divvied some pots, did the man a favour so he would oblige?'

'Pleased to help.' I sweated a terrified sweat. Big John's
approval tends not to last. 'Hope he does well.'

Shaver is John's nephew, dense as a moat. Sheehan had promulgated
an edict that Shaver must become an antique dealer. Finally, I'd got him a
position as trainee in Croydon. The dealer had only agreed because I'd divvied
his silver collection. Ten cruets, four inkstands. Only two were genuine
Georgian. He hadn't changed his labels, of course, but knowing what's fake
helps.

'He will.' The world nodded. 'Want anything?'

I drew breath. The wise man asks little, accepts less. I could
hardly say I'd just been flung out of a fashion show so would he please get
even. But refusal offends, so accept, costlessly.

'Would you ref, John?' Which would only take a single nod. No fee,
and he'd leave satisfied.

'Right, Lovejoy. Show me the reffo.'

Everywhere now, law has become irrelevant. In the dim past, laws
must have been useful and quite nice. Do this, do that. Fine, everybody living
by a code, transgressors getting tidily done for, all that. But happy days are
gone. Forget to pay a parking ticket, the law hounds you all the days of your
life. Steal gillions in some international scam, massacre a township, you get
instant immunity, and your biography's an alltime bestseller. Law is for the
mighty, not us.

In the antiques trade, the ref system has evolved. Ref for
'referee' in the old sense, not the football man with a whistle. Suppose I
promise to deliver an antique by a certain date. We don't go to lawyers, draw
up some contract that would take aeons to enforce. We ignore law, lawyers,
written agreements. We go to a ref, somebody who has violence—and therefore
justice—at his fingertips. It's called 'doing a reffo'. One thing first,
though. You've got to have the thing there— Old Master painting, Hester Bateman
silver jug, whatever. The ref has to see it. His word is law. (No, delete that.
His word is better. It's fair.)

'This, John, please.' I pointed.

'This board?' He stared at the Berkley Horse.

'Aureole's giving it me.' Sheehan, I remembered uneasily, is
moral. Better leave him in a state of innocence.

'That so, darlin'?'

'Yes, John.' Aureole smiled openly, plus a secretive smile
inwardly to herself. 'It's Lovejoy's.'

'Fortnight. No charge.' And that, said John, was that.

He left, his men tramping stolidly fore and aft, us all fawning
and hoping he'd remember how glad we were he'd called, then shakily blotting
our damp foreheads. Notice one thing? Doing a reffo takes no time at all. And
Sheehan didn't need to know what the item actually was. No money changes hands.
Normally, the ref is paid ten per cent of its value. Simple, eh? But if you
default, the ref simply inflicts what punishment he thinks fit. He can declare
you untouchable, a nothing' who is simply ignored by one and all and instantly
goes bankrupt. He can confiscate whatever he wants to make restitution. The ref
s word is, well, law. Sadly, refs don't do domestic cases, but let's hope the
time will come. We need laws. The trouble is we've only got lawyers. Where was
I? Calling, 'Ta, John. Appreciate it, ta.'

An hour later, exhausted, I reached my cottage. Its aroma disturbed
me, Thekla's perfume plus my grot. I sighed, got down to resuming life.
Solitude can be relief.

The sky was black, thunder on the go, lightning cracking the eerie
pewter sky. No rain yet. The estuary must be catching it. The air felt too
muggy to breathe.

Quickly I shed Thekla's husband's posh outfit and had a coolish
bath. I don't like heat. Summer's a pest, its sunshine making you sweat before
you've gone a yard. Give me grey skies any day.

Women undo seasons. Thekla had whinged about draughts, bare flagging
underfoot, no electricity, no phone, water from my garden's ancient well, et
endless cetera. She had everything reconnected in a trice, so she could remind
me every two seconds how grim things had been before she'd arrived, that I'd
cost her a fortune. I told her they would only cut it all off as soon as she
left, but women won't be told. They assume that everything's permanent when not
even life is that.