Ten Word Game (17 page)

“I hate you. You are vile!”

I chucked the towel in. “You’re probably right. See you at dinner time.”

Nimbly I joined an elderly couple going up to the golf on the sun deck and called a cheery so-long to Lauren.

“Have you had a row?” the lady asked in a stage whisper, glimpsing Lauren’s face.

“No, love. She won’t come dancing.”

“What a pity!” the old couple carolled. “We do so enjoy the ballroom dances! Daniel here loves Latin-American!”

“Doesn’t everybody!” I wittered, a perfect prat, poisonously full of bonhomie.

It was only when I escaped by the Photo Gallery that I felt a strange memory try to come back. It didn’t quite make it. I wondered what set me frowning. That store-room was quite a size, full of supposed antiques. Hadn’t Henry Semper given it a single thought? Surely it must have crossed his mind that somewhere on this ship, with music and antiques as its cruise theme for entertainment – leaving aside all the other thirty or forty shows, games, dances, films going
on – there might possibly be a passenger who knew at least a little about antiques? He’d taken a hell of a risk bringing on that stock of duds trying to pass them off as genuine. It was as if the musicians – twenty-five on board, not counting bar pianists – brought soloists who couldn’t play a tune.

Ever since I’d realised that antiques had as much voice as any human, and could speak across centuries if only people would listen, they’d been my life. Could anything be as beautiful or as loved as the antiques that once lived with our own ancestors centuries ago? And Henry Semper had the gall to think he could con everybody with his roomful of utter gunge. The more I thought about his arrogance the wilder I grew. As for Lauren, she obviously craved to be conned. She just adored fostering her hero’s grandiose scheme.

She would hate me from now on, of course. Par for the course.

Temper made me careless, and I nearly got roped into doing the Conga, some celebrations in a private party. I narrowly escaped, developing a spectacular limp and ruefully shaking my head as they frugged past. Sometimes I wonder about people who do the Conga, singing and whooping. Those great snaking lines are a cruel mimicry of a Congo slave coffle. It’s one of the few things I think should be forgotten. I once told our M.P. so. He thought I was off my trolley.

The captain, a suave man, sometimes held a cocktail party. I got ready to tackle him. I could hardly say I’d been shanghaied by an old dear in a wheelchair, so instead, I decided to make a simple, polite farewell. Hundreds of witnesses was what I wanted.

I got togged up, cleverly buying a static black tie from the shop, seeing Gloria had only bought me one I didn’t know how to tie. The steward came to check me and passed me fit. People were the height of
glamour
, all of us done up like tuppenny rabbits, ladies in gowns and men in tuxedos, older ones with medals. We were photographed by the ship’s camera girls, smiling at the lens. I’d seen this before. The snaps taken as we’d come aboard were mounted in the
display
panels on Deck Seven. We filed forward into lights, music, the throng in party mood.

Somebody said my name and I went forward with an ingratiating smile.

“Sorry I have to get off, Captain,” I started glibly. “So – ”

“Lovejoy is one of our antiques experts,” Purser Mangot cut in, moving me speedily along as the
camera
clicked. “Passengers want to meet him.”

The skipper’s eyes were glazed. “Excellent! Carry on!”

“So if it’s okay with you,” I was saying when two of Mangot’s serfs hustled me sideways. The captain was already shaking hands with a couple, his smile
stencilled
in place. He’d not heard a word I’d said.

“Don’t try that again,” Mangot said quietly through grinning teeth. “It’s a long swim home.”

“Er, I only meant…”

“Good to see you taking part in the festivities!” Amy the dancer took over as Mangot returned to his
chaperone duties. “Where did you leave Lady Vee?”

“Here, Lovejoy,” Les Renown the comedian said, already chuckling. “Heard the one about the parrot who wouldn’t stop cursing? His owner shoves him in the fridge as punishment. The parrot is scared and shouts he’ll be good. As he’s released, he asks, ‘What the fuck did that chicken do?’ Get it, Lovejoy?”

People sloshing back the whisky roared laughing. I tried to smile, keeping up appearances.

“Yes, I get it,” I said gravely. More than most.

“That’s terrible, Les. Can’t you can find some nice jokes?” Ivy slipped her arm through mine.

“Here’s one.” Amy drew breath. “A savage
man-eating
lion says to its little cub, ‘I thought you said this shop was crowded at weekends!’ Isn’t it lovely?”

Ivy was pleased. “The best jokes are quite sweet, aren’t they?”

“I don’t get it,” a lady was saying.

Les started to tell the joke voted the world’s
funniest
ever. “This hunter sees his mate collapse out in the Rockies. Luckily he has his cell phone so he calls…”

I moved away, like the talkative parrot wondering what the chicken had done to be entombed in the freezer. Ivy caught my eye. I didn’t stop, just left my wine glass and made my way out through the crowd.

Thoughts accumulate in the dark. I find that women are the only saviour of insomniacs like me, whereas antiques are sleep’s ruination. But with the next port soon due outside the porthole I finally had to make a fist of escaping. Every passing day took me nearer to St Petersburg, and I knew I’d never come back. The ship was sheer bliss, if you liked rest, sun,
entertainment
, superb food, and a whale of a time. If you were
a prisoner, it was different.

I
had
to get off.

That night I dreamt.

I’m never big on sleeping. It wears me out. At home in my cottage I have a radio – given free with a magazine subscription taken out by a friend, only she didn’t like me listening to it in the lantern hours. She was a travel writer, never had anything published. I listen to my radio through the night. It tells the strangest things – or does it? A half-doze is as far as sleep ever takes me. I usually rouse before dawn with weirds floating in my mind. Like, Tanzania has the best goat races. Sir Isaac Newton invented the cat-flap. Women athletes and
ballet
dancers perform better if they’ve made love earlier that day (doctors say it’s due to lower blood viscosity, but how do they know?). The Itelman tribe in far-flung Siberia is down to 350 native speakers. I can’t
understand
why some things are missed out – or maybe I dozed through bits. Like, Frinton-on-Sea was once
covered
in orange ladybirds – I saw it, the whole place bright orange with the creatures so thick underfoot I was scared to walk for fear of crushing the little things – yet it wasn’t even mentioned. The radio waxed eloquent, however, about red clouds of sand from the Sudan
blowing
over East Anglia after a storm, and frogs raining down on Wiltshire. See? People’s minds just pick out what’s odd
to them.

What was odd to me on the
Melissa
?

I found myself sitting up in my cabin, with
something
stuck in my mind from a long time ago. I
struggled
to recapture what seemed so strange.

My dream had been about Belle, my robbery pal, she of the gabby cell phone. She once had this bloke.
He was an army corporal who loaded heavy guns. He was sailing away some war to, well, load guns I
suppose
. Belle was in tears lest he got killed. She knew how to make his departure memorable, and told the Marquis of Granby regulars en masse, “Fine. Easy. I’ll just… well, you know?” The women regulars nodded understandingly, and we blokes nodded with what sagacity we could assume.

“I mean,” she explained, standing beside the roaring log fire, “it’s only right, yeah? And fair, yeah?”

“Yeah,” everybody said, because it was.

“The only trouble is,” she said, and paused.

We waited. Big Sadie, recently back from Hackney because her sister was playing up, put in, “When he comes home?”

“That’s it.” Belle started crying, tears flopping down on her blouse as she casually sipped her sherry, her expression unchanged. “What can I do? His wife’s a bitch, y’know?”

The women dealers glanced. This time the blokes nodded.

“Where, er…?” I said. This is my tactic, prompt a sobbing woman to supply her own question because then she’ll answer it, and that lets you off the hook.

“You mean where did we first get it together?” Belle pondered. “You’re
right
, Lovejoy! In my garden shed! That’s it!”

Everybody regarded me as a seer possessing the wisdom of the ancients and bought me a drink. Belle’s idea was to make her garden shed a new love nest. Women dealers applauded.

Time passed. The distant war ended and Johnny came marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. We all took an interest in Belle’s hookery nook. Belle’s friends started bringing in miniature swatches of
taffeta
, plus those painter’s charts that always get colours
wrong, and making suggestions for mood music. I only ever learned Gregorian chant at school so I was useless. Belle wanted romantic melodies. Vera who runs the plant barrows in Coggeshall market was
brilliant
at tunes. We listened to her selection. It was
really
nice.

And it came to pass that the seduction shed worked like a charm. We were all pleased. Belle was back on track, until she or the corporal got fed up and they parted and life’s rich pageant, dot, dot, dot.

Which was very strange to me. I don’t mean Belle’s fickle affections, or the response in the tavern, no. I mean the image of Belle’s garden shed that I’d
wakened
with. People said it was quite sumptuous. I never saw it myself. The walls were done in a red flock
velveteen
, with coral window frames and two dozen orange pulsing candles made to look like Christmas tree lights even though it was Easter, pink balloons, and a purple ceiling Dandy Jack built for her in exchange for a fake Victorian Belgian mantel clock. It sounded real class. I could see why Belle had such appeal. Thick, but full of artistic talent.

What stuck in my mind, though, as I woke when it was almost day, was an odd word heard in my dream. A dealer called Poncer said it while we were talking over Belle’s love nest the week before her corporal was due back. Poncer is a tall languid Oxford aristo whose family owns Hertfordshire or somewhere. He rides horses, shoots for England at the Bisley
championships
, golfs in plus-fours, and knows
incomprehensible
African dialects. We’re proud of Poncer. He’s a hopeless antiques dealer, though, and only took up with Martha when he left the diplomatic service because she owns a lavender field in Norwich.

“It sounds quite a boudoir,” his Martha said. “Can I see it?”

“You’d hate it, dear. You only like muted colours. Belle’s shed positively dazzles.”

“I’m sure I’d think it lovely.”

“Let’s hope,” Poncer said, casually raising an aloof digit so barmaids would hurtle to replenish his drink (serfs respond to Poncer’s slightest whim; I have to brawl to get served) “that Belle’s serdab proves
effective
, what, what?”

We all quickly agreed, pretending we knew what a serdab was. None of us did. I would have asked outright but Forelock arrived just then with news of Edwardian furniture due at Gimbert’s auction rooms, so I forgot. I thought vaguely it was some kind of collar.

If you’re fascist the ship stewards bring your
gaspawake
tea on a tray. I pressed the miniature kettle’s button unaided, wondering why I was dreaming of Belle’s tryst. I’d never met her corporal, nor saw her shed. I actually knew little about her except for those incidental bits one antiques dealer knows of another, and that’s only what you pick up trying to do
auctioneers
down.

The sea outside was fairly smooth. I sipped the tea – it was horrible – and saw a couple of distant vessels with their lights showing. We were slowly overtaking. Ships pass each other in the night. Like people. Like ideas? Like fleeting images prompted by an unfamiliar word like serdab? One thing’s for sure, I told my ghastly reflection later in the tiny bathroom, serdab won’t have anything to do with Belle’s spectacular shed.

The enticing notion faded. I yawned and got ready to start the day.

As soon as the library opened, I was there among the books. The library was on the top balcony of the
Atrium facing the row of shops, boutiques, nooks for sitting and having your cocktails. The main staircase looked bright, with its waterfall tumbling three storeys to the well by the elegant sweeping staircase, the band softly playing. I got a book on St Petersburg and sat in a plush armchair. I felt a fraud. I should have been pushing Lady Vee to her bingo or the casinos, but decided this was urgent. Her casino could wait a bit; she’d save herself a mint.

History is simpler than historians make it. The area round St Petersburg was once nothing but marshland, until Peter the Great battled the Swedes from the River Neva in the Second North War, and decided to build a city. He used enslaved Swedish prisoners and his own peasants, and drained the marshes. He raised money by taxing beards, shoes, horses, cufflinks, food, coffins, and even dying. In 1712, this huge man moved his court from Moscow. You had to fetch your own wood (taxable), serfs (taxed), tents, bricks, nails, and your families. Everything was taxed. Workers and Swedish prisoners died. The splendid city rose.

Peter was “the Great” because he was a giant of a man. He loved getting sloshed in a pub among visiting merchants. He often wore tatty gear like a common man. Despite this, he got people to elect their own municipality complete with magistracy. As Tsar, he took his stick to idlers, even to ministers of the crown, and literally clobbered them until they got their act together. This hero also joined his own Tsarist army as a private. A boisterous seventeen, Peter got fed up being married and slung his lovely Eudoxia into a
nunnery
so he could slog at carpentry, gunnery,
blacksmithing
, and sailing an English sailboat he found mouldering in a boathouse. In short, he zoomed about Russia non-stop and changed everything. He even introduced his famous “Table of Ranks”, whereby civil
servants rose by merit – do nothing, you lost
everything
. Hard work got you promoted. A true
revolutionary
.

St Petersburg was his legacy. He started an art
collection
, the embryonic Hermitage.

Catherine the Great, a Polish lady famed for promiscuity (exaggerated actually, though nine lovers at one go does seem rather a lot) developed the
museum
into world leader. I can never really judge women. I mean, she’d win the Ten Word Woman Game hands down because, although she had her husband Peter the Third assassinated by her military lovers so she could rule, as it were, untrammelled, and so counts as a truly naughty lass, she was Voltaire’s best pal and brought Russia into the Enlightenment. Who can balance that?

There was a small badly drawn map of St Petersburg. I located the Hermitage near the shore, and stared at it until my eyes grew gritty. I learned nothing. Except I looked up serdab. It’s a room, a
cellar
, an ice-house, a secret chamber, and has been taken into our language like so many thousands of other words. I had to sit down, thinking.

Lots of rooms about.