The Grace in Older Women (21 page)

'You bastard,' she wheezed, subsiding. 'Knew you'd be a crook,
soon as you shouted that insult.'

'Who puts the fruit and veg out?'

'Me and Malapert.' She explained. 'I have a Dutch dogcart. He
hauls it beautifully. I gather produce piecemeal.'

She indicated the fire. I went and chucked another log on it. It
spat at me, spent charcoal all over the hearth.

'Willow wood never burns well,' she said. 'But it's the only
material I can get. The orchards failed. Blight.'

'Don't you spray?' Believe it or not, they use five different
sprays in orchards.

'I thought last autumn would save me. Took a loan to buy
chemicals, hired machines. Vandals holed the drums, poisoned the vegetable
garden.'

Surprise surprise. 'Who's your neighbour? Huntsman.'

'That's Geake, churchwarden. A would-be gentleman.' She stopped
herself chuckling by holding her ribs.

'Look, Dame Millicent. Your dying village has five activists.' I
counted. 'You, Father Jay, Juliana, Jox, Geake.'

'That's about it, Lovejoy. Jox is useless. Can you believe his
grandfather was a Royal Navy captain, a hero?' She went nostalgic. 'Times
change. When Sir Ralph was alive, he kept trouble at bay.' She smiled, wistful.
'He had a klendusic quality. You know those plants that, whatever the
onslaught, have already prepared some protective mechanism? Dear man. Friends
in high places!' She smiled at me with pride. 'My lover, of course. The parties
we had, Lovejoy! Now, nobody comes near. I've not had a letter for over a
year.'

'Sorry, love.' This kind of thing makes me uncomfortable.

'It is for me to apologize.' Dignity regained control.

'We should all meet,' I told her. 'Throw a party, just the six of
us. Hatch a Save Fenstone plan, eh?'

'Would you come, Love joy?'

'As long as Juliana did.'

She smiled. 'So you've met Juliana. And liked her?' Her bright
eyes fixed me. 'I suggested you to her, Lovejoy.' And explained before I could
ask, 'I knew of you from Priscilla.'

Of course. I was lost. The Dewhurst biddies were everywhere before
me, with the American tourists, Jox's scam, this old lady. I limped gamely
after. 'You know the Dewhursts?'

'Doesn't everyone? They've made a superb discovery. It's the
Obverse Zodiac. Works every time! Priscilla should cast your natal chart,
Lovejoy. Perhaps you and Juliana are ideally suited! You are just the man to
wean her from that turbulent priest.' She became suddenly testy. 'What good is
a woman who isn't used, Lovejoy? I hate silliness. Life's simple if people
would only open their stupid eyes! A man must be loved. A woman must be used. I
get mad. I'd make it a law.' Anger wore her out. She leant on a cushion, spent.
Then resumed, conversational, 'Priscilla is the more prescient of the twins,
don't you think, astrologically?'

Which led to more pointless prattle of astral planes and things
planetary. Which led to me sloping off as soon as I could. I found some change
in the glove compartment, and bought two pounds of apples (money in the tin)
for the Misses Dewhurst. The trouble was, I was now broke which meant
defrauding somebody of an antique for money.

See how I'm forced into crime? And people still go about saying
things are my fault. I should talk to Chemise, if I could find her. Wondering
who did for Tryer, I realized I had the very best evidence, in the form of
bruises. Nick and his henchmen, courtesy of Roberta and Ashley Battishall!
Motive? I didn't know. I didn't care. They would pay. Time was crowding me. I
drove onto the A45, and got a ticket for speeding.

18

In the woods near where I live stands a small dwelling. It's part
of a theme park now-lakes, meadows, forests, miles of yawnsville where folk feel
Close To Nature. I'm not one for this, but I'd heard they were about to date
it, so went to see.

Half a dozen idlers were standing about outside. I'd had to park
our car a furlong off. A bedraggled scientist was explaining. Like all
scientists, he looked John the Baptist in trainer shoes.

'This country has a great resource,' he was saying earnestly. The
Nottingham Tree Ring Dating Laboratory. Our master sequence is around 1100 to
about 1750 . . .'

Around! About!
A king of scientific
precision. I wanted him to do the frigging thing, drill a core from the beams,
then we could all go home.

'We take cores,' this wretch intoned, 'pencil-thin, exterior to
centre. We measure two hundred rings, compare their widths from trees felled on
known dates.'

'How accurate are you?' I asked. Spectators shuffled in
embarrassment, such insolence to this fount of knowledge.

'Within a year,' he said, smug. The oldest mediaeval peasant's
cottage so far tested is AD 1335, Malpledurham in Oxfordshire, fifteen years
before the Black Death pandemic.'

Somebody whispered, 'Don't rub him up the wrong way.'

'Wotcher, Wilmore.' I was surprised. He was wearing a dark golfing
mac. I whispered back, 'Shouldn't you be with Gwena the Guide?'

'Astrology session.' He grinned the enthusiastic grin of an
escaping American. I couldn't help liking him. 'Recovered, hearing of this
development potential.'

'. . . was never intended as a manor house,' the cachectic saint
of science was intoning. 'Its roofs two timbers are in a curved, upturned V
configuration. Manor houses had those two main timbers held by a cross beam, a
letter A . . .'

'Will it be preserved?' I asked this scarecrow.

He said, just as stern, 'We already have a preservation order. Our
conservationist group has a plant watch.'

He started to show his implements, a drill, tubes to hold the
cores. Me and Wilmore drifted away. I'd seen it.

'Ring dating's not bad,' I groused to Wilmore. 'Radioactive carbon
dating isn't so good.' I was sad that Mahleen the Golden wasn't waiting by the
motors.

'I was hoping they might release this area, Lovejoy,' Wilmore
shrugged. 'Maybe the cottage won't be old after all. You can't blame me. One in
five of Britain's stately homes has been sold since the 1970s, right?' His face
showed a developer's rapture. 'The British Isles has one million registered
golfers, Lovejoy, 52.76 per cent of Europe's registered 1.9 million! England,
Scotland, Wales, total 32,286 golf holes, on 1,974 greens! Anti-golf maniacs
say we're world wreckers, creating sterile environments. But golf is the
greatest ever sport . . .'

'Good heavens,' I murmured politely, switching off.

Such numbers! Everybody uses statistics to bend arguments. It's
all fraudulent. Stockbrokers spend billions - and a six-year old chimpanzee
beat Sweden's top stockbrokers
by
chucking darts at the companies list pinned to a board
. Okay, I know that
figures frighten. I mean, the USA's eastern seaboard holds the record for
lightning, when the great blizzard a few years ago produced 59,000
cloud-to-ground flashes, peaking at 5,100 flashes an hour overall. Strikes
numbered 0.16 per square kilometre near Tampa, Florida. It doesn't reassure me
that East Anglia's lightning isn't a contender. I distrust forests, because
rogue elephants kill two Indians every three days - in India, of course, but
so? It doesn't mean I'm less scared in East Anglia. When one single crazed
beast kills forty-four poor villagers, charging trumpeting from the countryside
-

'Eh?' He'd said something important.

‘. . . the Battishalls' place. Excuse me?'

'Dragonsdale? Your group is at Dragonsdale?' I wanted at least one
strand tied up, at any price. So far only the slow obliteration of Fenstone
linked with Tryer's death.

'Sure is. I've asked Mahleen to examine its potential after that
zodiac session. What's the matter, Love joy?'

'Nothing,' I said heartily. The Battishalls are, er, friends of
mine.’ I swallowed the lie, but I'm courageous at heart. 'Jaunting out there,
Wilmore?'

'Now why don't we do that, Lovejoy?'

At last. Two birds with but a single stone. High time.

As I drove the valley on the old Broad, I reflected on how we
discover, uncover, reveal. There isn't a tabloid in the land that isn't packed
with 'personality girls' exposing How He Performs In Bed, all that. And every
morning brings news of the latest: 'Another
Tyrannosaurus
rex
Found!!!' Except impressions mislead. So far they've only found
fourteen
T. rex
skeletons in the
entire world, South Dakota their planetary mecca. We mesmerize ourselves into
whatever's fashion. And the latest is discovery at all costs.

Discoveries are always seen as exciting things. I sympathized with
Dame Millicent, whose instincts were sound: pretend that some ancient
gold/tomb/battlefield/whatever lay on her derelict property, and cash in as the
world beat a path to her door. Okay, so she was baulked, just like Jox. Just as
Juliana and Father Jay in that echoing church.

Yet Dame Millicent was right. It could be done. As I drove and
Wilmore chuntered on about Japanese green fees, a gillion ideas for her crummy
farm occurred. You didn't have to find a Grace Dieu or a German submarine -
like the U-534 that sailed from Kiel in May 1945, to its watery end in the
Kattegat, to resurface half a century later when Dutch salvagers hauled it from
the ocean. Or, the Sutton Hoo Viking ship that yielded priceless treasure.
Flukes - you know those - do happen. Like to those Jesuits of Dublin's Leeson
Street, who hadn't thought much of their painting, The Taking Of Christ, that
hung lopsided in their refectory. By some minor Flemish artist, worth only a
few quid, right? Well, no. Works of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the
painter of this (fanfare, please) 'discovery' go at seventy million slotniks.
The kindly priests gave it to a gallery. Is there a God?

Tryer said he'd tried with a holy wishing well. Jox's latest go
was Hugo the Thespian's UFO performance. I'm not knocking these notions., for
all placed growth comes from fib or fame. The ultimate examples are
Glastonbury, Tintagel, where folk market the mighty Arthur; Lourdes, Assisi,
battlefields like Waterloo and Gettysburg. And the inn, in France's
Auvers-sur-Oise.

Which is where a thirty-seven-year old painter arrived from a year
in a Provence lunatic asylum, for a short while before he shot himself.
Everybody knows how Camille Pissarro suggested Auvers (peace, beauty, that
precious northern light), how Vincent turned out seventy paintings in seventy
days. And how Van Gogh borrowed his wine-merchant-cum-innkeeper landlord Arthur
Ravoux's pistol to scare away crows, then shot himself. And returned at dusk,
answered, ‘Oh, nothing. I've hurt myself,' and ascended the two flights to his
bedroom. And how Vincent calmly smoked his pipe when two rude gendarmes came
in, superbly answering their bullying abuse, 'I am free to do what I want with
my body.' And how he died thirty hours later in his loyal brother Theo's arms,
while Vincent's friend Dr. Paul Gachet mourned impotently. The Auberge Ravoux
has a restaurant now, a bookshop, Vincent's sparse room as it was, and the
attention of the world.

Now, we can't have those treasures already discovered. So sinful
humanity finds treasures where there are no treasures at all. I support Tryer's
scams, stick up for Jox's daft exploits. But everybody does it, makes money
from people's dreams. The Church's income's been boosted by prostitutes' rents
for centuries. The United Nations - no mean exploiter of myth - bureaucrat who
ran a call-girl scam at the High Commissioner for Refugees Geneva HQ is one
example. UN vehicles 'donated' to pals, food aid in Uganda sold on the black
market, UN stores whittled away to pals . . . It's routine. Against that lot,
I'm a saint.

And some priceless objects discovered years ago get rediscovered,
to the joy of a select few. Like the Trojan Treasure excavated in Turkey by the
scandalous Heinrich Schliemann in 1873. (Scandalous because fraudulent - his
American citizenship was got by fraud; he ditched his Russian wife for a Greek
lass he got by mail order. An accomplished smuggler, and a chiseller in more
ways than one.) Its nine thousand gold artefacts were disputed in Turkey's
courts -Schliemann got fined the odd groat; Berlin's museums paid a whack.

He then gave the Troy treasure to Germany. The Soviets captured it
in 1945 from its secret hidey-hole under a railway station beneath Berlin Zoo,
and off it went to Moscow. Result of the new modern cooperation? Acrimony,
shrieking headlines, wholesale hatred. And why? Because we're gold struck.
Historically famous gold creates wails of avarice.

We parked in the hotel drive and Nick was immediately there,
watched us approach.

'Wait, Lovejoy.' Nick glanced at Wilmore. ‘I’ll ask the mistress
if you're allowed.'

'Hadn't you heard, Nick? I'm a resident.'

We made it past Nick without assault. He looked for my suitcases,
but I pulled out my pockets to show impoverishment. Neither of us smiled. I
thought, you wait, Nick, just wait. There'll be smiles a-plenty.

19

Not long since, I knew this woman. She had a shop near Bury St
Edmunds, sold toys. Only secondhand, hardly mendable. She was nice, nothing
between us, but sometimes I'd stop, pass the tea hour, admire her gunge.
Occasionally she'd pick up some teddy bear, usually a fake Steiff - the most
sought-after are German from 1903 on - with wrong stitching and a phoney stud.
I'd explain to Mary that even if the Steiff stud was correctly clipped to the
bear's left ear it still might be a fake. (Remember that Theodore Roosevelt
refused to shoot a tethered bear cub in 1902, which started the teddy bear
epidemic, so teddies dated 1889 must be fake. If you find a genuine one used at
Roosevelt's daughter Alice's wedding as table ornaments, you've arrived.)