The Grail Tree (11 page)

A woman usually likes this sort of modesty, knowing it can’t possibly be true because each thinks all other women are basically undesirables even on a good day. My unblemished humility didn’t work this time. Lydia froze.

‘
Oh.
’ She switched instantly to outrage, lips thin as a bacon-slicer. ‘I
see
.’

‘That reveals my base, carnal nature,’ I said
pleasantly, and saw from her expression that the million warnings she’d had were coming true.

‘Miss Evans did furnish me with the advice that . . .
certain
antiques dealers were of a
certain
disposition.’

I couldn’t help staring. She sat there indignantly, full of wholesome fruit, morals and wheatgerm. There’s a lot of people about who actually talk like this, many more than there used to be. It’s probably caught off the telly.

‘Good old Jean,’ I said. ‘But about antiques, love.’

‘It’s only his way, Lydia,’ Margaret said.

A familiar figure loomed in the doorway and waved. I didn’t even gesture towards my wallet. Tinker, on his way back with a fistful of glasses, shied nervously.

‘Morning, Tinker,’ the Old Bill said.

‘Why, hello, Mr Maslow.’

Lydia sat watching in horror as Tinker’s filthy mittens distributed the glasses round the table. You could see that microbes were suddenly on her mind.

‘Maslow, Lovejoy,’ Tinker whispered. ‘A right bast – er, a real grouser.’ Street traders’ slang for a bobby of serious and unpleasant disposition.

Maslow stood at the bar chatting to Nan, his back towards us. On the Continent, he’d have been stymied, but you never get an English pub without six thousand mirrors on every wall. He could see in everybody’s earhole.

I nodded for Lydia to start up. She drew breath.

‘There’s something wrong in Gallery Six. A Davenport in the central display.’

‘But the Davenport’s beautiful.’ Margaret halted abruptly when I gave her the bent eye.

‘It’s an excellent piece of work,’ Lydia said. ‘Lovely. The texture’s almost right and the colour’s exquisite.’
Her eyes were glowing now behind her bottle lenses. ‘Somebody has created it with such, well, feeling. But it is modern, not an antique.’

‘Sure?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ She examined her hands and said nothing.

‘What tipped you off?’ You have to be ruthless at this stage.

‘I just don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘The poor thing. So beautiful, yet basically a . . . well, just a trick, isn’t it?’

I gazed at her in silence for a moment. Tinker gave me her answer paper, a lined sheet torn from a spring notebook. Eight out of twelve right. Only an average knowledge, but knowledge is only a small percentage of knowing after all.

‘Have a look at this.’ I gave her a dazzling little 1598 leatherbound copy of John Wylie’s madrigals. Margaret had lent it. Lydia flipped it carefully, guessing it was special from my handling, but clearly bemused.

‘An old book.’ Quite lost. ‘Is it genuine?’

‘Yes. Rare. Superb. Brilliant.’

‘Oh. I’m afraid I know so little –’

‘He was inspired by an illicit love affair. Lady Mary of St Osyth. They were always at it.’ Lydia hastily dropped the book, reddening. ‘You win,’ I said. ‘Look, love. If you come to learn from me you work like a dog as and when I say. I’ll take you on for three months, then I might give you the push. No wages. A share in a nonexistent profit. No expenses. No grumbling. And no comeback if I sling you out before time because I suddenly take umbrage.’ She listened, still as a squirrel. ‘Everything else comes second to antiques. And one last point. I don’t like criticism.’ I waited. ‘Well?’

She nodded breathlessly. ‘Am I . . . taken on?’

‘Yes.’

‘Col will be so disappointed,’ she said sorrowfully, her eyes filling with tears. ‘He was so thrilled, brimming with expectation.’ Oh-ho, I thought. No tears for Angharad, only for Col.

Tinker. Find Col and Angharad and tell them sorry.’ Tinker nodded and started draining his pint glass.

‘Margaret, would you explain basic survival? I want a word with Maslow.’

Lydia rose, figure meticulously tidy and handbag on guard. ‘Thank you, Lovejoy,’ she said politely. ‘As your apprentice, I shall endeavour to fulfil whatever promise you see in me, and perform –’

I got up and kissed her cheek and Margaret’s.

‘Welcome, love. Meet me on the gallery in thirty minutes.’

‘Lovejoy!’ she was starting up indignantly, but Margaret hastily whisked her out as Maslow came over.

‘Wherever I go you’re grilling young ladies in some tavern,’ he quipped.

‘A merry jest, Maslow.’

‘Still in that public-spirited mood of co-operation, I see, Lovejoy.’ He knew he was nettling me. ‘Betty any good?’

I ignored that. We sat facing across the narrow table like gamblers. Nan was round in the other bar. It was too early for the regulars. Just me and this nerk.

I asked, ‘Well? Who killed the old geezer in the boat?’

‘Which is where we left off,’ he prompted. ‘What makes you think he was killed deliberately?’

‘No fuel. No gas. No explosives.’ These pedantic civil servants really get me. ‘Does that add up to kerboom at the police college?’

‘Boats have stoves, and petrol, oil. Old boozers drop matches.’

‘Immovable boats don’t.’

He shook his head and wagged his finger. It took all my self-control not to break it off. ‘Engine-driven boats are always movable, Lovejoy,’ he explained as if to an imbecile. ‘A flick of a wrist to cast off. The North Sea,’ he said, ramming it home, ‘isn’t all that far downstream.’

The bleeder actually sneered as he poked my collarbone with his pipestem. These pompous warts really chill me. I took his pipe away and dropped it into his beer with a succulent fizz. Second pint of his I’d ruined.

‘Concentrate. The estuary,’ I corrected, ‘might as well be on Saturn. The barge had no engine.’ Like I say, sometimes it feels like we’re ruled by Neanderthals. I saw I’d have to explain. ‘Engine number PDK oblique YOZ oblique 4331M oblique 299 was removed for scrap years ago. Longhelp Mason’s, bargeyarders, of Belchingham, Lanes. They’re on the telephone and everything, very willing ordinary people keen to help with the most simple routine enquiries. I phoned them. And one other thing, Sanders-of-the-Trail.’ I managed to stand up. I knew I was brewing the wrong exit line but I was trembling with fury.

‘Look here, Lovejoy –’

He tried to stand but I slammed him down. ‘If your shambolic gaggle of bumblers isn’t going to bother, then I am.’

‘Are you sure about –?’

‘When you’ve done some thinking, Maslow,’ I said, ‘call on me. Until then, leave us common folk to get on with dishing out the justice.’

‘Just you dare, Lovejoy.’

I was halfway to the door but found I’d swung round. ‘Oh, I dare all right, Maslow,’ I said. ‘I dare.’ I even felt pale. I went meekly out, not a little embarrassed at the contumely. Notice that expression I just used, not a little embarrassed at the contumely? That’s what listening to people like Lydia does for you. For some reason, I was mad at her as well as at Maslow.

It was high time I put my mind to trying to remember what old Henry and I had talked about when we were drinking ourselves paralytic. I always knew it would be left to me. No wonder I’d been so on edge.

‘Excuse me.’ A traffic warden barred my way in the alleyway. ‘Is that your car? It’s illegally parked –’

I kneed him and propped him gasping against the tavern wall. ‘Piss off,’ I said. I nodded a breezy good day to two old biddies gaping at the scene and stepped off feeling better already, though I knew I’d worry all day in case he was a friend of Brenda’s, the only traffic warden friend I’ve got.

Having alienated practically everybody I could think of – as usual, not my fault – I drifted into our town library to suss out books on the Grail.

Lydia was waiting patiently on Gallery Six. I’d never seen so many people in the museum. The galleries were crammed, at least a score of people and children to each.

‘Can’t you see?’ she said, pointing excitedly. ‘How . . .
guilty
the poor thing looks?’

‘You’re right,’ I calmed her.

For the next hour, I took her round the galleries, becoming more resigned every second. Lydia had
the knack beating fervently inside her, but it was a furniture knack. I showed her the ancient Galileo pendulum hanging from the museum’s glass ceiling to head height. It is really only a massive lead weight on a wire flex. Set swinging, it shows the rotation of the earth. Naturally, our museum authorities forbid this because children are always playing ‘chicken’ at it. Lydia thought it stupid and ugly.

‘How do they
clean
it?’ she demanded. She also gazed blankly at a blindingly beautiful Thomas Tompion clock worth a fortune. She was merely puzzled by a rare collection of cased smoking pipes for a Georgian lady – ivory and gold decorations, silver-and-pearl-embellished tobacco pouch, of the kind occasionally put on sale as snuffboxes – their greater size gives them away. She was bored stiff by a precious excavated set of Roman surgical instruments owned by the doctor of the famed – and doomed – Ninth Legion. She gazed, fingers tapping signals of boredom on her handbag, at a display I’d provided materials for in the English Civil War section.

‘See,’ I enthused. ‘English doglocks are so very rare.’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Those two little heaps of powder I put there to show the ingredients of gunpowder,’ I explained enthusiastically. ‘I left out the charcoal because it might get wafted about on to those uniforms. The trouble is it all needs re-doing, really neffie.’

‘Mmmm.’

A little kid pulled at my trouser leg and held up a bar of chocolate. I bent down and took a mouthful. It trotted off, pleased.

‘The curator made me take out the flints because he said –’

‘
Lovejoy!
’ Lydia said, incensed, pointing after the infant.

‘– it disturbed their line, made them look too much like weapons –’

‘You ate that baby’s chocolate!’

‘– which is what they
are.
Eh?’ I homed in on her outrage. ‘I know. It insisted.’

‘You – you insufferable, greedy –’ she stormed.

‘Here endeth the first lesson,’ I said wearily. ‘See you.’ And left.

I can’t understand what women are on about half the time.

There are garden seats placed on an especially windy corner of the market square. I flicked through Ashe’s book on the Grail for half an hour and finished up no wiser. Maybe I needed the close assistance of a desirable PhD in ancient history.

I strolled off, deciding to chat up Lisa. But no silly obvious questions about the Grail, because a lot of other antiques dealers see Lisa very, very often.

B
UT HOW DOES
an entire civilization lose the Grail, for heaven’s sake?

The whereabouts of all antiques isn’t necessarily known, even if they are very, very important antiques indeed. In fact whole palaces full of them have even gone missing, like Nonsuch Palace, for example. The notorious Barbara Villiers was at the back of it all, otherwise Lady Castlemaine of glamorous reknown. This famous beauty, cold and grasping down to her very bones, was a profligate gambler. She acquired the lovely Nonsuch Palace by means best not gone into, and immediately considered the alternatives: to sell for hard cash, or to hang on to, this exquisite wonder of the Royal Tudors, crammed as it was with the breathtaking craftsmanship of the glittering age of Henry the Eighth and Queen Bess. It was money or beauty. Needless to say money changed hands, and even the stones were savagely plundered. Finally, the Palace was gone, vanished.

Well, if you can lose a palace you can lose a pewter cup, can’t you?

I tried to calm down and forget my worries, wandering about the Arcade and chatting till Lisa
finished serving. I saw Jason, a retired army man turned honest, and made him blush by telling him that the ‘Linen-and-Calfskin Guinea-Pouch’ he was advertising was an early contraceptive.

‘They waterproofed them with linseed oil,’ I told, him affably. ‘Sometimes even tar.’

‘Is it
really
?’ he said, awed, gaping at it.

‘Making them impervious was the difficulty.’ There were other more natural ways, if you follow. I gave Jason a few details. Bill Shakespeare’s Dark Lady Emelia Bassano avoided, er, the issue (so to speak) by diverse other skilful practices, about which I’d better not digress. But it’s interesting that antique contraceptives, flea boxes and the like have to be called something else in order to sell them nowadays – we label them ‘sovereign purses’ or ‘snuffboxes’, or some such, often unknowingly. Odd how our hang-ups still haunt us.

You have to laugh at some stuff, though. Every day you find a piece which sets you falling about. Today’s gem was a plate of Spode type, priced high by Lennie. He hasn’t a clue, but hope beats eternal in the human breast. He called me over. His mother-in-law, Jessica, was with him and glamorous as ever. She has him in thrall owing to the fact that he’s penniless and she’s aggressively rich. Jessica has somehow managed the older woman’s perfect triumph – a kind of marriage by proxy, with every known practical, material and bodily gain. I’ve never even seen her daughter, Lennie’s wife. I sometimes wonder if Lennie ever has, either.

‘Lennie’s found a superb piece, Lovejoy!’ she breathed proudly. ‘Spode. Believe it or not, 1732!’

She moved ahead of me into the shop wearing a ton of gold bangles.

‘Hiyer, Lovejoy.’ Lennie looked bushed. It had
happened more and more frequently since Jessica took him in hand.

And Jessica was right, in that the blue-printed earthenware Spode plate was marked
AD
1732, which was a considerable achievement since Josiah Spode wasn’t born till 1733. I explained this slight technical flaw. Jessica saw Lennie’s face fall and pulled me quickly to one side. Lennie blundered eagerly towards two other customers.

‘Look, Lovejoy,’ Jessica said softly. ‘I know Lennie’s not too lucky at antiques.’ She squeezed my hand gently. ‘But couldn’t you just see your way to . . . well,
suggesting
Lennie’s successful for once? Made a really marvellous find?’