The Possessions of a Lady (26 page)

Manchester, not a million miles from where I was born. Odd, but
the wayward lass had travelled north-west. Map the trek, it pointed to
Lancashire. Hadn't she just been there, though?

'She could've just asked Tinker. He'd have gone north like a lamb.
So why this obliquity?' I wasn't sure of the word, but it sounded sly.

'Lovejoy,' Lydia said. 'I am fatigued. Can we sleep in a decent
hotel?' She caught my stare and quickly corrected, 'Hotels, near Piccadilly
Square. We can walk to the museum.'

'Museum?' I pulled the old motor to the verge.

'Manchester Textile Museum,' said this wonder. 'The message on the
photo.'

'Right.' I pretended to have known all along. 'Sorry. Thought I
saw somebody I knew.' And drove north.

•••

Here's a tip: Never go back, never
ever
cubed. Old schools, old loves. Never.

That old girlfriend you once loved to distraction. Should you ring
her after all these years, suggest you meet, hoping for the same old passion?
Don't do it.

Or you're now maybe a respectable housewife, remembering that
bloke, some past holiday. And you've accidentally (ho, ho, ho) kept his
address. Temptation nudges, you're at a loose end. Children off to school, you
can't settle. Why not phone, casual, oh good heavens, I must have dialled the
wrong number, can it really be you? Then it's, 'Well, I will be near the
Haymarket tomorrow . . .' And your heart's a steam-hammer as you put the phone
down and what'll you wear and where
is
the Haymarket, how long before the family get home . . . Exciting stuff? Don't
do it. It'll end in tears.

Please, I don't mean don't have a fling. I'm all for love.
Wherever it flourishes, let it be. But that's love. It's not nostalgia.
Nostalgia's fine in its bottle, but don't ever take the cork out.

Example: this housewife. Married eight years, thirty-two. Sees a
gorgeous actress. Hey! I was at school with her! She broods. Is she missing out
on life? Recalls a bloke she once knew. Out comes that old address book (ho, ho,
ho), arranges to meet him, lunch at the Royal Academy, posh nosh
should-auld-acquaintance-be-forgot. An enjoyable encounter is had by all three.
For, horrors, the uncomprehending Adrian brings his missus, who (of course she
would be, the cow) is an attractive expert on Tiepolo . . . See? Catastrophe.
Will our housewife ever sleep again? Unlikely. Her ghastly error was mistaking
nostalgia for passion, and uncorking nostalgia.

Example Two, though, is happier: this housewife, and all that.
Married, etc., sees actress. Hey! School, broods, missing out on life, etc.
Thinks, sod this for a game of soldiers. Joins a library/rambling/study/music
club. And guess what? Shares cars, club outings. Friendship blooms, a bloke she
fancies. Soon it's passionate rejoicing with dot-dot-dot and waves on the sand
and heavenly violins. She isn't past it at all! High marks for cool.

Just before you dash off a vitriolic letter to the Archbishop of
Canterbury saying I'm advocating unbridled promiscuity, I'm not. I'm saying be
honest. If you're going for it, go with care. Let a thousand fragrant flowers
bloom, sure, but don't talk yourself into something that isn't. Love is not
nostalgia. Why not? Because nostalgia's nostalgia. Love is love.

The implication is never go back. Your school's changed. Streets
have gone. That lovely girl's now a hateful woman. The scraggy little specky
lass you scorned is now a famed beauty. The yokel you laughed at owns the
county.

It's the same in antiques. There's a current move to send every
antique back. Where to? Why, to its roots! The Elgin Marbles, Leonardo's works,
Egyptian artefacts, Russian ikons, French Impressionists to Paris . . .
Politicians, noble as ever, jump on the bandwagon, hoping they're creating an
impression, which of course they unerringly manage.

It's gaining ground, this back-to-roots. I mistrust people yelling
that their idea's justice, right. Political rectitude has a foul record. I
don't know the rights and wrongs of things, because I'm basically thick, but
should antiques go home?

Sometimes, yes. Like, the Israelis pinched whatever they wanted
between 1968 and the early Seventies, and then gave them back to Egypt. Good.
I'm glad the tombstones they nicked from Sinai in 1956 are going home too.
Those funereal lamps, vases, steles are worth a mint, but back they've gone,
those 1,000 crates of Sinai Peninsula antiquities. Gold stars to all concerned.
Mamluk, Nabatean, Roman artefacts, the lot, representing from about 4000 b. c.
to the Middle Ages. Some regarded those antiques as sheer loot. Others
pretended it was legitimate archaeology aimed at finding proof (they failed,
incidentally) of those tiresome blokes wandering the Sinai Desert for those
yawnsome forty years. There are two dozen peaks that Moses might have strolled
up, the day he did the deal, but so?

It's not always clear-cut. Is Holy Mother Russia of the Czars the
same country as Russia now? If not, can contemporary Russia claim all the
Faberge eggs, so famed, so craved? If Faberge'd stayed in St Petersburg they
might well have executed him. How can we say where his original loyalty should
lie? I can understand the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art cleverly settling
out of court, after that terribly bitter legal joust, and reluctantly sending
back the Lydian Hoard of priceless gold and silver artefacts to Turkey.
Receivers of nicked goods don't want legal precedent hanging round their
gallery's neck, right? Turkey is stubborn these days, has its sights firmly set
on those wealthy New York galleries that display looted relics. And everybody
knows where they were ripped from their moorings in South Turkey.

There's an International Convention, to prove that comedy isn't
dead. The hilarious Hague Convention of 1954 ('for the Protection of Cultural
Property') is a laugh a minute. Occupying powers must, it avows, protect
antiquities and not sell, steal, loot, remove, pinch, or allow to be nicked,
any and all. Good, eh? So nobody must do what is currently happening in
Thailand, Cambodia, South America, the USA, Russia, the former Soviets,
South-East Asia, the Middle East, Central America, Italy, Cyprus . . . Stop it,
everybody.

Political nostalgia is the enemy of common sense. The priceless
Dead Sea Scrolls belong(ed) to Jordan, but the Rockefeller Museum hasn't given
them back. Fine to argue that the Elgin Marbles should 'go back' to Greece, but
they were bought originally from Turkey. And legitimately paid for. Return
them, to corrode like the ones left in situ? It's a problem. God knows what the
answer is, except He doesn't.

If we all stopped secretly paying tomb robbers to nick antiques,
there'd be no argument.

As long as money is the prize, everybody's in there. Not long
since, headlines blazed Four Countries Tussle For Priam's Treasure] because the
archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was a lying rat. He whipped priceless
chalices, breastplates, death-masks, from ancient Troy in western Turkey in
1873, and gave King Priam's treasure to Berlin, Prussia. He said he'd paid the
Ottomans 50,000 francs. In 1945, the 9,000 priceless gold antiques were
entombed in concrete beneath Berlin's Zoo station, and got collared by the
Soviets. Greece lays no claim. Turkey does. Germany does. Russia does, and has
them. They could settle in an afternoon over a cup of tea, but no. That would
be a precedent, then where would loot be? Loot gives theft a bad name.

Glad that's settled. Where was I? Saying never go back to your
past.

So I did.

24

A trouble shared is a trouble halved, they say. In antiques, a trouble
shared is a trouble doubled. If it's with Lydia, quadrupled.

My part of the North is stolid, grimy, impervious to analysis. The
South regards it as uncouth, inescapably grim, always raining, a subnation of
crude comics whose intellect is par with amoebae and whose wit is lavatorial.
The North, to some, is football hooligans and brash shabby girls squabbling in
slums between murky mill walls.

That's one view. It's wrong.

Lydia's opinion was expressed as we thundered up Trinity Street
past the railway station of my home town some miles from Manchester. It was
dark.

'Lovejoy, how depressing. Can't we find somewhere else?'

'I'm looking for a place to hide this crate.'

'Why don't we simply park it in Manchester? That's where we've to
meet this wretched girl.'

Left then right, and into Nile Street. Jesus, but they'd
obliterated the dark satanic mills' great chimneys. They'd shifted the station
clock tower, but this? Most of the houses were gone. In the bleak neons the
area seemed utterly stark.

'Thank God. Still there.'

The derelict garages where we played football were intact, rickety
doors askew. I picked the padlock, old habits dying hard. I drove the
Braithwaite in. Lydia squealed.

'Lovejoy! Something's squeaking!'

'Probably you, love.' I'd had enough. 'Places have mice.'

We went out into the night. I padlocked the door after me. I could
get to Manchester early, meet Vyna Dill, have a parents-want-you showdown, then
suss out some local antiques.

We started walking, Lydia working up to cut out. If she didn't,
I'd ditch her.

'This town, Lovejoy. It's the Mass Observation place, isn't it?'

Here comes the second view.

Back in the Thirties, some academic Yanks searched the world for
'the archetypal slum'. They found one, perfect. They trumpeted their
achievement, got a 'research' fortune. They developed this technique. Get
people to write in about themselves, year after endless year. They compiled a
masterpiece, tell the world 'about slum life'.

It's all nonsense. I was nearly adult when I came across it in a
library one wet afternoon. They meant my home town! I asked my Gran. She
sniffed, 'They asked me and Gramp. They couldn't understand us not having stamp
money for a fortnightly letter.'

'See?' I explained this to Lydia as we walked. 'The research is
worthless. Only the affluent could afford to write in.'

'It's still not very savoury, Lovejoy.'

For just a second I paused. She too halted.

'Yes? What, Lovejoy?'

We were plodding in drizzle. Some countries would pay God for a
single day of our wet. It was no use. Lydia saw only gaunt factories, skeletal
rafters where streets were being obliterated. Terraced houses clung together
begrimed, barely a window lit. Her opinion was a predetermined vision. But where
Lydia saw ugliness, I saw only beauty. It's as people view a woman. Lydia
thinks Aureole a slut, and I don't.

'Nothing.' We resumed. 'Mind your footing.' The pavement was
tilted where an excavator's great wheels had crushed the flagstones.

'Imagine, Lovejoy! People must have lived here before they started
redevelopment!'

Not they. We, me. Not scores, thousands. The area was the size of
ten football pitches. I said nothing more, just walked on, her arm linked with
mine, into the bright lighting of Bradshawgate. Very soon, there will be a
northern archaeology boom bigger than anything since the Egyptology explosion
of the twentieth century. Back then, every museum worth a groat had to have a
mummy and a slice of Pharaoh's hieroglyphics. Yet before long, they'll go
berserk with aerial photography, topographical surveys of fantastic
precision—to pinpoint our streets, mills, sawyers' yards, all our industries
that progress couldn't get rid of fast enough.

So dig out your great-grannies' baubles, your grandads' bowls,
pipes, clogs. Better yet, look them out now, while your Nellie's not slung them
in a mad-mood spring-clean. Write down everything you can remember, their
workplace stories, their boring tales, dances, songs, what they paid for food.
You'll weep tears of regret otherwise, and regret is the most useless human
emotion.

An hour later, I was in the Man and Scythe. Lydia, in the Swan. I
didn't sleep, just sat listening to the dialect from the taproom below. Even if
I couldn't have Lydia, selfish cow, I was in a state of bliss once-removed.
Home. Mistake, but here I was.

Come morning, I'd get shot of Lydia. Lovely, but now a liability,
a thousand leagues away while I lay alone. I'd not had a bird for years. Well,
less than that, but I couldn't help thinking of Lizbet among all those blossoms
in East Anglia's fair land.

Yet in a way I was crazy over Lydia, estranged as we were. I once
knew a middle-aged actress, pretty famous, and said ta when leaving. She fell
about.

'Silly!' she laughed. 'I was forty before I realised that it's not
how you look when you say your lines that matters. It's how you say your lines
when you say your lines.'

'Oh?' I'd responded, puzzled. She was voluptuous, dreamy, worn
out.

'It's what a woman
does
,
not how she looks. Don't tell other women. They'd hate me for saying it.'

This particular night, God, but I believed her.

The only remedy for woman-hunger is an antique, and vice versa.
The ideal is both together. Try to do without women, you starve. Do without
antiques, you die anyway. I'd discovered that when Amy took me in hand.