The Tartan Ringers (13 page)

‘My free hour’s up, Elaine,’ I said, but hesitated before sprinting back to the treadmill.

‘Another time, Ian,’ she said. ‘Not on your first day. Turn me round, please.’

‘Chieftainesses of distinguished clans shouldn’t have to ask.’

She glared up at me. ‘Oh yes we should!’

Some women have a terrifying knack of seeming to move their faces suddenly nearer you without stirring a muscle. They do it in love or in fury. I’ve noticed that. Elaine was the best at it I’d ever encountered. The images of physical love and the poor paralysed girl juxtaposed in my mind.

‘Penny for your thoughts, Ian,’ Elaine said slyly as I obediently set off along the drive to Duncan’s workshop.

‘Just how fascinating people’s faces are,’ I lied. ‘I’m good at faces.’

‘Women’s especially?’

‘Mind your own business.’

She was back to laughing then, swaying in her wheelchair. It was one of those oddish moments when the environment conspires. She was there beside the fountain. The sky behind her had darkened. Thunder rumbled. Yet a watery sun picked up the grey-yellow gravel, her white blouse, the colours of the old tartan. Lovely enough to mesmerize. Lucky I’m not easy to manipulate, or a girl this lovely could have me eating out of her hand. A terrible desire rose within me. My body’s a hostage to hormones, but with a lass who couldn’t walk—

‘Actually,’ she said, as we parted, ‘we cripples have different ways of making . . . music, Lovejoy.’ Another super-correct guess what I’d really been thinking about.

She left me so preoccupied that I hardly noticed Duncan playing hell with me for skiving instead of getting the bureau’s drawers undone. Elaine was disturbing. Weirdly swift to guess what you were thinking – far too swift for my liking. Only supposition of course. I don’t believe in telepathy or whatever it’s called. But I didn’t like this idea of not being alone in my own head.

Duncan put me at the old piece. He watched me like a hawk as I tapped and listened and set about marking the wood components. I’d got some self-adhesive labels from the Innes stores in Dubneath.

‘A waste of money, Ian,’ Duncan disapproved.

‘Oh?’ I cracked back sardonically. ‘So you’re the daft faker who pencils his illegal intentions all over the finished product, eh?’

He surrendered with a chuckle and lit his pipe to watch. He’d had to concede. Simplest tip on earth: when you’re thinking of buying antique furniture take a glance at its inner surfaces. There you might see measurements indicating the faker’s reduction factor – inches cut off, even types of wood to be used.

‘One goon I know in Newcastle even writes it on in felt-tip,’ I told Duncan. ‘I ask you.’

‘You know a lot, for a wandering cousin.’

Caught. ‘Ah,’ I stammered. ‘We had to learn all that. At the London College.’

‘Very thorough. Have you a family, Ian?’

‘No. Except now you lot. My erstwhile spouse found my transparent honesty too much to cope with.’

Duncan helped me to up-end the bureau. The base was in a better state than I’d hoped.

‘You should use Newcastle, Duncan,’ I panted, struggling to tilt it on a block support. ‘Handy for Liverpool, without being too direct.’

‘Aye, we tried . . .’ He ahemed and reamed his pipe. I’d caught him, but absently worked on.
Aye, we tried and failed
, is what he’d been about to say. He’d discovered, like many antiques fakers, that there are folk pathways in dirty deals. New dirt’s distrusted. Old schemes have a kind of inbuilt security. That’s why a woman chooses a particular colour, fancies a special perfume: it swept Cecil off his feet, so why not Paul? It’s the reason crooks stick to a particular
modus operandi
even when they know it hallmarks their particular chain of robberies. And a painter faking Cotman’s genius, like Big Frank’s mate Johnnie does in Suffolk, would rather polish off a dozen
Greta Bridge
phonies and sell them to that same fence in Hamburg than paint different ones every time.

Clue: Tachnadray’s fakes had only one outlet, and that was through my own stamping ground, East Anglia. Which meant also I could easily find out how much Duncan’s replicas had made lately. I whistled, irritably searching for tools on the bench.

‘No wonder you got rid of Joseph,’ I grumbled. ‘Messy sod. I’ll rearrange this lot when I’ve a minute.’

Duncan stilled. ‘Joseph?’

Unconcerned, I began rearranging the tools into some sort of order. ‘I knew a bloke once was so bloody untidy that—’

‘As long as you do better than he did, Lovejoy.’ Duncan went down to the other end of the workshop to mix varnish. An unpleasant reprimand, that, with its hint of threat.

Come to think of it, where
was
this Joseph? I decided I’d better find out. Tactfully as ever, of course. That’s my way.

* * *

It was three days before I had a chance of talking to Elaine without being up-ended by Robert the Brute. Which doesn’t mean they had passed uneventfully. Duncan and me’d argued non-stop about our next opus. I favoured faking a series of small Georgian tables from scratch; Duncan stuck out for modifying – ‘putting back’ in the antique-fakery slang – some tired Victorian bureau, very much as we were doing now. It was evidently his thing. And we had burdensome mealtimes with Elaine teasing us all, over Michelle’s table. Her grub was Frenchified, by which I mean tangy of taste but ethereal. We had suppertime visits from Shona, and a couple of flying visits from Jamie who dropped us some materials in his van. This, plus a shepherd bringing two sheepdogs to prove they were top-notchers, was it. I quickly got the hang of life at Tachnadray, or thought I had.

But getting the hang of a scene doesn’t mean tranquillity. It can mean just the opposite. There were just enough worry points to disturb my beauty sleep. Like, Michelle and Shona smiling their hundred-percent hatred smiles. Like, everybody knowing about Joseph but nobody saying. Like, Tachnadray’s pose as a glamorous laird’s mansion complete with loyal retainers yet having barely enough furniture to dress out two rooms, a stage set in a ghost palace. Like, Duncan’s lone wilting attempts to provide the crumbling estate with an income. When at my noon break Elaine called me over to meet the shepherd’s wriggly black-and-white dogs I thought: Here’s quite an opportunity.

‘Er, great,’ I said, trying to sound full of admiration.

The shepherd grinned, said something in Gaelic. The dogs gave each other a sardonic glance as if saying, Here’s another idiot townie who hasn’t a clue.

‘They like you, Ian,’ the shepherd said. ‘But they think you’ll no be a countryman. I’m Hector.’

We nodded. Another cousin. Were I the genuine article I’d feel safe up here, even from Sidoli’s vengeance-seeking mob of circus hands prowling the Lowlands.

‘They’re right, Hector,’ I said. ‘What do they do?’

‘Best working pair north of Glasgow.’ He waited, then explained, ‘Sheep, Ian. Tessie’s four, Joey two.’

‘You bullies.’ The dogs grinned and waggled round me, noses pointing up.

We talked about dogs for a minute while Elaine did one of her prolonged smiling stares at me. I felt her attention like a sunlamp, and listened while Hector listed his dogs’ excellences. Dogs are all right but doggy folk are real bores, aren’t they? Hector was confident about some sheepdog trials.

‘How do you train them?’ I asked. ‘And what do you feed them on?’ Much I cared, but Hector was loving all this in his grim Presbyterian way.

‘You must come over and see them do an outrun or two,’ he said. ‘It’s but a short step. Mornings I walk to check the cottage—’

Elaine interrupted brightly, ‘Och away, Hector. Can’t you see cousin Ian’s not really interested in your ould dogs?’

‘True,’ I said, maybe a little too quickly.

We all parted friends, me patting the dogs and seeing them off but thinking, The cottage, eh? Immediately Hector was out of earshot, Elaine said, spinning her wheelchair to accompany me back towards the house, ‘The cottage is an empty crofter’s place on the fells. We use it for winter shelter. There’s quite a few about.’

It’s that sort of nimble guesswork that makes you give up trying to out-think a female. I plodded along pushing her until she told me to walk beside her.

‘Tachnadray must have been a lovely estate once, Elaine.’

‘But . . . ?’ she prompted.

‘It could be developed. Tourists. Fishing. Build huts for nature cranks. Campsites. Tours round the baronial hall.’

She halted. Thinking I’d struck oil, I enthused, ‘Have your own Highland Gathering. Tents, pipers, dances, folk-song evenings, original tartan kilts, Ye Olde Clan McGunn whisky-making kits. McGunn brand genuine Scottish bagpipes—’

‘And breed hordes of McGunns? Repopulate the Highlands?’

She spoke with such quiet sibilance you had to strive to hear the venom. We’d stopped, her luminescent face white with anger.

‘Well, er, not all of it.’

The nervous quip failed. She motioned me to sit on the wall and listen.

‘Fall off a horse and lose the power of your legs, Ian. Myths are never the same again. They stand out with a certain clarity.’ She laughed, an ugly spitting ejaculation I wouldn’t like to hear again. ‘So we should join the great folklore industry? It’s the road to insanity. A social mania.’

I said, narked, ‘I was only trying to help. A little profit—’

She pointed a finger at me. ‘Don’t interrupt. Just pay heed. Original tartan? There’s no such thing. Listen: three centuries ago The Grant ordered his entire clan into his standard tartan.’ She put on a cruel brogue to mock the words. ‘And his own family turned up wearing a dozen different. You see? It’s all fraud.’

‘But tartan’s—’

‘A French word, Ian. “Tartaine” is a material, nothing to do with patterns. But then the
Irish
were great cloth weavers. The bagpipes? – the only invention ever to come out of Egypt. Scotch poetry? – our earliest indigenous one is in Welsh, for God’s sake. The kilt? – invented by Thomas Rawlanson, an English iron-smelter in 1730. All tartans indigenous to our Scotch clans? – nonsense; there’s even an authentic Johore tartan. Didn’t you know? With a royal imprimatur, too!’

‘I wish I hadn’t come to see your bloody dogs.’

‘We rhapsodize about Robert the Bruce and his spider, conveniently forgetting that he was an Anglo-Norman whose favourite method of murder was a stab in the back while the victim was unarmed and at prayer. Ask John the Red, whom he killed in the Franciscan church at Dumfries. And our fantastic Bonnie Prince Charlie? – a drunken Pole who thieved every penny his loyal followers possessed. And our famous Rabbie Burns.’ She rolled her r’s cruelly to mock. ‘Don’t tell anyone – his famous dialect is pure Anglo-Saxon. Nothing wrong with that, of course, unless you pretend it’s a pure something else. When adherents trump up clan loyalties and urge me to “develop my clan’s potential”, I begin to ask what they’re
really
after. You understand?’

‘You mean what I’d get out of it? Twenty per cent—’

‘Twenty per cent’s out of the question.’ She’d actually said her first three words in time with my last. Did she guess every bloody thing I thought? ‘Five.’

‘You mean bugger.’

She laughed, clapping her hands, and that terrible vehemence was gone as suddenly as it had come. At an imperious wag of her finger I trundled her obediently towards the ramp. Michelle emerged to see Elaine back in.

‘Duncan’s sounding for you, Ian,’ Michelle called.

‘What else is new?’ I said irritably.

Elaine laughed. ‘I’ve been telling Ian that we owe our tartans to Lowland machinery makers,’ she announced. ‘I think he’s really upset.’ She called after me: ‘Still, Ian. At least our patron saint is real. Your English one’s pure imagination.’

‘Sensible bloke,’ I said with feeling. ‘If I were him I’d stay that way.’

Her musical laughter followed like a hound on my heels.

T
HAT EVENING I
struck out of my mental cocoon. It was definitely becoming time to rock the boat. Over a frothy frozen thing which tasted of lemons, I asked about Robert. I badly wanted a phone but wasn’t even sure if Tachnadray had one.

‘It’s a question of money, folks,’ I announced, mostly to Elaine. ‘We ought to get Robert in to help us.’

Shona looked up quickly but it was Michelle who countered. ‘He’s no furniture man, Ian.’

‘He’s a pair of hands, love,’ I corrected, thinking: So Michelle wants Robert kept out of Duncan’s hair. Does Shona?

‘No,’ said Elaine as Duncan drew breath to chip in. ‘Robert’s already got too much to do.’

Duncan subsided. Happily I clocked up another fact: Robert was busily occupied, on Elaine’s orders.

‘Money,’ I said. ‘There’s a lesson here. Me and Duncan have laboured long and hard, and finished the “antique” piece this afternoon. It’s good, but now we’re stuck. We must start looking for wood, materials, decide on the next—’

‘You can’t start one till the first’s finished, Ian,’ Elaine said.

‘Wrong. It’s bad fakery, Elaine.’ I leant forward on the mahogany, eager from certainty. ‘Even genuine workshops work by overlapping. Sheraton, Chippendale, Ince, Mayhew, Lock. Do one at a time and you end in the workhouse.’

‘It’s dangerous, Elaine,’ Michelle said. Shona gave her a look, normally not this quiet.

‘Ian’s inclined to be bull-at-a-gate,’ Duncan added. I don’t like being apologized for and said so.

‘Let him speak.’ Elaine was in a lace blouse with a blue velvet neck ribbon. Some pudgy lady serf was helping tonight. New to me, but she was clearly a Tachnadray veteran and called Elaine ‘pet’, to Michelle’s evident annoyance. ‘I’ve already disappointed Ian once today. He wants to make us an olde worlde Disneyland.’

‘How much does running the estate cost?’ I asked, ignoring Duncan’s warning frown to go easy. ‘Say it’s X, for rates, wages, food, heating, clothes. And what’s the income? Say it’s Y, from Duncan’s reproductions, sheep, crops – do you grow crops?’ I enthused into their silence, ‘It’s Mr Micawber’s famous problem: happiness is where X is less than Y. What’s wrong with not being broke?’

Duncan cleared his throat. ‘Like you, Ian?’