This brilliant instrument was Rita's focus. She would buy the 1933 Patek Supercomplication for her baby granddaughter, who would be set up for life! Everybody loved Rita's devotion! The baby's trust funds were mobilized. Came the day when Rita embarked for the exciting Sotheby's sale amid an adoring crowd. I went to see her off on the London train, calling 'Good luck, love!' like the rest of the duckeggs. Jessica from Trinity Street's Antiques Nookery lit candles for Rita's success in Lion Walk church.
Rita reached London with her sack of money.
And kept going. And vanished.
That was the last anybody saw of Rita or the money. She never bid at the auction. She now lives with swarthy youths in Marbella, or on some Greek island, or Bali.
Rumours vary. Jessica angrily sticks pins in a Rita doll every Lady Day. I organized a whip-round for her granddaughter, who is six now. Her parents run a garden centre out on the Ipswich road, struggling to make ends meet.
The lesson is that we're a rotten species.
Antiques make crooks of us all. Is it the notion of something for nothing? My erstwhile lady Maya, who sells antique cosmetic potions in the Arcade, says it's the terror of thinking that some worthless trinket – maybe an ordinary dress ring discovered on pantomime fripperies, or that ugly brooch from Auntie Mabel's bequest – will suddenly turn out to be a priceless heirloom. We argue about this. She says it's the risk of nearly having chucked out Grampa's valuable old rocking chair, or given Auntie Edith's dull old clip-on to some jumble sale, that makes everybody desperate. Calamity breathtakingly avoided, and the relief that cascade of money finally brings, is the cause of the joys and murders. 'It's like sexual love,' Maya says repeatedly. 'Bliss, ecstasy, triumph, disaster.'
Maybe she's right. I dunno.
Vestry was the last antique dealer to die in odd circumstances. Rio Dauntless had reminded me.
8
SHE is PRETTIER than most, but gets me mad. She's always apologizing for being fifty-three, then fifty-four, and so on as the clock ticks. I shouted hello, looked round the door, and saw that she'd really got on. The horse was now head height, ugly as sin and all out of proportion. She sculpts it, dawn to dusk.
'You wish me happy birthday, Lovejoy,' she flared at me from behind the great statue's shoulder, 'and I'll strangle you.'
Bernicka (she made the name up; she was plain Glory once) is a sculptress, and loves Leonardo da Vinci.
'Never entered my mind, Bernicka.' I'd forgotten her birthday, was why. 'Looks good.'
It looked horrible. Who'd want that damned great thing? Terracotta clay, made of any old junk that solidifies, Bernicka slaps it on seemingly at random. I was amazed that it even looked vaguely equestrian. She does it in her husband's garage to rile him.
'You're gorgeous, Bernicka.' True, but women sense you're up to something.
She came round the statue, glaring. Coated in reddish dust, quite small, long hair, neat as a grape. She's solaced me several times, mainly to do her bloke down. She hates Jeb because he's not Leonardo da Vinci. He hates her for loving Leonardo.
'What d'you want, Lovejoy?'
'Nothing!' I beamed my sincerest. 'How did my portrait turn out?'
Last month I'd drawn her making her lover's horse statue. I drew her in sanguine – a kind of ancient reddish pastel I make myself with gum tragacanth. It was superb. I'd had to use skimmed milk because oxides are swine to shape into proper finger-long rods for sketching. Little Sarah and Charlotte from down the lane, eight and six respectively, shape them for me. They're so neat. I'm not. It's galling to see infants fashion Conté pastels ten times better than I can.
'It's there.'
Against the far wall, among Jeb's derelict motors and bits of engines, was my framed portrait of Bernicka. I'd got her lovely eyes exactly. I'd done her (I mean painted) in that earthy brown-red the Old Masters loved. Nothing wrong with monochrome, incidentally, though it's currently unfashionable. The real trouble is that you fall for a woman when you paint her portrait. It's impossible not to. You have to gaze at her features, drink her into your mind. Peer into a deep pool, you fall in. Above my sketch was a photocopied drawing of Leonardo da Vinci, Bernicka's adored lover. That's why she's always going to mediums, psychics, spiritualists. She sends Leonardo messages.
He fails to reply.
'Oooh.' She moaned with unrequited lust at Leonardo. She always does that.
'Still got the languishes for him?'
It's no wonder Jeb gave up. They sleep apart. She has a ton of love implements in her bedroom. All are devices with which a lovelorn lady might achieve solitary arousal. I once pointed out that Leonardo da Vinci has been dead for centuries, requiescat in pace. She says I'm too stupid to understand.
The horse is Leonardo's uncompleted, ill-fated monstrosity Il Cavallo. I hate the damned thing. He planned it in Milan after 1493, but only got to the model stage.
Everybody thought it okay, except the French armies strolled in to depose Leonardo's boss, Duke Ludovico. Shamefully, the French soldiery shot it full of arrows –short of target practice, you see. Milan's got a modern bronze replica of this giant horse, because making Leonardo's dreams come true is a money-making industry. Magazines these days are full of his never-were bridges, and buildings he built only in sketched fancy.
Next to my portrait hung several bowie knives. I eyed them uneasily.
'Knives,' she said. 'Some Yank bitch in Grand Rapids has made a crappy copy of Il Cavallo. I'll stab her when I get the chance.'
She means it.
'You do know that Leonardo's nag was going to be over three times taller than a man?'
Way over twenty feet, in fact.
Her eyes misted. 'Yes. But I am unworthy of my master.'
Bernicka always was off her trolley. 'Don't run yourself down. Love's strong stuff.'
'No, Lovejoy.' Genuine tears made clean wadis down her umber-dusted cheeks. 'If my love were perfect, it would bring my darling Leonardo back.'
'Well, there is that,' I said weakly. Agree with everything, I might get what I'd come for.
'Your nag is really, er, nice.'
It wasn't. It was a mound of clay in a rural garage. Trouble is, Bernicka has no idea of art. She's tried her hand at everything. Her enthusiasms go in rushes. Last June it was encaustic Roman painting. July she was a dancer, with the co-ordination of a yak.
September she took up the cello, tone deaf naturally.
Some women have this fatal attraction. Mary Queen of Scots had it, they say, so that even villeins kneeling in fear of their lives would lust after her. Lord Nelson's Emma Hamilton, despite her eternally filthy unwashed hair, had it. Nell Gwynne, King Charles's gorgeous Cockney orange seller of Covent Garden, had it. And Bernicka. Other women hate Bernicka. Can't for the life of me see why. Us blokes adore her. The thing is, even after you've made serious smiles with Bernicka you're just as susceptible as if you never had, if you follow. A man's vulnerable to all women, of course, which is the reason that any woman can have any man any time she chooses, though women don't realize this.
With Bernicka, popes and saints would come a-flocking if she simply beckoned. Where was I? Lying that her pot nag was really nice.
'Will Leonardo approve, Lovejoy?' she asked wistfully, gazing up at her hideous blob.
'I'm sure he would, will, er...' I gave up on tense. 'Does,' I concluded firmly. 'Look, love.
Will you seduce a bloke for me?'
'How dare you!' etc, etc.
Twenty minutes later we finished a cup of tea on her couch and she was agreeing yes, certainly. By then she'd dusted herself off and was arguing her fee.
'Get me anything of Leonardo's,' she decided. 'From his very own fingers.' She moaned at the thought of his fingers.
'Impossible,' I said sadly. It was going as I'd planned. 'The few Leonardo items in our rusty old kingdom all belong to famous people.'