Every Last Cent

2

ONCE, ANTIQUES AND women were the only two aspects of life.

Then one day I learned there was a third problem just as brilliant and difficult. And now, I wouldn't be without any of them for the world. I need all three.

I was under the overhang of that chemist's shop in Pelhams Lane next morning selling stolen Christmas trees.

'Come with me, Lovejoy,' Sandra said. 'I've found some old panels. Vice's wood yard.'

'No, ta,' I said. 'I'm doing fine.'

I knew straight away it was a trick. Her smile always tells you she's up to no good.

'They'll be worth a fortune to a forger like you, Lovejoy.'

They always say this, antique dealers. A bonny woman doubles the beauty and doubles the risk. It's one of my laws of antiques. Remember it.

'I'm making a fortune.' The shoppers surged past.

'Sold many, dear?' She looked me up and down. Frayed edges, shabby cuffs, patched jacket. I'd not eaten.

'Ninety,' I lied. 'Only three left.'

'It's summer, silly. And I've got what you want.' Truth there. Sandra waited, her smile promising me untold wealth. What can you do? I left my bedraggled trees, ignoring the angry shouts of the other hawkers to clear up my rubbish.

Vice's wood yard stands back from the Ladies' Golf Course at Lettenham, a rural estuary six leagues away from my village. This is how local East Anglian folk still speak, 'Six leagues and a furlong, booy.' It took us thirty minutes in her enormous Jaguar. 'You're sure they're worth it, Sandra?' I kept asking.

'Two lovely old cupboards and a bench.'

'How old?'

She couldn't say, which should have alerted me. Everyone knew I'd been searching for old, aged wood to forge Old Master paintings. I'd combed the three counties and found nothing. I looked at Sandra. All antique dealers have a quirk.

Sandra Gainer is a compulsive gambler. Her marriage ended when she gambled her husband into bankruptcy. Frederick was a pillar of society, churchgoer, an eight-to-six commuter. She had him arrested for credit card fraud, on account of her (not his, note) gaming losses. The last honest bloke on earth, he's currently doing four years, out next autumn. Sandra looks well on Frederick's suffering. She'll sell anything – hers, yours, mine – to fund her gambling addiction. She once sold my cottage to a Bavarian tourist and lost the money before teatime on another infallible system. Three different banks each believed they were my sole mortgagers. I had a hell of a time evicting the Munich bloke. That's Sandra.

'Sand? Why can't people gamble on wrestling?'

'I tried. They won't take the bets.'

My trouble is an uncontrollable mind. It darts about, asking the unanswerable. Like, why do all the big peninsulas on earth point south, never north? Africa, India, South America, Malaysia, Baja California. And why did God, who loves us, invent malaria?

'You can keep your hand on my knee, Lovejoy, if you stump up for the three o'clock winner at Haydock.'

'Can I owe?' My hand was accidental.

'No kitty, no pity.'

Reluctantly I withdrew my hand to holiness. I'd made stupendous smiles with Sandra after her Frederick got collared, but grew alarmed when I found she backed losing nags all over the kingdom. Now I keep out of her way, except when I'm stupid.

We drove through depressing countryside, trees, fields, gentle rivers. Not an antique shop for miles. Is it any wonder that rural pastures get you down? The only interesting thing we passed was Farlow. He was sitting at Stratford St Mary busily painting John Constable's famed Loving Couple by the Stour. Please don't complain that Constable never did such a work. I know that. Farlow knows that. But put one of his Constable fakes next to mine, his looks obviously a sham, and mine looks brilliant. It's called the match trick among the corrupt, when you pair a bad thing with a good. Customers assume the better forgery possibly isn't fake at all. Two tourists out of five will pay on the nail. Unless it's a woman buying gems, in which case it's four out of five.

You think it's a wicked ploy only done by antique dealers and other criminals? Wrong.

Look in any boutique or jeweller's window. Everybody's at it.

'Here!' Sandra called brightly, pulling in to Vice's wood yard, tooting her horn. 'I got him!'

And handed me over to an aggressive horde waiting to do me grievous bodily harm. I alighted with a sigh to meet my doom.

'Lovejoy?' Dennis De Angelo piped. 'We're going to hang you.'

There were fifteen antique dealers, Dennis to the fore. Brains of a spud, and enough makeup trowelled onto his face to open a shop. He wants to start a fashion business without money. Antique dealers are a laugh a minute, but on the whole not frightening.

You don't hang people who owe you money. I owed ten of these riff-raff serious gelt, but so? Life's one disappointment after another. Everybody has to learn.

The wood yard was quiet. Two workers whistled and laboured unloading a barge.

Sandra eyeing their sweating forms. A dog dozed on the riverbank. No escape. It would have to be lies.

'Now, Dennis,' Margaret Dainty soothed. 'None of that.'

Margaret and me occasionally make smiles. A real lady, she's forever trying to hide her lameness. (Why? What difference does a limp make?) Her husband's always unseen.

Sometimes, if I'm forced into a posh occasion, she lends me one of his suits. I'm lost in it, pea in a drum. Which should worry me, except five years ago she taught me a new way of making smiles. Until then I'd thought it was only in books. She saw me remembering and coloured slightly.

'We'll drown him instead,' Smarts said eagerly.

He's a Victorian jewellery freak. Wears all his stock on his person, earrings in great loops round his head. You can hear him coming if there's a wind. You never see him with fewer than two-score necklaces, bangles up his arms. He sounds like a small foundry. Smarts claims to be French but only comes from our village. Barmy.

'It's your by-blow, Lovejoy,' Jenny Blondel said. She really is French but says she comes from our village. Weird. She owns three falcons.

My mind went, who? I said, 'Who?'

Jenny's nice. I like her because she makes cider from my apples and has a secret lover called Aspirin who can do handstands when he's drunk. I admire him for that. I can't even do them when I'm sober. And I'm jealous because he's got Jenny. Aspirin is a defrocked vicar but nobody's supposed to know. He embezzled a church's antiques. He baptizes you when he's sloshed, whether you want to or not. Her husband Paul Blondel keeps hunting birds.

'Your son, Lovejoy. Mortimer.'

I gave them the bent eye. Dennis squealed, darted back. 'I haven't got a son.'

'That Mortimer,' Jenny persisted. 'He's ruining our trade.'

'You lot already do that.'

'Arf arf,' Willie Lott said. No humour there. No compassion either. 'Stop him, Lovejoy.

He's yours.'

Willie Lott really did worry me. Even a burp can sound threatening from Willie. He's been in one of those silent services, and says he hasn't. Pretends he's thick as a plank, but has several foreign languages. He looks like a street brawler, all crags and scars.

'Who, Willie?' I asked weakly.

Dennis got courage from Willie Lott and squeaked, 'Mortimer, your kid by that whore Colette Goldhorn.'

'What's he done?' I didn't admit a thing.

'He's divvying all our stock, free. Telling tourists which antiques are genuine and which aren't.' Smarts glared. 'He's frigging ruining us,' adding in his execrable French, for authenticity, 'Il est terrible, non?'

Except he says the words just as they're written, ill esst terry bull none. Why do we all pretend we're different from our real selves? Women do it with cosmetics and plastic surgery, men pull their beer bellies in. We're all at it.

'Hang him, Willie!' Dennis, from the rear.