'Yes, her.' She tapped my knee with a finger, not knowing Arcellano's lunatic serfs had kicked it to a balloon size. I nearly screamed. 'From now on, Lovejoy, your Friday reports will be superb.'
'They will?' I brightened. Not only was this luscious woman delectable, but she'd obviously fallen head over heels for me. With Arcellano away for weeks and my bonus money rolling in… It was my trillionth mistake of the week. I asked, 'How'll we fiddle Miss McKim's reports?'
'You mean cheat?'
I saw her face. 'Well, er, no. Not exactly—'
She went cold as charity. 'There's only one way, Lovejoy, and that's to earn a good report.' She collected her coat and gloves. 'Don't worry, I'll see you'll get the right sort of help.'
'Erm…'
She walked towards the small hallway, rabbitting on. I had the idea she was smiling deep down. 'From now on, Lovejoy, you eat regularly. None of this heroic starving for the sake of old pots and ramshackle furniture—' I gasped, outraged at this heresy. It only goes to show how boneheaded women actually are. 'And from tomorrow your electricity bill will be paid. Light and warmth.' She smiled, adding sweetly, 'And distractions will be minimized. I shall see to that first thing tomorrow.'
She meant Mrs Culpepper. My head was spinning with all this. Or maybe it was the unusual sensation of not being hungry.
'Er, look,' I mumbled, 'can't we discuss this?'
'Yes. In Italian.'
'Eh?'
'You heard, Lovejoy.' Now her smile was open and visible, a beautiful warm silent laughter. 'From now on, ask for anything in English and the answer's no. But ask in Italian and the answer's…'
'… And the answer's yes?'
For one instant her smile intensified to a dazzling radiance. 'The answer's… quite possibly.' She stepped into the darkness, leaving me in the candlelight. I heard the cottage door go.
'Good night, Lovejoy,' she called from the winter midnight.
'Good night.' I was trying to say thanks as well but the latch went and she had gone.
You can't teach women anything about timing an exit. I've always noticed that.
CHAPTER 3
From then on it was hell—but a peculiar kind of hell, with torment interspersed with a haunting promise of ecstasy. For a time. Under the white-hot attentions of Maria, I quite forgot about Arcellano.
Unaccountably, the attractive Joan Culpepper attended no further classes, apart from one hour's collective conjugation, so to speak, I got the full teaching blast. 'Incentive teaching,' she often reminded me with hardly a trace of her secret hilarity.
By Tuesday of the following week I was showing withdrawal symptoms which caused a bit of upset. Maria had kept me at it twelve and fifteen hours at a stretch. Apart from that glimpse of Mrs Culpepper's 'tassie', as we call such incised semi-precious carvings, the only antique I'd seen was a Newhall painted cream jug with a 'clip' handle—these are always pre-1790 and still a bargain. It had somehow crept from its place of honour in the little dining-room and was found on our table. I honestly had nothing to do with it, but a poisonous epsilon-minus cretin called Hyacinth reckoned I'd moved it nearer and blew the gaff on me. A tight-lipped Maria came across and restored it to its place on the sideboard. I was heartbroken. Newhall porcelain's enough to melt the hardest heart—Maria's excepted.
I was really peeved. 'Why d'you believe Hyacinth and not me?' Hyacinth's only twelve but she always came top in Italian at the end-of-day test.
Maria let the tea-lady pass with a loaded tray before accusing, 'It's antiques, isn't it, Lovejoy?'
'I'm fine.'
'You're not.' She was eyeing me as if for the first time in serious puzzlement. 'You're a wreck and going downhill like a pining child.' That was a real laugh. At my age.
'It's just I'm used to one way of doing things—'
'Wait here,' she said suddenly. 'Learn the past perfect of essere. I'll not be a minute.'
I shrugged. She hared off, obviously in the grip of some vital decision, while I wheedled a ton of cake from one of the tea-women and sat noshing it while admiring the clip-handled jug. You can still get these little polychrome beauties for a song—almost. And when you think they are always older than two whole centuries, made with love and elegance by potters with all the gifts of God in their gnarled fingers, and less than a day's average wage… I had tears in my eyes when finally Maria returned and jerked me back to reality.
She was dressed to go out. 'Get your coat, Lovejoy.'
'I've got none.'
'Sorry. I meant get ready.'
'I'm always ready. Where are we going?'
'Round the art galleries, antique shops and ruins of this fair town. Folk Museum.
Minories.'
My eyes misted and I reached for her, ignoring the delighted gaze of the canteen women. 'Darling,' I said. She was seeing things my way at last.
'Yes, darling,' she murmured, misty too. 'There's only one thing, Lovejoy.'
'Eh?' I drew back full of apprehension.
'Everything in Italian, please. You know the rules.'
Breathlessly but angrily I raced upstairs for my dictionary and the grammar, thinking of that sly bitch falling about laughing down in the porch. As I hurried I raged at myself, I'll kill her one of these days, just see if I don't.
I wish I hadn't thought that terrible thought now, but you can't look into the future, can you? And honest to God none of this was my fault. None of it.
* * *
That day was sheer torture. There was I, frantically trying to tell Maria about the engravings on the Jacobite drinking glasses in the town museum, and of the really serious need for ultraviolet light to distinguish between the fluorescence that demonstrates a glass's origin, and there she was nodding encouragement as I ballsed up my declensions time and again. At the finish we both knew it was hopeless. I was the only known language learner with zero vocabulary, which is some handicap. I lost half a ton in sweat that afternoon.
Maria dropped me off in the village at the end of a harrowing day. I had an idea she lived somewhere down on the estuary but didn't dare ask. During the somewhat uncontrolled journey out of town—the snow was still about with the roads pretty grim—
she hit on the idea of one particular item per day.
'It'll work, Lovejoy,' she asserted confidently. 'Pick a card.'
'Illuminated manuscripts,' I said. I've a real love for those.
She glanced at me, oddly amused. 'Fine. See you after midmorning break. We might as well go together in the car.'
That night I worked in a maniacal fever, slogging like a mad thing to scrape together enough language to tell the stupid woman about the purity and complexity of style in the mediaeval illuminator's work. Our town museum can only afford this one mediaeval Psalter, but there was so much to say. I was desperate to convert Maria's moronic mind from materialism to a proper appreciation of love in human skills. The trouble is, nothing shuts you up like having no words.
By dawn I was knackered, but capable of bleating a few short sentences about the most beautiful things on earth.
* * *
Five weeks later I had worn out my first pocket dictionary and I kept going in grammar only by the neat trick of nicking Hyacinth's text. I'm good at swapping flyleaves without trace so I could prove the book I'd pinched out of her satchel was mine. Anyhow, by then I was streets ahead of the rest. They were even leaving me out of the end-of-day tests. I out-smirked Hyacinth by miles, which served her right.
It was that day too that Maria came to me for the first time. We were speaking in her language all the time now. Admittedly, I had to pause every minute or so for a feverish fumble through the book, but basically it was all progress. I'd discovered the most curious thing: learn one word and use it, and before long it somehow grows into two.
Also, by then I wasn't hungry any more and had started filling out. Maria bought me a second-hand overcoat and my wages were already sparkling with bonus gelt. Likewise Tinker had prospered, the parasitic old devil. Maria and I had taken to using our pub hour for revision, and Tinker would bob up in the Cups to cadge enough for five pasties and get paralytic drunk. I didn't mind—though Maria presumably found him hard going—because when he's sloshed his mental radar works best and he starts to find antiques.