The Rich And The Profane (34 page)

‘Look, men,’ I said at one point in the reckless drive. ‘There’s something important I want to say.’

‘What now?’ Stan said through clenched teeth, eyes along his headlights.

‘Guernsey’s speed limit’s thirty-five miles an hour. We’re doing—’

‘Lovejoy,’
they said together, so I shut up.

Might as well talk to the wall.

The leisure centre was bulging, the world and his wife in. Anybody who could play an instrument was hard at it. Lights, colours, folk in carnival mood. Bars bulged. There was hubbub and music everywhere, a glittering procession of cartoon characters, searchlights and strobes blinding you so you couldn’t see a frigging thing. Glorious. I love peace.

We screeched to a halt. Victoria rushed out with a stream of uniformed girls. Like a pit stop at Brands Hatch. Guards hurried us, until Jimmy slowed us down so we smiled our way through the crowd. We were on TV. The music hall was being broadcast.

‘Is anything more maddening,’ I asked Victoria, ‘than hearing an audience laughing when you’ve missed the gag?’ ‘What?’ She said it just like Stan, except her teeth weren’t clenched. ‘Where were you, Lovejoy? Everybody told me off.’

‘Sorry, love.’ I bussed her for forgiveness while the rest unpacked the paintings. ‘There’s a number on each. See they go up in order.’

‘What about your one?’

‘That? It’s only an extra fake. Leave it in the office, please.’

The exhibition looked really quite imposing. The stands were burgundy velvet on chrome tubing. The walls had been done in magnolia and pink. Burgundy velvet and orange curtains set off the crystal chandeliers. One thing, I thought, everybody’ll remember the colour scheme if nowt else. It was quite a sight, Gussy’s paintings showing to real advantage.

People in the corridors caused such a crush that the guards had to move them on. I insisted they could peer in. The TV folk were already complaining they should have priority. A comic’s act ended in applause, and a singer came on. I recognized Maureen Jolly’s voice. She was really good. I said this to Stan.

‘I can pick ’em,’ I joked. He was too preoccupied to smile. Hostesses arrived to lay out wine and nibbles in the anteroom, chattering excitedly. Victoria had to get quite stem.

‘Done, Lovejoy.’ Jimmy clocked the time. ‘Now what?’

‘Allow people in at the music hall interval. Got the bid forms?’

‘Here, Lovejoy.’

Victoria had a desk by the entrance. Bonny girls in Splendid Sejour uniforms were already there. Embossed pens, modem naff crystal mobiles, television monitors showing us to ourselves, we were the height of glamour. I’d never seen so many hidden cameras. We were knee deep in security.

‘Each visitor gets a card, Lovejoy.’ Victoria was so earnest. ‘If they want to bid, they simply circle a number on the card and include a certified cheque.’

That didn’t sound quite right. ‘Standing in a crowd?’ ‘No, Lovejoy.’ She indicated two curtained screens by the desk. ‘Voting booths. Anyone wanting privacy can use those. The cabled and faxed bids have already been processed.’ She said that with tight lips, meaning that she’d slaved to cope after I’d scarpered.

I cleared my throat. Everybody in the team shushed to listen. ‘Look, everybody. Before the rush, I want to say thanks. You’ve all been...’ I searched for some archaism ‘... tickety-boo. I’m not even half as reliable as any single one of you. Thank you.’

Victoria turned away, eyes moist, as her uniformed girls clapped, so pleased. Jimmy bounced on his heels, harrumphed, did his beam.

‘Not at all, old boy. Comes with the ration gong, what?’ Stan reached for his mobile phone, snapped orders to begin a last security sweep. I heard the band crescendo, the applause for Maureen’s song. I decided I’d see the second half of the music hall. Waste of time gazing at rows of forgeries. I beckoned Victoria and we stood apart.

‘Here’s three envelopes, love. Give one to these bidders on the sly when they come in. OK?’ They were addressed ‘By Hand’ to Michaelis Singleton, Jocina Crucifex and Mrs Florida Champion.

‘Lovejoy?’ As she spoke a thunderclap made me jump. She calmed me. ‘It’s only Mr Ozanne’s fireworks.’ Through the windows came an unholy glare. Rockets and multicoloured lights shone and whizzed. My heart thundered in sympathy.

‘God Almighty, love. He might have let me know.’ ‘Don’t be frightened, Lovejoy.’ Bloody nerve. As if I was scared of a couple of bangers. She kept hold of my arm. ‘Is it, well, over now?’

‘What?’

‘Your trick?’

‘I’m not tricking anybody,’ I lied. Women are quick to condemn honesty. ‘Yes, it’s over.’

‘At ten o’clock you’ll reveal which is the genuine picture?’

‘Aye, love. The winner gets it. The losers go home. We keep the money.’

She was looking at her feet. The fireworks banged and whirred in the night sky. People oohed and aahed. The music hall doors parted and the clamour of a released audience began. We would soon be engulfed.

‘Will I see you again?’

‘Yes, love. Here. Early morning.’

‘Very well.’ Shyly she bussed me, toffee and lavender scent. ‘Thank you.’

For what? Chattering hordes swamped the lounges and thoroughfares, rushing out to the verandah bars to see the fireworks before the interval ended. We were separated. I went and sat in the office until the two-minute showtime bell went. I took the extra canvas, and entered the darkness of the auditorium last. I stood at the back to watch the show.

There’s something wrong with memories. I can remember classroom junk so meaningless there ought to be a law to protect children from having to learn it. Yet essential things go missing. I’d like to know how to keep calm, for instance. Do schools teach that? Do they heck. They teach the Church’s Canon Law, which you’ve to learn by heart or get whacked. In the armed forces they teach you to shoot to kill, when you only want to go home. It’s weird. I think God was a duckegg - who else would invent
Taenia solium,
the ugliest of ugly tapeworms, to show his cleverness? Name one thing he got right. Damned if I can.

The show was really smart, debonair, slick with repartee. Bonny girls, handsome singers, clever magicians, even two famous TV actors. I was proud. Four acts into the second half, I became conscious of somebody standing beside me in the gloaming, and whispered, ‘Wotcher, Jonno. Good, eh?’

‘How do, Lovejoy,’ he whispered back. ‘Thanks, incidentally.’

‘What for?’ Gratitude makes me nervous. I find it’s false. ‘We’re sold out for weeks. I’m syndicating mainland television.’

‘Oh, good.’ As if I knew what it meant. ‘Glad you’re pleased.’

‘Taking that anywhere in particular?’

‘This?’ The painting. ‘No. We’d one decoy too many.’

‘I like your friend.’

Well, I liked his. ‘Er, who?’

‘Maureen. She’ll need time, but she’ll make it.’

‘Ta, Jonno.’ Yet more gratitude. Of the right kind, of course. ‘Was it worth your while to come?’ I was serious.

‘More than anything, Lovejoy.’ He hesitated, then glided off as an act came to a close in a roar of applause. ‘Gotter see to something.’

Me too. Prior Metivier was missing, and so was the lovely Jocina. Which proved he would be with her - maybe on her boat - making smiles. I would plant Gussy’s painting on it, return to the celebrations and immediately create a fuss, claiming the prize had gone missing. I’d scream to the police, Jimmy O, Stan, the TV broadcasters, that the genuine picture had been nicked by Prior George and was probably on the
Jocina.
They would have to search for it. With Prior G. and Jocina Crucifex in custody, however temporary, I’d be able to hand the location of the cache to the highest bidder - for a fee. I’d insist on being made advisor/consultant, and live in clover for ever and ever on the proceeds.

It seemed foolproof, the thought of fools.

I left the theatre, an usherette letting me out into a stardingly bright and vacant foyer. I was glad. I made the fresh air among crowds clapping the spectacular brilliance of the fireworks. I stole one of the company’s bicycles, cursing the security chains. It took me ten whole minutes to find a padlock I could open with my key ring. People get on your frigging nerves. If I’d had time, I’d have gone back and sacked Stan. I pedalled off into the night, cursing the painting clapping against my leg.

I
t’s funny what
thoughts come into your head. I used to know a bird who made love thinking about shopping, collecting the children from school, her sister’s jealousy. For me, it’s the other way about. In mid-love my mind exchanges my ordinary world for giddy excitement - in imagination. It does it without asking me. Like, I was pedalling into St Peter Port’s harbour area, my brain in a fever of envy.

My scam depended solely on forgeries - if you insist, ‘reproductions’ - made by Augusta Quenard, a lady who copied over and over a painting she’d seen as a child in a sea cave. She turned out copies like biscuits, got laughed at. To me they looked Mondrian - from a distance. Close to? Dross. But she
had
seen something those years ago. And was any place more fortified than wartime Alderney? And the slaves had included hundreds from East Europe. The relatives of some survivors had eventually returned. Look at the fag-smoking Boris. Loot is often untraceable. These were facts.

Gussy seemed to have seen a genuine something that day. And Marie Metivier had manipulated a windfall - selling a work of art to save her brother from shoals of nasty creditors. Where had she got it? Alderney again. It was the age-old riddle: Where do you hide a tree but in a forest?

There’s the famous case of the Cupid. It stood for donkey’s years in plain view. A mansion house on Fifth Avenue, New York, no less. Folk wandered by the nice little statue, took no notice. They even ignored it at Sotheby’s sale in 1902, which billed it as a Michelangelo. Later, an architect bought it for a song and stuck it in the courtyard. Seventy years later, one Mr Parronchi wrote in Florence that it was Michelangelo. The world yawned and said, ‘Pull the other leg.’ Then somebody said, ‘Hey! That’s by Michelangelo!’ And this time publicity hit the fan. Throngs thronged. Television crews tore destructively into the courtyard. See what I mean? Pronouncements go unheeded for virtually an entire century. Sotheby’s, experts wholesale, authoritative analyses were all ignored. So what changed? It was, is, the same statue. Yet not a single thief tried his hand when the statue was unguarded. Now? You’d need a regiment to wriggle within twenty yards, and still wouldn’t make it.

There’s no accounting for taste.

Sometimes you know because you know that something’s a dud. Like that barmy ‘discovery’ that
A Funerall Elegie
by ‘W.S.’ was Wiliam Shakespeare’s. It’s a poem about some murdered West Country bloke. Sad, aye. Experts analysed the printing, the ink, the paper. Computers counted the words, dissected its syntax, drew histograms. Professors grappled with senile rage on faculty greenswards. But there’s one truth, plain as a pike staff. It’s this: the newly discovered poem is crap. My message to the discoverers? Shakespeare couldn’t write junk like that if he tried. Grow up, get a real job and stop pretending you know what day it is. Fraudsters nark me. Either do it right or don’t do it at all. A con trick deserves dignity.

She was waiting by the crossroads where I’d told her to be. I was so engrossed in my inner fury I almost pedalled past. I squealed to a stop.

‘Wotch, Gussy.’

‘Hello, darling.’ She sounded so excited. Her perfume almost knocked me off my bike. ‘I saw the crowds! Isn’t it wonderful? All to see my art!’

Well, no, dwoorlink, but I did not say. ‘You’ll be famous now, love.’

‘Thank you, Lovejoy. What do you want me to do?’

I alighted. The fireworks were still crackling and glittering in the sky over Splendid Sejour. Good old Jimmy, proving that advertising pays. We could hear the faint roars of the throngs.

‘I want you to wait, love. I’ll be twenty minutes. If any of my, our, er friends, come asking, tell them I’ve gone to the boat. All right?’

‘Right, darling.’ She hugged me. ‘I’ll be here.’

Trying to look heading for a genuine appointment instead of being sly, I left her the bike and legged it. Some distance along the wharfside I found three dinghies and nicked the smallest. For the gentle art of rowing you need sheer strength, and I’d not much. I hadn’t much idea, either. I’m useless at that sculling business, one oar over the stern. I do it with two oars, backing forward. You have to keep pausing to see where the hell you’re heading.

Down at water level on a night sea, and only the receding lights of the Esplanade to go by, you feel vulnerable. Even small yachts look massive, and the big ones seem huge liners. Worse, they don’t all have lights to guide a humble seafarer, selfish swine. They all had mooring ropes straining down into the harbour waters. I was scared of getting snared. For a second, as I really warmed up and started rowing steadily, I thought I heard somebody call my name. It must have been some seagull. Do seagulls fly at night? I scanned the sky, couldn’t see a one. They’d all knocked off. What was it, ten o’clock? Half past? The fireworks, now frantic and continuous, showered light. I heard a brass band distantly start up. Jimmy, bound to be him, unable to resist a parade.

I narrowly missed colliding with a long line of white craft. They nodded like tethered nags. I heard somebody singing in one. A TV reporter was bawling in that telly monotone, ‘The last of the bidders is going in! Countdown to closing! Soon somebody will be a millionaire! Ten-nine-eight—’ And all that.

Somebody clumped along a deck. Something poured nastily into the water. Pollution. Were they allowed? I heard rhythmic splashing. Somebody else was rowing, forgotten something maybe, or coming to a tryst on board a love ship. I felt jealous.

Then I realized I was lost. I stopped, drifting, stared about. Where had the
Jocina
been? Somewhere in the final row, I thought. Or nearer the harbour mouth? Was it like motor cars at the town hall, marked parking places? I thought of knocking on a boat’s side and asking. What if nobody was at home? I’d get done for breaking and entering.