'I'll go and see him,' I said. Nothing makes humanity more morose than an opportunity coming closer and closer as the risks of failure simultaneously grow larger.
A toddler gripped my calf crying, 'Dadda! Dadda!' delightedly. I tried unsuccessfully to shake the little psychopath off and had to wait red-faced until its breathless mother arrived all apologetic to rescue me. The little maniac complained bitterly at having lost its new find as it was dragged back to its push chair. Sheila was helpless with laughter at the scene. The fact that I was embarrassed as hell of course proved even more highly diverting.
'Oh, Lovejoy!' she said, falling about.
'You can go off people, you know,' I snarled. 'Very funny. A spiffing jape.'
'Oh, Lovejoy!'
'Mind that apothecary box!' I pushed her away just before she knocked it off a side table.
This gave her the opportunity to ask about it I saw through her placatory maneuver, but for the life of me I couldn't resist. It gave me an excuse to fondle the box, a poor example it was true, but they are becoming fairly uncommon and you have to keep on the lookout.
Watch your words. Not an 'apothecary's' box. It wasn't his, in the sense that he carried it about full of rectangular bottles and lovely nooky felt-lined compartments for pills and galenical 'simples,' as his preparations were called. It belonged usually to a household, and was made to stand en a bureau, a medicine cabinet if you like. You dosed yourself from it, or else hired an apothecary, forerunner of the general practitioner, to give advice on what to use from it. The current cheapness of these elegant little cabinets never ceases to amaze me. I wish they would really soar to a hundred times their present giveaway price, then maybe the morons who buy them and convert them into mini-cocktail cabinets would leave well alone and get lost.
You find all sorts of junk put in by unscrupulous dealers and auctioneers besides the bottles. This one had a deformed old hatched screwdriver thing with a flanged blade and a pair of old guinea scales imitating the original physic balance. I dropped them back in, snorting scornfully Sheila heard my opinion with synthetic attention and nodded in all the right places.
'If I catch somebody doing it, darling, I'll smash it on his head,' she promised as we strolled around.
'You'll do no such thing.'
'No?'
'Smash a
'For you, Lovejoy, anything.'
After an hour Sheila was protesting Inspecting stuff's best done by osmosis. Don't rush, stroll. Be casual. Saunter, wander, learn.
'We keep going round and round, Lovejoy,' she complained, sitting to take off a shoe to rub her foot like they do.
'Shut up,' I said, wandering off.
Jim, one of the elderly attendants, guffawed. 'Chivalrous as ever, eh, Lovejoy?' he said, and I was in with an excuse.
'This junk's enough to make a saint swear,' I groused. 'Never seen so much rubbish since Field's stuff came through.'
He was aggrieved at that. Nobody likes their own stuff being recognized for the rubbish it is.
'We sold some good stuff that day,' he said, quick as a flash. 'If you hadn't gone to Cumberland you'd know better.'
That explained why I'd missed it. I was beginning to feel better as things clicked into place.
'Nothing still around from it, is there?' I asked casually.
He grinned. 'Do leave orf, Lovejoy. It was donkeys' years back.'
'Oh, you never know,' I said, hinting like mad.
He shook his head. 'No, we played that one straight,' he admitted ruefully. 'Practically all of it went the same week we got it.'
'Just a thought, Jim. Some things do get left behind occasionally.'
'Pigs might fly,' he said.
I played casual another minute, then collected Sheila and we made it back to the car.
We pulled out, rolling against protesting traffic to get started.
'We have one more call to make before home,' I told her. 'Game?'
She sighed. 'These places always make me feel so grubby. I need a bath.'
'Same here.' I shrugged. The motor coughed into eraphysematous life and we were under power. 'What's that to do with anything?'
'Where are we going?'
'Down the creek.'
'Is it a tip from Tinker?'
'You guessed, eh?'
'It was pathetically obvious, Lovejoy.'
