Paid and Loving Eyes

“Good old Suleiman-Aga.” I made a show of relishing my first swig though it burnt my mouth. Women can drink scalding, with their asbestos throttles.

“Who?” Very, very guarded.

“Your Turkish ambassador, brought coffeetime to France. About the time of our Restoration, 1666, give or take a yard.”

She didn’t say anything. She’d already been to the loo, as had I. I realized I couldn’t quite see the edges of her pupils, however hard I looked. Funny, that. I’d done my most soulful gaze a number of times, hoping. Though what I’d learn from seeing if the pupils were dilated or pinpoint, God knows. It’s supposed to be a clue to drugs, but which size meant what?

Her eyes rose, held me hard with an intensity I didn’t like. Lucky that Guy was the mad one, or I’d have suspected the worst.

“We were warned about you, Lovejoy.” She drew a spoony trail in a spillage spot on the table. I was starting to hate surfaces. “I paid no heed. Now I’m wondering if I underestimated you.”

This is the kind of woman-talk I don’t like. Had I been too obvious? I went into a huff. It’s quite a good tactic, played with enough misunderstanding.

“Look, love.” I showed how heated I was. “I’d rather finish this job and get home. If you’re narked because I mentioned I’m a bit short of, ah, close company, then tell Marimee and get me sacked—”

“Sacked, shacked, packed?” Guy raced to the table, literally grabbing Veronique’s coffee. “Hacked?” He laughed so loud people looked round. He hovered about four feet above the floor, zingy, fully restored. “Hacked, then lacked? Wracked?” Happy days were here again. I didn’t need to look into his pupils.

“Guy,” Veronique reprimanded quietly as we rose to depart. Guy shrilled merriment, streaked off to the motor. We followed. “You will be told everything, Lovejoy.” She wore a watch that could have afforded me a thousand times over. “In three hours.”

“Three hours more at Guy’s lunatic speeds’ll have us in Vladivostok. Will we make it back to Paris? Only, I started fancying that hundred-year-old concierge. She’s just my type—breathing.”

That gave her a crinkly half-smile. I felt we were more allies after that short break than before. I tried telling Guy to take his time. He bawled that we were to make Zurich before midnight, and whiplashed us into the traffic with barely a look. Correct, at last. Mind you, the million pointers had helped. Gobbie and Lysette would now meet me as planned.

“Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow,” I sang, explaining to Veronique: “Alma-Tadema used to play that to visitors on his early phonograph. Real class, eh? Was it the onzieme?”

“Eleventh?”

“Arrondissement. Your warehouse, the cran. God, I’ve never seen so much reconstruction. Don’t Parisians get fed up? Between the Place de la Bastille arid the Boulevard Voltaire, wasn’t it? Lovely, once. I’ll bet, when it was famous for cabinet-makers.”

Silence. Guy nearly bisected our motor on an oil transporter.

“Mind you, what can you expect?” I said, blathering on. “The City of Paris’s planning department has no conservation section, has it? Cretins. That lets anybody do anything.”

More, but certain, silence. Funny, but now I was sure of their terrible scam my nausea had all gone.

Veronique didn’t chat much more during that pacy journey, and I shut up. But I caught her looking at me in a mirror when she did her lipstick. I cheered up. An ally? Or did her languid look mean she was simply on different shotpot than before?

Three more pit stops for Guy to toot his flute and we were across the Swiss border. I felt bright, optimistic. After all, here was lovely Switzerland. Never having seen it, still I knew it was clean, pristine, beautiful, orderly, utterly correct and safe and lawabiding. Veronique seemed to last out on only one kite flight. Except a vein in her left arm was now swollen and bruised. At the border, Guy produced three passports, one mine. They weren’t inspected, and we drove on through. I was so excited I nodded off.

“Lovejoy? Wake up.”

We’d arrived, quite dark. I stumbled out, bleary. The hotel seemed plain, almost oppressively compact. Stern warnings abounded in umpteen languages on every wall about baths, water, payment, lights, payment, doors, keys, payment. I didn’t read any, but climbed the stairs—stairs were free —thinking that whatever Monique Delebarre’s syndicate was spending, little of it went on lodging. Or was this doss-house strategically placed?

The microscopic room was dingier even than my cottage. One bulb flogged itself, leaking a paltry candlepower that barely made the walls. The place was freezing. I sprawled on the bed and thought of money.

Now I’m not against the stuff, though I know I do go on. It’s really crazy how prices dominate. The UK tries to keep track by teams which examine 130,000 shop-shelf items in 200 towns, compiling the Retail Price Index, but it’s all codswallop. Just as comparing antique prices. It’s a hard fact that a lovely epergne, a decorative table centrepiece, weighing a colossal 478 ounces 10 pennyweights, was auctioned in 1928 for 12 shillings sixpence an ounce, which equals 63 pence as this ink dries. Date 1755, by that brilliant master silversmith Edward Wakelin, no less. And in its original case, that collectors today would kill for. So where’s the sense in comparison? Answer: no sense at all.

The only honest matching is by time. And I knew no forgers, no artisans, who could or would devote time to making furniture exactly as they used to back in the eighteenth century. Except me. Yet Monique Delebarre and Troude and all seemed to have tapped an endless vein of superbs, by the load, by the ware-house.

Even though I’d no pyjamas I decided it was bedtime. Guy and Veronique were rioting and whooping in the next room.

For a while I lay looking at neon on-offs making shadowed patterns on the walls and ceiling. Antiques crept about my mind. Antiques that were laborious, time-consuming the way all creativity is. Like upholstery, tapestry, polishing furniture in a cruel endless method that only the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ever managed. And, I’d bet, paper filigree, and papier mache, that took many, many poorly paid hands. I think I dozed, and came to with somebody knocking surreptitiously on the door. I was there in a flash, opening it slowly, lifting as I turned the handle so it couldn’t squeak.