'Good morning, Lovejoy. It's only fourteen minutes to six.'
And nine seconds, I daresay. 'Could I enlist your assistance, please, dwoorlink?' I always feel in school with Lydia. She's my apprentice. Don't laugh. 'Will you travel with me to Saffron Fields?'
The door didn't waver. Lydia affects a stern, unrelentingly prim mode dinned into her by convent school. I'd finally discerned the passion beneath, but have to pay by watching everything I do and say. Morality rules, except when she permits otherwise in seclusion, meaning my cottage when I get round to mending the locks. Lydia's morality is hard-as-nails puritan.
'Hadn't you better ask Rosanne for assistance?'
This is women all over, the innocence of a toxin.
'Look, love,' I said indignantly. 'I had to butter Rosanne up. She had a collection of Victorian witches' balls I wanted.'
A witch's ball is a glass sphere, sometimes with a slender glass rope (sic) attached.
Witches tether one to their belts and peer into it for arcane assistance. The glass is too densely coloured to see through, or even into, unless you're a witch I suppose. They date from about 1865, are usually ultramarine or that disturbing dark green. I've even seen a red one, which put the fear of God in me. They sell for about three hundred quid, going to press. Rosanne runs an infant creche in Nine Ash Green. Hate to think what she teaches the babbies.
The door didn't move. 'You failed. Rosanne declined to sell.'
'I wasn't trying to buy them for profit. It was for,' I invented in a burst of genius, 'her babies' school. They need, er, bottles and things.'
The door instantly swung open and there stood Lydia. 'And the horrid woman wouldn't sell her antiques to help the babies?' she cried, furious. 'There! I warned you she was positively wretched!'
'You were right, dwoorlink.' I allowed myself to be coaxed inside, very contrite. 'I should have listened.'
She slammed the door seething with outrage. She's good at seething. 'Indeed you should, Lovejoy!'
'This journey to Saffron Fields is for the same reason,' I extemporized. Never change a winning team. 'The babies need desks.'
One thing about Lydia is that she's always voluptuous. Dishevelled from sleep, tousled from dusty auctions, glammed up for glitzy occasions, Lydia dims all other women.
She'd look good in rags or nothing. I tried not to reach for her.
'Desks?' She paused, suddenly cold. 'Another of your tales, Lovejoy?'
Didn't infants need desks, for Christ's sake, lazy little sods? I'd had a desk at school. 'Er, she's planning. But,' I added solemnly, 'is she the right sort of person, I ask myself.'
She quivered with vehemence. 'I also have doubts!' she cried.
'We must help, Lydia.' I went all noble. 'If we don't, who will?'
'Lovejoy.' She misted up. 'Sometimes, you have a heart of gold. Up so early, just thinking of those little ones…'
I felt myself fill up too, because it truly was a beautiful effort on my part. I reached to embrace her. She stepped back.
'Have you had breakfast, Lovejoy? I'll have a bath and dress, then make you something before we leave.'
'Maybe I could wait upstairs with you, talk over plans?'
'Certainly not! Please wait downstairs.' Deprived, I foraged, made a ton of toast and marmalade, brewed up, tried to boil three eggs but they always come out runny and I can't stand that gooey white so I fried some cheese and tomatoes and had that with a mound of bread. Lydia never has sliced bread. She makes her own loaves that you've to cut yourself, though my slices always go thick at one edge and dwindle to infinity on the other. She writes angrily to Ministers of the Crown about the quality of shop bread.
In the living room - the house is semi-detached - I found a small mystery. On the mantelpiece was a nickel- plated gadget I'd seen before. There's a well known device for automatically making tea by your bedside when you wake, called a 'Teasmade'. Rotten name, still on sale. This was the earliest version, patented by the gunsmith Frank Clarke of Snow Hill in Birmingham in 1903.I could actually remember telling Lydia, on her second day as my apprentice, to bid for this very instrument at Gimbert's auction. I even recognized the faint scratches on the spirit burner. She'd gone into the auction trembling, white as death, though I'd told her not to worry. Lydia had come in a fraction too soon, and stimulated the bidding beyond her 'add one' limit.
(Just a small point. Remember that, if you get somebody to bid for you at an auction, custom allows your bidder to go one bid higher if she thinks she can swing it. And you must pay up no matter how high that one extra bid takes you.) I smiled. I'd forgotten all about the incident until now. This was typical Lydia, to let that early mistake rankle. She must have hunted the item down, then saved up and bought it - four thousand zlotniks at current prices, note. Sentiment? Or her famous rage at not having done something exactly right? The nickel surface shone. This silly little instrument appeared cared for, loved even, on its wooden plinth with its spirit burner, spring-worked match striker, original matches, automatic tilting kettle, its alarm clock actually working. She'd had it lovingly restored.
'I see you had breakfast, Lovejoy,' Lydia said behind me. 'If we—'
She halted, noticing me and the tea maker. I looked. She was just as beautiful, but now dressed to kill. Matching accessories, gloves in the strap of her handbag, hair perfect in her inevitable bun. Good enough to eat.
'Well done,' I said. 'To find it, I mean.'
She blushed. 'I just came across it. It seemed so neglected. No particular reason, Lovejoy.'
'Of course not.' Awkward of a sudden, I waited. 'The Automatic Water Boiler Company of Birmingham made them, I think?'
'That is so,' she said primly.
