He grimaced at his stale madeira. 'Get a carder man for that. I'd try Saunty. You know him?'
'Aye,' I said, reluctant. Saunty, our best carder man, cohabits with a bird Yamta in a perennial state of frolicsome nudity. I didn't have time for an orgy.
'Don't settle for second best, Lovejoy,' Icky said piously, straight out of his adverts.
'Give him my regards.'
'Cheers, Icky. Ta for the hooch.' I left most of the drink.
Eleanora caught me by leaping out of her shrubbery as I made my way through the jungle. She's buxom when you get close. Her arms are the floppy sort, wobbling under her armpits.
'Lovejoy! Daraleeng!' She affects a pseudo accent, to show she's a true artiste. 'Coyme!
I sink yust por yoh!'
'Er, ta, El. I'm in a hurry.'
She linked my arm. 'You like my drrress, no?'
It seemed all metal, centurion-style slabs of tin, her bodice a cylinder of shiny bronze.
Her helmet was some Britannia thing.
'Very pretty, El. Is it for your songs?'
'You'll come, Lovejoy?' She warbled a snatch of falsetto gunge. I nodded, to support the arts. 'Icky told you about Arthur's boy wanting to be apprenticed?'
That stopped me. Apprenticed? Icky'd only said a course. 'Er, no.'
'I stopped it straight away! On your behalf.' She beat her breast meaningfully, bending metal. ' 'Desist!' I cry. 'Lovejoy is Colette's lower!' I tell heem. 'Lovejoy kill people!''
She stabbed herself with a pretend knife and crooned some scatty song to die with.
This was a bit much. The plod also jump to conclusions, like that Saintly.
'Then Arthur die. Colette loses all.' She came to for an instant, gave me a mischievous glance. 'She lost you too, hey, Lovejoy?' We were at the house now. She clasped me.
'Mek me sweet music, Lovejoy. I did you a favour.'
She plonked her mouth on mine. It was a struggle, but I wriggled free seconds short of asphyxiation. I got away by promising to see her at the concert, hoping nobody had seen me snogging goodbye to a tin lady. It had to be Saunty the carder man, then. But one thing niggled. Why didn't Icky tell me he'd almost taken Arthur's lad on as an apprentice? Something wrong somewhere, but what can you do?
20
GO ALMOST DUE east from St Ldmundsbury, and you hit a hamlet. It's famous for Doldrum and Mercy. Separate reasons, nothing to do with sailing ships or qualities of.
The former is famed among the silent folk of East Anglia for dangerous motor cars, the latter for a brothel. Until Doldrum and Mercy hove in, the tiny hamlet was typical.
Absent vicar, congregation down to nine, fences overgrown, post office closed, school desperate. A hamlet on its last legs.
Then, shazam, or whatever the comics say. Enter Doldrum, master of the dud secondhand motor. He was closely followed by Mercy. In three weeks it was boom city. The genteel old hamlet finally jerked to life and entered the Jet Age.
Suddenly its one street rumbled to the sound of car merchants' wagons. They brought derelict crash vehicles, winched them into an old barnyard Doldrum had hired for a peppercorn, and departed with 'restored' vehicles pristine as the day they'd rolled down the ramps of august car makers. It was, of course, the notorious 'cut-and- shut'. Highly illegal, but done everywhere. You get a handful of wrecked cars, any night. Hire some welding equipment, a farmyard, and you become a 'classic car restorer'.
Stalwart mechanics slice the ruined vehicle. When you've enough unruined bits, weld them together jigsaw fashion. A quick respray, and you sell the car as a 'secondhand bargain'. Naturally, you don't let on that it's simply crashed fragments pieced together.
You also don't state that its chassis is twisted, the doors unsafe, the engine number ground off, the tyres unbalanced, the steering kaput, the floor as porous as a tea strainer. The registration's also duff, taken from an honest lookalike model totalled at some accident black spot.
Doldrum throve.
For this tiny rural hamlet, the sequence was inevitable. Its two pubs revitalized. The grocery shop recovered. Retailers returned, hired baffled village girls. Crumbling dwellings were snapped up. Doddering parish councillors thrilled to dreams of maybe building a village hall - an ambition temporarily shelved in AD 1371 but hanging on, hanging on. Weekend folk stopped for lunch, and saw how truly rural the quaint hamlet was. They bought derelict cottages, restored them. A building merchant started a satellite shop - nails, paint, wallpaper, ladders. The post office reopened. Heavenly choirs sang as commerce raised its head. Quaintdom flourishes, where money ebbs and flows.
Ebbing and flowing better than anybody in East Anglia was Mercy. She heard of this thriving hamlet, and brought her brothel.
Don't laugh. And especially please don't scorn the like of Mercy Faldrop. She's part of civilization's rich pattern. When ancient armies rested after hacking through the hinterland, along came Mercy's kind to help the rude and licentious soldiery do the resting bit. And where miners dug gold, or fur-trappers trapped, where cathedrals soared and tired masons momentarily laid aside their tools reaching for ale to slake their terrible thirsts, who was it served the foaming jugs? It was Mercy and her ilk. And when, parched throats quenched, the artisans and trail-blazers stretched out to rest, what more natural than that Mercy should help them stretch that little bit more?
So, one day up drove Mercy, demure and fetching. Her grand Rolls Bentley made the place gawp. Her pretty cousins - Mercy has lots of pretty cousins - followed. Still meek and shy, Mercy purchased the Old Rectory outright
