losing.
Tobacco manufacturers insure themselves against the Feds in Raleigh, North Carolina, detecting their own tax-evading smuggling rackets. You with me at last?'
I surrendered and said resignedly, 'What do you want me to divvy? Where?'
He lit a cigar, though smoking wasn't allowed in the restaurant. Taylor Eggers beckoned me. I left. No tea, no grub, though it was all served ready for a hungry bloke like, say, me. No money either. Taylor still beamed. A cuckolded husband always smarts, even at the point of murderous revenge. Don't try telling me different. Taylor, however, smilingly walked me along the promenade to a stall. There we dined on pasties and hot spuds and tea thick enough to plough. He paid, thank God.
'D'you know where I'm to do the divvying, mate?' I asked him.
'Don't know what they're on about, Lovejoy.'
'Whose are those antiques?' I meant the Sevres and the Vienna piece. No good asking about the Meissen, requiescat in pace.
'Mine.'
I stared. He spoke in tones of faint regret. Not heartbroken, note. Merely a bit of hard luck, losing that priceless plate.
'My only three genuine antiques,' he said, like easy come, easy go.
'He's the consul, isn't he?'
'Don't, Lovejoy.' He stared out to sea. 'Hear no evil, speak no evil. Just go along.
There's no other way. The powers are too great.'
'Right,' I said. Then, 'Can I have some more tea?'
19
THE LADS WERE having a whale of a time reminiscing when I reached the Welcome Sailor in the teeming rain. Big Frank from Suffolk was especially creased. I went in grinning, hoping it wasn't the usual what-about-Joe-in- prison malarkey, got a pale ale on the slate from Unis, and sat by the fire to let my soaked jacket steam dry. My gran always said that's the way to catch a chill, but never did explain how to keep dry if you'd no raincoat.
'This bloke actually believed the rounder!' Big Frank howled.
Roars of merriment. Big Frank is always moving on to his next wife. Friends run a book on how long his new marriage will last. The longest is nine months (a significant duration). I honestly don't know why he keeps getting married. I tell him to just fall into romance, and so cut out the middleman. He says no, marriage is like flu, you can't stop it happening.
A rounder, incidentally, is a phoney antique that dealers know about and recycle through auctions. Do it often enough, the fake takes on a kind of allure, escalating as it goes from catalogue to catalogue. Everybody starts to think of it as nearly almost practically genuine. Sooner or later somebody buys it, for a high price.
'And he was the frigging auctioneer!' Peggy Price screeched, falling off her bar stool.
Peggy Price 'is to be admired', women say. She poisoned her bloke once (well, you can't do it more than once, can you?) who beat her savagely, put her in hospital. He was a junkie, drunkard, gambler, and idle. None of us liked him. The final straw, though, was when he stole the only genuinely real antique she'd ever had from her tatty little antiques shop down the sea wharf. He tried to sell it in Stepney.
A Minton fruit and nut dish might not sound much –to go and poison a whole bloke for, I mean – but it was true as a saint. I can see it now in my mind's eye: painted, not printed, those gorgeous florid colours of 1805 with Thomas Minton's interlinked stroke marks just like the Sevres device that Minton liked to imitate. Hearing about the dish, well, all the collectors and dealers in the Eastern Hundreds finally took Peggy's side.
'You can only go so far,' the lads sympathized. Our women dealers said things like,
'Well, you can only take so much, can't you?' We all gave evidence at her trial. The judge let her off with two hundred hours of community service. That only meant that when she came to sweep the market she didn't need to lift a broom. The stallholders simply kept their pitches clean.
Justice isn't often so straightforward, though.
Luckily, among the revellers was Cromwell, for where Peggy Price comes can Cromwell be far behind? He sat in his breastplate and gauntlets, smoking a churchwarden pipe.
He sometimes speaks daft Ho There Sir Knave stuff. Dunno why. He was once prevented from tethering his nag outside the pub. I spoke up for him at the town council.
They claimed there was no need to ride to the tavern on a horse these days. Walking and motor cars were good enough.
I claimed in evidence, 'His nag knows the way home, your honour.' I got pretty heated.
'Even when Cromwell is drunk as a lord, your, er, lordship, his horse carries him home safe. Cromwell himself was allowed to ride here.'
'Confine yourself to facts, please,' the judge said wearily.
It was Mrs Finisterre, a distinguished battleaxe with lovely legs. She shouldn't wear purple skirts. She should try tan or beige. I sold her a lovely Wellington chest once, and charged too little because I knew she was a famed lawyer. See what good it did me.
'I am, missus!' I'd bleated.
'Lovejoy. This plaintiff is not Oliver Cromwell. The Lord Protector died in 1658.'
Just like a woman, slipping truth in. They're sly. This particular Cromwell was the Rt Hon St John (say Sinjern or people think you're common) Featheringshay Popperinghe, late of the diplomatic corps. He can speak twenty
