The Possessions of a Lady (39 page)

'I took longer than I expected. Hope I didn't delay the fashion
show.'

'They've worked so hard, poor lambs!' from Briony.

I waved to Old Alice. 'Excuse me, please. An old neighbour. Any
way I can help, Craddie, just ask.'

He smiled. I hate his smiles. They're horrible, though you'd never
know that if you didn't mistrust him.

'Thank you, Lovejoy. You'll keep to our arrangement? I paid up
front, remember.'

'Right right.' I watched him go, and was enveloped in Old Alice's
crowd of well-wishers. They'd saved some grub for me in a nosh tent.

'Pasties, eccles cakes, chorleys, chips, mushy peas,' Old Alice
fluttered. 'Everything you like!'

'Ta, love.' I beckoned Tinker to come along. 'First sense I've
heard.'

Staying with this lot, and then going to the fashion show with the
crowd, might buy me a few hours before perdition finally struck. With Old
Alice's crack geriatric charity team, I was free to think. As we sat and
prattled, I set my mind free.

Teachers teach a prevailing opinion that we'd still be back in the
Dark Ages were it not for aluminium. It's the chemical-element theory of
civilisation. It's rubbish.

France's Napoleon III begged his scientists to discover some way
of making the pure metal from bauxite. By 1886 electrolysis had aluminium on
the market. Eastman Kodak cameras of 1915, motor car bodies. Then aeroplanes,
engines, airships like the R100. That's the theory: no aluminium, no mass
travel, no modern civilisation.

It's a naff theory, the goon's guess, and misses the point. Take
away people, you've got nothing. Okay, there'd be bricks and mortar left,
machinery and other marvellous residues. Things, but no people. No people? It's
too high a price to pay. Stuff aluminium.

So with doom approaching, I noshed with Old Alice's cronies the
stodge of childhood, and was content. Let it come. I'd stand by folk. Unless I
could wriggle out from under.

36

My reverie about the good old times—were there ever such?—was
doomed as the last frantic TV crews poured in. Keystone Kops, destroying
anything. Bongs went, crowds dashed screaming. I recognised the signs. Fashion
was going to happen. Hours late, but fashion, like royalty, has that right.

Sadly, I thanked Old Alice. She told me, eyes glistening, to look
after myself.

'Are those men chasing you, Lovejoy?' She actually pointed with
her arm out.

'No, love. Just old friends.'

Derry and his oppo, Bonch, were standing staring. Another couple
of dozen, we could have tableaued a biologic Stonehenge. Cradhead was talking
amiably with Mayor Tom. Stella had joined them. I bussed the old lady, beckoned
Tinker. He left the ale tent.

'Tinker. That lorry.'

'We going to make the dash, son? I'll decoy, 'f you like.'

Friends weaken selfishness, I find.

'Ta, Tinker, but no. Look. When the modern dresses start, hitch it
to yon purple caravan. It should be dusk by then. Everybody'll be gawping at
the parading models coming down the covered gangways.'

'Then?' He sounded dubious.

'Somebody's planning to nick the Victorian dresses. We'll do it
before they can.'

'Who? How? What for, Lovejoy?'

How much to tell him? 'I'll be at the fashion show. The Victorian
frocks parade first. Then they'll go back into Amy's purple trailer. It'll be
quiet outside. Inside will be pandemonium.'

'And I make off?'

'Tow Amy's caravan away, with the Victorian dresses in. It'll be
easy.' I hesitated. Things never are, around me. 'Well, maybe.'

'What if. . .?'

'Shut it, Tinker.'

Try to do right by everybody, and I get lip from Joe Soap. It's a
life and a half, this. They announced the fashion show. I left him and went
into the chapel. People made way, friends everywhere, not a killer in sight. My
seat was alongside the catwalk. The main stage was a-glitter, the antiques and
dealers gone. The unsaleable dross was cleared away.

The place was in hubbub. No Aureole. Roger though, Carmel, Tubb
beyond her making mystic signs at the remnants of holiness on the walls. Pews
had made a miraculous reappearance, but too few. Folk were sitting in the
aisles, already enraptured at the thought of seeing dresses, when clothes are
in every shop in every street. It beats me.

Faye was on stage, really bonny. No Nicola. Cradhead was seated
almost directly facing. I didn't like that. Derry and Bonch had vanished.

Thekla was also up there. I didn't like that, either. She saw me,
swiftly scribbled a note, gave it to a girl I was starting to recognise. Thekla
pointed me out, her expression one of concern. I'd seen it on the faces of
gunners taking aim. She could keep her neffie old message, whatever it said.
Rodney, in a luminous suit, was being admired.

Amy tore through a cluster of people in the wings, trailing
material in a panic. Still frantic, when she'd had weeks? The girl with the
note slid along the rows.

'Wotcher, Vyna.'

She bent, smiling. 'Love letter from Thekla. With her fondest,
Lovejoy.'

'I'll bet.' I put the note away unread. She was miffed.

'It's time we came to an arrangement, Lovejoy. We could sing
dollar music'

'Too late, love. You've missed what chances were going.'

She slid away, prettier still now she was white hot with anger. I
resigned my cerebral cortex to oblivion as TV crews rolled cameras about,
making everybody shift. They live for disruption, even give each other annual
awards for it. Loony. I'd almost nodded off when Nicola whispered into my ear
from the row behind. No disturbance. She'd never get a job in television.

'I've come to my senses, Lovejoy. I understand.'

'You do?' I turned to look. She was so bashful, her eyes lowered.
'Why?' I thought I'd given up whys. But if she'd worked out why Spoolie got
done, I needed to know.

She whispered. 'Sweet, Lovejoy.' True. 'You drove all that way, to
rescue me from that dreadful Florsston.'

'Er, look, love . . .' I turned away.

'Don't speak, darling,' she whispered. This in a horde. 'It's
dawned on me. My place is with you. I've been blind. I'll make it up to you,
Lovejoy.'

Appalled, I listened to her terrifying litany. Apologies,
promises, flowed from her lips into my earhole. I thought, No, no, a thousand
times no. I wanted to start tunnelling, flee to the fells.

Rodney meanwhile had begun the show up there, to thumping music.
Strobe lighting, searchbeams, silvery colours from rolling panels. He strutted,
sang. I watched, numb. Screens lowered slowly. Old movie scenes of carriages, seemingly
in heavy rain, showed in back projection as that stultifying noise pounded on.

The crowd went wild, stamping feet as Rodney waggled and
high-stepped. I wondered why the heck anybody in his right mind would want to
do it. TV crews tracked his every wriggle. Monitors glowed, one jauntily
suspended from a crucifix that had seen better—though not crazier—days.

He finally froze, staring at the floor, arm raised, legs apart, breathing
heavily as if he'd just given his all for art. Maybe he had.

'Luvvers, bruvvers! Achievers, reevers!' He got a roar of
approval. Fashion students climbed on tables, pew ends, dangled from walls.
'Can
you
out
there
see
me
in
here
!’ he cried. Roars. Was it some
code? I was mystified.

People were driving cars up to the chapel's entrances, to provide
vantage points.

Rodney posed in camp petulance, fist on hip, and pouted, 'Because
if you can't—
the show won't happen, see!
’
which got the biggest cheer of all. God knows whose cars they were, but their
roofs were getting danced on, the sound of distant impis.

'Now a delectational exquisitorial display that is
theeee
fashion durbar of the entire
galactic
yeeeeear!
I got sick of the
howls. Mind you, it's hysteria that caesars and presidents—add fashion—have
survived on through centuries.

'We begin with
exquatiously
modelled Belle Époque dresses!' He began a rhythmic swaying, as if suddenly
mutated into female, stepping to the crashing music. Couldn't they simply pin
the dresses up on a stand without all this?

'And who,' Rodney carolled, trotting and twisting, 'brought
all
the
way
from
Man
chester this
glor-yerss
display, but our—
my
—
your
—very own
Amy!
’

Bedlam. Amy walked on, pretending humility. All phoney. She
curtseyed. Manchester was ten miles; he made it sound like Amy'd dragged it
from the Yukon by sledge. Her eyes locked mine, moved quickly away to where her
fashioneer's heart lay, the mass of admirers. She bowed herself off. It brought
the house down. Rodney wept copious tears for a beat.

'Now!' he shrieked, leaving praise to mere mortals. 'For your
utteracious delectation, the Grand Parade of Dresses of Centuries A-gone! Your
narrator-
ess
,’ he squealed, making a
joke out of gender, 'is Faye, the Gay Way of
Today
! He handed over to her. She advanced, taking over the
microphone. Rodney couldn't bear to, but went.

Faye began to speak in a neutral tone as the spotlights fixed the
catwalk.

'First, a particularly fine long ball dress, severe for modern
taste but avant-garde before the twentieth century. Modelled by Clementine, it
shows . . .'

The music changed to wrong melodies from the Fifties, Thirties,
inappropriate World War Two songs, with 1920 decade numbers. Models danced on,
doing the Yam, the Charleston, miming some startlingly ectopic Great War
ballads, then WW2
Lili Marlene
. They
even had early Beatles tunes, film scores.

These last had me looking at my knees, but evasion doesn't work. I
felt Spoolie's spirit gazing sorrowfully in. He'd want to know what I'd done
about him, who was going to pay. Spoolie had been robbed.

The
Casablanca
theme
made me feel worse. Cradhead's steady gaze was on me. I glared. He didn't look
away, the swine. No chortles.

Meanwhile, the thin girls swaggered down the catwalk, swirling,
wrong for the old dresses they wore. When I watch 'period' dramas, the
actresses stride, like if they're wearing jeans. You watch, see if I'm not
right. Nil out of ten. They ought to take shorter paces, moving within the
compass of the hem. Daft, when they could look really authentic. Somebody tell
them.

Then my mind registered the dresses' jewellery as two more models
frolicked on, followed by a file of six more. Okay, lovely lasses, blonde,
raven, brunette, and bonny with it. But the jewellery.

It was so deafening, so blinding, that it all but blanked out the
girls themselves as they carried those precious items past and back, glowing
with a radiance I could feel. I stared, open-mouthed. I even started counting.
One, five, six. Then ten, twelve. I strove to see closer. Were the pinkos in
their original settings? You can change diamonds' colour by irradiation—
electrons, neutrons, deutrons, alpha particles, protons, the 'heavy' particles
from linear accelerators—with or without heat. But you need the naked gem to
muck about. And these looked mounted just as they'd been in Victoria's day. I
almost fainted from relief.

One dazzled me so I actually moaned aloud. There was (still is) a
precious aigrette called the Jika of Nadir Shah. Aigrettes are named from the
egret. Think of a small feather made of jewels for ladies' hats. English and
French, especially, in and out of fashion these 400 years, they quiver as the
ladies wearing them dance in the ballroom. Trembiants are another form, taking
off flowers on little springs of silver, set sometimes into slim miniature
'vases' made of precious metal. Semi-precious stones are commoner in aigrettes
than diamonds, that El Supremo of gems. Maybe it's because 'hair furniture'—as
Amy quaintly introduced the aigrette—was easily stolen by fast-running thieves
in the crowded cities of the past?

This was a copy of the famous Jika. Nadir Shah was a great Middle
East eighteenth-century warrior. Jewellers are raised on historic pieces, like
aspiring footballers have footballing heroes. This aigrette has a massive
emerald in the middle, and five smaller emeralds, the whole done as a feather.
They say it's a hefty 781 carats. It was the fashion in Victoria's day to copy
famous jewels in cheap materials—silver-plated steel instead of gold, cheap
gemstones instead of rubies. And the once cheapo pink 'fancy rose' diamonds,
instead of the priceless colourless 'white' gems.

The girl twirled, flounced, wearing some dress I didn't even see,
so seared was I by the rose-pink diamonds in her aigrette. An exact copy of the
Jika, but with pinkos substituting for the original's emeralds. Once, the
'taint' of pink colour destroyed a diamond's value, to the Victorians. Yellow
diamonds, even blue, were regarded as debris. Once mere curios, they now lurk
undetected in cheap discarded Victorian costume jewellery. I've never yet had
the luck to find one, though I know a dealer who bought a box of old Edwardian
neckties and almost amazed himself into a heart attack by becoming the proud
possessor of a pink diamond tiepin. He bought two new cars and a new house.
They're out there.