All round Quaker's walls are shelves covered with trophies, cups, bowls, vases, silverware, gold chalices. All sham. There's hardly an inch of wall that isn't stuck with plaques, shields, crests, ornaments that Quaker has not won hang-gliding, sprinting, shooting, swimming, high-diving. There are Olympic medals from the 1985 Mogadishu Winter Olympics for downhill slaloms and ski jumping. Quaker led our triumphant assault on Russian dominance of the downhill cycling races in the 1989 Honolulu Olympics. He collared the trophy for architectural Millennium designs. In fact, it's increasingly difficult to think up a new frigging sport or championship every blinking time I come.
He's done none of it. He's a dreamer whose dreams mean more to him than reality.
Hence my pathetic purchase of my kite trophy. Best I could do in such a rush.
'What is it, Lovejoy?' Quaker asked, spinning to face me.
Behind him, the brigadier rolled his eyes. I looked away. I always feel embarrassed at this stage.
'I feel a fraud, Quake,' I said. 'I've never ever won a thing.'
'No, no. It's okay.' Shining eyes on my parcel.
I unwrapped it, stood there like a duckegg with my glittering phoney cup and the silver kite model.
'It's your award, Quake. Eastern Hundreds Kite-flying Champion. They asked me to accept it for you at the National Awards Centre.'
He smacked his forehead.
'God, I clean forgot! Thanks, pal. You got me out of a real mess!'
I donated the award. He received it, eyes moist.
'Sorry, Lovejoy. It's just that I remember how Bushido looked after the match. Japan always held the title until I beat him in the playoffs.'
He sniffed a bit. I welled up myself. It's not often you meet a dynamic champ who is decently sympathetic about the chap he's defeated.
'Was Bushido there?' he asked sadly.
'Yes,' I invented. Well, I'd invented the championship, so I'd a right to invent who turned up. 'He looked pretty down. Said he'd give you a run for your money, next world championships.'
'You know, Lovejoy,' he said seriously, fondling his cup and the trophy, 'I admire that.
Taking defeat on the chin.'
'So do I,' I said fervently. I know defeat.
The brigadier couldn't hear behind the glass wall, but guessed the conversation. His headshake was graphic.
Maud entered at a sprint with a tray of edibles, thank God, all her own making. She was defloured, so to speak, in a clean pinafore and gave a smiling wave to her dad who nodded and returned to his newspaper. We settled down facing the river. Folk walk along the riverbank footpath into town. They pretend not to look in Maud's window, sometimes. They must wonder at Quaker's array of trophies and guess which sporting over-achiever lives there.
'How marvellous of you to bring Quaker's new award, Lovejoy!'
'No bother, love.'
Maud's grub is legendary. She cooks from Mrs Beeton's All About Cookery for the homeless of Suffolk. It's a wonder they don't all die from clogged arteries because it's heavy suety stuff. Or maybe that's the Council's plan? Some charity buys the raw ingredients for her. I like Maud. She and I started making smiles soon after Quaker took to his wheelchair, but I got worried. Anyhow by then I'd met Georgina from Stoke.
There you go.
The whole point of this is that Quaker doesn't even do sports that he can do. Doesn't shoot, no Paralympics, doesn't sketch or study ornithology. He just accepts awards.
It's all myth.
In fact, even The Day Quaker's Legs Got Crushed In That Accident is also a fable, invented for reasons nobody knows. There is no paraplegia. Quaker is as fit as a flea.
He could jump up and ramble his riverbank with the best of them.
We all deceive ourselves. Which raises the question of his missus.
This is Maud: thirty-six, palish hair, blue of eye, shapely if a bit dumpy. Nice legs, and what the county set call 'good bones', though I should think that all bones are pretty decent things to have around. Features pleasant, smile animated and alert. A bright compassionate woman is Maud Quaker.
She knows Quaker's a fraud, and told me about him when we were resting after having tired ourselves.
'Quaker's not to be blamed, Lovejoy,' she explained along the pillow. We were in my cottage, my chair propping the door because the lock needed mending.
'Why not?' I'd asked, mystified. 'He's a total con.'
'We all deceive ourselves. You. Me. My dad. Government. Why only blame Quaker?'
'Because he sponges on you,' I said, offended.
'So do you, Lovejoy.'
She pointed out that she paid for my food. She lent me her motor. She kept on about it until I got narked.
'At least I do a job,' I said heatedly.
'So does Quaker,' she'd said to my surprise. 'And he doesn't just scrounge off women and faint when he looks at silly old antiques.'
'What job?' I challenged. 'The idle bugger just sits in his wheelchair making up imaginary bloody trophies while I'm slogging in muck and bullets.'
I don't usually get narked, especially with blokes who've thought up a good scam. I too am an idleback. People who live in glass houses and all that.
It was then that she started to speak about Quaker really for the first time. Reluctantly, both of us naked as a grape, she told me in whispers. Afterwards she seemed scared, and swore me to secrecy. I promised, hand on her heart. And kept silent for ever and ever. Until now.
'Quaker's the conduit for the raj,' she'd said.
'Eh?'
My mind wearily chugged its synapses into action. Nerve ends groped. Electrons flickered.
'He can't be,' I got out. In fact, I almost laughed.
'He is, Lovejoy,' she said firmly, blue eyes looking at me that day in my divan bed. 'So take back what you said about him.'
'Quaker? He's the raj's brainpiece?'
Then I did it, made her mad. I really did laugh, rolling in the aisles at the thought that Quaker, that deluded bloke who lived a total sham, actually was the pivot for a – no, the – biggest club of investors in antiques.
I'd heard of women's devotion to dud blokes, of course. In fact I'd had plenty myself, but that was no fault of mine.
'Quaker?' I rolled in the aisles. 'He wouldn't know what the raj is.'
'No?' she spat. 'There are nine of them. Quaker knows. Who do you think he's seeing now, while you pleasure his wife?' She spoke with bitterness. 'And how come a foolish woman like me puts up with a neurotic like Quaker? Do you think I'd stay with him a minute, if he was only what he seems?'
'Stop it, love,' I said, wiping my eyes. 'You don't have to convince me. I like Quaker.
And you know I worship you.' I propped myself up on an elbow, looking down. 'I take it back, doowerlink.'
She gazed up at me, took a deep breath as she reached some decision.
'You want convincing, Lovejoy? Then listen: the raj decides which antiques to buy. And who can steal which antiques. And who's allowed to get away with it. Who can rob museums and who can't. Big John Sheehan's one.'
My smile faded. Women don't know these things as a rule. She must have read some article in one of those antiques glossies that get names, dates, and antiques wrong.
'Bet you Quaker's never even heard of the raj.'
'No? Ask me, Lovejoy.' She waited. I stared. She was deadly serious. 'That trio of motor car dealers who stole those two Constable oil sketches? They tried to sell them last New Year in a hotel. They were caught, weren't they?'