The traffic had become a sullen and glistening queue like it always does in drizzle. I was moving across the traffic lights, on red, when I did another half-step back, turned to wave. It happened all in a second. The nearest car’s engine boomed. Its side edged my calves and tipped me over. I heard Francie yelp. My trouser leg tore. Its tires squealing, the bloody saloon streaked across against the red light and swung down East Hill.
“Here,” I yelled indignantly. “See that silly sod?”
The lights changed to green. The traffic moved. Witnesses dispersed in the worsening weather. I grinned back at Francie. “I’m all right, love,” I called cheerily. “Lucky, eh?”
If I hadn’t been fooling about to make Betty laugh I’d have been… Keeping up a brave smile for Francie’s benefit, I made the opposite pavement and walked on before looking across the road to where Francie and Betty stood by the war memorial. I waved once, then the museum cut them off from sight. Only then did I start the shakes and lose my idiot grin. Luck’s great stuff, but it’s not stuff you can depend on.
« ^ »
—— 6 ——
Everybody lusts, but differently. And it seems to me that lust’s main function is the pursuit of what you haven’t got. So nuns in their lonesome beds may not all crave similarly. Likewise, me and Jo were panting after different prey when we met at the Tudor Halt. I was superconsciously nervous about having luckily stayed alive. Tonight I’d be the perfect lady’s man.
She was especially pretty, wearing a dark silk shawl and a late Victorian Neapolitan mosaic brooch, neat and minute. Her hair was ringlety, her face oval. Her lovely eyes had dark lashes ten feet long. She glanced about, amused.
“You chose this place because of some antique, Lovejoy. I know you. And I’ve lost sleep achieving this Regency look.”
“It’s not. Honest.”
We bickered all through supper. Lovely candlelit grub in the nooky old joint, with a beautiful woman shimmering opposite. You can’t spend your time better, almost. I enjoyed her company even though I was sussing out the other diners, checking that Karl’s waitresses hadn’t transmuted into thinly disguised mafiosi. Jo explained what the meal was—posh grub comes hidden under sauce—but knows me well enough to gloss over the grub. Finally I got Karl to bring me a cigar so they’d bring me one of the antique smoker’s companions. Jo laughed and clapped her hands.
“I knew it, Lovejoy!”
Found out. My face was red. This restaurant has an entire dozen of these lovely creations. Tonight I’d drawn the silver figure of a frog leaning on a toadstool. Remove the frog’s head and there’s a spirit reservoir. Decorative holes sprout spills for lighting your cigar with a grand flourish. Antique dealers often advertise them as “silver ornaments, incomplete,” thinking they’ve bits missing. Wrong. Buy them even though they’re little more than a century old, which isn’t much. You can still talk them off a dealer for an average week’s wage.
Jo and I left the nosh-house holding hands. Karl’s an old Hanover man whose wry good night was as good as a body search. For six years he’s refused to sell me the smokers’
companions. But one day…
“You love those old things, Lovejoy, don’t you?”
“Yes. Same reason as I love you older women.”
“Cheek.”
She came in for a coffee, and told me enough about her friend Shona. Enough for me to find her, I mean.
“You think it’s worth phoning her, love?”
“It would only worry her, Lovejoy. And her bureau was probably insured…”
Shona McGunn, I listed mentally. Teacher. Near Dubneath, Caithness. Single. House owner, et cetera.
Jo stayed a long, long while. I was on my very best super-romantic behaviour, really gallant. As the fire died into embers and pitch night began, I suffered fantasies about noises outside. Twice I got up to peer nervously into the darkness. Once, too, Jo laughed when something scratched in my thatched roof, probably a bat or some night creature. Jo’s joky question if my cottage was haunted didn’t help either. I’m thankful my garden’s an obstacle course of weeds and brambles.
Hiding my nervousness, I became frantically adoring and, I prayed, adorable. That night I really earned survival. I was the world’s most ardent lover. I became a raconteur, the wittiest humorist, sensitive and worshiping. And, it turned out, the most wideawake sleeper. Not a bloody wink all the dark hours from worry while Jo softly breathed. All right, I’m a coward, but that car business… Anyway, cowards last longer, even if knackered.
“Lovejoy,” Jo whispered as the curtain gained its gray dawn rims. “I must go. Will you see me tonight?”
“Anything you say, er, darling,” I said fervently. After all, maybe I owed her my life, having used her as a night shield against the predators. “Er, sorry about those, er, marks.” Her arms wore bruised fingerprints.
“Silly. I’ll come at nine,” she said mistily. “We must talk seriously. About us. And Bob.”
This sounded bad news. “Of course, love,” I said sincerely.
Cautiously I saw her off into the palish world. I waited until the milk float clattered along the lane, then, calming in the comparative safety of dawn, I fried some bread for breakfast.
That evening, ostentatiously carrying no suitcase, I caught Jacko’s rickety lorry into town.
Once, I saw a famous comedian die—not meaning he got no laughs, but as in death—
on the stage. The newspapers trumpeted that he’d “gone as he would have wished.”
Never. Death is the worst option, and I was going to give it up for Lent. The police would only ballock me if I asked their help because they always do. Flight was the best policy, and where else but to pretty Shona McGunn? And the prospect of that treasure mine of antiques.
An hour of flitting from alleyway to ginnel in town, from doorway to cranny, and I left the place underneath a friendly driver’s tarpaulin bucketing along the A604. He dropped me off at a Sudbury tavern, where I stayed until closing time. I stole a white towel during my sojourn there, and was down on the bypass by midnight among the windblown rubbish cutting letters from the towel with a penknife. When held, a passing motorist could see the name francie quite clearly. Then, soaked to the skin, I crouched miserably in the shelter of the hedge and waited with my improvised sign. God, I was tired.
The fairground cavalcade came through three hours after midnight. Clapped out, I creaked erect, and held up my sign against the driving rain. The seventh vehicle was Francie’s. I was among friends.
“Fairs are creatures of habit,” Francie told me as she drove northward through worsening weather. Husband Dan was driving the big wagon, which carried his Wall of Death sideshow. Little Betty was asleep in a specially made bunk in Francie’s vehicle.
She handled it with reflex skill, towing her caravan. Unless there was a holdup along the Great North Road somewhere, they’d be pitching in Penrith in time to catch the early evening crowds. The fair did the same every year.
“Penrith’s always worth two evenings,” she explained. “We call pitches twoers, fourers, sixers, according to how many days.” She’d put the heater full on to dry me out. “I guessed you were in trouble, Lovejoy. Dan was all for seeking that saloon car that tried to run you down when I told him. He was mad at me, not taking its number.”
Not imagination, then. I cheered up. Even a murder risk becomes easier to cope with when you know it’s really there. “Look, sunshine. I can’t exactly pay for the ride, but I’m good value. Any ideas how I can fund this excursion?”
She was a full minute replying. “I’ll think of a way, Lovejoy.”
I took a further minute. “Ta, love,” I said.
That day I slogged harder than I’d ever done. Illusion’s my main problem. In fact, it’s the one main problem for us all, because illusion does us down. It’s true: Blokes are narked that their bosses turn out to have feet of clay. Birds go sour realizing their lover isn’t exactly the handsome film star they’d imagined. Sometimes an illusion becomes an essential part of life; I’ve told you about Lily loving Patrick. She pretends that his womanlike behavior is just a passing phase. Illusion. It catches you out.