The Grace in Older Women Read Online Free PDF

excuses, but failing
often. He's a museum archivist.
    Patiently I waited her rage out. Long wait. Nobody had pinched her
pitch, of course; there were only three other barrows in the square. One I knew
vaguely, Connor, a seller of hot potatoes with cheese fillings. Another was
Lucille, the fish lass from Lowestoft, looking the part under red-and-white
striped awnings and straw boater, neat pinny. And Gravity Woodward, a morose
globe-hater who takes racing bets on commission while disguised as a tree that
speaks morose hatred in a little square of greenery encouraging you to throw
coppers in the charity fountain. The flyers - sudden sellers who whirlwind
through markets offering discount fruit on its last legs and who hadn't a legit
hawker's licence between them - weren't in today.
    Tonietta fired off one last salvo at Lucille and set up her cart
by simply halting and opening the top. It lets down into a small counter. She
smiled beatifically.
    ‘Hello, Lovejoy. You know Jox is looking for you?'
    'Aye.' I eyed her wares. Trinkets, some tortoise-shell.
    You go a long way to get more lovely material to work with than
tortoise-shell. Some major antiques were made of it. Like, Henry IV of France
was nursed in a cradle made of a tortoise's inverted shell, one complete thing.
Some writers claim that the ancient Greeks and Romans manufactured musical
instruments from sea turtle carapaces. I've even done a fake one myself, a lyre
from dried cracked old shell, copying the musical shape from a vase in the British
Museum and selling the final instrument for Jellbone's missus after he got done
for robbing two Bavarian antique dealers of a valuable Cozens watercolour in
Coggeshall.
    ‘I’ve some pale shell, Lovejoy.'
    Dealers call pale tortoise-shell antiques 'blondies'. It is highly
prized. The shell itself is sold by the pound, best from the Caribbean but
sometimes the Far East. White shell - I think it a sort of dusky amber colour -
costs ten times as much as the so-called 'black', which is grubby brown to near
black. The horrible thing is the way it's collected. The islanders catch a
turtle while it's laying its eggs, turn it on its back, then do one of two
ghastly things. They light a fire on its living belly, or they lever it into a
cauldron of boiling water so it can thrash and bleat and flail . . .
    'Sit down for fuck's sake, Lovejoy.' Tonietta abused me roundly,
giving me her folded stool. She rammed my head between my knees so I could
recover. 'You're always like this dying on me you squeamish bastard I'm sick of
the frigging sight of you you pillock that's three pounds twelve shillings and
elevenpence,' she continued brightly to a lady with a little girl. Tonietta
talks in old coinage, before the Great Decimal Deception conned us and made the
Treasury rich. She meant three sixty-five, give or take. 'Original genuine
tortoise-shell pendant, in silver plate. I've some beautiful combs . . .'
    The poor turtles are sometimes dissected free of their shell while
still alive, then, bleeding and naked, are chucked back into the shark-infested
waters where, in time, they grow another shell but of poor quality. It's an
industry. On the lovely wave-washed moonlight shores of the tropical islands,
you get served turtle steaks cooked in the poor thing's carapace. A turtle dies
slow. It dies slowest, they say, in Madagascar, where they can keep a sea
turtle alive during the very act of dissection so it can actually scent its own
turtle soup cooking . . .
    'What's the matter with Lovejoy?' the little girl asked.
    'Drunk, love,' Tonietta said smoothly, crouching to be friendly
while the tot's mother paid for the pendant.
    'Lovejoy? She's telling porkies, isn't she?’
    'He'll be better when he's sober.' Tonietta straightened, less
friendly.
    'Lovejoy drinks when one of his aunties tells him off,' the mite
foghorned. 'Your aunties don't stay long, do they, Lovejoy?'
    'Not usually, Brenda.' I babysit for Brenda and her cousin Henry.
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