The Vatican Rip

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The trouble with life is, you start off worse and go downhill. I'd bought the rip in winter, two days before my Italian lessons with the delectable Maria were to begin— though I didn't know that then.

I'm an antique dealer. The antiques game is always at a lowish ebb in January, probably because everybody's spent up after Christmas and is knackered by the weather anyway, so I was on the scrounge and feeling very sorry for myself. It hadn't been too easy of late, what with inflation and all that. And the scanty tourists who knock about East Anglia in deep midwinter tend to be holy, on their way to carol services in our ancient little chapels. They aren't so keen on our priceless (or indeed worthless) antiques.

On this particular day the roads out of my village were bad. There had been one of those heavy snowfalls the previous night after a solid weekend of sustained gales.

Typically, the buses never even started out from the nearby town, and as far as civilization was concerned our village might have been on Mars. A couple of lads from Hall Farm managed to shift the worst snowdrifts using tractors and got the south road partially cleared by noon. I was lucky—so I thought—and got a lift in from Ann Scott, the cheerful and pretty lace-mad wife of an insurance assessor. She tried telling me that the famous nineteenth-century torchon lace was superior to Honiton if properly made. We argued all the way. She was wrong, of course. 'Torchon' means dishcloth, but she wouldn't be told. She has a valuable collection of lace samplers I'd been trying to buy from her on tick for years. We'd had several intimate afternoon negotiations. I'd lost every one on a pinfall.

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