Signs and Wonders
A/N: Re-watching Lovejoy for the first time in DECADES and oh how I still love Lady Jane, hideous blue eye shadow and pantsuits and all. A tiny little angsty meander, this.
I still remember the first time he did it.
"Janey-" he said.
I'm not sure I even heard the rest of the sentence, to tell you the truth, although there was one. Lovejoy casually turned my name into an endearment and then rattled on about some piece of apparently gorgeous Louis XIV furniture that Tinker had barked up for him at a saleroom in Harrogate. And I tried to listen, I really did. I imagine he thought I was listening – when one spends an inordinate amount of time seated beside landed bores at dinner parties, one becomes rather good at faking interest. And I was interested, genuinely, as I usually was when Lovejoy got going on the subject of antiques. His enthusiasm and knowledge combined to create some special reaction that lit up his face, it really did. But for some reason, just then, my mind had caught on the sound of my name with that softened ending as if it were a record jumping over a scratch. For a moment or two I couldn't get past it, that sound. It was simultaneously unlike anything I had ever heard and as if I had never been called anything else in my life.
Janey.
I'm not even sure he realised he'd done it. We didn't even know each other that well then, not really. But I suppose that's how it was with Lovejoy and I: we met, and we were friends. There was no 'getting to know you' period. To anyone looking in we were a distinctly odd pair with nothing in common at all: Me, the lady of the manor and him, an ever-so-slightly disreputable antiques dealer whose only real interest in refinement was if it had been sculpted, carved or joined together by hands long since departed.
Janey.
He did it frequently after that. I always noticed, not that I ever let on. What could I tell him? That I found, after entirely too much consideration, that I liked it? That I liked it so much in fact, that it was bordering on the inappropriate and he should really stop? He would have crowed at that. He would have teased and flirted. And it really wasn't a flirtation. Oh, he flirted a-plenty, but that extra vowel wasn't part of it. It was just his name for me, in the same way that he called Tinker 'Tink'. He would not, for example, have spent as long thinking about it as I have over the years. It would have been off-the-cuff, an ad-lib, a spur-of-the-moment thing that somehow stuck. It was an endearment in the simplest sense, a signal that I had become part of his inner circle. That's what I concluded at the time, anyway.
No one else ever called me that, not before and not since. Not my husband, not my family, not old friends from long ago. I was only ever Janey to Lovejoy.
I wonder, now, if Alexander ever knew. Did Lovejoy ever call me that on the rare times he spoke to my husband out of my earshot? I doubt it, somehow, unless it was without thinking, and I suspect that Lovejoy had enough experience of dealing with the husbands of his female acquaintances to use caution without even really having to consciously do so. That makes our connection sound guilty and clandestine, but it really wasn't. Alexander simply was not jealous of Lovejoy. He had no need to be, but still. Given how easily he left me behind – how quiet and simple the dissolution of our marriage seemed to be for him – I wonder now whether I should have taken that more to heart. But at the time I was simply grateful to be in a partnership where I was trusted to have the friends I chose, even if Alexander didn't really approve.
He probably would have approved even less if he'd known how that endearment danced across my heart. Only gently and with very light feet, but dance it did nonetheless, in a way that should have tripped greater alarms than I ever acknowledged at the time. Or perhaps – just perhaps - alarms would have been the wrong kind of signal. Perhaps it should have been songbirds and trumpets. Perhaps I should have let those feet dance harder and perhaps I should have danced with them. Perhaps, perhaps.
Janey.
What a strange thing time is. How it changes our perceptions. I look back now and the meaning of that diminutive strikes me in a way it never did at the time, ringing a note as clear as bell. No, Lovejoy wasn't flirting when he gave me that name and no, he had not realised he'd even done it. I became Janey because I had become more something to him than I had been previously, and that I was something more to him came so naturally to both of us that neither of us noticed it. He was doing what those master craftsmen he so admired had done in the centuries before even the idea of us had existed. He was sculpting an image of me in his mind, with the curlicues and flourishes he somehow thought I deserved. I was no longer just Jane. I had acquired an architrave, a decorative shell to stand in that was formed of a name given to me by him alone.
I don't know why I never realised it then. Perhaps I did but I refused to acknowledge it. Now I think that perhaps, just perhaps, it was his way of saying he loved me, though he probably didn't even realise it himself.
Did he?
[END]