JUNK and other short stories

by Duncan James

  So he took his time, stopping to look at what other sellers had on offer. He noticed on one of the tables a couple of old toys – he used to have some exactly like that when he was a lad. He idly picked one up to look at the price. Staggering! A hundred and fifty quid for a van he remembered had only cost a few shillings of his pocket money. The chap selling it said it would be worth a great deal more if he had the box to go with it.

  The only other thing that caught his eye was a rather nice looking oriental vase. Except that it had a lid on it, so it wasn’t really a flower vase. A ginger storage jar, the man said, and real Chinese, too. You could tell by the characters scrawled underneath it. And there are dragons on it, and everything. Fifty pounds was the asking price, but he eventually settled for thirty-five. It would look rather good on the table in the hall, which was decorated in a sort of blue colour, like the jar. He must have been mad, he thought afterwards. He’d gone there to sell things, not to buy them.

  Anyway, it looked good on the hall table when he got home, although he did take the lid off and put it in the drawer. It somehow looked better without it. The more he looked at his new purchase, the more he liked it. It was nicely glazed and delicately coloured, and there wasn’t a bit of damage on it anywhere. He actually began to wonder if it might be worth rather more that he had paid for it. You read about these things, after all. Old vases in the attic for years, suddenly found to be worth thousands. He got a book from the library about old vases, and decided that his bargain could just as well be from the Ming Dynasty as anything. He was beginning to convince himself that he had picked up a rare collectors’ item, so he took it to the local museum to see what they thought. They didn’t think much, as it happened, as the man there didn’t really know about rare vases, Ming or otherwise. He did suggest, though, that one of the big auctioneers in London would know, without a doubt.

  So off he went with his precious possession, to Christerbys, in Old Bond Street. The lady on reception said they had an expert on these things, and he eventually appeared from upstairs to have a look. He seemed too young to know much about anything, but studied it carefully, and gave the impression of knowing what he was talking about. He eventually decided that it wasn’t a genuine Ming, but a very good copy, probably made in Holland, and, quite honestly, not worth putting in an auction, but he was curious to know how he had got hold of it. He told the man the story, from car boot sale to hall table, via the local museum. He gave the expert his address, so that he could be sent a catalogue of their next auction of oriental porcelain, in case something similar took his interest.

  So that was that. For thirty-five quid, what more could you expect. It went back on the hall table, and there it stayed until one dramatic and frightening afternoon.

  He had been out, shopping – a few bits from Sainsburys, nothing much. He got back to find that he had forgotten to lock the door, although he could have sworn he had – he always did. You could never be too sure these days. But it was open, so in he went. That’s when he got the shock of his life.

  There was a masked man in the hall, with a gun in one hand and his vase in the other.

  “Stay where you are, or I’ll shoot,” said the man, but he was too late. Before he could even take aim, he had been knocked off his feet and all the breath taken out of him in a flying tackle. His head struck the bottom stair with a sickening crack – the sort of noise it makes when you break a stick across your knee – and he lay quite motionless, with the gun under his twisted body, and the vase in two pieces on the hall carpet. It was all over in a flash.

  The proud owner of the vase was trembling with fear and anger. Whatever had he done? It had been a spontaneous reaction on seeing the man. He wasn’t violent by nature, and had never done anything like that in his life before. He didn’t know he had it in him to react like that.

  He nervously went over to the twisted figure at the foot of the stairs, and felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. The masked man was quite dead.

  In a daze, he phoned for the police to explain what had happened, and then called an ambulance, which arrived first. He had picked up the two pieces of the broken vase and put them in the drawer of the hall table, with the lid.

  He kept on explaining what had happened; how he’d feared for his life at the hands of the armed burglar and had reacted in self-defence. Eventually, the body was taken away, and he went to the police station to make a statement and face more questions. This time, he made sure he locked the door, which bore the marks of having been forced open. A jemmy or something like that, so the policeman said.

  He was eventually allowed home on police bail, but hated going back on his own. His GP gave him a sedative to calm his shattered nerves, and he got a man in to mend the door and change the lock.

  To cut a long story short, the coroner eventually brought in a verdict of death by misadventure on the masked man, who had no previous criminal record and was obviously acting on information, perhaps even from the local museum, which had led him to believe that the vase was worth trying to steal, which of course it wasn’t. To make matters worse, the man’s gun was a fake – an imitation – just like the wretched vase he had come to steal.

  Some months later, a judge accepted a plea of guilty to manslaughter and agreed that he had acted in self-defence. He was given a two year suspended sentence.

  It was a good time afterwards that he eventually plucked up the courage to get the broken vase out of the drawer in the hall table, determined to throw it away. Damn thing – he should never have bought it in the first place. But he began to change his mind, however, when he looked at it closely. The base had come away from the body of the vase where the two parts had obviously once been joined. It was as clean a break as you could wish to see. But what really caught the man’s eye was what looked like some form of document, neatly folded into the base of the vase. The manuscript, if that’s what it was, was in neat but tiny Chinese script, on very thin and flimsy paper of some sort. Perhaps rice paper, he thought.

  He was very puzzled by this discovery. The man at Christerbys had said the vase had been made in Holland, famous for its Delft and other makes of porcelain. So why would they hide a document like this in the base of it – written in Chinese, too? All very odd.

  There was only one thing for it – he would pay another visit to the young expert in Old Bond Street.

  He told the receptionist that he had been there before, told her what it was about, and asked to see the same young man again.

  “An expert in oriental pottery, I think he said he was.”

  “We certainly have a specialist in that field,” she replied. “I’ll enquire if he’s free to see you.”

  An elderly man eventually arrived, shook his hand warmly and asked how he could help. This fellow looked much more the part, and instantly inspired more confidence.

  He was shown the vase, and the manuscript secreted in the broken-off base. He showed immediate interest.

  “Where did you come across this?” he asked, squinting at the manuscript through an eyeglass produced from his waistcoat pocket.

  He told the old man the story, although did not go into detail about how the jar had come to be in two pieces.

  After some time, the man said, “This is almost certainly a genuine piece of Ming Dynasty porcelain, I would guess dating from about 1400 to 1450. What’s more, I am almost sure that the British Museum has one exactly similar. But I have never seen a manuscript like this before,” he admitted, “and certainly not one hidden in the base of a Ming jar in this fashion.”

  He carefully examined the two pieces of jar.

  “It is such a clean break, exactly along the line of the join, that a restoration should be relatively easy and impossible to detect afterwards,” he pronounced. “That is, of course,” he added hurriedly, “if you should wish it to be restored. I can easily arrange
for that to be done if you should so decide.”

  The owner of the broken pot was speechless again, but nodded.

  “I suppose it’s worth restoring?” he asked.

  “Without a doubt,” replied the expert. “I can arrange for one of the top porcelain restorers at the British Museum to undertake the work for you, if you wish.” The man paused. “There is, however, one difficulty.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “We shall need to decide whether to remove the manuscript during the refurbishment, or to keep it hidden where it is. I am no expert on documents of this sort, but I can easily consult a colleague who would be able to help you decide. Much will depend on what the document says, and whether it has a value in its own right.”

  “Ah,” he said, now quite bewildered. “I suppose we should know what the document is all about before we decide,” he agreed. “It could lead us to hidden treasure, or something!”

  “I doubt it,” said the expert. “And in any case, my guess would be that you hardly need hidden treasure now. You already have it in the shape of this historic jar.”

  “You mean it could be valuable?” he asked.

  “Without a doubt,” replied the learned old man again.

  “How much?”

  “I have no idea how much the manuscript might be worth, but the restored jar, on its own, could fetch at least a quarter of a million pounds at auction.”

  “Good God!” he exclaimed. “And I only paid thirty five quid for it at a car boot sale!”

  “It’s such a pity it’s not quite complete,” said the expert thoughtfully.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is a storage jar,” explained the man, “probably for keeping ginger in, or honey, or some such thing. It should have a lid.”

  “But I have the lid,” he exclaimed, “at home, in the drawer of the hall table.”

  “In good condition?” asked the expert auctioneer.

  “Perfect, so far as I can tell,” he replied.

  “In that case, add another half a million pounds to the likely sale price,” said the man. “Perhaps you would be good enough to let me see it.”

  “I shall bring it up tomorrow,” he promised, “and leave to rest to you - the valuation, repair, decision about the manuscript – everything. I would like you to auction it for me when you can.”

  “Certainly,” replied the man. “It will be a great pleasure to act of your behalf, and it could well be that the British Museum would wish to buy it themselves, to put alongside the similar jar which, I recollect, they already have on display. Now, if you would be willing to leave this with us today, I will draw up an official receipt and immediately insure the objects for a sum of – shall we say – one million pounds?”

  And so it was agreed.

  As he was leaving, he said to the expert, “By the way, what happened to the colleague of yours I saw when I first brought this to you? He told me it was a copy, made recently in Holland.”

  “A young man?”

  “Yes, he was. I thought at the time he didn’t look old enough to have the experience to decide.”

  “As it turns out, you were quite right, and he certainly should have known better. Anyone with the slightest knowledge on the subject could have told you that it was an original, dating from the fifteenth century. But he is no longer with us, I’m pleased to tell you, although the circumstances of his leaving were, shall we say, unfortunate.”

  “Why, what happened.”

  “He was killed in a somewhat mysterious incident. Something to do with a gun, I am told.”

  ***

  3 - A BRIDGE OF LETTERS

  Marjorie Northcot died quite suddenly. It turned out to be a heart attack, but it was a great shock because nobody was expecting it at all. There were no real signs, early on.

  There is never a good time to die, but, although she had no real say in the matter, this was about the worst time she could have picked.

  Her husband, Maurice, was abroad. He was ‘something’ at the Foreign Office, although no-one, not even Marjorie, was ever quite sure what. Neither was anyone quite sure where he was. One thing soon became clear, though. He was not ‘abroad’ in the sense of ‘gone to a conference’ or anything like that. He was travelling abroad. One official at his office thought he had flown to Singapore, while another thought it had been Hong Kong. One chap, a clerk of some sort, even suggested he had gone to Korea, but nobody took much notice. Not that Maurice had a proper office either, really. Not the sort one commutes to every day, because that is something Maurice never did. Commute.

  In the end, when they did eventually track him down, it turned out that they were all wrong, as he had intended.

  He had gone to Helsinki, but only a couple of people knew.

  So it took some time to find him, and even longer, since he was travelling, for him to get home for what, in the end, turned out to be a much delayed funeral for Marjorie.

  Not that it made much difference to her, of course. The one who really suffered was son Peter.

  He was only ten at the time, and devoted to his mother. She was gentle and kind and loving, but strict just the same. She spent as much time as she could with Peter, and realised that what he really needed was a father. Peter realised this too, but he never saw much of him because he was always travelling. When he was home, though, they got on like a house on fire. Football, fishing, long walks with the dog, playing with the train set – everything. But only ever for a day or so at a time - never for long enough. His mother was useless at fishing, didn’t play football or enjoy watching it, and didn’t understand about railways, real or toy.

  Suddenly, Peter was a very lonely, small boy. No mother at all, and not much of a father either.

  He had no time to wonder what might happen to him, because it happened anyway, and immediately. Aunt Elizabeth moved in, for the time being, especially to look after him. After the funeral, when they had finished packing all his stuff, like toys and books and clothes and so on, they took him back to their place. He ended up staying there for ever, with Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Norman. His old home was put up for sale, and his Dad bought a small cottage somewhere else.

  Now; there was nothing wrong with Aunt Elizabeth, or her husband, Uncle Norman, who was OK, too. But they were no substitute for a real Mum and Dad, and they had no children of their own, so he still had no-one at home to play with. However, it was as strange for them to have Peter staying there as it was for Peter to be staying with them. It soon became obvious that he was not just staying there, either – he was living there. This was his new home. Uncle Norman and Aunty Liz had a nice house, in a sort of rural area, and they had a dog, and they had a decent sized garden where you could kick a ball about without annoying the neighbours, who were also OK by the way, and the nearby school he was sent to was, in many ways, better than the one he had started at and just left.

  But somehow it wasn’t home, and never would be.

  Peter and the dog got on really well; he made a lot of new friends there, at school, and, for some reason, seemed to be learning a lot. He was probably quite happy, given the stress and upheaval and sadness he had recently gone through. But he longed for the rare visits his father was able to make. He knew his father couldn’t visit more often, but, for a few months, actually saw him now more often than he had when his mother was alive. But it wasn’t half often enough, and the visits quickly became less and less frequent.

  One day, not long after Peter had moved to his new home, his father sent him a letter. There was not a lot of news in it, and his father didn’t say where he was, but the envelope had a London postmark, so Peter guessed he was not ‘travelling’.

  My Dear Peter,

  I thought I would drop you a line just to see if you are all right, and to send you my love. It was wonderful to see you again the other day, and I wish I
could see you more often, but you know my work keeps me away from home quite a bit. I’m afraid I shall be away quite a long time this trip. Aunty and Uncle tell me that you are well, and I hope you are starting to settle in with them OK. They are good people and are very fond of you so I am sure you will be all right staying there. But I know it is not the same as being at home, and perhaps one day we shall be able to live together again in another home of our own. That will be really nice, and it is something I shall look forward to. They say you are doing well at school, which is good news, so keep working hard. If you get the time, it would be nice to get a letter from you to hear your news. The address at the top will always get to me.

  With much love, Dad.

  The address at the top was just ‘Dept. OS 19, The Foreign Office, London, SW.1.’

  Peter wrote back, almost at once, thinking his Dad would do the same.

  Dear Dad,

  Thank you for your letter. I hope you are well. I am alrite and getting used to things. But I miss you and Mum of course. School is OK and I am playing football. We have started French which I like and am good at. Please write again soon.

  Love Peter, xxxx

  But he didn’t write soon. In fact, he didn’t write for a month or so, during which time Peter had sent at least two more letters. Eventually, they managed to keep up a pretty regular flow of correspondence, which, in time, became the only contact between them, as Maurice spent more and more time away. His letters to Peter never contained much news, and always seemed to be posted in London. “I never have much news, as nothing much ever happens for me to tell you about. I just seem to work all the time”, he once explained. Peter, on the other hand, always had plenty to talk about, and the older he grew, the more he enjoyed writing about his life. It was obvious to his father that he was doing well at school, and that he was particularly good at languages. He eventually started talking about his own future, and even thought he might one day join the Army, if he could get to university first. Maurice was delighted to read this, and was full of encouragement.