“Tell her I’m ill – something infectious but not prostrating. Tell her I’ve got pinkeye . . . Very well, then, tell her I think I’ve got pinkeye. Surely your conscience could go so far as that. It’s got an enormous balance in hand; it would never feel the difference.”
He was still trying to outmanoeuvre Archdeacon Barnard’s sturdy shade when Mary Fitzgerald proclaimed her presence in the house. “Lydia! Lydia! Here I am. I let myself in, to save trouble.”
“These labour-saving devices!” Lydia exclaimed. She set her teeth, arranged a smile over them, and left the room.
Lydia was right, and lunch would mean tea; for Mary announced that she would take off her hat and just run a comb through her hair. As they went upstairs, he opened the study door a chink and listened, since at least he ought to know if he was developing pinkeye. Gabble-gabble, gabble-gabble. Then came a loud, glad shriek.
“Tebic! So you are a Tebic addict, too.”
Nothing is created without purpose, said Humphrey to himself. Mary Fitzgerald knew about Tebic, and presently he would partake in that knowledge. For Lydia, reared in strict regard for truth, could scarcely pretend to be an addict to something she knew nothing about. Besides, why shouldn’t she ask? There is nothing humiliating in an honest admission of ignorance.
The ensuing silence was fractional, though to his impatience it seemed endless. Then he heard Lydia say – and her voice was round and warm and glowing as a pigeon’s breast – “I can’t imagine myself without it.”
He gave a shout of laughter.
Having thus discovered himself, there was nothing for it; he had to go in to lunch. And between lunch and tea Mary Fitzgerald insisted on arranging his books for him, grouping them by height, which would make it much easier to dust them.
A Flying Start
YOUNG MR HARINGTON was paying one of this usual studious visits to the Abbey Antique Galleries and had as usual brought Mrs Harington with him. Seeing them come in, the assistant, mindful of a previous recommendation, unobtrusively withdrew; the gentleman was one of those customers, like the pot in the proverb, who won’t come to the boil if they are watched. Mr Harington had settled to his studies, and Mrs Harington, who couldn’t positively withdraw, was giving an appearance of having done so, gracefully killing time with the patch boxes and vinaigrettes displayed on the rosewood sofa table, and eventually rewarded by finding something she could study, too. She stood patiently, cradling it in her hand. Once or twice, she held it out, saying, “Look, Richard. Isn’t this rather . . .” But Richard was absorbed in the decision whether or not to buy the églomisé mirror, and did not turn his head.
If a poet or artist had happened to be walking down Abbey Street and had glanced in at the window that framed Richard and Lizzie Harington amid the dusk and glitter of the showroom like two elegant fish poised tail downward in a rather overfurnished aquarium, he might have wondered why anybody should be interested in antiques when the Abbey Galleries contained two such strikingly handsome specimens of the contemporary. The third denizen of the aquarium (a crab, not a fish, and therefore stationed, not poised), Mr Edom, the gallery owner, was lurking behind an Empire harp, waiting for Mr Harington to make up his mind. The young gentleman was a distinguished customer, one who paid on the nail and scorned to bargain; but it did not do to hurry him.
There was a sudden stir in the aquarium. Richard had taken the wallet out of his pocket. But a moment later he put it back again, and with the coquettish flick of a fish moved away to examine a George II coffeepot. His examination was appreciative but did not go deep. Noticing this, Mrs Harington came forward, holding out her hand. “Look, Richard. Isn’t this rather charming?”
On her palm lay a very small enamelled locket, shaped like a heart; against a scarlet background and framed by a band of seed pearls was the head, in full face, of a grey cat with a pretty expression. “I suppose it’s Victorian,” she said.
Mr Edom, coming forward in his turn, said, “Second Empire.”
Richard Harington gave the locket a brief but careful scrutiny. “I don’t like it.”
Her lovely, tranquil countenance registered no shade of disappointment, of protest, of private disagreement. Without a word, she replaced the locket on the velvet-lined show tray whence she had taken it, and began to turn over a portfolio of prints.
She’s not out of quite the same drawer as he, thought Mr Edom – a fact that he had for some time suspected. Too tactful. Poor young lady, she wouldn’t get her locket! A shame, really, since she had been so taken with it. But, of course, young Mr Harington was absolutely right; the locket would have looked quite unsuitable – trivial, and even slightly disgraceful – attached to that classically long, full, white neck. It wasn’t that Mr Harington grudged his lovely Lizzie a pleasure, didn’t love to decorate her: the necklace of white jade, the set of French paste, the Nattier fan – no end to the things he had bought her; though lately the ardour of his choosings had turned more strongly to the furnishings of his son and heir. But if you possess both flawless taste and a flawlessly lovely young wife, you are bound to feel as a connoisseur as well as a husband. A matter of what you might call sacred and profane love, thought Mr Edom; they can’t be expected to curl up under the same blanket. That is what flawless taste brings you to, rendering you unable to enjoy both the draped beauty and the plump dreamy charmer who leans over the wellhead as though she were smiling at the reflection of her breasts. Flawless taste – an excellent thing in a customer but outright ruin to any art dealer if he once allows it to dictate to him.
Meanwhile Mr Harington had left the coffeepot, paused awhile for another survey of the Waterford comports he had looked at last time and wouldn’t get this time, either; and returned to the églomisé mirror. There he stood, gazing at it with the whole power of his sight – and not even noticing the reflection of himself that it gave back. I hope he gets it, thought the dealer. He deserves it.
And at that moment the door opened and a lady came in. Could anything be more unfortunate? Wringing his hands behind his back, Mr Edom approached her in silence.
“Have you got a pair of Staffordshire prophets?”
“No, Madam. I have no Staffordshire of any description.”
Short of spitting in her face, he could scarcely have made himself more repelling. Trembling with thankfulness, he saw her go away.
Mrs Harington had strayed her way into the more miscellaneous assortment at the back of the gallery. Mr Harington was still fixed before the églomisé mirror. Time went on.
“I’ll have it.” Raising his voice, he called, “Lizzie! Come and look at this. Shall we have it?”
“Oh yes! It’s an enchantment. I’ve been longing for you to get it.”
It reflected her as though she were standing in the doorway of a trellised arbour. Mr Edom came sidling into the background of the picture. “So have I, Mrs Harington. I knew it was Mr Harington’s piece. So much so that whenever a London dealer has come in I’ve stepped it up by another fifty guineas. Defended it with my life, you might say.”
Out came the wallet again, and a neatly folded cheque was drawn from it and filled in with young Mr Harington’s usual care. Whether he made out his cheques for a sum of one figure or, as in this case, three, he wrote them with the same deliberation, read them over with the same care, and checked them against the receipt. Meanwhile, Mrs Harington had gone in search of her gloves, which she had put down, she said, somewhere or other.
“I think you left them on the sofa table, Mrs Harington.”
“So I did! Mr Edom, you’re wonderful. You’re a falcon. You notice everything.”
Together they left the gallery, he with his receipt, she with the heart-shaped locket. Mr Edom had noticed this, too.
Having summoned back the assistant, he got out his ledger and wrote against the églomisé mirror, “R. Harington Esq. 4 V 62,” and against the locket the word “Lost”, with no date. He felt no animus; indeed, he felt a kind of admiration, and even a degree o
f tenderness. She had known what she wanted; she had secured it. She might become a collector yet. What would she go in for? Cats, or heart-shaped objects? Both are much collected, so in either event she had made a flying start. Heart-shaped objects, cats . . . Since she was not invigilated by flawless taste, her collection might end by being more illustrious, and certainly more interesting, than her husband’s accumulation of virtuoso pieces. But the little locket would not appear in it; she would keep that strictly to herself. Deep in my soul the something secret dwells – a poem by Byron that he could not altogether remember. Lonely and lost to light for evermore. Then something about a sepulchral lamp. He reflected with pleasure that he had undertaken to supervise the delivery of the mirror that same evening. He wanted to see her again, to view her in this new and interesting light of larceny.
But he was disappointed; she was, he learned, upstairs, putting her little boy to bed.
It was several weeks before he saw her again, on another of young Mr Harington’s studious visits to the gallery. It was during a spell of very hot weather, and she carried the Nattier fan. But even before he recognised the fan he saw that a change had taken place; for now her lovely, tranquil countenance had acquired a pretty expression.
English Mosaic
WHEN A STRANGER walks into an antique shop, an experienced dealer doesn’t need to ask himself whether the entrant has come to buy or hopes to sell. Mr Edom, who kept the Abbey Antique Galleries, in St John Street, could tell at a glance, or even without glancing – by a footfall, by the timbre of a cough – what was in the air. In the case of those who came to buy, he could usually make a good guess as to what they were after; apart from dealers and runners, who stick out, as he was wont to remark, like good deeds in a naughty world, there is the clockwork type, the satinwood type, the like-it-quaints. But who might bring in what to sell remained a mystery, and always would. Buyers express their own preferences, sellers the preferences of others – of those they have inherited from, or accidentally acquired from (you wouldn’t believe what treasures can be left behind in a lodging house) – or perhaps the preferences of those whom they have obliged by taking a settlement in kind. Even in the case of things that have been stolen, the prior preference echoes on, like the cry of jarred crystal, through the automatic vulgarity of the thief’s notion of what may be worth stealing; and as such preferences are sometimes quite exquisite, checking one’s purchases against the lists of stolen valuables that the police issue to the trade can be extremely painful. A dealer, however chastened by professionalism, remains human and has preferences, too. Something he really fancies comes along. He buys, only to find he must notify the authorities and see it pass from his hands. Altogether, as Mr Edom often confided to his assistant, trading with unprofessional vendors, never knowing what they won’t bring in, and having to judge from what they’ve brought what else they might have up their sleeve, is a tricky business, not to say incalculable.
To the young lady who came as a replacement when the assistant was swept off to the hospital for a month’s treatment, Mr Edom had nothing whatsoever to confide. Her qualifications and references were all anyone could ask, and the London agency that produced her assured him he was lucky to get such a nonpareil at such short notice. But after a couple of days, he knew he couldn’t stomach her. She was a Miss Know-All.
So, the first time he had to leave her alone in the Galleries, it gave him considerable pleasure to say that if a seller came in and wouldn’t wait for his return, she was to make out a receipt of deposit, take the seller’s name and address, and bid him call later for Mr Edom’s decision. “No comments, please, Miss Hartley. Just the routine acceptance pending a possible offer.”
“But if it’s something obviously impossible?”
“Even so, if you don’t mind.”
That she had minded with fury was plain when he came back and found her blandly gloating over two rock-garden rabbits, a grouse claw mounted as a brooch, and a large framed photogravure of Wedded Love. Being master in his own establishment, he took her down by remarking with suavity that the time wasn’t yet ripe for these. This went home nicely. For the next half hour there wasn’t a whisper of omniscience out of her, so absorbed was she in brooding on her wrongs and thinking of all the retorts she might have made if she had thought of them in time. When another absence and another visitor with something to sell gave her a fresh opportunity to express her resentment by displaying with the utmost prominence on a show table a proffered Staffordshire Duke of Wellington hot from Czechoslovakia whose steed trampled on a bocage of soap-bubble iridescence, he used a variant of the same technique, dwelling with tutorial tact on all the reasons that would have justified her in viewing the ornament with mistrust. “As I don’t for a moment doubt you must have done, Miss Hartley.”
“Well, I should hope so!”
“Exactly, exactly! With all your knowledge, I was sure you would.”
She could be stifled, but not for long. Only by wringing her plump young neck could he have silenced her affability, her fellow-expert airs, her sprightly comments on his customers, her mosquito persistence in teaching him his own business. It was torment to be under the same ceiling with her. However, trade was slack, and though it was a choice of evils – for Miss Hartley was visibly pleased to be left in charge, and pleasing Miss Hartley was no pleasure to him – he contrived to be out pretty often, sweetening his returns by airy visions of finding she had done something he could be disagreeable about. She never had. After reporting on her blameless doings, she showed a kindly interest in his, and on wet days condoled with him.
On the thirtieth of the month, a Friday, it rained so remorselessly that if he had not been tied to a Valuation for Probate he would have stayed in the shop. When he returned, nerved against condolences, he found himself welcomed back with the airs of a mama disclosing a surprise cake. “Look what’s come in!”
It stood upended in the middle of the room, cylindrical as a length of earthenware drainpipe – which, in fact, it was – and gay as a Joseph’s coat of many colours. The drainpipe having been plastered with some sort of bitumen, a medley of broken china and pottery had been pavemented all over it. The labour and ingenuity expended must have been prodigious; the aim, he supposed, to enrich a home with an ornamental umbrella stand. In short, a labour of love.
“English mosaic,” remarked Miss Know-All Hartley. “Isn’t it a marvellous specimen? I’ve never seen a better one.”
After a first glance, Mr Edom began to circle round the object with an expression in which reprobation deepened into woe.
“I don’t wonder you’re spellbound. I’ve been hanging over it all the afternoon. Have you noticed the bird’s head sticking coyly out from the teapot handle?”
“Yes. It’s Chelsea.”
In the extremity of his anguish, he went down on his knees and peered into the medley. “That’s Nantgarw,” he moaned. “That’s second-period Dr Wall. That’s Coalport. That’s a Billingsley rose. That’s Whieldon tortoise shell . . . and there’s another bit of it . . . and another . . . and another! She must have had a whole dish and taken a hammer to it.”
“How perfectly appalling! The ignoramus! But why are you so sure it was a woman?”
He did not reply. He had just found more of the Dr Wall – judging by contours, a punch bowl. Still on his knees, he circled round the drainpipe, tracing, scrutinising, identifying; and becoming increasingly sure that not only had a Whieldon dish and a Dr Wall punch bowl been immolated on the altar of Home Art but also a Nantgarw plate, a Cookworthy jug, and, almost certainly, a dozen Bristol teacups, since, in the compiler’s enthusiasm for Billingsley roses, nine had been hacked out, and the remaining three, no doubt, broken past using. Insult had been added to outrage, for bits of kitchenware, alehouse mugs, simpering Victorian pomade pots jostled the fine porcelain, higgledy-piggledy. And as he shuffled round and round, the Chelsea bird, clasped in the half hoop of a broken kitchen-teapot handle, recurrently looked him in the eye w
ith a disgraced facetiousness.
“But why are you so sure it was a woman?” she repeated.
“I’d expect it to be,” he replied, not very attentively, since at that moment he had noticed a Felix Pratt tree upside down.
At length he rose and dusted the knees of his trousers. It was a tragedy, an act of blasphemy, a monument of busybody spoliation – but there was nothing to be done about it.
“Some inheriting lady’s maid,” he added. “Some clever Jael with a hammer. Snipping up brocade for kettleholders, pasting colour plates into scrap albums . . . it’s all the same, it’s all woman’s work!”
It was then (though in his state of stupor he did not accept the evidence of his eyesight until some ten minutes later) that he glanced up and saw what was in Miss Hartley’s mind. Her gaze was travelling over the shelves, here resting, there disregarding. At intervals it returned to the drainpipe and dwelled on it; and while her gaze dwelled on the drainpipe, she smugly, dreamily, purposefully smiled. She had very long coarse eyelashes; when she blinked, they seemed to be whispering together.
His attention was called back to business when a woman who had been looking intently at something in the window came in, saying in an Australian accent, “I’d like to see that piece of Belleek. I collect Belleek.” It was one of those love matches, occurring between improbable partners, that even the most experienced antique dealers could not foresee. He would never have expected this lady to collect Belleek; a string of racehorses would have seemed more likely. Meanwhile, Miss Hartley had retreated to the back of the shop, as was expected of her. The woman left, and he entered the purchase in his ledger. His mind returned to its state of woe. All those beautiful pieces – rarities, objects of unrepeatable perfection, unsurmisable value, but above all, so beautiful – broken to fragments and plastered hideously on a drainpipe . . . How could people do such things?
How could people do such things? Then he remembered the look on Miss Hartley’s face, and how her glance had travelled, and rested, and travelled again; and what it had recurrently dwelled on. He heard his own fatal voice saying, “Woman’s work.” He could not have been more instrumental if he had put the hammer into her hand.
Music at Long Verney Page 10