If this happened, as well it might, then he wanted time to compose himself and rehearse light-hearted acceptance of the disappointment. On the other hand, if Chaffery endorsed his opinion, then he wanted to nurse his triumph in secret all the way home to Llandudno, and burst in upon Frances like a boy running home with news that the world was at his feet. He wanted to run up the stairs into their cosy living room over the shop and shout: “I’ve done it, Frances! I’ve done it at last! It’s ‘right’, just as I said it was! It’s ‘right’, Francie, and you’re looking at the man who bought a masterpiece for shillings!”
For nearly forty years he had been dreaming of such a moment. Long before he and Frances had eloped, when he was a shy young salesman in his first job, he had pictured himself coming back from an auction sale with a masterpiece acquired for a few shillings. He had no clear idea what kind of a masterpiece it would be, perhaps a picture, or perhaps just a piece of exquisitely modelled china from one of the early factories. Whatever it was it would be something that would attract the attention and interest of specialists all over the antique world, and drive the other dealers half-mad with jealousy and frustration when they remembered how they too had had an opportunity to buy it, but had overlooked it because they lacked his knowledge.
Every now and again Edgar had come near to fulfilling such a dream. There had been the lost and badly damaged Giovanni Bellini, painted over by a Victorian amateur, the picture that he carefully cleaned and then sold again for a few pounds, only to read in The Times a month later that the picture had been resold at Sotheby’s for fourteen thousand guineas.
There had been the Bow tea service, almost perfect, that he had purchased privately during the first year that they opened in Llandudno and been obliged to resell for a quick profit, because of the mortgage debt on their premises, and of the urgent necessity to invest in stock and keep the business turning.
Then there had been the 16th century French tapestries, at Gorsehill Hall, which he would have bought had not his courage failed him at the final bid. ‘Skipper’ Williams had bought those tapestries, and resold them at a huge profit within an hour of the trade knock-out. All these and other opportunities had slipped by, usually because his nerve proved unequal to gambling with Frances’ capital, and with two women dependent upon him.
Now the mortgage was paid off and he was holding a fair-sized stock. Now Pippa was earning and living away from them, in London, and he was much more free to speculate and back his judgment to the limit of his means. But then something else had stepped between Edgar and fulfilment, ‘Skipper’ Williams’ wartime reorganisation of ‘The Ring’, a ring that Edgar had steadfastly refused to enter, because, after a lifetime in the trade, he still possessed a squeamish conscience.
As the war continued and the Ring tightened a notch at every sale, Edgar’s conscience began to cost him money. By the autumn of 1942 Williams and his associates, if not exactly ruining him, were at least making his life very difficult, and forcing him out of the sale-rooms.
Edgar had known what to expect, for Williams had warned him that they were determined to do this after Edgar had turned down his final ultimatum at the Gorsehill three-day auction.
“Look-you, Manny,” he had said, in his music-hall Welsh accent, “You’ll have to come in see, or get out altogether, Manny! Everyone else is in and we won’t stand for outsiders keeping the prices up! Now be a sport, Manny, and don’t make us freeze you out! It’s good friends we can be, if only you’ll step down off that high horse of yours, and be reasonable, isn’t it?”
But Edgar, although he knew that the threat was not idle, had remained obstinate. He had always operated outside the ring, and he would continue to do so for as long as he was in business. It went against his conscience to see a set of chairs worth at least two hundred pounds bought in by the ring for a tenth of this sum, and then knocked out, immediately after the auction, for its true value, the difference being split between the dealers instead of going into the pocket of the vendor.
There had always been a ring, of course, but in the old days it had been an optional arrangement. A man could join it or stay free of it, and if he stayed out no pressure was put upon him to join. It was very different nowadays! Stock was hard to find, and Edgar did not like the kind of dealer that the ring had attracted since the war, seedy little opportunists for the most part, who attended every auction sale without the slightest intention of acquiring stock, men who were content to hang around, do the bidding for Williams and his associates, and then slink off with their share of the knock-out money.
Williams himself was typical of the kind of man dominating the trade. He had no real business premises but operated from a ramshackle barn on the Fossdyke by-pass. It was getting more and more difficult to combat this kind of competition, for a legitimate antique dealer was faced with the inevitable overheads of a shop, and was obliged to keep a proper set of books, instead of dealing exclusively in cash, thus evading a high proportion of tax.
Edgar had fought back. He had tried, half-heartedly, to organise three or four of the better-class dealers into an opposition, but he had failed, finding that they were afraid of ‘Skipper’ and his following, and preferred to fall back upon private purchases, rather than compete with the Ring under the auctioneer’s rostrum.
He himself went on attending sales, his false teeth clenched in grim determination to go down fighting, but after delivery of Williams’ ultimatum it became impossible to hold out any longer. The crisis came at the Tandovery Manor sale, where he was unable to buy a single lot and retired, humiliated, into the garden before noon.
It was then that he had first seen the Cupid. He had been sitting on the low wall of the lily-pond, munching his sandwiches, and the Cupid had seemed to wink at him from its plinth, at the junction of two rose-walk paths.
He got up and walked over for a closer inspection. The little statue was about thirty inches high, with a smooth, pouting, cherubic face and undamaged wings. A person possessing no special interest in statuary could have been excused for passing it without a second glance. It had been there so long that it had merged into the landscape. The muscle crease between the shoulder blades was worn smooth by centuries of Welsh rain, and the toes were hardly distinguishable as separate extremities. The entire body was slumped sullenly on the bow stave, as the eyes surveyed the cloud-masked mountains in the west. Edgar at once christened it ‘The Sullen Cupid’ and made up his mind to buy it on the spot.
He knew that Williams and the Ring would not dispute it with him. They hardly ever bothered with outside lots, leaving the contents of sheds and garages to the locals, who often bought in gardening tools and greenhouse equipment for shillings. He went down on his knees in the mud and carefully examined every inch of the Cupid, applying his pocket glass to an indecipherable inscription on the plinth. He could make out four letters, ‘ARDI’, which was obviously part of a longer word, so he put his glass away, finished his lunch, and waited until the auctioneer headed the crowd into the sunken garden and began selling the outside lots.
He had to wait a long time and before they reached Lot 1003 which was the Cupid, it was raining hard and almost everyone had drifted away.
“Garden ornament, Lot 1003! What am I bid?” demanded the auctioneer, hunching his shoulders, and glaring round at the dwindling crowd.
“Ten shillings,” said Edgar, firmly.
“Any advance on ten? Any advance? Once, twice, three times…sold to Mr. Frith,” said the auctioneer, with a token tap of his hammer.
A gust of wind almost lifted his hat and he made a wild grab at it. “This is murder!” he said, “we’ll finish off in the greenhouse.” Then everyone shuffled away, leaving Edgar alone with his Cupid.
He got it to the car with the assistance of one of the auctioneer’s men. It was surprisingly heavy and the effort distressed him, bringing on a sharp bout of indigestion. Notwithstanding this, he drove home with a soaring heart, left the Cupid in the car, and hurried upstairs t
o the kitchen, where Frances was preparing supper.
She looked up and smiled as he bustled in.
“Did you get anything? Were they as horrid as ever, dear?”
“I got The Cupid,” he said, breathlessly, unable to keep the jubilation from his voice, “I got The Sullen Cupid and I’ll stake my wig that it’s ‘right’! It’s ‘right’, Francie, it’s a wonderful, wonderful buy!”
Frances left the stove and relived him of his dripping raincoat. That was what was wonderful about Frances, she was so expert at catching a man’s mood, and never irritated by tut-tutting about chills, wet clothes, and warmed-up meals.
“Tell me, Edgar, tell me all about it!”
He told her as they ate their supper. He said that the Sullen Cupid was no ordinary Cupid, but the work of a master, almost certainly an Italian master. He did not know which master, and would not attempt to guess until he had looked up the books, and scraped the moss and grime from the inscription, but he was quite sure that the Cupid was ‘right’, as sure as he had been about the tapestries. This time he would take his time over identification and resale. This time he would make quite sure that he and no one else got the credit for the discovery.
He worked on the statue all the following day but succeeded only in deciphering one more letter, a ‘B’ immediately proceeding the ‘ARDI’. It was enough, however, to enlarge his opinion. The Sullen Cupid, he decided, was the work of the same master as the famous Pensive Cupid, now in the Mond collection. It was a creation of Antonio Lombardi, the Venetian responsible for the Doge’s tomb, in Venice. It was worth, at a guess, at least four figures, probably much more, and he had bought it for ten shillings!
It did not seem strange to Edgar that he should discover the work of a 15th century Venetian in the garden of a Welsh manor house. He had been in the antique trade far too long to remark upon such things. All these beautiful objects had a wandering destiny, owing allegiance to no one but the man who created them, and who had died, long since, leaving them to drift here and there like ageing wantons, attaching themselves to this owner and that owner, until these custodians died, or needed money and parted from them.
Edgar had seen ancient Chinese porcelain sold from the bedroom mantelshelf of a Shropshire cottage, and the paintings that Dutch masters had painted before the Armada set sail sold in the terrace houses of industrial towns. The vagaries of the trade did not surprise him, but its element of chance occupied his thoughts day and night. As he packed the Cupid into a specially-constructed box and watched the carrier lift it into his lorry en route for the station, he felt like a gambler who, after a lifetime of routine punting, had at last secured a huge bet on a virtual certainty. He drove behind the carrier all the way to the station, and when they arrived he stood close by while they hoisted the box into the luggage van. He could hardly drag himself away to buy his ticket, and when he did he was back again within minutes, taking up a position in the corridor where he could glance into the van at every stop, and make sure that the porter did not toss any baggage on top of his freight.
He was glad now that he had kept in touch with Chaffery, his former employer, who still did business in Croydon and Purley. Chaffery might be a hard-drinking cynic, and one of ‘The Boys’, and he might boast that he was in the game for profit and nothing else, but Edgar knew him rather better than that, and had not been surprised by his immediate response to the letter telling him of the Sullen Cupid. The dealer had wired: “Nice going. Stop. Bring it down. Stop. Will get Dixon to confirm.”
Dixon, Edgar recalled, was a West-End dealer, and an acknowledged specialist in Renaissance art. Ordinarily, Edgar would have hesitated to trust him, but he knew that Chaffery was one of his best agents and that Dixon would be certain to give him an unprejudiced opinion. On arrival in Croydon he left the box in Chaffery’s back room to await Dixon’s visit, and Chaffery promised to telephone the verdict by eight o’clock that same evening.
“It’s better that you shouldn’t be here when Dixon comes, old man,” Chaffery said, and Edgar agreed with him but he did not embarrass his former employer by enquiring what story he had told Dixon. He trusted Chaffery more than he trusted anyone in the trade, having learned his business from the man, and he believed him when Chaffery said: “You’ve earned a real find, Frith, old boy! You’ve really earned one! I’ll get the truth from Dixon! He won’t spoof me. You can rely on it!”
Thus, having settled the major part of his business, Edgar turned to domestic matters, and made his way back to the Avenue.
Elaine had written and told him that she had recently become engaged to an American, and invited him to meet her fiancé. He also wanted to see Pippa again, and enquire about Mr. Carver’s boys and poor, old Esme, whose child he and Frances still cared for in Wales.
The thought of the child, Barbara, hardened his heart towards his daughter, Elaine. He found it difficult to understand why she had never wanted to see the baby since the divorce, and had never mentioned her in her letter about the American. He supposed that Elaine must have inherited his first wife’s flinty streak, and nothing whatever of his own sentimentality. It was curious, he thought, that Frances’ child, Pippa, now meant so much more to him than his own daughter, and seemed to possess far more of his own characteristics than Elaine possessed. He wondered what Elaine would make of her life in the end. Would she find happiness with a second husband, or would she tire of him as quickly as she had tired of Esme and seek excitement in some new relationship? She was not much like her mother in that respect. Esther had found it almost impossible to give herself to one man, much less a string of men, and he wondered if his daughter inherited his own sensuality or if it was sensuality, and not the cold-blooded exploitation of physical attractions in order to get what she wanted from men. He decided that he could not begin to answer this question, for he knew even less of Elaine than he had known of her mother, or brother.
He was still thinking about this when he knocked at her door and she popped her head out of the bathroom window, over the alley, calling down to him.
“Come right in, Daddy! The door’s open, and I’m in the bath!”
He went into the hall and was startled when a slim, uniformed man emerged from the front room. Somewhere close by a gramophone was playing and the soldier had to shout above the music to introduce himself.
“Mr. Frith—sir—I’m Ericssohn, Lootenen’ Ericssohn! I guess you’ve heard about me! Elaine’ll be right down! Would you care for a martini, sir?”
“No,” Edgar told him, rather flustered at this unconventional reception, “but you go ahead and have one.”
He put his hat and umbrella on the hall-stand and followed the American into the front room, studying him closely as he bent over the gramophone and stopped the music.
He was surprised at the man’s insignificant physique. He always had the notion that Elaine preferred big men, like that young scoundrel, Carver over whom she had made such a fool of herself, and who was now, so he had heard from Pippa, serving a prison sentence for manslaughter.
The Lieutenant mixed himself a drink and tossed it off to cover his obvious embarrassment. Edgar was finding the interview equally painful and wished heartily that Elaine would put in an appearance and get it over.
“Have you two known one another very long?” he ventured, at length.
“All summer,” Woolston told him, “I’m billeted just across the road. Lady by the name o’ Clegg. Funny little body!”
“Is that so?” Edgar said, but could think of no comment to make on Edith, whom he knew only by sight. “When do you and Elaine propose getting married?”
“Hard to say,” the American told him, “we hev to get all the formalities fixed up. There’s a heap o’ rules and regulations ’bout this kinda thing, sir, and it looks as if our outfit might be moving out pretty soon, to North Africa I guess, or mebbe the Second Front! We’ll get around to it, I guess, soon as we can.”
It was all so muddled and casual, like the rest of Elain
e’s life, and like almost everybody’s life these days. People decided to get married, divorced and married again, just as though they were making arrangements to go to a ball or on a picnic. Was this haphazardness the result of the war, and had young people behaved like this during the first war? He couldn’t recall that they had, but of course there had been Frances and her young officer, the father of Pippa, and that had been haphazard enough. Perhaps he was the only person left alive who yearned for a smooth, settled existence, rooted in one particular spot, and pursuing one particular job?
Elaine floated in on an aroma of lavender bath salts. Her mass of dark hair was tied up in a turban and she wore only a closely-wrapped bath robe and yellow silk bedroom slippers. She kissed him, smelling sweet and fresh, and he marvelled again that he and Esther had been able to produce such a vital, strapping, shapely, uninhibited young woman.
“I hope you two have got the talkie-talkie over by now,” she said, and Edgar, noticing a note of coyness in her voice, thought that it went ill with her breezy informality.
He decided that the best thing to do in the circumstances was to match her informality, and said:
“I can’t imagine what there is to ‘get over’ as you say. You wouldn’t be likely to take much notice of anything I had to say about getting married!”
He saw at once that he had said the wrong thing, for Elaine’s expression hardened, though she still smiled brightly and said, quietly:
“Woolston and I didn’t want to make it public without you first having met him, Daddy! Surely you realise that?”
He was out of his depth and must have shown it, for Elaine jumped up from the arm of the chair and gave Woolston a playful push.
“You go and freshen up, darling, while I have the little talk with Daddy! Woolston was so keen to meet you, Daddy that he came in straight off duty. Now run along, Sugar, and come back in about twenty minutes. After all, I haven’t even seen Daddy myself for a year!”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 40