A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair l-21

by Jonathan Gash

  With a mute appeal to Puntasia - her name's a mixture of Fantasia and Pocahontas because she's daft on cartoon films -I removed the lids. Inverting the container I groaned. William Copeland joined Josiah Spode II as the eighteenth century turned.

  The indented Spode mark changed to a painted Spode and Copeland, which met my eyes. You can't match the feeling. Just think of the romantic trystes this lovely porcelain had witnessed! Reverently I returned it, my vision misty.

  'Genuine, Lovejoy?' Puntasia asked, real pity in her voice.

  'Perfect, love. Give me first offer?'

  'Can't, Lovejoy. You only pay in IOUs. How much should I ask?'

  'As much as you like, love. That's Spode blue. Buy the market.'

  'Good luck in Chelsea, Lovejoy.'

  'Chelsea? Who said anything about going to Chelsea?'

  Quickly I walked down Tower Bridge Road, crossed by the Old Kent Road, and eventually survived the maddening traffic at the Elephant and Castle, to catch the Tube.

  If I'd the sense I was born with, I'd have raced to find Colette earlier. That doddering scrumper lady in the market had reminded me of her, yet I hadn't taken my mind's hint. Colette, my 'old pal', was the rich owner I once made smiles with. When in trouble, reach for money.

  The journey took minutes, just long enough to think of Colette.

  5

  THE STEAM HAD left me. I felt lost, my head 'filled with jolly robins' as Gran used to say. She stored up various proofs of this, like proving the same theorem over and over.

  I didn't mind. She knew where she stood. 'Vague, do what's necessary,' she used to say, moving about our one room. 'Idle, get on with it.'

  London's traffic gets worse. I stood at Tottenham Court Road, where William Blake walked and wrote his poems about Innocence and Experience, meaning, I think, their opposites. A street lady slid past. 'Want business, dear?' I walked into a Charing Cross Road bookshop pretending to hunt some tide. Chinese furniture? I looked, and thought of Wrinkle. Now, Wrinkle owed me serious money, had for a twelvemonth. And here was me short of brass. A hint!

  The crossroads is properly called St Giles Circus. It was here that the carts carrying condemned prisoners halted on the way to Tyburn's gallows for their last drink. People still joke, when summoned to see their grim boss, 'Better have a St Giles bowl, eh?'

  Except it feels ghostly. Take away the swirling buses, the chugging taxis, hurrying people, and all that's left is the silent church with its silent churchyard. The eerie rumbling of tumbrils and the victims' pale faces are too recent for comfort. It was here too that child pickpockets - think Dickens - teemed. They even had schools for subtlemongers to teach the trade, infants grubbing for crusts in these very alleys.

  For a while I watched the traffic. Make yourself forget the spirits, you instantly see that modern life is beautiful. That's why America must be pure heaven. A country that has everything, free of all these phantoms and dark histories. I got quite a lump in my throat. Good old Yanks, getting it together. No wonder they're all millionaires.

  Yes, time to be decisive. I shook myself free of vagueness, and caught the Tube for Whitechapel.

  Wrinkle's lock-up garage where he does his forgeries abuts on a furniture retailer's in Spitalfields. I crossed Commercial Street. Jack the Ripper's first victim Martha Turner was found nearby, but who believes in spooks? Anyway, it was daylight.

  Shinning up the corrugated tin roof, I peered through a grimy window, and there he was. The god of fakery was with me. Watching a craftsman is one of life's pleasures.

  He was carving a chair arm. Chinese, from the curvature. That too warmed me, because he fakes nothing but Ching Dynasty and earlier. Standards lived in Spitalfields!

  The radio was playing, some lass crooning of inadequacy. Wrinkle said something, testy and sharp. I sympathized. Being interrupted at vital creativity's a nuisance. A lady moved into frame. She wasn't young, but so? She danced to the music, writhing, enticing. I blinked, a bit embarrassed, but couldn't resist spying.

  Years ago me and a bird were walking past an alley on our way to the pictures.

  Lamplight revealed a couple snogging against the wall. The bloke was, as it were, entering oblivion, the lass clinging for dear life. I stared. My lass hissed, 'Lovejoy! Don't look! It's mean. So I stared straight ahead. And glimpsed, from the corner of my eye, my bird having a right old butcher's, gaping at them. See what I mean? We all want to be thought proper, but deep down we're rotters.

  Wrinkle's called Wrinkle because he's got the smoothest face on earth. Cheeks, brow, smooth as a babby's bum. He looks about fourteen. I only know two things about Wrinkle besides his forgeries. One is, he owes me for a fake Angelica Kauffmann painting. I did him a beauty on genuine panel like she did for the Adam brothers.

  Wrinkle never paid me. Kauffmann was a Swiss bird who came to London, helped to found the Royal Academy, being a friend ('nuff said) of the great Reynolds. Wrinkle wanted me to copy some fake antiques of her lovely Georgian porcelains but I wouldn't because they're ten a penny, and faking signed Angelica Kauffmann porcelain plates is really naff. They're dead obvious. Shepherdesses in their nighties, colours marvellous, playing musical instruments in idyllic groves, they look the business, the sort of decorative porcelain plate you'd show to your friends. Except Angelica never signed her name, and never really did paint on porcelain. You can see the tiny dots where the colours were printed on - and the skill of printing pictures on porcelain wasn't invented until she'd long passed on. I'd slaved over my panel. In fact, I remember making my own Naples Yellow, hell of a risk—

  The woman started to dance voluptuously.

  Wrinkle tried to keep working but his strokes, like my concentration, weakened. His interest in the sinuous lady became what I can only call unconcealed.

  The woman shed some clothes.

  Wrinkle weakened, angry, complaining.

  The woman shed all her clothes.

  'Look!' Wrinkle yelled, frantically trying to keep going, his former chisel shaking, his mallet definitely on the wobble. 'I'm finishing this frigging—'

  The naked woman wrapped herself round him, smiling. I sprawled flatter. I heard Wrinkle moan as he dropped his chisel - and it takes a lot to make a craftsman surrender his tool.

  Some things I'm not proud of. There was I, mesmerized on his roof while she and he went at it on his workbench. She didn't complain about the wood shavings. And Wrinkle no longer objected about interruptions. It was a beautiful scene. Okay, I ought to have gone about my business. But love is filled with enchantment. And what's wrong with it?

  I felt honoured, really privileged.

  At the finish, waves and heavenly violins and smiles made, she lay among the wood fragments, replete, and looked up. And smiled at me. While Wrinkle was pulling himself together she even gave me a little wave, rippling her fingers. I almost waved back, caught myself in time.

  Sliding quietly off the roof, I went for a walk, gave them ten minutes, then came up shouting, 'Wrinkle? It's me, Lovejoy.'

  The only other thing I know about Wrinkle is his scam. It's called the lone bone. Before I go on, I suppose I'm making us antique dealers out to be all crooks, on some nefarious con trick. I want to be frank. We're no better or worse than other folk. It's just that antiques are high profile. Money's where it's at, so can we be blamed? Take ten thousand antique dealers, a thousand will make some sort of precarious living. Of those, a hundred will be doing well. Of those, nine will have decent holidays and a good motor. If you harbour a lifelong ache to be an antique dealer in a 'nice little antique shop', remember Lovejoy's Law of Dealers: of every ten thousand wannabe antique dealers, nine - repeat nine - are affluent. The rest give up, go broke, lose heart, scrape by.

  Where was I? The lone bone scam is survival, Wrinkle style. It's unpleasantly easy.

  He replies to lonely hearts adverts, pretends he's middle-aged gentry. Ex-officer, own car, loves theatre, Rome holidays, adores animals. He sends photos of handsome minor actors,
even using their name. When the lady replies - he accepts them up to seventy, give or take an hour - he visits, gets to know, etc. She's impressed, if a bit puzzled. He's so much younger! But true love finds a way, and he milks her of whatever goods and chattels she feels inclined to offer. This is Method A. Alternatively, in Method B he arranges to meet her, usually after several confiding phone chats, at some station or theatre. By then he's got her address, of course, for haven't they exchanged letters?

  While she's on her way to Mayfair for that ground-breaking hand-holding lunch, all eager, Wrinkle the swine turns up at her house and steals whatever antiques he can cram into his Ford van. The lone bone.

  Meanwhile, he creates his fakes in London's Spitalfields.

  'Is that you, Lovejoy?' He looked bleary.

  'I bawled my name, Wrinkle. It was a clue.'

  'Look.' He tried to block my way. I'm a bit pushed.'

  'That what they call it?'

  I shoved in anyway, and immediately halted at the most glorious sight. Not the middle-aged lady in her nip, but a magnificent array of furniture. I went giddy as vibes shook me. For one second I thought he'd discovered some way to fake genuine antiques.

  Then I saw three pieces of ancient furniture against the side wall. They were his models, and genuine. My shivering knees almost let me down. I sat on a stool.

  The workshop was no bigger than the ground-floor area of your house, say. The centre held the workbench where I'd seen Wrinkle, er, hard at it. On the left wall furniture was stacked. It looked desiccated, practically ready to fall to powder.

  Don't know if you're into Chinese antiques, but it's certainly where money is, these switchback days. Before communism fragged, all interest was in porcelains. After the 1980s, though, Chinese furniture - pottery too - soared. Dealers everywhere spoke about Ching Dynasty (1644 to 1912 - think from our Great Civil War to King Edward VII) and Ming (preceding, to 1368). In the USA, it was Ching time in the Rockies.

  Dealers went doolally for Chinese furniture and porcelain. Europe bulged with artefacts robbed from Chinese tombs. Folk say China has eight million burial sites, of which 99.5

  per cent remain unlooted', archaeologists licking their lips like it's their duty to ruin ruins. The figure's important, since in 1974 a serf blundered into the Terracotta Army of over seven thousand massive figures in a huge underground City of Burials. That peasant was honest - I'm not kidding, there is such a thing - and told his guv'nors.

  Wholesale looting began.

  China was displeased. Beheadings followed. So stern did China become about this, that if some kulak was found homeward plodding his weary way with a Warrior's terracotta head in his knapsack he himself would suffer the same gruesome penalty. Did the looting of tombs and archaeological sites halt? Certainly not. Peasants simply got the message: If authorities executed a starving villein simply for stealing an earthenware figure, it meant something earth-shaking. It meant the figure was valuable. Lovejoy's formula: hunger + treasure = loot.

  Loot exports boomed. Hong Kong was doing its stuff. Exports hurtled merrily to dealers everywhere. Then the oddest thing happened.

  During the 1980s and 1990s Chinese unglazed earthenware tomb figures became common. They were in every dealer's window, on every collector's shelf. Their value tumbled. Small figures costing the price of a good new car in 1980 wouldn't buy a respray by 1995. But furniture? Furniture soared, and soared. And kept on.

  A hardwood yokeback armchair in pretty good nick would have cost you the price of a mere week's holiday twenty years before the millennium. And they were common. You simply phoned Hong Kong, paid your four hundred dollars, and took delivery. Then China realized. Simultaneously, Hong Kong's lease ebbed. And the price of that hardwood curved-spine squarish chair? It rose hundredfold. If rare, like your folding swing-pin hardwood sitter that museums fight tooth and nail for, you're into half a million US zlotniks, and pay your own security guards. The prices, and the scarcity, have got worse.

  Enter Wrinkle. I honestly don't know where he gets his woods from, but they're good.

  The usual ones are what we call huang-hua-lee (dunno what it means). There's some called zee-tan - ditto - and of course a whole variety of Indonesian and illicit Burmese redwoods and mahoganies. One piece already finished took my breath away.

  'Here, Wrinkle,' I gasped. 'That's zylopia wood!'

  Zylopia's curiously coloured, hard and tough. I went closer and peered. Its grain is tight, close, and very straight.

  You can get it fairly easily from importers. Except it comes from Africa, and is often a curious grey. Using zylopia was a stroke of genius, saving the need for dehydrating and staining all in one go.

  He reddened, shrugged. 'I'm in a hurry, Lovejoy. A friend's lending me the gelt. Make hay while the sun shines, eh?'

  'Doesn't it pick up when you're working it?' I was fascinated.

  Picking up is horrible. It means the wood tends to break away where the grain interlocks or crosses. A forger's nightmare, and a real giveaway.

  'Terrible, Lovejoy. You have to be so careful.'

  Wrinkle's lifetime ambition, I might add, is to fake all the main variants of furniture design of the Ming and Ching periods. One example of each, in the right woods. He'd done about twenty-six when he'd defaulted on paying for the Angelica Kauffmann panel I'd done.

  'How many so far, Wrinkle?'

  'Thirty-seven, Lovejoy. Nine to go.'

  Full of admiration, I whistled. A true craftsman, he uses original methods, tries to make the right glues. He even makes his own tools.

  'Got my money, Wrinkle?'

  His innocent eyes blinked. 'Money, Lovejoy?'

  I grabbed him by the throat. A woman's voice said drowsily, 'What's the matter?'

  In the corner was a vast four-poster bed, four blunt-S shaped legs, carved low railings top and bottom. It was beautiful (I mean the bed). The lady stirred. Now, this was a forgery (the bed) but wondrously done. It was a year's job, piercing and slaving (t.b.). I walked over. The surface could have been ancient, powdery in places just like the real thing.

  The joints had come away from contracture and shrinkage. The surface edges looked genuine. Only the absence of my bells told it was a fake.

  Wrinkle had discovered his own ageing process. I had tears in my eyes. 'Beautiful, mate.'

  'Why, thank you kind sir,' she fluttered.

  'Not you, you silly cow,' I said. 'The wood.'

  She sat up and glared. I touched the genuine three pieces against the opposite wall. I knew where he'd got those. They were from a colonel's elderly widow in Norfolk. He'd met her through his lonely hearts ploy, got them as a gift. The curvature of Chinese arms is just that little bit odder than on our furniture. I came to.

  'Can't you hang on a month, Lovejoy? You'll get your money.'

  'How do you shrink this wood, Wrinkle?'

  There's a rough rule that wood cut in the long axis of its grain shrinks only one per cent. Wood cut radially, 2 to 7 per cent. Cut it tangential, it can shrivel up to 15 per cent. This is why old oak pews hurt your bottom when the sermon drones on - the dowel pegs poke up after a century by as much as an eighth of an inch. This is why church seats ladder ladies' stockings and scag your trousers.

  'Got a good Far East supplier.'

  'Excuse me!' This harridan stormed up. 'I've spoken to you three times and you've ignored me!'

  It was Wrinkle's woman, presumably the one 'helping' him with gelt. Close to she was even bonnier.

  'It's only Lovejoy, Honor,' Wrinkle said, fumblingly brought out a note. 'Here. On account.'

  'I need it all, Wrinkle. I'm skint.'

  Honor was wrapped in a large towel, furious. 'I'll pay you, Lovejoy. Then you get right out of here!'

  She wrote a cheque. I demanded she write her address on the back, said so-long, wished Wrinkle luck, caught the bus to Liverpool Street station.

  Where the bank politely informed me that there was no such account. The cheque was phoney. They politely a
sked me to wait while the police arrived. I politely said I'd just go to the loo, and eeled out into the street. Infallible at antiques, excellent at forgeries, useless with money.

  And with people? Dud, dud.

  6

  ODD HOW RELIEVED I was to catch the Tube away from the street-barrow life I love.

  Old enemies, old friends, make me tick. Yet here I was, jostled by commuters and tourists, heading out of my natural grotty world into the sleek wonderland of Chelsea's glamorous King's Road.

  The King's Road, Chelsea, starts at Sloane Square and heads south-west, towards Parsons Green. Oddly, road maps number its upper stretch A3217 and its lower the A308, but this is only cartographers having us on. They make changes in case we cotton on that they've no real job. Incidentally, note that definite article - The King's Road, like there's no other. It's deserved, for the King's Road, Chelsea, has its own peculiar message. That message has only one word in it, but is utterly vital: Money.

  Nowhere else in the antiques world does money bend behaviour more than in pricey, spicy, decidedly dicey Chelsea, where Cheyne Walk runs from Cremorne Gardens along Old Father Thames to the suave Embankment. If ever you stroll this way, keep your hand on your ha'penny, as folk say, because every single thing is expensive, from the stones beneath your feet to the windows gazing haughtily down onto thronged serfs hoofing glumly below. Money rules.

  In spite of all, it's gorgeous in ways that other streets aren't. Chelsea's antiques shops, their facades announce snootily to us hoi polloi, not only have made it but also have it made. Provincials like me snort derision at some signs. I mean, The Original Chelsea Antiques Market (EST. 1967), for God's sake? A grocer in our local East Anglian town says how badly his business fared during the war. 'Yes, sir, 1648 was a bad year,' he'll sigh with regret, 'on account of disturbances concerning the late King…' and so forth.