Drawing the Line

by Judith Cutler

  ‘Griff, I’ve just found this book I know! A page, anyway. Very old. All these strange plant-things curling round the outside of the title page,’ I gabbled. ‘Then in the middle, just where you’d expect it in fact, the title. I reckon it’s in Latin.’

  Griff passed me coffee in the Thermos lid, pretending to be calm. ‘Something else they fail to teach in schools these days, alas. Have you any idea what it might have said? Or must I drift over with feigned casualness myself?’

  ‘Nature something or other.’ Why had I never worked harder at school? OK, why had I hardly ever gone to school?

  ‘Nature exactly?’ he pressed. He sounded very interested.

  ‘Naturam?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Or Natura?’ There was no mistaking his excitement.

  If I wasn’t careful I’d say it was just to please him. But it sounded right. ‘It could have been. Then there was another word. It couldn’t be Rerum, could it?’

  He clasped his pudgy little hands across his chest. ‘Natura Rerum! The nature of things. Nothing to do with flora and fauna as such – more a philosophical treatise.’

  ‘What about all the plants and things?’ My fingers described them in the air.

  ‘Well, more to do with what makes a plant a plant as opposed to an animal. I suppose you didn’t notice a date?’

  ‘Come on, Griff – all those Xs and Ms! You know I can never work them out!’

  ‘Author?’

  ‘A Gentleman.’

  Feeling carefully behind him, Griff sat down on the edge of a packing case.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, trying to think straight, ‘it wasn’t Roman numerals. No, it was ordinary numbers. It said – would 1589 make sense?’

  ‘Natura Rerum. A Gentleman. 1589. Lina, dear heart – do you know what you’ve found?’

  ‘A book I know,’ I insisted.

  ‘More than that!’

  ‘All right,’ I said, knowing I had to humour him before he’d humour me, ‘tell me.’

  ‘Lina – unless I’m very much mistaken – you’ve hit the jackpot!’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Natura Rerum is one of the rarest books there is! In the whole world, Lina. Only two or three extant,’ he continued. His voice had risen to a squeak.

  ‘You mean – only two or three still in existence? Out of how many?’ Funny how my head was working. Half of it wanted to think about the book as precious and important in its own right, the other kept on hammering away about its value to me.

  ‘No one knows for sure. But who in their right mind would cannibalise one? It’d be worth infinitely more whole.’

  ‘No one who knew what it was,’ I said slowly. ‘Copeland’s a print dealer, not an expert in old books.’

  ‘Marcus?’

  I shrugged – absolute negative. ‘He’s got some sort of art qualification. When he’s not doing that watercolouring stuff he sculpts embarrassing nudes for the export market.’

  Griff looked at me sideways. ‘Dear heart, are you sure, absolutely sure?’ He didn’t mean about Marcus.

  ‘Sure as I’m standing here,’ I said. But standing still was very difficult when I wanted to go and snatch it and bring it safely here. Or just dance on the spot.

  ‘I know you’ve got a nose – sometimes you sniff out such unpromising items from such unlikely places I wonder if you’re got a bit of a divvy in you – but for you to recognise it when Copeland doesn’t –’

  ‘I told you,’ I said, grabbing his hands and shaking them from side to side, ‘the thing is that I’ve actually seen the book itself. The whole book. When I was very young,’ I continued. ‘It’s part of my very earliest memory. It was somewhere my mother took me. It certainly wasn’t her family. So it had to be –’

  ‘Your father’s side.’

  I took a breath. ‘So you see, if I can trace that book –’

  ‘Maybe you can trace your father,’ Griff finished for me, sighing. He looked at me from under his eyebrows. ‘My child, I’ve said this before, and I daresay I’ll say it again: this may not be wise. Looking to the future is, in my humble experience, far better than looking back. Far less dangerous. Leave it. I beg you: go and flirt with another young man or two.’

  ‘Flirt! I never flirt!’ I pouted.

  ‘My cherished one, you never stop.’

  ‘In any case, shouldn’t we be after that book? It’d make our fortune!’

  There was a long pause as if ideas were coming that he should have had five minutes ago. ‘Believe me, if – and it has to be said it’s an enormously big “if” – if that frontispiece is genuine and comes from a genuine copy of Natura Rerum, then the bibliophile world and his wife will be looking for it. And not for sentimental reasons, believe me.’

  ‘“A big if”! You’re not saying it’s a forgery!’

  He nodded sadly. ‘Ralph Harper’s not the only one who tampers with things.’

  I couldn’t speak. Giving me something between a hug and a shake, Griff said in his everyday voice, ‘Be that as it may, I noticed a pretty little Worcester posy bowl over on Josie’s stall – ever such an ugly repair. Now Josie said she was interested in that Majolica plate you’ve been working on. If she won’t offer you enough, try that new lad down by the exit to the loos: he looks pretty damp behind the ears. And there’s a darling little Art Deco oil and vinegar set on someone else’s stall – I would have thought that it would repay your ministrations threefold.’

  That was Griff’s way of reminding me that I was at Detling to work. Although I was fizzing with a mixture of excitement and anxiety, there was no point in arguing. And, now I needed money desperately – whatever Griff said, I had to buy that page – work made the best sense.

  The idea was that each time I bought damaged ware cheap and restored it to a saleable state I would plough the profit into more and more items, thus bringing in bigger and bigger returns to my part of the business. I’d agreed with Griff that I should keep back a small proportion to keep me in clothes and what he called gewgaws. Actually, most of the jewellery I bought was from fairs like this, since I was into retro-chic in a big way. Plus, if I didn’t like something I could always sell it again, usually at a profit. This was my very own money, not something to contribute to the stall. Today I was wearing a big pair of Lalique glass ear-clips, lovely to be seen wearing but murder on the earlobes. I had an original – but not the original – mounting card tucked into my box of tricks. You never knew when such odds and ends might come in handy. I transferred it to my bag. I could always take off the clips – which would be a relief all round – and, attaching them to the mounting card, flog them this morning. Though it cost a month’s gewgaws, a year’s, Natura Rerum would be mine. Well, a small part, at least.

  Josie was an elf of a woman, probably never more than five feet tall and now shrunk into a wizened question mark. Griff said she’d got something that hunched spines called osteoporosis. She might have been any age between sixty and ninety. She looked with grudging approval at the Majolica plate I showed her. I’d spent hours soaking off disgusting old glue, which left a thick ugly scar where some hamfisted idiot had tried to repair a nice clean break, and replacing it with slow-setting, practically invisible epoxy-resin. The plate was now almost as good as new. Or old. It wasn’t really valuable anyway, not a sixteenth-century piece a dealer would have given his teeth for. Nineteenth-century manufacturers had twigged that naïve tourists to Italy would give a mint for what they thought were mediaeval plates. I suppose you could call what they produced either forgeries or tributes. This particular plate yelled it was nineteenth century. The young woman in the centre – a damsel, Griff called her – sat there like some drapery-hung sack of potatoes. Queen Victoria on a bad day. I’d been tempted to paint in a double chin, for spite.

  The price Josie offered, I wished I had. I didn’t like offending Josie, because apart from being an old mate of Griff’s she’d let me loose on odds and ends when I was still at the kindergarten stage. But I wanted at least f
ifty per cent more. Mumbling that I’d think about it, which meant leaving the posy bowl where it was, I drifted to the exit Griff had told me about, in search of the new lad. The only male stallholder around was about sixty. Still, Griff always did like a spot of poetic licence, so I dawdled to a halt. A rather prissy floral sign at the back of his stall announced, Arthur Habgood, Devon Cottage Antiques.

  He seized the plate like a starving man grabbing his dinner. ‘Istoriato Rafaelle ware!’ he crowed.

  I pointed out the join. I’d rather not have done, but I had my reputation – and Griff’s – to think of. Never, ever, he’d said, should one ever try to pass off damaged goods as the perfect article. Not if one wanted to stay in the trade. I’d seen plenty of people flourishing in the trade like dandelions while ignoring his dictum – maybe even because they ignored it – but felt better, if poorer, being straight.

  Habgood favoured me with a rundown of the genre, full of detail, mostly wrong. I smiled and nodded, not daring to offend a potential buyer by a look at my watch or even a glance back at Marcus. But if he didn’t stop waffling soon, all the profit in the world might be in vain, and that frontispiece in someone else’s hands.

  ‘And how much did you want for this?’ he asked at last.

  ‘I’d really keep it on our own stall,’ I lied, ‘but it’s not really our period.’ Not true either: wherever possible, Griff preferred perfect goods. ‘I suppose my best would be –’ I gave a price a hundred per cent more than it was worth.

  New to the business he might be, but he hadn’t come down in the last shower of rain. The look he cast under his ill-kempt eyebrows was shrewder than I’d expected. Don’t tell me he’d been playing me at my own game, boring the socks off me so I’d ask for less.

  He offered what Josie had offered. But when I picked up the plate, shaking my head emphatically – if anyone was going to get a bargain it would be someone I owed a favour – he shuffled his hand into his back pocket and fished out a few scruffy tenners. When he fanned them out I counted forty more than Josie’s price.

  Wrinkling my nose, I made as if to walk away. But we both knew I’d turn back. ‘Throw in that cracked Staffordshire figure – you know you can’t sell it as it is – and it’s a deal. And I’ll let you have first refusal when I’ve restored it.’

  He shook his head, removing a note from the wad. ‘That’s my best if you want the figure.’

  I picked it up. With a little help from me it would fetch a great deal more than a tenner. ‘Deal,’ I nodded. As money changed hands, I said, ‘You’re new on the circuit, aren’t you?’

  ‘On the circuit, yes. But I’ve had a shop in Totnes for years. Then there was foot-and-mouth and September 11th and the Americans stopped coming over and flashing their lovely greenbacks.’

  ‘So you took to the road?’

  ‘They said this was supposed to be a quality international fair,’ he said gloomily. ‘I didn’t quite expect the NEC but I did expect indoor loos.’

  ‘There are some indoor ones right opposite the other hall. New ones.’

  ‘They aren’t here, are they?’

  I couldn’t argue. What I needed was some sort of exit cue. ‘So where’s your next gig?’ That wasn’t very good. ‘So I can prioritise this.’ Which might sound as if I were about to dash off and do it straightaway.

  ‘Stafford. Another agricultural ground.’ He made it sound like a slaughterhouse.

  ‘Don’t worry: it’s a couple of notches up on this. Not just the ground, but the quality of goods on sale. Look, I’ve got to go and see a man about a dog.’

  ‘OK. Nice doing business with you – er –?’ His smile showed off more filling than I’d have wanted the general public to see.

  ‘Lina.’

  He came out with a joke I’d come to dread. ‘Lena as in Horne, I suppose.’ The smile broadened. What teeth weren’t filled looked like crowns. Like every other old geezer, he added, in case I’d never heard of her, ‘Lena Horne the singer. More my generation than yours, of course.’

  Very true. ‘Lina as in Evelina. Evelina Townend.’

  I could practically see his tonsils his grin was so broad. ‘Not every day I meet a character from Fanny Burney.’

  Not every day I got chatted up by a man old enough to be my grandfather. I gave what Griff called my winsome smile and slipped away.

  Trying to look cool and serene I hotfooted it to Marcus’ stall. To my relief he was still prettifying maps, and my frontispiece was still unsullied, just as I wanted it. A memory in black and white was worth half a dozen blurred by watercolour.

  It was priced in letters and numbers, but neither Marcus nor Copeland would have been much use deciphering the Enigma codes, so it took me about five seconds to realise that my bounty wouldn’t buy more than about half of it – and that was before they popped it into a gold-leaf frame.

  The only thing to do was lay my cards on the table. Some of them, at least.

  At twenty-four or five, Marcus wasn’t much older than me but while I still appeared in my mirror as something like an overgrown schoolgirl – until I’d popped on what Griff called my slap, at least – Marcus had shed anything that smacked of his teens. He cultivated what some of the women I’d met called his Mr Darcy look. I thought he looked more like the Duke of Wellington, in those portraits when he was still plain Arthur Wellesley. Not all that plain, come to think of it. Calculating eyes and a nose to sneer down. But sexy with it. Marcus rarely calculated, except when dealing with punters with more money than taste, and never sneered – not, at least, until he’d stowed their cash in his back pocket. He always greeted older women with a courtly kiss on both cheeks. Since he and I were eyeing each other up as possible dates, he simply flapped a hand as I approached his stall. Maybe I’d suggest that drink for tonight.

  Or maybe I wouldn’t. When I brought the conversation round to the frontispiece, he did rather peer down that nose.

  ‘Out of your league, Lina, I’d have thought. Or has someone commissioned you to get it on the cheap? In which case, add another hundred and we’ll split it.’

  ‘No, not a commission. And I want it as seen – not tarted up or framed, thanks. So you can give me the real price, not the wish one.’

  ‘What on earth do you want it for? It’s not your Victorian pretty-pretty china. Not branching out, are you?’

  ‘I want it for a friend,’ I said, touching the side of my nose.

  ‘Since when have you had the sort of friend to give something that pricey?’

  No, I wouldn’t be suggesting that drink after work. Not unless he stopped being a pain in the bum and named a sensible price. I said nothing and waited.

  To be fair, what he asked wasn’t outrageous, not when you considered how rare Griff had said the original book was. All the same, I haggled a bit – not the best move, since I’d be asking for credit, whatever the price. And yes, even if he’d asked double, I’d have had to raise the cash somehow. No, I wouldn’t consider the possibility that it was a fake.

  At last he came down another twenty pounds. ‘Strictly cash, mind. And don’t tell Copeland.’

  ‘You may have to tell him, though. I want to pay in instalments. Here you are. A hundred on account.’

  His Wellington eyebrows shot up. Had I met my Waterloo? I almost expected him to send for some pantalooned aide-de-camp to sling me out of his tent. I played the pathos card. ‘Look, it’s for Griff’s birthday. A big birthday.’ Well, all birthdays were big when you were that age. ‘And I don’t want him to know.’

  ‘So when do you plan to pay the rest?’

  ‘Soon as I sell my gewgaws and some more china.’

  ‘Like, today?’

  ‘More like next fair,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t inherited this truth gene from wherever. ‘Unless you know someone who’d like three old Worcester cups and saucers and a pair of Lalique earrings?’

  He stroked his long chin, graced with just enough stubble to be sexy. ‘I couldn’t say – no, hang on! There
’s a woman with one of the outside stalls. She’d got a load of costume jewellery.’

  I pulled a face. An outside stall implied she needed to keep her overheads really low. My Lalique wasn’t Christmas cracker tat: it was quality glass. But I could try.

  As I turned, it was Marcus’ turn to tap his nose. ‘No need to say anything about this to Copeland,’ he muttered.

  I hadn’t intended to. How such a dish as Marcus came to have such a ferrety-faced cousin I’d never know.

  ‘What about when he tells you to start painting it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Better get the rest of that cash quick,’ he said.

  I nodded and at the sight of Copeland melted away. I’d ask about the Ruskin later.

  Clouds, which when we’d set out had been white fluffy pompoms emphasising the blue of the sky, were now congregating in ominous black banks. My heart bled for the poor dealers trying to work out whether to cover all their gear to protect it or to leave it where it was in hopes of a quicker sale. One look at the jewellery stall Marcus had mentioned told me I was wasting my time: it wasn’t even good paste, but cheap brightly coloured glass in fancy absolutely-not-gold settings, the sort of thing Iris said she wore with taffeta dresses and seamed nylons when she went to dances she called hops when she was a teenager. I was drifting sadly away when I remembered the other display hall, a couple of hundred yards from ours. No. Don’t ask. That’s just how it is. Mostly this one held furniture, some of it good quality, but there was sometimes a stall specialising in glass. It was there today, the owners rather belatedly setting up, unwrapping early twentieth-century glass from France and Germany. It might be an acquired taste – Griff loathed it – but I loved the iridescence and the weird colours, which needed clever lighting to show them at their best. I’d have murdered for that bluey-purple Loetz vase… And what were they unpacking now but some Lalique. A couple of birds, which I really liked, though I’d have said they were 1930’s, no earlier, and a nymph: lovely opalescent things. In their professional lights my earrings probably looked just as good. I knew that they were really from the sixties, and not this stall’s period at all, but couldn’t resist a try. And managed it. I never mentioned a date, honestly, and they were so sure they were on to a bargain, they practically tore them off my ears. Who was I to argue? I left the backing card in my bag: it’d come in useful another day, maybe. Meanwhile, I pondered which was worse: the pain of the clips or the pain of the circulation coming back.