Gold by Gemini

by Jonathan Gash

  Antiques begin, fans, in the shoulder of that lovely blissful Year of Grace 1836. No matter what dealer groups do with fanciful definitions, keep that magic date in mind. But please don’t think I’m advising you to sprint out and hurl your Coronation souvenirs into the nearest jumble sale. That would be foolish, because three other factors besides age come into it. They’re rarity, nature, and condition.

  And here it comes, pals, the end of our beautiful friendship. What I’ve just told you is okay for antiques as such. It’s known by any dealer worth a light, and by most collectors with any sense.

  But nobody knows it like forgers do.

  You reach antiques by standing on piles of money. So my mind went:

  One, I have no antiques of my own.

  Two, I need money.

  Three, I therefore need to sell antiques, but have got none.

  Four, I therefore need to sell some things that resemble antiques but which aren’t the real thing. Hey ho.

  Chapter 14

  BEFORE I GO on, don’t knock forgery. It’s a respectable trade and has done a lot of good for mankind. Anyway, what’s wrong with a good honest forgery? People only hate the idea because it means they can’t afford to be lazy when buying. Michelangelo started out as the most expert forger of the Renaissance, copying an ancient sketch so well even his teacher Ghirlandaio was misled, mainly because Michelangelo had cleverly aged it. And even then he didn’t own up, only being caught out by being overheard bragging about it in the boozer. And he went from strength to strength. It’s a sobering thought that he would never have got himself launched, had it not been for his famous Sleeping Cupid forgery – he buried the statue where it would be found, and saw it actually sold to the famous collector Cardinal Riario. He’d the sense to include a ‘straightener’ (a give-away) so he could claim his just deserts later on.

  So, folks, an expert may do the actual forging, but it’s us that make it something it never was in the first place.

  Ever since I can remember I’ve been making. As a kid I’d only to hear how William Blake revived and modified Castiglione’s monotype engraving for me to go thieving copper sheet and working dementedly till all hours to see how it could have been done. It might sound odd behaviour, but it’s taught me more about antiques than any other experience – and I include reading. I’ve tried everything: casting bronzes, silver-smithing, hammering coins, early ‘chemical’ photogravure, wood-block printing, making flintlocks, copying early German clocks, making parchment like St Cuthbert’s monks in his Lindisfarne outfit, ironwork, Chinese glazes, making chain armour, anything.

  I often think of Fabergé, that great (permit me to repeat that, folks: great) designer. He didn’t actually make his brilliant masterpieces: that beavering was all done by subterranean troglodytic minions in his workshop such as Durofeev, the self-taught mechanic of St Petersburg who made the fabulous gold peacock which still trots out of Fabergé’s exquisite rock crystal Easter egg he gave to the Czar. When the new bureaucracy poured into his Moscow business at the Revolution’s takeover, Fabergé simply begged leave to be allowed to don his coat and hat and politely faded out of this modern era. The coming of the Admin. Man was just too much. Understandable, perhaps. My reaction’s different. I fight. The opponent is barbarism.

  Being an antiques man and not having much else to fight with, I fight with antiques. And now I had a fight on my hands.

  I explained to Janie I had work to do.

  ‘More of that mysterious business in the cottage you won’t let me see?’ she complained.

  ‘That’s it’

  ‘If I find it turns out to be a secret cupboard containing a dumb blonde, Lovejoy –’

  ‘Very funny,’ I got back, not wanting her to think of hiding places. ‘Your husband’s back today anyhow. Time for your homework.’

  ‘There’s an alternative course of action.’ Janie never smiles in this sort of conversation.

  ‘Tell any dealers you see I’m still contagious and they’re not to call.’ I pushed her out. I could tell that pleased her. She didn’t even say, ‘Including Margaret?’ – which I expected.

  ‘Phone me,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I promised. She’d written the best times down in case some stray serf picked up the blower and summoned her better half to take me to task. I stood at the door watching her drive off in the Lagonda. Like a mobile Stately Home.

  My workshop’s only a shed. As much as possible I like the scene to be set correctly. No electricity. No gas. No lasers or power drills, just candles and an oil lamp. I have one wooden bench, a marble slab for special work and an old dental drill, foot-pedalled to a horizontal spindle for grinding and polishing. At the back of the garage there’s a small brick kiln I’ve built and some leather foot-bellows I made. That’s really it.

  The law on forgery’s a bit funny, as on everything else. Anyone’s allowed to make likenesses without infringing copyright law. But if you pass one off as somebody else’s work for gain, the magistrates get cross and you’re for it. So, sign any fake you’ve made with your own name, however skilfully hidden, and you’re in the clear. I decided that Beck was the mark. For him I decided to make a special effort. I would skate very close to the edge. Beck unsuspectingly would provide the money. I would knowingly provide the forgeries, and I’d stay legal.

  I’d already tried copying Roman and Egyptian glass. One heats the glass – pick modern glass tubing because it’s so easy to melt and get going. The idea is to get a blob of glass on the blowpipe, fairly centrally. Then push it into a mould you’ve made ready, of earthenware, sand or whatever. Blow like hell and keep the pressure up until you’re practically on your knees. Then simply cut the glass off with big shears. Whatever impressions or patterns you’ve made to decorate the mould’s inner surface, that’s the pattern you’ll have on your little glass bottle. Okay?

  Well, no, not really. The weight and density of the glass will give you away – ancient glass seems so light. And the colours (green, yellowish, blue). So add some colour from mineral compounds when the glass is in the molten state. Trial and error’s the only thing here, I’m afraid.

  It took me a day to make three. One was a bowl, another a small jug and the last a small bottle. I did one extra by the lost-sand process because it was probably the first-ever of all processes mankind found. My own method is to sink a weighted earthenware bowl into a crucible and let the crucible cool, probably how it was done in Phoenician times.

  I engraved LOVEJOY FECIT, my address and the day’s date in minute stippled lettering as deep inside as I could reach, A buyer wouldn’t look with a hand lens. I was really proud. They looked more Roman than the Roman stuff. Or did I mean Egyptian?

  I next did a découpage, from an old – last year’s – Christmas card. This was for speed, though my hands made it a painfully slow business. Profits are not enormous, but you can knock out a few quid by forging your first ‘antique’ as follows: find a ruined wardrobe, table, anything on its last legs, say your auntie’s worm-pocked cupboard. Make sure it’s not antique. Take the back off. Old, dried, wrinkled, warped wood, right? Cut a piece about thirteen inches by nine. Now go to that heap of Christmas cards you keep meaning to chuck out. Find one picture print you think looks oldish. Peel the design – perhaps flowers and grasses – off the thick card, and glue it to the wood which you’ll have by now sandpapered smooth and wiped clean. Leave it a day. Scrape some burned umber from your nephew’s paint set on to your finger, and rub it into the edges of the stuck design. Not too much. Warm it all in a fireplace. Then varnish the lot, several coats. Use the new synthetic varnishes if you like, with maybe a scratch of chrome yellow to the final coat. Rose madder does quite well, too, but you’ll need to be very careful with that. And there’s your genuine William IV, or even late Georgian, decorated place-mat (‘from the house of a local country squire’ as we dealers would say). Never mind that Georgian country squires practically never used table mats. You have the money for your next meal.r />
  Then I did a lovely tiling job. A tiler is a low quality forged painting, a sort of beginner’s forgery, though with an impressive record of giddy success. It’s done like this: take a modern book showing the paintings by, say, Samuel Palmer. You take one area of a picture (say, a mid-ground forest) and trace its outline on to a paper. Then you trace a barn from a second painting, the mountain from a third, sky from a fourth and so on. If you don’t care about the book you cut the pictures out, and assemble the paper bits, very like a jigsaw or tiling on a wall, until all the area of your blank paper’s area is filled. Then, with any old watercolour paintbox, you assemble the painting. Tip: do it fast. You’d be astonished at the speed real forgers work. I suspect the original masters worked just as fast. Think, for example, of the contemporary descriptions of Turner. He always had his skates on.

  For Beck’s ‘Palmer’, I used the heaviest paper I could find, which was about one hundred and twenty poundage. Heavy paper always helps. It took about an hour. Then, ensuring I’d a lovely straightener – my name in pencil, done minutely in a crease folded into the area to be covered by the frame — I blew a faint gust of soot and heated soil-dust over it. Never use soot alone. I fronted it with faintly brown-tinted glass. (Well, actually, I couldn’t afford that, so I inserted a sheet of thin plastic over which I’d washed a mixture of Vandyke brown and chrome yellow.) Any trick for age’s sake, forgers say.

  Next was a copy of a letter, copied from a famous book of Peninsular War letters, ostensibly from one of Wellington’s soldiers at Salamanca. I used ordinary typing paper, two sheets glued together to get that crackle and frayed with a wire brush. I wrote using a real quill and some ink made from crushed oakgalls out of the garden. Two or three very warm warmings in the oven, and my own name in a grand convoluted signature so complex even I had to trace the scrolled lines to read it.

  I invented my own antique musical instrument next. Vaseline smeared over an old bike inner tube, cut and clipped to be one long inflated rubber. Two inner cardboards from lavatory rolls, also Vaselined, and a handful of four-inch glue-soaked bandages rolled round the tube and the cardboards and waggled into a double-S shape. Once they’d set, I pricked the inner tube and pulled it out as it deflated. The rigid S-shaped piece was now solid enough to wind more glue-soaked bandages around. When it hardens you can cut oval holes at various distances along it. I drilled a piece of horn into a mouthpiece shape and stuck it in the thin end. The trouble is that bandages are white so I stained the thing with teabags crammed into a jamjar with a little burned umber and saffron powder before varnishing. I engraved my signature, the date and my address round the inner rim of the mouthpiece and the belled rim. LOVEJOY FECIT again. Ten to one Beck would call it a crumhorn without knowing a crumhorn from a foghorn. A million to one he’d never look for the maker’s name. I baked it gently in a low oven.

  They looked really good. I’ll have to be careful what I buy in future, I thought. I lined them up on my bench for a last look. Good. Or, rather, bad. I normally only do things properly to teach myself. But this was different. Once people start going about killing people, people have to take very special measures against certain people, don’t people? Even if it means people taking frightful risks. I was ready.

  That evening I took out my one precious piece, very dear to me. A jade coin, apparently from the Ch’ien Lung period. I had it in my priest-hole. Now the cupboard was bare.

  I phoned Tinker Dill at the White Hart. He called at the cottage for the jade. I told him to enter it at Gimbert’s auction by a devious route and under a fictitious name. He was going to ask what it was all about but looked at my face.

  ‘Will you be there, Lovejoy?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t miss an auction for the world.’ I gave him the bus fare back to town. ‘I’ll be in action again soon, Tinker.’

  ‘See you, then.’

  ‘Oh, Tinker,’ I called after him. ‘See that Beck’s there, can you?’

  He grinned. ‘Thought as much.’ He waved from the drive. I saw him hitch a lift from the milk float further up the lane.

  Ready, steady, go.

  Chapter 15

  THE DAY OF the auction dawned blue and clear. By six o’clock I was up and sweating like a dog, nervous and on edge. I go about trembling and singing, clattering the pots and getting ready twice. I’m always like this. Janie was due to come for me at nine-fifteen. By then I was a wreck. The wildlife got their breakfast three times over and I lost pounds. I couldn’t eat any breakfast though I’d got some of those flaky things out and made some toast.

  ‘There must be easier ways to earn a living, Lovejoy.’ Janie pulled the Lagonda in and sat staring at me.

  ‘Why are you so bloody late?’ I couldn’t unlock the car door for fumbling.

  ‘I’d like to point out that I’m early,’ she said sweetly. ‘And good morning, world.’

  ‘Well, then,’ I said lamely.

  ‘And it isn’t locked.’

  Two down. I got in sheepishly and we left the village sedately, a visiting lady and her agent respectably bound for an ordinary sale. I always feel so sick at this stage. The first sight of town by the nursery gardens makes me retch. That’s the trouble with ordinary sales – there’s no such thing. Every single one’s a matter of life and death.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Janie slowed at the station. ‘Shall I stop?’

  ‘No.’ I’d only have to get out and run.

  ‘If I see something I like in the auction, can I get it?’

  ‘Tell me.’ It took me three tries to speak. My mouth was sand. ‘And I’ll tell you what to do.’

  ‘Oh, I can bid,’ she said, poor little innocent. ‘I know how.’

  The eternal cry.

  ‘Everybody knows how about everything,’ I said, ‘Only Caesars and Wellingtons know when.’

  She shrugged. ‘Anyway, there may be nothing nice there,’ she countered. ‘And keep your hand off my knee when I’m driving, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ My hand had actually fallen on her knee again. My mind was on other things.

  No matter what the auction is, somewhere deep in that crush of old mangles, derelict bikes and discarded trinkets is a gem, a real trophy going for a song.

  I’ve never yet been to an auction where every single thing’s rubbish. I don’t deny that on viewing day you’ll hear plenty of people all about you saying disgustedly, ‘Did you ever see such rubbish?’ Have you ever wondered why? If you’d spotted, say, the missing chunk of the Cullinan Diamond thinly disguised as a paperweight between a battered radio and a heap of gardening tools, what else would you do but go about pretending everything was a waste of time? I mean, you don’t want all Hatton Garden clattering in. So naturally you go about saying it’s all a heap of dross. Loudly. Often. We call it ‘shading’ the stock. It puts honest people (me, maybe you) off. You’d be surprised how effective it is. You’d also be astonished at seeing how many of these doom-gospellers actually turn up on sale days all eager to bid for the same rubbish they’ve previously decried.

  Janie put the Lagonda in Gimbert’s yard with the dealers’ old bangers. We left it looking like a cathedral among kennels. We walked down the hill, Janie primly keeping her distance from me and smiling good mornings to one and all. We were all assembling. Barkers tend to huddle in doorways, smoking and nodding. A housewife who will be bidding usually stands waiting vigilantly in one spot, presumably in case Sotheby’s suddenly send a dozen experts to bid for the ashtray she fancies.

  It’s a saying round here that the best trees are found in forests, and they’re very hard to tell from all the rest. When you go bidding just remember that people aren’t what they say or think or seem. We’re all what we do.

  There were already eighty or so people in. Everybody was on tenterhooks, hearts thumping and fingers itching. I had to tell Janie about her coat. She had unconsciously adopted the old shoplifter’s trick of carrying her coat over her arm.

&nbs
p; ‘Do you mean they’d think me a . . . thief?’ She was outraged.

  ‘No, love. Er,’ I invented, ‘you remind them, that’s all.’ It had to do, though she was deeply riled. The dealers relaxed as she slipped the coat over her shoulders.

  This morning, Gimbert’s auction warehouse was offering several hundred items of assorted junk ranging from battered old tables to tatty trinkets in those pathetic little boxes signifying recent bereavements and relatives desperate to clear out. Some people say all life’s only must, dust and rust. People wandered about among the bicycles and lawnmowers, mostly without any idea. From the entrance it was ugly, dowdy, pretty rough. To me, exquisite. Somewhere in all that rubbish was that missing Leonardo. I would find it or get damned close. To some that single bargain would be nothing more than a ring, a worn Edwardian matchbox, a Victorian maid’s mob cap. To me, a delight as spectacular as the Crown Jewels.

  There’s a technique. You drift. Don’t tear in thinking to see it all and race on to the next auction. Don’t search. Idle about. After an hour or so a gradual change takes place. Objects begin to move like swallows shuffling on a wire. I swear it. You can feel it, even see it. Dusty old items you wouldn’t look at twice shift into prominence as if they somehow grow taller and beckon stealthily. But take no notice yet, just carry on drifting. In time one will be practically shrieking for your attention. That grotty old desk covered with rubbish will have grown to twice its size and be throbbing like an old cinema organ. Everything else will fade into the background. And of course it will turn out to be a genuine early New England block-fronted desk, so ugly yet so much desired today. On a good day maybe two or even three items call you. Once I even had to mortgage my cottage again to pay for the seven delicious items I’d bought.