The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Come back,’ called the woman.

  The child crept back. And to me the woman said, ‘We’re closed,’ and having got the two inside, shut the door in my face.

  The moral is this: if The Burning of Cranmer was August’s treasure, it was hopeless to try and get it before he had time to guess what mine was. It was clear to him I was too new to the trade to have one. And, in fact, I don’t think he had the piece. Years later, I found my collector had left his collection complete to a private museum in Leicester when he died. He had obtained what he craved, a small immortality in being memorable for his relation to a minor work of art.

  I know what happened at August’s that night. In time his woman, Mrs Price, bellowed it to me, for her confidences could be heard down the street. August flopped on his bed and while he was sleeping off the drink she got the bundles of notes out of his pockets and counted them. She always did this after his racing days. If he had lost she woke him up and shouted at him; if he had made a profit she kept quiet and hid it under her clothes in a chest of drawers. I went down from London again and again but August was not there.

  Most of the time these shops are closed. You rattle the door handle; no reply. Look through the window and each object inside stands gleaming with something like a smile of malice, especially on plates and glass; the furniture states placidly that it has been in better houses than you will ever have, the silver speaks of vanished servants. It speaks of the dead hands that have touched it; even the dust is the dust of families that have gone. In the shabby places – and August’s was shabby – the dealer is like a toadstool that has grown out of the debris. There was only one attractive object in August’s shop – as I say – he went in for ivories and on a table at the back was a set of white and red chessmen set out on a board partly concealed by a screen. I was tapping my feet impatiently looking through the window when I was astonished to see two of the chessmen had moved; then I saw a hand, a long thin work-reddened hand appear from behind the screen and move one of the pieces back. Life in the place! I rattled the door handle again and the child came from behind the screen. She had a head loaded with heavy black hair to her shoulders and a white heart-shaped face and wore a skimpy dress with small pink flowers on it. She was so thin that she looked as if she would blow away in fright out of the place, but instead, pausing on tiptoe, she swallowed with appetite; her sharp eyes had seen my red car outside the place. She looked back cautiously at the inner door of the shop and then ran to unlock the shop door. I went in.

  ‘What are you up to?’ I said. ‘Playing chess?’

  ‘I’m teaching my children,’ she said, putting up her chin like a child of five. ‘Do you want to buy something?’

  At once Mrs Price was there shouting:

  ‘Isabel. I told you not to open the door. Go back into the room.’

  Mrs Price went to the chessboard and put the pieces back in their places.

  ‘She’s a child,’ said Mrs Price, accusing me.

  And when she said this Mrs Price blew herself out to a larger size and then her sullen face went blank and babyish as if she had travelled out of herself for a beautiful moment. Then her brows levelled and she became sullen again.

  ‘Mr August’s out,’ she said.

  ‘It is about a piece of Staffordshire,’ I said. ‘He mentioned it to me. When will he be in?’

  ‘He’s in and out. No good asking. He doesn’t know himself.’

  ‘I’ll try again.’

  ‘If you like.’

  There was nothing to be got out of Mrs Price.

  In my opinion, the antique trade is not one for a woman, unless she is on her own. Give a woman a shop and she wants to sell something; even that little girl at August’s wanted to sell. It’s instinct. It’s an excitement. Mrs Price – August’s woman – was living with a man exactly like the others in the trade: he hated customers and hated parting with anything. By middle age these women have dead blank faces, they look with resentment and indifference at what is choking their shops; their eyes go smaller and smaller as the chances of getting rid of it became rarer and rarer and they are defeated. Kept out of the deals their husbands have among themselves, they see even their natural love of intrigue frustrated. This was the case of Mrs Price who must have been handsome in a big-boned way when she was young, but who had swollen into a drudge. What allured the men did not allure her at all. It is a trade that feeds illusions. If you go after Georgian silver you catch the illusion, while you are bidding, that you are related to the rich families who owned it. You acquire imaginary ancestors. Or, like Pliny with a piece of Meissen he was said to keep hidden somewhere – you drift into German history and become a secret curator of the Victoria and Albert museum – a place he often visited. August’s lust for ‘the ivories’ gave to his horse-racing mind a private oriental side; he dreamed of rajahs, sultans, harems and lavish gamblers which, in a man as vulgar as he was, came out, in sad reality, as a taste for country girls and the company of bookies. Illusions lead to furtiveness in every-day life and to sudden temptations; the trade is close to larceny, to situations where you don’t ask where something has come from, especially for a man like August whose dreams had landed him in low company. He had started at the bottom and very early he ‘received’ and got twelve months for it. This frightened him. He took up with Mrs Price and though he resented it she had made a fairly honest man of him. August was to be her work of art.

  But he did not make an honest woman of her. No one disapproved of this except herself. Her very size, growing year by year, was an assertion of virtue. Everyone took her side in her public quarrels with him. And as if to make herself more respectable, she had taken in her sister’s little girl when the sister died; the mother had been in Music Hall. Mrs Price petted and prinked the little thing. When August became a failure as a work of art, Mrs Price turned to the child. Even August was charmed by her when she jumped on his knee and danced about showing him her new clothes. A little actress, as everyone said, exquisite.

  It took me a long time to give up the belief that August had the Cranmer piece – and as I know now, he hadn’t got it; but at last I did see I was wasting my time and settled in to the routine of the business. I sometimes saw August at country sales and at one outside Marlborough something ridiculous happened. It was a big sale and went on till late in the afternoon and he had been drinking. After lunch the auctioneer had put up a china cabinet and the bidding was strong. Some outsider was bidding against the dealers, a thing that made them close their faces with moral indignation; the instinctive hatred of customers united them. Drink always stirred August morally; he was a rather despised figure and he was, I suppose, determined to speak for all. He entered the bidding. Up went the price: 50, 5, 60, 5, 70, 5, 80, 5, 90. The outsiders were a young couple with a dog.

  ‘Ninety, ninety,’ called the auctioneer.

  August could not stand it. ‘Twice-Five,’ he shouted.

  There is not much full-throated laughter at sales; it is usually shoppish and dusty. But the crowd in this room looked round at August and shouted with a laughter that burst the gloom of trade. He was put out for a second and then saw his excitement had made him famous. The laughter went on; the wonder had for a whole minute stopped the sale. ‘Twice-five!’ He was slapped on the back. At sixty-four the man who had never had a nick-name had been christened. He looked around him. I saw a smile cross his face and double the pomposity that beer had put into him and he redoubled it that evening at the nearest pub. I went off to my car and Alsop of Ramsey, the ephemera man who had picked up some Victorian programmes, followed me and said out of the side of his mouth:

  ‘More trouble tonight at August’s.’

  And then to change the subject and speaking for every dealer south of the Trent, he offered serious news.

  ‘Pliny’s mother’s dead – Pliny of the Green.’

  The voice had all the shifty meaning of the trade. I was too simple to grasp the force of this confidence. It surprised me in the
following weeks to hear people repeat the news: ‘Pliny’s mother’s dead’ in so many voices, from the loving memory and deepest sympathy manner as much suited to old clothes, old furniture and human beings indiscriminately, to the flat statement that an event of business importance had occurred in my eventless trade. I was in it for the money and so, I suppose, were all the rest – how else could they live? – but I seemed to be surrounded by a dreamy freemasonry, who thought of it in a different secretive way.

  On a wet morning the following spring I was passing through Salisbury on market day and stopped in the square to see if there was anything worth picking up at the stalls there. It was mostly junk but I did find a pretty Victorian teapot – no mark, I agree – with a chip in the spout for a few shillings because the fever of the trade never quite leaves one even on dull days. (I sold the pot five years later for £8 when the prices started to go mad.) I went into one of the pubs in the square, I forget its name, and I was surprised to see Marbright and Alsop there and, sitting near the window, Mrs Price. August was getting drinks at the bar.

  Alsop said to me:

  ‘Pliny’s here. I passed him a minute ago.’

  Marbright said: ‘He was standing in Woolworth’s doorway. I asked him to come and have one, but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s hit him hard his mother going,’ Marbright said. ‘What’s he doing here? Queen Mary’s dead.’

  It was an old joke that Gentleman Pliny had never been the same since the old Queen had come to his shop some time back – everyone knew what she was for picking up things. He only opened on Sundays now and a wealthy crowd came there in their big cars – a new trend as Alsop said. August brought the drinks and stood near, for Mrs Price spread herself on the bench and never left much room for anyone else to sit down. He looked restless and glum.

  ‘Where will Pliny be without his mother,’ Mrs Price moaned into her glass and, putting it down, glowered at August. She had been drinking a good deal.

  August ignored her and said, sneering:

  ‘He kept her locked up.’

  There is always a lot of talking about ‘locking up’ in the trade; people’s minds go to their keys.

  ‘It was kindness,’ Mrs Price said, ‘after the burglars got in at Sampson’s, three men in a van loading it up in broad daylight. Any woman of her age would be frightened.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with the burglary,’ said August, always sensitive when crime was mentioned. ‘She was getting soft in the head. He caught her giving his stuff away when she was left on her own. She was past it.’

  Mrs Price was a woman who didn’t like to be contradicted.

  ‘He’s a gentleman,’ said Mrs Price, accusing August. ‘He was good to his mother. He took her out every Sunday night of his life. She liked a glass of stout on Sundays.’

  This was true, though Mrs Price had not been to London for years and had never seen this event; but all agreed. We live on myths.

  ‘It was her kidneys,’ moaned Mrs Price. One outsize woman was mourning another, seeing a fate.

  ‘I suppose that’s why he didn’t get married, looking after her,’ said Marbright.

  ‘Pliny! Get married! Don’t make me laugh,’ said August with a defiant recklessness that seemed to surprise even himself. ‘The last Saturday in every month like a clock striking he was round the pubs in Brixton with old Lal Drake.’

  And now, as if frightened by what he said, he swanked his way out of the side door of the pub on his way to the Gents.

  We lowered our eyes. There are myths, but there are facts. They all knew – even I had heard – that what August said was true, but it was not a thing a sensible man would say in front of Mrs Price. And – mind you – Pliny standing a few doors down the street. But Mrs Price stayed calm among the thoughts in her mind.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ she said peacefully as we thought, though she was eyeing the door waiting for August to come back.

  ‘I knew his father,’ said Alsop.

  We were soon laughing about the ancient Pliny, the Bermondsey boy who began with a barrow shouting ‘Old Iron’ in the streets, a man who never drank, never had a bank account – didn’t trust banks – who belted his son while his mother ‘educated him up’ – she was a tall woman and the boy grew up like her, tall with a long arching nose and those big red ears that looked as though his parents had pulled him now this way now that in their fight over him. She had been a housekeeper in a big house and she had made a son who looked like an old family butler, Cockney to the bone, but almost a gentleman. Except, as Alsop said, his way of blowing his nose like a foghorn on the Thames, but sharp as his father. Marbright said you could see the father’s life in the store at the back of the shop; it was piled high with what had made the father’s money, every kind of old-fashioned stuff.

  ‘Enough to furnish two or three hotels,’ Alsop said. Mrs Price nodded.

  ‘Wardrobes, tables …’ she said.

  ‘A museum,’ said Marbright. ‘Helmets, swords. Two four-posters the last time I was there.’

  ‘Ironwork. Brass,’ nodded Mrs Price mournfully.

  ‘Must date back to the Crimean War,’ said Marbright.

  ‘And it was all left to Pliny.’

  There was a general sigh.

  ‘And he doesn’t touch it. Rubbish he calls it. He turned his back on it. Only goes in for the best. Hepplewhite, marquetries, his consoles. Regency.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘And,’ I said, ‘his Meissen.’

  They looked at me as if I were a criminal. They glanced at one another as if asking whether they should call the police. I was either a thief or I had publicly stripped them of all their clothes. I had publicly announced Pliny’s lust.

  Although Mrs Price had joined in the conversation, it was in the manner of someone talking in her sleep; for when this silence came, she woke up and said in a startled voice:

  ‘Lal Drake.’

  And screwing up her fists she got up and, pausing to get ready for a rush, she heaved herself fast to the door by which August had left for the Gents, down the alley a quarter of an hour before.

  ‘The other door, missis,’ someone shouted. But she was through it.

  ‘Drink up,’ we said and went out by the front door. I was the last and had a look down the side alley and there I saw a sight. August with one hand doing up his fly buttons and the other arm protecting his face. Mrs Price was hitting out at him and shouting. The language!

  ‘You dirty sod. I knew it. The girl told me.’ She was shouting. She saw me, stopped hitting and rushed at me in tears and shouted back at him.

  ‘The filthy old man.’

  August saw his chance and got out of the alley and made for the cars in the square. She let me go and shouted after him. We were all there and in Woolworth’s doorway was Pliny. Rain was still falling and he looked wet and all the more alone for being wet. I walked off and, I suppose, seeing me go and herself alone and giddy in her rage she looked all round and turned her temper on me.

  ‘The girl has got to go,’ she shouted.

  Then she came to her senses.

  ‘Where is August?’

  August had got to his car and was driving out of the square. She could do nothing. Then she saw Pliny. She ran from me to Pliny, from Pliny to me.

  ‘He’s going after the girl,’ she screamed.

  We calmed her down and it was I who drove her home. (This was when she told me, as the wipers went up and down on the windscreen, that she and August were not married.) We splashed through hissing water that was like her tears on the road. ‘I’m worried for the child. I told her, “Keep your door locked.” I see it’s locked every night. I’m afraid I’ll forget and I won’t hear him if I’ve had a couple. She’s a kid. She doesn’t know anything.’ I understood that the face I had always thought was empty was really filled with the one person she loved: Isabel.

  August was not there when we got to their shop. Mrs Price went in and big as she was, she did not knock an
ything over.

  ‘Isabel?’ she called.

  The girl was in the scullery and came with a wet plate that dripped on the carpet. In two years she had changed. She was wearing an old dress and an apron, but also a pair of high-heeled silver evening shoes. She had become the slut of the house and her pale skin looked dirty.

  ‘You’re dripping that thing everywhere. What have you got those shoes on for? Where did you get them?’

  ‘Uncle Harry, for Christmas,’ she said. She called August Uncle Harry. She tried to look jaunty as if she had put all her hope in life into those silly evening shoes.

  ‘All right,’ said Mrs Price weakly looking at me to keep quiet and say nothing.

  Isabel took off her apron when she saw me. I don’t know whether she remembered me. She was still pale, but had the shapeliness of a small young woman. Her eyes looked restlessly and uncertainly at both of us, her chin was firmer but it trembled. She was smiling too and, because I was there and the girl might see an ally in me, Mrs Price looked with half-kindness at Isabel; but when I got up to go the girl looked at me as if she would follow me out of the door. Mrs Price got up fast to bar the way. She stood on the doorstep of the shop watching me get into the car, swollen with the inability to say ‘Thank you’ or ‘Goodbye’. If the girl was a child, Mrs Price was ten times a child and both of them standing on the doorstep were like children who don’t want anyone to go away.

  I drove off and for a few miles I thought about Mrs Price and the girl, but once settled into the long drive to London, the thought of Pliny supplanted them. I had been caught up by the fever of the trade. Pliny’s mother was dead. What was going to happen to Pliny and all that part of the business Pliny had inherited from his father, the stuff he despised and had not troubled himself with very much in his mother’s time. I ought to go ‘over the water’ – as we say in London – to have a look at it some time. In a few days I went there; I found the idea had occurred to many others. The shop was on one of the main bus routes in South London, a speckled early Victorian place with an ugly red brick store behind it. Pliny’s father had had an eye for a cosy but useful bit of property. Its windows had square panes (1810) and to my surprise the place was open and I could see people inside. There was Pliny with his nose which looked servile rather than distinguished, wearing a long biscuit-coloured tweed jacket with leather pads at the elbows like a Cockney sportsman. There, too, was August with his wet eyes and drinker’s shame, Mrs Price swelling over him in her best clothes, and the girl. They had come up from the country and August had had his boots cleaned. The girl was in her best too and was standing apart touching things in the shop, on the point of merriment, looking with wonder at Pliny’s ears. He often seemed to be talking at her when he was talking to Mrs Price. I said: