Paid and Loving Eyes l-16

by Jonathan Gash

  Sherry’s his missus. She used to help him out, for authenticity’s sake. Baffs standard trick was this: break down, engine boiling over or something, in the very gateway of some old dear’s house. Baff knocks—can he please have some water for his radiator? (Sherry smiling anxiously from the motor.) Baff takes the pan of water, while Sherry nips round the back and susses out the house. She slips a window catch, or inserts a sliver of comb into a lock to make it easier to pick. There’s even a spray you can get that makes a window impossible to close properly—I’d better not tell you its name, or you’ll all be at it.

  That night, back comes Baff, cleans out your antiques and other valuables while you kip. Easy.

  The boyos—real hard-liner antique robbers—despise breakdown merchants because police always have their number. Within an hour of waking up, the robbed old lady’s on the blower to the Plod. Who of course have a score of other reported breakdown-style thefts in the vicinity. Somebody always has the car’s description. And Baff’s. And Sherry’s. Who suddenly need alibis… et relentless cetera. No, the boyos want scams you can do unscathed and often. Breakdowners are the lazy antique thief’s theft. It’s also risky. Which is why Baff’s done time.

  Sherry was grieving in her mother’s cottage, which is where she and Baff live. Mum’s their chief alibi, forever in court testifying to the innocence of her daughter and Baff. I knocked, went through the sordid courtesies folk use to ward off grief.

  “You were a real friend to Baff, Lovejoy,” Sherry told me, sniffing. My friends were having a hell of a day. Was it just me?

  “That’s true, right enough,” her mum said, dabbing her eyes fetchingly at the mirror. “You’ll miss Baff’s trade, Lovejoy.”

  The ugly old bat showed all the grief of a road sign. A pro. And Sherry, a lovely plump woman with a penchant for old-fashioned hairstyles, scrolls on her forehead, was only going through a let’s-pretend sorrow, half an eye on a telly quiz show. She knew I knew, only too well. She hostesses with excessive zeal on the town bypass, between helping Baff’s breakdowner jobs. I discovered Sherry’s exciting pastime accidentally, when doing a night valuation for Big John Sheehan. The Ulsterman had taken a liking to some display silver at The Postern, a crude hotel of creaking antiquity. He’d told me to drainpipe in and suss the silver, see if it was (a) genuine, and (b) worth stealing. Everybody knew it was in three cabinets, second floor. That night, I’d started out to obey—only to step on two heaving fleshly protuberances in the darkness. Both turned out to be Sherry, plying her hostessly trade in a manner unorthodox and a mite unexpected. Next morning she’d sought me out, frantic lest I divulge all to Baff. I’d gone along, because women have hidden persuaders. Anyway, silence spared Baff heartache, right? But why was an idle sod like Baff—sorry, requiescat in pace —why was he doing an extra night job?

  “I’ll see the lads have a whip-round, Sherry,“ I said gently.

  Her face lit up, instantly shedding sorrow at the sound of monetary music. “You will? Oh, Lovejoy! That would be marvellous! I don’t know how I’m going to manage, what with…”

  She petered out, pinkly remembering our first nocturnal encounter and its mutually beneficial consequences.

  “Never mind.” Embarrassed, I made my farewells, paused at the door. Mum absently borrowed her daughter’s eye-liner. “Here, Sherry. Baff actually working, was he?”

  “Baff?” Her mind reluctandy left thoughts of how much money the more sentimental antique dealers would chip in for her newly found widowhood. “Yes. He was doing a sea-front stall. They’d phoned him. Good money, Lovejoy. Of course,” she added hastily, in case word got back and diminished Baff’s friends’ generosity, “I haven’t had it yet.”

  “Look,” I said. “Let me collect it for you. Where’d you say it was?”

  She got the point instantly. “Selveggio Sea Caravans. On the Mentle Marina waterfront near the funfair.”

  “Er, did Baff leave any antiques around, Sherry? Only, he owed me a couple of items…” He didn’t, but it was worth a try.

  “No, Lovejoy. We’d had a run of bad luck lately. So many people have dogs and burglar alarms these days.”

  “Never mind, love,” I said nobly. “Forget Baff owed me a thing.” I felt really generous, pardoning Baff’s non-existent debts to me.

  Sherry came to see me off. She closed the door and stood on the step in the darkness.

  “Lovejoy. I’m quite free now.” She straightened my jacket lapel—no mean feat—and smiled beguilingly. “It’s hard for me to accept. But you’ve no regular woman, have you? Maybe you and I could get together. I could pop round, see if you needed anything.”

  “I’ll bring your money round later.” I bussed her, cranked the Ruby out of its moribundity, and chugged out of the tiny garden heading for reality.

  This is half my trouble. I can cope with more or less anything, except with events that change in mid-stream. Like, here I was expressing my genuine sorrow over Baff’s mugging/killing, only to find myself propositioned by his bird who was more interested in hitching up with a replacement bloke and getting a few quid. It felt weird. Sandy and Mel actually separating, Baff getting done.

  When I’m bewildered, I head for antiques and sanity. The auction called. My best-ever fake was back in town. But first, a fake historical interlude, at a genuine knight’s gathering.

  Because I’d promised, I went to Sir Edward’s Event. I didn’t want to go. It’s near Long Melford. Every year they select some historical date by chucking dice, then re-enact the trades and village life of that particular year. The whole village is at it. They wear period garb, serve period-style food and drink on trestle-tables. They dance to reproduction musical instruments. It’s a bit too hearty for me, especially if they get things wrong. It’s still quite pleasant to see the children done up in a make-believe old schoolhouse, farriers shoeing horses with a travelling forge, all that.

  The grounds at Sir Edward’s are given over to the Event, two whole days. There must have been three hundred people there, counting us visitors. Admission costs the earth; this year it was to raise gelt for Doc Lancaster’s unspeakable electronics that he tortures us with. A good cause, our luscious choirmistress Hepsibah told me, laughing, as she took my money. I wandered in among the mob, hoping nobody would see me slope off after a token grimace at the jolly scene. Enthusiasm has a lot to answer for.

  At Pal’s joiner’s bench, though, I really stopped to really look. He had a table.

  “Wotcher, Pal.” He’s an old geezer, does the woodwork scene every Event. “Rain held off, then, eh?”

  “Thank God, Lovejoy. Want a genuine antique table, Anno Domini 1770?”

  The table was lovely. I stared at it, worrisome bongs not happening in my chest. It was labelled Sideboard Table, Chippendale Type, c. 1770, with all manner of fanciful descriptive balderdash; from the home of a Titled Norfolk Gentleman… The surface got me, though.

  “Genuine is it, Lovejoy?” Jodie Danglass, no less. Sir Edward’s Event was a burden for me; it was extraordinary for Jodie.

  “Course it’s genuine,” Pal groused. He’s pleasant, until you differ with him on some opinion. “Think I’d kill myself doing a surface like that, do you?” He went on lathing a piece of wood, using a rigged-up sapling drill. That’s only a rope stretched from a stooping sapling to your instep. Grudgingly I watched him. Better skilled than me. “Borrowed it from Sir Edward’s Hall.”

  Well, the local bigwig might have had a fake made by the original methods. But nowadays? Except…

  “Are you all right, Lovejoy?” Jodie asked.

  “Stop nagging.”

  We went to get served by a little girl. Dilute mead, quite good. “That surface, love.” Perfect, with the sheen only the hand of man can create. “I’d heard somebody say last week they’d seen a mint Sheraton side table in the Midlands, the surface unflawed, perfect, original. I didn’t believe him. But for some craftsman still to be faking so good these days—”

  “Loo
ked genuine to me.”

  She sounded quite indifferent. I nearly choked. Antique dealers think nothing of the things they’re supposed to know, understand, admire. I saw red. “Listen to me, you silly cow. See over there?” The little girls serving the mead had a kitchen table, virtually a plank of chipboard with four machine-made legs. “That’d take any nerk less than an hour to make, household drill and buffing pad. But that…?” I looked across to where Pal was pausing to light a fag. Somebody shouted a criticism, were cigarettes in period? He waved back apologetically, took no notice, grinned with an addict’s afront. I was to remember that grin, in far, far different circumstances.

  “That?” she prompted. She looked as disturbed as I was, probably thinking how near she’d come to making an offer for it.

  “You buy a log of mahogany, love.” I described its huge shape with my hands. “Not the forced spongy wood they import nowadays, but the slow-growing natural unforced trees you have to pay the earth for—if you can still find one in the raped wild forests. Then you—top dog, as they used to say—straddle the log over a saw-pit. Some poor sod—bottom dog—climbs down into the saw-pit. You get an enormous woodman’s curved two-handled log saw—itself a valuable antique, because nobody makes them now. Hour after hour, you saw the log lengthways to make a plank…”

  It takes me like this, the shame, the ecstasy of antiques. I’m the only man living to have done the whole thing, start to finish. I couldn’t move for a week afterwards. I paid a fortune for seven stalwart farm lads to partner me on the saw-pit I’d dug in my garden wilderness. They’d given up, one after the other, and left calling me barmy. I’d slogged on, hands like balloons, bleeding and blistered.

  “Then you take your sawn plank of mahogany. You plane it flat. Takes three days.” Jodie was looking at me, mesmerized. I could have swiped her one. Antique dealers and fakers think of automatic electric planers, gouging drills you work with a button while having coffee and a fag. I heard somebody shouting for me from over where the horses were. I yelled back a sod off, pressed on. “Then comes the hard part.”

  They’d worked barefoot, mostly, those ancient cabinet-makers. All heroes to me. When the table’s surface was smooth as any hand-plane could make it, they’d got children—often their own —to beg or buy fragments of broken brick. The children ground the brick pieces to dust in a pestle and mortar. They’d then winnowed it, casting the dust up into the air.

  “Coarser brick-dust particles fell first—resisting the air, see? The children, toddlers to seven-year-olds, caught it on bits of fustian, in a bowl, anything. The finer particles were caught separately.”

  The bloke was still shouting. Torry from Beccles, pockets full of phoney silvers as usual. I rose to move away, sickened by my tale anyway. Jodie caught me. Her eyes were huge. “Wait, Lovejoy. The children?”

  “No sandpaper in those days, Jodie. The maker smoothed it with brick-dust. I’ve done it. You rub the flat tabletop—coarse powder first. Your bare hands, to and fro along the wood’s grain, hour after hour.”

  “But don’t your hands…?”

  “Aye, love. They swell, blister. The skin shreds. They weep on to the dusty wood. The dust becomes a paste, of skin fragments, brick-dust, blister water, sweat, blood. Think how it must have been. Virtually naked at the finish, dripping pure sweat. But you kept going. You had to, or you and your children starved, literally.” My voice went bitter. “I had delusions at first. I would do it exactly as those ancients did. What a pillock! I lasted two hours. After a week’s rest, another two hours.”

  My skin had peeled first, then blistered from my raw palms. I’d used my elbows. Then I’d stripped naked, and stood on the tabletop with bare feet, shuffling the brick-dust up and down the wood.

  “See why it’s special, having a genuine Sheraton table? A modern Formica job’s machined in a trice, virtually untouched by human hand. But the heartwood of an antique table’s still got the craftsman in it. His blood, sweat, flesh, it’s there in the living wood. Is it any wonder a genuine antique feels different? Modern furniture is chemical-covered chipboard. The real antique is a person. It’s a friend living with you.”

  “That’s… lovely.” But she’d started out to say something very different. Well, truth takes you different ways.

  “Know how long it took me, Jodie? Sixteen weeks, to repeat three days’ work of a seventeenth-century man.” I tried to give her a grin, defuse the talk. Her face was all alarm. “I had to keep resting to battle on. Pathetic. You women have it easy, love. The work of your sisters three centuries ago is still within your reach. Look around.” Across a patch of grass two milkmaids were hand-milking some Jersey cows, admired by a small crowd. Other girls were washing clothes in the fountain, beating garments on stones. People wandering among the stalls were laughing, joking. Oh, so very merry. “You women can still give it a go any time, cook, wash, bake, skivvy for fifteen hours a day. You’d be tired, aye, but could still congratulate yourself on how marvellously you’d relived your grandma’s routine.”

  “And you?”

  Answering took a long time. “Ashamed, Jodie. I’d thought myself fit. I knew what to do, God knows. But the long-dead craftsmen defeated me.” I looked across at the village church. “Yon graveyard’s full of the old bastards. Any one sleeping there could wake today, step out, and produce brilliance like us modern clever clogs couldn’t do in a month of Sundays. Admitting that is the shame of my life. It does something to a man. See, love. A woman can always claim she’s prettier than the Queen of Sheba, that Lady Hamilton’s hair was a mess and her own isn’t. We blokes have more absolute comparisons. And we lose out every single time, to those that’ve gone before.”

  “Can nobody do it nowadays?”

  “That sideboard table Pal has on show there is a fake, Jodie. But it’s been done using the old methods. Must have killed somebody.” I snorted a half-laugh. “Until now I’d thought I was the only bloke alive who’d ever made a genuine fake. Get somebody able to repeat the old processes nowadays, you’d be a millionairess by teatime.”

  “Then why don’t they, Lovejoy?”

  “Because the old methods use up people, not gadgets.” Well, I should complain. I’m the one who always argues people first, things second.

  That is all I want to say, for now. We saw Sir Edward tottering towards us. He’s a boring old devil, so I left Jodie and went to watch the morris dancers. That’s something else I’m no good at, either.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  « ^ »

  Once upon a time, antiques were a rarefied pursuit for scholars. Oh, don’t misunderstand. A few titled gentlemen really did pursue antiquities all over the ancient world. They spent fortunes, founded private museums in attics. Great, but kind of chintzy.

  Until July, 1886.

  In that month the great antiques hunt began, when an auctioneer intoned ‘Lot One’—and the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim Palace’s magnificent art, furniture, statuary went under the hammer. That gavel was gunfire that reverberated round the world. The Great Antiques Rush was on. Think of a rocket soaring upward, that’s never yet begun to fall. Okay, it’s levelled off now and then, but always resumed rezooming prices into the stratosphere.

  Now, we’re all at it. Clever people draw graphs of antiques’ values, starting back in that lovely summer of 1886. Don’t be fooled. It’s not a mathematical proposition. It’s not philosophy. It’s a scramble.

  Umber Auctions took over from Wittwoode less than a month after he got nicked for “discretion”, that hoary old get-out by which auctioneers absolve themselves of blame for trickery. They behaved like a new Prime Minister. Wholesale sackings, Under New Management posters everywhere, advertising campaigns—then no change. The same whifflers drift aimlessly about hoping to make a few quid on the side, crooked auctioneers, crooked vannies, crooked antique dealers moaning that the antiques are pure unadulterated gunge. It still stank of armpits and stale smoke. I love it. An auction has paradise within. All you have to do
is look.

  “Lovejoy.” Practical was over like a shot, trying to pull me to see. “What d’you reckon?”

  Even before we pushed among the grumbling dealers I knew it would be the same old fake. You have to laugh at blokes like Practical because they’re a waste of time, yet sensible in a weird kind of way. He fakes only the cheaper end of antiques. Not badly, but not well either. Fortyish, thin, stained with his famous watercolours. He uses his jacket for a rag, so half of him is always rainbow, the other half taupe tat.

  “Good?”

  I looked. The famous George Cruikshank, who died in 1878 or so, illustrated Charles Dickens’s works. He also sketched as he wandered, producing little watercolours that have never really caught on. You can get genuine Cruikshank for less than a week’s wage. This is the sort of thing Practical fakes—hence his nickname. Old Masters ‘aren’t practical’. Cheaper, less risky forgeries are.

  “Not bad, Prac. Not, definitely not, good.”

  My tone disappointed him. “Give me a tip, Lovejoy?”

  “Get a couple of decent old frames from Farmer. New fake frames are a dead give-away. And stop using tea to mimic foxing. Everybody nowadays knows to look for a sharp rim. Leave the watercolour surface undamaged. Say it’s just been cleaned. And for heaven’s sake stamp its reverse, Prac—you can buy a fake Agnew’s stamp for ten quid down the market.”

  I turned away, exasperated. Folk drive you mad. Then I paused. Seeing Diana enter from the street, swivelling every head, made me think.

  “Here, Prac.” Voice low—antique dealers have three-league ears. “You still a neb man?”

  Door-to-door con tricks come in many guises. The commonest among antique dealers is the neb man. The old game where you pretend to be a council/social worker/health inspector—some kind of semi-authoritative official. You talk your way into somebody’s home, filch a small antique, and scarper lightly on your way. It always works. In fact, it’s so easy I sometimes wonder if people actually want to be tricked. “Neb” comes from the old word for the peak of a cap—as once worn by officialdom’s intruders. You still see market barrowboys and bus crews surreptiously touch their foreheads, symbolizing touching a neb, to signify an inspector’s on the way.