A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair

16

AN INTERESTED CROWD gathered outside. To ironic cheers, I ducked , shamefaced into Saintly's motor while everybody laughed and pointed, hey, look, our good old police arresting a crook, serves him right.

'Look, guv,' I started in a Richter Four whine, 'I didn't—'

'That will do, Lovejoy.'

He sat beside me, fingering the card I'd written my message to Arthur on. A serf ploddite drove us along the No. 15 bus route until he could park in an illegal space.

'Divvy, that's what you are, Lovejoy. Hence this scrawl. I only just put two and two together.' He gestured me to shut up in case I wanted to exercise my right to freedom of speech. 'That's my favourite London bus, Lovejoy, the old Number Fifteen. East Ham, Piccadilly Circus, Ladbroke Grove.'

'It's—' I started.

The driver turned, looked, so I shut up. Freedom of speech is for overlords.

Saintly went on, 'Plod having favourite bus routes, eh?' The way he spoke was reflective. I didn't like this. Like seeing them smile, you just know something's wrong. 'I like the old Seventy-eight. Shoreditch, Bermondsey market, Dulwich. You see a lot from a London bus. And the One Five Nine - odd those yellow numbers, don't you think?' He paused, letting me chance a verb. I stayed silent. 'Oxford Circus to Streatham Hill.'

Did he know I'd called on Sorbo?

'Last night you caused a disturbance in a Soho caff. Why?'

'By accident I met an old friend. I stood her a cuppa. Some passing bloke misunderstood. I scarpered.'

'Not quite, Lovejoy.' So far he'd only stared out of the window. 'It was Dame Colette Goldhorn, widow of Arthur, lately owner of Lovely Colette Antiques, and a manorial estate in East Anglia. Both properties are now owned by Mr Gluck.'

'She's still a friend.'

Now he did look at me. 'You're visiting a lot of old friends, Lovejoy. Your path keeps crossing Gluck's.'

'So what, Mr Saintly? I'm in antiques, and Mr Gluck's an antiques dealer. I'm employed to find some torn - jewellery, gems. I didn't want to come to the Smoke. I got sent.'

'Why the recruiting drive?' I didn't answer. 'You're collecting enough old pals to start a war, Lovejoy.'

'Me?' I acted bitter, not difficult in these circumstances. 'You've done your homework, Mr Saintly. You'll know that I'm the bloke whose bread always hits the floor marmalade side down. Whose grapefruit always spits in my eye, whose girl spots me admiring another woman's legs. I know not to go on crusades.'

'Oh, I do know you're a prat, Lovejoy,' he said reasonably. The serf in the driving seat snickered. 'My question is, are you a dangerous prat?'

I'd had enough, but you never dare say so. 'At Gaylord's caravan you told me to come out and be arrested. They're wrong words, aren't they? I'm not actually nicked.'

'I don't want you troubling eminent Chelsea businessmen. Understand?'

'Yes, sir.' A grovel never does harm.

'And your old friend Arthur Goldhorn simply misjudged his dose of digoxin. Nothing sinister. It's what sick folk do. Understand?'

'Yes, Mr Saintly.'

That was it. As I left he raised a hand.

'Is it true, this divvy thing? You feel genuine antiques?'

'Aye. And it gives me a headache.'

He considered this. 'It'd be worth a headache. Does it work for people too? You see through fraudsters?'

'No. I get people wrong.'

He almost smiled. 'Let me know how your search goes, eh?'

'Search?' I froze on the door, scared. 'What search?'

'For the gems, Lovejoy. What d'you think I meant?'

A bit ago I said there were too many it's knocking about. The truth is that in life there's never enough. I emerged into the press of people heading into the Belly, trying not to look red in the face from embarrassment at having alighted from a plod motor.

Snob. So Gluck who killed Arthur, was a snob. Did that help? Auntie Vi and Gaylord reckoned so.

Well, sometimes. Look at The Great Castellani.

Excitement began to throb in me. Just a little, but starting up. I went and sat in Maria's Caff over tea and a wedge wondering if I'd found the answer. It had come to me when Saintly had been yapping. Something he said gave me a sudden vision. He'd said see through. One difficulty in seeing through to an antique's dazzling soul is patina. In fact some dealers claim that patina is everything. Trying to look bored, yet sensing the thrill a con trick brings, I sat, noshed, and wondered about appearances. What else is snobbery but appearance?

My mind scoured its memory pits, and I came up with the answer.

Long ago - we're in mid-Victorian days - the Ancient World was all the rage. Bring home Etruscan, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, and you were admired. Gentlemen had cabinets crammed higgledy-piggledy with antiquities they collected on the Grand Tour. Trophy time. To prove you were educated to the correct degree of snobbery you had to display ancient scarabs and funereal artefacts from Mesopotamia. If you couldn't afford to go on the Grand Tour, you saved up at home then quietly bought a cabinet stuffed with a dealer's miscellany. It was the reliquary chasse but more personal. These collections were mere aggregations bought without thought. They occasionally come to auctions nowadays. When they do, dealers fall on them because the items are usually untouched. They've got a 'late provenance'. This means that since those intaglio rings were purchased in Damascus one hundred and fifty years back they've just lain in Great-grandpa's bureau.

Which, put bluntly, was snobbery.

This isn't to say that travelling gentry didn't pay through the nose for those antiquities.

They often paid too much. And everything in these collector's cabinets isn't always genuine, because they're often gruesome fakes of the most transparent silliness. Some are so clumsy you have to laugh, or weep.

And some are so genuine they melt your heart.

I don't even go to see these cabinets when they surface. I can't. I think they're a bit spooky, like entering a temple then realizing you're in a mausoleum. It's the difference between life and pretended life. I can understand a bloke collecting penknives, fossils, sparking plugs for heaven's sake. But somebody who sets out simply to accumulate is just a gannet. No points for that. Snobbery is as snobbery does.

It wasn't only society folk on the Grand Tour, though. Snobbery struck museums, famous galleries, eminent societies, even nations. And where snobbery goes, can shame be far behind?

Enter the British Museum, and The Great Castellani.

Now, this prestigious museum is one of the great places on earth. I'm a fan. It's also honest - well, narrow that down, maybe it edges near to honesty. It proves this by putting on displays of its mistakes. Antique dealers don't advertise our clangers from the rooftops. We certainly don't go racing after some lady calling out that the mid-eighteenth century kneehole desk, 'made in London's Long Acre', that we've just sold her is actually a fake we made last weekend from a Utility, World War II vintage wardrobe. (This sort of fake is common, because horrible Utility furniture was made from the right thickness of wood, and antedates chipboard.) All of us, blokes and birds alike, don't advertise past sins. We keep quiet about our holiday in Folkestone, don't we?

One of the BM's mistakes was multiple. It involved a superb nineteenth-century jeweler in Rome, called Alessandro Castellani. Now, good old Alessandro's firm was highly regarded. It employed only eminent craftsmen. He sold his quality jewellery and

'restored' antiques to international buyers. Much of the allure of those days centred on patina. Look it up. A patina was once a flattish dish used in the Eucharist, but the word also means a film or incrustation forming on old bronze, usually green 'and', adds the OED drily, 'esteemed as an ornament'.

Take any ancient bronze statuette or bowl. Let's suppose it's genuine Etruscan, just the right trophy for your living room, to impress neighbours, make friends jealous. Its surface colour, texture, appearance (remember appearance) is a conspicuous sea green. Okay, it feels slightly granular, looks a little matt in oblique light on account of its great age. And after all, didn't the Roman and Ancient Greek bronzes always have that delectable leaf green or even green-black colour?

No, not really. Paintings that have survived from those times show Ancient World statuary. I'm always rocked back onto my heels by the immediacy of the faces, the astounding impact of the colours, the clothes, the brightness of the eyes. Look closely.

The statues are painted flesh colour! Or, if they're made of bronze, they're painted bronze! They're not black, not green. Collectors over the past two centuries only believed they were. So they went about hunting the opposite of what was right.

In other words, snobbery made them seek, and pay through the nose for, antiques that were the opposite of genuine. The real Ancient World wanted its statues lifelike, the more flesh-coloured and red-nippled the better. And so what, if the ancient artists had to use a little russet copper to pink up the statue's lips? Living women use cosmetics, everybody dyes their favourite shirts and skirts. Nobody today wants a dead statue, a moribund painting, stuporose art. And they didn't Back Then, either.

Enter the forger, anybody who could do a hand's turn with a crucible of wood ash and a few impure chemicals.

There's a saying about patina, among antique dealer illiterati, that 'green is great, black is bosh'. Don't trust this motto. It stems from the great collectors of the early 1800s, who believed that ancient bronzes of pretty goddesses, incense burners and the like, were originally black. So when they bought genuine antique bronzes with greenish patina, they thought, oops, wrong colour. By then, of course, emerging industries could offer collectors a range of chemicals. So you can find marvellously convincing ancient bronzes unaccountably black, when they ought to be lovely matt green. The Chinese have made replicates, new 'fakes', over the past aeons, mimicking patina as a kind of testimony to ancestral creativity. Like, a bronze bowl made in the Ming (say Good Queen Bess's time) period and decorated with a phoney patina is highly valuable even though it's a clear copy of an artifact buried in the Shang period one thousand years BC.

It's customary nowadays to blame Pliny's remark about patination by bitumen for the notorious black-should-be-green fallacy, but I say leave Pliny alone. We can't go on whining that every mistake we make is somebody else's fault, though that's the modern fashion. Some sins - can this be true? - are of our own making, and we deserve the blame. Mea, in fact, culpa.

There's chemicals you can buy. Suppose you pick up a modern statuette. Maybe you've even seen it cast in some holiday pottery, foundry, or even in some 'resin-and-rubber', as they're known, moulding shop where tourist trinkets are created. You rather like the bronze appearance of the pretty dancing girl, say. You buy it for pennies. On the way home, you realize how very similar the little figurine is to that statuette Uncle George once had, so cruelly stolen by your nasty cousin from Sunderland. How nice, you think, if this little cheapo had the same patina!

Any antiques workshop will do it for you. Cost? The price of a cup of coffee. Time?

Come back tomorrow, and collect. (On the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, people give you any patina you like while you drink the coffee.) Everything made in antique days develops a patina with time, from flints to ironwork, coins to statues, exposed stonework, glass even. And every patina is different. Chlorides, carbonates, sulphides and sulphates, all change metals. My own trick was currently deep in an East Anglian fen. I'd made a series of hammered silver coins of Harold II vintage. They're easily done, if you have the correct die. About ten weeks before, I'd buried three score of these little hammered silver pennies in the slimy fens. A spell of wet weather, a dismal winter-tide, and I'd dig them up by spring. The patina - darkish sulphurous black, smooth and shiny once cleaned - would do the selling for me to other dealers, maybe Chris Ollerenshaw in Wormingford. I'd not need to advertise. Grub money for a few weeks, with luck. Where was I?

With Alessandro Castellani, in nineteenth-century Rome, while great institutions bought his 'antiquities'.

Look at Sotheby's, Christie's, Philips, Bonham, Agnews, the rest. Reputation is justifiable snobbery. We go with the flow of common approval when in fact there's no sense in it.

Buyers the world over love to say to friends, 'Ah, I know they're expensive, but dealers allow me a special price.' Or, 'This restaurant always keeps me a table.' Daft, isn't it.

Snobbery costs. It's as if we love being ripped off, because it proves we can afford to get done.

The problem is, it's inextricably mixed with trust.

Signore Castellani, eminent, thoroughly proper, sold antiques. The greater the museums buying his items, the more he was exalted. The costlier, the higher soared Castellani's fame. There was however one cloud on the horizon. His workshops also produced new items of jewellery 'in the style archeologica', as he freely advertised. A few dark suspicions must have lurked unspoken, because his craftsmen slogged to

'restore' the assumed original appearances of certain antiques.

A small step to fakery.

Over two thousand items of ancient jewellery were imported from Castellani's in 1872.

Modern laboratory tests prove that his beaten gold filigree is actually made from modern drawn wire. The trace-metal analyses don't hold up. His stuff is what dealers call 'tiler fakery' - that is, a bit of so-say genuine antique here, a bit there, joined by forger's hands. Genuine antique beads or miniature figurines mounted as a modern gold necklace is one of Castellani's typical jokes. They were still coming eighty years later, ending only in the 1930s, when skilled rivals entered the market.

I don't blame the fakers. They were poor, working for peanuts. British dealers being paramount in Georgian days, several of them set up on the spot. Thomas Jenkins was the faker's maestro. This hero even employed English artists to assist local talent. He had a factory making cameos, amber jewellery, rings, intaglios, actually in - that's in -

Rome's Colosseum. His blokes did no more than sit round whittling, carving, supplying Jenkins with gems, ambers, cameos, whatever. Some of his pals kept notes, and produced laughable tales - like Joe Nollekens the sculptor, who used to help out by assembling the bits of statues dug up in the vicinity. Jenkins paid off Nollekens with dollops of fakes 'to say nothing', he records with blithe honesty for posterity to read.

The very best forgers in Rome were Pistrucci and Nathaniel Marchant. I'd give a lot to hold some of Marchant's engraved gems. See the problem? Brilliant artisans, wondrous jewelers, using the same skills and gemstones as the Ancient World. Can you call their creations fakes, forgeries, Sexton Blakes, duplicates, replicas?

Some antique bronzes Castellani stripped of their genuine patina, and 'restored' them, with more fashionable patinas which museums would more readily buy. It is easily chipped off, and the genuine antique beneath seen clearly.

Great opportunities there. For the murderous Dieter Gluck.

Time was getting on. I had to meet my team. I finished my cold tea.

This canal business - where and what? And Colette. Does a woman hang about because she's addicted to a scene? Because that's what she told me. She was a street-market lover, just like me, she'd said.

Now, I don't know much about women. Being a bloke I go about saying I do, but that's only me pretending I'm Beau Nash or whoever. I do know one thing, though. It's this: A bloke will slog away at something just because it's that something. He'll slave away building a dream because it's his dream - build a tower, change a coastline. A woman won't. She's too practical. Sooner or later she'll think, good heavens, here am I hauling logs to build a path across this swamp, when I'll never even see its completion. And she'll think, stuff it. She'll leave.

Unless it's for a Somebody. She'll carry on with might and main for somebody else.

She'll go hungry, be humiliated, shamed before the herd, suffer indignity year on year.

It's noble. You may only see an old scrubber woman's degradation as you drive past in your Rolls, but get to know her and she's putting her grandson through medical school or guarding her dead man's memory. Nowadays we're not supposed to be sentimental.

We've left that behind in Charlie Chaplin films. But it's still about, if you look.

Or if you happen to know somebody like Colette. Who must therefore be protecting somebody dear to her. Who else but her son Mortimer? Presumably he was the lone singer at his dad's funeral in the forest by the vineyard.

Admittedly only half a tale, but there were glimmerings. I'd get Lydia to piece it together, while I thought of patina and what conceivably might lie beneath. For the first time I felt real hope. For me it's usually not a good omen, but despair makes ghosts, so hope's better.