A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair

24

THEY TOLD ME at the manse that Mrs Dee was out painting. It meant a trudge of a mile before I found her at her easel by a river's oxbow bend.

You never know with artists. They mostly hate gawpers, especially those who say, 'Hey, you've got the clouds wrong.' So I stood there like a spare tool. In countryside, everything's hunting. A heron standing on one foot, a kestrel flicking the sky, a crow on a branch, all itch to slaughter. An angler downstream proving that fishing is a good doze ruined.

'Thank you,' she said eventually. 'Others can't resist talking.'

'Okay.' I felt awkward. She seemed at home amid country carnage.

'You're dying to tell me what I'm doing wrong, Lovejoy.' Her smile was mischievous. I didn't move to help her pack up. Artists are funny about that, too.

'No.' Though I was, of course. Why the hell did she use a sable No. 12 brush, her washes so thick on 120 Whatman paper? 'Don't blame people, Mrs Dee. The eye can distinguish six million different hues. Bound to be argument.'

She smiled, folding the easel, drying the paint wells with tissues. No litter from this lady. Clicked her box. Ready, steady.

'Did they say when's teatime?' she asked. I took the wooden box, leaving her to tote her priceless works of art.

'No. They never invite me in, at strange houses.'

I was glad her hair was long. The Other Woman always has longer hair than The Betrayed Wife. Odd but true. A moral in there? Let your hair grow long, you'll not only keep your own bloke but snaffle some other woman's?

'I heard they do. Invite you in, I mean.' She seemed to find me funny.

Had she sussed me out? I didn't like that. Today I wanted everybody to be gullible.

Especially Mrs Gloria Dee, who had antiques. I needed money to do Dieter Gluck. You can't con a crooked dealer without being at least a bit rich. Those two admirable Italians proved that, with their now fabled 'Walt Disney Scam'.

They ordered four million dollars' worth of jewels in Place Vendome. Cleverly, they hinted at illicit arms deals, knavish underworld connections, and in France's posh Hotel Intercontinental showed the jeweller two cases bulging with German banknotes. 'Assure us of privacy,' was their line, 'and we'll pay over the odds.' What salesman could resist?

The jewels and money were swapped, the Italian conmen vanished. The money proved to be marked 'Banknote Walt Disney', with Mickey Mouse logos. This cheeky scam proved the universal law that greed rules us all. And Gluck.

We came in sight of the manse where her village began and countryside, thank God, ended. She hesitated.

'The question is, Lovejoy, whose side are you on?' Her blue eyes held me.

I didn't know what to say. 'In what?'

'In poor Mortimer versus Dieter Gluck.'

Women are often ahead of me when I think I'm miles up front. 'Dieter who?'

She smiled, nodded as if to herself. 'That's sensible. You don't really know me, do you?'

We entered the short drive. 'I might be an enemy, after all. Do come in. My husband will soon be home.'

That almost stopped me. I'd assumed that she and Sir Jesson Tethroe, Member of Parliament, were sort of, well, frankly lovers. The housekeeper who'd first responded to my knock took Mrs Dee's clobber and we went through into a homely parlour overlooking a neat garden. Manse indeed. Christian books everywhere. I should have guessed. Mr Dee was a minister.

We sat to tea and crumpets. No antiques, though. I listened to my chest. Not a thing. I must have looked accusing. She placed herself opposite with that in situ casualness women have. I ate quickly. Survival is timed speed. No antiques meant I ought to be going.

'Look, missus.' I gestured at her home. Quite posh. Nothing like Clovis's grand manor, but well furnished, good Axminster carpets. 'I came to see antiques. Er…?' I wanted to ask if they were at Tethroe's, but married women's love is thin ice.

'Yes, Lovejoy. I would like you to assess their authenticity. If they're forgeries, please say. If not, do a valuation.'

This value thing's a problem. Any antiques dealer can guess what an antique will bring.

Look at TV programmes, those 'Road Shows' which, the presenters piously preach, 'are not about money; they're about learning'. Watch for five minutes, you soon see whether they're about money or not. Out here in real life, dealers will charge you for

'valuation'. Their fee's a percentage. Please remember that not one guess is worth a single groat. If some dealer says he charges a Valuation fee', tell him you'll charge him exactly the same fee for a look at your antique, and stalk off. It's a blinking nerve.

'Thank you, Lovejoy. I didn't think dealers were so honest.'

'Eh?' I must have been thinking aloud. Better watch that.

'Robert seems late. Shall we take a look?'

She rose with that one-move smoothness men can't do. I angled up, a bag of spanners, and followed through the french windows to a small conservatory. No jungles here. The lawn was stencilled, bushes in line, grass swept, trees clinging to their leaves for dear life like nervous visitors scared of spilling crumbs.

It's a queer thing, this divvying. I suddenly felt truly clammy and shivery, like sudden flu. The conservatory curtains, sap green, were drawn.

'I keep it locked, Lovejoy.' She wore a replica chatelaine, and used a key. We entered the conservatory's encapsulated dusk. I halted. She was speaking. I knew that because her mouth was moving, but I didn't hear.

Above the very centre, from reinforced struts, hung a chandelier. Now, everybody knows a chandelier. Some are valuable. But, porcelain? A few lustres hung from the limbs to reflect light. I stood looking up, my chest bonging, sweat stinging my eyes. I felt it drip off my chin.

'Sit, for heaven's sake. Don't you just hate it?'

She had her hand under my elbow and helped me to a chair. I reached it on the slant before my knees went.

'I'm fine,' I snarled. 'Leave me alone, silly cow. I'm okay.'

'Stay still. Is it the antiques?'

'Shut your row.'

'I didn't know you would be like this.' She was all anxious. 'I thought it was just a matter of taking a look.'

Porcelain is a world of history. From porca, Latin for sow, since it suggested pigskin.

The stuff itself's quite simple - mix the right sort of clay with a fusible fedspathic rock, shape it, bake it in a kiln. The Chinese began it in the eighth century, and perfected it with their usual brilliance during our Middle Ages. China's original clay is the plasticky kaolin. The rock was called 'petuntse' by the French missionaries. This 'true' porcelain was the genuine stuff. It came first to Germany's Meissen, then Vienna about 1720-ish.

Nearly fifty years later, the great names of France and England got going, and porcelain was king. We English copied the Chinese porcelain, from the 1740s on, by mixing 'frit' -

glassy bits fused with lime or plain chalk. This made a 'soft' porcelain. There were other

'soft' porcelains - Bow and Chelsea and Liverpool - made with calcined bone chucked in.

Soft-paste porcelains I always think are merely beginners' tries. Real porcelain is the hard Chinese type, white, translucent, and lovely. One annoying fad is to speak with bated breath of 'bone china', brought out by Josiah Spode in 1794, but it's only hard porcelain formula with added bones. Purists regard it with contempt as an in-between.

This chandelier was true hard porcelain of the Vienna factory. This manufactory's products are among the most highly prized and priced. Even at a distance, I could see the coloured onion-shaped churches and steepled roofs of houses depicted on the chandelier limbs. I must have moaned, because she cried, 'I'll get some water!' I restrained her.

Rarest of all in those days was the porcelain room. It sounds enough to make you ill, yet it was once all the rage. Great houses and palaces had rooms where furnishings, tables, and even walls, were porcelain. To me it's over the top, but who am I, when wealth defines luxury? The Vienna factory was created by du Paquier in 1719. It had ups and downs, going broke then thriving only to dive again. Empress Maria Theresa herself even had a go in 1744, but it tottered to a close in 1864. This financial swingbacking always provides one of the antique trade's ingredients for desirability -

rarity.

'Got a table? Chair with porcelain inset?' I asked, hoarse. This was what I needed, to hunt Gluck.

'No,' she said simply. 'Only half a dozen mugs with black figures painted on.' She brought out a couple from under a sheet. 'Aren't they just horrible? Fat men sitting on barrels playing bagpipes?'

So I keeled over. One of us had to.

'Who is he?' this minister was saying, peering at me. Last rites, was it?

'Lovejoy,' I grunted, hauling myself upright.

'He fell when I showed him those pot things.'

I didn't say, but should have done, that her 'pot things' would buy half her village.

'Hot sweet tea, he needs,' the housekeeper said. She was a nice old dear with the self-righteousness all women have when somebody's ailing. 'People don't eat right any more. It's not good enough.'

She poured tea into me until I was waterlogged. Then provided biscuits, cakes, buttered scones, jam. I began to recover.

'I'm Robert,' said the bloke. 'You saw Arthur's pottery?'

'Yes.' My mind called a halt to honesty. 'Er, is it for sale?'

Arthur? The most sought-after porcelain is 'schwarzlot'.

Collectors go mad for it. They're not all bobby-dazzlers, just mugs or other items decorated with rustic scenes depicting travellers at an inn, pipers playing for a drink.

Importantly, it's not at all flashy, just monochrome, black. Sometimes du Paquier's men touched up the figures' hands or cheeks with a dab of red, maybe with a little gilding for light relief. These still qualify as schwarzlot items, so don't go chucking any away (joke). One such mug will buy you a brand new car. A full schwarzlot drinking set will buy you a new house, plus a motor, plus a round-the-world cruise with a bawbee left over. Rare, they're out there waiting to be spotted.

'No, we can't sell them. They belong to a friend's son. Arthur's died, but gave them to us in trust for the boy. Only—' Here Robert paused, looked anxiously at his wife.

'Only what?' I was starting to piece things together. Mortimer, Arthur Goldhorn. But how come Arthur knew he was at risk? And why hadn't Colette taken any such steps? It was almost as if… I caught Gloria weighing me up, and stopped thinking. Women see through me.

'Only, lately we've had two people call.' He made a determined face when Gloria exclaimed. 'No, dearest. We must tell him. Arthur mentioned Lovejoy. I distinctly remember the awful name. He said that Lovejoy would call sooner or later and help us.

Now,' he intoned nobly, 'is the time.'

My head was splitting. 'Any chance of some more tea, love?' I asked the housekeeper.

'And an aspirin?'

She scurried. I dithered upright. They walked me about a bit until I got breathing organized, then we sat like decent folk while I told them what they'd got. If the antiques were Arthur's - read Mortimer's - I had to answer Gloria's question by my actions, and prove whose side I was on.

My own question came on its own. 'Look. If money could make Mortimer safe, would you borrow on those antiques?' And the most marvellous thing happened. Gloria smiled.