Every Last Cent

2

ONCE, ANTIQUES AND women were the only two aspects of life.

Then one day I learned there was a third problem just as brilliant and difficult. And now, I wouldn't be without any of them for the world. I need all three.

I was under the overhang of that chemist's shop in Pelhams Lane next morning selling stolen Christmas trees.

'Come with me, Lovejoy,' Sandra said. 'I've found some old panels. Vice's wood yard.'

'No, ta,' I said. 'I'm doing fine.'

I knew straight away it was a trick. Her smile always tells you she's up to no good.

'They'll be worth a fortune to a forger like you, Lovejoy.'

They always say this, antique dealers. A bonny woman doubles the beauty and doubles the risk. It's one of my laws of antiques. Remember it.

'I'm making a fortune.' The shoppers surged past.

'Sold many, dear?' She looked me up and down. Frayed edges, shabby cuffs, patched jacket. I'd not eaten.

'Ninety,' I lied. 'Only three left.'

'It's summer, silly. And I've got what you want.' Truth there. Sandra waited, her smile promising me untold wealth. What can you do? I left my bedraggled trees, ignoring the angry shouts of the other hawkers to clear up my rubbish.

Vice's wood yard stands back from the Ladies' Golf Course at Lettenham, a rural estuary six leagues away from my village. This is how local East Anglian folk still speak, 'Six leagues and a furlong, booy.' It took us thirty minutes in her enormous Jaguar. 'You're sure they're worth it, Sandra?' I kept asking.

'Two lovely old cupboards and a bench.'

'How old?'

She couldn't say, which should have alerted me. Everyone knew I'd been searching for old, aged wood to forge Old Master paintings. I'd combed the three counties and found nothing. I looked at Sandra. All antique dealers have a quirk.

Sandra Gainer is a compulsive gambler. Her marriage ended when she gambled her husband into bankruptcy. Frederick was a pillar of society, churchgoer, an eight-to-six commuter. She had him arrested for credit card fraud, on account of her (not his, note) gaming losses. The last honest bloke on earth, he's currently doing four years, out next autumn. Sandra looks well on Frederick's suffering. She'll sell anything – hers, yours, mine – to fund her gambling addiction. She once sold my cottage to a Bavarian tourist and lost the money before teatime on another infallible system. Three different banks each believed they were my sole mortgagers. I had a hell of a time evicting the Munich bloke. That's Sandra.

'Sand? Why can't people gamble on wrestling?'

'I tried. They won't take the bets.'

My trouble is an uncontrollable mind. It darts about, asking the unanswerable. Like, why do all the big peninsulas on earth point south, never north? Africa, India, South America, Malaysia, Baja California. And why did God, who loves us, invent malaria?

'You can keep your hand on my knee, Lovejoy, if you stump up for the three o'clock winner at Haydock.'

'Can I owe?' My hand was accidental.

'No kitty, no pity.'

Reluctantly I withdrew my hand to holiness. I'd made stupendous smiles with Sandra after her Frederick got collared, but grew alarmed when I found she backed losing nags all over the kingdom. Now I keep out of her way, except when I'm stupid.

We drove through depressing countryside, trees, fields, gentle rivers. Not an antique shop for miles. Is it any wonder that rural pastures get you down? The only interesting thing we passed was Farlow. He was sitting at Stratford St Mary busily painting John Constable's famed Loving Couple by the Stour. Please don't complain that Constable never did such a work. I know that. Farlow knows that. But put one of his Constable fakes next to mine, his looks obviously a sham, and mine looks brilliant. It's called the match trick among the corrupt, when you pair a bad thing with a good. Customers assume the better forgery possibly isn't fake at all. Two tourists out of five will pay on the nail. Unless it's a woman buying gems, in which case it's four out of five.

You think it's a wicked ploy only done by antique dealers and other criminals? Wrong.

Look in any boutique or jeweller's window. Everybody's at it.

'Here!' Sandra called brightly, pulling in to Vice's wood yard, tooting her horn. 'I got him!'

And handed me over to an aggressive horde waiting to do me grievous bodily harm. I alighted with a sigh to meet my doom.

'Lovejoy?' Dennis De Angelo piped. 'We're going to hang you.'

There were fifteen antique dealers, Dennis to the fore. Brains of a spud, and enough makeup trowelled onto his face to open a shop. He wants to start a fashion business without money. Antique dealers are a laugh a minute, but on the whole not frightening.

You don't hang people who owe you money. I owed ten of these riff-raff serious gelt, but so? Life's one disappointment after another. Everybody has to learn.

The wood yard was quiet. Two workers whistled and laboured unloading a barge.

Sandra eyeing their sweating forms. A dog dozed on the riverbank. No escape. It would have to be lies.

'Now, Dennis,' Margaret Dainty soothed. 'None of that.'

Margaret and me occasionally make smiles. A real lady, she's forever trying to hide her lameness. (Why? What difference does a limp make?) Her husband's always unseen.

Sometimes, if I'm forced into a posh occasion, she lends me one of his suits. I'm lost in it, pea in a drum. Which should worry me, except five years ago she taught me a new way of making smiles. Until then I'd thought it was only in books. She saw me remembering and coloured slightly.

'We'll drown him instead,' Smarts said eagerly.

He's a Victorian jewellery freak. Wears all his stock on his person, earrings in great loops round his head. You can hear him coming if there's a wind. You never see him with fewer than two-score necklaces, bangles up his arms. He sounds like a small foundry. Smarts claims to be French but only comes from our village. Barmy.

'It's your by-blow, Lovejoy,' Jenny Blondel said. She really is French but says she comes from our village. Weird. She owns three falcons.

My mind went, who? I said, 'Who?'

Jenny's nice. I like her because she makes cider from my apples and has a secret lover called Aspirin who can do handstands when he's drunk. I admire him for that. I can't even do them when I'm sober. And I'm jealous because he's got Jenny. Aspirin is a defrocked vicar but nobody's supposed to know. He embezzled a church's antiques. He baptizes you when he's sloshed, whether you want to or not. Her husband Paul Blondel keeps hunting birds.

'Your son, Lovejoy. Mortimer.'

I gave them the bent eye. Dennis squealed, darted back. 'I haven't got a son.'

'That Mortimer,' Jenny persisted. 'He's ruining our trade.'

'You lot already do that.'

'Arf arf,' Willie Lott said. No humour there. No compassion either. 'Stop him, Lovejoy.

He's yours.'

Willie Lott really did worry me. Even a burp can sound threatening from Willie. He's been in one of those silent services, and says he hasn't. Pretends he's thick as a plank, but has several foreign languages. He looks like a street brawler, all crags and scars.

'Who, Willie?' I asked weakly.

Dennis got courage from Willie Lott and squeaked, 'Mortimer, your kid by that whore Colette Goldhorn.'

'What's he done?' I didn't admit a thing.

'He's divvying all our stock, free. Telling tourists which antiques are genuine and which aren't.' Smarts glared. 'He's frigging ruining us,' adding in his execrable French, for authenticity, 'Il est terrible, non?'

Except he says the words just as they're written, ill esst terry bull none. Why do we all pretend we're different from our real selves? Women do it with cosmetics and plastic surgery, men pull their beer bellies in. We're all at it.

'Hang him, Willie!' Dennis, from the rear.

Jessica tutted. 'Shut it, Dennis, or I'll smack your wrists.'

Jessica is holy, runs a prayer chapel to bring us all back to purity, and lives down the estuary with her son-in-law in a state of mortal (I sincerely hope) sin, wears enough perfume to stop a clock and slinks about the Eastern Hundreds in a full-length dress adorned with zodiacal symbols. I like her, too.

'Mortimer does no harm,' I said. Plant your flag and name the price, there's not much anybody can do.

Jessica took out a list. The waft of scent almost keeled me over. I leaned away for oxygen. 'He told the truth about these antiques in the Arcade.'

A groan arose, really heartfelt. I could have hired them out for a biblical epic. Antique dealers go weak when honesty sneaks in. Truth is death. Get any dealer tipsy, and he'll admit that only three per cent of all the antiques he's ever seen are genuine. Get him utterly kaylied, he'll finally admit that it's only one per cent. Which means, so you get the point, that ninety-nine per cent of all antiques currently on sale anywhere are forgeries.

'You want chapter and verse, Lovejoy?' Willie Lott said quietly. 'Marry-Me Burnside's fuddling cups, genuine slip-ware? Jessica's papper mash genuine Henry Clay table?'

For genuine read fake. Dealers speak in fable. 'Two hundred items last week, Lovejoy,'

Margaret said with sorrow. She loves me, a true friend. 'Speak to the boy. That's all we ask.'

'And Rose Madder's printed Hours of the Virgin on vellum—'

'He what?' I interrupted, because I'd done that fake medieval manuscript myself.

Sweated blood on it, only finished it a fortnight back.

Vellum's not parchment, incidentally. It's a pig to print on, slips and shuffles as the type comes down. It was a beautiful forgery, though I say it myself. I'd throttle Mortimer, the little sod.

'I never see him,' I said lamely. I'm really good at sincere indignation so I tried that.

'And who says he's my responsibility? How can I find somebody who lives wild?'

'By tomorrow, Lovejoy,' I got from Willie. 'No later.'

He slit my jacket from top to bottom in a movement so swift I didn't even see the knife.

Hero that I am, I froze.

Tronker, one of Willie's goons, approached carrying my unfinished Gainsborough. He slashed it to ribbons. It made an odd sound, grush, grush. I watched stonily. More heroism.

They left then, skittering motors spattering me with mud. I looked at the slashed Gainsborough. Destroyed. No chance of marouflaging it. I gave them ten minutes, then walked to the trunk road and thumbed a lift home.

An hour later I was in my overgrown garden sitting on my unfinished wall by my old well. The robin came, saw I'd no cheese, flirted off with an angry cheep. Six bluetits did the same.

After a few minutes I spoke into the air. 'Mortimer?'

Silently he came out of the hedge and sat with me. Fifteen years old, thin, brown hair awry. Shoddy as me, but cool.

'I wish you wouldn't do that,' I said, narked. 'Can't you knock?'

'Sorry, Lovejoy. I didn't know they'd get mad.' He waited. 'I've found you a customer.

Dangerous, but rich.'

'They go together.' I was so tired. 'Let's go.'

'What's a fuddling cup?' he asked as we walked down the lane. 'What's slipware?

What's papper mash? Who was Henry Clay?'

'Shush. I'm thinking.'

Being with Mortimer was strange. I never knew what to say, how to behave. I mean, a child's a terrible thing. When you unexpectedly come across one who's fifteen, they're worse. Am I right or what?

They're also that third risk I mentioned.

On the bus, I pondered.

The dealers' vehemence seemed wrong. Okay, the antique trade is always chaos in search of a wardrobe. Frankly, it's mayhem. Lives are lost in the scramble for this gorgeous pendant, that perfect Chippendale. But lately the whole trade had been depressed. Antiques are riddled with calamities. An example: Not long since, an elderly lady made her way, heart pounding, into a jeweller's. She fetched an old watch. Could the jeweller be so kind as to please value it? The jeweller's heart also pounded. He offered her a handful of zlotniks –fifteen to be precise, twenty dollars barring the handshake, enough for a meal. Not more, dear sir?

The dear sir regretfully said no, madam. Worth only scrap value. The lady took the paltry sum. Thank you and good day.

Normal business in the antiques trade, right?

The jury thought it shouldn't be, and said so at the trial. For it seemed the watch had quite a history.

Cut to the ship that's always in the news, the Titanic. It happened, on the fateful day the great ship sank, that the waters closed over a certain lady. Horror! But two brave jolly jack tars hauled her into a lifeboat. Saved! She was the Countess of Rothes, and was eternally grateful.

So thankful was she, in fact, that she had two special watches made, engraved with the date of the sinking, a dedicatory inscription, and the sailors' initials. Two watches, then, eminently collectable.

Time passed.

The old lady's watch was one of the pair. The jeweller, a witness said, 'gloated'. A similar watch – presumably the partner – sold for a cool $30,000. Somebody blew the whistle. In came the plod. The jury thought the jeweller heartless. Guilty verdicts abounded.

What gave me a wry smile, though, was the front page headline, now famous among dealers. It read Fears of 'fair price' precedent. Get it? 'Fair price' was a threat! Suddenly antique dealers were terrified. When buying an antique from the innocent public (assuming there is such a thing) maybe they'd have to pay a 'fair price' for everything!

Gulp.

Dealers call it the Southampton Case. Where antique dealers meet, the ghost of the Southampton Case lurks in their midst. And the commonest grumble of all? It's this:

'Whatever happened to caveat emptor, buyer beware?' Dealers sob into their muscatel, drop crocodile tears on their caviar. Cruel fate, making them behave!

Me? I think that Law, as ever, simply won't work. It never does. The innocent get taken to the cleaners, and the robber barons get the Rolls, blondes, and villas in Monte Carlo.

The bus trundled. I slept.