Jade Woman

24

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A brief note about prices, and faith.

If you’re keen on antiques, be careful. When money and antiques mix, somebody comes off worst. Pick up a rarity cheap and you’ve “stolen” it, according to some. Like the dealer Rohan, who in the early 1920s paid highly (£100, a lot those days) for a stupendous ancient George Ravenscroft wine goblet, sold it instantly for £300, and actually wrote a book bragging about his astuteness. Leaving aside the question of the goblet’s current value (almost priceless), antiques is a game of buyers’ keepers. Now, Rohan behaved perfectly properly. If a buy turns out a dud, you’ve no redress no matter what the dealers promise. So, if that tatty painting turns out to be a Constable, that chair Chippendale, that old timepiece a costly 1680 London hooded clock, and you got it for a song, keep hold no matter what people say. You paid in fairness, so it’s yours—finish. As the antiques trade says, the complainer wouldn’t do the opposite with the opposite. Meaning if you bought a dud, the vendor wouldn’t chase after you to return your payment, right?

The point of all this is price. It’s easy to decide the cost, say, of a loaf. The farmer must grow the grain, harvest it. Somebody winnows, bakes, delivers. Add all that up and you’re heading for the minimum-possible price of your loaf, bicycle, house, anything.

Anything except antiques, that is. Because there’s something called faith.

Faith’s dicey stuff, but when it’s around it’s heap-big medicine. It’s why people queue in the street to pay zillions for a few daubs of pigment on a tatty bit of canvas—just because a bloke called Monet did the daubing. It’s faith—faith that everybody else would also give zillions for the same painting if they had that much. I mean, authenticity’s in the mind of the holder. I think Schwarz’s theory—that Mona Lisa’s face is actually Leonardo da Vinci’s—is barmy, though. Well, what can you expect from computers?

No. It’s prices and faith. In antiques they are inseparable.

At the Digga Dig, If-Ever letters, as I call them, were arriving. Chok, one of the waiters, kept them for me. The first was from Lorna expressing misery and saying If Ever I was in the States… A second came from her wanting me to phone, write, send photographs—me, who’d crack any camera at four hundred yards—and saying she was trying to wangle a return buying trip soon. She sent three photos of herself in affluent surroundings.

And the presents. Women baffle me. I couldn’t get the hang of it. All the rewards were coming my way for a change. I was briefly tempted by a Monaco lady called Gabriella, if I’ve got her name right, who said I’d love her Mediterranean villa If Ever… About that time I was shocked by the sight of Algernon’s face on the front page: The idiot was doing well at practice laps in Macao. Unnervingly, he was even interviewed on television, large as life. I prayed he’d start losing and retire home. Now I was secure at least for a day or two, he was the last person on earth I wanted. I pulled myself together and headed for the Surtons’.

It was the first time I’d been inside a proper house in Hong Kong. The Surtons had really put themselves out, so I put myself out too. I tried to be charming, pleasant, anxious, and diffident. I admired everything they showed me.

“Lovely,” I said. “You must be really happy here.”

“Exotic Hong Kong?” Surton chuckled. “The house is a boon, of course.

Accommodation’s terribly expensive.”

“Terrible,” Phyllis agreed. “This is university property.” She was in a rather faded oldish dress, powder blue with an incongruously wide belt, but appealing. The meal had been different sorts of pork, tons of rice, and colored pickles and things, with a pudding I hadn’t understood. The amah was a happy soul, delighted with company. “Luckily nobody wants these houses.”

“No?” I was surprised. The veranda overlooked the Lamma Channel, a wonderment color with the South China Sea and Lamma Island and a sunset to stop the world.

“Ghosts, you see, Lovejoy.” Surton shook with suppressed laughter. “In the war; Japanese. Down the hillside is a house that would be quite inhabitable. Except ghosts litter the gardens. It’s all overgrown.”

“Real ghosts?” I asked.

“So the locals say. We have one ourselves.”

Ordinarily I’d have gone home at this point, though I mean I’m not superstitious. And I’m not spookable. No, really. The Surtons looked so matter-of-fact. The ceilings were tall, the fans the old central type, no air-conditioning. Wood was everywhere, teak, common as muck. The floors were parquet and the veranda shuttered great walk-throughs. It was stylish, airy, almost managing to be cool despite the hot thick air. Little lizardy creatures ran up the wall occasionally chuckling to themselves behind the pictures and the pelmets. Geckos I’d seen before, but had to have them re-explained to me by an amused Surton because I’d leapt out of my skin.

“It doesn’t look very ghostly to me.” I smiled at Phyllis to show I admired her as well as her house. We were on the veranda. Gold light striped the evening through shutters. It was as romantically tropical as my imagination could cope with.

“Our ghost’s nocturnal.” Surton had supplied strange liqueurs with the coffee. “She either has no feet or no head. Nineteen. Wears a lovely cheong-sam.”

“Greeny blue.” From Phyllis.

“You’ve both seen her?”

“Not really. Well, hardly. If Ah Fung weren’t so loyal we’d be here alone. The thing to do is treat ghosts as incidental, or the amahs vanish for good.”

“The Cantonese are so superstitious.” Phyllis was so fetching in the patterned light.

“The poor thing is a Hungry Ghost, an unrevered spirit. Nobody to send her things.

They’re so expensive, you see.”

I gave a sigh, to humor the loony pair. Send a ghost things? Did spirits have Christmas?

“Money’s a problem, isn’t it?” This was the in I’d been angling for. “I’m struggling myself.”

“Everybody’s the same,” Surton sympathized, “except people working for the big banks, multinationals.”

“I was sent to do a reconstruct,” I lied, rueful. “But my allowance barely buys essentials.” Phyllis kept her eyes on her cup. “The firm’s central office gave me no guidance about the reconstruct. I was lucky to dig your name out of the university registry.”

“Reconstruct?”

“Well, we know a few facts about Song Ping, but we have nothing really original, as I told you. What we need’s a replica of all his artifacts. The London end’s got a few original papers coming from China, but—”

Surton was beside himself and rushed to replenish our glasses. “Documentary artifacts?”

“Mmmmn. Reconstructs of his exhibition catalogs, as authentic as possible. Newspaper cuttings. Even parts of his diary—we’ve only unlearned English translations of that, I’m afraid, so it’ll need a lot of scholarship reconstructing it back into the original Chinese of a century ago. Plus reviews of his work that’ll have to be reconstructed from a schoolboy French translation we’ve come across. And a few letters; they were translated into English by a Victorian traveler. We got copies from one of his descendants. That sort of thing.”

“So you want them translated back into last century’s Chinese manuscript? And typefaces? Capital, Lovejoy!”

“And on the right paper, the right inks, calligraphy—”

“What a lovely task!” Surton rubbed his hands. “With any luck I could start a research student on it next year.”

I felt myself pale. The frigging Triad would execute me tomorrow if I didn’t set the scam up instantly, and here was this daft old don programmed on some Paleolithic sidereal clock, the loon. “Money of course is available immediately,” I croaked, cleared my throat, pressed on. “I’m authorized to pay it over within the week.”

“Money?” He spoke as if I’d invented a problem word.

“Oh, Stephen!” Phyllis gave him one of those desperate wifely glances saying for God’s sake be practical for once.

“Yes. To any expert who would do it for us. We need it urgently, you see…”

And I was home and dry. We chatted and swigged, but the deal was already settled.

Phyllis would come out of retirement, become Surton’s assistant for the duration of the Song Ping project. I would cable my London firm, whoever they might be, for everything they had on the elusive artist. Surton would make every detail perfect. Song Ping’s original material, on its way from Canton, would prove his authenticity, should Dr. Surton entertain any doubts. He politely pooh-poohed this. I promised that they should both be guests of honor to the first Song Ping exhibition.

“Maybe they’ll commission Stephen to do a book on him,” I said at the door to Phyllis, departing about midnight. Surton had wrung my hand and shot upstairs to his study in a fever of academic zeal.

“He’s so thrilled, Lovejoy.” She accompanied me along the forecourt, a balustraded walk lined with bougainvillea and hibiscus. “He’s superb. You’ll not be disappointed.”

“I know that. And, Phyllis—thank you for not sending me packing just because… those bars. You’re kind.”

“Oh, I understand financial difficulties, Lovejoy. We can’t afford a car, haven’t taken home leave for years. I know how desperate…” She petered out and stood there, face down. I felt her agony. She was right. She did know how it was. I said a tentative so-long in the lanterned darkness.

“You’ll get a taxi if you walk down towards Kennedy Town, Lovejoy. The number seven bus stopped an hour ago, I’m afraid. The typhoon warning.”

Eh? These daft local weather customs. The air hung balmy and still. “Right, love. Good night.” I paused. “If I… I see you elsewhere, is it all right if I say hello?”

A pause. “Very well, Lovejoy.”

I walked out of the villa’s small area onto Mount Davis Road and struck downhill towards the lights of Kennedy Town market. I was jubilant.