Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER SEVEN

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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.

“A bit. Why?”

Practical hates doing it since he lost his teeth. No smile. A con man needs a smile. Too much booze had rotted his fangs, and pot teeth were looming from the dentist on Chitts Hill. For Practical, it had been the Year of the Tooth. I watched Diana out of the corner of my eye. She was urgently questing, not strolling. Drowning, not waving. I ducked. I’d my own problems.

“Done anything round Mentle? Ladyham?”

“Me and Baff did turn and turn about. I sold him Mentle a month since.”

“Ta, Prac.”

I promised to see Farmer, persuade a frame out of the stingy old nerk to help Prac out, and eeled towards the door. It was then that Donk saw me and yelled my name. A right pest he was turning out to be. I had to stand upright and pretend I’d been casually inspecting an Eastern mirror mounted in a brilliantly cut mother-of-pearl surround. Diana came over as soon as she could, all the oafs deliberately not getting out of her way.

“Hello, Lovejoy. I thought I’d find you here. Can we speak?”

“What do you think of this?” I seethed with disgust. “Leave mother-of-pearl in sunshine, you never get its glisten back. A waste of all that lovely carving.” Actually, there are ways, but they’re not good.

I went with her, but only so she wouldn’t give me that can-we-talk? routine. I hate it. It’s all they ever say on telly soaps: Can we talk? As if you have to set up a Security Council before telling a bird her dress is a mess and you love her. God, but the world needs me.

“My own fake’s here, Di,” I said shyly. “Want to see it?”

“Which is it, Lovejoy?” our greatest failed lover butted in to ask.

Dicko Chave. He’s hopeless, which is to say an average dealer. A pompous, bluff bloke, he’s proposed to every woman in the Eastern Hundreds, rejected every single time. Nobody knows why. He’s begged me to tell him where he goes wrong. I’m stumped. I mean, an ex-officer, doesn’t drink much, his own house, keeps accurate tax accounts would you believe, church-goer, shoes polished, reliable as a Lancashire clock. You’d think women’d find him a good prospect, if only for economic reasons, but no.

“Sorry, Dicko.” I now regretted boasting, even quietly, to Diana. Already dealers were sidling up to listen. The auction prices would fall now, from general suspicion. My Sheraton would have to wait for its deserved adulation until after it was auctioned. I took Diana’s arm.

“Lovejoy. Won’t you introduce me?” Dicko asked, wistful with his unmarried smile, drawing himself up for social niceties.

“I’m sorry,” Diana snapped. “We’re busy.”

“Oh. Perhaps some other…” We were out of the door, which wafted after us: “… time”.

See what I mean? Diana hadn’t given him a glance. Yet Dicko’s polite as well. Strange.

We went, brisk with purpose, to the Tudor Rest across the road. Not far enough, but their coffee’s the only drinkable coffee in East Anglia. Hank the Yank runs it, needless to say. A triumph of caffeine-soaked heredity over environment. She chose a corner place after prolonged inspection.

“Expecting being stabbed, love?”

No levity. My heart sank. Deadly earnest time, and an auction about to start a hundred yards away. I have rotten luck.

“No time for wit, Lovejoy. What did he tell you?”

A pause while Hank T.Y. himself served us. He has three waitresses, but they do sweet nothing—as far as observers can see, that is. But Hank is a very happy proprietor. He admired Diana, tried to extend his delivery with chat, and failed at least as badly as Dicko Chave. He retired hurt to his kitchen, but not too hurt. Giggles arose from there within seconds.

“Troude?” I wondered about the wisdom of this meeting. I mean, why was she asking? “Why’re you asking?”

“I suggested you, Lovejoy.” She did that woman’s head-shake that loosens their hair but makes you feel they’re girding for war. “I have to know if he hired you.”

“Is he your pal, Di?”

She lit a cigarette with aggressive intent, spouted smoke. She was mad all right. I began to regret that bonus. She was here to cash in on the obligation. No need to ask whose obligation, either. It’s always on mine.

“If you call me Di once more, Lovejoy, I’ll throw you under the next bus. Understand?” I nodded, to get the rest of the ballocking. “Monsieur Troude and I are good acquaintances. We have difficulty keeping in touch, under the circumstances.”

“Mmmh.” She’d said about some husband. Maybe a club member? Investor? Or was that Member of Parliament’s wife a regular iron-pumper there? I had to go careful. “Mr Troude just said he’d be in touch.”

“That means he has hired you, Lovejoy,” she translated for her own, not my benefit. “Have you a pen?”

She lent me a gold pencil from her handbag. I wrote the address on a menu. She held out her palm, but I honestly wasn’t trying to pinch her pencil. For God’s sake, everybody forgets to return pencils, don’t they? Anyhow, I’d swap her rotten gold propelling pencil any day for a genuine Borrowdale graphite, the best writing tool ever made since the world began. It was back in the 1560s that gales uprooted an ash tree in Borrowdale, Cumberland. A man happened to see pieces of a strange solid in its up-ended roots. Curious, he felt it, and saw how easily it blackened his fingers. He used it to mark his sheep, and graphite—stone that draws—was born. Sensibly, folk began enclosing slivers of graphite—“English antimony”—in a lathed wooden tube and hey presto! I hadn’t realized I’d been telling her out loud. She clipped her handbag closed. I think I was beginning to like her. She smiled at something achieved, and I was sure.

“I’ll make it worth your while, Lovejoy. Keep me informed. In more ways than you can imagine.”

Her hand touched mine, a promise on account. Promises have the half-life of snowflakes, which makes me wonder why I fall for them. You’d think I’d learn.

“Won’t Troude be narked, if I blab to you?”

“He’ll be glad, Lovejoy. No need to let on, though. Let’s keep it just between ourselves.” She rose to go, leaving that red crescentic reminder of lust on her cup rim. “Oh, Lovejoy. Parlez-vous-Francais?”

“No, love.”

“School slanguage, though?”

“Plume de ma tante’s all very well, love, but teaching doesn’t get you very far. Here, love. You forgot the bill.”

“Oh.” She paid up with a kind of surprised amusement. “You know, Lovejoy, I rather think we’re going to get along. It’s some considerable time since I’ve had a partner I could rely on.”

We said goodbye, me promising I do it too—to let her know the instant Troude showed up. I found Hank beside me watching her walk up the brough into town.

“You’re a lucky swine, Lovejoy,” he said. “She looks a really great lay. How much a trick?”

First Jodie Danglass thinks Diana’s socially unacceptable. And now Hank jumps to the same conclusion. Most be some allergen in the pollen.

“She’s my client, Hank,” I said airily. “Antiques buyer from, er, Michigan. Paid quarter of a million for a collection of Philadelphian teapot lamps last week.”

“An American?” he cried delightedly. “And I thought she was Paris France! Nice trace of accent.”

“Educated there, Hank. Cheers.”

He went back in to resume his onerous labours making waitresses giggle in the kitchen. I went across the road more thoughtful than before. Suddenly there seemed a lot of France about, where France wasn’t.

The world restored normality when Tinker caught me up and dragged me into the Ship Inn. He had Steve Yelbard waiting, victor of the Portland Vase competition.

“Hello, Steve.” I let my delight show. “Congrats. Your glass-work’s beautiful. Here, let me get these…” I ordered ale for the three of us, which was numerically equal to six—four for Tinker, one each for Steve and me.

We spoke for quite some time. He was a nice bloke, not able to tell me much. Genuine, as far as I could tell. More interested in glass than breathing. An enthusiast after my own heart. I asked if he’d visited anywhere locally besides Long Melford where he was staying, was told no.

Steve told me about Jan Fotheringay. “I got a note saying he had a commission for me, copying some varied-knop bell-mouthed wine glasses, but he didn’t show.”

“Newcastle, eh?” I sighed. Even a fake 1734 vintage glass, with its knops shaping the stem with lovely variation, yet in exquisite proportion, would send me delirious. Newcastle’s glass has never been bettered—and I do include Venice. They are nearly priceless. “You do your own wheel engraving, Steve?”

“No. Got a Dutch bloke.”

I laughed. “Traditionalist, eh?” Even that long ago, our glasses were sent to Holland for engraving. The real difficulty is making sure the air-beaded ball knop isn’t a fraction too large. Some glass-maker fakers run amok when they try for the most valuable—“Eh? What, Steve?” He’d said something.

“Jan. Terrible luck.” Steve tutted. “His motor home. Didn’t know he was a drinker. You can’t tell, can you?”

“Mmmh,” I went. I’d get it from Tinker later.

And that was that. Steve knew nothing about Phoebe Colonna, despite strong views on her morals, substituting a Victorian replica for one of her own. Unscrupulous, he called it.

“An American trait, Lovejoy. Spreading all over the world.”

So we parted, me and Tinker waving off this pure-minded forger who’d discovered America was to blame for all our wrongdoing. God knows what the Old World would do without the Yanks to blame for everything—blame our horrible old selves instead, I suppose.

“Tell, Tinker,” I ordered.

“Dry old day, Lovejoy.” He threatened a rumbling chestiness. I flung a couple of pints down his throttle in the nick of time. “That poofter Jan lives in a motorized caravan. Its engine caught fire driving through Archway. He lost the lot.”

“What’s this about drink?”

“Pissed as a newt, Lovejoy,” he said inelegantly. “The Plod checked his blood. Insurance’ll shell him like the bleedin’ plague. Out of hospital, magistrate’ll chuck the book at him.”

“That bad?”

The long hand of Fortune? Or the longer, more decisive hand of Big John Sheehan, Corse, both?

I remembered then I was going to Barlfen with the lovely Almira, and made a run for it. From my chat with Steve I was practically sure there was no connection between the Portland Vase competition and this Troude bloke. And sure too that Almira was only pretending she had no investments in the Nouvello venture in Ladyham. After all, she might have an old flame on the board, and simply be doing him a favour, right?

It came on to rain about then. I saw no new omens.