The Great California Game

CHAPTER THREE

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NEW York’s a collection of islands, then?”

Rose laughed, vivacious. The breeze along the boat kept blowing her hair. I’d have told her she was bonny, but she believed she was ordinary. They’re full of daft ideas. We were just docking after a circular trip round Manhattan.

“The song, Lovejoy! To the New York Islands…” She pointed across the Hudson River, singing about this land being her land or something.

“Oh, aye,” I exclaimed quickly so she’d know I’d only forgotten for a sec. “That barge?”

“Every day, Lovejoy. Garbage goes out on barges, dropped into the ocean. The city’s almost blocked with the stuff we New Yorkers throw out. Unbelievable.”

“I’m struck by the buildings.” And I was.

Everything in a new country’s astonishing, I know, but New York is beyond belief. Until then I’d only seen New York in rain. My images had been formed from cinemas, that skyline they always show you—skyscrapers, tugboats, traffic on those bridges, the same old longshot of people crossing that long street between blocks.

I now saw New York was beautiful, kaleidoscopically and mesmerizingly lovely.

Most of Manhattan’s buildings are no more than three or four storeys, all different. And the ferryboat had steamed between forested hillsides and cliffs studded with lovely houses, chalets, countryside so colourful it could have been Tuscany. I was so taken aback I’d asked Rose, “Are we still in New York?” when I’d run out of landmarks. Several people standing along the boat’s railings had turned and laughed, made jokey remarks.

“Not often New York gets such a good press, Lovejoy,” Rose said as we watched the docking. “Especially from a Californian.”

“Why not?”

She gazed at me. “East Coast and West Coast. Sibling rivalry.”

“Oh, that old thing.” I laughed, I thought convincingly.

The city seemed really… well, bright. Remade yet sound, not at all like the brash New World I’d expected. And such friendly people. Preconceptions are always wrong.

We got a taxi.

“Hey!” I’d spotted something. “There’s a pattern. Avenues north to south? Streets east to west?”

Rose laughed at my exitement. “Sure. The rule here.”

“And numbered!” I was more thrilled than Columbus. “In sequence!” How simple it all was.

“Except for Broadway,” the taxi driver cut in. “And lower n’ 14th Street’s real bad. Old-fashioned, y’know?”

He and Rose engaged in an incomprehensible dialogue about whether all even-numbered streets should all have eastbound traffic. I looked out. The place was heaving, for all that it was Sunday. Rose had told him to go round the southern tip of Manhattan to show me SoHo and Greenwich Village. I thought it all wonderful. And I was safe here, which was more than could be said for the place I’d left.

More parks and open spaces and different architectures than the parson preached about. I was exhilarated when we stopped in West 56th Street to disembark. I had an ugly moment of terror about the tip. Rose explained.

“A tenth, fifteen per cent if you’re pleased.”

We were standing in a quiet street outside an antiquarian bookshop of the name Hawkins. Hardly any traffic, and Rose looking distinctly flushed as she fumbled for a key. Why was she nervous? I’d not made any serious mistakes, not said the wrong thing.

“I work here, Lovejoy. I’d like you to see it.”

If she said so. I followed her up the steps into a pleasant but confined shop. She seemed a little breathless, talking too much.

“My sister’s business, really. She’s the one with the knowledge. I’m just a hanger-on.”

“Mmmh, mmmh,” I went, saying the books were really quite good, the usual lies. There’s a feel you get from reading old pages that you don’t from new. I thought Blake a swine until I read his own printing.

“That glass case holds Moira’s special sale stock.”

I paused. Nothing special, save a tatty copy of Martin Chuzzlewit. It bonged me like the first edition, which is fine but common. “Great,” I said heartily, trying to please.

“Of course, Moira dreams of the one really big find,” Rose said, switching lights on so I could be impressed all the more.

“Don’t we all, love,” I said with feeling. “Same back home. Er, in California.”

There was a desk at an angle between the cabinet and the door, with unanswered letters spread about.

“We have associates in England, France, Germany. Coffee?”

She had a silvery pot all ready, fresh milk in a carton, cups. Modern gunge.

“Please.” I didn’t like Rose’s let’s-pretend conversation. But that alone wasn’t what was worrying me.

One of the addresses I could see on the letters was not far from where I live. Lived.

“Moira’s on the trail of something now.” Rose already had the pot making a noise. I watched her.

“Special?”

“Something drastic, fantastic”

Oh, dear. I almost switched off. Antiques are an open invitation for every extraterrestrial to orbit in from Planet Greed. We’re all avaricious, wanting Tutankhamen’s gold bracelet for a song, dreaming of finding a Turner watercolour behind the wainscoting so we can ballock the boss and eagle off to Monte Carlo. And legends don’t help, teaching us about King Arthur’s lost crown, Shakespeare’s autobiography, the fabled gold ship lost in the North Sea. Newspapers make us worse, always full of little lads digging up early Christian silver chalices, old aunties discovering that their plain gilt earrings are the ones Cleopatra lost in the Nile, all that. You think I’m against romance? Work a week in antiques. You’ll get weary with reports of miraculous finds that turn out to be utter dross. It’s always somebody else’s exultant face under the banner headline, never mine.

Still, friends justify the means. And Rose was a sort of pal. So I smiled and went, “Mmmh.”

“Moira was the same when she found that Book of Hours. Cream?”

“No, ta.” What’s wrong with milk? “Where, love?”

“Sixteenth-century, French.” She pointed.

“Eh? Oh, aye.”

Pull the other one, I thought. It stood there among the parchment bindings. Phony now, phony always. I think it knew it, too. But next to it was a tattered relic volume that beamed out enough radiance to warm any dealer’s vitals. It was labelled Burnet, probably that Thesaurus which the crabby old doctor had published in Venice about 1700. (Tip: Nothing—repeat, zilch—has soared in price quite so much as the devotional Books of Hours did a few years ago. But be careful. Fakes are flooding onto the market, the better-class ones priced about the same as your average Rolls.)

“I play a game, Lovejoy…”

I on the other hand was wondering about the elegant woman sitting in the back room. She’d been there when we arrived. Rose knew it. She’d manoeuvred me round the wrong side of the desk so I wouldn’t see her. Sister Moira? Only a glimpse, but I was sure she was the aloof lassie who sat and read in Fredo’s. I’d caught her in the reflection of the glass door.

“What game?” Nicko had toasted some game.

“What I’d buy if I had the money.”

“The Burnet,” I said, in for a penny in for a pound.

“Not the Book of Hours?” I mumbled something in reply. She heard me out. Then, “Lovejoy. How long will you stay?”

“I’m for California, as soon as I can. See the, er, folks.”

“What d’you get at Manfredi’s?”

A slow inhale. American confidences have three-league boots. But I was being my up-front Californian self, so I told her and she shook her head.

“That’s peanuts, Lovejoy.”

“I made some extra last night, waiting on at a private party.” I cursed myself for sounding defensive. Why should I defend stingy old Fredo? “Fredo’s okay.”

We talked of money in the book trade. Actually, book dealers are my least favourite antiquarians. They’re demon elbowers at book fairs, chisellers with each other and worse with customers. Go to any provincial book fair in England. Booksellers’ commonest moan is “There’s no books to buy!” Meaning there’s a shortage of cheap rarities they—booksellers—can salt away for themselves. The elegant woman didn’t emerge.

We finished the coffee, both pretending, and went to the antiques show she’d promised me. On the way I heard a girl yell abuse at a taxi. I heard a man tell another, “Get outa here, ya bum.” We saw buskers playing wonderful street music. I nearly had my toes whisked off by every passing car. Noticed that the street corners are kerbed in iron! Asked why the manhole covers steamed so, got no answer. Learned the murder rate in New York topped anybody else’s, though Washington was a contender.

But beautiful it is. Despite what happened it’ll stay that way in my memory for ever and ever.

WE walked alongside Central Park to the New-York Historical Society’s place.

“Note that hyphen, Lovejoy,” Rose warned. “They’re compulsives!”

“Show me a museum curator who isn’t.”

The elegant woman was there ahead of us, standing on the corner of West 77th, ostensibly admiring the Natural History place next road along. I didn’t wave, but wondered uneasily about Rose’s pale indentation on her ring finger. I knew from ancient Doris Day films that marriage holds a special place in American lawyers’ hearts. Was I a prospect, Moira along to suss me? She followed us in.

The exhibition gobsmacked me. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Here was quite a small building, not many people about, getting little attention. And inside they’d pulled together a staggering display of Regency furniture. I’ve seen most of the stuff that matters. I simply stood there, gaping.

Remember preconceptions? Even though I’d landed hoping simply to somehow scrape the transatlantic fare home, I’d been an arrogant swine, imbued with that Old World toffee-nosed attitude: the United States of America’s got no culture, not deep down.

The first glory I saw was a Hepplewhite piece, then a blinding Ince cabinet, two—that’s two—Sheratons, then a Chippendale… I filled up, had to pretend I had a sudden cough. It was like suddenly meeting a houseful of friends and lovers.

There’s only one way to greet people you love, including antiques. And that’s to drift. I kept losing Rose in the process. Finally I chucked in the sponge of pretence as the hours flew away. Until then I’d been trying my best to be the returned expatriate. Now I thought, what the hell, I’ll probably never even see Rose again. I started answering naturally when she asked about things.

“No, Rose.” I remember grinning like a fool. “They loved brass. See that brass inlay, all round the sofa table? They couldn’t resist it. Good old George the Fourth. He has more influence on everyday life through furniture and household decoration than we care to remember. Of course, he was a bit of a ram, women all over the kingdom…” I saw people looking. “Er, he was a libertine…”

“Why did you pull a face at that one?”

“It’s a fraud, love. See the woods? Coromandel’s a devil to use, hard as iron, difficult to place just like the Regency makers did. In fact, it’s as if they filed rather than planed. We use fierce electric sanders and routing planes. If you were to look with a McArthur microscope at the surface, you’d see microscopic…”

More folk listening, one gentleman stern, two others casual. And the elegant beauty. In an odd moment she’d crossed glances with Rose, though neither had shown recognition. I moved Rose on underneath a silver chandelier.

“There’s only a dozen known, replicas excepted. Find one and you’ve pulled off the biggie.” That was a thought, because in the USA possession of a silversmith’s die—with which each made his hallmark—isn’t illegal, whereas back in dozy old East Anglia… So anybody could make a new silver chandelier, get an original Regency silversmith’s die, and in a trice be the proud owner of a “genuine”Regency silver chandelier, one of the world’s greatest rarities… I wasn’t really serious. Only daydreaming, as I told Rose when she called me to earth.

The clocks were disappointing. Some goon nearby started expounding about the 1820s being the peak of London’s longcase clockmakers—the nerk called them “grandfather”clocks. He would. This sort of thing’s often quoted from the slithery catalogue spiel of auctioneers. You have to arm yourself with truth to counteract it. London clockmakers let longcase clocks alone after about 1804 or so, when the provinces took over. There was a bonny archtop bracket clock in mahogany I would have found room for under my jacket if I’d been the only visitor (only kidding) and a pearlware Wedgwood jug with that priceless yellowish tinge they couldn’t get rid of until they discovered that a little touch of cobalt made all the difference.

“For myself,” I was saying as we left—it shut at teatime—“I’d rather have the lemonish tint.”

I ignored the glimpse of the elegant woman to one side of the entrance, because what did it matter? Her sister was overprotective. So what?

We shared a gentle meal in a self-service place and said so-long. Rose suggested we meet some time. I agreed because it’s my only response with women. I waved her off near Columbus Circle, started walking.

I’d gone a hundred yards when I was taken in custody by a couple of plainclothesmen who flashed badges at me just like on the pictures and bundled me inside a motor the length of a cathedral. I was made to believe that any attempt at discussion would be ill received.