Drawing the Line

QUALITY ANTIQUES FAIR.
They didn’t intend you to miss did they? It was AA-signposted for miles. The trouble was, once you’d got off the road, you had to drive all the way round what seemed like an entire farm just to reach the car park. Detling. The windiest exhibition site in the world, according to Griff. It’s really Kent’s county agricultural show ground, which might explain why they expect hardier souls than antiques dealers.

‘Go and don your thermals, Lina, ducky,’ Griff had said that morning as we sat at the breakfast table. ‘It may be almost May but put plenty on. Layers, that’s what you need at Detling. Layers, and plenty of them. None of your crop-tops showing your belly-button.’ He waved a pudgy finger. ‘Or you’ll get a spare tyre, you know you will! Did I ever tell you…’

I knew it was rubbish, of course, Griff’s theory that if you exposed flesh to the cold you’d grow a layer of fat to keep yourself warm. Blubber, he called it. All the same, I’d pick out a couple of sweaters and a body warmer. Better blubber you could take off at will than blubber that you couldn’t. And I really couldn’t risk cold hands, not when I was handling china all day. I’d rather have looked beautifully svelte for Marcus but the chances were he wouldn’t have noticed anyway: he’d be too busy keeping his eyes open for customers.

‘My dear child,’ Griff interrupted himself suddenly, placing his teacup with an emphatic little tap on a saucer that was equally fine china but from a different century, ‘milk in Earl Grey! Didn’t your mother teach you
anything?’ Before I could say anything, he got up, going bright red and wringing his hands. ‘Silly me! No, worse than silly! I’m so sorry.’

I got up too, to give him a hug. ‘You’ve been better than any mother,’ I declared, quite truthfully. ‘Any of mine, anyway. Apart from Iris, maybe – and the best thing she ever did was introduce me to you.’

How many mothers had I had? Not ‘real’ ones, of course. Foster mothers. Iris had been the last in the line. Halfway through my stay with her they’d decided she was really too old to be fostering, but she’d kicked up such a stink when they suggested I should move for the eighth or ninth time that they let me stay. She had hated the idea of casting me off alone at sixteen, when social services decided people in care were officially ready to tackle the world, so I’d stayed, paying what little rent I could afford from my earnings in a number of jobs that Griff described as sweated labour. When I was eighteen and we both reluctantly agreed it really was time for me to move on, she’d somehow persuaded Griff to take me on as his live-in assistant. They’d been friends ever since she’d been his landlady when, as he put it, he’d trodden the boards. If she was anything like she’d been to me, she’d have been the softest touch around, so kind that you really didn’t want to take advantage of her and felt awful if you did. The deal was that Griff would teach me all he knew about antiques, which was a great deal, and I would do the housework, which in a cottage like this was very little. Although the scales were balanced heavily in my favour, the deal suited us both very well. What memories I had of less happy arrangements were polished over, if not quite wiped out, like the scratch marks
on this table.

But there was one memory I did wish I could bring back. Occasionally a tantalising snippet of a visit I must have paid with my birth mother slipped into my mind, but it would slide out as quickly as it had come. I had a little box of treasures some kind social worker had preserved: a few photos of people I didn’t recognise, a handful of books Mother must have read to me, a couple of strings of beads that made Griff shake his head and tut, and what I suppose must have been her engagement ring. The stone was so tiny and of such poor quality it spoke of a young man – my father? – with more hopes than money. When Mother’d died – no, there was no drama about it, much as I’d dreamed there might be in my early teens – in a bus crash, there were no aunts or grandparents to take on her toddler. If the giver of the ring had still been around, he didn’t offer either.

‘Iris is a dear soul,’ Griff agreed. ‘But her ways with tea and coffee are truly deplorable.’ He produced half a lemon from the fridge. He slipped the merest sliver into another china cup – this one Victorian Spode – and returned the lemon to the fridge. The knife went straight on to the washing-up pile. No dishwasher for Griff. No point, really: all our meals at home were served on finest china, absolutely not guaranteed to be dishwasher-proof. The only difference between our china and the sort you see in museums or stately homes was that theirs matched. Nothing in our kitchen matched anything. Nothing in the cottage matched anything else, come to that. Perhaps that was why it was so cosy and homely. Griff always referred to himself as a snapper up of unconsidered trifles – ‘but at least you’ll
never find my hand in a placket,’ he’d giggle. ‘
A Winter’s Tale
, dear heart, and
King Lear
, both plays you say you’ll get round to reading one of these days. Whatever are our schools coming to if they don’t encourage you young things to read the Bard?’

‘Not the schools’ fault,’ I sighed. ‘I wasn’t at any of them very long.’

‘If you’d spent a lifetime at the best, I don’t suppose you’d have read enough Shakespeare. Certainly not Chaucer in the original. Now that’s what I call a cup of tea.’

He came back to the table, helping himself to toast from a silver Christopher Dresser rack I’d picked up for him last Christmas. As always, he turned it so I could see a different facet. ‘Details, dear heart. Look at those details. Not that you haven’t an eye for them. But occasionally you let your mind wander. Now, for instance. We have to leave the house in fifteen minutes and you haven’t even started your coffee, child!’

It was a very twenty-first-century cafetière, but the coffee it produced ended up in an eighteenth-century Derby can. No, nothing to do with tins of peas. It’s the term for tiny handleless cups. Griff had been right to wean me from crock mugs: the coffee really did taste better. Honestly.

If I’d been on my own and in a hurry like we were now, I’d have scraped marg out of a tub and with the same knife scooped jam from the jar. But Griff held that if one got sloppy in little things, one could get sloppy in big ones. So despite our haste, I passed him butter in a Shelley dish and marmalade in a glass saucer of unknown provenance. The marmalade’s provenance was
immaculate. It came from our own kitchen, made from genuine Seville oranges cooked in Griff’s own jam kettle. I didn’t know how it compared with other people’s marmalade, but it sure as hell beat the supermarket stuff.

We might have been on the road a minute or two later than scheduled, because you can’t just dump old china in the sink and leave it to soak. The village was still asleep, however, as I pulled the van on to the main street. Bredeham might be a cosy village, but Griff still made sure we locked the van up in the garage every night; the six-foot high garden gates were electronically controlled. Like the shop – a retired lady called Mrs Hatch was looking after that today – the white Kent boarded cottage and its tiny garden had the latest in security systems. As Griff pointed out, it wasn’t that we had much worth stealing, it was the damage criminals could do while they were hunting, or, worse, their revenge when they’d realised that there was nothing worth stealing.

Griff double-checked every lock behind me, pithering around until I was ready to scream with frustration. It wasn’t as if I was driving a nippy little sports car and could make up for delays by putting my foot down once we’d picked up the motorway.

If I was anxious, Griff didn’t seem to give a damn. He sat in the passenger seat waving his hands in the sort of gestures he probably used to make on the stage. He’d point at the countryside, admittedly very pretty at this time of year, and come up with snippets of poetry to do with cherry trees and others heavy with blossom. Being Griff he didn’t observe that after a day bent under wind like this the trees would shed all their lovely petals,
littering roads and fields alike with confetti.

‘I told you our late start wouldn’t matter,’ Griff observed complacently. ‘The gods have blessed us with virtually empty roads.’

They had, and I wasn’t about to argue. The roads in the south east have got stuck in some time warp, narrow and twisty, like in some Fifties movie. Don’t ask me why major towns should be joined by winding lanes, not decent dual carriageways. But then, don’t ask me why once flourishing towns like Dover and Hastings should have become so out at elbows that no sensible holiday-maker would want to stop off there when they’re within spitting distance of France. Perhaps that was why they’d built the M20 and the M2 – to make it easier for people to spend all their money in Europe, not at home. At least the M20 was a boon to two of Kent’s residents, Griff and me. Though we didn’t go to every antiques fair, not by any means, we set up our stall at enough to need motorway access to major sites all over the country. Did the M25 help or hinder our progress? That was a matter of frequent, if not deep debate. OK, bickering.

Detling was only on our doorstep – spitting distance, as Iris would have said. Our stall there – it was really Griff’s but in business just like at home he treated me more like a partner than an employee – was at least indoors. It was in one of the couple of big halls, a couple of hundred yards apart. Ours was no better than a barn really, matting covering uneven bare earth. Whenever anyone moaned, someone would point out that floorboards would be much less convenient for the usual occupants, sheep or cattle.

Outdoors, even in this arctic blast, were dozens of
poor saps of stallholders who couldn’t rake up the indoor pitch fee. They smiled and waved cheerily as we lugged our boxes and they lugged theirs. But we knew they’d keep at least as anxious an eye on the weather as they did for punters: if you’re selling rugs or upholstery the odd April shower can be a pain, a downpour a disaster. Most of them were much lower in the food chain, however, selling all sorts of ‘collectables’ that Griff despised – especially when people bought them instead of the proper stuff we had on sale.

Our beady eyes wouldn’t be on punters yet. There’s always a couple of hours for dealers only – or Joe Public rich enough not to worry about the hiked up admission charges designed to keep him out. First we set up. When you watched Griff it was obvious why he’d needed a young fit assistant: maybe Iris really had been thinking of him as much as of me. He was getting very stiff about the knees, and he always found some excuse to let me handle the most delicate stuff. He wouldn’t admit it, but one or two of his knuckles looked shinier than the others, and if he thought no one was looking he’d rub a finger as I would if I’d shut one in the door. His stage photos suggested he must be nearer seventy than sixty. I made sure I tackled not just the expensive china but also any heavy lifting. I might be only five foot two and fool people into thinking I’m delicate, but I’m whippy with it and can lift weight for weight with most of the dealers here.

As soon as we could, we started prowling around, buying here, selling there. Yes, to other dealers. Sometimes a stallholder specialising in, say,
eighteenth-century
glassware would have picked up a Victorian first
edition, or an Art Deco person wanted to shift some Derby. So swaps or little deals were taking place wherever you looked. My brief was to look out for Victorian china, and some early twentieth-century pottery called Ruskin, which a collector down in Devon was after and was willing to pay silly prices for next time we were at West Point. It was silly prices that kept Griff and me in marmalade.

Not as silly as the labels put on that row of teddy bears. If they’d been Stieff or Merrythought, they would have been good quality toys in the first place. These might have been lucky to claim their origins in Woolworths: why didn’t people realise that tat was tat, whatever its age? I wouldn’t have paid in bottle tops what these people were asking for in pounds.

Griff caught my eye.

I blushed.

‘Dear heart, it’s no shame to be searching for your heritage. I know what you’re looking for – that teddy in the little photograph. But I fear you’ll have to settle for your old Griff buying you one for your next birthday. But not,’ he added, flaring his left nostril, ‘one from this stall.’

I nodded. It wasn’t just the system’s fault that I had hardly any possessions. It was partly mine. You get so used to throwing things away – McDonald’s containers, plastic bottles – that you don’t always value better things. At least, I didn’t, not even the little I’d got. It was only thanks to Iris that the social worker’s cache remained – I’d had a quarrel with myself one night and thrown the lot in the bin.

‘Harrods, perhaps,’ Griff added grandly. ‘Next time
I’m in town.’

As if there were just the one.

I shook my head. ‘You know I wouldn’t want anything posh.’

He looked pained. ‘How many times have I told you one should always buy the best one can afford?’

‘You couldn’t cuddle a posh bear,’ I argued. ‘You’d be too worried about wearing its fur out.’

‘Dear heart, you shall have one to cuddle. But ere long you’ll have a young man in your bed to cuddle.’ He suppressed a sigh.

As well he might. Last time I’d flirted with someone – a guy we met in a bar in Stafford – blow me if Griff wasn’t flirting with him too.

He nudged me. ‘I believe that Person wishes to speak to you.’ In an undertone, he added, ‘A young man by all means. But not from this stall. You know, if they allow stuff like this – and have you seen all that plastic rubbish over there? – I can’t see us coming here again.’ He drifted off before I could stick my tongue out at him.

‘’Allo, gorgeous! Lina! ‘Ow are you, darlin’?’

I turned, not bothering to smile. It was Ralph Harper, not one of my favourite dealers. He sold furniture, but mostly wrong ’uns. Oh, all the wood might be old, but he’d attach legs from one table to a top from another and had the brass neck to pretend the resulting mishmash wasn’t a fake. Chests of drawers, dressing tables, chiffoniers: nothing escaped his help. The trouble was he could undercut proper furniture dealers, many of whom no longer did this or other fairs he patronised.