The Rich And The Profane (14 page)

And the blonde Paula, she of the glitzy earrings and miniskirts, high heels and skimpy bolero. Paula’s enormously fat, so somehow her clothes - what there is - look wrong. Women give each other meaningful looks about Paula, but I like her. She really packs on the cosmetics, rouge, mascara, lipstick, so you’re knee deep if you get within striking distance, and wears scent enough to make you gag. She’s an expert dealer in eighteenth-century English porcelain, so she tells customers.

‘Lovejoy?’ Desdemona was suddenly there.

‘That you, love? Where’s your bloke?’ I was narked at Gesso, but didn’t want to tell her off. She was Gesso’s ex-wife, water under the bridge now.

‘Not here.’

She looked pale, led me out to the car park. It was coming bright, gusty. I like Desdemona, though her name embarrasses me. Just saying it makes me feel I’ve started a speech, then I feel daft because I’ve nothing else to say, and silence isn’t much where women are concerned. She stood there, pretty, quiet. It was only then - honest truth - that I felt the first twinge of anxiety.

‘Have you seen Gesso?’ I said nothing, looking at her eyes. ‘Only, he’s not been about since you took him to rob the priory.’

So much for secrecy. ‘I’ve not seen him either. No,’ I went on as she drew breath, ‘I’ve not put word out. The Plod are asking.’

Dangerous ground, this. I told her what happened that night. They divorced some two years since when Desdemona gave up over Gesso’s bad spell of remands and gaol sentences.

She said bravely, ‘I’m frightened something went wrong.’ ‘It did. I told you. Gesso got—’

‘Normally he phones. He crows about robberies he’s just done. This is the only time he’s not called.’

‘The only time?’ I asked, even more uneasy.

‘Lovejoy.’ She held my hands tight. I tried to pull away. ‘You know how things are. In his way Gesso was all right. Weak, but what man isn’t?’

This falsehood made me try to look strong, utterly reliable.

‘I never gave him away. His calls were like a bond, the only bit left between us. You’re not hiding him, are you?’ ‘Me?’ I heard them call for the start of the auction. ‘I’ll find him, love. Honest.’

‘You will, Lovejoy?’ She scanned my face, found enough near-truth in my lies to be going on with. ‘Just so he’s all right. Nothing more.’

‘Right, love.’ I watched her go. She has a little Continental motor. What on earth was Gesso thinking of, chucking her for an inept life of robbery? Mind you, I should talk.

Back inside, Paula collared me. The crowd had swelled enormously, to at least a dozen, drifting among the trestle tables and home-made cabinets.

‘Lovejoy,’ she breathed. ‘Come and look!’

‘There’s not much here, love.’ No chimes in my chest. Everything was modern - for modern, read dross.

‘That dancing girl, Lovejoy!’ She pretended to be chatting, but deceived nobody. Her excited breathing alone gave the world clues enough.

‘Fake, Paula.’

‘It can’t be!’ she wailed. Dealers everywhere sprang out of the floorboards to hear. I was tired, wanted out. ‘I’ve put a dog in!’

Dog is the dealer’s word for a written bid delivered just before an auction. You scribble the amount you want to bid, give it to the whiffler and lurk about pretending you’ve not bid at all. Some dealers do it to increase the price of an antique - having themselves put the antique in for auction -but risk buying their own antique. This means that they lose serious money, commission, tax, premiums on the transaction.

There are more fakers about now than ever, but they haven’t the skill, patience or the understanding. And they certainly don’t have the feel for the original antique. So they use wrong glazes, clay, paints, enamels, or fire things at the wrong temperature. Modern forgers get me down. They won’t experiment. Worst of all, fakers nowadays don’t bother to learn. Like trying to write yet another sequel to
Pride and Prejudice
without having bothered to read the original - though that’s done often enough, God knows.

‘Duff it, love. Be sharp. They’ve called starters.’

‘Yes! Yes!’

She hurtled, a formidable velocity. Margaret Dainty smiled, came near. I bussed her a hello.

‘We were all wondering about that piece, Lovejoy. Thank you.’

‘It’s a shame.’ I eyed the little figure. ‘She could have been lovely.’

In London, about the 1750s, a small factory blossomed. It’s known by one of its principal figures. The Girl-In-The-Swing factory only became recognized as something really special in the world of genuinely old antiques about the mid-1930s, when collectors realized their quality. One of these rare figures was of a little dancing girl, with a yellow flower in her hair. So far so good, until the Torquay Couple started faking. The man-and-wife pair lived in Devon, and swiftly upset the porcelain collectors’ market by turning out fakes. Tips: the Torquay Fakers
never
got a girl’s shoulders and waist right. They seem thickish, clumsy. And the poses are strangely inelegant. The really best tip, though, is this: stare for a full minute at the colours on, say, the porcelain girl’s dress. They look as if they’ve been put on with a gluey paintbrush. If that’s the impression, don’t - repeat,
do not
-buy. It’s fake. Let somebody else snap the little figurine up. Never mind that your friends’ll boast afterwards, jeering that you’ve missed the bargain of the year. Let them. They’ll change their tune when they try to sell it.

‘How much, Lovejoy?’ Margaret asked.

Sadly I looked at the pathetic little fake. ‘Nowt, love. Not a groat.’

‘Are you all right, Lovejoy?’

The auction was starting up. I wandered with Margaret among the tables, listless. It was all gunge and semi-gunge, old bikes, record players, old throwout plastic toys, tatty furniture. I felt really down.

‘Heard anything of Gesso, Margaret?’

‘No. Only that you and he ...’ She grimaced. ‘They’re saying you did over the priory at Albansham, the night it closed.’

‘Closed?’ I thought a moment. ‘Went into retreat?’

‘No. Closed. It’s going to be amalgamated.’

‘For good?’

Gesso hadn’t said. But the priory had been very, very quiet that night. And Marie hadn’t exactly been silent when she’d barged into the chapel. Nobody else had come running. No alarms had sounded. Because the abbey was empty, or because me and Gesso had been especially cunning?

‘Yes, Lovejoy. It was in the paper.’ She put a hand on my arm. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Best of order, please, ladies and gentlemen!’ the auctioneer chanted, gavelling away. ‘Item one, a beautiful ormolu clock, probably made by Vincento Ostrakis and Sons of Norwich in 1720 ..

This morning the whole world seemed dross. Dross attitudes, dross fakes, dross bargains, dross people. There never was any Vincento Ostrakis, 1720, clockmaker of Norwich. So even the blinking auctions begin with a non-existent non-craftsman. The fake clock was a feeble replica of a Harrison work of genius. It’s our civilization. Right there and then, I could have stopped the world and got off. In that single moment everything seemed betrayed and dirty.

‘Come home, Lovejoy?’ Margaret suggested. ‘Positively no obligation?’

It’s what antique dealers say on the knocker. It was her attempt to make me smile. I tried, didn’t make it.

‘Not now, love, ta. Can I come later on?’

She weighed me up, sighed. ‘You’d better, Lovejoy. I can’t leave you to the tender mercies of others, the state you’re in.’

Two quips from Margaret in one morning? Paula had captured a hangdog whiffler who was feebly trying to escape. Much chance.

‘Anyway, enjoy the meet, Lovejoy.’

‘Meet?’ I paused. ‘What’s a meet? I thought that was horses.’

‘It is.’ Margaret gazed at me. ‘Noon start. Isn’t it Florida’s big show?’

‘Oh, aye. I was just on my way.’ That must be what I’d agreed.

Margaret’s motor was outside. I got in, scraped the wires with my thumb, splitting two fingernails, cursed a few curses, and drove like a fiend.

Sometimes a whole area can feel really strange even when you know it well. There’s a place near Wivenhoe village on the Colne estuary where the road narrows. It’s the least spooky place on earth. You can see the whole countryside, farms, distant houses, trees, cows doing their somnolent best to look thrilling for some passing watercolour artist.

But I hate -
bate
- that bit of road. Won’t drive there at any price. I’ve looked it up. No savage Ancient Britons waylaid Romans there. No Viking marauders hacked peaceable wagons on the way to market. No Great Civil War skirmish, no highwayman got hanged there on the gallows tree. It’s the one furlong of the kingdom that is seriously boring.

The moral? Don’t trust history - there’s no future in it. I simply don’t believe the facts. Once, it was an Ancient British trackway to the coast, then a rollicking road to the ancient Christian missionaries’ seashore chapels. Later, a horse road for mediaeval merchants, then simply a road to the seaside.

It’s eerie. There’s something wrong with it. That road, I don’t go on.

Even in Margaret’s nicked car, I belted along the coast to avoid it, came on Albansham before I could think. I stopped the car and stared towards the priory’s tower. I was worried, because I’d brought that Wivenhoe road’s weird feeling along with me.

No mysteries, though, in antiques. You have to get on, get gone or get none. I drove in, whistling. Into a spooky silence.

‘Hello?’ I called out.

No noise. Not a sausage. No merry monks pouring molten metal into sand moulds. No nuns bent over embroidery. Nobody carrying hoes to merry work in the fields. The place was quiet. I almost thought it a deathly quiet, but that would have been stupid. I mean broad daylight, a holy priory, deathly?

Now, I’m big on quiet. I like it. I’m pleased if the town’s emptier than usual, as when a tourist ferry fails to come in because of storms at Harwich. But there’s quiet and quiet. By the latter, I mean an ominous protracted silence that itches.

‘Hello?’ I shouted, listening. My own voice, nobody else’s.

Worrying, I walked along the walls to where I’d eeled out of the chapel. I tried the vestry. Locked. I tried jumping up to look inside, but the curtains were drawn. No red votive light that I could see.

The forge? You simply can’t close a forge in a few minutes, not like laying aside your embroidery. I tried the big door. It was firmly padlocked.

‘Hello?’ I shouted, rattling the handle. ‘Gesso? It’s me, Lovejoy.’

Quiet.

My fingers could reach the sill. I hauled myself up to chin the window, toes scrabbling, and saw inside.

A glow from the furnace still, but dying. Bellows, sand moulds on the stone-flagged floor ready for the molten metal. Gantries above, haul-and-tip chains. I got out of breath, dropped down, did it again, had three or four looks until I was shaking from effort. I stood and thought.

The wind was rising slightly, leaves blowing across the courtyard. Funny-sad how desolate a place becomes the instant folk leave, isn’t it? A house can have all the family warmth imaginable, but within minutes of the last child’s departure, mum getting on her coat and dad locking up, a house grows as sad as sorrow. Is it that it’s no longer lived in? Or that the house feels left behind? That’s exactly the difference between an antique and something modern. An antique’s been created, been lived with. People are in it, their feelings, hopes, dreams, their very selves.

The priory felt dead.

Drainpipes aren’t difficult to climb. To any burglar, even a hopeless one like me, they’re simply hollow ladders. I’ve heard real burglars say that. I shinned up, peered into the nuns’ embroidery room. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust, but it was sedate, vacant. No hurried cast-off stitchery here. I slid down, walked about some more.

Margaret Dainty was right. This place was closed for the duration, not merely resting between shifts. I was worried sick. You don’t start the Bessemer process - that difficult, chest-corroding manufacture of molten metal - unless you intend to go through with it. Only days ago, the monks were hard at it. I mean, you need melted cast iron, through which you force air. Since its heyday - it was promulgated in 1856 - furnaces have come and gone. It killed most of its workers from silicosis and injury. What I’m saying is, the Bessemer process isn’t a whim. Valuable metal when you’ve finished, but there’s a price to pay for every solid pig. Yet the furnaces, still not cooled, had been shut down in mid-cycle. It’d be hell to start the foundry up again. So they were dud for good.

‘Gesso?’ my voice quavered.

This priory had been hurriedly abandoned, a landlubber
Marie Celeste.
It hadn’t just been closed for the hols.

For a sickly hour I trudged the priory, knocking on doors, peering in windows, trying handles. I scaled more drainpipes than the parson preached about. I called out my hellos and anybody-theres like a fool. I even went round to where there’d been some sheep. Gone, the pen open. Tyre tracks indented the soil, showing where they’d been loaded. Market? Transferred to another farm?

The nuns, I knew, spun the wool that the monks sheared off the sheep, and made it into cardigans. I knew this because I’d made some hand carders for their history gala. I’d sent them over with some schoolchildren who’d asked for help on a history project. I’d also made them a Lancashire spinning wheel, but had run out of heartwood. I’d got them woad seeds, and showed the children how to make the most beauteous dyes on earth - blues, yellows, greens. They hadn’t paid me, but you can’t really take umbrage about mere gelt when people are reworking ancient beauty, can you?

The dye vats were cold, a residue of soggy wool, the cauldrons gone.

It was starting to drizzle. I sat on a wall. Empty is as empty does. The place was vacated. Nobody was coming home, not to Albansham Priory.

‘Well, Lovejoy,’ I said aloud. ‘Time to clear off.’

And didn’t, just sat there getting soaked, trying hard to move. My feet wouldn’t do as they were told.

Behind, on the rising hillside behind me, there was a faint sound. Plop, bubble, plop. I hated, still hate, that sound. I found myself trying out different tunes in time with its gurgling. ‘Marching To Pretoria’ almost slotted in, but missed out after a few bars. I tried ‘Goodbye’, no luck, then ‘White Cliffs Of Dover’, but had most success with ‘Abide With Me’. I rose humming, nervous, and walked towards the hot pool.