The Rich And The Profane (26 page)

If I hadn’t been so kind to Irma Dominick, I’d not be in this mess. Demanding to be taught to steal so she could balls my life up, stupid cow. I’d murder her if I could get my hands on her. Which made me think. What on earth
had
happened to Irma? She’d got nicked, I’d asked wino lawyer Michaelis to spring her, but then what? I felt a glim of hope. Wasn’t Irma the Rockingham porcelain thief
who hated her Aunt Jocina
? Had I a secret ally here in Guernsey after all? I used a public phone box, got the operator to reverse the charges by an inventive lie.

‘Yes, Vino Wine Importery of Guernsey here. To place an order.’

They put me through like a shot. ‘Hello?’

‘Michaelis? It’s me, Lovejoy.’ He was partly sober. ‘Sorry about the phone charges trick, but I’ve no money. What happened to Irma?’

‘I bailed her, and she scarpered. You owe me her bail.’ He mentioned a sum verging on the National Debt. I felt ill. ‘Clients don’t welsh on me, Lovejoy.’

Despite the threat my spirits rose, first time since I’d got marmalized. Irma had done a bunk. Where to? Here, of course! I could use Irma to betray Jocina.

‘I’ll not let you down, Michaelis. I’ll see you’re paid. I mean that with sincerity.’

‘I warn you, Lovejoy. My people get nasty.’

Irma
must
be here. I wish I’d had the sense to think of this a couple of days before instead of wasting my time. It came on to drizzle. I was past caring and sat there watching the marina, ships to and fro. I scanned things in my mind. Antiques had got me into this, thanks to Irma. Antiques must get me out. Then I’d settle up with Metivier for Gesso’s ... I couldn’t think the word ... vanishment.

Then I recalled when Walt Jethou had given me that lift on his crummy motorbike. We’d driven down a street. I’d yelled in his earhole that an antique shop we were passing looked a likely place. He’d shouted back, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. They’re not local!’ laughed like a drain, didn’t stop.

Two o’clock, in drizzle, I found the shop near the Parish Church. If the dealer was ‘not local’, I stood a chance. A chance is all I’ve ever needed in antiques to get in a worse mess. I went inside, the bell clonking overhead.

A woman, pleasantly tubby and harassed, was packing handies - small antiques you can palm. I waited for my gong to go. Hardly a chime. I heard a creak behind a curtain. Grannie in a rocking chair?

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Can I look, please?’

‘Please do.’ She brushed a wisp of hair with her wrist. I like them doing that. It’s somehow touching. ‘I’m sorry, but we’re closing soon. The charity auction, you see. I’m due there.’

‘Got much?’ No more creaks. I smiled. Grannie was listening.

The place was no bigger than a living room, a cumin dividing off the rear. Around the walls, furniture, paintings, poor-quality harbour scenes looking good from a distance but aged by tobacco smoke, one circular table that would have been worth restoring, except some loon forty years back had replaced the legs with modern dross and reveneered the surface. Dealers do that, and finish up with one ‘good’ antique they can sell to some unsuspecting buyer who thinks she’s getting a perfect eighteenth-century dining table. In the process, they’ve murdered maybe three honest old tables while doing their ‘antique creation’. It’s the in phrase. Plates hung from those modern hook-and-spring wires that have chipped (and therefore ruined) more valuable Georgian plates than any carelessness. I once wrote to our MP, tried to get them banned. He wrote back that I was insane. That, note, from a politician.

‘Not a great deal, I’m afraid.’ She had a nice smile. A door closed quietly. The curtain wafted up then settled. Grannie leaving, not interested after all? I tried to avoid sniffing the aroma. Oil of cloves? ‘We’re practically brand new.’

‘But you’re Guernsey, Rita?’ Her name was stuck on her lapel.

‘Yes.’ She was flustered, checking, forgetting where she’d put her list. ‘I have no experience. I mean, antiques are special, aren’t they?’

‘I like that brooch.’ Cardboard box, fewer than a dozen objects.

She glanced at the time. ‘I see you know your antiques! That has to go for quite a lot!’ Her voice hushed, big secrets. ‘It’s Berlin jewellery.’

Berlin work was made in, well, Berlin, at its Royal Berlin Factory, though it had started earlier somewhere in Silesia. I picked up the bracelet. Heavy, not very attractive. Its inside had the stamp GGIFE, meaning
Gold gab ich filr Eisen,
proving that some lady had patriotically handed in a precious golden bangle to fund Prussia’s efforts against Tyrant Napoleon. Such ladies received iron jewellery in exchange, a custom they repeated in every major war, though Napoleon nicked the moulds and started a French manufactory. There are even Wedgwood variants, valuable things if you can find them.

This bracelet was decorated with a single garnet jewel. I love garnet, a much maligned stone beloved of the ancients, almost as much as I hate the term ‘semi-precious’. I mean, would we like to be called that, semi-human maybe? It’s an insult to a gemstone that has lived millions of years and will be here long after we’re gone. Sometimes Berlin iron jewellery was designed in parures, which are suites or sets, such as earrings, necklace, bracelet, brooch, plus an aigrette to adorn the lady’s hair or headdress. You only come across them split up nowadays, unless you’re rich enough to fund a search. It set me thinking. I looked closer.

Somebody had had a go at enamelling the bracelet’s rim. It had blistered quite badly. I sighed. The antiques game is ruined by its players, who despoil in ignorance.

‘Well, don’t blame me!’

‘Eh? Oh, sorry.’ I must have spoken aloud. ‘I wouldn’t care, except this piece is genuine.’ I explained about parures, and incomplete sets dealers call ‘demis’, meaning demi-parures. I laid the iron bracelet down, mentally told it thanks for not minding. ‘You didn’t do this enamelling yourself, then?’

‘No. It was done somewhere on the mainland.’

‘Well, tell him not to use a drying oil for painting in the enamel colour. It always froths up. Temperature faults, probably. It’s a giveaway that somebody’s tried to make jewellery more valuable.’

Enamelling is beset with these problems. The worst thing is to try some short cut. I’ve even known blokes who’ll try to exclude cobalt oxide when doing a first enamel on sheet iron. Barmy. It can be done, but at prodigious risk.

She went to the curtain. ‘Oh. Sorry. He’s just gone. I’ll tell him. Can you write it down? I know he’ll be very pleased.’

So I did, like a burk. Sometimes I can’t believe my stupidity. ‘Got any Golden Syrup? Tell him to use gum mastic, syrup, glycerin, in equal amounts, with a little distilled water. Add a drop or two of wetting agent. Never mind those expensive mediums. They only carry the vitrified colours to the heat.’

She watched me scribble. ‘Do you really mean household—?’

‘Certainly. Golden Syrup’s very underrated stuff. A spoonful in butter cleans grime, makes your hands like a baby’s bum.’ We forget these old remedies. Like, Cleopatra’s ladies used natron - sodium carbonate - in honey as a contraceptive douche. They
said
it worked. Mind you, they said the same about crocodile dung.

‘He’s ordering a small kiln.’

‘Tell your faker not to be so blinking impatient when he’s forging antiques. Impatience is worst on precious metals. You have to do layer after layer, brief firings one after another. Save him a fortune, tell him it’s hopeless firing enamels straight on to gold. Do it on silver first, then layer it in.’

‘Thank you. Mister ... ?’

Robbing this innocent lady would be like strangling a butterfly.

‘Hang about, Rita. I’ll have a look round your antiques.’ It took about half a minute. What was bad was horrid. What had been good was ruined.

‘He restored this painting himself, did he?’ I stopped before a Victorian seascape. With enormous restraint, I managed not to sob.

‘I think his partner.’

‘He’s ruined a perfectly good painting.’

‘Oh, no. You’re wrong. He’s very proud of having restored it himself. It was mouldy. He even scraped the surface! Restoring is an art.’

Indeed. If you really want to learn the Great Antiques Trade, learn by heart my nine truest calamity stories. They’re all terrible, and carry bitter lessons bitterly learnt. I’ll not give all nine. Here’s just one - if you haven’t a nervous disposition.

Two Canadian blokes one day wandered through a local auction. ‘Hey,’ says one. ‘Look at that moth-eaten mouldy oil painting! Vaguely like Turner, eh?’ They had a laugh, bought the begrimed canvas for a groat, took it home. The more they looked, the more they thought of the immortal Turner, greatest painter the world has ever known. And the
more
they looked, the more it
felt
Turner. Finally they thought, Fingerprints!

Cut to the police in West Yorkshire, Merrie England. Whose fingerprint department checked, rechecked and issued a few mild words. ‘Yes, those fingerprints are Turner’s.’ They’d got his originals off the
Chichester Canal
painting in the Tate. Ecstasy! Paradise indeed! Oh, and money. Mustn’t forget money, because if you, me or Joe Soap paints a daub as best we can we’d be lucky to get sixty zlotniks. But if a crumbling decaying canvas is by Turner, you’re in zillionnaire land and no mistake. It was jubilation time in the old homestead that evening, to be sure.

(I know what you’re thinking. A moment ago I said it was a calamity. So how come it’s suddenly angel choirs and violins? Read sadly on.)

At Phillips, posh London auction rooms, in the gloomy rain of dark December, there was one shining beacon of light. It was gelt. For the newly found
Landscape With Rainbow,
proven handiwork of the immortal artist, was up for auction. Then (here comes our calamity) the light guttered and died. Buyers and Old Master experts came, saw and wept. For the painting had been ‘restored’ almost to extinction. Dirty, it had been worth millions. Now, it had been scrubbed free of all its artistic brilliance. The auctioneer knocked it down for peanuts, amid a stony silence broken only by the sounds of the sobbing newshounds in that Oxford Street pub and the loud ping of perforating duodenal ulcers. The owners had scrubbed off a king’s ransom. Tip: if you don’t know what to do to an antique,
don't do it.

‘That’s terrible!’ Rita was saying.

‘Eh? Oh, well, old artists sometimes tried new media, different effects on colours, see? Turner was always at it.’ I smile when I think of him. I can’t help it. ‘He’d used megilp, a stuff made of mastic varnish and linseed oil crammed full of poisonous white lead. It’s brilliant to do forgeries - er, I’ve heard. But it starts wrinkling almost as soon as you walk away from the canvas.’ Forgers use it, though, with ochres as a yellowing agent, to deceive people into thinking they’re buying something truly old.

‘Isn’t that fantastic!’ Rita looked from me to the box of dross. ‘Why did you say thanks to the bracelet?’

Thinking aloud was getting out of hand. ‘Sorry. I used to do it, er, as a lad.’

She was smiling. ‘Would you help me out to the car, please? My dealer has gone ahead.’

‘Certainly.’

So I carried her crummy box out through the back room. Where a peal of thunder stopped me.

‘Can you manage, Mister ... ?’

‘Aye, ta. Just noticed that lamp.’

‘Yes.’ She spoke with distaste. ‘I told Mr Crucifex it ought to be removed. We should have this room renovated.’ Above the back door hung a cresset. Scotch folk call it a crusie, Shetlanders a collie. In Lancashire it’s a Betty. Basically a Roman design, it’s just an iron stand with a hook to hang a glim. You fill it with oil, stick a wick in it, and there’s your lamp. The Channel Islanders had this variant. Their word cresset is Norman, not English. This was an old, old version. One form is the basket and spike you see in Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics, burning torches on castle walls. This looked like it had been corroding there a couple of centuries.

‘Rusty old thing. It’s dangerous.’ I was thinking, Did she say Crucifex? But Walt Jethou had said the proprietor wasn’t local. ‘Shall I get rid of it?’

‘Have we time?’

‘Only take a second, love,’ I said, piously hurrying out and stowing her box in the boot. ‘What if it fell on some little child, or a customer?’

‘Exactly!’

She went back to get her handbag. I followed and lifted the cresset down. It had a metal loop that had discoloured the wall plaster over the years. It felt exquisite, that crooked old piece of bent iron and its flattish metal bowl. There was even a charred wick in the bottom under thick dust. Only a couple of hundred, but that’s more than nowt. A year for each zlotnik? Cheap at the price.

‘There!’ I showed revulsion, acting away. ‘Have you a dustbin?’

‘In the yard. Collection’s Mondays.’

‘Right.’ I placed it with reverence behind the bin, dusted off my hands. She got into her car. ‘Did you remember to lock up, Rita. Front door and back?’

She smiled. ‘Yes. And I put the “closed” notice in the window.’ She gunned the engine. ‘You’re nice, Mister ... ?’ ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ I said. ‘But I don’t go on about it, do I? Was that Mr Crucifex who’d left as I arrived?’ ‘No. Mr Slevin’s not a Guemesiais. He’s new, rents the shop from Mr Crucifex.’

‘I’d like to met him.’ Maybe black his eye, for damaging antiques by mucking about like that bad enamel.

‘Thank you for your assistance. Are you a collector?’ ‘No. My cousin runs this orphanage in Manchester. I try and help her out...’ I smiled nobly. Stick to a good lie.

‘An orphanage? Look, please let me ...’ She fumbled in her handbag.

To my horror I heard myself say, ‘Certainly not! I wouldn’t dream of it. How could you be sure I’d send it to her?’

She pressed a note into my hand. ‘I know people,’ she said, all misty.

‘Get to St Peter’s,’ I choked back my welling piety.

‘It’s not there. The charity auction’s at Splendid Sejour.’ She started the engine, a manoeuvre taking the best part of the day, and said shyly, ‘Will you call in again?’

‘Perhaps I’ll follow you to the auction.’