This rumour, like all really interesting ones, died the death. It was always a long shot. The craftsmanship needed to adapt these baroque shapes into centaurs, dragons and butterflies died out with the Renaissance jewellers of Italy and Spain. But for a few days, while that luscious rumour circulated, every antique dealer in East Anglia licked his chops and prayed that the Siren variant would come his way. Common sense sadly prevailed and we all sobbed into our ale, because huge high-quality baroque pearls just simply aren’t found in these days of standardized conformity in the pearl farms of Japan and the Arabian Gulf. Too good to be true, in other words.
Now, the one name that kept cropping up when the Siren rumour was doing the rounds was Spendlate Antiques.
By driving like the clappers I was in the tavern in Lowestoft in fair time. I had a three-millisec bath, and was languidly noshing breakfast when Donna Vernon came down. She looked radiant, dazzling the few occupants of the breakfast room with her smile, glowing with health and beauty, dressed to kill.
‘You look a rag, Lovejoy.’
‘What else is new?’ I offered her toast to be going on with. If she wasn’t an enemy I’d fall for her. ‘Actually, I thought all night of a certain person.’
She pinked and shoved at her hair like they do. ‘None of that, Lovejoy. We have too much to do today.’
‘Exactly.’ Oh cunning, cunning Lovejoy. ‘We’ve dallied and dillied too long. I’ll show you how a real antique sweep is done. Eat,’ I commanded, trying to sound like a granny, ‘and save the world trouble.’ My mind felt free-falling and white-hot. The grub nearly choked me but I was behaving beautifully. Until now I’d meekly done as I’d been told. Hereon it’d be speed and light. Owd Maggie’d died because I’d dawdled. ‘I’ll find Sid for you, love.’
As God’s my judge I’ll find him, I thought with grim piety.
She eyed me with a doubtful smile.
‘Nice pearls you had on last night,’ I added as the fried eggs arrived. ‘Time they were restrung. I noticed the nacre was going at their equator . . .’
Chapter 10
MY TIREDNESS EVAPORATED. I was actually grinning as Donna drove us out on the A146 towards Beccles, me urging speed and going demented when I mislaid her list. I’d got the antiques fever on me, that berserk craving that makes you certain of antique everything. Immediately. Yesterday an indolent drifter doubting your own name, today you bullet about in a mental ferment. You pull antiques by magnetism. I swear that luscious antique items catch the feeling too, and think: Thank God a proper divvie’s arrived and will instantly spot that I’m a genuine 1790 Boule inkstand, and will stop me being used as a frigging button jar in this neffie cupboard. And they leap into your arms with a squeak of joy. Don’t laugh. I really believe that antiques feel this way. If you disagree, you don’t deserve any and it’s your own fault.
Not only that, but other dealers recognize it. And they bow to your unstoppable passion. It is utterly exhilarating. They fetch out of hiding their specials, their sleepers, their savers which they’ve been gloating over for years. Safes are opened. Dusty drawers unlocked. Truth, believe it or not, is told whereas normally antique dealers infarct at the first glimpse of sincerity. Divvying out-magics them all.
‘Only three miles before we reach Barnby, Donna. Can’t you go any faster?’
She gave that exasperated deposit of a laugh. ‘What is the matter with you today, Lovejoy? I want no chauvinist sexist moves from you,’ she said. It was meant as a slight mockery of her old style.
‘You’ll get none, love,’ I said. ‘And that’s the truth.’ I beamed sickeningly into her puzzlement. I got her to park off the intersection while I walked down the unmade road.
The Barnby address was a newish semi-detached house, three bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom, garage and garden, living room, dining room, and a wife with a flowery apron holding a paintbrush heavenwards. Seagull emulsion, not a bad colour for a hallway. She looked fourteen, bless her heart, in enormous yellow household gloves. She was badly in need of another arm to keep her hair out of her eyes.
‘Mrs Sutton? I’m Mr Vernon’s partner,’ I said. Not that much of a lie. ‘I came about the antique. You advertised, I believe?’
‘Yes. Mr Vernon changed his mind, then?’
‘Not really. I’m the expert, love. Here.’ I extracted her hairclip and clumsily shoved it back with her locks trapped in it. ‘Your hair’s in a worse state than China.’
‘I know,’ she said, embarrassed but smiling. ‘This decorating. I’ve so much to do. Mind. Everything’s wet paint.’
‘Does Mr Sutton mind you selling, erm . . . ?’
Into her face came that toxic scorn wives show. As if they realize that any man gullible enough to promise to clothe, feed and provide for a woman for life deserves all he gets. It’s an expression you often see in cosy company before blood flows.
She showed me the rectangular glass plaque standing on a table, held in an ebony stand. ‘The engraving’s supposed to have been done by somebody quite good,’ she said a little nervously. ‘The glass is old, though.’
Aye, I thought sadly, but not as old as me. The faker’s idea was good, because glass slabs were made even in Roman days for decoration. You get all sorts of engraved ones, mosaics, enamelled ones even, opaque whitish plaques, painted scenes. Some look really very effective with scenic pictures on them. Early Egyptian and Roman, and seventeenth-century Bohemian, plaques are worth a fortune. This thing was dross, a pathetic new thing, ostentatiously dated 1804, showing some country house or other. I touched it to make sure, and not a vibe, not a single mental chime of authenticity. And, do you know, that glorious power was so absolute that I smiled, not disappointed in the least. Because I felt something here in the house. I was warm all over. Something was excitedly pealing I’m here, I’m here. Sounds daft, I know, but I went mesmerized into the living room and laughed aloud to see it there on the wall.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I said to the painting. ‘My name’s Lovejoy.’
It hung there all bashful, a small landscape painting. Most painters have a 100 per cent individual style. See one, and you can spot Richard Wilson’s work for life. Thirty years ago you could get a genuine painting for a fiver. God’s truth. Richard Wilson painted with his own unmistakable hand no fewer than twenty-five variants of his landscape The White Monk. Even London dealers have let Wilsons go for peanuts because their textbooks tell them that the ‘original’ is in some posh gallery. And remember that the great Turner himself started as a humble apprentice copy-painter, so that non-Girtin Girtin copy your auntie’s got might in fact have been painted by a greater genius still. I felt a right twerp when Mrs Sutton brought me back to earth.
‘You’re talking to the painting!’ she exclaimed.
‘Ah.’ I came to. ‘Er, a print like it hung on my nursery wall when I was little. Nice to see it again.’
I turned as if to go. She said, ‘Do you like it?’
In her voice was the housewife’s concern for balanced budgetry.
‘Well . . .’ I said reluctantly. ‘You mean your plaque and the painting together? I might be able to stretch a point . . .’ The world’s fate hung.
‘Have you time for a cup of tea?’ she said.
Mrs Sutton looked instantly familiar, like one of those actresses who, wives of film producers, suffer relentless overexposure in afternoon features and telly adverts which doom them to a life brimful of unrealized potential. She deserved better. I liked her.
‘Well, I shouldn’t . . .’
Donna was fuming when finally I streaked – well, walked – up.
‘Do you call that speed, Lovejoy?’
‘Hasten, James. And don’t spare the horses.’ I was desperately thinking: Where’s Tinker now I need the old sod? I was mad with myself. I should have asked Mrs Sutton if Vernon had asked about pearls.
We made Bungay by eleven o’clock.
Days like that stick in your mind.
We tore among the villag
es and townships of the Broads. All day a dilute sun reflected from the long waters of East Anglia’s inland stretches. Distant sails glided along the dykes and low ridges, triangles of browns, reds, blues and white showing where the boats cut through waterways. More bridges than Venice and glimpses of white motorboats with girls atop front decks. Striped awnings from Mediterranean sun beaches showing among reeds. Lads splashing near a remote village’s wharf, and those little black ducks chugging jerkily across gleaming surfaces. These townships at holiday times seem full of brown limbs and weird yachting caps.
But within minutes of our next address I’d got the pattern, and found yet another flaw.
It turned out to be a houseboat moored at a patch of sudden tidiness in a small river camouflaging itself skilfully along a line of willows and tall reedy stuff. That’s the trouble with East Anglia. You think these tangled strips are hedgerows till you splash.
The inhabitant was a young painter, bearded and biblical. When we arrived he was hard at it on the foredeck painting an orange triangle on an octagonal canvas. A cardboard cut-out bird was tacked to the railing. I helloed and paused respectfully on the bank, the way one waits when a magistrate goes to the loo. The houseboat looked on its last legs to me. I wasn’t going on that thing at any price and whispered that to Donna when she impatiently ordered me to board. Its chimney had fallen and was stuck-rusted on to the cabin’s railing. The mooring ropes had rotted, but the houseboat had remained in place. The bloody wreck couldn’t even drift. The painter kept on painting.
‘Money,’ I called out.
Magic. He dropped his brush. ‘Why didn’t you say?’ With one bound he vaulted free of his artistic chains to the bank beside us. I’d never seen such a tall relic before, living. He was clothed in a series of patches which were vague neighbours rather than closely sewn. ‘What kind do you want?’
‘Didn’t you advertise, erm . . . ?’ I said cleverly.
‘Oh, in that free paper. Yes.’ He wasn’t downcast, just hopeful in a newer direction. ‘It’s over here.’ There was a rickety shed nearby, looking stitched up the middle like a Welsh blanket. Ivy and brambles covered it. Butterflies hung about. Birds twittered. God, it was rural. He pulled a rickety door aside. My chest didn’t chime, but my heart jumped. Under a mass of rotting planks and sacks stood a bicycle. It took half a second to lift aside enough debris to reveal all.
A Sanaquizzi bicycle is really rather special – metal wheels with forks of strengthened bamboo, believe it or not. They were Continental, made over four slender years from about 1908. Hardly antique, but odd and highly sought. Laugh if you like, but old butcher’s-boy bikes, post-office bicycles, lovers’ tricycles for spooning while you pedalled like mad and she struggled to keep her elegant bonnet on, represent the greatest of all modern booms. It took everybody by surprise in the 1960s. These ‘new antiques’, as people call collectibles from 1950 back to 1914, range from a year’s average salary to a week’s. Please ignore their condition; start bargaining. And, if they’re chucking in a suit of grandad’s ‘bicycling apparel’ from the wardrobe, sell your wife to raise the ante.
‘A man called. Only talked from the bank. Didn’t even take a look. Interrupted my painting of a bittern.’
‘Tut-tut,’ I sympathized, and looked at Donna. She’d already turned on her heel.
‘Sorry, mate. I’m not interested.’ I slipped him a scribbled IOU for twenty quid with a wink.
He was quick on the uptake. He glanced after Donna with a veteran’s experience of women who criticized his spending the grub money on rose madder and Prussian blue. I looped my finger to show we’d settle up later.
No pearls here either. Pattern: good old Sid was moving faster. Was he sticking to the order of places as listed?
We found the answer in the next two, one in Diss and one in Eye. Lots of jokes about both names, of course, but not from me. Both were misses. I didn’t care, because they confirmed my new flaw: Sid Vernon might have nicked Donna’s money and be associating with an evil partner called Chatto, but he clearly didn’t give a damn about antiques. He was a front, but for whom?
As hunters we too were being pretty lackadaisical, no? Yes. Because when I’d hurried Donna early this morning she’d been almost tardy.
The Diss man was a cheerful bloke talking to his three beehives. He was in his garden smoking a pipe, sitting on a huge inverted earthenware plantpot. Donna hung back, thinking him barmy.
He waved me in, quite unabashed. I’d seen it all before. I whispered to Donna that beekeepers aren’t insane, or even sane come to that. They’re just beekeepers. Bad luck if you don’t keep your bees up with the gossip. When he got round to me it transpired we’d missed Vernon by two days.
‘He didn’t think much of my antique, I’m afraid,’ he said amiably. ‘A local dealer bought it, Jim Prawer. Always thought it was worth a bit. Little five-legged ivory chair only a few inches high. Toy, I suppose. Been in my family years.’
‘Christ.’ I almost wept. It sounded a genuine antique. They made the best in Goa for the Portuguese. I thanked him, said cheerio to his hives.
‘They only came about that ivory antique,’ he started telling the bees pleasantly as we left. Well, whatever turns you on. Still no pearls.
Eye’s an ancient old place, the sort you should linger in. Though it pained me, I urged Donna on through. She was becoming a bit ratty by then. I was hearty as a breakfast broadcaster because my very own flawless plan was forming. I’d had enough of other people’s.
The chap was a burly aggressive chap, beery of odour and piggy of eye. I knocked and asked him politely if his antique was still for sale. He threatened me by raising his voice and telling me to sod off. The object had been sold to a reliable dealer in Eye.
He re-emerged at a second knock and loomed larger. His beer belly shoved me off the porch. ‘I’ll not tell you again,’ he bawled.
Blokes like him tire me quickly, like a joke on a seaside cup. ‘Look, sir,’ I tried pleasantly. ‘Your fake antique might be worth a—’
He went deranged. ‘Fake?’ he howled, forcing me down the garden path by sheer advancing mass. ‘Fake? It was a genuine America’s replica. A London silversmith, too, date stamp and everything, 1851. I told that other idiot that I didn’t deal with gypsies, so clear off or I’ll have the police on you . . .’
I explained to Donna as we rode between hedges to Saxmundham, ‘Sid must have been “that other idiot”. Getting close, eh?’
‘My husband’s a warm human being,’ she reprimanded frostily.
More socialspeak. As if everybody should have a knighthood for breathing. I settled back, having learned all I wanted from the boat-mending baddie: he had said ‘America’s’, so he was a true yachtsman who knew 1851 was the date of the first America’s Cup Race, exactly right date for a fashionable replica. To me the man was exactly in pattern: a non-antique non-dealer, who’d advertised an antique from a home address.
She drove on in silence, more worried than ever I’d seen her, me smiling and nodding encouragement. We were catching up with the bastard.
None of this was my fault to start with, so what followed when I caught him wouldn’t be my fault either, right?
* * *
At a tavern in Saxmundham we separated for a few minutes before having a late nosh. I couldn’t get Lydia on the blower and I knew Helen was having a big thing with a moneyed civil servant so she’d not be up yet – Helen in love wakes late and smokes her first packet of fags to dog-ends before brewing up. Luckily Margaret was at the White Hart. She was all ready for a long chat but I cut that short and made her take down the details, the Russian gedanite rosary at Michaela French’s in Lincoln, the genuine Wilson landscape I’d reserved and its neffie companion the glass plaque at Mrs Sutton’s, the genuine Sanaquizzi bike, the miniature ivory chair at dealer Jim Prawer’s shop near Diss, and that America’s Cup replica now in ‘some reliable dealer’s hands’ in fine reliable Eye.
‘I’ve reserved some, Marg
aret,’ I told her. ‘Mrs Sutton’s stuff, the bike. The others will have to be bargained for. Get me somebody to do a fixed sweep on a split.’
She went doubtful. ‘That’ll be difficult.’
‘For God’s sake, Margaret, I’m on a divvy streak,’ I yelled frantically. ‘It’s money for jam. You?’
‘I’m stuck, Lovejoy. I’ll search about. Lydia’s gone to see Beatrice over something.’
‘Drink up and get looking,’ I said. I didn’t want Lydia. ‘I’ll ring you at the arcade in an hour.’
At the right time I gave Donna the slip and got the news from Margaret: she’d got Sandy and Mel for basic expenses and 20 per cent of the gross. I went berserk but she said there was nobody else. They’d already left for Lincoln. She rang off in tears, me blazing. Now I was in even more of a hurry.
My stealthy search round East Anglia was becoming like Trooping the Colour. First Vernon, followed by Chatto, then the police, me and Donna, then Tinker, all now followed – last and noisiest – by Sandy and Mel in the universe’s least secret sequin-toting motorcar. Jesus, but I had a headache. At first it was only terrible, but got much worse two seconds later.
Chapter 11
INFORMATION, LIKE STATISTICS, is rubbish, yet I’m a mine of the stuff. I have an irritating knack with pointless facts. Napoleon perfumed his horse. One acre supports 47,000 tons of air. Richard the Lionheart could play every known musical instrument. Turner the painter drank a bottle of sherry a day. I can go on and on.
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