The Lies of Fair Ladies

by Jonathan Gash

  Back in the fabled Good Old Days, when singers sang the words and gold was simply color at Christmas, bureaux used to bring out catalogues listing prices of British Colonials and Persian Commemoratives and whatnot. That set the scene for ever and a day—or at least until the next catalogue. Then things changed. Inflation (remember that old thing?) happened. Currencies wobbled. Oil did, or didn't, do something vital. Stock markets seethed. One fateful dark day in 1980, London awoke jubilantly to the Stamp World Exhibition. To find the floor had vanished. Nobody wanted stamps.

  Prices fell like a stone. Stamp empires were engulfed. Down through the widening cracks plummeted dealers, traders, speculators' portfolios. Amsterdam to Tel Aviv, Geneva to New York, the philately world went crunch. This is my point: If you want to speculate, fine. Anything you like—gold, stocks, shares, land—and good luck. But speculate in antiques? Stick, please, to those where collectors provide a permanent floor to market prices. Better still, don't speculate at all. Be a pure collector; you can have the top brick off the chimney.

  The Great Stamp Catastrophe of 1980 was odd. All portents were favorable. Times were mindbendingly boomy. Wasn't the sixth of May the one hundred fortieth anniversary of the first Penny Black? Wasn't the Cold War dissolving? Everybody was over the moon, joyous with profits.

  You see, nobody bought.

  Dealers wept, gnashed, pleaded. But the only sound was the popping of speculators' bubbles, the splashing of tears.

  Since that date, there are two markets in old stamps. One's the top market, where unique stamps still bring buyers for the yawn-some little things. Here sells the 1849 vermilion tete beche for a fortune, and the American 1918 twenty-four-cent airmail with an upside down middle. The other market is down here, you and me. Forget dealers, portfolio managers, that lot. Think only of Joe Soap next door. How often does he come home rich and rejoicing? He's your market.

  See? Not boring at all. I wish it were. It's something far worse. It's really rather scary. Because there's a terrible hidden question here: What exactly turned the floor into Scotch mist in sunny old 1980? Answer: Nobody knows. Which is when fright creeps night-stealing into the soul. It crouches, chewing its nails and blubbering every time the door goes. Antique dealers want straight upward graphs, not ones that nuzzle the lino.

  If I knew all this, what was my problem as I fumed down East Hill? The sudden influx of old stamps. Like swallows at midwinter, they just don't, aren't, can't. But they'd come to town, via Sandy. And he truly is your rare bird.

  Sandy was alone. This was the other mega news of the century. He was determinedly showing he Didn't Care by setting up shop near the Ship tavern. He'd rowed with Mel—cerulean taffeta for a wall hanging—and ended the only permanent partnership our local antiques scene has. Had.

  The door blared "Y.M.C.A." I blocked my ears.

  "Wait, too lay mond!" a voice trilled. "Coming!"

  East Hill's a trailing string of small dumps. Never been any different since the Emperor Claudius slithered cursing down it on his decorated war elephant, the Roman legions grinning him a safe journey home. For a king's ransom in rent you get a square room and a curtained back the size of a confessional.

  The curtain slowly opened. A recording blared "The Entrance of the Queen of Sheba." Sandy emerged. I watched, irritated. It's gormless. He wore a sequined bolero, a caftan, scarlet Cossack trousers. His T-strap ribbon-trimmed high heels were French, 1920s. His turban was beige velvet decorated with mameluke points and pearls. He spun, eyelids fluttering. His cosmetics could have filled a pint pot. Ridiculous.

  "The music, Sandy," I bellowed, suddenly embarrassed because it silenced in the middle of my yell.

  "You adore, Lovejoy? Worship, positively drool?"

  My tongue almost spoke the truth. Then I remembered. I wanted his help. I managed a feeble smile.

  "Magenta?" I said. Doubting colors works with women. By extension . . .

  He leapt to the half-cheval mirror, advertised as a genuine Sheraton and priced for any passing tycoons.

  "Scarlet! You dare doubt, Lovejoy?"

  "No. Honest. Maybe it's the light."

  These vague things are what you've to say when you've not a clue. It saves you knowing what they're on about. Sandy's inspection satisfied him. He perched on a high stool, eyes twinkling maliciously.

  "Face it, Lovejoy. You're not Beau Brummel, are you, dear?"

  You have to hand it to Sandy. His sense of decor is superb. The grottie shop was tasteful. Style comes with wit and elegance. Him and Mel could make an alcove in a garret into a cathedral, just by panels, mirrors, lights, textures. Sandy had a small bar counter, spirits, wines.

  "In spite of all, you may deliver your message, Lovejoy." He gushed coyly, fingers glittering striped plum and madder nail varnish.

  "Don't tease, Lovejoy!" He actually blushed. I thought. Oh, Christ. "Mel's sent you, hasn't he? To apologize?"

  He lit a cigarette in a rotating ivory fag holder. It chimed "What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?"

  "Don't make excuses for him, Lovejoy. I know he's headstrong. He begged you to make the peace. Poor lamb." His lip quivered as he struggled not to cry. "Give him this letter. Tell him it wont be easy. Not after what he said about my carpet." He glared, spitting spite. "I mean, you've only to see what he did! Chandeliers like Woolworth earrings ..."

  "Sandy." I felt stricken. This was serious stuff. I'd never known them to part before, though they're always swearing lifelong malice. "I've not seen Mel."

  He paled. He gathered himself and swept grandly into the back room. The curtain closed. Then he wept, sobs so total they almost shook the walls.

  "Sorry," I called after a bit. I honestly was sorry for him. I mean, where love flourishes and all that. But I hadn't got time for all this. Gunge Herod's speciality is household pre-Victoriana. Was he in with Prammie Joe? Today wasn't one of Connie's usual days at the Arcade. That papal ring business felt a put-up job. By Connie? She alone offered to do a dropper. And she'd seemed unnaturally tense. Or was it my imagination?

  "Er, I’ll come another time, Sandy.'' I was leaving gingerly, when the curtain swished aside and Sandy stood there dramatically attired in a black sheath dress, beret with a diamond clasp.

  He swished out, sat smoldering on a cockfighting chair.

  "Ay shell neffer foor geef 'eem, Loofjoy." He snapped out of it instantly, doing his eye shadow with stuff from his handbag, and said, "Right. Who was I?"

  "Ginger Rogers? Betty Grable?"

  "Marlene Dietrich, buffoon! Don't you know anything?"

  "Mind your fag ash. That reading chair's Sheraton."

  "It is?" He was suddenly all dealer. I never know when he's being Sandy or not himself, if you follow.

  "It's a reading chair, Sandy. See how narrow the back is? You sit astride it, facing backwards." The rear ledge sticks out for a book. "The mistaken name, cockfighting chair, comes from engravings of blokes watching cockfight mains seated in them."

  "Anything else, Lovejoy?"

  "Your half-cheval's dud."

  ''Bitch!'' He examined it. "It's eighteenth-century!"

  "It's last month, Sandy." Giving bad news always wears me out. "Free with some crummy magazine, I shouldn't wonder."

  A cheval ("horse") glass is so called because of its "horse" pulley for swiveling the mirror to different angles. The plate glass revolution brought in the "full" cheval, instead of the mirror in halves. This faker had used chunks of genuine old mirrors, a common trick.

  "Spiteful beast! You're saying that to buy it cheap!"

  Enough. I opened the door. "See you, Sandy."

  "Please, Lovejoy." He looked stricken. I didn't go back. It might be another mercurial mood switch. "I'll behave. What?"

  "Those stamps. You tried touting them ten days ago."

  "Flat fee, Lovejoy." He simpered. "My friend had a dreadful terrible time in jail, poor dear."

  Flat fee? My slow neurones clunked into gear. Another ex-jailbird? Nobody likes se
lling antiques for a flat fee. Like, fifty quid if you sell this antique turk's head hourglass. You lose money if it goes for a thousand.

  "Did they sell?" They couldn't have.

  "No. Parceled them into job lots, Wittwoode's next auction. Best I could do, dear." He tittered. "He'll be furioso!"

  So would anybody. Sending antiques to auction is an admission of failure. So why do it? Because somebody was desperate, that's why. Somebody who'd come out of nick after a number of years.

  "Didn't you warn him?"

  "It was all he had." Sandy shrugged, admiring his reflection. "Got this horrid dollop broker to store his stamp cache until he was released. Lovejoy. Do you think I should go platinum blonde? Mel would rage!

  That adjective meant the dollop broker was a woman. Sandy's vernacular. Also Sandy's ex-convict pal was desperate for money.

  Time to scarper. I risked one last dig. "Wish Mel's friend good luck with his Penny Blacks."

  "Mel's friend?" Sandy cooed after me. "With his coloring?"

  So Mel also knew who it was. My mind was working out: This old lag emerged from a stretch of long porridge. He wanted money. So he unearthed his portfolio of stamps—they must have seemed a cast-iron investment, way back when. He gives them to Sandy to sell. Sandy can't, because the floor's vanished. Sandy sends them to Wittwoode's, for costly auction. Flat fee, too. The cheap way. Any dealer on earth would hang on, for the market to recover.

  And, surprise surprise! Monday the massive haul of household goods from Prammie Joe's turkey job had to be handed over. Joe said so. And Connie wanted me to divvy a load of heavy antiques without delay. A pattern? With the conviction of the unlearned, I went to meet The Great Marvella and her talking snake. I like her. Not sure about the snake.

  Four

  There's a joke: Antiques is the hobby God would have, if only He had the money. Like all cracks, there's a grain of truth. Antiques is a bottomless well. This parable proves it.

  A bird bought a small hotel hereabouts. She made a go of it, started discos, bingo, resident band. Then bought a garage, import concessions for foreign motors, flashy dress shops. A ball of fire. The town hadn't seen anything like Gervetta. Then she got antiques, like people get beriberi. A deficiency disease.

  In her case, she wanted paintings. I mean hungered, craved, would do anything for. Now, paintings are the one antique everybody knows. We look and go "Yuck!" or ''Yes!" We may not react the same, but we do it. Gervetta looked, waved her bulging checkbook. Paintings flowed in. The trouble is that liking is light-years away from being able to recognize that Rembrandt, that priceless Turner or Monet. Paintings are the frightening game of Spot the Dud.

  Gervetta knew she knew she knew paintings. She didn't.

  She started on scenic English watercolors, pre-1851. This expensive market is one where, dealers sadly remark, a collector can't go wrong. Oh, fakes abound: David Cox, Samuel Palmer, Turner, John Constable even, the Rowbothams. But usually a competent friend can more or less guarantee good odds of authenticity. So, dearly beloved, Gervetta drained the countryside. Dealers scavenged for watercolors like maniacs. Then on a whim she changed—old Irish and English drinking glasses. She'd have been wiser to choose American blown-three-mold glassware, which is classy, identifiable, and plentiful. And not much faked—yet.

  Our fakers had a riot. They sold her recycled glasses barely cool from the furnace. In sets of six, would you believe. They sold her Jacobite drinking glasses so rare nobody had ever seen their like—meaning, the faker had got it wrong but was reluctant to chuck the damned thing away. Then by mistake Gervetta came to me. I’d heard of her. Who hadn't? She wanted to sell her precious antiques.

  ''You understand, Lovejoy," she explained after introducing herself in my workshop, a tumbledown ex-garage in the overgrown garden. "It's tax write-offs." She smiled winningly. "The Inland Revenue's caught up, and wants a cut."

  "Why me, lady?"

  "You're the only dealer in the Eastern Hundreds who hasn't sold to me," she said frankly.

  Aye, well. I'd been away overseas. Still had the scars. Anyhow, crooks don't trespass. We—I mean, they —daren't.

  She watched me work. I was repairing a worm-eaten Charles the Second cane-bottomed daybed. For all the world a low chair with the seat inordinately stretched. They're unbelievably rare. This lovely piece was "relic," too far gone to be anything but firewood. All six wormholed scroll legs were shredding sponge.

  I use that thin plasticky stuff shops use for packing porcelain. Here's how wormy furniture's restored: Make a cup of this, and fix it beneath the moth-eaten wooden leg with elastic bands. Pour in a thick cream of rabbit-skin size, chalk, and plasterer's whiting, with a drop of formaldehyde to kill the woodworm. Let it set a couple of days. Harden it off three or four days.

  The leg I was working on was the fourth. I test the stuff with a pin. Hard as stone. Then you can file it, like real wood. I include a few artificial cracks, of course, filling them with stained beeswax. This trick is unnecessary, but legally allows you to advertise the furniture as "restored." The buyer then has no legal claim on you.

  "You're good, Lovejoy."

  "You're beautiful, love. But your antique glass isn't."

  She stared. "How do you know it's glass?"

  "You lifted the box out of your motor like, well, glass. And I’m the only real antique dealer on earth."

  It was all beyond her. "But you haven't seen it unpacked."

  "Don't bother. It's fake."

  Naturally, being a bird, Gervetta was all doubt. I had to show her the simple glass trick. Put a fake antique glass down. Stand a brand-new glass, bought today, next to it. Shine an intense light at both, equal illumination. Look at the rims. The new glass rim seems whitish. So will a fake. The antique glass shows lovely grayish crescents.

  "Yours, love, are white. See?" She also had some Stuart crystal, hohoho, engraving white as snow, edges sharp. "Born yesterday."

  "Me? Like the glass?"

  She took it well, give her that. But women are fifty times more practical. She wouldn't believe that all her "antiques" were duff. She asked me to come and check. I said no.

  "Why not?" She was outraged. "I have to know, stupid!"

  "Can't you see, you silly bitch?"

  We were in the cottage. Her Rolls-Royce besmirched the garden. Inside, bare flagged floor, no furniture, no fire, no light, bare windows. She looked, the bewilderment of wealth.

  "You said your Carolean bed was highly valuable, Lovejoy."

  "It's somebody else's, missus. Now clear off. I've done you an expensive favor. Free. Now let me earn my next three meals."

  That was when she hired me, and learned the ghastly truth about her collections. Her real heartbreak was an antique David Wolff glass. He was a Dutch bloke whose stipple-engraved glasses are famous. He worked on English drinking glasses shipped to Holland, his tiny dots so fine you need a lens. This fake {white dots is a giveaway) even had an English shilling of 1782 in the glass as "proof." It's the oldest trick in the book.

  Me hired meant we moved on to other kinds of linkage. The dealers wouldn't speak to me for ending their spree. Women dealers were doubly scathing. Females don't like other birds. Dunno why.

  Gervetta and me were friends for almost a fortnight. She suddenly sold up and went to live in Charlottesville, U.S.A., among the ineffably rich. She left me a fake Ch'ien Lung tea-dust-glaze bowl, having paid a fortune for it. The five phony certificates—British Museum, Sotheby's—were still stuck on. You didn't need to check the absence of that curious green hint to the dark brown glaze, or peer through a surface microscope to see the unnatural smoothness. It felt dud. Poor—poorer—Gervetta.

  The lesson? Bottomless wells take any amount of gelt and echo for more. Parable ends.

  • • •

  So I went to see Jeff. They call him a different nickname, but he's Dalgleish. Geordie, from the Tyne. He lives with Eleanor, blind and bonny since birth.

  The bus got me down the estua
ry in time for dark. Jeff teaches tense people relaxation. Antique dealers always do a spare-time catchpenny. Jeff's was the easiest I've ever heard of. "Sit down, lady. Nod off. Next."

  "Wotcher, Jeff. I warn you I want a lift to the Bricklayers Arms in a few minutes."

  "Come in, Lovejoy." He called my arrival ahead. They live in a cottage. He's leveled off every floor so there are no ledges, no sudden steps. The lights are always apologetically dimmed, in self-rebuke for Eleanor's misfortune. "Glad to see you."

  Jeff has the lowered gaze of the blind minder, forever checking protrusions. They never lose it. Eleanor on the other hand has the strange merriment of the afflicted, her laugh straight poetry. She's lovely, vivacious. Makes me wonder what the rest of us have done. She immediately was up to buss me, hurrying to make tea. I always dawdle at Jeff's, never move anything. I'm clumsy enough.

  "Jeff. You sent a ring through Gunge Herod?"

  "Yes." He looked too hopeful. I sighed inside.

  "Take a hint?" He hesitated. I'd been right to come. He had it bad, lured by some big scam. "Yes or no, Jeff?"

  "Anything wrong, Lovejoy?" He glanced to the kitchen door.

  "I think so. Suspect," I corrected.

  "I own the ring, Lovejoy." A guarded little speech.

  "Jeff. Before Eleanor comes back." We both spoke softly. "My guess is, you've been asked to put some money in a scam. Big. Cast-iron. The money's needed fast, tomorrow. Am I right?" Silence. "Cut out, Jeff."

  He licked his lips. He doesn't have much savvy. I should talk. He's the one with the gorgeous bird.

  "You don't understand, Lovejoy." He indicated Eleanor's trilling. "I'm her mainstay. I'll need help as we grow older. A nest egg's vital."

  "What if the nest egg's a myth, Jeff? You in clink?"

  He searched my face. I've seen that look a million times, the ineffable hope of the wistful buyer.