Spend Game

by Jonathan Gash

  I put my fingers in my ears to keep out this rubbish. People will keep on talking gibberish. She shut up, and I started to explain. There are fashions in antiques. If you want a tip about profit it’s this: try to anticipate the next fashions, and you’ll be well away. I’ll give you some guidance. Firstly, unless you are loaded, go for fairly recent first editions. They aren’t real antiques, but dealers pretend they are for sordid gain. Secondly, I’d go for Victorian jewellery of the semi-precious kind – sombre jet brooches, garnets and so on. Thirdly I’d go for ‘fringe’ household items that are seriously underpriced: pewter, polescreens, soapstone ornaments, decorative glass table bells, that sort of thing. And treen. Treen is dealers’ slang for any wooden kitchenware. You can still, believe it or not, find even the rarest genuine Tudor treen for a few quid. Any old town has a stock of it. I defy any collector with half an eye for antiques to fail to find it, and cheap. You buy it in junk shops, or even these travelling antique fairs which abound everywhere at weekends these days.

  The commonest treen is the old family bread-board, with or without knife slots and decoration to match. That and little peppermills, salt-boxes (made for hanging by the fireside to keep the deliquescent impure salt mixtures dried out), platters, decorative butter moulds and carved cheese paddles, wooden cups, scissor-shaped glove-stretchers, anything from lovely sycamore cooking mortars to ingenious wooden washing tallies for checking that the serfs were hard at it. If you don’t believe me, try it. I did a favour once for Taffy, a local dealer I owed for a lovely illuminated parchment manuscript Book of Devotional Hours. He was getting after me for the price and I hadn’t managed to bring myself to sell it. He was broke and had a buyer. I staved him off by borrowing a hundred quid and taking him round about twenty antique shops in two days. It knackered us both, but he finished up believing me. We bought a luscious little Welsh oak herb chest, an Elizabethan spice grinder, three seventeenth-century lemon squeezers, a basting stick inscribed 1647, gingerbread boards galore, and six square platters with handles and salt ‘sinkings’ (smoothly hollowed recesses). We got a lot more for the same money, but I’ll lose the thread if I go on. Taffy sold the lot as a ‘collection’ of historic treen at an auction by the following week. He made plenty and shut up whining for his gelt. It’s still that easy.

  ‘Get it?’ I concluded.

  Moll was wide-eyed. ‘But what if I buy the wrong things?’

  I described the layout of Corporal’s crummy dump on East Hill. He isn’t bad as antiques dealers go. Rough-mannered and a bit greedy, but quite fair on those rare occasions when he’s not sloshed on pale ale. He believes he is a major world authority on Norwich School and Dutch oil paintings, though Christie’s are rumoured not to have lost any sleep over this claim. Corporal’s thick as a plank.

  ‘Can’t I just ask Mr Corporal for them?’ Moll was saying.

  I closed my eyes. Women like Moll give me a headache. ‘It isn’t done that way, love.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’ll know what you’ve come for. And he’ll increase his price. See?’

  She was instantly indignant. ‘How very unfair!’

  ‘True, true,’ I said with deep feeling. ‘But look for the money code. That’ll tell you if he’s hiked the mark-up.’

  Women are good listeners when you mention money, and Moll for once listened intently. We have no ‘fixed’ prices in the world of antiques. Whether we’re dealing for the fabulous Eureka Gem or a mundane Edwardian inkwell, there is no fixed price except the one the dealer himself puts on. Always remember that. So every dealer above the junk-shop level invents his own code, or uses somebody else’s. Even famous firms do it. You simply take any word or words totalling ten (or possibly nine) letters, and they become the numbers from 1 to 9 plus 0.

  ‘Am I allowed to look at each sticker?’ Moll asked.

  ‘Look?’ I tapped the air vehemently. ‘You must crawl all over the bloody things.’

  ‘But the code –’

  ‘Every dealer’s code’s easy to break, simply because no letter can ever recur. Get it? By asking the price of about three items you can deduce the code in practically every shop you come to.’ She looked blank so I made it easy. ‘Corporal uses Come and Buy,’ I told her. ‘Copied from a famous firm in St James’s.’ I didn’t tell her which one, because I’m sure Spink’s of London would prefer to remain anonymous. Continental dealers have their own codes but most of the ones I know use Goldschmit, like Münzen & Medaillen secretly used to in Basel.

  ‘How many do I have to buy?’

  ‘As many as you can without an overdraft.’

  ‘Really?’ I could tell she was becoming excited at the thought of a spending spree.

  She was gone in a few more minutes. I gave her a wave and streaked to the phone. There was no chance of raising Tinker this early, so I rang Margaret. She was just opening her place in the Arcade. I made her promise to catch Tinker as he reeled past towards breakfast at opening time, and get him to phone in for instructions. In case she missed him among the shoppers I rang Woody’s and told Erica the same thing. She was all set for telling me off but I put the receiver down because women always get necessity in the wrong order. Finally, I rang Bern’s and told his missus I’d be calling round in his dinner hour. Rosie said one o’clock, but earlier if I wanted veal and two veg.

  Moll returned so late I was sure we would miss Bern. I was in something of a temper, worried what nasty facts about my railway pass Bern was going to cough up. I told her off, but she was too flushed and excited to notice.

  ‘Don’t be angry, Lovejoy!’ she cried, rushing in while I said where the hell have you been. ‘I’ve had a lovely time. Done exactly as you said!’

  ‘Hurry up.’

  ‘One second.’

  I waited, fuming, in the car while she hurtled crashing about the cottage. Bathroom going, her case under the divan, a door slamming, and out she zoomed. I had to drive because she was breathlessly eating bread and honey. She forgot to set the burglar alarm – all antiques dealers have burglar alarms – and had to dash back while I turned the car round.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘The treen? Coming this afternoon,’ she applauded herself with delight. ‘You’ll be thrilled!’

  That seemed odd; but I said nothing. I didn’t see why she couldn’t have fetched it. The phone started up as I got in gear, but then it always does. I ignored it.

  ‘Did Tinker catch you?’ He’d eventually phoned in, sounding bleary. I’d sent him to find Moll and stay with her in case Corporal got delusions of grandeur at the sight of a genuine customer.

  ‘Yes, Lovejoy. He’s a perfect dear, isn’t he?’

  ‘Er, yes . . .’ Nobody’s called Tinker that before. ‘Putting up with so much from his assistants, and being paid so little.’ She slipped her arm through mine, but only friendly. ‘I do wish he had an easier life, poor soul. Having to go off and do the shopping for his old Mum. Aren’t some people marvellous?’ She prattled on about how Tinker, that noble pillar of virtue, also cared for an old and feeble comrade-in-arms named Lemuel, whose terrible leg condition had caused the Minister of Health mercilessly to write him off, leaving him unprotected in a changing world. ‘Poor Lemuel,’ she said, practically tearful. ‘He waited so patiently while Tinker advised me. Such a bad limp.’

  A terrible suspicion was forming. ‘You didn’t give him any money, Moll?’

  ‘Of course. He hadn’t a penny. I gave him the money for his dinner, and a taxi to see his sister’s child in Lexton. The poor mite’s ill with a terrible disease they can’t –’

  I sighed wearily. One day, I really will cripple Lemuel. ‘Love,’ I told her. ‘Lemuel’s fit as a flea. And his sister’s lad is our local champion swimmer. Lemuel’s a dirty old devil who gambles and boozes every farthing he can cadge. He does odd jobs for Tinker, who’s as bad.’

  ‘How dare you, Lovejoy!’ She pulled her arm away. ‘Typical, just typical!’

  I drove doggedly on.
‘And Tinker’s old Mum’s an evil old cow worse than he is. They’re the worst scroungers in the whole of East Anglia, love.’

  ‘You’re horrid, Lovejoy. They’re two lovely old men who need care.’ I gave up arguing. She raved at me then, as I drove out on the Wormham road north out of our village. She kept it up for bloody miles, going on about cynicism and selfishness. I even learned a new word, gravamen. She said the gravamen of our differences were so enormous as to make us irreconcilable. I didn’t like the sound of gravamen, whatever it was.

  I just shut up and held the wheel. Anyway, I had plenty to think of. While Moll was out I’d gone over the Ordnance Survey map of the Mount St Mary and Scratton areas, inch by painstaking inch. In fact, that’s partly why I’d got her out of the way. There was no tunnel, not even a viaduct, in or on or even near the Mount St Mary hillside. And the river bridges are so narrow, being medieval, that even I wasn’t scared of them.

  But all morning I’d fretted uneasily. Maybe that’s why I had shelved the idea of seeing Bern or some other local historian for so long, subconsciously knowing there was something unpleasant and even frightening at the end of it. And, as it turned out, there was.

  We came to Wormham’s erratic main street. Moll was still going on. ‘How could you be so –’

  ‘Shut it, Moll.’

  ‘– positively callous and unfeeling –’

  ‘Shut it.’ She took a sidelong look at my face and shut up. I pulled into this small estate of uniform semidetached houses and stopped us opposite the eighth house. A garden sign read THE JUNCTION. Good old Bern. ‘We’re here,’ I told her.

  My palms were damp. If Bern told me there really was a frigging tunnel under that frigging hill then I for one wasn’t going down into its horrible deep slimy cobwebby blackness for all the tea in China. And, I thought with feeling, there’s a hell of a lot of tea in China.

  ‘Lovejoy,’ Moll said as I started to get out. ‘I think you should rest for a few days –’

  I reached back in and got a handful of her blouse at the neck. ‘One more word from you,’ I said. ‘Just one more word.’

  ‘Yes, Lovejoy,’ she said after a pause.

  Bern was at the door, smiling. ‘Thought you were never coming, Lovejoy. We’ve finished nosh.’

  ‘Sorry, Bern.’ I walked up the little garden path, Moll trailing. ‘I have help these days. Always makes me late.’

  I heard Moll snort and draw breath to make some retort, then wisely say nothing.

  Train enthusiasts go in gaggles, like geese. If you find one wandering lone he’s lost. There’s another characteristic: no matter how amateur they are, they are very, very expert. It’s true of the entire breed. I know one chap who can tell you the whole yearly timetable of the Maltese railways, and there hasn’t been a railway there for decades. See what I mean? So I wasn’t surprised to find Bern had another historian with him.

  ‘I got Gordon along,’ Bern told me as the young blond lad rose and said hello. ‘He’s our local branch-line expert.’ That’s another thing. You learn to expect all ages of expert. This lad was about fifteen, thin and tall as a house, as they all seem to be these days. I think it’s school dinners.

  ‘How do.’ I explained Moll to them both, and we settled round the table. Rosie cleared the meal away with the practised alacrity of a wife escaping from a hobby.

  Gordon and Bern began fetching maps and books. I watched uneasily. It seemed a big pile of fact for what I was hoping would be a legend. I contributed my disc, to Bert’s excitement.

  They did their mysterious bit with magnifying glasses and catalogues. Rosie hurried a table lamp in, pretending to share in the thrills. I waited for the verdict.

  ‘I never believed they’d struck one,’ Bern concluded, marvelling.

  ‘Me, neither,’ from Gordon.

  ‘Who’s they?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘The railway company.’

  ‘Which railway company?’ I persisted. I wanted negatives, not vague replies that suggested there were horrible positives just around the corner.

  Bern deferred to Gordon with a nod. ‘This railway company tried to build a branch line through here,’ the lad said earnestly. ‘From town, on up the valley. One arm out through Scratton going inland. The other through Wormham to Mount St Mary.’

  ‘They wanted to run it coastwards,’ Bern put in, still goggling at the disc with a glass at his eye.

  I said, ‘But the old railway station here in Wormham’s –’

  ‘– the end of the line,’ Gordon finished for me, reaching to show me its course on a 1930 Ordnance Survey map. ‘Of course it was.’

  ‘So it never actually ran to Mount St Mary?’ There was no dotted line going north from Wormham station, thank God.

  ‘No.’

  I sighed with relief and rose smiling but trying to look disappointed. ‘Well, that’s that,’ I said cheerfully.

  ‘Is that all you want to know, Lovejoy?’ The lad was obviously downcast.

  ‘I’ve taken an extra hour off,’ Bern complained.

  ‘Good of you, Bern,’ I countered happily. ‘But another time. Come on, love.’

  Gordon was puzzled, as well as sad he was going to lose his audience. As I started for the door he turned to Bern and said accusingly, ‘You told me he’d want to know all about the Mount’s railway disaster.’

  I stopped. Moll bumped into me. ‘Disaster?’ My voice seemed miles away. Bern had mentioned a disaster when we’d met at Elspeth’s medical centre.

  ‘Why, yes. At Mount St Mary.’

  I felt my hands chill with sudden cold. Surely you can’t have a railway disaster without a railway, can you? ‘You said it never reached there.’

  ‘It didn’t.’ He held up a book which seemed familiar. ‘Because of the disaster.’ It was a copy of Chase’s book with the town library’s gilded stamp on its spine.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Er, what happened?’

  ‘The tunnel,’ he said.

  ‘Tunnel,’ I repeated faintly. ‘In Mount St Mary?’

  Bern chuckled, the lunatic. ‘Well, it couldn’t be on top, could it?’

  I didn’t smile. My eyes were riveted on Gordon.

  ‘It was awful,’ Gordon said. ‘The tunnel caved in.’

  Tunnel, I thought, keeping tight control. The deep dark tunnel. It caved in. Dark and deep and it caved in.

  I felt Moll’s hand clamp hard on my arm. She propelled me to a chair. Gordon’s enthusiastic voice and Bern’s cosy little front room receded into a mist as all cares vanished.

  ‘There now.’ Rosie was bullying us all, but mostly me. ‘That’s what comes of going back to work too soon after an accident.’

  ‘He insisted.’ Moll was defending herself, not me.

  ‘You don’t need to tell me, my dear.’ Rosie had the table cleared of Bern and Gordon’s clobber, which showed how narked she was. ‘Men are born stupid and stay so.’

  She had a bowl of water and some towels.

  Bern’s concerned face came close. ‘Are you all right, Lovejoy?’ I wish people would stop saying that.

  ‘You almost keeled right over.’ Gordon sounded quite pleased.

  Moll was holding me, her hands cool on my forehead. ‘I’d better get him home.’

  Rosie wasn’t going to be thwarted. ‘Drink this herb tea, Lovejoy.’

  I drank a ghoulish mess of unspeakable green liquid. It stripped my mucosa down to my boots. I thought I’d finished with all this when my granny went.

  ‘He needs some thick gruel,’ Rosie pronounced.

  ‘Jesus, Rosie!’ from me in a whine.

  ‘Don’t argue, Lovejoy. He does.’

  I hate the way women talk all around you, as if you either aren’t there or are imbecilic.

  ‘And,’ Rosie battled on, glaring at Bern and Gordon, ‘if you ask me, he needs less of your ridiculous stories about people being buried alive and screaming for help –’

  ‘You’re perfectly correct,’ Moll cut in swiftly,
yanking me to my feet. She practically hauled me to the door.

  Gordon and Bern, both now properly in Rosie’s bad books for reasons beyond me, followed us meekly to the car. Gordon reached in and put a brown folder on the back seat.

  ‘That’s my stuff on it,’ he said, worried. ‘You can give it to Bern when you’ve done.’

  ‘Thanks, Gordon. Sorry about that, folks.’

  ‘Get better soon, Lovejoy,’ Bern said, giving a thumbs-up. ‘Pop over when you want –’

  ‘Not for at least a week, Bern,’ Moll said firmly. ‘He’s to rest.’

  ‘But look, Moll . . .’ I started. She gunned the engine.

  ‘People who are too stubborn,’ Rosie said with satisfaction, ‘have to be told.’ She was still rabbiting on at them when we drove off. And one look at Moll’s face told me I was in trouble with her as well. That’s women. Just when they should be sympathetic they get mad as hell.

  I decided to break the ice with some merry chatter. ‘Sorry, Moll,’ I said brightly. ‘I –’

  ‘Shut it.’ She snapped it out just like me, so I did.

  It was probably just as well we didn’t speak on the way home. I never know what women mean half the bloody time anyhow.

  In my garden a vannie called Doug was sitting on the grass. Tinker was there. They were part-way through a crate of brown ale, bottles everywhere. Two other vannies were smoking and swilling. A right party. They’d parked two vans on my gravel.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I was all ready for a dust-up.

  ‘Wotcher, Lovejoy.’ Tinker gave me a wave.

  ‘It’s my treens,’ Moll exclaimed, pleased.

  ‘Treen,’ I corrected mechanically. ‘Collective noun.’

  ‘You’ll be so thrilled, darling.’

  I hesitated at that ‘darling’, but as long as our tiff was forgotten I’d bear it.

  ‘It’s all here, Moll.’ Tinker handed me a brown ale. He took Doug’s bottle off him, wiped it on his filthy sleeve and gave it to Moll. His idea of gallantry.

  ‘Oh,’ she said faintly, taking it like something ticking. ‘How kind.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  We all said cheers and drank, some more enthusiastically than others. My eyes were on the two covered vans.