Ten Word Game

by Jonathan Gash

  But I was pure and unsullied. Which is about as pathetic as you ever can be. I made the ship, half an hour’s slow walk, stopping every now and then to go into a shop and examine their goods. I kept thinking. Had he fallen, perhaps cracked his head on the dinghy? But then why was his chest bubbling and stove in? And that red froth in his mouth? And was the dinghy still there when I reached him?

  And I’d seen no sign of head injury. But had I looked?

  I bought a tee-shirt with something on in German. Jolly, no doubt. Only when I was being sick in my cabin did I realise, as I wiped my mouth on the damned thing, that it had a picture of the harbour printed on it. I’d inadvertently bought a memento of my bravery where Mr Moses Duploy had died. It made me sick again. Like I say, pathetic.

  Eventually I came out of it. For over an hour I sat on the bed staring at nothing. I had a shower, made sure I wasn’t trembling. Then I went for a swim in the Crystal Pool in the sunshine. I thought of Amy the dancer and Les the comic. They would perform on stage with the troupe after dinner. I found a recorded phone message from Lady Vee saying to collect her for the show. She’d ended her message with a titter. “June sends her love!”

  Aye, I told myself, we’re all a load of inscrutable masks. I felt cold, and deliberately stayed wet after another shower in my cabin. I grew cold. The light began to fade outside, day drawing in. Time passed. I got colder. Still I stayed wet. My teeth began to chatter. I’d once had malaria, and knew it was quite like this. The image of Moses Duploy stayed with me and I shivered worse.

  He was no angel, but who is? And was he any worse than, say, you or me? Time I stopped being a drogue and did something off my own bat.

  I dried and dressed. The noise bonged for dinner. I went out calm and confident, saying hello to everybody, poisonously hearty to one and all.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Poor Henry Semper,” people were saying at the table.

  Holly told me as we all took our places, “They fly sick people back.”

  “At least we’ll be spared his ghastly shirts!” Kevin tittered, so witty.

  “The ship’s hospital can only do so much,” Millicent remarked. “A lady once broke her ankle, line dancing…”

  Ivy looked pale, but didn’t she always? Billy her husband was telling jokes, “better than that comedian chap,” he kept assuring us before each one. Jim Akehurst was explaining ring auctions in antiques – still illegal, the law unused these many decades, antique dealers still getting away with it. Kevin was having a fit of the vapours, Holly Sago trying to soothe him.

  “Bad news, I heard,” Millicent said. Ivy kept looking at me, God knows why. “Has Henry Semper a family, do you know?”

  “You ill too, Kev?” I asked, changing the subject of bad news.

  He recovered instantly and spat, “Kevin’s the name, infidel.”

  “Kevin’s had a mishap today.” Holly held his hand. He looked about to burst into tears. “He bought the wrong eyeliner.”

  “And they haven’t my brand in the shops here!”

  “Does it matter?”

  Kevin went white with rage.

  “That’s the sort of remark I’d expect from a buffoon like you, Lovejoy. First you make dear Henry sick as a parrot about his antiques, then you go ashore with that ghastly woman in bottle green, the one with the terrible legs.”

  Fern and Delia were seating themselves at the next table. They looked at each other and smiled, hearing Kevin’s remark. I’m always surprised how women take people of Kevin’s disposition, really tolerant.

  “They’re saying June Milestone’s taking over all Henry Semper’s talks and quizzes,” Millicent said. Lauren was approaching. “It must be serious.”

  “Excuse me, please.” Lauren stopped by us. “Lovejoy, could I have a word?”

  That’s what they always say on TV soaps, I thought, when they could just as easily say what they wanted without preamble. Back in the cabin, getting ready, I’d decided to be cool and direct. People were either good or bad.

  “Yes.” I waited.

  “Lauren means in private,” Kevin said roguishly. “Lovejoy’s so thick, sweetie.”

  One day I’d clock Kev. I could see it coming.

  “Go on, Miss Lauren.” I didn’t move.

  She saw I wasn’t going to budge. “Would you please do the dinner quiz with me? Mr Semper is unavailable, and Purser Mangot…”

  “Certainly.”

  I was hungry, but easy come, easy go. I followed her to the entrance, people watching as we went. Lauren’s colour was high. I was trying to be calm. I wondered if Henry Semper’d been ashore in the German port.

  “This is what we do,” Lauren said, stopping at the main doors where restaurant captains were welcoming late-comers. Lauren had her small table, stacks of cards, pencils and a tray on which stood a small Wedgwood style creamware jug.

  She said quietly, interrupting herself to smile at couples entering, “You accompany me. I shall show the antique and give out the cards. Your task is to simply answer questions. Understood?”

  Sharp rhetoric makes me fed up. It’s always aimed at me. I swallowed and nodded. We set out, Lauren doing her spiel at each table. I was interested how people responded. One or two asked to see it, turned it over and said, impressed, “Wedgwood, see? There’s a mark!” Some held it to the light. An occasional diner took out a loupe and tutted knowingly.

  “The question is this,” I said to the first table. “What’s the give-away? Because it’s a fake.”

  Lauren drew breath, quite a loud hiss. I beamed, ignored her, said it again. In the next hour I said this so often I began to get giddy, but it was plain hunger. Only when we’d nearly finished the entire restaurant did I realise I knew one of the ladies at Table 104.

  “Can I pick it up?” Margaret Dainty looked up at me.

  “Er, aye.” When I’m flummoxed I stutter.

  “Thank you.” She inspected it. “It seems beautiful.”

  “Not new, lady, but a Sexton.”

  “Sexton Blake, Cockney rhyming slang, fake?”

  “That’s it, missus. Are you a dealer?”

  She didn’t crack a smile. “Hopeless in comparison,” she said evenly. “Thank you for showing it to us.”

  She wrote a few words on her card, and blithely resumed the table conversation.

  With Lauren I did the complete circuit, and went to stand by the exit while the nine hundred diners drifted out, dropping off answers.

  “You chose a neat way of getting out of your moral dilemma,” Lauren said quietly, smiling fixedly at everybody.

  “Dilemma?”

  “You think my antique Wedgwood is a forgery. You asked everyone to identify the forger’s mistake. Against orders.”

  “Miss Lauren, I’m fed up with orders. From now on I want details.”

  “Details of what?”

  She looked so innocent I changed my mind. She wasn’t in the know, just another dupe. Except she wasn’t like me, who’d let someone die and not even bothered to raise a finger. I warmed to the lass, visualising her trying to hold Mr Moses Duploy free of the water as it lapped at his bubbling chest and flooded his glazed eyes…

  “Sit down, Lovejoy,” she said of a sudden, telling people, “He’s not had his dinner yet, you see.”

  Somebody put me in the maitre d’s chair between the banks of flowers. As I recovered, some passengers tried to coerce me into giving them the answer. They weren’t above signalling the answer to friends who were still at the tables, to win the prize. I wouldn’t be drawn, sat there all clammy. Women smile better than men. They almost always nearly sometimes manage to look possibly partly sincere.

  Even Lauren was done for when the last of the diners had gone. We went to a staff restaurant on a different deck.

  “Isn’t it exhausting?” Lauren said.

  We sat at a table near three of the ship’s officers. I saw Mangot holding court at the far end. He didn’t look. I didn’t look at him either, so take
that, fascist.

  We sifted through the cards as we had our meal.

  “There’ll be one right,” I told her. “Table 104.”

  Margaret’s answer read: Didn’t Wedgwood’s name lack the central letter E?

  We hadn’t got the creamware piece, still up there for the second sitting of the evening. Lauren looked at me.

  “I saw her write something,” I said lamely. “Good for her.”

  “Does it?” She went a little pale. “Have I spelt it wrongly all this time?”

  “Lots do, love. Even famous galleries. As did J. Smith & Co in 1848, of Stockton Potteries, who made your creamware piece. Nice old antique in the meaning of the word, but still a forgery.”

  We talked of the meaning of a forgery. I told her it was a problem, because Chinese two centuries agone made replicas of Chien Lung style porcelain, in homage to the old great potters. They didn’t intend to fake as such, just to emulate and thereby confer honour on their ancestors.

  “I suppose old Smithy in Stockton meant to do the same thing, and make a decent living at the same time. And Michelangelo faked older sculptors, with his Sleeping Cupid.”

  She was shocked. I told her Van Gogh had copied Corot, Delacroix, Gaugin, Rembrandt. And Rubens faked Caravaggio, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Titian, and a couple of dozen others. I could have gone on.

  “It was a business, like your Henry Semper. He can only tout words and a few opinions, none of them very good. Painters, artists, motor car makers, everybody simply makes something they can call brand new – while nicking ideas from everybody else. They put together what they hope will sell.”

  “It’s so cynical,” she said, distressed.

  “I’m not knocking it, love. Just saying it’s how the world is.” To appease her, I asked after Henry Semper.

  “He didn’t even say goodbye,” she said, eyes filling. I never know what to do when women cry. I wanted to leave. “Not even a note.”

  “He’s gone?”

  “Yes. The executive purser said he needed to go to a hospital. He should be there by now.” She sniffed over her pudding. “You never got to know him like I did. He’s such a splendid person. Everybody admires him.”

  Except me. He was a wart in creep’s clothing.

  “You’ll have to help Mrs Milestone to cope.”

  A bit sudden, Henry’s leaving like that. I tried to remember if Henry had been unwell before we docked last time, or whether he’d simply not come back from a trip ashore.

  We did the second restaurant sitting with our tray, Lauren putting on a show of bright friendliness to one and all. Two more people got the give-away, answering that Wedgwood was spelled wrongly.

  Lauren sent each winner a year’s free subscriptions to The Antiques Trade Gazette and free tickets to all of England’s antiques fairs. I wish I’d won, because they can be expensive if you’ve no gelt. I usually cadge my way in, except the Chelsea and Kensington Fairs are a sod for security. When I asked Lauren if I could try for the prize she said stop it, keep smiling at the passengers, don’t give the ship a bad name. I said to her, “Me?”

  * * *

  “Your Secretum sold, Lovejoy.”

  For a moment I wondered what Margaret was saying. The word didn’t make sense. Secretum? Then it came like from an ancient mist.

  Several months before, I’d been really desperate. A lass, Anya, took me to the cleaners. She talked me into paying for a set of opaline chalices from Dandy Jack, a rival dealer. I was broke, so snowed paper IOUs for a day or two. I was sure I could make the money. Opaline is very beautiful stuff. Think of glass trying to become porcelain, and there you have it. The very best is mid-Victorian English, though pieces were made in France and passed off as London or Birmingham. The trick is to do a simple specific gravity test (the same old weight business on cotton threads). English pieces are almost all lead crystal, so very heavy, and virtually opaque or at best translucent. Decoration is usually floral, improbable blooms in yellows and browns. I love them. If uncracked, each one will net you a week’s holiday.

  The set Anya bought consisted of eight, plus a small opaline tray to carry four. I fell for Anya’s passion for it, mainly because I’d fallen for Anya’s passion. Together, nine pieces, complete. (Note: If one antique costs X zlotniks, then a complete pair will cost four to eight times X. It’s not just twice the price of one. Sometimes, the price will go as high as 16 times the price of a single one, depending on rarity.) So I was confident. We celebrated by making smiles that night.

  Anya wasn’t there when I woke. The opaline chalices were gone. I’ve never heard of her since.

  Which left me paying off the IOUs with a terrible headache caused by Wilco, Big John Sheehan’s assistant, who kicked me silly when I said I’d no means to pay until I could run some antiques across Gimbert’s auction on East Hill. Big John is one of those quiet smiling Ulstermen you don’t cross in case they stop smiling. He ordered me knocked around. I was allowed one day to come up with the gelt, and went to Margaret Dainty to lend me space in her flat while I worked a scam up.

  It was the Secretum, and how secret is that for heaven’s sake?

  There’s only one Secretum, and it’s multo famous. It is the erotic museum of mid-Victorian Dr Witt, Mayor of Bedford. Well, dear George Witt became a rich banker – some doctors have a sideline – and developed a healthy, maybe not-so-healthy – interest in the occult erotic. He amassed antiques, all to do with erotic pastimes of the Ancient World. So, the God Pan’s erotic doings, sordid bestial frolics in porcelain, mosaic, wax paintings, and sculpture, he collected avidly. Then in 1857 Parliament poured cold water on the private glees of Dr Witt, by passing a stern corrective called the Obscene Publications Act.

  The government’s notion was simple: erotic art is important, yeah verily, but seeing most working classes were just learning to understand culture it was vital to protect them from sordid sexual fetishes. Only the affluent educated should be exposed to such dark passions. Dr Witt thought his duty clearly lay in donating his collection to the British Museum, a very proper going concern established long before in 1753.

  They called it the Secretum, and stuck it in a sort of closet thing called Suite Fifty-Five. It’s kept under lock and key to keep shifty-eyed gloaters out. You have to beg on an official form to reach it. Only a couple of dozen (mostly females, incidentally) crave to ogle it every calendar year, and though a few books have been written about erotic arts as seen in the Secretum, it was simply asking to be forged up. In a frantic afternoon of phoning round and offering money as wildly as if I actually had some, I managed to acquire thirty erotic items. After my pasting from Wilco, I was in no fit state to forge letters from Dr Witt, so I had to resort to Geordie – mercifully sober and for once not in some religious crusade (he sings hymns to trees) – I managed to make my phoney collection look authentic. I got Bernice from Coggeshall to mock up some earthenware phalluses, and used some rusted mattress springs to devise a chastity belt. Phosphoric acid’s the stuff for making the fastest rust, and I had two chastity belts (nails from Wickes Builders Merchants on the by-pass, locks from an old Utility cupboard vintage 1940, holes by Black and Decker power drill) mocked up in less than two hours.

  Pottery is easy, because Parsonage sells those near Southwold, and he brought two down, lately done. I coloured them in acrylic, and while Margaret went out for some nosh microwaved them after chipping the edges to give them age. (Don’t heat them on High setting, or they crack asunder.) I knew a lady who owns a trout farm beyond Arlesford who’d bought from me a replica homoerotic scene – only in a job lot from holidaymakers just back from Corfu, where they’re on sale everywhere. I bought those back for an unmentionable promise. I had phalluses of various kinds, with two dozen small tokens – flat coin-like coppers and bronzes made in Hong Kong in the 1970s, penny a ton and worthless now. Yet if mounted on red velveteen cards and labelled with various legends in gibberish they look convincing. (“The artistic links with the reign of
Yang Sher Peng, 1311-1517, will be apparent to those familiar with the poems of Tsu Shing” and the like, all made up.)

  In spite of aches and my splitting head, I did three swift paintings in wax using egg yolk and a sort of mad gouache I make up myself on occasions requiring speed. I use Gum Arabica. They depicted matrons being ravished by men or other formless beasts. One was so good it nearly broke my heart having to age it up by fragging the edges of the board. I had no cypress wood, so used pine from Margaret’s wardrobe; lucky she was out. I sawed it into small pieces and submerged it in hot water for an hour then heated the little panels in a dry oven before giving them a coat of rabbit-skin size – all dealers have it – and chalk. It stank the place out. Margaret played hell when she came home, but what can you do? Women lack priorities and lose a sense of what’s important. I’ve always found that.

  Later than day I fixed up an appointment with two buyers from Apaloosa. (Where’s Apaloosa? Margaret said in the USA. I think the Yanks make these names up.) I cut out after leaving Margaret to do the deal, and scarpered. It was that night that I was made to do the robbery at Gotham with Belle. And the rest, as they say, is…

  “It sold? The Secretum?”

  “It sold, Lovejoy. And you didn’t come back for the money.”

  She looked lovely sitting there, telling me this. And the more I thought of what she was telling me, the lovelier she looked. I think women have a really sound sense of what’s important.

  “Sold? Did – ?”

  “I got the money to Wilco. It was more than enough.”

  Odd how relief makes you shaky but it does so I shook for a bit. Margaret watched and finally said, “You hadn’t heard?”

  “If I’d heard I wouldn’t be so scared, would I?” Women always miss the obvious.

  “Belle went missing.”