A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair l-21 Read online

  A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair

  ( Lovejoy - 21 )

  Jonathan Gash

  A fool there was and he made his prayer (Even as you and I) To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair (We called her the woman who did not care) But the fool he called her his lady fair - (Even as you and I!)

  Rudyard Kipling, 'The Vampire'

  'What is aught, but as 'tis valued?'

  William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

  1

  LONDON'S TRAFFIC ROARED past as I prepared to attack.

  'Don't, Lovejoy.' Shar was beautiful and furious. But she's a lawyer. They always say don't. 'You'll get arrested.'

  People on passing buses stared. Old crones called things like, 'Riff-raff!' It gets me narked. This was me out in the rain, fighting for them. We could all sit in warm buses and do nothing while the world dies.

  Nothing for it. I went to the middle of the road with my placard and howled at Holloway University, 'You swine stole my Old Masters! You thieving—'

  Two weary bobbies arrested me.

  Shar was still arguing two nights later in bed. Do lawyers ever give up? I honestly think they're abnormal.

  'This behaviour must stop.' Shar was giving it me - aggro, I mean.

  'I'm not the criminal,' I shot back, indignant. 'They are!'

  'The law clearly states—'

  'The law is a—'

  'Say that once more and you're out of this bed this instant!' She was blazing.

  I was amazed. 'Tell me just one thing I've done wrong.'

  She glared along the pillow. Nice hair, lovely eyes, but a lawyer's a lawyer for all that.

  'You bawled abuse at Holloway University.' Even in bed lawyers sound extra-terrestrial.

  'Despite,' she said bitterly, 'your lawyer's advice. The magistrates show forbearance—'

  Oh, aye, like slamming me in the pokey.

  'Thieving swine sold my paintings.' My hand had accidentally fallen on her bare thigh, but she shoved it off.

  'They aren't your Old Masters, Lovejoy. And stop that.'

  Her breast had accidentally come into my palm, but whose fault was that? Typical woman, drags me naked into bed, wreaks her savage lust on my defenseless body, then tells me to lie still. Is that fair?

  She sighed. 'Lovejoy. I'm utterly tired of this. The Cottesloe Report says the University couldn't sell the objects unless authorized by the Courts or Charity Commissioners or the Minister of Education—'

  'Fraudsters,' I muttered. 'They flogged my paintings.' To flog is to sell.

  Shar cuffed me as my face reached her belly. 'You got arrested. They are in the right.'

  It was time to make smiles again so I pretended to give in. I'd not got long.

  'You're right, dwoorlink.' I put a smile on. 'Thanks for keeping a clear head.'

  'Promise you'll remember the law, Lovejoy?'

  'Very well, dwoorlink.'

  It worked, thank heavens. Shar was mollified. We slept afterwards, had another breakfast, though she'd run out of bacon, which really narked me because what is breakfast for? We parted with endearments.

  'Be good, darling. Remember you're bound over to keep the peace.'

  Pure love shone from my eyes. 'I shall, luv. Back in an hour.' Another promise, but promises aren't the trouble, I find.

  As I waved up at her window from the street below I tried to remember her surname.

  Maybe I'd still got her trade card somewhere.

  Then I went to Bermondsey, where Floggell lives. He'd know how to burgle a university better than anybody. 'Not my paintings' indeed. Universities always say they've a right to steal. Once, only banks and politicians made that excuse. Now, theft's called progress. Remember that detail, or you'll get lost in the murk of this story.

  But cheer up. One dauntless warrior is still in the arena fighting for honesty and justice against the forces of evil, greed, and law.

  It's me, Lovejoy, honest antique dealer. It's blinking lonely, especially when they slam you in the dock as soon as you want them to play fair. Unfortunately, I'm on my tod. So far, nobody had lifted a finger to help.

  I'd come to London's street markets to find who the heck was flooding the antiques world with dud padparadshas (lovely gemstones; tell you about these in a minute). I'd been hired by Dosh Callaghan for the purpose against my will. I'd been feeling sorry for myself after a really bad day. I'd backed an illegal Carlton Ware forger's pottery with a load of lOUs. Staffordshire's maniacal Trading Standards Officers raided it, in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent. Can you imagine anything so unfair? I was seething with self-pity and poverty. They weren't even fakes of antiques, because the Carlton factory only closed in 1989. A so-say 1957 vintage Guinness toucan lamp, for God's sake? I honestly think morality's gone to the dogs. If you can't make pots in the Potteries, where is truth?

  Needless to say, dealers all across East Anglia jeered at me.

  Me and a lass called Iana had made a go of total permanent unending eternal love for a couple of days once, but she proved unreliable. She had a rotten temper, accused me of infidelity just because I'd stayed with Jessica at Goldhanger when trying to buy Jessica's Regency cabinet. For all that, our valencies always linked whenever she zoomed in. And she tended to broker antique sales. Iana had promised me a genuine Holbein miniature painting, owned by a hunchbacked Romford dealer called Syme.

  'Genuine Holbein!' Syme protested as I gave it back across the tap-room bar.

  'No, Syme. Hans Holbein was lefthanded.'

  'So?' Syme asked, puzzled.

  'Miniaturists paint their portraits with northern light on their left. Righthanded, they sit facing east, see? Holbein's subjects have the light coming the other way.'

  Syme's pal had done the commonest forger trick of all. In any book on miniatures, the photographs are reproduced actual size. So forgers simply trace them in reverse, to look like different versions of some famous portrait - like Syme's, of Lady Catherine Howard, date about 1540.

  'Also, Syme,' I added sadly, 'it's on Ivorine. Holbein painted his miniatures on vellum stuck to card.' I could have gone on about the brilliant art of 'limning' - painting miniature scenes and portraits. It's a miraculous art-form. I love it. But like I say I was down in the dumps, instinctively feeling that worse was on the way.

  Dealers like Syme get taken in by the old forger's trick, to do quite a good fake using the wrong materials. Ivorine is a synthetic modern plastic. Good stuff, though, you can cut with scissors. Respectable miniaturists use it all the time. But no way is it ivory. Nor is it real vellum - that stretched skin of aborted veal calves. I could have sworn Syme's miniature painting was done over acrylic 'carnation', as ancient limners used to call their ground. And acrylics, like Ivorine, are modern.

  'No good, Lovejoy?' Iana had asked. I sat with her.

  'Bad, love. The original belongs to the Duke of Buccleugh.'

  While we were talking Fakes I Have Known, that saga of antique dealers everywhere, Dosh Callaghan hove in and told me to go to London.

  Dosh saw nothing unreasonable in forcing me into slavery while he took gorgeous women out to belly-rumbling restaurants.

  'Why, Doshie?' I pleaded. 'I hate London.'

  He's one of these criminals who wears alpaca coats down to the heels, has gold teeth and a gunslinger hat. He has two goons, to enforce whatever rules he dreams up for us on the spot. The charm of a boil, and lies like a gasmeter. In spite of this, I like Dosh.

  His party trick is to find obscure relatives, claim close kinship, and do them out of every penny. He owns a propeller plane at Earls Colne airfield, says an auntie left it to him.

  He beamed, flashed his rings about the tavern. We w
ere in the Welcome Sailor at East Gates, that being where our town's antique dealers congregate to enter terminal decline.

  Think of a dodo graveyard but where all extinct species are still pretending they know life.

  'You used to love London, Lovejoy,' Iana said. This is her way, prettily taking me over every time she returns from Cyprus.

  'Me? I've always hated London, ever since—'

  Some things you can't tell. I'd known a London lass who got me to do two forgeries. I faked a Monet - his now-lost-for-ever painting of the bridges of Venice on that tatty little rio - and a Boudin watercolour. The latter's one of the hardest painters to forge, incidentally, though they're appearing now in numbers at the New Caledonian street market. Go and see for yourself. (Last-but-one barrow, farthest from St Mary Magdalene church.)

  'Ever since who, Lovejoy?' Iana purred prettily.

  'Ever since you wuz knocking that tart, Lovejoy!' Dosh burst out laughing. Everyone within earshot laughed along, being scared of him.

  'Who was she?' Iana demanded, her frown suddenly less pretty.

  'Doshie,' I begged. 'Can't you send somebody else? I've this sick uncle. And my motor's laid up.'

  'You won't need wheels, Lovejoy. Buses and the Tube'll do fine. And your uncle's playing bowls for Manchester.'

  People roared at Doshie's cleverness. Oh, it was such a merry scene.

  'Find out who duffed my padpas, Lovejoy. I bought a job lot last week, and they're fake.'

  He said this in high indignation, though he sells more frauds, fakes, and forgeries than any other antique dealer in the Eastern Hundreds, including me. Then he dropped two small green brilliant-cut gemstones on the bar. Maybe half a carat each. I love jewellery, even gems hatefully called 'semi-precious', and couldn't help snatching them up for a look with a xlO loupe.

  'These aren't padpas, Doshie,' I said. 'They're tsavorite.' A tsavorite is properly green grossular, a sort of garnet discovered some seventy years ago near Kenya's National Park at Tsavo. Its lovely green lies between deep Sri Lankan emeralds and a peridot.

  (Tip: Don't buy a tsavorite unless it's above one carat in size.) 'Measure its single refraction, Doshie, to prove it isn't green tourmaline or green zircon. Save me a trip to London. Also, I know nothing about precious stones.'

  Dosh grinned. 'Lovejoy. A few of these came in antique settings. You're a divvy and you can tell an antique by feel. So go.'

  'Advance me a week's salary?' I asked, hoping he'd say no.

  'Okay, Lovejoy,' Doshie amazed me by saying. He's started smoking these thick cheroots. He stuck one in his mouth, graciously tilted his head so that his shelt wouldn't have too far to reach with the lighter, puffed smoke to share his carcinogens, and left saying, 'Pay the lazy sod seven days.'

  And that was that. I'd be able to buy Iana's Minton cup. I'd square my conscience later.

  I always invent excellent reasons for surrender. I bought the Minton cup from Iana, endured her tearful farewell, and left on the London train after an equally tearful farewell from Cathy to whom I sold the Minton cup for twice what I'd paid Iana. I also was in tears, because the Minton is the most exquisite early pottery you'll ever see. Tip: if you find a piece that seems greyish instead of pure white, and is troubled by little black flecks, then you've got in your hand one of the most important pieces in the history of the world. Phone any Minton collector, and he'll run up panting, bulging wallet at the ready.

  Having to sell it broke my heart, but I exacted a promise from Cathy that she'd give me first refusal. I made her swear on everything she held dear, and I didn't believe a word.

  I'd have sealed it with loving smiles, but her bloke was in. He's a mechanic hooked on axles and carburettors. Cars that actually go, he thinks a waste of time.

  It was on that fatal train that I read - the lady opposite had a newspaper - of Holloway University's criminal sale of their vast heritage of Old Masters. I went berserk. The lady was called Shar, a lawyer, astonished at my anger. I said I'd hire her to sue Holloway University. Which is how I got arrested, bound over to keep the peace, three days late for my doomed encounter in the antique street markets.

  These markets look the soul of innocence, street barrows lined up under merry bunting.

  In fact they can be scary, while seeming the friendliest places on earth. You've been warned. Much good warnings ever do, though. When greed and antiques meet everybody ignores warnings. Like me, like you. Into antiques, in Olde London Toon.

  2

  SOMETIMES, EVERYTHING SEEMS the opposite of what we're told. That Benedictine monk Dom Perignon, experimenting with double fermentation, is supposed to have sipped his prototype champagne and yelled out, 'Come here! I'm tasting the stars!' Did he really? What are the odds he actually called out, 'This batch is no good, lads!

  Another failure!' then sat there alone in his cellar cackling his head off and wickedly swilling it all back himself? You can't help thinking.

  Free of Shar, I inhaled the London antique market's perfumed air. Pure nectar, aroma of the gods. Paradise, but where you can lose your shirt. You might be in raptures thinking you've finally collared that missing Da Vinci and made zillions, when in fact you've just mortgaged your whole future and put your children into penury.

  It's still life's most glorious arena.

  Across the Bermondsey greensward, by St Mary Magdalene church, with twittering birds pecking among the tombstones, you see warehouses, antique shops. But the main feature delighting your eye is shoals - no other word - of stalls, stalls as far as vision allows. Among them drift two or three thousand hopefuls. You hear every language under the sun - Greek, Italian, French, Chinese. The globe flocks.

  To find it, go to lower Bridge. Walk south down Tower Bridge Road. Takes you fifteen minutes. I'd advise you to take sandwiches, because you may never leave. There's tales of folk who've turned up with an hour to kill before zooming home to Rotterdam, wherever, and simply stayed. Everyone's dazzled by the antiques, forgeries, collectibles, the sheer exhilaration of hundreds of stalls bulging with antiques. It is concentrated wonderment.

  The good cheer is ineffable, if that's the right word. Euphoria rules. Stallholders joke, laugh, arguing good-naturedly about everything on earth from corruption to cricket.

  Here, an old lady wears a tall Ascot topper with serene aplomb. Over there's a delectable lady in enticing attire, and everywhere's noise and pandemonium with - I assure you - some utterly genuine antiques among the dross.

  Lesson for today: Go to Bermondsey at six a.m. Fridays. It dwindles about noon. Other days, you've to roam in warrens of converted warehouses and godowns near the green.

  Oddly, the indoor stallholders are less jovial than the open-air barrow folk. Is it the gypsy element, some thrill of travelling as opposed to the lurk? Dunno. But go there, best entertainment on this planet. Not only that, but you might finish up with a priceless silver salver or that porcelain Worcester jug you just know is waiting. (Sorry.

  I've just realized this reads like an advertisement. Won't let it happen again.) I made for a bloke who might help me. Crooks first, saints second. A warning, though: never in the field of human nonsense is so much gunge being sold as antique. Even in a posh listed auction, only 3 per cent will be genuine. The rest will be bodge-ups, twinners, or downright fakes. Never, never ever, is more than one in ten genuine.

  Sir Ponsonby P. Ponsonby, Bart. - no prize for guessing that middle initial - was there, bold as brass. He's a florid bloke of forty, has a stall on the Corner Green, a little triangular plot beyond the main market. You go up three steps to it. Make sure you don't fall off the raised little plateau, where eager tourists sometimes come a cropper.

  Kindly souls rush to help you up, meanwhile nicking your purse, wallet, and every credit card and groat you possess. Subtlemongers, our ubiquitous pickpockets, are about, so beware.

  'Wotcher, Sir Ponsonby.'

  'Lovejoy, old sport! What brings you to this urban decay?'

  He seemed delighted to
see me. Sir Ponsonby was once headmaster of an imposing public school - which every other country calls private - and was deposed for embezzling funds. He's never looked back. He dresses flamboyantly - deerstalker hat, Sherlock Holmes cape of expensive Harris tweed, plus-fours and spats. He sports a monocle, muttonchop whiskers, knows Ancient Greek, Latin. He's one of the few stallholders in this most fabled antiques market to sport his own sign above his barrow.

  The rest go anonymous into the good fight, or have discreet cards.

  One reservation: Sir P wears wren's feathers in his hat. It's a hideous country custom.

  St Stephen's Day, village lads beat the hedgerows, chanting a gleeful ancient rhyme -

  I'll not give it, not wanting to encourage grue. They kill wrens. The tiny corpses are plucked, and the feathers worn as adornments until next year, when they do it again.

  Wren feathers in your titfer, bad mark from me.

  'Sent,' I said. 'Somebody duffed a spark.' Translation: faked a gem. Heaven knows why we don't just use English, a language for which there's been a transient vogue, but antiques has its own lingo. What with that and Cockney rhyming slang, it's a wonder London is able to communicate at all.

  'Oh, dear!' he boomed. Sir Ponsonby's notion of subtlety is to bellow as if addressing an Eton prize day. 'Allow me to present my new apprentice, Miss Moiya December.'

  'Er, wotcher, miss.'

  A beautiful lass was coiled on a stool beside Ponsonby's barrow. She was gloriously blonde. Everything about her shone, teeth, lips, eyes, tan leather coat. In bed you could have used her as a nightlight. I'm ever in hope. Religion did wrong, making sex a sin.

  We'd all be holy, if Moiya took the evensong collection of a Sunday.

  'Is this he?' she asked Sir Ponsonby, as if I'd been expected.

  'Yeah verily, I be he,' I said. Which raised the question, who she?

  Ponsonby leant to confide some secret, and thundered, 'Moiya's learning the trade, Lovejoy!' He swelled like Mister Toad. I recognized a gay quip on its way, and stepped back a yard. 'Isn't the trade lucky?' And he guffawed.