Firefly Gadroon Read online

  There’s a narrow footpath down the brook. It cuts off a good half-mile because the road has to run round the valley’s north shoulder. I set off along the overgrown path, Lovejoy among the birds and flowers. Some people actually leave civilization to tramp our forests and fields, the poor loons. One couple I know do it every Saturday, when they could be among lovely smoky houses and deep in the beautiful grime of a town’s antiques. No accounting for taste.

  As I trudged I remembered Maud Endacott’s face and got the oddest feeling. She’d been so determined, sure of herself. She’d paid over the true market value for a little cage – yet she didn’t know what it was for, where it was from, its age or its value. And from the way she’d behaved she’d been prepared to pay every shekel she possessed to get her undeserving hands on it. None of it made sense.

  For the last furlong I kept thinking about the exquisite Japanese masterpieces of the Utamaro school. His lovely woodblock prints don’t look much at first, but with familiarity their dazzling eroticism blinds you. The truth is, Utamaro loved women. Women are everywhere, even – or maybe especially – in his The Fantastic Print-Shop series. You can’t help chuckling to yourself. Of course he tried his hand at prostitutes, star courtesans and all, as well. The point is that the brilliant lecher made lovely erotic art out of everything he saw. There’s nobody else in the Ukiyoe School quite like him.

  The reason the famous old Japanese prints kept haunting me as I walked was the fantastic lively detail they crammed in among all that sexy eroticism. One famous picture came into my mind’s eye as I entered my long weed-crammed garden. Eishosai Choki’s lovely silvered night painting, say 1785, give or take an hour. In it, a luscious courtesan holds a small cage on a cord. It’s a firefly cage. And, straight out of that desirable print two centuries old, had come the little bamboo cage I’d auctioned off to Maud Endacott this morning.

  My thoughts had gone full circle. I fumbled for my key, and found I wasn’t smiling any more.

  After swilling some coffee and chucking the birds a ton of diced cheese I felt a lot better. Rose the post-girl had called and pulled my leg about fancying Jeannie Henson who now runs old Mrs Weddell’s grocer’s shop, our village’s one emporium. ‘Make an honest woman of her,’ Rose cracked merrily, shovelling a cascade of bills on to my porch. ‘I would,’ I gave back, sidefooting them aside for the dustbin, ‘but her husband’s a big bloke.’ She mounted her bike and bounced suggestively on the saddle. ‘That’s never put you off before,’ she said sweetly. ‘Get on with you or I’ll tan your bum,’ was the best I could manage to that. ‘Oooh, Lovejoy. When?’ She pushed off down my gravel path to the nonexistent gate. I waved as she pedalled up the lane, grinning. Funny how women have this knack of always getting the last word. Something they’re born with. Usually it’s irritating as hell. Today, though, it cheered me up and I went back in smiling.

  I fried tomatoes for dinner, dipping them up with brown bread and margarine. They’re all right but the actual eating’s not a pretty sight. I had tried to make a jelly for pudding, only the bloody things never set for me. It’s supposed to be easy, just pour water on these cubes and hang about for a few hours, but I’ve never had one set yet. I always finish up drinking them and they’re not so good like that. By the time I’d washed up it was nearly time for Drummer. I’m always nervous at this stage, so I whiled away the time phoning a false advert to our local paper.

  This is the commonest of all secondary tricks in the antiques game, and my favourite. I’m always at it. It creates a demand for something you want to sell, like this Bible box I had. I had to cash it in urgently, my one remaining asset.

  I dialled, putting my poshest voice on because I knew Elsie was today’s newspaper adverts girl and she’d rumble my trick unless I was careful. I used to know her once.

  ‘An advert for the antiques column, miss,’ I bleated in falsetto. ‘Wanted urgently, English Bible box, oak preferred. Nineteenth century or older.’

  ‘Address to send the bill, please?’ Elsie put her poshest voice on too. Cheat. She’s even commoner than me.

  ‘Ah. Hang on, love.’ I fumbled quickly through the phone book at random. Riffling the pages a name caught my eye. Oho. That posh address which kept getting burgled of its antiques, the careless berks. Hall Lodge Manor in Lesser Cornard. Who deserved conning more? I read it out in full to Elsie, pleased at the idea of giving that snooty village something to talk about. ‘And please include the name,’ I added, still falsetto. ‘Mrs Hepplestone. Send me the bill.’ Damn the cost.

  Happily I settled down with Hayward’s book on antique fakery, pleased at having ‘done a breader’, as we dealers say. By tomorrow evening enough dealers would have read the advert, and my Bible box would be in great demand once I flashed it. Tough on poor old Mrs Hepplestone, though. Still, I thought indignantly, what was the cost of a grotty newspaper advert, for heaven’s sake? And serve her right for being careless with her antiques. If I remembered right she’d been in the local papers at least three times for having her place done over. Paintings, ornaments and medallions had all gone in a steady stream. You’d think they’d learn.

  The knocker clouted three times, bringing me back to earth. Drummer, I thought nervously. I got up to answer the door, my palms sticky like a kid at school meeting his teacher, and me the best antiques divvie in the business. I ask you.

  ‘How do, son.’ There he stood, looking like nothing on earth. Old tartan beret, scarf at the trail, battered clogs, shabby overcoat and enough stubble to thatch a roof. He lives down on the estuary with this donkey since he retired, giving rides to children. What a bloody waste of the world’s last surviving handsilversmith. You’d think he’d live better in his old age, but he likes drunken idleness.

  ‘Er, wotcher, Drummer.’

  ‘Nice day.’ Nervously I started to lead the way round the side of the cottage. ‘How did it go, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Er, not so good, Drummer,’ I confessed nervously.

  He smiled and paused to thumb a bushel of tarry tobacco into his pipe. ‘Improving?’

  ‘Well . . .’ My throat had gone dry. I waited with nervous politeness while he did the fire magic.

  The old man is gnome-sized, a mobile bookend. He’s one of these blue-eyed Pennine men who are gnarled and grey-haired from birth. They seem a special breed, somehow, weirdly gifted and imaginative beyond the ordinary. They tend to speak in odd sentences which have most of the meaning in the breaths between. He looks dead average – until you see him at a benchful of raw silver. Then his rheumy old eyes spark and clear and his arthritic hands instantly become as tough as a wrestler’s and graceful as a temple dancer’s.

  In a puff of grey tobacco smoke we walked into the back garden, Drummer’s smile twinkling brighter at the unkempt state of it all. I ignored his silent criticism. Plants have enough troubles without me making their lives a misery.

  My forge is actually a garage with a couple of brick structures – furnace and hot-sand table – erected near one wall. There’s an end window opposite the up-and-over door. That’s about it, except for a bench made out of old packing cases for tools and any stray pieces of wood I can cadge.

  I offered Drummer the only stool. He sat and reached across the bench for my gadroon. I stared. The instant transformation in him gets me every time. It’s remarkable. From an old codger in clogs he becomes slick, certain, completely in command. He hefted the heavy steel plate about with casual ease. It cripples me just to hold it upright.

  ‘This it, Lovejoy?’ he said at last, squinting along the rim.

  My heart sank. He actually meant: and you’ve brought me here to see this travesty, Lovejoy, you useless berk?

  ‘Er, yes, Drummer. That’s it.’

  He laid it down and smoked a bit. I looked dismally at my gadroon and waited for the verdict while Drummer gazed out on the bushes. It was honestly the best I could do. My arms and elbows still creaked.

  I’d better explain here about the Reverse Gadroon because it
’s important.

  I’d been lucky to find Drummer, lucky beyond belief. He’s the last of the real hammermen, a genuine ‘flatworker’.

  In days of yore silversmithing was silversmithing, every task done by eye and hand. The polishers, modelmen, finishers, all did their work. They actually created. And of all these master craftsmen the greatest was the hammerman, because he had the terrifying responsibility of beating plain silver into a thing of miraculous beauty. Without skill and love the final form would be piteous, sterile. But with these two utterly human qualities the luscious virgin silver catches fire. The design draws life and love from its hammerman, finally glowing and throbbing with a pulsating beauty of its own. This explains why some silversmiths were superb, while some silver – even good antique – is only moderately good. There’s a million designs, almost as many patterns as silversmiths. But of them all, none is so difficult, risky and beautiful as the Reverse Gadroon.

  Drummer used to be an apprentice silversmith at Gurrard’s in the Haymarket. Now he’s the last of the line. I first realized who this old duffer was in a pub about a year ago, and just couldn’t believe my luck. I might have missed it if I’d been casually gazing the other way. Through the barroom fug I saw this pair of crooked old hands take a bent halfpenny from the Shove-Ha’penny board and straighten it against the brass pub-rail with a flick of a metal ashtray. Mesmerized, before I knew what I was doing I’d pushed through the mob in a second and collared the old scruff, and demanded, ‘Can you do that trick again?’ Everybody laughed, thinking me sloshed.

  ‘Aye, son,’ he’d smiled. We were in people’s way trying to reach the bar. He took the coin and tapped once, bending it literally like paper. Then straightened it perfectly flat again with another tap on the rail. And all the time he looked at me, smiling.

  I’d cleared my throat, daring the question. ‘Have you ever heard of a Reverse Gadroon?’

  His amusement lit with interest at the reverence in my voice. ‘I’ve done it, son. Now and then,’ he said, by which he meant for half a century.

  And that was it. There and then I’d started learning from him, twice a week in my homemade forge. I even began exercises trying to strengthen my arms and shoulders, with dismal results.

  It sounds easy. You take a tray of solid silver and hold it by the bottom edge over a patterned tool held in a vice. The idea is to hammer the silver’s perfect upper surface over the die, thereby impressing the die’s design. Then you move the tray a fraction, and hammer again. Do this all the way round, using even blows every time. If you’ve held it right, judged every single blow to perfection, struck with the massive hammer at exactly the right spot and with the same force, if you’ve turned the silver exactly the same distance for every blow and never stopped until the whole piece is finished, and if you are possessed of Olympian strength, endless stamina and unerring judgement, then you’ve done a Reverse Gadroon. But make a fractional error, pause a split second or weaken, and you’ve ruined the whole solid chunk of precious silver. Nowadays machines do it all, without the slightest risk of a human error – or human love – creeping in. It’s called progress.

  Drummer’s the last living original silversmith. I don’t mind his eccentricities, that he’s been made redundant by the onward rush of mechanization. I don’t mind that for the past twenty years he’s lived in a shack down on the estuary giving donkey-rides for a living. To me Drummer’s a great man, a genius. But when he’s gone, God forbid, I’m determined there’ll still be somebody to pass on his priceless skill of the Reverse Gadroon.

  Me.

  Only at this particular moment I’d made another balls-up. Drummer gazed at me, puffing.

  ‘Not so good, son, is it?’

  ‘No,’ I said miserably. The last time he told me off like this I felt suicidal, except living’s hard enough as it is. I practise on thin steel sheet, cut in ovals. To take the weight I’d rigged up a wooden grip on a counterpoised cord. Old Drummer screwed his eyes at it.

  ‘Look, son,’ he said at last. ‘Pretty soon you’ll have the strength. After that it’ll just be practice, direction and power.’

  That sounded hopeful. ‘And then I’ll do a proper silver pattern?’

  ‘No, son.’ He rummaged for more tobacco. ‘You’re a divvie, son. Stick to your trade.’

  ‘Sooner or later I’ll do a Reverse Gadroon,’ I said doggedly.

  ‘You’re too immersed in antiques, lad. A new hammered silver’s not antique. That’s why you’ll never do it, never in a million years.’

  I ticked off on my fingers, narked at the old duck egg. ‘Strength, Drummer. Practice. Direction. Level power,’ I snapped. ‘You said yourself I’ll soon—’

  ‘Give it up, son. Germoline could do better.’

  Germoline is his donkey. I watched his match flare between puffs. ‘Then what’s missing?’ I honestly couldn’t see.

  ‘Fire, son. In you.’ He rose sadly and gave me the stool. ‘Listen, Lovejoy. There’s no such thing as weakness, getting tired, making a mistake. It does itself.’ He opened the door. ‘When you’ve got the fire in you, the Reverse Gadroon does itself.’ He gave a slow grin. I was so mad I didn’t smile back.

  ‘But—’

  ‘You’ve got it for antiques, son. Not for new things.’ His gaze saddened me. ‘Got a motif?’

  I spoke without thinking. ‘A firefly,’ I said. Why I said that I’ll never know.

  ‘Fireflies? Never heard of a firefly gadroon, but why not?’ He nodded and made to go. ‘Might as well ruin a firefly pattern as any other, mate.’

  We parted after that, still friends, but me in low spirits.

  ‘Look, Drummer,’ I began at the gate. ‘Er, I’m a bit strapped . . .’

  He chuckled. ‘The money? Forget it, Lovejoy.’ I give him a quid every lesson when I can. I said I’d owe it. ‘I don’t need any fare. Joe’s picking me up at the chapel.’

  ‘Cheers, Drummer.’

  He gets a lift from a chap called Joe Poges, our coastguard on Drummer’s bit of coast, who comes into the village to see his sister. Her husband’s one of these characters mad on racing pigeons. Drummer sets them free on the river and they fly home again. Have you ever heard of such wasted effort?

  I stood until Drummer’s small figure had vanished up the lane. Then I went back into the garage and tried and tried on a new sheet of iron. All I did was make it look like a clinker. After an hour I sagged to a stop, sweating and exhausted.

  It had been a hell of a day. First losing the firefly cage like that. Then crossing Devlin and antagonizing Inspector Maslow. Then losing out with Maud. And last but not least getting the elbow from Drummer. Well, I thought in my cretinous innocence, it couldn’t get much worse, could it?

  I gave the day up and went back to reading Hayward on fakes.

  Chapter 4

  I’m not one of these constant blokes, urbane from cockshout to midnight. By the time the pubs opened I’d cheered up. Life is variation, after all, and I’m up and down with the best of them. Late that afternoon Tinker rang in with word of an inlaid early Victorian knifebox going cheap at Susan Palmer’s antique shop on the wharf. And he’d sent Lemuel after a set of Shibayama knife-handles in Dedham but didn’t sound very optimistic. Neither was I, to put it bluntly, because Lemuel knows more about astrophysics than antiques. Anyway, the horse-racing at York never finishes till five and I knew he’d lose the bus fare on some nag because he always does. The good sets are real ivory with inlays, the rare Shibayama being a composite of bronze and iridescent stones. (Always check that it is ivory and not synthetic ivorine; and the more varied the inlays – insects, birds, butterflies – the more pricey.)

  ‘I’ll bet,’ I told him sardonically over the blower.

  ‘Straight up, Lovejoy,’ he croaked. ‘Brad’s going over tomorrow.’

  Oho, I thought. Brad’s mostly flintlock weapons and lately Japanese militaria, but he never goes anywhere without good reason.

  I decided after a quick think. ‘
Okay, Tinker. Suss it.’

  He caught me before I could hang up. ‘Lovejoy, she come after you today.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘That sexy souper, the one with the big bristols.’ He cackled evilly. ‘You’ll be all right with her, Lovejoy—’

  ‘Shut it,’ I told him. He did, but I could still feel his gappy grin down the wire. ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘White Hart, eightish. That all right?’

  I let him go, feeling much chirpier. Maybe she’d seen sense and wanted to sell me the firefly cage after all. Perhaps it wasn’t what she’d expected. People commonly make this sort of mistake, assume some trinket box has secret compartments crammed with jewellery. You have to learn that the antiques game is one of dashed hopes.

  Served her bloody well right.

  Dusk was falling as I plodded up the lane. I have a lump of corrosion shaped like an old Austin Ruby somewhere in the long grass but its road licence ran out at an inconvenient moment of poverty. So until I strike a Rembrandt or two it waits, patiently oxidizing in the evening mists, and I walk everywhere. We have no street lights owing to the simple fact that we have no streets. Our three pubs are the only nightlife, except for a maniacal crowd of sweaty badminton players straining ligaments in the village hall, and a church choir murdering Palestrina twice weekly to the utter despair of our new choir mistress. The desirable Hepzibah Smith is a pneumatic young graduate from the Royal College of Music. She was attracted to our village not so much by an impressive musical tradition as the job we wangled for her bloke, a gigantic pear-shaped blacksmithing hulk called Claude who farriers horses on a local farm. Nobody laughs at his name, unlike mine. I could hear our choir from the path through the graveyard as they lumbered through the Agnus Dei. It came on to rain about then, heavenly retribution I suppose.