“How many items could you’ve made something on, Lovejoy?” Dan said eventually. The assembled company leaned forward.
“Sooner or later? Ten. Three, if you mean at the next reasonable-sized town.” I spend my life being ashamed of myself. It’s another of my unpaid full-time jobs.
Sidoli gave a low moan. Calamity Sadie uttered one grievous sob. The rest exhaled despair and gin fumes.
Francie spoke to the row of somber faces. I swear three of them were in surgical shock.
She said quietly, “I told you he was honest, even if he is stupid. You wouldn’t listen.”
“Here,” I began indignantly, but Sidoli’s hand lifted to shtope me.
Big Chas had cheered up. “So we must hymns of welcome sing in strains of holy joy.”
“Are you sure that’s right?” I asked Chas. “Isn’t it: And we…?”
Big Chas frowned. “You sure, Lovejoy? It’s the Instantis adventum Deum, isn’t it, where—”
“Ask Ern,” I said helpfully. “It’s Hymns Ancient and Modern.”
“He’s off his frigging head,” Sidoli screamed. “Right! That does it! Francie, you pick a helper to put up the money and rig a punter system.”
Francie examined the faces. “Big Chas,” she decided.
“No,” Sidoli ruled. “Enough hymns in this fairground.” Eeen eess foyergron.
“I will,” Joan said quietly. Her first words all that session. Maybe all year.
“Right,” Sidoli said brokenly. He had his face in his hands. “Now get him out.” Dan jerked his head. I left.
Within half an hour the new system was operating perfectly. By that is meant that the poor public were being robbed blind. Situation normal.
In case you ever take your Sheraton cabinet to one, here are the hallmarks of the Great Antique Road Show Con Trick:
You are put into a queue and given a number (“to make sure of your place…”). The
“expert” values your great-granddad’s Crimean War medals, and off you go. Maybe he’ll even scribble the valuation on your number. As you leave, you’ll be approached by somebody apparently from the public—in the queue, just arriving, just leaving—who will say that his uncle/brother/auntie/granddad just happens to collect medals. And he’ll offer you about a quarter of the valuation marked on your number. “Good heavens,”
you cry, recoiling. “Certainly not! They’re worth four times that!” With great reluctance, the chap ups his offer, and finally, in considerable distress, offers you the sum named by the expert. You’d be a fool to refuse, right? Because the great London expert’s just valued them, right? So you sell your granddad’s medals and go on your way rejoicing with the gelt.
And the passerby takes the medals, grinning all over his crooked face. Why the grin?
Because he’s the so-called expert’s partner. The “expert” of course grossly undervalued your medals. To make it worth their while, the average markdown (i.e., underestimate) must be what crooks call “thirties.” That is, they’ll never pay more than thirty percent of the current auctionable value, not for anything. Anything higher than that is going dangerously close to a fair market price, you see.
Francie used Betty, in a little colored stumper’s booth, to give out the numbered tickets.
She herself scraped the punters, as the saying is, with two youngsters hastily borrowed from the electric generators. Joan, as she’d promised, put up the money, silently fetching the bundle of notes from her caravan in a grocery basket. She gave me her transfixing stare from those opal-gray eyes, and returned to her Devil Riding. I said thank you, nodded to Betty on her perch, and we were off.
Some things ruin pride. I told myself this crookery was all in a good cause, the preservation of Lovejoy Antiques, Inc. That and safely heading north to meet Shona McGunn. But I didn’t feel pleased with myself and my progress any more. Like I said not long since, everybody lusts. I only wish we knew what for.
« ^ »
—— 8 ——
I’m not the only fraud in and around antiques. Look at names, for instance.
“Dresden china” is really a descriptive term. The truth is there never was a porcelain factory at Dresden. The famed Royal Saxony porcelain factory started in 1709 was a distance away, at Meissen. The patron was King Augustus the Strong, whose domain took in Poland and Saxony, which is why the so-called “Dresden” mark is actually his AR
Augustus Rex monogram. There’s a further truth, too: They weren’t up to much at the beginning, mostly copying styles and adopting colors from the more sophisticated Chinese. This is why the early stuff looks eastern—robes on the figures, stiff-looking mandarins and clumsy attendants. Artistically they’re dud, not a patch on the later stuff.
But it goes big among collectors and dealers because it’s rare. The modern dementia for rarity’s a pathetic revelation of how little we know. I mean, this pen’s rare because I made it myself from hawthorn, not another like it in the world, but it’s still not worth a bent groat. Cynics say “Dresden china firstly copied Chinese, secondly Venetian, and after that anybody,” but it’s harsh criticism because once Joachim Kändler arrived about 1730, they really took off. His figures are lively original objects you never tire of: pretty ladies in farthingales and yellow-lined cloaks, hussars, dancers.
The night we left Penrith I sat mesmerized long after the fairground closed and the folk had all gone. I’d bought a broken porcelain figure of a Harlequin. He was seated on a white stump in his checkered costume and grinning mask. Black cap in one hand, the other to hold what had once been a jug, now broken off and lost. A junk bloke had lugged in a great wooden box of assorted porcelains and slammed it on the table.
“Fifty quid the lot, mister,” he said. “Good and bad.”
“For a flyer, yes.”
Without looking, I’d humped the box to the floor, got Francie to pay him. My chest was clamoring like Easter Sunday. Something pure and thrillingly antique lurked down among the clag. It was the Harlequin, when I looked. Harlequins are the most vigorous of Kändler’s porcelains, these and dancing ladies and waistcoated gentlemen. They were often in pairs, but one swallow does make a summer.
“The show’s pulling up, Lovejoy.” Carol and Mike ran the peas-and-mash booth, a noisy homely couple with their six spherical children. Carol had an idea it might advertise her grub if the antiques expert was seen dining off her elegant edibles. “There’s a bowl and a brew-up for you.”
“Oh. Right. Ta.”
As the crews fell on the fairground and began dismantling it, I had the pasty and peas while evaluating the haul. A piteously worn slender wedding ring with the thick broad gold band that Victorians called the keeper ring, to be worn distal to the wedding ring and prevent its loss. There was an old love letter some young woman had told me was her granny’s, and that she needed money for her baby… Her boyfriend, a flashy nerk with gold teeth and a giant motorbike, had waited outside. I’d paid up without a second thought.
“Lovejoy.” Francie was there, with Joan. And Sidoli, and his two stalwart lads off the electric generators. They still hadn’t shaved. “Sid wants to know what the take is.”
“Take?” I said blankly. “You mean gelt? Nowt.”
“No money?” Sidoli’s lads seethed, leaned in.
“Let him tell you, Sid,” Francie said. “I’ve seen Lovejoy work before.”
“What you pay for this?” Sidoli pointed to the letter.
I shrugged. “Fiver. Can’t remember.”
Sidoli paled. “Can’t even remember?”
“He’s been had,” the slinkiest lad said. He held a length of metal rod. “It was a bird, crying poverty. She was dressed to the nines. With a bike bloke in leather. Stank of booze, both of them. She told Lovejoy the tale. He paid her, not a word. They went off laughing.”
“You’re a trusting sod, Mr. Sidoli.” I’m not keen on sarcasm, but it has its uses. This time it stopped him signaling his two nephews to annihilate me. “No need to read the letter. Just glance. It’s in two alphabets. Called ‘messenger writing’—a letter within a letter. Sort of secret code. The young couple who brought it had made the story up, granny’s love letter and all that. Messenger writing of that style was popular during the Great Civil War—sieges, politics, family conflicts, elopements, heaven-knows-what. The subject will determine the price. But 1642, or I’m not me.”