The Pritchett Century (56 page)

The old lady sniggered.

“I was jealous,” said the old lady in a moping voice.

“Ah you would be I expect,” Harry agreed.

“Yes,” moped the old lady.

“And then,” said Harry giving a loud slap to his knee. “There was this ring at the bell …”

The old lady looked suspiciously at him.

“The same as the time I told you about, when we docked at Marseilles—with that Algerian. Short black socks he had on and …”

The old lady woke up out of her moping, offended.

“Algerian! He was not an Algerian. He was a Cypriot. I was very surprised to hear a ring at that time of the evening. I thought it must have been one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses. I went to the door and there he was, this little dark Cypriot with a bottle sticking out of his pocket—I thought he was drunk. He asked for Mr Charles. ‘There is no Mr Charles here,’ I said. ‘What number do you want?’ ‘Six’, he said.”

“And you were four!” said Harry.

“ ‘This is four,’ I said pointing to the number on the door. Well you’d think people could read. ‘Number six is upstairs.’ And I shut the door quickly, I was frightened.”

“You can mark a man with a bottle,” said Harry. “I’ve seen that too.”

“I heard him ring the bell upstairs. I heard talking. And then it was all quiet. Then suddenly I heard a shout and I thought the ceiling was coming down, like furniture being thrown about.”

“An argument?” said Harry.

“An argument,” said the old lady. She tightened her shawl round her and leaned back as if she were warding off blows.

“Screams, Harry! Lobster, Harry! Glass! And Deb rushing out to the landing making a horrible squeal like a dog being run over. I rushed out of our flat and up the stairs and there was Deb in her petticoat shrieking and just as I got to her the Cypriot rushed out with ketchup or blood, I don’t know which, on his boots and ran downstairs. I pulled Deb out of the way. Her scream had stopped in her wide open mouth and she was pointing into the lobby of the flat. There was Charles getting up from the floor, in his shirt sleeves with blood all over his face. You couldn’t walk for glass.”

The old lady stared at Harry and, picking up Baudelaire’s poems, contemptuously threw them to the end of the bed. Then slowly she smiled and Harry smiled. They smiled at each other with admiration.

“Yes,” said Harry with a nod. “It’s feasible.” The old lady nodded back.

“It’s feasible all right,” Harry said. “The same as I was saying happened in Marseilles when I was in the
Grantham
—Egyptian onions
from Alexandria—you could smell us all over the port. I went ashore with the second mate and we were having a drink in one of those cafés with tables on the street—only there five minutes and this Algerian comes in, a young fellow. He walks straight between the tables to the head waiter who was flicking flies off the fruit and shoots him dead. Not a word spoken. Same idea. The head waiter had been fiddling chicken and brandy, selling it on the side and when the boss tumbled to it, the waiter said this Algerian kitchen boy—that is what he was—had done it and the boss fired him. Same story. They’re very hot-blooded down there. It was all in the papers.”

“The Cypriot was kitchen boy at the club. Champagne, lobster, caviar, it all came from there! Week after week,” said the old lady.

“Yes,” said Harry.

“We kept it out of the papers, of course,” said the old lady loftily.

“You don’t want a thing like that in the papers,” Harry agreed. “Just sweep up and say nothing, like that time at the Queens when Mr Armitage …”

“We had a reason,” said the old lady. “I’ll tell you something I never told you before. When Deb came screaming to the door, I didn’t tell you—she had a broken bottle in her hand.”

“Is that so!” said Harry very startled.

“It’s true. That is what happened. It was Deb that did the fighting not the Cypriot. It was Deb.”

“God Almighty,” said Harry. “And she married him after that!”

“She didn’t marry him,” said the old lady. “I know I said she did, but she didn’t. ‘I wouldn’t marry a man who cheated like that,’ she said. She wouldn’t speak to him. Or look at him. She wouldn’t get a doctor to look after him. He had a terrible cut on his forehead. I had to clean it and bandage it and get him to the hospital and nurse him. She wouldn’t go near him. And it wasn’t because he’d cheated. Now she knew about him, the secret, she didn’t want him. She was a girl like that. It was a pity. He did well for himself. I showed you the postcard of his hotel—it must be one of the biggest in Cannes. When you sit like that with your feet turned out, you remind me of him. He could tell the tale too,” she suddenly laughed. “You’re the double.”

And then the landlady came in with tea and put the tray across the old lady’s lap.

“There,” she said. “Tea for two as the saying is. And don’t you tire her out, Mr O’Hara. Another quarter of an hour.”

The old lady frowned at the closed door when the landlady went and listened for her steps going down the stairs.

“I
could have
married him,” the old lady said.

“Now this woman, Harry,” she said quickly. “With the horse. She was after you, wasn’t she? Why did she make you come up and get that horse down? Why couldn’t she ride it down, she rode it up. You’re trying to throw dust in my eyes …”

“No, it was a fine horse and Irish bred,” said Harry. “She bought it off a man who had lost his leg …”

The afternoon had darkened. The bird that had been sitting on the tree all day had gone. Harry said “Good-bye” to the old lady. “See you next Thursday,” he said.

“And don’t be late. Don’t let that woman at the Queens keep you. It’s your day off,” she called as he stood by the open door at the top of the stairs.

He went back along the front, listening to the laughter of the sea in the dark and then into the bar of the Queens Hotel. But because it was his half day off, on the other side of it, as a customer, drinking a small whisky and listening to what people had to say.

(1969)

August’s? On the Bath Road? Twice-Five August—of course I knew August: ivory man. And the woman who lived with him—her name was Price. She’s dead. He went out of business years ago. He’s probably dead too. I was in the trade only three or four years but I soon knew every antique dealer in the South of England. I used to go to all the sales. Name another. Naseley of Close Place? Jades, Asiatics, never touched India; Alsop of Ramsey? Ephemera. Marbright, High Street, Boxley? Georgian silver. Fox? Are you referring to Fox of Denton or Fox of Camden—William Morris, art nouveau—or the Fox Brothers in the Portobello Road, the eldest stuttered? They had an uncle in Brighton who went mad looking for old Waterford. Hindmith? No, he was just a copier. Ah now, Pliny! He was a very different cup of tea: Caughley ware. (Coalport took it over in 1821.) I am speaking of specialities; furniture is the bread and butter of the trade. It keeps a man going while his mind is on his speciality and within that speciality there is one object he broods on from one year to the next, most of his life; the thing a man would commit murder to get his hands on if he had the nerve, but I have never heard of a dealer who had; theft perhaps. A stagnant lot. But if he does get hold of that thing he will never let it go or certainly not to a customer—dealers only really like dealing
among themselves—but every other dealer in the trade knows he’s got it. So they sit in their shops reading the catalogues and watching one another. Fox broods on something Alsop has. Alsop has his eye on Pliny and Pliny puts a hand to one of his big red ears when he hears the name of August. At the heart of the trade is lust but a lust that is a dream paralysed by itself. So paralysed that the only release, the only hope, as everyone knows, is disaster; a bankruptcy, a divorce, a court case, a burglary, trouble with the police, a death. Perhaps then the grip on some piece of treasure will weaken and fall into the watcher’s hands and even if it goes elsewhere he will go on dreaming about it.

What was it that Pliny, Gentleman Pliny, wanted of a man like August who was not much better than a country junk dealer? When I opened up in London I thought it was a particular Staffordshire figure, but Pliny was far above that. These figures fetch very little though one or two are hard to find: The Burning of Cranmer, for example. Very few were made; it never sold and the firm dropped it. I was young and eager and one day when a collector, a scholarly man, as dry as a stick, came to my shop and told me he had a complete collection except for this piece, I said in my innocent way: “You’ve come to the right man. I’m fairly certain I can get it for you—at a price.” This was a lie; but I was astonished to see the old man look at me with contempt, then light up like a fire and when he left, look back furtively at me; he had betrayed his lust.

You rarely see an antique shop standing on its own. There are usually three or four together watching one another: I asked the advice of the man next door who ran a small boatyard on the canal in his spare time and he said, “Try Pliny down the Green: he knows everyone.” I went “over the water,” to Pliny; he was closed but I did find him at last in a sale-room. Pliny was marking his catalogue and waiting for the next lot to come up and he said to me in a scornful way, slapping a young man down, “August’s got it.” I saw him wink at the man next to him as I left.

I had bought myself a fast red car that annoyed the older dealers and I drove down the other side of Newbury on the Bath Road. August’s was one of four little shops opposite the Lion Hotel on the main road at the end of the town where the country begins and there I got
my first lesson. The place was closed. I went across to the bar of the hotel and August was there, a fat man of sixty in wide trousers and a drip to his nose who was paying for drinks from a bunch of dirty notes in his jacket pocket and dropping them on the floor. He was drunk and very offended when I picked a couple up and gave them to him. He’d just come back from Newbury races. I humoured him but he kept rolling about and turning his back to me half the time and so I blurted out:

“I’ve just been over at the shop. You’ve got some Staffordshire I hear.”

He stood still and looked me up and down and the beer swelled in him.

“Who may you be?” he said with all the pomposity of drink. I told him. I said right out, “Staffordshire. Cranmer’s Burning.” His face went dead and the colour of liver.

“So is London,” he said and turned away to the bar.

“I’m told you might have it. I’ve got a collector,” I said.

“Give this lad a glass of water,” said August to the barmaid. “He’s on fire.”

There is nothing more to say about the evening or the many other visits I made to August except that it has a moral to it and that I had to help August over to his shop where an enormous woman much taller than he in a black dress and a little girl of fourteen or so were at the door waiting for him. The girl looked frightened and ran a few yards from the door as August and his woman collided belly to belly.

“Come back,” called the woman.

The child crept back. And to me the woman said, “We’re closed,” and having got the two inside, shut the door in my face.

The moral is this: if The Burning of Cranmer was August’s treasure, it was hopeless to try and get it before he had time to guess what mine was. It was clear to him I was too new to the trade to have one. And, in fact, I don’t think he had the piece. Years later, I found my collector had left his collection complete to a private museum in Leicester when he died. He had obtained what he craved, a small immortality in being memorable for his relation to a minor work of art.

I know what happened at August’s that night. In time his woman,
Mrs Price, bellowed it to me, for her confidences could be heard down the street. August flopped on his bed and while he was sleeping off the drink she got the bundles of notes out of his pockets and counted them. She always did this after his racing days. If he had lost she woke him up and shouted at him; if he had made a profit she kept quiet and hid it under her clothes in a chest of drawers. I went down from London again and again but August was not there.

Most of the time these shops are closed. You rattle the door handle; no reply. Look through the window and each object inside stands gleaming with something like a smile of malice, especially on plates and glass; the furniture states placidly that it has been in better houses than you will ever have, the silver speaks of vanished servants. It speaks of the dead hands that have touched it; even the dust is the dust of families that have gone. In the shabby places—and August’s was shabby—the dealer is like a toadstool that has grown out of the debris. There was only one attractive object in August’s shop—as I say—he went in for ivories and on a table at the back was a set of white and red chessmen set out on a board partly concealed by a screen. I was tapping my feet impatiently looking through the window when I was astonished to see two of the chessmen had moved; then I saw a hand, a long thin work-reddened hand appear from behind the screen and move one of the pieces back. Life in the place! I rattled the door handle again and the child came from behind the screen. She had a head loaded with heavy black hair to her shoulders and a white heart-shaped face and wore a skimpy dress with small pink flowers on it. She was so thin that she looked as if she would blow away in fright out of the place, but instead, pausing on tiptoe, she swallowed with appetite; her sharp eyes had seen my red car outside the place. She looked back cautiously at the inner door of the shop and then ran to unlock the shop door. I went in.

“What are you up to?” I said. “Playing chess?”

“I’m teaching my children,” she said, putting up her chin like a child of five. “Do you want to buy something?”

At once Mrs Price was there shouting:

“Isabel. I told you not to open the door. Go back into the room.”

Mrs Price went to the chessboard and put the pieces back in their places.

“She’s a child,” said Mrs Price, accusing me.

And when she said this Mrs Price blew herself out to a larger size and then her sullen face went black and babyish as if she had travelled out of herself for a beautiful moment. Then her brows levelled and she became sullen again.