Kiss Kiss (8 page)

      
“I thought maybe you were looking at something,” Rummins
said. The wide frog-mouth widened a fraction further into a
crafty grin, showing the stubs of several broken teeth.
      
“No, no,” Mr Boggis said. “Oh dear me, no. It’s just my heart.
I’m so sorry. It happens every now and then. But it goes away
quite quickly. I’ll be all right in a couple of minutes.”
      
He
must
have time to think, he told himself. More important
still, he must have time to compose himself thoroughly before
he said another word. Take it gently, Boggis. And whatever
you do, keep calm. These people may be ignorant, but they
are not stupid. They are suspicious and wary and sly. And if it is
really true—not it
can’t
be, it
can’t
be true . . .
      
He was holding one hand up over his eyes in a gesture of
pain, and now, very carefully, secretly, he made a little crack
between two of the fingers and peeked through.
      
Sure enough, the thing was still there, and on this occasion
he took a good long look at it. Yes—he had been right the
first time! There wasn’t the slightest doubt about it! It was
really unbelievable!
      
What he saw was a piece of furniture that any expert would
have given almost anything to acquire. To a layman, it might
not have appeared particularly impressive, especially when
covered over as it was with dirty white paint, but to Mr
Boggis it was a dealer’s dream. He knew, as does every other
dealer in Europe and America, that among the most celebrated
and coveted examples of eighteenth-century English furniture
in existence are the three famous pieces known as “The
Chippendale Commodes.” He knew their history backwards—that
the first was “discovered” in 1920, in a house at Moreton-in-Marsh,
and was sold at Sotheby’s the same year; that the
other two turned up in the same auction rooms a year later,
both coming out of Raynham Hall, Norfolk. They all fetched
enormous prices. He couldn’t quite remember the exact figure
for the first one, or even the second, but he knew for certain
that the last one to be sold had fetched thirty-nine hundred
guineas. And that was in 1921! Today the same piece would
surely be worth ten thousand pounds. Some man, Mr Boggis
couldn’t remember his name, had made a study of these
commodes fairly recently and had proved that all three must have
come from the same workshop, for the veneers were all from
the same log, and the same set of templates had been used in
the construction of each. No invoices had been found for any
of them, but all the experts were agreed that these three commodes
could have been executed only by Thomas Chippendale
himself, with his own hands, at the most exalted period in his
career.
      
And here, Mr Boggis kept telling himself as he peered
cautiously through the crack in his fingers, here was the fourth
Chippendale Commode! And
he
had found it! He would be
rich! He would also be famous! Each of the other three was
known throughout the furniture world by a special name—The
Chastleton Commode, The First Raynham Commode, The
Second Raynham Commode. This one would go down in
history as The Boggis Commode! Just imagine the faces of
the boys up there in London when they got a look at it
tomorrow morning! And the luscious offers coming in from
the big fellows over in the West End—Frank Partridge,
Mallett, Jetley, and the rest of them! There would be a
picture of it in
The Times
, and it would say, “The very fine
Chippendale Commode which was recently discovered by Mr
Cyril Boggis, a London dealer. . . .” Dear God, what a stir he
was going to make!
      
This one here, Mr Boggis thought, was almost exactly
similar to the Second Raynham Commode. (All three, the
Chastleton and the two Raynhams, differed from one another
in a number of small ways.) It was a most impressive handsome
affair, built in the French rococo style of Chippendale’s
Directoire period, a kind of large fat chest-of-drawers set upon
four carved and fluted legs that raised it about a foot from
the ground. There were six drawers in all, two long ones in
the middle and two shorter ones on either side. The serpentine
front was magnificently ornamented along the top and sides
and bottom, and also vertically between each set of drawers,
with intricate carvings of festoons and scrolls and clusters.
The brass handles, although partly obscured by white paint,
appeared to be superb. It was, of course, a rather “heavy”
piece, but the design had been executed with such elegance
and grace that the heaviness was in no way offensive.
      
“How’re you feeling now?” Mr Boggis heard someone
saying.
      
“Thank you, thank you, I’m much better already. It passes
quickly. My doctor says it’s nothing to worry about really so
long as I rest for a few minutes whenever it happens. Ah yes,”
he said, raising himself slowly to his feet. “That’s better. I’m
all right now.”
      
A trifle unsteadily, he began to move around the room
examining the furniture, one piece at a time, commenting
upon it briefly. He could see at once that apart from the
commode it was a very poor lot.
      
“Nice oak table,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s not old enough
to be of any interest. Good comfortable chairs, but quite modern, yes,
quite modern. Now this cupboard, well, it’s rather attractive, but again,
not valuable. This chest-of-drawers”—he walked casually past the
Chippendale Commode and gave it a little contemptuous flip with his
fingers—“worth a few pounds, I dare say, but no more. A rather
crude reproduction, I’m afraid. Probably made in Victorian times. Did
you paint it white?”
      
“Yes,” Rummins said. “Bert did it.”
      
“A very wise move. It’s considerably less offensive in white.”
      
“That’s a strong piece of furniture,” Rummins said. “Some
nice carving on it too.”
      
“Machine-carved,” Mr Boggis answered superbly, bending
down to examine the exquisite craftsmanship. “You can tell it
a mile off. But still, I suppose it’s quite pretty in its way. It
has its points.”
      
He began to saunter off, then he checked himself and turned
slowly back again. He placed the tip of one finger against the
point of his chin, laid his head over to one side, and frowned
as though deep in thought.
      
“You know what?” he said, looking at the commode, speaking so
casually that his voice kept trailing off. “I’ve just
remembered . . . I’ve been wanting a set of legs something
like that for a long time. I’ve got a rather curious table in my
own little home, one of those low things that people put in
front of the sofa, sort of a coffee-table, and last Michaelmas,
when I moved house, the foolish movers damaged the legs in
the most shocking way. I’m very fond of that table. I always
keep my big Bible on it, and all my sermon notes.”
      
He paused, stroking his chin with the finger. “Now I was
just thinking. These legs on your chest-of-drawers might be
very suitable. Yes, they might indeed. They could easily be
cut off and fixed on to my table.”
      
He looked around and saw the three men standing absolutely
still, watching him suspiciously, three pairs of eyes, all different
but equally mistrusting, small pig-eyes for Rummins, large
slow eyes for Claud, and two odd eyes for Bert, one of them
very queer and boiled and misty pale, with a little black dot
in the centre, like a fish eye on a plate.
      
Mr Boggis smiled and shook his head. “Come, come, what
on earth am I saying? I’m talking as though I owned the piece
myself. I do apologise.”
      
“What you mean to say is you’d like to buy it,” Rummins
said.
      
“Well . . .” Mr Boggis glanced back at the commode, frowning.
“I’m not sure. I might . . . and then again . . . on second
thoughts . . . no . . . I think it might be a bit too much trouble.
It’s not worth it. I’d better leave it.”
      
“How much were you thinking of offering?” Rummins
asked.
      
“Not much, I’m afraid. You see, this is not a genuine antique.
It’s merely a reproduction.”
      
“I’m not so sure about that,” Rummins told him. “It’s been
in here over twenty years, and before that it was up at the
Manor House. I bought it there myself at auction when the
old Squire died. You can’t tell me that thing’s new.”
      
“It’s not exactly new, but it’s certainly not more than about
sixty years old.”
      
“It’s more than that,” Rummins said. “Bert, where’s that bit
of paper you once found at the back of one of them drawers?
That old bill.”
      
The boy looked vacantly at his father.
      
Mr Boggis opened his mouth, then quickly shut it again
without uttering a sound. He was beginning literally to shake
with excitement, and to calm himself he walked over to the
window and stared out at a plump brown hen pecking around
for stray grains of corn in the yard.
      
“It was in the back of that drawer underneath all them
rabbit-snares,” Rummins was saying. “Go on and fetch it out
and show it to the parson.”
      
When Bert went forward to the commode, Mr Boggis
turned round again. He couldn’t stand not watching him.
He saw him pull out one of the big middle drawers, and he
noticed the beautiful way in which the drawer slid open. He
saw Bert’s hand dipping inside and rummaging around among
a lot of wires and strings.
      
“You mean this?” Bert lifted out a piece of folded yellowing
paper and carried it over to the father, who unfolded it and
held it up close to his face.
      
“You can’t tell me this writing ain’t bloody old,” Rummins
said, and he held the paper out to Mr Boggis, whose whole
arm was shaking as he took it. It was brittle and it crackled
slightly between his fingers. The writing was in a long sloping
copperplate hand:

Edward Montagu, Esq. Dr.
      
To Thos. Chippendale
      
A large mahogany Commode Table of exceeding
fine wood, very rich carvd, set upon fluted legs, two very
neat shapd long drawers in the middle part and two ditto
on each side, with rich chasd Brass Handles and Ornaments,
the whole completely finished in the most exquisite
taste..........................................Ł87

      
Mr Boggis was holding on to himself tight and fighting to
suppress the excitement that was spinning round inside him
and making him dizzy. Oh God, it was wonderful! With the
invoice, the value had climbed even higher. What in heaven’s
name would it fetch now? Twelve thousand pounds? Fourteen?
Maybe fifteen or even twenty? Who knows?
      
Oh, boy!
      
He tossed the paper contemptuously on to the table and
said quietly, “It’s exactly what I told you, a Victorian
reproduction. This is simply the invoice that the seller—the man
who made it and passed it off as an antique—gave to his client.
I’ve seen lots of them. You’ll notice that he doesn’t say he made
it himself. That would give the game away.”
      
“Say what you like,” Rummins announced, “but that’s an old
piece of paper.”
      
“Of course it is, my dear friend. It’s Victorian, late
Victorian. About eighteen ninety. Sixty or seventy years old.
I’ve seen hundreds of them. That was a time when masses of
cabinet-makers did nothing else but apply themselves to faking
the fine furniture of the century before.”
      
“Listen, Parson,” Rummins said, pointing at him with a thick
dirty finger, “I’m not saying as how you may not know a fair
bit about this furniture business, but what I
am
saying is this:
How on earth can you be so mighty sure it’s a fake when you
haven’t even seen what it looks like underneath all that
paint?”
      
“Come here,” Mr Boggis said. “Come over here and I’ll show
you.” He stood beside the commode and waited for them to
gather round. “Now, anyone got a knife?”
      
Claud produced a horn-handled pocket knife, and Mr
Boggis took it and opened the smallest blade. Then, working
with apparent casualness but actually with extreme care, he
began chipping off the white paint from a small area on the
top of the commode. The paint flaked away cleanly from the
old hard varnish underneath, and when he had cleared away
about three square inches, he stepped back and said, “Now,
take a look at that!”
      
It was beautiful—a warm little patch of mahogany, glowing
like a topaz, rich and dark with the true colour of its two
hundred years.
      
“What’s wrong with it?” Rummins asked.
      
“It’s processed! Anyone can see that!”
      
“How can you see it, Mister? You tell us.”
      
“Well, I must say that’s a trifle difficult to explain. It’s
chiefly a matter of experience. My experience tells me that
without the slightest doubt this wood has been processed with
lime. That’s what they use for mahogany, to give it that dark
aged colour. For oak, they use potash salts, and for walnut it’s
nitric acid, but for mahogany it’s always lime.”
      
The three men moved a little closer to peer at the wood.
There was a slight stirring of interest among them now. It
was always intriguing to hear about some new form of
crockery or deception.
      
“Look closely at the grain. You see that touch of orange in
among the dark red-brown. That’s the sign of lime.”
      
They leaned forward, their noses close to the wood, first
Rummins, then Claud, then Bert.
      
“And then there’s the patina,” Mr Boggins continued.
      
“The what?”
      
He explained to them the meaning of this word as applied
to furniture.
      
“My dear friends, you’ve no idea the trouble these rascals
will go to to imitate the hard beautiful bronze-like appearance
of genuine patina. It’s terrible, really terrible, and it makes me
quite sick to speak of it!” He was spitting each word sharply
off the tip of the tongue and making a sour mouth to show
his extreme distaste. The men waited, hoping for more
secrets.
      
“The time and trouble that some mortals will go to in order
to deceive the innocent!” Mr Boggis cried. “It’s perfectly
disgusting! D’you know what they did here, my friends? I can
recognise it clearly. I can almost see them doing it, the long,
complicated ritual of rubbing the wood with linseed oil,
coating it over with french polish that has been cunningly
coloured, brushing it down with pumice-stone and oil, bees-waxing
it with a wax that contains dirt and dust, and finally
giving it the heat treatment to crack the polish so that it looks
like two-hundred-year-old varnish! It really upsets me to
contemplate such knavery!”
      
The three men continued to gaze at the little patch of dark
wood.
      
“Feel it!” Mr Boggis ordered. “Put your fingers on it! There,
how does it feel, warm or cold?”
      
“Feels cold,” Rummins said.
      
“Exactly, my friend! It happens to be a fact that faked
patina is always cold to the touch. Real patina has a curiously
warm feel to it.”
      
“This feels normal,” Rummins said, ready to argue.
      
“No, sir, it’s cold. But of course it takes an experienced and
sensitive finger-tip to pass a positive judgement. You couldn’t
really be expected to judge this any more than I could be
expected to judge the quality of your barley. Everything in
life, my dear sir, is experience.”
      
The men were staring at this queer moon-faced clergyman
with the bulging eyes, not quite so suspiciously now because
he did seem to know a bit about his subject. But they were still
a long way from trusting him.
      
Mr Boggis bent down and pointed to one of the metal
drawer-handles on the commode. “This is another place where
the fakers go to work,” he said. “Old brass normally has a
colour and character all of its own. Did you know that?”
      
They stared at him, hoping for still more secrets.
      
“But the trouble is that they’ve become exceedingly skilled at matching
it. In fact it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between
‘genuine old’ and ‘faked old.’ I don’t mind admitting
that it has me guessing. So there’s not really any point in our
scraping the paint off these handles. We wouldn’t be any the
wiser.”
      
“How can you possibly make new brass look like old?” Claud
said. “Brass doesn’t rust, you know.”
      
“You are quite right, my friend. But these scoundrels have
their own secret methods.”
      
“Such as what?” Claud asked. Any information of this nature
was valuable, in his opinion. One never knew when it might
come in handy.
      
“All they have to do,” Mr Boggis said, “is to place these
handles overnight in a box of mahogany shavings saturated in
sal ammoniac. The sal ammoniac turns the metal green, but if
you rub off the green, you will find underneath it a fine soft
silvery-warm lustre, a lustre identical to that which comes
with very old brass. Oh, it is so bestial, the things they do!
With iron they have another trick.”
      
“What do they do with iron?” Claud asked, fascinated.
      
“Iron’s easy,” Mr Boggis said. “Iron locks and plates and
hinges are simply buried in common salt and they come out
all rusted and pitted in no time.”
      
“All right,” Rummins said. “So you admit you can’t tell about
the handles. For all you know, they may be hundreds and
hundreds of years old. Correct?”
      
“Ah,” Mr Boggis whispered, fixing Rummins with two big
bulging brown eyes. “That’s where you’re wrong. Watch
this.”
      
From his jacket pocket, he took out a small screwdriver. At
the same time, although none of them saw him do it, he also
took out a little brass screw which he kept well hidden in the
palm of his hand. Then he selected one of the screws in the
commode—there were four to each handle—and began
carefully scraping all traces of white paint from its head. When he
had done this, he started slowly to unscrew it.
      
“If this is a genuine old brass screw from the eighteenth
century,” he was saying, “the spiral will be slightly uneven and
you’ll be able to see quite easily that it has been hand-cut with
a file. But if this brasswork is faked from more recent times,
Victorian or later, then obviously the screw will be of the
same period. It will be a mass-produced, machine-made article.
Anyone can recognise a machine-made screw. Well, we shall
see.”
      
It was not difficult, as he put his hands over the old screw
and drew it out, for Mr Boggis to substitute the new one
hidden in his palm. This was another little trick of his, and
through the years it had proved a most rewarding one. The
pockets of his clergyman’s jacket were always stocked with a
quantity of cheap brass screws of various sizes.
      
“There you are,” he said, handing the modern screw to
Rummins. “Take a look at that. Notice the exact evenness of
the spiral? See it? Of course you do. It’s just a cheap common
little screw that you yourself could buy today in any iron-monger’s
in the country.”
      
The screw was handed round from the one to the other,
each examining it carefully. Even Rummins was impressed
now.
      
Mr Boggis put the screwdriver back in his pocket together
with the fine hand-cut screw that he’d taken from the commode,
and then he turned and walked slowly past the three
men towards the door.
      
“My dear friends,” he said, pausing at the entrance to the
kitchen, “it was so good of you to let me peep inside your
little home—so kind. I do hope I haven’t been a terrible old
bore.”
      
Rummins glanced up from examining the screw. “You didn’t
tell us what you were going to offer,” he said.
      
“Ah,” Mr Boggis said. “That’s quite right. I didn’t, did I?
Well, to tell you the honest truth, I think it’s all a bit too much
trouble. I think I’ll leave it.”
      
“How much would you give?”
      
“You mean that you really wish to part with it?”
      
“I didn’t say I wished to part with it. I asked you how
much.”
      
Mr Boggis looked across at the commode, and he laid his
head first to one side, then to the other, and he frowned, and
pushed out his lips, and shrugged his shoulders, and gave a
little scornful wave of the hand as though to say the thing
was hardly worth thinking about really, was it?
      
“Shall we say . . . ten pounds. I think that would be fair.”
      
“Ten pounds!” Rummins cried. “Don’t be so ridiculous,
Parson,
please!
”
      
“It’s worth more’n that for firewood!” Claud said,
disgusted.
      
“Look here at the bill!” Rummins went on, stabbing that
precious document so fiercely with his dirty fore-finger that
Mr Boggis became alarmed. “It tells you exactly what it cost!
Eighty-seven pounds! And that’s when it was new. Now it’s
antique it’s worth double!”
      
“If you’ll pardon me, no, sir, it’s not. It’s a second-hand
reproduction. But I’ll tell you what, my friend—I’m being
rather reckless, I can’t help it—I’ll go up as high as fifteen
pounds. How’s that?”
      
“Make it fifty,” Rummins said.
      
A delicious little quiver like needles ran all the way down
the back of Mr Boggis’s legs and then under the soles of his
feet. He had it now. It was his. No question about that. But
the habit of buying cheap, as cheap as it was humanly possible
to buy, acquired by years of necessity and practice, was too
strong in him now to permit him to give in so easily.
      
“My dear man,” he whispered softly, “I only want the legs.
Possibly I could find some use for the drawers later on, but
the rest of it, the carcass itself, as your friend so rightly said,
it’s firewood, that’s all.”
      
“Make it thirty-five,” Rummins said.
      
“I
couldn’t
sir, I
couldn’t!
It’s not worth it. And I simply
mustn’t allow myself to haggle like this about a price. It’s all
wrong. I’ll make you one final offer, and then I must go.
Twenty pounds.”
      
“I’ll take it,” Rummins snapped. “It’s yours.”
      
“Oh dear,” Mr Boggis said, clasping his hands. “There I go
again. I should never have started this in the first place.”
      
“You can’t back out now, Parson. A deal’s a deal.”
      
“Yes, yes, I know.”
      
“How’re you going to take it?”
      
“Well, let me see. Perhaps if I were to drive my car up into
the yard, you gentlemen would be kind enough to help me
load it?”
      
“In a car? This thing’ll never go in a car! You’ll need a truck
for this!”
      
“I don’t think so. Anyway, we’ll see. My car’s on the road.
I’ll be back in a jiffy. We’ll manage it somehow, I’m sure.”
      
Mr Boggis walked out into the yard and through the gate
and then down the long track that led across the field towards
the road. He found himself giggling quite uncontrollably, and
there was a feeling inside him as though hundreds and hundreds
of tiny bubbles were rising up from his stomach and bursting
merrily in the top of his head; like sparkling-water. All the
buttercups in the field were suddenly turning into golden
sovereigns, glistening in the sunlight. The ground was littered
with them, and he swung off the track on to the grass so that
he could walk among them and tread on them and hear the
little metallic tinkle they made as he kicked them around with
his toes. He was finding it difficult to stop himself from breaking
into a run. But clergymen never run; they walk slowly.
Walk slowly, Boggis. Keep calm, Boggis. There’s no hurry
now. The commode is yours! Yours for twenty pounds, and
it’s worth fifteen or twenty thousand! The Boggis Commode! In ten minutes
it’ll be loaded into your car—it’ll go in easily—and
you’ll be driving back to London and singing all the way!
Mr Boggis driving the Boggis Commode home in the Boggis
car. Historic occasion. What
wouldn’t
a newspaperman give
to get a picture of that! Should he arrange it? Perhaps he
should. Wait and see. Oh, glorious day! Oh, lovely sunny
summer day! Oh, glory be!
      
Back in the farmhouse, Rummins was saying, “Fancy that
old bastard giving twenty pound for a load of junk like this.”
      
“You did very nicely, Mr Rummins,” Claud told him. “You
think he’ll pay you?”
      
“We don’t put it in the car till he do.”
      
“And what if it won’t go in the car?” Claud asked. “You
know what I think, Mr Rummins? You want my honest
opinion? I think the bloody thing’s too big to go in the car.
And then what happens? Then he’s going to say to hell with
it and just drive off without it and you’ll never see him again.
Nor the money either. He didn’t seem all that keen on having
it, you know.”