The Grace in Older Women (31 page)

Outside the mob were hammering on doors, tapping windows. Voices
were raised. This, note, to bring forgeries for sale, which says something
about the antiques markets. Can't think what. 'You demanded
money
, for a
baby
charity?' Her voice has a commendable vibrato when she's being
mad or sexy. Her husband shook.

‘I’ll try to pay the rest, Columbine,' I said, St Alban in chains.

'It's only right!' Harlequin said defensively, but I'd won. 'Lovejoy's
dealers - look at them! They're animals!'

'Give it back!
' Quaver, vibrato,
tremble, fury, were all in there. I wish I could do it. I tried, when we made
smiles once in the pub yard but I can't do it. Infants can. You'd get away with
murder with a voice like that.

Harlequin repaid me. I handed a note to Columbine. 'Love. Could I
have a glass of water? I haven't had a thing since yesterday. I don't want to
keel over during my charity.'

She blazed, 'I'll make you a decent breakfast!'

She drove Harlequin out. He beamed hate, but what had I done
except given him the chance of doing a little good in the world? I honestly
can't understand some people.

'Which New Baby Unit, Lovejoy?' George asked. 'My daughter's due
in seven weeks.'

Some people really do irritate. 'The one in, er, Moon Morrow,
George,' I invented, narked at the silly old goon. 'It needs cots and, er,
spoons. Let them in.'

He shuffled towards the door. I'm thankful I don't have his bad
feet. 'We'll have a whip round at the station, Lovejoy. The lads raised a
fortune for the surgery unit.'

'Ta, George.' Already I was worn out and I'd not even started.
Kindness is tiring. All administrations are set up to exploit, by the pretence
of giving service. Harlequin ushered in Juliana Wither-spoon, her face white.

'Lovejoy!' she said. 'Where is he?'

'He?' I asked, blank.

'My brother. Doctor Dill said he's here, needs me urgently.'

'Oh. It was a mistake.' Tinker's surname is Dill. 'Got a
notebook?'

'Notebook?' She looked like she had a terrible headache.

'Aye. We're listing people to, er help Father Jay. George, let
them in. Single file.'

George opened the door, was trampled by the inrush of antique
dealers with forgeries to sell. Hear them talk, you'd think they'd never seen a
fake in their entire lives. Put out the whisper that you'll buy any dud from
their stock, and you get flattened by the stampede.

The Plod poured in with the yelling crowd, struggling. They
managed to resuscitate a huffed George, and the auditions were on.

'Gold ecus, Lovejoy.' Tapper's named for his skill in forging tap-and-die
strikers for making medals, coins. Actually a presentable young banker, but I
don't ask.

'Gold content, Tapper?'

'Nought point one above genuine.' He spoke with justifiable pride.
Italians set this precedent, forging King George V gold sovereigns with fractionally
higher gold content than the real thing. Very hard to prosecute people who
manufacture fakes worth more than your original.

'You're in, Tapper. Your own security display case, proper
labelling. Take his name, Juliana, put ECU.’

'What?' she asked, bewildered. I sighed. This was going to be one
of those days.

'For God's sake, Jul, set up a frigging desk. You're mucking about
doing sweet Fanny Adams.'

'I have no notebook, Lovejoy,' Juliana wailed, distracted.

'Next, George.' I ignored her. Women haven't got enough to do. Ask
them to do a hand's turn, they crack.

'Morning. I'm Jackery.' Stout, balding, tired shoes, daubed
corduroys. 'I've one forgery, Lovejoy, but they're lovely.'

Jackery. Closing my mind to Juliana's whingeing I rummaged in my
ragbag memory. Lavenham, three years ago. An obsessed lunatic, one painting
that he does over and over.

'Seurat's nudes?' The plural for singular gave him away.

'It's not fair, Lovejoy.' He spoke earnestly. 'They always call
them names. They're beautiful.'

'Isn't it in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia?' Barnes was an
eccentric American doctor who amassed an art collection, 1900s. Major stuff,
over 2,000 works. In 1915 he wrote his notorious book,
How to Judge a Painting
. Critics howled with laughter. He got his revenge,
though, by guarding his possessions with paranoia. 'How did you see it? Dr.
Barnes's will stated his collections should never be reproduced, lent, even
colour photographed.' Jackery's famous for this, his one forgery. The original,
Seurat's three nudes, Les Poseuses, is nearly as famous (joke).

'They came to Paris.' His eyes went dreamy. 'I went. Lost my job
over it.' He spoke without rancour. 'And my wife. She didn't understand.'

'Thank you, Jackery,' I said. We shook hands. 'You've done a great
thing for mankind. I'm honoured to have your forgery in the exhibition. Your
label must say it's for sale.' He started to protest. I waved him away. 'You
don't have to
sell
. Name an
impossible price, see?'

His lip trembled. 'What if somebody agrees to pay it, though?'

'No, Jackery. A stated price is legally only "an invitation
to treat". Say you've changed your mind. Give your name.' I indicated
Juliana, who was finally getting round to scribbling, distraught. 'Tell her to
get a move on. Next.'

We got going, faster after Columbine brought a fry-up in for me. I
had to send her back for more, but eating was a refreshing novelty. I took some
really risky decisions as the offers came in.

A trio from Cambridge said they'd faked some silverware and two
gold emblems from King Croesus's famed Lydian Hoard. Turkey recently sued for
the original treasure, got it back from the USA. Quite right too, I say,
because somebody stole it back in the 1960s, and smuggled it to unscrupulous
buyers via international fences. I'm not making allegations here, because New
York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art will want to remain anonymous and I
respect their privacy most sincerely. I believed this trio of walking
derelictions, because one had a goldsmith's segs - small hard nodes of skin on
his right index finger.

Sadly, I rejected some copperplate letters 'by Sir Walter Scott',
done by an old lady. Scott wrote
Guy
Mannering
in under six weeks, had a voluminous output, especially after
Byron grabbed the poetry market from him. Forged letters from writers are
useless, unless you've some originals to compare. She tried showing me
parchment fragments of
Cardenio
,
Shakespeare's lost play, but everybody has cupboards full ever since that
American chap found it - he says - in the British Museum Library. I felt sorry
for her, but what can I do?

'That was despicable, Lovejoy!' Juliana stood over me.

‘I’m trying to help you snaffle your bloke. This isn't a charity.
This is fakery!'

'What was that, Lovejoy?' from Columbine inside the kitchen. ‘I
mean I want donations, Biney,' I amended quickly. 'Everything must make a
profit. Those barns need blankets and bottles.'

Juliana lowered her voice. 'Lovejoy. I mistrust this whole enterprise.
I shall watch you every inch.'

'One thing,' I said, just as softly. 'How would your Whistlejack
forgery do if I subject it to electrochemical abrasive stripping voltammetry?'

'My what?' She recoiled. I only know the words, not how to do it.

'It uses graphite electrodes, Jul. Measures pigments almost
without failure.' I smiled. The dealers outside were yelling, George in
distress. 'Don't blame me, and I won't blame you. Deal?'

'You declared it genuine, Lovejoy! Ashley told me so.'

'I lied.'

She was pale. 'What else have you lied about?'

'Next, George.' Practically everything, except antiques.

They really started then. I clocked them about sixty an hour, one
after the other. I became dizzy. There were the usual things -furniture
promised by the truckload, paintings galore, enough silverware to plate East
Anglia, fake bicycles - more of these than you'd think; they bring high gelt
these days. Where there's wheels, dealers say these days, you get nutters. In
that first hour I had a lad who'd faked Daimler's prototype 1885 motorbike,
Otto four-stroke engine and all. I asked him if he'd a pal who could forge S.
H. Cooper's original steam-driven bicycle, pre-1870, but he hadn't. I accepted
the lazy devil. I'm not really into engines.

Some were fascinating. A school teacher from Northampton produced
photographs of a cupboard house.

'This is a Dutch fake, or ours?'

He went shy with pride. 'Mine, Lovejoy. I made every item. It's in
a genuine old cupboard, too.'

It stopped my breath. An Ince corner cupboard, lovely, untouched.

'You didn't damage it?' I asked.

'In my family generations, Lovejoy. Pristine. I lined it with
clean cardboard, then made the doll's house Regency furniture. My wife makes
tapestries and candles.' He pointed, pleased.

In Holland, these 'baby houses' were fashionable a couple of
centuries ago. Brides got married about fourteen or fifteen years of age. They
liked these things. Many were made by skilled craftsmen, some for advertising
purposes, others for selling to newly wedded girls. See an original, it blows
your mind. They are made in exquisite detail.

'. . . six hundred items, Lovejoy. Regency chandeliers . . .'

'Accepted,' I said, wondering how I could get his Ince cupboard
from him without disturbing the doll's house furniture.

Some things just had to be rejected, even though a commensurate
amount of effort had been expended on them. I refused a Stortford bloke who'd
faked a fragment of the 7000 BC linen found lately in Asia Minor. He left in
tears.

'That was wretched!' Juliana, storming the Bastille again.

'Hold it, George.' Wearily, I drew her behind the counter and
shoved my fist in her face. 'Listen to me, you stuck up bitch. I know what I'm
doing. You don't. Understand?'

'You are a disgusting, retarded beast, Lovejoy. I've heard about your
scrounging off women, your cheating -'

'That does it. George? Evict this bird. She's useless.'

But she stayed, only so she could sulk. We resumed, Juliana
sitting in mute reproach while I worked. I was furious, because everything on
earth is possibly fake, isn't it? I remember hereabouts a nerk called Coacher
selling plants by post, until he was arrested by Maud for mail-order fraud. He
advertised the Military Orchid, thought to be extinct until some Sherlock found
one in 1947. Notoriously fickle, there are now two hundred plants growing in
secret, watched by vigilantes. See? Everything's fake until proved otherwise.
And people are desperate to join in a fake. Somebody calculated that if you
send a pyramid letter to five other people, in four months everybody in the
world would have received 13 million letters. Mind you, statistics aren't. I
mean, the average peal of twelve church bells, ringing one peal every few
seconds, would take 38 years of ding-donging to complete all possible changes.
So?

But some things are less fake than fake. In 1863, the famous
antiques expert William Chaffers decided that Chinese porcelain was actually
all made here, in Lowestoft to be precise. In tribute, I accepted the works of
a potter from Harwich. He'd forged Chinese porcelains, complete with bizarre
inscriptions.

'See the inscriptions?' he enthused over his photos.

When Western traders placed orders for special pieces, Chinese
potters made blunders, not knowing our language. Families wanting particular
decorations simply wrote out inscriptions on paper, which were then taken to
Canton for the designs to be copied on the porcelain dinner services. One
Swedish chap drew his design he wanted on a page from his son's exercise book,
on which his little lad had scrawled, 'Mother is today in an even worse
temper.' The Chinese service was brilliantly manufactured with his son's acid
comment in the design.

'Are they this good?'

'Honest,' he said. I'd seen some of this bloke's early Nantgarw
ware, good in spite of the duff glazing.

'Accept. Ten pieces, separate labels. Name to the lady.'

Accepting forgeries can go in bursts. In one heady spell I nodded
a score of clever items, all manufactured by enthusiastic amateurs. I took a
forgery of Michelangelo's sketch
The Holy
Family with the Infant John the Baptist
- it was sold for millions not long
since at Christie's. Nobody even knows where it was discovered, because Major
Robb of Great Tew, Oxfordshire, isn't telling. I grinned at Juliana, who looked
away, though I could tell she was dying to see the drawings the girl showed me.
I accepted a bloke's copies - poor things, really - of Picasso paintings, for
notoriety value, because he was well faked during his lifetime. And Salvador
Dali, who was forged seemingly with his own connivance.

I turned down an electronic mugger, who looked decidedly shifty.
This modern crime's very simple. You set up a machine outside a bank at weekend
when it's closed. Your printed notice announces that this machine is a new ATM,
automated teller machine. When people insert their cards, it flashes a signal
saying sorry, folks, but it isn't properly installed yet. The ATM spits out
your card, and you go on your way grumbling. But it has secretly copied your
plastic, which the electronic mugger simply uses for his own high-spending
purposes.