Gold By Gemini

A week ago I'd "missed a rosewood table - you won't believe this - actually signed by Timothy Walford, about 1810, complete with fringed base-edge carving on triple scrolls.

If this page is wet it's because I'm sobbing. Good class furniture with a provincial maker's name is so rare. It was sold an hour before I reached the Arcade. What with taxes and an unbelievably greedy public, life's hard.

You may be developing a low opinion of my most endearing qualities. Don't. My qualities are yours, folks, same as everyone else's. I would have been as fascinated and excited by old Bexon's lovely forgery if I'd just made a million in gold minutes before, instead of being broke and getting desperate. I tell you all this now because the behaviour you actually see around antiques is only the tip of the dealer's iceberg. From there it sinks on and on, down and down to include the thousands of fearsome emotions sociologists do not know. And if at the end of this you think I'm lascivious, crude, sexist and selfish, do you know anybody who isn't?

Janie drew up, calling gaily, 'Hello, sailor!' Her joke.

'Where've you been?' I said coldly. 'I've been here an hour.'

'I've been exactly ten minutes,' she said, calmly eyeing me. I climbed into her Lagonda.

'Where've you been?'

'Working.' And how hard, I thought.

'You look exhausted, Lovejoy.'

'I am.'

'Was she worth it?' she asked sweetly, pulling out.

'If you're going to nag -'

'And where were you last night?'

'Ah,' I said, thinking quickly. 'I got stuck.'

'In…?' she prompted, all bright innocence.

'Cut it out, Janie.' I tried to seem annoyed. 'With a deal.'

'Anything really good?'

'No.' True, true.

'Where are we going?'

'Woody's.'

'That filthy place gives me fleas, Lovejoy.'

It gives me a living. Or rather,' I added bitterly, 'it should do.'

'Let me, Lovejoy.' A pause while hedges and fields swished by. 'Give you a living,' she added.

I turned to watch her drive. The Lagonda didn't even purr. Janie's beautiful, twenty-six, wealthy in her own right. Her husband's wealthy too. He often goes abroad to mend companies sick of the palsy. Crackpot. They have a mansion in Little Hawkham, the next village to the one I'd just been working. Great Hawkham has two houses more, hence the adjective.

'I'm good value,' she said, smiling. 'Worth a quid or two. Good legs. Teeth my own.

Socially trained, convent-educated. I could buy an antiques auction firm for you to play with. Think, Lovejoy. And take your hand off my knee when I'm driving.'

'And your husband?'

'Who?' She gave me a 1920 stare, trying to make me laugh. They only do that when they're serious. 'Spell it.'

'Look, love,' I said wearily. 'Am I loyal?' You can't muck about. You have to tell them outright.

'No.'

'Kind?'

'Never.'

'Considerate?'

'Hopeless.'

I went down the list of virtues getting a denial every time.

'Then what's the use?'

'You're worth it, Lovejoy,' she said after a think. 'You understand what love is. If only you weren't an escapist.'

'Flight has a long tradition of success,' I got back.

She wouldn't let go, though. 'Besides,' she said, 'something's always happening around you.'

'I wish it bloody well was,' I groused.

Now I wish I hadn't said that. Not that I'm superstitious, but you can't be sure, can you?

CHAPTER III

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JANIE DROPPED ME at the corner post office among prams and shoppers. I told her twenty minutes. Woody's Bar tries to hide itself in an alley between a pub and a jeweller's but gives itself away by gushing out steamy blue fumes swamping the pavement. Wise pedestrians cross over. The alley's partly covered, and is known as the Arcade to locals. It looks like a beginner's cardboard cut-out Camelot joined together wrong. Bloody town council planners. The beauty is that it's crammed with antique dealers' shops.

I pushed into Woody's Bar and peered through the opaque air. There he was. Tinker Dill, my barker, among the crammed tables. He was lashing into one of Woody's specials and hastily trying to sober up before the pubs got under way again. It's not a pretty sight. A dozen other dealers were about, wolfing mounds of chips, sausages and mashed triffid greasily concealed under slithering mounds of ketchup. I tell you this trade needs nerve.

'Tea, Woody,' I called into the blue haze towards the back. He'd be there, smoking ash into some poor soul's charring haddock.

'Hello, Lovejoy,' a few voices called. I waved, a picture of the successful antique dealer.

Cheerful adversity is vaguely entertaining, but even friends steer clear of doom.

I sat and watched Tinker Dill eat. All this yap about civilization really is utter cock.

Civilization isn't art, religion and all that. It's two things: paving and cutlery. Without paving everything's jungle. Without cutlery eating's a clumsy dissection which ends by stuffing pieces of dead animals and plants between your jaws. Tinker does it without a net.

'Tinker.'

No reply.

'Tinker,' I tried again, louder. Not a sign. 'Money,' I said softly. The place stilled with utter reverence. I watched Tinker begin to respond to therapy.

I've known him years but it's still gruesome. Bloodshot eyes swivelled as if searching for the next planet. Stubble, corrugated black teeth, skeletal limbs shuffled into human shape. He's thin as a lath. His lazaroid knuckles are always concealed under ketchup-stained woollen mittens, his frame lost somewhere in an overcoat straight from the Crimea. At the magic word even Woody's clattering pans had silenced. Tinker's brain fidgeted painfully into action. His eyes focused, two raw balls wobbling in gin-soaked aspic. He saw me.

'Hello, Lovejoy.'

'Did you pin the scrambler?' I asked.

'Yeh.' He was coming round.

'Settle later, okay?'

'Yeh.' (Translation: Tinker Dill reports he has successfully found a Georgian hurdy-gurdy for me, complete with animated French figurines. He would get it, and I'd pay him enough commission to get sloshed out of his mind again. To continue:)

'Great,' I praised.

Tinker crumpled a grin. The tension all about eased and noise began again. Woody's giant waitress Lisa loomed in the fog with my tea like the Bismark through its last smokescreen.

'How's Lovejoy?' She ruffled my thatch.

'Poor. Lonely.' Disbelieving snickers rose from nearby tables. 'No money, but good company.' She surged away, smiling.

'You're always after crumpet, Lovejoy,' Tinker criticized piously. He goes to chapel, but I hear the wine's free.

I waited while he shovelled his huge meal away like a smelter frantically raising steam.

All around muttered deals were being made, messages muttered through mouthfuls of grease and tea just too weak to plough. The door tinkled. A tourist peered briefly in and reeled away at the sight of huddled, feeding, smoking, belching humanity still stinking of last night's booze.

To me Woody's permanent fry-up is like a church - holy, something to venerate.

Blasphemy? Come down one day and see for yourself. There'll be a Woody's in your town, full of antique collectors and dealers. If you stick it for more than two days you'll be hooked for life on antiques because there's no mistaking that sense of religious devotion. Antiques are everything, even the reason for living. Nothing else exists. It's the feeling that makes crusades. I know because I have it, have for years. Dealers are dealers down to the marrow and out to the skin again, no variation or treachery. And more money passes across Woody's unwashed grease-smeared tables in one week than our town councillors fiddle in a whole year, and that's enough to refloat the franc.

Woody's is beautiful.

'Better, Tinker?'

'Yeh.' Tinker finished elegantly as ever, settling like a tattered combine harvester coming to rest. He wiped his mouth on a stained mitten and emitted three rhythmic belches. I got Lisa to bring him a pint of tea. He lit a cigarette, in paradise. Hangover gone, smoking, tea in hand, having survived Woody's breakfast, the auction coming up tomorrow, pulling oft a find and almost sober enough to start getting stoned again. To business.