They weren't really very old, Mr Boggis told her, and they wouldn't be easy to sell, but he did have a client who rather liked that sort of thing. Maybe he could go up another two pounds - call it thirty-seven. How about that?
They bargained for half an hour, and of course in the end Mr Boggis got the chairs and agreed to pay her something less than a twentieth of their value.
That evening, driving back to London in his old car with the two wonderful chairs in the back, Mr Boggis suddenly had the most brilliant idea.
If there is good furniture in one farmhouse, he said to himself, then why not in others? Why shouldn't he search for it? He could do it on Sundays. In that way, it wouldn't interrupt his work at all. He never knew how to spend his Sundays.
So Mr Boggis bought maps of all the countryside around London, and with a pen he divided each of them up into a series of squares. Each of these squares covered an actual area of ten kilometres by ten, which was about as much territory as he could cope with on a single Sunday. He didn't want the towns and villages. It was the isolated places, the large farmhouses and the old country houses, that he was looking for; and in this way, if he did one square each Sunday, he would gradually visit every farm and every country house around London.
But obviously there was another problem. Country folk are full of suspicion. You can't ring their bells and expect them to show you around their houses, because they won't do it. That way you would never get inside the house. Perhaps it would be best if he didn't let them know he was a dealer at all. He could be the telephone man, the repair man, the gas inspector. He could even be a vicar ...
From this point, the whole plan began to become more practical. Mr Boggis ordered a large quantity of cards on which the following was printed:
THE REVEREND
CYRIL WINNINGTON BOGGIS
President of the Society
for the Preservation of
Rare Furniture
Every Sunday, he was going to be a nice old vicar spending his holiday travelling around for the 'Society', making a list of the antique furniture that lay hidden in the country homes of England. And who was going to throw him out when they heard that? Nobody.
And then, when he was inside, if he saw something he really wanted, well - he knew a hundred different ways of dealing with that.
To Mr Boggis's surprise, the scheme worked. In fact, the warmth with which he was received in one house after another was, in the beginning, quite embarrassing, even to him. Sooner or later there had, of course, been some unpleasant incidents, but nine years is more than four hundred Sundays and all that adds up to a lot of houses visited.
Mr Boggis continued to drive, and now it was all farmhouses. The nearest was about a kilometre up the road, set some way back in the fields, and in order to keep his car out of sight, Mr Boggis had to leave it on the road and walk about six hundred metres along a track that led directly into the back yard of the farmhouse. He always parked his large car away from the house he was visiting. He never liked people to see his car until after the deal was completed. A dear old vicar and a large, modern car somehow never seemed quite right together. Also the short walk gave him the opportunity to examine the property closely from the outside. This place, he noticed as he approached, was small and dirty and some of the farm buildings were in a very bad state.
There were three men standing in a close group in a corner of the yard. When these men saw Mr Boggis walking forward in his black suit and vicar's collar, they stopped talking and became absolutely still, three faces turned towards him, watching him with suspicion as he approached.
The oldest of the three was Rummins and he was the owner of the farm.
The tall youth beside him was Bert, Rummins's son.
The short flat-faced man with broad shoulders was Claud.
'Good afternoon,' Mr Boggis said. 'Isn't it a lovely day?'
None of the three men moved. At that moment they were all thinking the same thing - that somehow this vicar, who was certainly not the local fellow, had been sent to look into their business and to report what he found to the government.
'May I ask if you are the owner?' Mr Boggis asked, addressing himself to Rummins.
'What is it you want?'
'I do apologise for troubling you, especially on a Sunday.'
Mr Boggis handed his card and Rummins took it and held it up close to his face.
'And what exactly do you want?'
Mr Boggis explained the aims and ideals of the Society for the Preservation of Rare Furniture.
'We don't have any,' Rummins told him when he had finished.
'You're wasting your time.'
'Now just a minute, sir,' Mr Boggis said, raising a finger. 'The last man who said that to me was an old farmer in Sussex, and when he finally let me into his house, do you know what I found? A dirty-looking old chair in the corner of the kitchen, and it was worth four hundred pounds! I showed him how to sell it and he bought himself a new tractor with the money.'
'What are you talking about?' Claud said. 'There's no chair in the world worth four hundred pounds.'
Rummins shifted from one foot to the other. 'Do you mean that you just want to go inside and stand in the middle of the room and look round?'
'Exactly,' Mr Boggis said. 'I just want to look at the furniture to see if you have anything special here, and then I can write about it in our Society magazine.'
'You know what I think?' Rummins said. 'I think you want to buy the stuff yourself. Why else would you take all this trouble?'
'Oh, I only wish I had the money. Of course, if I saw something I liked, and if I could afford it, I might be tempted to make an offer. But, sadly, that rarely happens.'
'Well,' Rummins said, 'I don't suppose there's any harm in you taking a look if that's all you want.'
He led the way to the back door of the farmhouse, and Mr Boggis followed him; so did the son, Bert, and Claud. They went through the kitchen, where the only furniture was a cheap table with a dead chicken lying on it, and they entered a fairly large, extremely dirty living room.
And there it was! Mr Boggis saw it immediately, and he stopped and gave a little cry of shock. Then he stood there for five, ten, fifteen seconds at least, staring like a fool, unable to believe, not daring to believe what he saw before him. It couldn't be true, not possibly! But the longer he stared, the more true it began to seem. There it was standing against the wall right in front of him, as real and as solid as the house itself. And who could possibly make a mistake about a thing like that? Yes, it was painted white, but that didn't make the slightest difference. Some fool had done that. The paint could be removed. But good God! Just look at it! And in a place like this!
At this point, Mr Boggis became aware of the three men standing together in a group watching him carefully. They had seen him stop and stare and they must have seen his face turning red, or maybe it was white, but anyway they had seen enough to spoil the whole business if he didn't do something about it quickly. Mr Boggis put one hand over his heart, fell into the nearest chair and breathed heavily.
'What's the matter with you?' Claud asked.
'It's nothing. I'll be all right in a minute. Please - a glass of water. It's my heart.'
Bert fetched him the water, handed it to him, and stayed close beside him, staring down at him.
'I thought maybe you were looking at something,' Rummin said.
'No, no,' Mr Boggis said. 'Oh, no. It's just my heart. It happens every now and again 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 importantly, he must have time to calm down before he said another word. Go slowly, Boggis. And whatever you do, keep calm. These people may be uneducated, but they are not stupid. And if it is really true - no it can't be, it can't be true ...