God's sake? I honestly think morality's gone to the dogs. If you can't make pots in the Potteries, where is truth?
Needless to say, dealers all across East Anglia jeered at me.
Me and a lass called Iana had made a go of total permanent unending eternal love for a couple of days once, but she proved unreliable. She had a rotten temper, accused me of infidelity just because I'd stayed with Jessica at Goldhanger when trying to buy Jessica's Regency cabinet. For all that, our valencies always linked whenever she zoomed in. And she tended to broker antique sales. Iana had promised me a genuine Holbein miniature painting, owned by a hunchbacked Romford dealer called Syme.
'Genuine Holbein!' Syme protested as I gave it back across the tap-room bar.
'No, Syme. Hans Holbein was lefthanded.'
'So?' Syme asked, puzzled.
'Miniaturists paint their portraits with northern light on their left. Righthanded, they sit facing east, see? Holbein's subjects have the light coming the other way.'
Syme's pal had done the commonest forger trick of all. In any book on miniatures, the photographs are reproduced actual size. So forgers simply trace them in reverse, to look like different versions of some famous portrait - like Syme's, of Lady Catherine Howard, date about 1540.
'Also, Syme,' I added sadly, 'it's on Ivorine. Holbein painted his miniatures on vellum stuck to card.' I could have gone on about the brilliant art of 'limning' - painting miniature scenes and portraits. It's a miraculous art-form. I love it. But like I say I was down in the dumps, instinctively feeling that worse was on the way.
Dealers like Syme get taken in by the old forger's trick, to do quite a good fake using the wrong materials. Ivorine is a synthetic modern plastic. Good stuff, though, you can cut with scissors. Respectable miniaturists use it all the time. But no way is it ivory. Nor is it real vellum - that stretched skin of aborted veal calves. I could have sworn Syme's miniature painting was done over acrylic 'carnation', as ancient limners used to call their ground. And acrylics, like Ivorine, are modern.
'No good, Lovejoy?' Iana had asked. I sat with her.
'Bad, love. The original belongs to the Duke of Buccleugh.'
While we were talking Fakes I Have Known, that saga of antique dealers everywhere, Dosh Callaghan hove in and told me to go to London.
Dosh saw nothing unreasonable in forcing me into slavery while he took gorgeous women out to belly-rumbling restaurants.
'Why, Doshie?' I pleaded. 'I hate London.'
He's one of these criminals who wears alpaca coats down to the heels, has gold teeth and a gunslinger hat. He has two goons, to enforce whatever rules he dreams up for us on the spot. The charm of a boil, and lies like a gasmeter. In spite of this, I like Dosh.
His party trick is to find obscure relatives, claim close kinship, and do them out of every penny. He owns a propeller plane at Earls Colne airfield, says an auntie left it to him.
He beamed, flashed his rings about the tavern. We were in the Welcome Sailor at East Gates, that being where our town's antique dealers congregate to enter terminal decline.
Think of a dodo graveyard but where all extinct species are still pretending they know life.
'You used to love London, Lovejoy,' Iana said. This is her way, prettily taking me over every time she returns from Cyprus.
'Me? I've always hated London, ever since—'
Some things you can't tell. I'd known a London lass who got me to do two forgeries. I faked a Monet - his now- lost-for-ever painting of the bridges of Venice on that tatty little rio - and a Boudin watercolour. The latter's one of the hardest painters to forge, incidentally, though they're appearing now in numbers at the New Caledonian street market. Go and see for yourself. (Last-but-one barrow, farthest from St Mary Magdalene church.)
'Ever since who, Lovejoy?' Iana purred prettily.
'Ever since you wuz knocking that tart, Lovejoy!' Dosh burst out laughing. Everyone within earshot laughed along, being scared of him.
'Who was she?' Iana demanded, her frown suddenly less pretty.
'Doshie,' I begged. 'Can't you send somebody else? I've this sick uncle. And my motor's laid up.'
'You won't need wheels, Lovejoy. Buses and the Tube'll do fine. And your uncle's playing bowls for Manchester.'
People roared at Doshie's cleverness. Oh, it was such a merry scene.
'Find out who duffed my padpas, Lovejoy. I bought a job lot last week, and they're fake.'
He said this in high indignation, though he sells more frauds, fakes, and forgeries than any other antique dealer in the Eastern Hundreds, including me. Then he dropped two small green brilliant-cut gemstones on the bar. Maybe half a carat each. I love jewellery, even gems hatefully called 'semi-precious', and couldn't help snatching them up for a look with a xlO loupe.
'These aren't padpas, Doshie,' I said. 'They're tsavorite.' A tsavorite is properly green grossular, a sort of garnet discovered some seventy years ago near Kenya's National Park at Tsavo. Its lovely green lies between deep Sri Lankan emeralds and a peridot.
(Tip: Don't buy a tsavorite unless it's above one carat in size.) 'Measure its single refraction, Doshie, to prove it isn't green tourmaline or green zircon. Save me a trip to London. Also, I know nothing about precious stones.'
Dosh grinned. 'Lovejoy. A few of these came in antique settings. You're a divvy and you can tell an antique by feel. So go.'
'Advance me a week's salary?' I asked, hoping he'd say no.
'Okay, Lovejoy,' Doshie amazed me by saying. He's started smoking these thick cheroots. He stuck one in his
