The Judas Pair

'Genuine?' They looked like Chelsea.

I touched one. Ding-dong. 'As ever was.'

'You haven't looked for the gold anchor mark underneath yet,' she said, vexed.

'It'll be there,' I said.

'Seeing you're on form,' she asked, 'what are these?'

There were four of them, shell cases of various sizes, cut and decorated. A small cross, also brass, had been drilled into each. I picked one up. The crosspiece of each was loose and came free.

'Table bells,' I told her. 'Prisoners of war, probably Boer War. You signaled for the next course by combinations of these four bells. Not valuable.'

'Thanks.' I cast an eye for flinters, but they weren't in Margaret's line.

In he tore, alcoholic and worried, eagerly trying to judge if we were just browsing or up to something, stained of teeth, unshaven of chin, bleary of eye, shoddy of gear, Dandy Jack.

'Come and see my jades, Lovejoy,' he said.

I tried to grin while backing from his evil breath. A customer was showing interest, so Margaret stayed put, making a smiling gesture for me to look in before I left.

I let Dandy tell me how clever he'd been to do the deal. A retired colonel's widow, Far East wars and all that. I would have to be careful asking about flinters, but so far my approach had been casual in the extreme. Out came the jade collection. I sat on his visiting stool while he showed me. By hook or by crook I would have to do him a good turn.

Jades are odd things. There are all sorts of daft ideas in people's minds about antiques of all kinds—that all antiques if genuine are priceless, for example, a clear piece of lunacy. Nothing is truly beyond price if you think about it. All you can say is that prices vary. Everything's always for sale. Another daftness is that anything is an antique, even if it's as little as five years old. Remember the golden date, 1836. This side equals modern. That side equals antique. The most extreme of all daftnesses, though, is the idea that if something looks mint and beautifully preserved, it shouldn't, and therefore needs false wood-worm holes bored into it, scratches and dents made in unscathed surfaces, and splinters worked from corners. Wrong. Moral: the better preserved, the costlier. Keep things mint.

Jades attract more daftness than any antiques. And Dandy Jack had every possible misconception, displaying them all to anyone who called.

'It's a pity some aren't proper green,' he was saying, fetching the small carved pieces out. 'They must be some sort of stone. But here are some deep green ones…' and so on. I tell you, it's bloody painful. You'd think these people can't read a reference book between them. 'I played it cool,' he kept on. 'Maybe I'll let them go for auction. Do you think Christie's would—?'

I picked one up—a black-and-white dragonfly, beautifully carved. Not painted, but pure jade through and through. To tell real jade—though not its age, however—from anything else, feel it. Never leave jade untouched. Hold it, stroke it, touch it —that's what it's for, and what it loves. But never touch it with freshly washed hands. If you've just washed your hands clean, come back in an hour when your natural oils have returned to your fingers. Then pick up and feel the jade's surface. You know how oil gets when it's been rubbed partly dry, like, say, linseed oil on a wooden surround? Faintly tacky and slightly stiff? If the object you hold gives that immediate impression, it's jade all right. To confirm it, look at the object in direct light, not hooded like posh lamps. The surface mustn't gleam with a brilliant reflection. It must appear slightly matt. Remember what the early experts used to say of jade: 'Soapy to look at, soapy to feel.' It's not too far out.

Now, there are many sorts of jade. Green jades are fairly common, but less so than you might think. 'Orange- peel' is one of my favorites, a brilliant orange with white, not a fleck of green. Then there's 'black-ink' jade, in fact perhaps nearer blue-black, usually mixed with white streaks, as in the dragonfly I was holding. One of the most valuable is 'mutton-fat' jade, a fat-white jade of virtually no translucency despite its nickname.

Of course, nowadays the common green jade comes from damn near anywhere except China—Burma, New Zealand, you name it. And it's blasted out of hills in a new and unweathered state, which gives a massive yield but of a weak, scratchable quality. Most of these wretched carvings of fishes or horses you see now are done in China, of jade imported there. Green, fresh, soapy, mechanical travesties they are too. Get one (they should be very cheap) to teach yourself the feel, texture, and appearance of the stuff, but if your favorite little nephew shatters it to pieces one day, don't lose any sleep. China's exporting them by the shipload. 'New Mountain Jade' they call it in Canton, Kwantung, China.

But. That only goes for the new modern mine-blasted green jade. The ancients were much more discriminating. To satisfy them, a piece of jade had to be weathered. The raw pieces were found exposed on hillsides and were taken to a craftsman carver, an artist who loved such a rare material. With adulation he would observe where the flaws ran, what colors were hidden beneath the surface. And then, after maybe a whole year of feeling, stroking the magic stone, and imagining the core of beauty within, he would begin to carve. New Mountain Jade (i.e., modern) is soft. The antique stuff is hard, hard, and to carve it took time. This means that a dragonfly such as I was holding took about six months. The craftsman had left the dragonfly's wings, head, and body black, and the underbelly had been skillfully carved through so it was mutton-fat jade, white like the spindly legs. The dragonfly was on a white mutton-fat jade lotus leaf—all less than two inches long, the detail exquisite, all from one piece of antique hard jade. And not a trace of green. Lovely. An artistic miracle.

I did my own private test—put it down a minute, my hands stretched out to cool, then picked it up again. Yes, cold as ice, even after being held in a hot, greedy hand. That's jade for you. The miracle stone. The ancient Chinese mandarins had one for each hand, a 'finger jade' just for fiddling with, to comfort themselves. It was regarded as a very human need and not at all unmanly to want dispassionate solace as well as human comfort in that civilization, and what's wrong with either?

Dandy Jack fetched out about thirty pieces. About half were agate, and of the rest some six were modern ugly deep leaf-green new jade pieces, carved with one eye on the clock and some productivity man whining about output. I found nine, including an orange-peel piece, of old jade—exquisitely carved foxes, hearts, lotus plants, bats, the dragonfly, fungi. It really was a desirable cluster.

'You've got some good stuff here, Dandy,' I said. It hurt to tell the truth.

'You having me on, Lovejoy?' He had the sense to be suspicious.