good these days—”
“Looked genuine to me.”
She sounded quite indifferent. I nearly choked. Antique dealers think nothing of the things they’re supposed to know, understand, admire. I saw red. “Listen to me, you silly cow. See over there?” The little girls serving the mead had a kitchen table, virtually a plank of chipboard with four machine-made legs. “That’d take any nerk less than an hour to make, household drill and buffing pad. But that…?” I looked across to where Pal was pausing to light a fag. Somebody shouted a criticism, were cigarettes in period? He waved back apologetically, took no notice, grinned with an addict’s afront. I was to remember that grin, in far, far different circumstances.
“That?” she prompted. She looked as disturbed as I was, probably thinking how near she’d come to making an offer for it.
“You buy a log of mahogany, love.” I described its huge shape with my hands. “Not the forced spongy wood they import nowadays, but the slow-growing natural unforced trees you have to pay the earth for—if you can still find one in the raped wild forests. Then you—top dog, as they used to say—straddle the log over a saw-pit. Some poor sod—bottom dog—climbs down into the saw-pit. You get an enormous woodman’s curved two-handled log saw—itself a valuable antique, because nobody makes them now. Hour after hour, you saw the log lengthways to make a plank…”
It takes me like this, the shame, the ecstasy of antiques. I’m the only man living to have done the whole thing, start to finish. I couldn’t move for a week afterwards. I paid a fortune for seven stalwart farm lads to partner me on the saw-pit I’d dug in my garden wilderness. They’d given up, one after the other, and left calling me barmy. I’d slogged on, hands like balloons, bleeding and blistered.
“Then you take your sawn plank of mahogany. You plane it flat. Takes three days.” Jodie was looking at me, mesmerized. I could have swiped her one. Antique dealers and fakers think of automatic electric planers, gouging drills you work with a button while having coffee and a fag. I heard somebody shouting for me from over where the horses were. I yelled back a sod off, pressed on. “Then comes the hard part.”
They’d worked barefoot, mostly, those ancient cabinet-makers. All heroes to me. When the table’s surface was smooth as any hand-plane could make it, they’d got children—often their own —to beg or buy fragments of broken brick. The children ground the brick pieces to dust in a pestle and mortar. They’d then winnowed it, casting the dust up into the air.
“Coarser brick-dust particles fell first—resisting the air, see? The children, toddlers to seven-year-olds, caught it on bits of fustian, in a bowl, anything. The finer particles were caught separately.”
The bloke was still shouting. Torry from Beccles, pockets full of phoney silvers as usual. I rose to move away, sickened by my tale anyway. Jodie caught me. Her eyes were huge. “Wait, Lovejoy. The children?”
“No sandpaper in those days, Jodie. The maker smoothed it with brick-dust. I’ve done it. You rub the flat tabletop—coarse powder first. Your bare hands, to and fro along the wood’s grain, hour after hour.”
“But don’t your hands…?”
“Aye, love. They swell, blister. The skin shreds. They weep on to the dusty wood. The dust becomes a paste, of skin fragments, brick-dust, blister water, sweat, blood. Think how it must have been. Virtually naked at the finish, dripping pure sweat. But you kept going. You had to, or you and your children starved, literally.” My voice went bitter. “I had delusions at first. I would do it exactly as those ancients did. What a pillock! I lasted two hours. After a week’s rest, another two hours.”
My skin had peeled first, then blistered from my raw palms. I’d used my elbows. Then I’d stripped naked, and stood on the tabletop with bare feet, shuffling the brick-dust up and down the wood.
“See why it’s special, having a genuine Sheraton table? A modern Formica job’s machined in a trice, virtually untouched by human hand. But the heartwood of an antique table’s
“That’s… lovely.” But she’d started out to say something very different. Well, truth takes you different ways.
“Know how long it took me, Jodie? Sixteen weeks, to repeat three days’ work of a seventeenth-century man.” I tried to give her a grin, defuse the talk. Her face was all alarm. “I had to keep resting to battle on. Pathetic. You women have it easy, love. The work of your sisters three centuries ago is still within your reach. Look around.” Across a patch of grass two milkmaids were hand-milking some Jersey cows, admired by a small crowd. Other girls were washing clothes in the fountain, beating garments on stones. People wandering among the stalls were laughing, joking. Oh, so very merry. “You women can still give it a go any time, cook, wash, bake, skivvy for fifteen hours a day. You’d be tired, aye, but could still congratulate yourself on how marvellously you’d relived your grandma’s routine.”
“And you?”
Answering took a long time. “Ashamed, Jodie. I’d thought myself fit. I knew what to do, God knows. But the long-dead craftsmen defeated me.” I looked across at the village church. “Yon graveyard’s full of the old bastards. Any one sleeping there could wake today, step out, and produce brilliance like us modern clever clogs couldn’t do in a month of Sundays. Admitting that is the shame of my life. It does something to a man. See, love. A woman can always claim she’s prettier than the Queen of Sheba, that Lady Hamilton’s hair was a mess and her own isn’t. We blokes have more absolute comparisons. And we lose out every single time, to those that’ve gone before.”
“Can nobody do it nowadays?”
“That sideboard table Pal has on show there is a fake, Jodie. But it’s been done using the old methods. Must have killed somebody.” I snorted a half-laugh. “Until now I’d thought I was the only bloke alive who’d ever made a genuine fake. Get somebody able to repeat the old processes nowadays, you’d be a millionairess by teatime.”
“Then why don’t they, Lovejoy?”
“Because the old methods use up people, not gadgets.” Well, I should complain. I’m the one who always argues people first, things second.
That is all I want to say, for now. We saw Sir Edward tottering towards us. He’s a boring old devil, so I left Jodie and went to watch the morris dancers. That’s something else I’m no good at, either.
