Paid and Loving Eyes

me which they were, but there was a map somewhere in the glove compartment, darling…

See? No secrecy, no possible subterfuge. Mrs. Almira Galloway was clearly nothing to do with the Troude scheme financed by Paulie et al. She was just along for the ride, so to speak.

As we talked and saw people roll up, stop for a chat, smoke and coffee, then trundle off, I prepared my sentence. And asked the serving lass if there was a ville nearby avec un antiques magasin. I’d have been quarter of an hour disentangling her swift joyous reply but for Almira, who cooed why didn’t I ask, for heaven’s sake? And drove me six more miles. To heaven.

“There’s always one antique shop, Lovejoy,” Almira was pacifying me for the eleventh time, getting narked like they do when you ask quite a reasonable question. “Don’t keep on.”

“We should drive to the next town,” I grumbled. “Happen the bird got her wires crossed.”

“We’ve hardly looked!” she was saying, when I stopped and felt a bit odd.

The town was hardly that. Set among small fields, it was on a little plain, a river not far off. It seemed amateur, somehow, but didn’t care. Houses of that peculiar Frenchness, dry ground, trees indolent, unlike our busy East Anglian trees that are always hard at it—God knows what “it” is, but they always seem to be giving it a go, stirring the air to a brisk breeze. Maybe it’s our skies, never still. A few cars, a horse and trap, a lone flag proclaiming nationality. The windows of houses always look strangest to me in a new country. Flowers competing on opposite sides of the main street.

“This way, love.”

We crossed the main street. Three or four shops, a small restaurant, some men drinking outside at tables under an awning. A lane led up from the thoroughfare. I felt the oddness from that direction, towards the church. Less than a score yards along stood a yard, with a bow-fronted shop boasting antiques.

Remember this, for money’s sake.

French furniture either goes ape in fashions so distinct from ours that your mind boggles—rococo chairs so ornate you sometimes have to work out where your bum goes. Like the fashion to implant floral decorative Sevres porcelain plaques in the surfaces of cabinets about 1774 on, glorious but overwhelming unless you care for those horrendously smiling masks of women and lions that ornament the corners and frieze. Or it does the other thing, goes individual with a strange elegance that I love more. Oddly, the great furniture-makers were often not French at all, though they sometimes learned their craft there. Like David Roentgen, who sold in Paris but worked in Neuwied.

I stared. In the yard was a small converted Citroen truck. I reached to uncover the bureau more, but the odd feeling died. I let go, and turned in disappointment to find a diminutive bloke standing next to me. Gave me a jolt.

“Er, bonjour, Monsieur,” I said, “Je desire pour regarder votre antiques.”

He sighed a long French sigh and shot a mouthful of exasperation at Almira, who explained while I wandered to where my sensation grew stronger. It’s exactly like that hot-cold game of children’s parties. You know when you’re standing next to the real thing, even if it’s only a mildewed crate.

“… need, Lovejoy,” Almira was saying.

“How much? Combien pour acheter?” I told him.

He gauged me. He was the slyest man I’d ever seen. Even his direct appraisal was an oblique squint-eyed effort that never quite made your face. Then, when you’d finally given up and turned aside, you’d find his quizzical shifty eyes trawling after you, taking you in. He’d have made a cracking spy.

“This is not for sale,” Almira said after a voluble interrogation. “The bureau on the car is.”

“Je desire acheter le contents a l’interieur.”

He asked Almira a question.

“Non,” I said. I knew that flic and agent were police-laden words, and he’d gone even shiftier. “Mais je… aime beaucoup what is inside, Monsieur.” I remembered I hadn’t a bean.

Almira told him I was an antiques collector. He brightened shiftily, and tried to pull me back to the piece on the truck.

“Pas the tromperie fake,” I said. “Mais le vrai un.” Just in case he managed to sly his way round this syntax, I added, “Le vrai un. Dans votre box.”

He tried telling me all sorts about the priceless magnificent late eighteenth-century bureau, just arrived on his truck, but I wouldn’t have it. At last, slyly he undid his crate—already the screws were out—and slyly exposed a fire screen laid in the bottom. I went weak with delight.

Sometimes, mixing styles can be so dazzling that even the simplest object becomes glorious. I mean, can anything be simpler than a fire screen? Anything rectangular that stands up will more or less do the job, right? But Georges Jacob in the last quarter of the eighteenth century made a meal of rectangles. He married the new classical style with the older natural period. Another foreigner — Burgundian—he was a riot with the Parisians, and even did a brisk export trade to posh gentry in England. It was good enough to eat. The screen itself was slightly arched gilded wood, carved with sphinxes, arrows, twists on the support columns, cornucopias on the feet. Little garlands and ribboned top, all carved with unbelievable skill, showed just what they could do in those hellish workshops.

“Est-ce-que a vous, Monsieur?” I asked as best I could when breath let me.

He was ruminating slyly at my response, said something shifty to Almira.

“He owns it, Lovejoy,” she said, staring. “But it’s not for sale.”

“Everything else on the planet is,” I countered. “Ask him.”

The piece smiled up at me from its bed of polystyrene grot in the crate. The screen’s panel was a wonder, embroidery pristine as the day it was finished, florets in plum on a beige ground. Lovely. Some people say antiques