fact.
Russian art ranged across a century, but hereabouts feminism had raised its head.
Quick as a flash pickets gathered in Bond Street chanting slogans about sisterhood subjection and degradation of women. Some artists had painted nudes, you see, and such images were imperialist, whatever.
'You stopped me, you bastard!' She laughed, remembering. 'Trying to stab the painting!'
'Maybe I shouldn't have,' I mused. 'Serov's underpainting is duff. Green's essential—'
Caprice shouted for coffee, still falling about on my lap, not without hazards of various kinds. 'You knocked me senseless, you bastard.'
'Well, I couldn't see the point.' I still couldn't. Stabbing a painting is like burning books, always criminal. I hadn't liked the Vladimir Serov painting, a crowned nude, but who am I?
'Thank Christ for that, Lovejoy. It proves you're sane.' She lit a fag. I stared. She didn't use to smoke. Smoking had been a wicked male stratagem promoting women's serfdom. The coffee came. I got a theatrical special, so thick it wouldn't swallow.
Caprice drank hers with a flourish, still on my lap. We talked of changing times.
Fashion alters art. It also does something scary - it changes prices. This is good news and bad news. Before the millennium, 'political correctness' became a stigmatizing accusation shrieked by anyone who wanted media time to air their prejudices, whether barmy or not. The world became miserable. Doomsters were everywhere on radio, telly, the good old tabloids. And the value - the money you actually hand over - of antiques changed. It took a year to happen. (I'm telling you this because it can happen again any time, but the mechanism's the same.)
The bad news? Quite drossy paintings shot up in price. Okay, they weren't artistically up to much - say, some poor quality Ukrainian cottage - but they were the sort of oldie that dealers tend to buy to 'body out', as dealers call it, their shops or next phoney Antiquarian Road Show Travelling Auction. Paintings of some lovely nude plummeted. It became politically incorrect to like some portrait of a crusty old cleric or kindly father.
Even yet these are badly undersold. Thousands of portraits - regimental officers, colonial stalwarts, doddering priests, millmasters - have been cleaned off so the canvas can be used by fakers. Forgers call it 'emptying' an ancient canvas. And the fakers use those genuinely old canvases to paint 'Victorian' scenes that are politically correct -
ladies reading, children at the seashore, or boring old golf. Forgeries, in brief, where nobody has a job.
I call it sinner's stiffness, this move to make everybody glare accusingly at history through modern eyes. It's evil because it kills antiques. Because it burns books. And because it's phoney. Sorry to go on. I once came across a forged painting on an old canvas. I recognized the canvas from the marks a dealer called Tollbooth had made on its reverse (dealers often do this in pencil, so a pal in their auction ring will know how much to bid). He uses the code CRAFTY, the letters' meaning being 1 to 6, because Tollbooth never bids over 666 for anything.
The painting had come from Armenia, and was of an elderly woman coming from a tin bath. It was obvious the artist had seen Rembrandt's painting. It was condemned by political rectitude, and went for a song. Cleaned off, the canvas was used by some forger who daubed on it a golf house in mid-Edwardian style. It went for a relative fortune. See? Fashion slaughters art, and substitutes gunge. Collectors out there, please note: if you want regimental histories, religious allegories, nudes, anything condemned in the great hogwash period of the 1990s, get out there and buy, because they'll never be as cheap again once the world recovers its senses.
'As long as there's a few like you left, Lovejoy, we can identify the norm,' Caprice was saying.
Eh? Whatever it was, I agreed. 'Look, love, I wonder—'
'Get on with it, Lovejoy,' she said. 'We've three shows, all doing bad business. The boss is near bankruptcy, driving us mad. He's got some new tart. I've to find a West End play she can star in. She has the thespian skills of Amoeba proteus and the dress sense of Mrs Gamp.' She sighed. 'God knows what she does in bed, but it must be brilliant.'
She waited. She ahemed. 'Come in, Planet Lovejoy.'
'Oh, sorry.' I'd got distracted by the thought. 'Er, a gun, love.'
That shook her so much she ground out her fag. I watched it die. 'You what, Lovejoy? I never thought I'd hear—'
Caprice Rhodes married this landowner near Grime's Graves. They own heathlands, fields, valleys, there to breed pheasants, quail, and other innocent birds, all the better to slaughter them by twelve-bore shotguns. Saves the old legs, don't ya ken, killing the birds all in one spot.
'There's eleven thousand country guns available, Lovejoy. Why mine?'
A 'gun', incidentally, isn't your actual tubes. The term actually means a place at a shoot.
People pay - no joke -up to two and a half thousand zlotniks of the realm a day for the privilege of going out for a quick massacre. Huntin' and shootin' meets are where cabinet ministers of any political stripe are made, they say. Other, even more passionate, relationships are also fostered.
'It's near somewhere I'm investigating.'
She pondered, posing, chin on her finger. Pretty. I began to wish she'd get off my lap, or sit closer still.
'The Goldhorns?' she guessed, quick. 'They were the only people of our…' of our class who would bother with a lowlife like you, Lovejoy were the words she wanted. She finished, 'district who knew you. Is it them?'
'Yes.'
'Arthur died, didn't he? Broken heart, after some sod took your place when you left Colette.' She nodded. 'Well, since you ask, Lovejoy, I'll get you a gun.'
'Now?'
That gave her a laugh. She shook her hair like they do, as if trying to throw it away over her shoulder. 'Phone this number early tomorrow. Lovejoy?' She looked as I bussed her goodbye. 'You won't disgrace me, will you? I mean, Clovis is a stickler for behaviour.'
