Victorian house, sniffing the air and considering afresh. All about him furniture was stacked, just purchased, waiting to be sold again.
Mrs Hammond forgot about Mr Jeffs almost as soon as his voice ceased to echo in her consciousness. Nothing about Mr Jeffs remained with her because as she had conversed with him no image had formed in her mind, as one had in his. She thought of Mr Jeffs as a shop person, as a voice that might interrupt a grocery order or a voice in the jewellery department of Liberty’s. When her
So it was that Mr Jeffs was led into the Hammonds’ kitchen by a girl from central Switzerland and told abruptly, though not intentionally so, to clean the windows.
‘What?’ said Mr Jeffs.
‘Start with the kitchen, Mrs Hammond says, since they have most filth on them. There is hot water in the tap.’
‘No,’ said Mr Jeffs. ‘I’ve come to see a table.’
‘I myself have scrubbed the table. You may stand on it if you place a newspaper underneath your feet.’
Ursula left Mr Jeffs at this juncture, although he had already begun to speak again. She felt she could not stand there talking to window-cleaners, since she was not employed in the house to do that.
‘He is a funny man,’ she reported to Mrs Hammond. ‘He wanted to wash the table too.’
‘My name is Jeffs,’ said Mr Jeffs, standing at the door, holding his stiff black hat. ‘I have come about the console table.’
‘How odd!’ murmured Mrs Hammond, and was about to add that here indeed was a coincidence since at that very moment a man called Jeffs was cleaning her kitchen windows. ‘Oh my God!’ she cried instead. ‘Oh, Mr Jeffs, what a terrible thing!’
It was this confusion, this silly error that Mrs Hammond quite admitted was all her fault, that persuaded her to let Mr Jeffs have the table. Mr Jeffs, standing with his hat, had recognized a certain psychological advantage and had pressed it imperceptibly home. He saw that Mrs Hammond, beneath the exterior of her manner, was concerned lest he might have felt himself slighted. She is a nice woman, he thought, in the way in which a person buying meat decides that a piece is succulent. She is a nice person, he assured himself, and will therefore be the easier and the quicker to deal with. He was correct in his surmise. There was a prick of guilt in Mrs Hammond’s face: he saw it arrive there as the explanation dawned on her and as she registered that he was a dealer in antiques, one with the features and the accents of a London Jew. She is afraid I am thinking her anti-Semitic, thought Mr Jeffs, well pleased with himself. He named a low price, which was immediately accepted.
‘I’ve been clever,’ said Mrs Hammond to her husband. ‘I have sold the console table to a little man called Mr Jeffs whom Ursula and I at first mistook for a window-cleaner.’
Mr Jeffs put a chalk mark on the table and made a note of it in a notebook. He sat in the kitchen of his large house, eating kippers that he had cooked in a plastic bag. His jaws moved slowly and slightly, pulping the fish as a machine might. He didn’t pay much attention to the taste in his mouth: he was thinking that if he sold the table to Sir Andrew Charles he could probably rely on a hundred per cent profit, or even more.
‘An everyday story of country folk,’ said a voice on Mr Jeffs’ old wireless, and Mr Jeffs rose and carried the plate from which he had eaten to the sink. He wiped his hands on a tea-cloth and climbed the stairs to the telephone.
Sir Andrew was in Africa, a woman said, and might not be back for a month. It was far from certain when he would return, but it would be a month at least. Mr Jeffs said nothing more. He nodded to himself, but the woman in Sir Andrew Charles’ house, unaware of this confirmation, reflected that the man was ill-mannered not to acknowledge what she was saying.
Mr Jeffs made a further note in his notebook, a reminder to telephone Sir Andrew in six weeks’ time. As it happened, however, this note was unnecessary, because three days later Mr Jeffs received a telephone call from Mrs Hammond’s husband, who asked him if he still had the table. Mr Jeffs made a pretence of looking, and replied after a moment that he rather thought he had.
‘In that case,’ said Mrs Hammond’s husband, ‘I rather think I would like to buy it back.’
Mr Hammond announced his intention of coming round. He contradicted himself by saying that it was really a friend of his who wanted the table and that he would bring his friend round too, if that was all right with Mr Jeffs.
‘Bring whomsoever you wish,’ said Mr Jeffs. He felt awkward in advance: he would have to say to Mr Hammond or to Mr Hammond’s friend that the price of the table had doubled itself in three days. He would not put it like that, but Mr Hammond would recognize that that was what it amounted to.
Mr Jeffs was in the kitchen, drinking tea, when they called. He blew at the mug of tea, not wishing to leave it there, for he disapproved of waste. He drank most of it and wiped his lips with the tea-cloth. The door-bell sounded again and Mr Jeffs hastened to answer it.
‘I am the nigger in the woodpile,’ said a Mrs Galbally, who was standing with Hammond. ‘It is I who cause all this nonsense over a table.’
‘Mrs Galbally hasn’t ever seen it,’ Hammond explained. ‘She, too, answered our advertisement, but you, alas, had snaffled the treasure up.’
‘Come into the house,’ said Mr Jeffs, leading the way to the room with the table in it. He turned to Mrs Galbally, pointing with one hand. ‘There it is, Mrs Galbally. You are quite at liberty to purchase it, though I had earmarked it for another, a client in Africa who has been looking for that very thing and who would pay an exceedingly handsome price. I am just warning you of that. It seems only fair.’
But when Mr Jeffs named the figure he had in mind neither Mrs Galbally nor Hammond turned a hair. Hammond drew out a cheque-book and at once inscribed a cheque. ‘Can you deliver it?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Jeffs, ‘provided it is not too far away. There will be a small delivery charge to cover everything, insurance in transit, etcetera. Four pounds four.’
