Antique Dust Read online

  Nobody rushed to buy the Allington house, with its sixty-foot ballroom. Perhaps nobody felt big enough to fill Alderman Allington’s shoes. Perhaps it was the thought of him sitting there a fortnight in evening-dress, with mouldering bread and cheese in front of him. Perhaps the house was just too big for modern tastes.

  None of this bothered Clocky, who got the house and the furniture for four thousand. He even got the Rolls, for there was no heir, and the lawyers were afraid of vandals. Clocky boasted he sold the Rolls within two days, for two thousand. He was the first to spot the London boom in vintage cars.

  Oh, yes, Clocky Watson was riding high; but I reckoned he was riding for a fall. Even that crabbed, calloused soul could not enjoy walking that great grey house, where an old man had sat down to supper and never got up again. I said as much, in the pub. Somebody told him what I’d said. He came over to laugh in my face, and invite me across, so I could see.

  It was no longer a house. A huge sign said ‘CLOCKY WATSON ANTIQUES’ in gilt lettering on black – like the flashier kind of funeral parlour. The old man’s beautiful over­grown garden had been gouged out into a red gravel car park. The main rooms had been stripped of everything saleable, fitted with neon lighting, and filled with antiques so wonderful that I knew they must have been stolen.

  But it was the rooms at the back that really broke my heart. The mahogany ballroom floor was covered with black marble clocks from one end to the other; a city of clocks, like a view over a black marble London, or a miniature cemetery of black gravestones. Not a clock ticked; they were dumb, like black cattle awaiting slaughter. Already the spiders were spinning webs between them.

  ‘What the . . . ?’

  ‘Investment, boyo, investment. Five bob each. Nobody wants them; people are throwing them out. But in ten years’ time, when there’s no clocks left in the whole trade . . . forty quid, fifty? There’s a thousand clocks there. You lay down your little bottles of wine, Ashden. I’ll lay down clocks.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘We’ll see.’ He showed me another room; every wall packed with Georgian barometers, exquisite things. He saw my admiration.

  ‘They’re all off to Germany next week – three container-loads.’ He flicked ash from his cigar on to the floor. ‘You feel pleased to sell one, Ashden. I sell by the hundred. I told you I was going to eat you, Ashden.’

  ‘May God forgive you,’ I said. ‘What happens when all the antiques are gone?’

  ‘You’ll go bankrupt. I’ll find something else to sell. Rosebud chamber-pots . . . Victorian postcards. I’m buying them up cheap already. Keep anything for twenty years, you’ll make a fortune.’

  I really hated him then. The wicked was flourishing as the green bay tree. I actively sought to do him harm. It was surprising how easily I got the chance. As they say, the Devil finds work for idle hands.

  I’d taken my wife shopping in Muncaster on New Year’s Eve, as a conciliatory gesture. I’d been neglecting her recently, building up my business. So I let her spend the whole day in Plensbury’s. I admired the dresses she tried on, and the curtain-lengths she held up. We bought piffling household things like tap-washers and carpet-shampoo we’d needed for months. It was hot, stuffy and boring, and as we left the store I felt like giving myself a treat.

  There was an antiques supermarket in a basement behind Plensbury’s. It was run by a sharp young Jew who was cashing in on the rich married women who were starting to want to play at antique-dealing. My wife, glutted and laden, followed me for once without complaint.

  I was disappointed; the place had gone downhill. In the old days, a bargain had always been possible because the young wives hadn’t known the value of half they were selling. But now there were outbreaks of the trendy and unsaleable. Old Victorian harmoniums, dug out of the Muncaster slum-clearance areas. Victorian bloomers, sold by students in jeans wearing too much make-up. Even some modern brass guns and carthorses, the dry-rot in the body of the dying antique-trade. I was round the whole place in five minutes, despair in my heart. I had a word with Monty, the grizzled, crop-haired veteran who managed the place.

  ‘Bad, Mr Ashden? It’s downright murder. Boss has gone to pieces – lost all his business sense. These young married women – in the old days when their money ran out, and they couldn’t pay the rent, he’d take their stuff in payment and throw them out. That’s business. Now . . . he’s letting them pay their rent in bed. Up to his neck in three divorce cases, and one of them’s pregnant. That’s all he thinks about, these days.’

  I took a heavy-hearted look round; it’s always depressing when a good source dries up. It was then I saw it; high up on an Edwardian tallboy, big as a mahogany cliff. A black clock, massive. What we call in the trade a bracket-clock, though you’d put it on your mantelpiece. Shaking with excitement, I grabbed a kitchen chair and climbed up to examine it.

  It was made of ebony, or some other dark, close-grained wood I didn’t know. Inlaid with ormolu. Gold feet, exquisitely chiselled. A gold mask above the dial, and five gold balls on top. It was ticking softly and evenly; no wear on the works. I turned it gently so as not to damage the pendulum. The back of the movement was engraved; an eighteenth-century fusee; the maker was John Pike of London. Pike had been clockmaker to the Prince of Wales.

  Trembling, I reached for the price-ticket. If it was under a thousand pounds, I had a bargain worth taking straight to Sotheby’s.

  The price-ticket read £25--, and my heart sank. The owner knew its value. Though what it was doing among all this tat . . .

  ‘Nice, innit?’ Monty, coming up behind me, made me jump.

  ‘No chance of discount for trade, I suppose?’ I said bitterly.

  ‘No discount,’ said Monty, enjoying some kind of private joke at my expense. ‘Twenty-five, the boss said, and no discount.’

  ‘Twenty-five hundred, of course?’

  ‘No, squire. Twenty-five quid; twenty-five greenbacks.’

  ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ I turned back to the clock. Cheap plastic repros were coming on to the market then, from Italy. But surely I knew real wood, a real Georgian fusee?

  ‘It’s genuine. A genuine John Pike. Boss had it to Muncaster museum – we’ve got a certificate.’

  I scrambled down and wrote a very wild cheque.

  ‘Geoff,’ came a low voice from the shadows behind us. My wife’s voice. ‘Geoff, what are you buying?’

  ‘A genuine Pike – got it for twenty-five.’

  ‘Then you can just get your money back. I’m not having that thing in the house.’

  ‘What . . . ?

  ‘Can’t you see what it is? Are you blind?’ She dropped her parcels and scrambled up on the chair. I couldn’t help noticing her legs; which was odd. My wife has very pretty legs, but I’d lived with them for eight years. But now, as her black skirt rode up with the effort of scrambling, I noticed the plump smoothness of calf, the dimple behind the knee. I was seized with a fantasy of dumping the clock in the car, and driving home like a maniac and making love to my wife with the black clock ticking in the corner of our bedroom . . .

  But nothing could have been further from her mind. She turned to me with a pale and outraged face.

  ‘Can’t you see the feet?’ I looked closely, and was surprised. Instead of the usual lion’s foot, they were gilded cloven hoofs. Her hand moved upwards, caught between a desire to show me and snaking revulsion. The gilded mask above the dial wasn’t the usual goddess or lion’s head, but a goat’s head with tight-curled horns and oval eyes. On the silvered dial was engraved the number thirteen – XIII – below the usual number one. And the corner-spandrels round the dial contained . . . miniature male genitals. Well-draped with vine-fronds, but definitely gilded male genitals.

  ‘So what?’ I said. ‘It just makes it more special.’

  ‘Special?’ she said. ‘Special? Can’t you feel it’s evil?’

  ‘Well, I’ve bought it now. Aren’t you over-reacting?’

  I wa
s ashamed of her, going on like this in front of Monty. I wanted to punish her; put the clock in the corner of the bedroom and make love to her on the floor beneath, and if she didn’t like the idea, so much the better.

  ‘I’m not having it in the house,’ she said. ‘If you bring it in, I’m leaving you. I won’t ride in the car with it, and I’ll thank you to give me half an hour to pack and leave before you fetch it in.’

  When she said the word ‘leave’, I suddenly knew she meant it.

  ‘All right, I’ll keep it down the garden shed!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right, I’ll drive it straight to London.’

  ‘You’ll find me gone when you get back.’

  I glanced at Monty, hating this scene in public. But he didn’t seem surprised. Just . . . interested.

  ‘Look,’ I shouted, ‘I’m not throwing up the chance of making two thousand quid. What do you know about antiques?’

  ‘I know about that one.’

  I looked helplessly at Monty.

  ‘You can’t have your money back,’ he said. ‘The sale’s made.’

  ‘Did the others want their money back?’ asked my wife.

  Monty shrugged.

  ‘How many others wanted their money back?’ asked my wife, sensing victory.

  Monty shrugged again. ‘In the end, they just leave it on our doorstep, when we’re shut. It’s a wonder it hasn’t been stolen. But the dogs won’t even pee on it.’

  ‘Dogs have sense. Well, Monty, we won’t even bother to take it down. You can keep your twenty-five pounds and welcome to it.’ She pulled on her gloves, as if that made it final.

  ‘I wish to hell somebody would take it,’ said Monty. ‘We’ve had no bloody luck at all since it came.’

  It was then the idea came into my mind. ‘Can you do a delivery?’

  Monty nodded.

  I gave him Clocky Watson’s address. ‘Put “Happy New Year” on the wrapping,’ I said.

  He got it, of course. I heard him boasting in the pub; though he didn’t know who’d sent it. Clocky didn’t make any secret of his triumphs, however dark he kept his fiddles. Then I heard he was drinking hard; that he’d sit in a corner, pale and sweating, knocking back the whiskies one after another and talking non-stop, until people just went away.

  I clashed with him at several auctions, and beat him hollow. He couldn’t seem to concentrate. Then he developed a nervous trick of nodding to himself . . . fatal at auctions. There was a lot of junk knocked down to him he’d never intended to bid for, let alone buy. And it cost him. Because when people saw him bidding for junk, they bid against him, thinking he’d noticed something valuable they’d missed. Then they began to force up the bidding against him for a cruel laugh, once they saw he no longer knew what he was doing. As I said, he was never popular after Joe Gorman’s death.

  Then he just vanished. When he hadn’t shown up for three months at any auction, I began to get nosy; I went round to the old Allington house.

  It looked a bit empty, a bit thin on items, like an antique-business does when it’s starting to fail. The grand black-and-gold nameboard was starting to flake with the sun, the weeds were sprouting all over the car park. It was a total stranger who came out to serve me. I toyed with this and that, bought up a job-lot of 1930s novelty brass ashtrays – cats’ faces, crescent moons and the like – and then said casually, ‘Mr Watson around?’

  ‘He’s . . . in . . . London at the moment, sir.’ The man looked decidedly worried. ‘I’m running the shop for him.’

  I couldn’t leave it alone. ‘Used to know Clocky well . . . my name’s Ashden . . . got a shop in town.’

  ‘Yes . . . I’ve heard him speak of you.’

  ‘Has he still got that black clock with the cloven hooves?’

  ‘As far as I know . . . he didn’t leave it behind here, sir.’

  I went round to the Allington house about once a month after that. Not so much hunting for the odd bargain as for news of Clocky. The place got slowly tattier and emptier, but it didn’t close. I got to know the manager well – a Yorkshireman called Tom Ponsonby. I got a few cheap items, but never a sniff about Clocky.

  Until one sultry dark day at the end of August. I was going over a mahogany chest, looking for woodworm; the wormholes were very difficult to see, in the dark wood, with no lights on.

  ‘My, my,’ said a voice. ‘It’s Geoff Ashden. I hear you’ve been round quite a bit, Geoff, asking after my health.’

  He was only a shadow; a little shadow against a distant window. I couldn’t see his face in the shadow, but I knew it was Clocky from the way he picked up a vase from a table and began to turn it over and over in his little pale hands, like he was going to devour it. ‘I hear you’ve been asking about a clock as well, Geoff?’

  I was silent; my mouth was dry. He was different, in a way a man should not be different. I had an odd fear he might be a ghost.

  ‘Well, don’t you want to know what happened to me, Geoff? After I got your little clock? Isn’t that what you’ve been coming back for, all these months?’

  He laughed; not a pleasant sound. And this is what he told me.

  Well, Geoff, it was late when I found it on the doorstep; dark already, because the traffic out of Muncaster had been heavy. I nearly fell over it. I carried it in, and read ‘Happy New Year’ scrawled on the packing-box. I thought one of my old mates had left it there because it was nicked and too hot to handle.

  I set it up in the little ground-floor room at the far end of the corridor. Got it going all right. Then I just sat looking at it, and drinking whisky to celebrate, till nearly midnight. Then I went to bed. My mind was full of how much I might get for it – I know one or two big collectors in the States who’d ask no questions.

  I was wakened about two by the sound of water dripping. I banged on the light bloody quick, I can tell you. You know what a frost we had, last New Year’s Eve, and I’ve got some bloody great old slate water-tanks in the roof, and the water-pipes are all lead and crumbling to crap. You know what water does to antiques, and I had a load of walnut veneer in at the time.

  Anyway, I looked at the carpet, and it was bone dry. No drips coming from the ceiling, no bulge in the plaster. But the sound of dripping now seemed to come from another room. I grabbed my dressing-gown and ran from room to room, switching on lights and looking to my best stuff first.

  Not a trace of damp anywhere. But there might be a leak in the roofspace, and a soggy ceiling just waiting to collapse. I searched the whole house . . . nothing.

  Except that sound of dripping water; the ‘plink’ that water makes falling into a puddle. Then I thought it might be outside. But when I went out with a torch, everything was frozen solid, crunching underfoot, and quite silent, the way frosty nights sometimes are. So I went back to bed and switched off the light and listened to the ‘plink’ of water.

  Ever tried to get to sleep when a tap’s dripping in the room? You lie awake, waiting for the next drip. And they never come regular, like the tick of a clock. Well, this was much worse than a dripping tap. There were, it seemed to me lying listening in the dark, at least eight different drips, all dripping at different speeds, one right beside me in the room. I kept trying to place them. And the longer I lay, the keener my ears seemed to get. I couldn’t just hear drips, but echoes of drips, unmuffled by carpets and curtains. Wherever the drips were coming from, they weren’t coming from my carpeted showrooms downstairs, or the bedrooms either side of me, stuffed with junk I’d picked up for a song and meant to do up some day.

  In the end, I put the light on again and fetched a whisky. I keep some in the bedroom, for the very occasional girl who agrees to share my bed for the night. I was drinking it when the solution hit me. The frost outside must be causing condensation inside my ancient cavity-walling. Quite harmless to the furniture. I rolled over and slept immediately.

  It never occurred to me that the echoes suggested a far bigger space than a four-inch wall-cavity.
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  When I woke up again, my first thought was how big the room sounded. Huge, high-domed, and somehow made of stone. The drips and echoes rang through it, like flights of frantic birds, backwards and forwards. A cold draught of air touched the cheek I lifted from the pillow, bringing a smell of . . . damp . . . underground.

  Where the hell was I?

  But with the stupidness of sleep, I still reached for my bedside lamp; found it in its usual place. It clicked on, and there was the whisky bottle leering at me, an empty glass and ashtray full of dog-ends. And my shirt and socks in a heap on the bedside chair, though my trousers had fallen on the floor as usual, weighed down by my pocketful of loose change.

  But it didn’t banish what I began to think of as the cavern. My eyes told me I was in my bedroom; my ears, nose and skin told me I was underground. I felt split in half; like when you wear stereo headphones, and hear the guitarist thumping away over your head, and the invisible singer’s footsteps pacing the floor in front of you, and a huge audience stirring that couldn’t possibly be contained in the room you’re sitting in.

  I normally enjoy that sensation; I didn’t enjoy this. But there must be some rational explanation. The draught must have come from my bedroom door that was slightly open into the darkness of the hall. I closed it in a rush, and leapt back to the safety of bed. The musty smell? My shoes lay tumbled by the bed. I got one up and sniffed the filthy muddy sole. It smelled damp and dark and ancient. A dealer spends a lot of time in old, cold houses and damp cellars.

  I poured another drink and looked at my watch. Just on three. I lay back and waited for my old friends the clocks to start chiming in the showrooms downstairs.

  First came the long-case I’d inherited from old Allington. That nobody would buy, because it carried a brass plate, recording its presentation to him by the employees of Barlborough Council on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. It had been in the room where he died, and they don’t like dead men’s shoes in Barlborough, do they? Fools. Don’t they know all antiques are dead men’s shoes? Bedroom mirrors that have reflected centuries of dead men’s lovemaking? If you don’t like the dead, buy Danish teak . . .