Jack Cox - Dodge Rose

We showed her the cardboard box and she noted the remaining contents. She winced but wrote. She even picked up some things we’d missed. One gold fish mask, acetate. Have I seen it all. Eliza affirmed. What happens now. I’ll write a report and a valuation. Nothing in principle prohibits them appearing in the same document so to make your part as lucid and as uncomplicated as possible I’ll combine and send you a copy that’ll be yours, to use that is. Take it with you to the buyers and beware.

The next manoeuvre had been planned. Would she be interested in any of it, all of it.

Certainly not. That would be a flagrant conflict of interest. I hope that. She straightened an arm. Do you know what you’re doing.

I suppose we couldn’t offer any of it to your husband then either.

Correct. Ted wouldn’t touch it, be people just waiting to trip him up. He’s one of the best, unique, but he has to rise above a lot. With all he cops from those goddamned nanny goats and worse, above and below, he’s a consummate professional, a great communicator. Phah. Vendetta of the flesh. Anyway I thought you wanted to sell the stuff straight off. I’ll send you a list of places you could try. There’s some value here, among the store-bought furniture, but let me tell you, this is a long way from a sure business; whatever you got for that bookcase, I wouldn’t spend it yet.

Mrs. Sullaman wound on her film then dropped her things back in the bag. Would she like a cup of tea or coffee before she left. No thank you. And I suggest you give all that tableware a proper clean before you try pushing it on anyone. Relatively small things like that can make a difference.

Yes ma’am.

After she had gone Eliza suggested we draw lots for the washing up this time but I told her not to bother. She hooked her finger in the elastic tabs of her boots and pulled them off, then she stretched out on the sofa with a slip of junk mail raised to the fading light. The valuer had been over longer than I’d realised. I put the gloves on as they were and dumped the silver back in the sink. It shivered the unaccumulated quiet of the flat, waking me up to the lull between peak hour and the various night traffic, when you can hear the leaves if there are any, and the birds, closer than that long, silent migration that darkens over the city at twilight, when voices on the street break so clearly they reach the kitchen window without the words that carried them. Eliza was shuffling through her reading matter. I poured a handful of baking soda into the sink.

I may as well say in faith to the arbitrariness by which I apparently got here that I began when I came across a photograph of a scale model escalator on fire in a volume bound, I believe, in the colour of the baseball team named for keeping out of the way of the new trolley cars in Brooklyn, and containing a report from a seminar on Fire Dynamics and the Organisation of Safety at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, augury into the accident in the shaft serving the deep Piccadilly line at St. Pancras. An intestine catastrophe as they nicely call it. How did it happen. Probably a match, the ban ignored, dropped alight by some careless traveller at the right side of the wooden stairs and falling in a grease track pregnant with paper fragments from discarded tickets, sweet wrappers, fluff, rat and human hair, never cleaned. An eastbound train arriving and a westbound train departing. The wind in the wings. No one believed the first computer simulation, that it burns obliquely: the model proved it. Remain calm, fire does not burn downwards, gh devoured. Anisot, well, you remember the bits, the solvent in the ceiling turning the smoke oily black, and so on the vidimus, less the wax of course in such mounting heat. At least it’s true I’ve always had a soft spot for pictures. It might have been different.

The day word from Mrs. Sullaman arrived I was out of bed before Eliza, who was normally moving around by dawn. I washed, caught the lift in my pyjamas and brought the brown A4 envelope back up to the dining room, where it lay unopened on the dining table while I made breakfast. There had been disappearances. All but the necessary silver had been put away and we had gone through the rest of the flat wherever we thought we could make a difference, so the morning light ran level over most things and the smell itself was less confused. Something similar missing. The curtains in the dining room were half drawn. I was sitting in it eating a bowl of cornflakes and watching a fly turn circles over the razed expanse of killed maple before me when Eliza came in a bit flushed, smiling. She said what’s that.

It’s from the valuer.

She ripped the top off. So we make progress. Inside were a few typed sheets held together by a bulldog clip and a handwritten note. Eliza lifted the sheets one by one. Blah blah blah, need of restoration, blah blah. Here. Estimated market value. She read off a series of preliminary numbers, her fingers twitching at the edge of the page, glissando to a computational flutter, then smacked the bundle down and sat motionless with her hands in her lap, her head inclined and her eyes fixed in utopian middle distance. We’ve done it she said at last, winking again. Pull out that pinky, we’re sitting on thousands. Still something in my.

The handwritten note contained a list of places. We couldn’t tell if it was in ascending or descending order so we went blindly from the top. Bob’s Second Hand and Fossicker’s were on south King Street, in Newtown. We started with Fossicker’s. Yes they were interested in some things, not the major things but they could do something with some of the furniture, the lamps, the heater, that sort of thing. They would send someone on the weekend. I wonder is this how Dodge used to do it. We pottered around the flat smoothing the pillows down. Tooth, got it. That won’t come back again. Eliza planted the list with gory asterisks and we discussed technique, settled on a terminus a quo, let the phone ring. She was standing in the middle of the living room pointing the television aerial in various directions when I answered the door to a grave young man, clearly somebody’s son. He arrived later than you might have expected, being anxiously observant of the other civilities and knowing, he said, the area. Apologies. The weather. Yes of course. You look cold, poor thing. His shirt was buttoned above the collar of a plastic rain poncho that he took off at my invitation and hung where it dripped onto the hallstand. Come in don’t just stand there. He put his hands in his pockets and followed me squelching into the living room, the freckles rising in his cheeks. He was as tall as Eliza and strongly built. In another place with his elbows free he might have been taken for athletic. I offered him a chair and Eliza went in to make some tea. She regretted having to leave the aerial. I heard something she said over her shoulder. I swear, just for a second I had it, something.

While she was in the kitchen our guest and I talked about his shop, antiques. He answered directly enough but his eyes nutated all over the place and by the time we ran out of small talk he was literally squirming. I wish I could put my finger on exactly what it was. It was a sombre day and the rainclouds banked in the windows had thrown the room into faint relief. The air rumbled. With the first price I happened to mention I thought I saw him blanch. He did jump. If that seems unbelievable, things certainly went downhill from there. We had already mentioned quite middling costs in the shop so it can’t have been the money that put him off. He must have been prepared for that, which in any case was his job, or at least. Something spooked him. When Eliza came in with the tea things he was gone. Just like that. Did he say anything. . He forgot his raincoat. She stood, stunned, a fillet of steam unwinding from the teapot into the rays of the oncoming storm. The television began to crackle.