Kyril Bonfiglioli - All the Tea in China

In the morning, to my great satisfaction, smart errand-carts began to arrive from the tailor, shirt-maker, boot-maker and other people with whom I had placed orders. This was good because of my engagement with Lord Windermere that night. I had ordered a blue coat very like that of Mr Jorrocks and a buff kerseymere waistcoat, too, but had stopped short of the dark-blue, stocking-net pantaloons and the great Hessian boots. Instead, I had ordered what the breeches-maker called “drab shorts and continuations” which more fitted my station in life, yet still lent a sportsmanlike relish to my outfit.

While I was trying on my new fineries, a large, fat, happy man came into the shop; I peeped at him through the peephole at the bottom of the stairs. His belly stuck out in front, so did his magnificent moustache which was of the sort the English call “walrus” but was not in fashion in England at that time. I was sure that he was either a German or a Hollander and, certainly, had some good, strong, Jewish blood in his veins. He did not mind when the boy “You” told him that I was out and that all the stock was, for the time being, spoken for; he chuckled happily and went on looking, occasionally picking up a piece and nodding, chuckling. Then he left the shop, telling “You” that he was “a good boy” and giving him a halfpenny, telling him that he was to tell me that he would see me very soon.

“You” looked at the halfpenny in his hand for a long time — I watched him through the peep-hole — then put it into the till. He was, indeed, a good boy. After a little while I stamped noisily downstairs, examined the till and made the first credit entry in the ledger.

“½ d ,” I wrote. Then I called for hammer and nail and solemnly nailed the coin to the counter. I said nothing to “You”, nor he to me.

When I went out that evening I bade him buy ten pennyworth of tincture of opium. I handed him a shilling.

“With the change,” I said, “you may buy yourself two fresh penny buns or, if you are sensible, three stale ones, which are better for you. If they are very stale and the baker a kindly man you might well get four.”

He looked at me as though I were kind, which was far from the truth, although not so far as it would be today.

I realised, as I climbed into the cab, that I did not know Lord Windermere’s address. The cabby however, did.

“You means the mad toff wot buys old junk?”

“That will be he,” I said stiffly.

He whipped up his mare, a fine old black who looked as though she had known better days — he called her “Beauty” although he treated her ill — and soon we pitched up at a Square called Eaton; a fine neighbourhood, one could see that it was bursting with toffs. He tried to cheat me, of course, but I had, by then, at Mr Jorrocks’s advice, acquired a copy of that inestimable work: Mogg’s Guide to 10,000 London Cab Fares.

Lord Windermere’s fine house was bursting with antiques and works of art and vertu of every description, some of them mistakes, I could see that, but all most valuable. He roared with laughter when he saw me in my new clothes, it was his way of putting me at my ease, you understand.

“Now,” he cried, thrusting a bumper of fine port into my hand, “now, let’s try you. Eh? D’you see these two pots? Uncle Henry here tells me I’ve been had, diddled. One of them’s a ringer, d’you see, not right. Wrong ,” he added in the way the English explain things to foreigners.

I peered about the room for the Uncle Henry he spoke of. From a deep wing-chair emerged the large, fat, happy man who had visited my shop that afternoon. He beamed and we offered each other two fingers to shake.

“Duveen,” he said happily. “Henry Duveen. Everyone calls me Uncle Henry pecoss I look like an uncle, ja?”

“Yes indeed, Sir,” I said carefully. I liked this man but he was strong and dangerous and I was disturbed to find that my mad toff was already on friendly terms with a Dutch Jew who knew how to feel the glazes on pottery and porcelain. (Who would have guessed that I was facing the first of that great House of Duveen, that House with whom ours was to be locked in a death-grapple — and still is — for mastery of the art trade?)

I turned to the table upon which stood the pair of suspect pots. They were supremely beautiful hawthorn-pattern ginger-jars from the period when, briefly, generations of experiment, using up a thousand camel-loads of pigment from Arabia, had led to the discovery of the true Celestial Blue, the Blue of Blues.

I did not even touch the glaze with a wet finger, I simply looked at them narrowly. On one, the glaze had drawn away from the pigment during the firing, just as my mother had once told me, although she herself had never owned such a pot.

“Will you tell me what you gave for these, Lord Windermere?” I asked diffidently.

“Six hundred guineas.”

“The genuine one is worth quite that and more by itself. As for the other, the wrong one, I will give you five pounds for it as a curiosity. Even so clevered a fake as this should not be in a nobleman’s collection.”

“Done!” he cried, roaring with laughter again, “but which is which, eh? Which? What?”

I put five golden sovereigns on the table, fetched the poker from the fireplace and brought it down smartly on the bad pot, praying, as it fell to flinders, that I was right.

“Stap me!” bellowed Windermere, “oh stap me, I say! Said you were a cool card from the first — from the first! Oh, curse me, d’you never tire of smashing pots?”

“So clever a forgery,” I said solemnly, “capable of deceiving even you, should not be allowed to survive. You see, it might have fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous dealer.”

Now Uncle Henry, too, was shaking with laughter.

“Bot if you had zmoshed der right pot,” he wheezed, “Vot den, my jonge, vot den?”

“Of course,” I said modestly, jingling in my breeches pocket the few sovereigns remaining to me, “I would have given Lord Windermere the six hundred guineas. Less, of course, the five pounds.”

Windermere swept up my five sovereigns and forced them into my unreluctant hand.

“Buy a suit of duds for that little bastard you keep,” he cried. “It was well worth it to watch your face as you lifted the poker!”

He and Uncle Henry and I became firm friends that night, I think. We also became a little drunk: I recall that they had some difficulty in lifting me into my hansom, we all fell over again and again but my new coat was not damaged, only muddied.

The next day Lord Windermere called to see me early in the afternoon. I was setting about a pudding which the boy “You” had fetched me in from a place nearby in the Strand. It was called “Simpson’s” and still is, for all I know. It is long since I was able to digest such a pudding, made of beefsteak and kidneys and oysters and sparrows; very good.

I offered to send out for just such another pudding for Lord Windermere but he seemed to be in no mood for eating.

“Pudding?” he cried, “pudding! Damme, you’re not eating , Van Cleef; you can’t be!”

“But in my country everyone eats a little something at this hour of the day, it is to keep our strength up. Do you not do so? Come, I have seen English gentlemen eating puddings in Simpson’s as early as half-past noon!”

His face turned a strange colour, almost as though he had the “hot coppers”, which is an English expression for how you feel at noon when you have drunk some good port the night before. When Englishmen’s faces turn strange colours you must give them tea. I made him a pot of Mr J.’s “superior black”, he drank with relish and seemed to be the better for it.