I don't know if Robbie has developed his contempt for what used to be called the working classes from the shadowed cloisters and manicured lawns of Glastonhall, or whether it has been served to him, piping-hot, by Lucien the celebrity chef. But it soured my wine. I felt a deep stab of shame and, of course, of guilt that I hadn't been there to guide the habits of his early manhood. It doesn't take much for us to treat every other person in this world first with respect and then with kindness, if possible. All other virtues are only targets, whereas these two are imperatives. In the days that I'd been set apart from the upbringing of my son he'd turned into a posh, sneering little viper, unnecessarily abusing the waiter in Spiga. Of course, I crossly told Robbie about what George Orwell said regarding people who bring you your food. But I made sure the waiter heard the boy get that dressing-down before he fixed up our salad.
I also decided that a dose of a thousand days at the local comprehensive might help Robbie's true education before he followed Sarah on to university. Claire had to suffer the same fate. Though she was already doing A levels, and didn't mind in the least being switched from snooty St. Anne's. In fact she kept telling me her new school was "cool." Robbie's school was not cool. In fact, I think he found it a little hot down there in the trenches, studying Information Technology with the sons and daughters of plumbers, car salesmen and desk-jockeys like myself. Oh, and of non-celebrity chefs, it occurred to me. So now we weren't on speaking terms.
Lucien the pastry chef might have baled him out. Why not? He was more of a father to him these days in the sense that Robbie chose to live with him and Fay instead of me. But then my network of spies had told me that Lucien, for all his celebrity endorsements, voice-overs and book deals, had money problems of his own; something I would leave Fay to discover rather than inform her and risk her hating me still further.
A footnote on snobbery: Robbie's, Lucien's or anyone else's. No, not a demon either. Just a deeply unpleasant human trait magnified and cemented by a vigorous British class system; vicious, sadistic and thriving very well in the twenty-first century. If Robbie wanted to continue to knock tennis balls over the net with his conceited privately educated cronies he would have to find the humility to fucking well ask me for the cash.
There was some post to open. I tore one of the envelopes and my heart quickened to see that there was a development on dear old Jane Austen and one or two other things. By the time I'd finished perusing the letter and opened the rest of the post I was draining the last of the Beaujolais into my glass. Which, even for me, was some kind of a record.
Ideal in rare books and manuscripts. Not as a profession, but as a hobby. Second-hand and antiquarian books, as it states on my card. But not for profit, which it does not state.
Oh no, not for profit. Not any more. Originally, when I started the game back at college in the early 1980s, profit was exactly the motivation. Those were the days when Madam Thatcher set her nose to the wind and her commandments were clear: thou shalt trample the faces of the poor and rub thy hands with glee. How we rubbed. Rubbed and rubbed.
But all that rubbing produces smoke, and out from the smoke poured the djinn. That old story of the lamp is a mere externalization, for the simpler mind. The rubbing of hands is quite enough to do the trick. The avidity. The avarice. Out pour the demons, exulting in profit.
Luckily for me, I became ill, and recognized the dangers. Others of my ilk from that era were not so fortunate. They went on to make vast profits or to pursue fame.
It started for me when a slip-cased copy of
The Shanachie
, an Irish miscellany of short stories—featuring no less than Yeats, Shaw, Synge and Lord Dunsany—fell into my hands. I was a student at teacher-training college in Derby and while trying to sleep with a girl called Nicola I was roped into helping with a stupid jumble sale designed to raise money for the homeless. Despatched to a large house on the London Road, I collected some boxes of dusty books from a spindly old woman who stank of cat urine and who jawed incomprehensibly at me as I humped book-laden cardboard boxes to the student societies' minibus.
I remember feeling tricked. I had hoped to spend that Saturday morning with Nicola, and in doing so gain some advantage over her many other pursuers, and here I was, my sinuses wheezing with house-mite dust, fending off invitations to sip Darjeeling with a stinking cat-lady.
What else was in those boxes? I don't know but I've lain awake at night wondering. I recall rummaging through a fairly vile assortment of mildewed volumes for which the entire box might yield no more than a few pence at the jumble sale; and since I was already a fan of W. B. Yeats the copy of
The Shanachie
, neatly slip-cased, took my fancy.
It stayed on the shelf in my student bed-sit on the Uttoxeter New Road for some months, until a bookish, stoned, pot-dealing brother of a fellow student crashed on the floor in my room one night. At breakfast time he ran a nicotine-stained finger along my bookshelves and pulled
The Shanachie
from its resting place. He said he thought it might be "worth a few bob" and offered to trade me a quarter ounce of very fine Thai grass. It seemed like a good deal, but for some reason I declined, and after he'd gone I decided to check it out for myself.
I got two hundred quid for it—a handsome figure for a student in those days. Today it would fetch possibly ten times that amount. But the point is that it set me on a trail. If one of these things could turn up so casually, I decided, then there must be more out there. And I was of course correct.
Fast forward to some thirty years later and the letter that had just arrived indicated that there might be hope yet for the Jane Austen project to arrive in time to offer a reprieve for Anthonia's GoPoint. I no longer profit personally from my forays into the antiquarian book-dealing world. Without fail I turn over the margins—often huge—to some useful cause. I'm good like that. In this case, GoPoint would get the loot. Obviously I would like to enjoy the fruits of my labours for myself. But if I did, then I wouldn't be able to cheat the demon.
In the book-hawking game—just as in the worlds of art-dealing, arms-trading and drug-trafficking—securing the object of sale is only half of the business. Of equal or greater importance is the identification, cultivation and gulling of the buyer. The mark, if you will. In this case, the inveterate collector. The obsessive, the driven, the covetous customer who cannot breathe easily until he or she has secured yet another grain of sand for the hourglass of all eternity.
For this type of client is not a victim of an ordinary psychological condition. This is not like alcoholism, or snobbery, or other social afflictions. This is easy prey. For this one, for the mark in question, is settled under the wings of that most red-toothed of demons.
"Did you get it?" Otto asked me as I stepped into his gaily attractive toyshop in Ealing, even before the pretty bell over the shop door had stopped tinkling. He even stepped back from a transaction with a paying customer. Note the absence of a how-are-you, good-to-see-you, how-is-your-belly-for-spots and all of the rest of it from the normally genial Otto. Just this unpleasant leaping to the point to betray the presence of the leathery inner creature.
Otto Dickinson picked up his demon somewhere in southern Iraq near the Kuwait border during Operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf War of 1991. Strictly speaking his demon should be described as a djinn, and it took up residence while paratrooper Otto, having removed his helmet, was resting under the shade of a tree with three other members of his battalion. Otto was exhausted. In the heat of the afternoon he closed his eyes and slept for perhaps only a second. Or maybe he didn't sleep at all but drifted in the measureless space between waking and sleeping, whereupon the Arabic demon, seizing the opportunity, slipped down from the tree as softly as a speck of wind-borne sand falling through the air to land upon a single hair, and then found ingress through the cavity of Otto's sunburned ear.
Otto, recovering from his split-second of sleep, woke to hear his comrade paratrooper Wayne Bridges reading aloud from a scrap of paper:
A reed had not sprung forth, a tree had not been created,
A brick had not been laid, a brick mould had not been made,
A house had not been built, a city had not been formed.
All the lands were sea then Eridu was created: The holy city,
And with Eridu the first shadow, and within the first shadow
The seed, the egg, of the very first demon.
"What's all that about?" Otto asked sleepily
He didn't get an answer because Wayne Bridges took a bullet through the throat, fired from a Kalashnikov rifle poking out of the rubble of a house in an area previously declared clean of snipers. Otto, seeing the muzzle-flash from the rubble, was up and running and calling for backup.
About twenty minutes later, after several tons of ordnance had been dumped on the lone sniper, Otto returned to inspect the body of his dead comrade. Wayne Bridges still had wedged between his fingers the document from which he had been reading when he was shot. It was a very old pocket guidebook to the archaeological sites of Sumeria, Akkadia, Babylon and Assyria. Otto flicked through the pages, went to return it to his dead comrade's pocket, but the demon spoke gently in his ear: "
No. Keep it.
"
Otto told me all this himself. Except the part about the demon. He was unaware—and still is—of what happened to him in that moment. I never try to tell him, or anyone else for that matter. It's always counter-productive. But, even without the open-jaw hiss and wings-at-full-pinion sudden waking of a slumbering demon, it is immediately obvious to the trained eye.
"Well?"
"Please, Otto, finish serving your customer. I'm in no hurry."
Otto looked back at the customer—a stunning photo-model mum with a baby slung from a rope-like contraption at her breast, tanned legs, gold high-heels and done up for the opera—as if she had just materialised. He appeared irritated by her presence. Then he remembered his manners, assured the lady that the hand-carved tumbling gymnast was free of lead paint, and completed the sale quickly.
I waited until the tiny bell cleared the way for us to talk. But if Otto wanted to dispense with the pleasantries, I didn't. "How's the toy business."
"Up and down. It's hard to compete with the giants."
Otto was one of the very lucky few. With the British government refusing to recognise Gulf War Syndrome, Otto had returned from the Gulf to be diagnosed with degenerative arthritis at the age of thirty-two, accompanied by migraines, asthma, skin disorders and burning-semen syndrome. As I say, one of the lucky ones because he got a war pension and sunk what assets he had into his toyshop. Fifteen years or so after his combat duty had ended, it seemed like the toyshop was a fox-hole and he was still fighting for an escape out of his war experiences.
I liked Otto, and I hoped that instead of ripping him off I would have to disappoint him when he was outbid by the vile poet Ellis. Despite his "up-and-down" maunderings and his "little ol' me" routine, I knew that his toy business was doing very well and that he had a chain of almost a dozen of these neatly crafted toyshops. Otto had spotted that the 1990s had produced a sudden rush of baby-making amongst the well-heeled. The selfish eighties had given way to the caring nineties, we were told. Then the full horror of parenthood had caused a stampede back to work amongst the coiffured mums, frantic to shake themselves free of the clamping jabberwocky jaws of their infant charges; which in turn led to a tide of guilt, flowing more freely than mother's milk. And guilt, where it could, lavished money on finely crafted toys.
Otto saw that he should stock his shop not with the cheap plastic imported playthings that children actually wanted, but the expensive handcrafted toys that reflected so well on the parents who placed them decorously around the nursery. Otto coined it.
And so fed his collecting demon.
Otto was prepared to pay me over £90,000—an intermediate price—for a first edition
Pride and Prejudice
. Personally I can't abide Jane Austen. Can't read a line without hearing it offered up in the squeaky tones of a spiteful piglet. Emily Brontë I'd want to drag into my house and kiss her thin lips, but Austen, no. I don't think Otto was a great fan either. That's how it goes: you start by collecting the things you admire, then you go on to collect the stuff other people are collecting.
Otto had no wife, no kids, no addiction to drugs, cigarettes or alcohol. Where else might his money go? After the slew of prissy Hollywood costume dramas, Austen collectibles had generated more interest than ever, and here I was, offering an 1813 first edition printed for Egerton. "I'm told I'll have it next week, Otto."
"That's what you said last week." Otto had what you might call poached-egg eyes. He looked at me morosely.
I shrugged. "I think it's reliable. But I have to tell you, there's a third bidder."
"Oh? I suppose you won't tell me who it is."
"Come off it, Otto." I'd revealed to him Ellis's identity
on strictest understanding you don't use this information, Otto,
but only as part of the confidence. Of course there was no third bidder, but because I'd told him who the other guy was, he'd have to believe there was also a third.
Otto dug his thumbs in the elasticated waistband of his trousers and hoiked them up a little. "Oh well. I can't go much higher."
No businessman can. Unless he wants to. I pretended to be interested in a pair of joke spectacles in which eyes drop forward on springs. I tried on a pair. "These are terrific. You have terrific stuff. I'll take a pair for my nephew. The new bidder has put in ninety-one."
"Sorry. I'll have to chip out at that."
I took off the joke glasses and handed them to him along with a ten-pound note. He took both from me with hands in the grip of a terrible rash—from the chemicals or the depleted uranium, I guessed—and rang up a figure on his till. "Never mind, Otto. You want me to keep you informed of what comes in?"