He handed me the joke glasses in a plastic bag emblazoned with his toyshop-chain logo and was about to open his mouth when the bell above the door tinkled. We both turned.
The figure looming in the doorway looked like the Ancient Mariner. The man's face was red as if from exertion and his grey hair hung lank at either side, almost plastered to a grey beard. His teeth were stained with nicotine. He wore an army greatcoat and strong fell-walking boots, one of which was laced with string. He shuffled deeper into the shop, and barely seemed to notice me there.
"Seamus!" said Otto. "How are you, me old mucker?"
"Just came in to say hello." Seamus's voice was crazed in the way of an Old Master painting. "You don't mind?"
"I've told you before I don't mind. Don't mind a bit. William, this is Seamus, an old mucker from Desert Storm. Seamus, have a cup of tea."
"We don't mention Desert Storm," said Seamus. He glanced at me from under huge eyebrows composed of tangled steel wires.
Otto tipped me a salute. "Right. We don't mention Desert Storm."
Christ, I thought, if he was a combatant in the first Gulf War he couldn't be more than about forty or fifty years old: yet he looked like someone who had drowned at sea a hundred years ago and returned as a ghost. "Let's not, then," I said, winking affably at Seamus. I don't know if it was my wink that offended him, but I felt a flash of tension run through his body. A thunderous expression passed across his face. He turned away from me rather obviously.
"Shall I get that kettle on then, Seamus?"
"No. Not stopping. Only came by to say hello." He glanced around the shop as if trying to remember something. Then he darted another look at me, as if I were someone not to be trusted.
"There was a message for you," Otto said, opening his till.
I saw Otto pull out a few large-denomination notes and stuff them quickly in an envelope. Then he came from behind the till and handed the envelope to Seamus, who took it without a word. That was Otto for you: sparing the finer feelings of a tramp who wouldn't have wanted me to witness this handout.
Seamus folded the envelope and stuffed it in his army greatcoat pocket. He stared at the floor, as if slightly confused.
"Sure you won't have that cup of tea, Seamus?"
"Ah, that was it!" Seamus was suddenly animated. "That was it! I come to tell you I'm onto something! A secret!"
"Oh, what's that?" said Otto.
Seamus waved his hands in the air as if limply fighting off an aerial attack. "No! No no! I'll tell you when I have it all bang to rights. A secret! But you'll be the first one I tell, you will be! Now I have to be on my way. I've an
himportant happointment
." He said these last two words as if mimicking the aristocracy. And he laughed. Still chuckling, he turned and shuffled out of the shop.
"Poor fucker," Otto spat angrily after he'd gone. "Far worse than me. Got nothing. Fucking outrage." Otto turned away from me but I could see him thumbing back a tear. Then he turned back to me. "Seen it, have you? The book? With your own eyes?"
"Not yet, Otto. I only know what I've been told. Which is: three volumes from a Victorian collector's library, half-titles supplied, occasional light foxing and offsetting
,
contemporary green half morocco, spines gilt, marbled sides, red sprinkled edges. Covers worn at spine and edges, joints starting. Modern slip case, of course. What you'd expect. An exceptional copy, they say."
If it wasn't a fake I'd be interested in it myself,
I almost added.
"Hell's bells," Otto said. "All right, sod it: ninety-one-and-a-half."
Yes, of course the
Pride and Prejudice
was a fake. We should have had it ready there and then but there had been a small technical problem with my printer's nose: he'd pushed too many drugs up it. Then he'd been chased across his workshop by—and I had to laugh when he told me—demons. Not real demons, of course, but drug-induced fancies, which I suppose may at times seem just as terrifying as the real thing.
The consequence of the fray was that a bottle of turpentine substitute got spilled across not the fake, but one of the volumes of a
real
first edition which we'd obtained—on the pretext of potential purchase—to study in the production of the copy. Whatever the drug-induced phantoms had done to my forger's mind, the turps had done real damage to the morocco leather cover of the original. It left us with a number of options. We could pay the seventy-eight-thousand asking price to the vendor; we could replace and age-simulate the damaged cover before returning it; or we could replicate two copies and keep the genuine but damaged item and retain it for sale in a couple of years' time.
We chose the latter option, even though it set back our trading plans: hence my milk-round visits to Ellis, Antonia and Otto. As a legitimate dealer it was easy enough for me to stall the vendor of the authentic copy; I just didn't want the extra time to allow my buyers to either go off the boil, or even to discover there was "another" copy on the market at the same time. As any salesman will tell you, the art of selling is the art of closing.
Forging rare books is not like forging Art. The original print run for the first edition of
Pride and Prejudice
is uncertain. Perhaps 1500 copies were produced. Where do all these copies go? Book lovers are notorious hoarders. Even assuming three-quarters of the copies were used for lighting fires and stuffing Victorian dolls, no one is surprised when a house-clearance turns up an extra couple of copies for auction. Unlike a singular painting by Turner, or a Constable.
Naturally, a book has to cross a certain price threshold before faking becomes lucrative. The
Pride and Prejudice
edition, like many books from that period, was published in three individual volumes: the materials alone required to replicate and age the paper and to season the binding, not to mention access to museum-effect print machinery, will set you back several thousand pounds. Plus the multiplicity of skills required dangerously expands the number of people who know what you're up to. So you need a genius who can do the lot.
"I'm a donkey. I'm so sorry, William." Ian Grimwood was a remarkable painter, sculptor and printer, and no hee-haw. Sadly no one, or at least no paying person, shared his artistic visions.
"Accidents happen," I said, clearing a space for myself to sit down in his chaotic studio in Farringdon.
He sat rubbing a large, scarred hand across the dome of his shaved head. I'm sure that he would never be the sort of man to apply kohl or eye-liner, but, exaggerated by the baldness of his head, it always seemed that way. His grey eyes had a glitter like a rime of frost on a winter pavement. "I wish you hadn't told me all about those boys and girls."
He meant GoPoint. The homeless. He'd negotiated me down when I told him what I was doing with my share of the loot. I'd tried to get him to stay with his fairly priced original pitch but he wouldn't. He'd been homeless himself once, he told me. I could believe it. He was the working-class hero that Ellis kept pretending to be. Unlike Ellis he carried the wounds, the way an old boxer carries every single punch he took in the ring, the way an old political campaigner carts an economy of hope.
"That's the trouble with this game, Stinx," I said. I held up my hands. I had some dye or paint on my fingers. "It gets you all moral. It's horrible."
He threw me an oily rag. "I hope you keep schtum about my good deeds. I've got my reputation to think about."
"Not back on the marching powder, are you, Stinx?"
"Who you been talking to? It wasn't coke, it was crystal meth. A moment of stupidity. A tiny indiscretion. Won't happen again, Your Honour. And I mean it."
"You serious?"
"Serious. I 'ad a dark night of the soul, William." He looked out of the big, dirt-smeared windows of his studio. It was a converted Gothic warehouse and we could see the roofs and chimneys of Clerkenwell sweeping away from us. "Lucy left me again."
That lacerated old heart of his. He was in love with a woman who left him on average once every three years. Seems she couldn't stand living with a genius. Last time she left him it was for a commodities broker. The time before that it was a wine importer. Before that I can't remember, but the pattern was clearly to swing from the bohemianism and chaotic brilliance of Stinx to the ultra-conservative; then after six months of life in the twin-set-and-pearls lane she would rediscover his virtues, returning to give him another spin like a favourite but chipped and scratched psychedelic album from the 60s.
We belonged to an unofficial club, Stinx and I. A society of abandoned men. We called ourselves the Candlelight Club, I can't remember why—something to do with W. B. Yeats. There was one other member, Diamond Jaz, who'd been dumped by his male lover. The circumstances of our meeting some three years ago was strange, not to say auspicious.
It was the sixth of June when Fay told me she would be leaving me. The date is burned in my brain because I'd returned early from work—no, the book thing is a hobby, not my principle employment—after an angry exchange with a government junior minister. Luckily for everyone involved I was only early enough to see a man whom I vaguely recognised leaving my house in Finchley to climb into a shiny blue soft-top BMW. Well, I did recognise him, didn't I? He was on the telly.
Confrontation, admissions, recriminations, tears. The full shopping-list. "It doesn't matter," I tried to tell Fay. "I've been inattentive. It doesn't matter."
Oh, but it did matter. Even my trying to take the blame was part of the problem, apparently. I was stunned to discover how
over
it was between us already.
I wanted to avoid facing the children so I left the house and walked. I walked blindly until I came to my senses in Kentish Town. Then I slithered inside the Pineapple, which was pretty quiet at that time of the day. I sat at the bar and ordered a glass of wine. I must have made short order of it, because I very quickly asked for another.
"That first one didn't touch the sides," said a gruff voice from two barstools away.
I didn't pay him much attention. The Pineapple attracts an odd mix of trade—that's where I later met Ellis—and this hunched, tattooed brute with a shaved head was like a scary species of genie behind his cloud of curling, blue cigarette smoke.
He tried again. "You look like how I feel," he said. He held his cigarette with the cone pointing in towards the palm of his hand, like a schoolboy smoking behind the bike-sheds. His knuckles were tattooed, old-style. I could see "LOVE" on one hand; I only guessed at "HATE" on the other.
I met his gaze from behind the wreathing smoke. I was sure he wasn't about to grant me three wishes, but there was a sympathetic cast to his eye. I don't know why, but I blurted it out: "My wife's left me for another man."
He sat upright and wafted a hand through all this curling smoke, as if to look at me better. "My life!" he said. "My life!"
I thought it an odd remark. I mean, it must happen to lots of men somewhere every day. I took another nip of wine.
"Same here exactly!" he said. "When?"
"About an hour ago."
"Stone me!" He chuckled. "Well, stone me!" He rotated his stool away from me, checked out the bar and sucked hard on his ciggie, still shaking his head.
I wasn't feeling companionable, but I felt obliged to ask. "What about you, then?"
He turned back to me. Now, as he regarded me steadily, his eyes looked sad. Huge skin-folds hung from under them, each like a miser's pouch. "What I'm saying. About an hour ago."
I wasn't sure for a moment if he was taking the piss. Then I decided he couldn't be. We chatted a little bit, offering guarded information, and concluded that we'd been dumped by our respective spouses—spice?—within moments of each other.
He reached a leathery hand across the bar. "Ian. Though everyone calls me Stinx on account that I reek of some sort of chemical or other. I'm a painter."
To my discredit I assumed he meant the sort of painter who slaps a coat of magnolia on your hall-stairs-and-landing. I didn't realize my mistake until much later. We weren't about to spill our emotional guts, so in turn he asked me what I did.
"I'm director of a youth organization. Well, kind of a youth organisation."
"What's that, then?"
"I head up the National Organisation for Youth Advocacy. NOYA."
"What's that, then?"
"It's an umbrella outfit. I represent a number of organizations to government and official bodies, that sort of thing."
"How's that work, then?"
"We lobby for change, make representations, sit on funding committees. You know?"
"No, I don't get it."
I suddenly felt depressed about my job as well as my marriage. "No, no one ever does. I dread meeting anyone new because I feel worn out just trying to explain my job."
Stinx waved a nicotine-yellowed finger at the barmaid, a freckled redhead with button-eyes. "Haven't I told you before not to leave a man with an empty glass?"
"It's my first night on the job," she said, pouring me a fresh globe of wine. She was Australian, as are all bar staff now in London. Compulsory. "So that's kinda gotcha."
"You're too fast for me," he said. "Have one for yourself."
While we skirted around our respective matrimonial disasters I noticed another man sitting at the bar fiddling with the text on his mobile phone, though I had the impression he was eavesdropping on our conversation. He was Asian and extraordinarily handsome; the kind of groomed figure you see in moody men's magazines with full-page adverts and quarter-page articles. He tapped away at his text with growing impatience.
Meanwhile Stinx shuffled one stool along to sit next to me. "What's the wisdom, then?" he said seriously. "What is it?"
"About women? You must be joking if you think I know the answer to that."
"Date blokes instead," the Asian man said without looking up from his text.
We both turned our heads towards him at the same time. "Well, I suppose that's one answer," Stinx said gruffly.