Real Wood Veneer

REAL WOOD VENEER

“As much as that? Really, I don't know,” said Margie Philips. Cautiously, appraisingly, she ran her hand across the scarred and blackened oak surface. “It's very lumpy and worn, isn't it? 'Course, it is old....”

“Old? Indeed, it is old, Margaret.” Marcus Mettsys was standing attentively at her elbow. “It's more than three hundred years old.” He touched the sloping half-metre wide lid of the Bible box delicately, with the very tips of his fingers. “What stories it might tell! And the patina -- what a patina we have here! Only the hinges have been restored, and, of course, this baize lining. I doubt if there's a finer Italian Baroque piece in the whole of Australia. Certainly this is the jewel among my present shipment.”

Margie smiled at him encouragingly. The smile was easy to read: “Do give me some more of that,” it was saying. She had already decided to buy the piece. The price was exorbitant, naturally, but that wasn't at issue. Margie hated bargaining. What she did want, and could insist on before the act was consummated, was a generous amount of foreplay. She had had a previous transaction with Marcus and it had been very satisfactory.

By unspoken agreement the two of them now left the exhibition area, Marcus bearing the box reverently. They moved over to the corner of the church hall where Marcus had set up an impromptu little office with a fine mid-Victorian davenport as a desk. Here they sat opposite each other on a pair of canvas directors’ chairs, knees almost touching, fanning their faces occasionally with their catalogues. The honey-soup light of an early March afternoon was being ladled down generously upon them from a high clerestory window. To the observer -- had there been one, for the hired hall was empty now; the viewers had gone home -- the two of them made a handsome Nineties couple, each striding confidently across the broad plain of middle age: post-Yuppie creatures for whom the visible world exists. Here sat Marcus, a tall, spare figure in his pale linen suit and paisley tie, with his widow's peak of sleek greying hair and indeterminately ‘European’ manner. And there sat Margie: “a lady of a certain age” was how Marcus classified her, though not without a mental grimace, for he knew that they were both of them of similar years, which is to say, their mid-forties.

Marcus was not gay, though many people thought he was; and although nowadays he preferred the commercial modes of seduction, he could not help but feel a modest prick of appetite. Margie, this afternoon, looked as wholesome as a multigrain loaf. “Besides, they always smell of bread-and-butter,” quoted Marcus to himself. He had had a weakness for Byron ever since, long ago in his English secondary school, he had studied attentively the selections from that poet in a grubby little anthology. She had what he privately defined as the stereotypical Australian feminine physiognomy: a round open ingenuous face, snub-nosed and encased with that bobbed golden-syrup hair which is late to fade and whose shade is the least taxing for the hairdresser to imitate when it does. Her calves were bare on this hot Friday afternoon: she looked delicately cool in a flounced cream sundress with matching open-weave sandals, and her toenails were metallic cushions of vermilion. The total effect was appetising. Only her hands let her down. They were large and square, her hands, and the texture of the skin was detergent-coarsened, with rather knobbly red knuckles. Looking at them, your thoughts turned at once to starched blue uniforms and tightly tucked sheets. The association would have been true once, but its cause lay long in the past now. A couple of decades at least had flown since Margie Philips had carried off her intern and sluiced her last bed-pan.

As for Marcus; what of him? Marcus had never heard the aperçu that Australians love experts but despise intellectuals, but instinctively he obeyed its dictate. It is mere commonsense that an antique dealer should not be over-familiar, boisterous or presume to first names without invitation. However, Marcus’ genius was not to swing to the opposite pole. There was nothing chilling about his expertise; he never patronised; he was patient with stupidity. He sounded authoritative, never just clever. “As you know”: that phrase was his great resource. “Here's a very fine cloisonné vase. As you know, cloisonné is a kind of enamelling. You see how all the tiny panels of colour are perfectly distinct? Masterly work, isn’t it?” In a different universe, Marcus could have made a good high-school teacher.

“That piece came from Northern Italy, Margaret, from a castle not far from Pratolino. I secured it myself. As you know, the great days for the collector are long over in Italy. However, even now the type of the decayed aristocrat is not quite extinct. There are the taxes. Avoiding tax is a national hobby there, but if by mischance the Ministero delle Finanze should descend, it can be merciless --"

“Don't we know it,” breathed Margie, attentively.

“ -- and this is when our aristocrat is forced to sell some choice pieces to pay the bill. The Milanese industrialists and the American museums take the cream, of course. But there are still plenty of pickings for those who understand how to negotiate.” Here Marcus allowed himself a small significant smile. It implied that of the art of negotiating Marcus Mettsys was the complete master.

“How clever you are, Marcus, being able to deal with them in their own language.”

“No, no. It makes my job easier. How perfect the tongue is for buying and selling!” He paused and smiled. “You remember the definition of Italian, in Beppo?

It melts like kisses from a female mouth,

And sounds as if it should be writ on satin...."

Margie returned his smile uncertainly. Her circle had its pleasant vices, but literary allusion was not amongst them.

"Yes, indeed," Marcus pursued. "In that tongue it is easy to come to a settlement. It speaks for reconciliation, for good fellowship."

Margie felt her feet on firm ground again. "Oh, I do agree. David and I love Italian life, Italian food, Italian . . . things." The words, as she spoke them, made her heart expand; they were without pretence; in the warmth of the moment they were true; sentiment made them true. Tears pricked her eyes. Tears came easily to her. In her youth, the boys who escorted her to the cinema had been unnerved to see, even before the film began, her eyes filling like cisterns at the very first deep-chested Marlboro cigarette advertisement. How broad were their sympathies, Margie's and David's, citizens of the world!

But what was this bubble of memory, surfacing slyly in her consciousness? She recalled how, on their big European trip, she and David had ducked into Italy from Switzerland, and with mutual accord had straightaway ducked out again. Those buildings with their peeling plaster! And the plumbing! Was there one dwelling, anywhere from the thigh to the toe of the country, from a palazzo to a contadino's hovel, which contained an unstained toilet bowl with a decent flush? She shuddered briefly, remembering those stinking cubby-toilets in cafes with their flimsy concertina doors, into which icily elegant women would vanish and emerge without a flicker of disgust. Such were the contents of the memory bubble. But it did not suit her present mood. She did what long ago she had taught herself to do, for self-protection, after a gruelling shift on the children's wards: she thickened the skin on the bubble until it was opaque, then allowed it to sink with its contents back into unconsciousness.

For what did those things matter, really? The Italians she met at the clinic were cheerful, down-to-earth folk, and the homes of the richer ones were really very striking, with their tall white porticos and statues. But those statues, she knew, were moulded cement and marble-dust; not the real thing. Anyone who could deal with the race on their home ground and, more, wrest true treasures from them, was a different order of being in her eyes. To make a present of her admiration, to share her glow, she said impulsively, “You know, for me, Italy is the last country left where they understand the real pleasures of life.”

Marcus inclined his head mutely, solemnly, then took a black Sobranie from a silver cigarette case. As he exhaled gently, successively, the soft smoke rose lazily in the hot still air and wrapped a gauze net close about the two of them.

Dexterously drawing the conversation back on course he said, “A delightful country, to be sure, and this is a delightful piece. How I wish I could keep it myself. But, alas” (on Marcus' lips this quaint expletive sounded dignified, not odd) “I fear it cannot be inexpensive.” (He preferred the double negative to the blunt monosyllable. 'Cheap' was not in his vocabulary.) “Apart from the intrinsic value, there is the export licence, the Customs, the shipping agents. . . . Such matters are never easy for the negotiant." Here he leaned forward; his tone grew confiding. "So many grasping officials must be . . . satisfied. Otherwise they interpose themselves between you and the gentleman with whom you are treating: you know how it is, Margaret. Nevertheless, to the astute collector, to one of taste and means. . . .”

Here he paused, drew a sharp breath and slapped his knee gently with the catalogue. “But how I am forgetting myself! Dr Philips, he is well, I trust? His little needles keep him busy, yes?”

“David? Oh yes, he's very well, the pet. Our appointment book's so full at the moment that I've persuaded him to keep one weekday afternoon free. We play sets of tennis with dips in the pool in between.”

Not very energetically, was Marcus's private opinion. Marcus had dined once at the Philips' sprawling aerie in the Hills. What a desperate occasion that had been! The doctor was a taciturn teddy-bear of a man, with heavy grey features and pouched eyes, as if his very facial flesh was sagging from the bones with boredom. Neither Margie's vivacity nor Marcus’ most sparkling urbanities had triggered any response. A real porker of the first order, has been Marcus’ opinion. The perfect marital landlord. The only time the medical porker has shown any real animation was when the two men had been chatting over their aperitifs. Philips specialised in acupuncture. Margie kept the books, greeted the patients and prepared them on the couches; Philips did the initial consultation, then slouched from room to room dispensing gruff homilies and inserting and twiddling the four or five needles stuck strategically in each recumbent body. The daily through-put was astonishing, and so were the profits. With such a husband-and-wife team overheads were negligible; there was no expensive equipment, just a large autoclave and some cheap disposables, and the mortgage on the house. Philips had once tried adding some refinements: he'd fooled about with electrical stimulation to the needles and tried burning perfumed moxibustion cones over the nerve points, but he'd quickly concluded that it was all too much trouble. He bulk-billed to avoid chasing debts, and from Medicare he got around eighteen dollars a treatment. Most of it he syphoned off, pure cream, into a Barclays dollar account in the Channel Islands.

“It was bulk-billing that got us started,” Margie was wont to confide to her intimates after her second Buck's Fizz, the champagne-and-orange juice which was her preferred tipple. “My dears, bulk-billing laid the foundation of the Philips fortune.” And here she would giggle and lay her palm at the base of her throat, as women do when they feel a rising belch.

There had been, Marcus now recalled as Margie continued to expand on her athletic prowess on the tennis court, a rather painful incident later that evening, over the dinner. The conversation had turned to alternative medicines. Another guest, rather daringly, had raised the question of whether acupuncture really works. For a few minutes the discussion had been lively, until it became apparent that Philips himself wasn't joining in; then it had quickly petered out. In the following embarrassed silence, he had laid down his cutlery deliberately and touched his lips with his napkin. He had let his glance rove around his dining room, resting briefly but with a certain dour satisfaction on the crystal, the silver, the walnut. “Acupuncture?” he said heavily, to no-one in particular. “Acupuncture works all right.” Then he had picked up his knife again and addressed his steak. No one had dared even to raise a titter.

The recollection made Marcus wince, and momentarily he lost the thread of Margie’s discourse. This must have been obvious on his face, for there was a little pause, which Margie ended by uncrossing her legs and stretching them vigorously in front of her, saying at the same time, “God, I’m feeling stiff. A set or two and a dip wouldn’t come amiss right now, actually.”

A sidelong glance accompanied this observation. Marcus knew he must try harder. Your gigolo knows the use of charm; but he knows too that while charm can do much, it cannot always do everything. There is a time for audacity, for the frontal assault. Marcus laid aside the violin; he prepared the kettledrum. After a little preparatory cough, he said: “This Bible box is an investment, of course; that goes without saying. But it's a conversation piece, too. It has a story.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned back, fingertips joined. “As you may know, the castle near Pratolino, which was the source of the treasure over there, once belonged to the family of the Medici."

Margie vented a little squeak of awe. Marcus flapped his hand at her in mild disdain.

"Oh, the castle was only a minor possession, and of a cadet branch of the family. In any case, by the end of the seventeenth century the Medici were quite degenerate." The edge of his palm traced the angles of a descending staircase. "Yes, truly degenerate. They were -- how shall I put it? -- footling their way down into oblivion. The lord of Pratolino in that era was a Ferdinando. An amiable tyrant he must have been; for he filled the castle with his relatives, all living on his bounty. One of those under his protection was an orphan girl, Eleanora di Garzia. She was, we may surmise, young, beautiful and passionate.

"As well as their relatives, the Medici loved to have their enemies nearby. Even their corpses, if it were necessary to kill them, were often kept close at hand. So English, that, is it not? So the dungeons at Pratolino were rarely empty. One of their occupants, at the time we speak of, was one Bernardo Antinori, a condittore, a soldier of fortune. Of his offence against the Medici, history is silent; but we may deduce that he was young and handsome. Eleanora secretly helped him to escape; of course, they were in love. Soon afterwards Ferdinando left the castle at the head of a troop of his soldiers, in a skirmish against the banditti who infested Tuscany in those days. He left only a small garrison behind. Eleanora was quick to send word to Bernardo that it was safe for him to visit her. Perhaps she hinted at an elopement. From a tower window she threw down a rope ladder so he could climb in. Bernardo duly arrived but, unknown to Eleanora, not alone. While they were, shall I say, engaged, a band of his men climbed that selfsame ladder and made short work of the feeble defences. Then they ransacked the castle and carried off all its treasures, including the gilded and bejewelled Bible which once lay within this box."

Marcus paused impressively. Springing tears, he noted clinically, was no literary conceit. The ducts did indeed spurt their fluid: liquid coursed down her cheeks; it even streaked her neck.

“Bernardo and his men took their loot and went their way at last. They left Eleanora alive, but that was no kindness. From the ruthless Ferdinando no mercy could be expected. She knew well that her life was finished. Her last act may have been to use this box as a prie-dieu, crouching over it and sobbing out a last prayer for forgiveness. Or, using its lid as a desk, she may have penned on it a despairing apology to her kinsman. We shall never know. All we do know for sure is that afterwards she climbed with a firm tread to the battlements and without the slightest hesitation threw herself headlong on to the rocks below.” Here Marcus brought his hands down sharply, palms flat and outstretched, to suggest the impact of the body.

Margie's face was pale and slack with the aftermath of emotion. She sighed and wriggled her bottom hard against the slung canvas seat. “Ooh, that was lovely, Marcus.” She cleaned herself up, dabbing efficiently at her cheeks with a tissue. “What were those names again? Eleanora, was it, and the castle at Pratolino? How wonderfully romantic. I must remember them. But now I really must be flying; John has a late clinic tonight. You can deliver the box, can't you? Now, where's my bag? And do you have a pen?”

Marcus set the alarm and locked up the church hall, then went out in the heat to his Rover. The late afternoon light had thickened now to its richest toffee perfection. He unlocked the car with his keyring control and slipped behind the padded wheel. In profile now he looked stern, almost vulpine. Once upon a time, in England, he had been plain Mark Mason, helping his father out in the family junk shop at the corner of the marketplace in Wolverhampton. Even then it had only been a junk shop to the ignorant populace. On its signboard it had been ‘The Curiositie Shoppe B. & M. Mason, Props.’ The spelling had been the youthful Mark's idea. Perhaps it had worked, for the shop was successful. But his old dad had died, quite young, in '72, his mother had retired, and Mark had wanted a change. He had filled a dozen tea-chests with the most portable stock -- chiefly Art Deco china -- and got rid of the rest. The tea-chests had entered the country as household effects and had sold quickly. 'Marcus Mettsys Antiques' was born. He was proud of the name. It had class, and the right kind of class. And along with his business, Marcus had successfully remade himself. His syntax had become mildly, delightfully, irregular. His native Midlands accent with its hooting perky vowels had, mysteriously, been replaced by a discreetly rolled 'r' and a slightly throaty intonation to the 'k's and 'g's. His breeding and mien were English, his expressiveness Gallic, his readiness to please Italianate, and in making terms he exhibited the phlegm of the burgher Dutchman. All of the European Community had gone to the making of Marcus.

The new persona had not quite finished its moult, however. He had practised before the mirror, but had not yet publicly risked, an “'Ow do you say, in English?”, but he knew with a kind of nervous certainty, with a little inner shiver of dread, that the first trial, quite unpremeditated it would be when the moment came, lay close ahead in time. On that day the final bit of the casing of the chrysalis would crack off and Marcus Mettsys would stand entire.

The nearly-completed Marcus drove back through the city and then out again along a main road until he came to a neighbourhood of small workshops and factories. Outside one of these nondescript premises he parked. Through the dusty windows might be spied a few broken oddments of furniture, too uninviting to cause any stroller to linger. He let himself in and carefully locked the door behind him. He advanced to the rear of the workshop through a hot meaty stink of boiling bone glue, overlaid hauntingly with the sharp tang of ammonia. There he greeted a younger man in overalls who was carefully wiping down some battered and stained pieces of wood, surrounded by the simple tools of their trade: the tub of rock salt, the old plane iron, screwed on a wood shaft and used as a hacking adze. Marcus stretched himself out on a newly-upholstered chaise longue, raising one elegantly betrousered leg before him.

The other raised an interrogative eyebrow. “Well?”

Marcus gave him a tight smile. “Good. The Bible box went off this afternoon. No nonsense about a provenance certificate or anything like that.” He grimaced. “She insisted on having a story with it, though.”

His companion was all nervous admiration. “Shit, Marcus. That must have put you on the spot. How did you think of something, with no warning?”

“Pah, it's like a stew, all the better when you whip it up on the spur of the moment from what's to hand in the mental cupboard. In this case, a bit of Rapunzel, a snatch of local colour. And wasn't there some treacherous tart in Roman times who let the enemy into the city, only to have them crush her under their shields?" He angled a gleaming black shoe at his companion in disgust. “Some such rubbish served the purpose.”

“No one thinks faster on their feet than you, Marcus.”

“Ah, but all I have to manage is the words. The object has to be right too. And a very pretty job you made of that, Ken. You'll get your cut as soon as the cheque clears.”

The other looked gratified, but said only, “You're a crafty sod, Marcus. Antiques is a tricky game. One day you'll go too far.”

“No we won't. You know the secret. It's only a small sideline. A hobby, you might say. And we'll keep it very simple. We'll never do a bureau or a chest of drawers. What was that box, after all? Just planks of oak and iron sprigs. Iron is iron, new or old. And those big Edwardian wardrobes give us all the oak we could want. After three days in the ammonia vat those panels might have been polished by Lorenzo's housemaid herself. Let's just be sure to keep away from the American Quercus. Oak from the western hemisphere could undo us. European oak's fine. The silly bitch'd need to run a Carbon-14 test to find anything amiss." He paused, stretching luxuriously.

“Oh, there’s just one thing, Ken. Before you distress a surface again, get a couple of metres of finer chain, will you? With that bike chain you've been using, you can practically see an imprint of the maker's name off the links. Remember, to get the real patina takes just the kindliest lash." He wriggled his fingers gently along a line in the air. "Just the merest touch; a delicate caress; a little spider’s footsteps. Okay?"