The Heirloom Read online

  ‘Listen,’ I asked Sara. ‘Can you just tell me what you think of this chair? Your calm, unbiased opinion?’

  Sara walked around it. The back was even taller than she was, and she wasn’t particularly petite. Five feet six inches in her naked feet. The arms were carved to look like entwined snakes, twisting their way right down to the feet, which were ball-and-claw. The seat was black leather, with a faint hint of blue, like a raven’s wing; and when I pressed into it with my fingertips, it felt almost as if it were upholstered with something warm and alive.

  ‘It’s ugly,’ said Sara. ‘In fact, it’s hideous. But I have to admit that it does have something.’

  It was the decorated back which fascinated me. The splat – which is the centrepiece between the top of the chair and the seat – was thickly carved with what must have been hundreds of falling people, each of them only two inches long. They formed an intricate cascade of intertwined human bodies, all naked and all with their mouths stretched open in silent screams. I ran my fingers over them and the sensation was extraordinary. They felt bobbly and polished.

  At the crest of the splat, the man-serpent face grinned with blind mahogany eyes and a wriggling mass of mahogany vipers for his hair. Two pythons formed the cresting rail along the top of the chair’s back, their mouths open to regurgitate a curving stream of carved fruit and wolves’ heads, which joined up with the snake-like arms.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Mr Grant. I noticed that, once it was set down on the ground, he didn’t touch the chair at all. Most antique dealers lean on their chairs in an easy, proprietorial fashion, as if the chairs actually belong to them; and they almost always tilt their chairs this way and that, just to show you how snugly the frame has been put together, or how well the stretchers have been repaired.

  Mr Grant treated the chair as if it were mine already, or at any rate as if it didn’t belong to him. Maybe a chair like it only ever belonged to itself, I thought. It had such presence, such silent self-confidence, that it was hard to imagine it fitting easily and comfortably into anybody’s home decor.

  Jonathan came up and stared at the chair in fascination.

  ‘What are all those people doing?’ he asked me, at last.

  Mr Grant, his hands clasped tightly in front of him, said, ‘I believe they are tumbling from Hell into Sub-Hell. They are not very pleased about it, as you can see.’

  ‘Why don’t they have any clothes on?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘They’re going for a swim,’ I put in. I gave Mr Grant a disapproving tight-lipped look for pre-empting my right to answer the first question. I believe in telling Jonathan the truth, but all that baloney about Hell and Sub-Hell, wherever that was, well, that was all baloney. Rotten baloney, at that.

  ‘May I sit on the chair?’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Sure,’ I told him.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Grant, quickly.

  ‘There’s no harm in letting the boy sit on the chair,’ I told Mr Grant. ‘Don’t you ever sit on a chair before you buy it?’

  Mr Grant came forward and stood between Jonathan and the chair. He was still smiling, in that peculiar unreal way, but I could see that he wasn’t going to let Jonathan go past him, no matter what.

  ‘Why can’t he sit on the chair?’ Sara wanted to know. ‘Are you afraid it’s going to fall to pieces or something?’

  ‘It’s not a – child’s chair,’ smiled Mr Grant. ‘And apart from that, I don’t usually allow people to sit on my chairs before they buy.’

  ‘Well, in that case, we’ll just have to go without the pleasure,’ I replied. ‘Do you want me to help you lift the chair back in the van?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ asked Mr Grant.

  ‘You heard me,’ I told him. ‘Do you want me to help you lift the chair back in the van?’

  ‘You’re not going to buy it?’ His affability vanished like steam off a sidewalk, and he was suddenly, inexplicably, alarmed.

  I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘But – my dear Mr Delatolla – I was quite sure that you would. If I’d known –’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s a very interesting piece. Obviously unique. Late eighteenth-century domestic, I’d guess. Made in Massachusetts or possibly Pennsylvania. The basic proportions are probably based on designs in Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director, as far as I can tell. Excellently interpreted, too. And with all this inventive carving around the back and arms… well, that’s almost genius.’

  ‘And you don’t want it?’ asked Grant, aghast.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said firmly. ‘Come on, Mr Grant, be serious. I’m dealing with customers who live in condos and Seaview apartments with strictly limited room-space. They want their furniture on a particular scale, in a particular style. Light, spindly, and elegant, that’s what they go for. But this thing… it’s amazing, I admit…but it’s like someone blowing the Trump of Doom right in the middle of a piccolo concert.’

  ‘Mr Delatolla,’ said Mr Grant, ‘if you buy this chair, I’ll throw in everything you see around you. Everything. Even that cheveret. Even that tea-kettle stand, and that’s Chippendale.’

  I glanced at Sara and Sara glanced back at me. There was a cool breeze blowing across the driveway and both of us communicated a feeling that there was something terribly wrong about all of this.

  ‘Is any of this stuff stolen?’ I asked Mr Grant, directly.

  ‘Stolen? What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I’m not trying to say anything. You seem awful anxious to get rid of it, all of a sudden.’

  Mr Grant took off his sunglasses. His eyes were bulgy and pale, and were as unmemorable as his face. Sometimes I recall that they were dark, or that one of them was milky and blind. Sometimes I can’t remember them at all.

  ‘Listen, Mr Delatolla,’ he pleaded, ‘all of this stuff is honestly and genuinely mine. I swear it. But I have to get back to Santa Barbara tonight, and I don’t want to take it all with me. That’s the only reason. I mean, you’re right. What I said before was just sales talk. It’s not very good stuff. So what’s the point of my carrying it all the way back up the coast? I might just as well offload it here for whatever I can get.’

  I narrowed my eyes. No house-clearing agent had ever spoken anything like this to me before. Mr Grant was actually begging me to take all of this furniture off his hands.

  ‘How much do you want?’ I asked him, cautiously.

  ‘Ten thousand, and that doesn’t even cover my expenses.’

  I paused. The chair alone had to be worth $12,500, or even more. None of the rest of the stuff was very good, but I had plenty of contacts in downtown San Diego who could sell it off for me. I stood to make $15,000–$20,000 clear profit, all for the sake of a house-clearer who couldn’t wait to get home to Santa Barbara.

  ‘Do you have a card? Any form of identity?’ I asked Mr Grant.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Here.’ And he handed over a card that read ‘Henry E. Grant, Antique Dealers, Houses Cleared, Antiques Bought & Sold. Member of the Association of California Antique Dealers.’ There was an address near the beach in Santa Barbara.

  ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ I said, turning the card over and over between my fingers. ‘I mean, this chair, there’s no way to put an accurate price on it. No way to compare it with anything. It could be worth half a million, or five dollars.’

  ‘Eight thousand,’ said Grant. ‘And that’s as low as I can go.’

  Sara said, ‘Ricky… do you really want all this junk?’ She knew like hell that I did, especially at eight thousand, but she was playing her usual game of beating other dealers down just by pretending to talk me out of whatever it was they were selling. I’ve had dealers end up by ignoring me completely, and haggling hysterically with her.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to one or two of the pieces…’ I mused. ‘But, well, I don’t know… if you don’t think it’s a good idea…’

  ‘Seven-five, but no
lower,’ put in Grant. His voice was very whispery now.

  ‘Seven thousand five hundred? For all of this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Just take it,’ he said. ‘Send me a cheque in the mail.’

  ‘Hold on one minute,’ I asked him. I leaned over and murmured in Sara’s ear, ‘Make sure he doesn’t leave.’ Then I walked quickly into the house, and into my library. I leafed through the North San Diego County telephone directory until I found ‘Jessop, Samuel F., San Miguel, Escondido’. I punched out the number and waited while the ringing tone went bzzzz – bzzzz – bzzzz –

  ‘Jessop residence,’ said a wary voice. A woman, maybe sixty years old or older.

  ‘Oh, hallo,’ I said. ‘You may not know me – in fact you probably don’t – but my name’s Delatolla. Rick Delatolla. I’m an antiques specialist, in Rancho Santa Fe. No, an antiques specialist.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman. ‘We don’t want to buy anything, and we have nothing to sell.’

  ‘No, please – this isn’t a sales call. I just want to tell you that a man called Grant is around here at my house this afternoon with some items of antique furniture – some tables and secretaries, things of that kind, some dining-room chairs – yes, that’s right – and, well, he says he got them from the Jessop house at Escondido.’

  There was a lengthy pause. Breathing. Then the woman said, ‘Yes, that’s true. A man called Grant did come around last week. He cleared one or two pieces of furniture from old Mr Jessop’s study, and from some of the guest rooms. We’re having that part of the house restyled.’

  ‘I see. So Mr Grant’s genuine.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he’s genuine. No question about it. I believe he was known to one of old Mr Jessop’s business partners, and that’s how we came to use him. He comes from Los Angeles, I think.’

  ‘Santa Barbara,’ I corrected.

  ‘Well, whatever,’ said the woman.

  ‘Is it possible you can tell me anything about the chair?’ I asked. ‘I’m having a difficult time pricing it, and I was wondering if you –’

  ‘Chair? What chair?’ asked the woman.

  ‘There are several, actually. But the one I’m particularly interested in has carving all the way up the back, and a kind of a beast’s face on the crest. You must know the one I mean. It’s not exactly the kind of chair you can overlook, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said the woman. ‘We have never had a chair of that description anywhere. Not in this house, nor at San Clemente.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I frowned. ‘Mr Grant certainly gave me the impression that he’d gotten it from you.’

  ‘I expect you were mistaken.’

  I held the receiver away from my ear. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I expect I was.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’ said the woman’s voice, tinnily.

  ‘No, no, thank you. You’ve been very kind. I’m sorry I disturbed you.’

  I set down the phone and stood thinking for a moment. I was sure that Grant had told me the chair came from Escondido. Hadn’t he told me that old man Jessop had brought it back from Europe? But even if he hadn’t, the woman had betrayed something in her voice. A hurriedness. A sense of anxiety. The same sort of let’s-get-it-over-quick impression that I’d gotten from Grant.

  It seemed like old man Jessop’s furniture wasn’t very popular. Particularly the chair. In a way, I could understood it. The chair was one of those pieces of furniture you come across from time to time in the antiques business that are works of brilliant craftsmanship and superior design, but which nobody in their right mind could stand to have in their home. I remember buying a love-seat once from a collector in Los Angeles, and it was all carved out of South African yellow-wood into the shape of two embracing kaffirs. An incredible achievement, but a terrible piece of furniture to live with. It took me two years to sell it, at a $300 loss.

  I walked back along the tiled hallway and out into the front garden. Sara was still standing there, surrounded by the bric-à-brac that Mr Grant had unloaded on to the driveway. Jonathan was there too, only a couple of feet away from her. Grant, however, had gone, and so had his black van.

  ‘Sara?’ I called, hurrying down the steps. I took her arm. ‘Sara? Where’s Grant?’

  She turned her head around slowly and stared at me. For a moment her eyes looked unfocused. Then she said, ‘Grant?’

  ‘Grant – the guy with the furniture. I told you to keep him here.’

  She slowly, slowly shook her head. ‘I don’t remember any Grant.’

  ‘Sara?’ I asked her, more gently. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? Sara, there was a guy here with a black van… a guy in sunglasses. I told you to make sure that he didn’t leave. Sara – are you kidding me, or what?’

  ‘A black van?’ she frowed. ‘Yes, I remember.’ Then she looked bright, and pointed down the driveway to the road. ‘Yes, he just left. Only a minute ago. You missed him by seconds.’

  I hunkered down beside Jonathan. He was staring at me with the same dreamy expression as Sara. I waved my hand from side to side in front of his eyes, and he blinked and smiled at me, but at the same time he still seemed to be distant, and disconnected.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I asked him, ‘did you see what happened? What did the man do to you?’

  ‘He went,’ said Jonathan, simply. ‘He said he had to go, and he went. He told me to look at the chair.’

  ‘Sara?’ I said. ‘Is that what Grant told you to do? To look at the chair?’

  Sara thought, and then nodded. ‘That’s right. Jonathan’s right. He said it was such a fine piece of carving, I ought to look at it more closely. Particularly the face, he said. It was the cruellest, most loving face ever. That’s what he said. More like life, than carving.’

  I turned around and looked at the face on the crest of the chair myself. There wasn’t any question about the subtlety with which it had been wrought. Solid Cuban mahogany, shaped and smoothed until it had taken on the shape of a man-serpent’s face. You could almost feel the bones underneath the skin, even though it was nothing but wood.

  I checked my watch. It was two o’clock, which meant there was still time to drive out to the wild-animal park. Personally, I didn’t feel like going any more – not that I’d been crazy about going in the first place. But I felt that it would probably be a good idea if I took Sara and Jonathan away from the house for an hour or two, to freshen up their minds. Maybe they’d remember what had happened when Mr Grant had left.

  ‘Give me ten minutes to hump the best pieces in the garage,’ I told Sara. ‘The rest of the stuff – well. If anybody comes and steals it, they’ll be doing me a favour.’

  ‘You’re going to keep the chair?’ asked Sara, a little stiffly.

  ‘I’m going to get rid of it as soon as I can,’ I told her. ‘As soon as I can find anybody to give me eight thousand dollars for it, it’s out.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ she said, emphatically, in the same way she’d say ‘I don’t like zucchini’ or ‘I don’t like old Charlie Chaplin movies.’ Then she walked quickly back to the house, taking Jonathan by the hand as she went. They disappeared inside, and the front screen door banged a loud period to the arrival in our lives of old man Jessop’s chair.

  *

  My life hasn’t always been wealthy, but I guess you could say that it’s always had a certain eccentric style. I was conceived in the front (and only) seat of a ridiculous three-wheeled automobile called a Davis, a Californian ‘fancy car’ of the mid-1940s which seated four people abreast. Few of these cars were ever built, but one was enough for me.

  My father, whose square Eisenhower-generation face still stares short-sightedly from the photograph frame in the living-room, was a house plasterer. I guess I should be loyal and romantic, and say that he could plaster two rooms in a day, and that the walls would be as smooth and flawless as silk. In fact, my mother told me the year after he died that he hadn’t ever been particularly good at his job. His workmates had called h
im ‘Sloppy Joe’, or ‘Old Trowel and Error’. His real ambition had been to set himself up as a bookie. A bookie, can you imagine it? If only he had. I would have spent my childhood on the track at Santa Anita.

  Instead, I was brought up in Anaheim, in one of those crowded uninteresting streets you pass on the way to Disneyland. My parents wanted me to be a dentist, for God’s sake; and every time they introduced me to anyone they would fold their hands and smile smugly at me and say, ‘This is Ricky. He’s going to be a dentist.’ I used to have nightmares about wet salivating mouths, and wire braces that nipped me like skeletal lobsters.

  The dentistry thing kind of petered out after my father died of lung cancer in 1958. My mother became fussy, over-indulgent, and if I’d announced that I wanted to join the circus as a fire-eater’s assistant, I think she would have said, ‘Oh, yes, dear. Whatever you want,’ and given me a dollar for gasoline. I drifted through high school, playing moderate football, bad baseball, and even worse piano. I dated pretty girls with ponytails and spots. But then, everybody I knew had spots.

  The only teacher I really liked a lot was a young guy called Panov who spoke in a thick Hungarian accent and taught woodwork. His family had immigrated to California from Europe just after World War Two, bringing with them most of their old furniture and paintings. Since the war, Panov’s father had lost most of his money on stock speculations, and the family lived in a tiny, tacky little house in West Hollywood. But Panov took me back home there one day for horscht, and inside of that tiny, tacky little house, there was a riot of antiques. Tables, wardrobes, commodes, mirrors, chairs – the contents of a seven-bedroomed mansion crammed into a three-room shack. We spent the whole afternoon clambering around it, and over it, and under it, while Panov explained to me the beauties of eighteenth-century dovetailing, the wonders of walnut marquetry, and the joys of fluted legs.

  I went into that house liking Panov as a friend and a teacher. I came out, five hours later, realising that he’d become a whole lot more. He’d become my inspiration, my mentor. He’d shown me a completely new world that I’d never really been aware of, and it was the most exciting and beautiful world you could imagine. After I graduated, I took a course in fine art and antiques at UCLA, and I learned about Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and Gillow. I could tell kingwood from pearwood, splats from stretchers, and frets from friezes.