The Heirloom Read online

  ‘Ricky, something’s wrong with him,’ said Sara. She didn’t have to say any more, because I was running after that dog as if he’d snatched my annual tax rebate.

  I followed him around to the paved patio in back of the house, beside the pool pump enclosure. He was sitting outside his kennel, shivering and panting, and when he looked at me his eyes rolled around so that I could see the whites.

  ‘Sheraton, steady boy,’ I called, in what I hoped was a reassuring voice. ‘Come on, now. Steady, boy. Steady.’

  I knelt down beside him, and he allowed me to stroke his head, and rub his trembling flanks. At first, I didn’t think he’d been injured. But as I ran my hand through the thick golden hair around his flanks, I felt the matted wetness of blood.

  Sara had come around the house now, and bent over to pat Sheraton’s back.

  ‘He’s hurting,’ I said. ‘Somehow, that goddamned chair’s hurt him.’

  Sara took a cloth from the pipe beside the pump enclosure, and dipped it in the pool. While I held Sheraton still, she mopped away the blood from his coat, and tried to see where he was wounded.

  ‘It’s hardly anything at all,’ she said, at last. ‘Look – it’s not much more than a puncture. Maybe he scratched himself on the carvings when he jumped up.’

  I peered closely at the wound. It was a single, circular pinprick. Nothing serious. Already, the blood was starting to coagulate and form a scab.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Sara.

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look like the kind of scratch he would have got from catching himself on the carvings. And what made him jump up in the first place?’

  I fastened Sheraton’s collar to the long chain that was stapled to the side of his kennel, and gave him another soothing-rub around the neck.

  ‘If you dab some antiseptic on it,’ I told Sara, ‘I’ll go load the chair into the wagon. Sheraton should be okay while we go out to the lake. It won’t take us more than twenty minutes, there and back.’

  ‘You’re sure we ought to leave him?’

  ‘He doesn’t look badly hurt, does he? And he’s stopped shivering now. Maybe the chair just gave him a fright. Dogs are supposed to be susceptible to all kinds of vibes that we can’t pick up, aren’t they?’

  Sara looked around at the flaking trees, and the dried-up grass. ‘That chair gives off more than vibes,’ she said.

  I went back to the station-wagon. Jonathan, obediently, was standing a few feet away from the chair, waiting with one of his serious, grown-up expressions on his face. I ruffled his hair as I came up to him.

  ‘Sherry’s okay now,’ I reassured him. ‘He’s scratched himself a little, that’s all. It could have been a bug bite, or something. But he’s quite okay.’

  Jonathan said, ‘The chair spoke to me.’

  I was bending over, just about to tilt the chair into the back of the wagon. I said, ‘What?’

  Jonathan came closer. His face was grave, and I knew that he was telling me the truth. ‘The chair spoke to me,’ he said. ‘When you were gone, it said, “Break the windows. Break the wagon’s windows.”’

  I stood up. The man-serpent looked as malevolently self-satisfied as before; but whatever it looked like, I knew that it was fashioned out of nothing but mahogany. And mahogany, as far as I was aware, wasn’t capable of speech. Oh God, I hoped it wasn’t.

  ‘You imagined it,’ I said.

  Jonathan shook his head.

  ‘It said, “Break the windows.”’

  ‘So what did you say?’

  Jonathan didn’t answer at first. He was clearly very frightened. I hunkered down beside him and held him in my arms. There were tears in his eyes because he couldn’t understand how a chair could talk to him, and how it was fall in California when it was really summer, and why Daddy and Mommy were so anxious to get rid of this dark, peculiar piece of furniture.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, gently. ‘There’s something real funny about this chair. I don’t know what it is. But somehow it makes people think they see things and hear things they don’t want to hear or see. It’s like a kind of magic chair, you understand me? But it’s not very nice magic. So, what we’re going to do, we’re going to take this magic chair out to the lake, and we’re going to throw it away, for ever.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jonathan nodded, through his tears.

  I stood up. ‘Jump into the wagon, and then we’ll go. You can sit in the front seat with us.’

  I went back to the chair. I paused a moment, and then I seized hold of its legs and heaved it into the back of the wagon. Its cresting-rail just fitted under the roof-lining, although its back was so long that I couldn’t fit its legs completely inside, and I had to lash the wagon’s tailgate closed with the nylon rope.

  Sara came around from attending to Sheraton, flapping her hands to dry them. We all climbed into the front seat of the Impala, and I started up the engine and backed out of the driveway.

  We had to drive through the centre of Rancho Santa Fe to join the road which led out to Lake Hodges. It was sunny and quiet, as usual, and the only people I saw on the streets were two old friends and customers, moseying along to the Post Office to collect their Monday-morning mail. There are no house-to-house mail deliveries in Rancho Santa Fe, and the Post Office is a daily gathering-place for anyone who wants to gossip about money and real-estate prices and whatever happened to the good old days. Next door to the Post Office is a supermarket called Jonathan’s, and we always used to joke with Jonathan that we had bought him there, for fifty-nine cents.

  We left a trail of summer dust behind us as we left town and drove along the sweeping road that took us through the hills. The sky was raked with high cirrus clouds, but they would probably bum off before mid-morning.

  Lake Hodges is a grey-surfaced reservoir which lies amongst the wooded hills on the way to Escondido like a pool of mercury in the fold of a dark-green blanket. As we approached it from the west, we saw the narrow concrete dam which holds the water back, with its cascading overflow plunging nearly a hundred feet to the rocky riverbed below.

  I pulled off the road on to the rough parking area, and turned the wagon around. Fortunately, it was too early for sightseers or tourists, and the only other vehicle in sight was an oily old Mack tanker which was toiling its way up the grade in a cloud of filthy exhaust.

  ‘Do you want me to help you?’ asked Sara.

  I shook my head. ‘I think I can manage. Just stay there. This shouldn’t take more than a couple of seconds.’

  I untied the rope which held the tailgate closed, and then wrenched at the chair until it toppled from the back of the wagon and fell sideways on to the ground. It looked defeated, lying like that. More like an ugly piece of old furniture than some species of evil spirit incarnate. It was only fifteen feet or so to the edge of the precipice which overlooked the dam, and I decided to risk carrying the chair with my bare hands.

  Tentatively, I touched one of the arms. It felt like wood. I turned the chair on to its back, and took hold of the other arm. That felt like wood, too. So far, no nasty surprises.

  Sara called, ‘Is everything okay?’ and I gave her a wave to show that everything was.

  I lifted the chair on to its ball-and-claw feet, and then I picked it up by the arms and began to carry it slowly over to the precipice. The chair was heavy, but not abnormally heavy, and I had the feeling that whatever influence it contained, wherever it had come from, I had it licked.

  The man-serpent face watched me without emotion as I sweated and struggled to carry the chair over the uneven ground. Up above, the sun had already frittered away most of the clouds, and it was growing uncomfortably hot. All I could hear was the rushing of the reservoir water as it slid down the long steep face of the concrete dam, and foamed on to the rocks below.

  At last, my chest heaving in and out like the bellows of a harmonium, I reached the very brink of the precipice. I stood there for a half-minute, to get my breath back, and then I lifted that damned chai
r as high as I could, and launched it out into space.

  Instantly, like a suicide who ties himself to a boulder, I was plucked off the edge of the precipice after it. I couldn’t let go! My hands were fastened tight to the arms of the chair as if my flesh had grown into the wood.

  There was a blur of rocks, sky, sliding gravel, and bushes. I was tossed end over end, battering my face and body against the chair and the cliff, until something inside of me commanded let go, for Christ’s sake, let go! And then the chair tumbled away on its own, and by some split-second miracle I slid into the roots of a tough old bush, and was brought up short in a scratchy, bruising, mind-jolting shock.

  I lay there, almost halfway down the face of the precipice, gasping and coughing and thanking God. Far below me, I glimpsed the chair falling into the foamy river, and then disappearing.

  Sara appeared, wide-eyed, at the brink of the precipice above me.

  ‘Ricky!’ she screamed. ‘Ricky!’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I called back. ‘Not very okay, but reasonably okay. Just a few bruises.’

  ‘Oh my God, I thought you’d been killed.’

  ‘So did I,’ I told her, wrestling my way out of the roots, and standing up. My nose was bleeding, and I had to wipe it on my arm.

  ‘Can you climb back up?’

  I looked around. ‘I think so. If I edge my way along this ledge a ways, as far as that big rock there, I should be able to make it easy.’

  It took me ten minutes of sliding and slipping and clawing at roots to reach the top, while Sara and Jonathan watched me in apprehensive silence, but at last I made it. When I got there, I hugged them both, and we stood for a long time without saying anything, a small family who loved each other very dearly.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Sara. ‘I was watching you in the rear-view mirror and you just – fell.’

  ‘I think the chair made a last effort to get its own back,’ I said. I brushed twigs and mud from my shirt and jeans. ‘I threw it over the edge, but right at the last moment I couldn’t let go of it. It was like my hands were stuck fast. The chair went over, and I had to go over with it.’

  ‘Is it gone now?’ Sara asked me. ‘Is it really gone for good?’

  ‘You can’t go any gooder,’ I smiled, dabbing at my nose with a tissue. ‘I saw it fall into the river, and disappear under the water, and that’s what I call gone.’

  We got back into the wagon. ‘How about a celebratory drink?’ I suggested. ‘Let’s all go along to The Inn and share a bottle of champagne.’

  ‘Don’t forget you have an appointment at eleven,’ Sara reminded me.

  I checked the clock on the dash. ‘We have twelve minutes. If we can’t finish a bottle of champagne between us in twelve minutes, then we don’t deserve to celebrate.’

  It only took us a few minutes to drive back into Rancho Santa Fe. I parked the wagon in the sloping parking lot outside of The Inn, and then we walked along the brick path beside the neat-clipped lawns and manicured hedges to The Inn’s front door. The morning was sunny and beautifully calm, and I put my arm around Sara and gave her a squeeze of affection. We may have lost the night to old man Jessop’s peculiar chair, but we were alive and well on one of those balmy Southern California days that makes you feel richer and younger and almost religious.

  They brought us a frosted ice-bucket of Domaine Chandon in the high, airy drawing-room, where we sat on chintzy sofas amidst antique furniture and The Inn’s collection of old decoy ducks. I ordered a fresh orange juice for Jonathan, but I fizzed it up for him with champagne, and he laughed because it tickled his nose. Then Sara and I raised our glasses to each other, and drank a silent toast. We didn’t need any words.

  At ten after eleven, I left Sara and Jonathan at The Inn and walked across the street to the store. There was a sand-coloured Rolls-Royce Corniche parked by the kerb, with its hood down. I walked in through the store doorway, and the Russian troika-bell jingled pretentiously behind me as I crossed the brown-carpeted floor between the softly-illuminated display cabinets.

  My appointment was waiting for me, a tall tanned man of about forty, with swept-back hair that was tinged with grey, and that kind of hawkish profile that you only seem to see at English country houses. He wore an off-white suit that must have cost him $750, and a yellow silk shirt.

  Bill, standing behind the counter in his usual rumpled denim suit, said, ‘Hi, Ricky. This is Mr David Sears.’

  I shook hands. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. I was having a small celebration with my family.’

  ‘It’s not your birthday, is it?’ asked Bill, worriedly.

  ‘No, it’s not my birthday. It’s just – well, one of those days when you feel you have to celebrate.’

  ‘Not too many of those in the antiques business these days,’ said David Sears, in an accent like clipped-up tea-leaves. ‘I usually expect to turn over well above six million dollars on each of my annual visits to California. But this year, well… a dismal lack of buying power has fallen over the land.’

  ‘I’m surprised I haven’t met you before,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m not,’ he replied. ‘I don’t usually come as far south as San Diego. I can generally do all the buying and selling I need to do in Los Angeles. Expatriate English film stars are suckers for anything antique, and anything that reminds them of home. My most effective sales incentive is to promise to send them a pound of English sausages every week for a year, air charter, wrapped up in paper with Dewhursts the Butchers printed on it.’

  ‘Are English sausages really that good?’

  ‘Not really,’ smiled David Sears. ‘The only real attraction is that they’re not American sausages. Find them too bready, myself.’

  ‘Can I offer you a drink?’ I asked him. ‘A cup of tea?’

  ‘A Tab, actually, if you have one.’

  ‘Sure. Bill? Do you want to go across to the market and get us a six-pack of Tab?’

  ‘I’m dieting,’ admitted David Sears shamefacedly, patting his stomach. ‘I’m afraid I have an inexhaustible appetite for Pacific lobsters. I could drink tea, I suppose, but Americans make tea too well for me. I like it thick and stewed, with rather a lot of milk. Criminal, isn’t it? But most English people do.’

  ‘Bill told me you were interested in that japanned cabinet.’

  ‘Yes, I am quite,’ said David Sears. ‘What sort of price are you asking for it?’

  I walked across to the cabinet and opened it up. ‘It’s English,’ I told him, ‘as you can probably guess. Late seventeenth century – undoubtedly japanned after the publication of Stalker and Parker’s treatise on japanning. Good baroque carving around the top and the stand.’

  ‘I had a pretty close look while I was waiting for you,’ said David Sears. ‘It’s one of the best examples of japanning I’ve seen for a long time. So much of it was done by gifted amateurs, wasn’t it? I saw a frightful example in San Francisco, and they were asking eighty-five thousand for it.’

  ‘You could take this one away for ninety-three,’ I told him.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  I grinned. ‘I’m afraid there can’t be any “hmm” about it. It’s either going to have to be “yes” or “no”. That’s my rock-bottom price.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind if I think about it?’

  ‘Of course not. Was there anything else you were interested in?’

  ‘Nothing much, old boy. Although you don’t happen to have a cheapish long-case clock anywhere, would you? I have a lawyer friend in Los Angeles who’s been decorating an apartment for what you might call a lady companion of his. He doesn’t want to spend a fortune… he’s too canny a lawyer for that. But he did ask me to keep my eyes peeled for a cheapish long-case clock.’

  I suddenly thought of the clock that Mr Grant had left standing in my driveway. I hadn’t looked at it very closely, but it certainly wasn’t anything special. Enough to satisfy the whims of a lawyer’s mistress in LA without breaking the b
ank. And if I gave it to David Sears at a reasonable price, he might think more favourably about paying ninty-three grand for my japanned cabinet.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘why don’t you come back to The Inn with me and help my wife and I to finish off another bottle of champagne? Then come along back home for lunch. Someone brought round a pretty low-priced long-case clock over the weekend, and you might like it. There are one or two other bits and pieces there, too. You never know. You could find yourself picking up some bargains.’

  David Sears brightened. ‘Do you know something,’ he said, ‘that all sounds like a jolly good idea.’

  Bill came back with the Tabs, but I told him to keep them in the ice-box at the back of the store. There were always going to be plenty of long hot afternoons when nobody called by for hours, and on afternoons like that we’d be glad of them.

  ‘Everything’s okay, is it?’ Bill asked me, as I opened the front door for David Sears.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You look kind of bruised, that’s all. Like you jumped off a cliff or something.’

  I touched the abrasions on the side of my cheek. ‘It’s nothing. But you’re right. I did jump off a cliff.’

  Bill gave me an odd, quizzical look; but when I slapped his shoulder and grinned at him he went back to the counter with a rueful, silly smile. ‘Ask a silly question…’ he said.

  I closed the store door behind me. Outside in the sunlight, David Sears was just starting up his Rolls-Royce.

  *

  We ate guacamole and cheese salad out on the patio, under the leafless trees. David Sears had been curious when he arrived about the ravaged appearance of the vegetation around the house, but I told him that our Mexican gardener had mixed up weedkiller with fertiliser, and accidentally sprayed most of the grounds with a lethal dose.

  ‘You sacked him, of course?’ asked David Sears, sipping cold white wine.

  I cut my throat with my finger, and nodded.

  Over on the far side of the yard, Sheraton was sleeping beside his kennel. He hadn’t eaten his lunchtime bowlful of food, but apart from that he seemed to have recovered from his experience with old man Jessop’s chair. Every now and then he wuffled and turned over, or semi-consciously patted a paw at the flies which danced around his nose.