of the houses; and their grounds. Whereas Victorian businessmen set up their mistresses in the small neat terraces of St John’s Wood, they built their own Gothic piles in neighbouring Wheatstone. Ugly London brick, embellished with all the turrets and pinnacles and porte-cochères their tormented Romantic hearts could desire. Fretted cast-iron balconies that rusted dangerously; gargoyles that grimaced and blackened through the great Victorian pea-soupers.
The servant problem, after the Second World War, was the houses’ downfall. Their owners moved somewhere bijou in Hampstead or Highgate, leaving them to rot as bed-sitters. Later, the Thatcherite boom brought a feeble gentrification, one family to a floor; and Thatcherite service industries, vulnerable as poppies to the economic winds.
These uncertain newcomers coo about ‘original features’. Desperate house-agents have learnt to stress stained glass and plaster cornices, rather than central heating and double glazing. But all the improvements are within. Outside, in the over-large gardens, the elaborate fountains stand cracked and dry, ornamental trees grow unchecked to darken the windows and everywhere, the dark insidious rhododendrons gather strength to bury all in their shadowy silence. Massive wooden gates rot on their hinges, forever open; then collapse leaving mere gaps of thin, rutted, puddled gravel that lead to parking for a dozen cars where once flowers bloomed. Nobody walks in Wheatstone; grass grows up through the cracks in the pavement, beneath the tall, leaning garden walls. After dark you hear the sudden smash of milk-bottles, or the panicky run of some benighted woman’s footsteps. Plenty of shadows for muggers and worse.
Why do I choose to live there? These uncertain people, with their uncertain money and uncertain dreams, are my livelihood. I prosper by making their dreams a little more real; I sell antiques, of a sort. Don’t come to me for anything good. I have no sets of Georgian dining-chairs for five grand, or decent oil-paintings or Louis XIV commodes.
My commodes are Victorian; with chamber-pots inside. Polished with dark-tan boot-polish to hide the scratches made by long-dead invalids. People use them to stand TV sets on; but they are curiously keen to have the intact chamber-pot inside. The commodes look well alongside my Victorian coal-boxes (complete with shovel, but never the original shovel); my fly-blown Victorian mirrors that you can hardly see your face in; my horrible oleographs of lumpish cows up to their bellies in some unbelievable river, the once-prized possessions of some Victorian pavior or plumber.
Ugly trash, but beautifully polished, to hide the fact that the carcasses of my grandfather clocks, the backs of mirrors, the bottoms of drawers, are new. I am a creature of my time; economical with the truth. Which often makes me grumpy, because I am in love with the beautiful and true.
Like the girl, woman, who walked into my premises one late March afternoon in 1987. I felt a prick of interest, because she was so tall. Odd, but I cannot help respecting women according to their height. I can never take a woman under five feet three seriously. I can be friends with them, spoil them, indulge them, because to me they are no more than pets. Whereas a woman over five feet eight is half-way to being a goddess; until she proves otherwise.
A cruel man would have said this woman was all teeth and eyes. The tips of her upper teeth were always visible, even in repose. But when her wide mouth smiled in greeting, fleetingly, the teeth were perfect. As for the eyes, they seemed full of the grey brightness of the March sky she had just left outside. Beneath heavy eyelids, which I always take as a sign of a passionate nature. Only Rembrandt could have done justice to her bone-structure, so fine she might have been any age from thirty to fifty. Her hair was fashionably streaked, so I had to judge her age by her neck. No trace of crêpiness; just those two horizontal lines that come to women in their thirties. She still had a touching trace of gawkiness, a casual air of being a student, enhanced by the UC London scarf hanging inside her open pink anorak.
She touched my gilt clock appreciatively in passing, with long slender fingers. She went up in my estimation; it was the only half-decent thing I had in the shop. I watched the subtle play of expressions across her face, as fluent as wind across a lake on some idle afternoon. Faces like that carry lines early; but these were good lines. Intelligence, a kind of