The Judas Pair by Jonathan Gash Read Free Book Online Page B

‘Prisoners of war, probably Boer War. You signalled for the next course by combinations of these four bells. Not valuable.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    I cast my eye for flinters, but they weren’t in Margaret’s line.
    In he tore, alcoholic and worried, eagerly trying to judge if we were just browsing or up to something, stained of teeth, unshaven of chin, bleary of eye, shoddy of gear, Dandy Jack.
    ‘Come and see my jades, Lovejoy,’ he said.
    I tried to grin while backing from his evil breath. A customer was showing interest so Margaret stayed put, making a smiling gesture for me to look in before I left.
    I let Dandy tell me how clever he’d been to do the deal. A retired colonel’s widow, Far East wars and all that. I would have to be careful asking about flinters, but so tar my approach had been casual in the extreme. Out came the jade collection. I sat on his visiting-stool while he showed me. By hook or by crook I would have to do him a good turn.
    Jades are odd things. There are all sorts of daft ideas in people’s minds about antiques of all kinds-that
all
antiques if genuine are priceless, for example, a clear piece of lunacy. Nothing is truly beyond price if you think about it. All you can say is that prices vary. Everything’s always for sale. Another daftness is that anything is an antique, even if it’s as little as five years old. Remember the golden date, 1836. This side equals modern. That side equals antique. The most extreme of all daftnesses, though, is the idea that if something looks mint and beautifully preserved, it shouldn’t, and therefore needs false woodworm holes bored into it, scratches and dents made in unscathed surfaces, and splinters worked from corners. Wrong. Moral: the better preserved, the costlier.
Keep things mint.
    Jades attract more daftness than any other antiques. And Dandy Jack had every possible misconception, displaying them all to anyone who called.
    ‘It’s a pity some aren’t proper green,’ he was saying, fetching the small carved pieces out. ‘They must be some sort of stone. But here are some deep green ones . . .’ and so on. I tell you, it’s bloody painful. You’d think these people can’t read a reference book between them. ‘I played it cool,’ he kept on. ‘Maybe I’ll let them go for auction. Do you think Christie’s would –’
    I picked one up – a black-and-white dragonfly, beautifully carved. Not painted, but pure jade through and through. To tell real jade – though not its age, however – from anything else, feel it.
Never leave jade untouched.
Hold it, stroke it, touch it – that’s what it’s for, and what it loves. But never touch it with freshly-washed hands. If you’ve just washed your hands clean, come back in an hour when your natural oils have returned to your fingers. Then pick up and feel the jade’s surface. You know how oil gets when it’s been rubbed partly dry, like, say, linseed oil on a wooden surround? Faintly tacky and slightly stiff? If the object you hold gives drat
immediate
impression, it’s jade all right. To confirm it, look at the object in direct light,
not
hooded like posh lamps. The surface mustn’t gleam with a brilliant reflection. It must appear slightly matt. Remember what the early experts used to say of jade: ‘Soapy to look at, soapy to feel.’ It’s not too far out.
    Now, there are many sorts of jade. Green jades are fairly common, but less so than you might think. ‘Orange-peel’ is one of my favourites, a brilliant orange with white, not a fleck of green. Then there’s ‘black-ink’ jade, in fact perhaps nearer blue-black, usually mixed with white streaks, as in the dragonfly I was holding. One of the most valuable is ‘mutton-fat’ jade, a fat-white jade of virtually no trans-lucency despite its nickname.
    Of course, nowadays the common green jade comes from damn near anywhere except China – Burma, New Zealand, you name it. And it’s blasted out of hills, in a new and unweathered