The Grail Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

a curtained kitchen alcove off. This divan I have extends into a double bed.
    I made my tea: two pasties and beetroot, a pint of tea, five slices of bread and marge. You can get some of that sweet pickle but it costs the earth.
    Normally, I turn on the telly to watch the politicians for a laugh. This evening I couldn’t settle. You know the feeling. Books you’d normally leap at seem suddenly too familiar and the notes you desperately want to bring up to date are too irksome.
    A few tickles had come in, letters replying to my newspaper adverts – I place two a week. My most successful gambit is always the innocent widow (as if there ever was such a thing) struggling to make an old groat from the sale of her pathetic belongings. This week I’d put:
    For sale: Pr. v. old & large Japanese vases, colourful embossed figures; Black Bess flintlock rifle; old silver tea service with hallmark; box of old stamped envelopes. Late husband’s effects. Please write with offers. Recently bereaved widow.
    We call it breading, as in loaf. Just as anglers chuckbread into a river, so we dealers ‘bread’ the public pool. I’d no such articles, naturally, and of course I’d used terms just wrong enough to be convincing. Seven replies, five naturally from dealers taken in by my deceptive innocence. I read their ingenious scribbles with dry amusement, then chucked them away. The other two replies were from collectors. You can tell them a mile off. One, a stamps addict, babbled incoherent enthusiasm but the scent of money was missing. The second was a genuine collector, who wrote gravely that my Japanese vases sounded like Satsuma ware. We call them ‘Second’ Satsumas, in the trade, these gross and horrible pots decorated with too many colours and white-slip outlines. The Japanese made them in the nineteenth century to cater for the crazy European idea of current Japanese elegance. European collectors and Japanese potters finished up equally bemused in a lunatic situation, the former collecting the wrong stuff and the latter turning out hideous stuff they didn’t like. Folk go on collecting it, thank heaven. ‘First’ Satsuma’s beautiful delicate small stuff. I’ve yet to see a single real non-phoney piece anywhere in Europe, so beware. The collector, a Sunderland geezer, went on to ask did I not mean Brown rather than Black Bess? The former is the famous Land Pattern Musket, possession of which is the indelible mark of the flintlock collector. Black Bess, on the other hand, was a highwayman’s horse. The collector offered to have my items priced by independent valuers at his own expense and even offered a deposit to guarantee his good faith. He would supply personal references from banks etc. I filed his name and address reverently. I love a real collector.
    Now, I thought, where the hell do I get a pair of Second Satsuma vases and a Land Pattern from?
    Believe it or not, that was the high spot of my evening. I fidgeted some more.
    I was worried. The point is that tales like the Holy Grail happen every day around here. I hear thirty a week. The commonest is King John’s lost treasure, which gets itself found every few minutes. And next comes the poor tired Holy Grail which nobody will let rest in peace. A mere sniff of good old King Arthur’s enough to set millions daydreaming and digging in back yards from one end of these islands to the other. To a dealer whose next meal comes through finding real antiques these legends are a drag, an absolute pest.
    I played a record of a Mozart flute piece. He hated composing for that instrument and used to write home to his dad moaning about it, but he’d get no sympathy from me tonight. I finally spent the rest of the evening ringing round my mates arranging things for the next day.
    Angela was first, seeing I owed her a fortune. I swore an oath that I’d bring her bloody money in first thing. May I be forgiven. Jim Fleet, who is Japanese militaria and prints, came next. I promised to