Gold by Gemini by Jonathan Gash

score? You already know the answer.
    It’s the only way to learn the antique trade. Look at rubbish, any cheap modern crud on sale now. You’ll finish up hooked for life on what other people call antiques, but what I call love. Laugh if you like, but antiques are just things made full of love. The hands that produced them, in factories like flues from Hell, by some stupendous miracle of human response and feeling managed to instil in every antique a deep hallmark of love and pride in that very act of loving.
    That’s why I’m an antiques dealer. What I can’t understand is why everybody else isn’t.
    I ended my explanation. Algernon was goggling. He’s heard it umpteen times.
    Algernon failed that whole evening miserably. He failed on the precious early Antoine Gaudin photograph I’d borrowed. He failed on a rare and valuable ‘Peacock’s New Double Dissection and History of England and Wales’, 1850, by Gall and Inglis of Paternoster Square (‘What a tatty old jigsaw, Lovejoy!’), and a child’sGeorge IV complete teaser, almost microscopically small – the teapot’s a quarter of an inch long – brilliantly carved from hardwood and very, very costly. Of this last Algernon soared to his giddiest height yet, asking brightly, ‘What kind of plastic is it, Lovejoy?’
    I slung him out after that, unable to go on. I’d not laid a finger on him. Willpower.
    The world would have to wait with bated breath for Algernon’s judgement of paired water ewers, Wedgwood and Bentley polished black basalt, which I’d borrowed to include in his test. But I was especially keen not to hear him on the film transparency of a tortuously elaborate weapon by that genius Minamoto Tauguhiro. I couldn’t bear hearing him say it was a fancy dagger for slicing bread.
    He donned his motorbike leathers. I pushed him forcibly into the dark garden.
    ‘I expect you’re letting me off early because I was doing so well,’ he said merrily. He believes every word.
    ‘Sure, sure.’
    ‘Will you please inform Uncle how successful I was with those sugar ladles?’ he asked at the door. ‘He will be so hugely delighted.’ His uncle pays me for teaching the goon.
    I wonder where all my patience comes from, honestly. ‘I’ll tell him you’re making your usual progress, Algernon.’
    ‘Thank
you, Lovejoy!’ he exclaimed joyously. ‘You know, eventually I anticipate to be almost as swift as your good self –’
    I shut the door. There’s a limit.
    Normally, I’d stroll up to the pub to wash all that Algernon-induced trauma out of my mind. Thisparticular night I was too late to escape. There was a knock at my door.
    ‘Nichole. What –?’
    ‘Kate,’ she said. Her smile made it the coldest night of the year. ‘The wicked sister.’
    ‘Oh, come in.’ She was slightly taller than Nichole but the same colouring.
    ‘No, thank you. You’re Lovejoy?’ I nodded. You feel so daft just standing holding a door open, don’t you? You can’t shut it and you can’t go out or back in. ‘I want to ask you not to help my sister,’ she said carefully. ‘She . . . her judgement is sometimes, well, not too reliable, you understand.’
    ‘I haven’t helped her,’ I explained. ‘She wanted a sketch and some –’
    ‘Some rubbish,’ Kate cut in. ‘Uncle was a kindly man, but given to making up fanciful tales. I don’t want my sister influenced.’
    ‘About his other belongings,’ I began hopefully.
    ‘Very ordinary furniture, very cheap, very modem,’ she stated, cold as ever. ‘And now all sold. You do understand about Nichole?’
    ‘Sure,’ I said. She said goodnight and drove into the darkness in an elderly Mini. I sighed and locked up. I seemed to be alienating the universe.
    I’ve told you all this the way I have because it was the last quiet time there was in the whole business, I realized during the rest of that evening that something was rapidly going wrong in my humdrum normal life. Looking back, I don’t see to this