Those Who Feel Nothing by Peter Guttridge

Author:Peter Guttridge [Peter Guttridge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2014-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

A bell above the door jangled as Bob Watts entered the antique shop. A woman behind a desk at the far end of the shop looked up and smiled at him. Her hair was drawn back tightly to accentuate the perfect oval of her face. Incense drifted around her from burners at either edge of the desk.

Watts smiled back and looked around him. Buddha heads and torsos carved from stone or cast in brass. Big pieces of French colonial furniture: chests, cupboards and bedheads made from teak or some other hardwood. He’d seen similar modern versions in the Lombok shop, imported from Thailand.

The woman let him browse but when he approached her desk she looked up and gave him the same neutral smile, one eyebrow slightly raised.

‘How old are these pieces?’ Watts said.

‘Their ages vary,’ she said, with the hint of an accent. ‘Did you have a particular piece in mind?’

Watts pointed behind her. ‘That Buddha there, for instance. It looks really old.’

The woman glanced behind her. ‘It’s not. Late nineteenth century. Burmese.’ She gestured back into the shop. ‘That one down there is much older. The brass one? Sixteenth century from Thailand.’

Watts nodded. He pointed at the furniture.

‘Suppose you can’t get stuff like this any more, given it’s made from hardwood.’

‘They farm teak so you can still get it, but modern furniture doesn’t have that patina of age.’

‘Age can be imitated though, can’t it?’ Watts said.

‘Faked, you mean?’ the woman said. ‘Of course. There are unscrupulous people in this business as in any other.’

‘I’m trying to place your accent. I’m guessing French.’

‘You guess correctly.’

‘Have you been in Brighton long?’

She gave him an appraising look. ‘Why would you want to know?’

Watts recognized that he was hopeless with women. He grinned, feeling foolish. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t prying. It’s just that if I lived in France I can’t imagine I would want to move to England.’

‘I have never lived in France,’ she said, a small smile playing on her lips.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That makes two of us. You’re French-Canadian?’

She gave him that appraising look again. ‘I was born and raised in Indochine.’

‘Vietnam?’

She nodded. ‘My parents were plantation owners too stubborn to leave during the Vietnam War.’

‘They lost everything?’

‘Let us say their circumstances became rather straitened.’

‘Straitened.’

She smiled. ‘Indeed. And not long before Saigon fell they decided it would be politic to take what money they had left and move to Cambodia.’

‘Probably wise.’

‘It was wise until Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took over the country four years later.’

‘They lost what little they had retained?’ Watts said.

‘The French embassy arranged transport out of the country for all non-Cambodians just before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. They took what they could carry, including me.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Laos.’

Watts frowned as he thought for a moment. ‘A safe choice – at least, I can’t think of anything horrible happening there.’

She smiled, a broader smile than before. ‘You’re right.’

‘So that’s where you were brought up.’

‘Well, we moved back to Cambodia a decade later, in the late eighties, once

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