Wicked Spirits by Tony Medawar

Author:Tony Medawar [Medawar, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2024-08-02T12:00:00+00:00

MODERN ANTIQUE

Milward Kennedy

One day, a week before the end of our holiday, I was alone; that happens quite easily when one is on holiday. My wife and the children had gone off in the car to expect a battleship, and I had cried off on the grounds that I had to write. I was so anxious to avoid the fatigue of climbing up the insides of masts and trying to ask intelligent questions about paravanes and donkey-engines that I did not blench when my wife told me that she had promised the servants the day off. After all, a lunch of beer and cold pie and fruit is the kind of meal which any man can get ready for himself.

And so as soon as they had all departed and I had the bungalow to myself I decided that I would postpone work until I had had a stroll. Up the village I went (preferring that to the sandy shore), and in I went to an antique shop against the window of which we had once or twice flattened our noses on our way to buy the day’s provisions: it being the local custom to collect one’s own food from the shops—a custom created by the inability of the shops, during the August rush, to deliver your lunch before about 10.30 p.m.

It was a surprising shop to find in such a place; for though one window was full of the trumpery junk (Chinese bowls and brass ashtrays and pen-holders in the form of penguins) that would serve nicely as souvenirs of a summer holiday and ultimately fail to sell at a rummage sale, the other had the sort of stuff that would draw a collector. Bristol glass, blue and white and magenta and amethyst and the rare green, and some pieces of Waterford, and superb pewter dishes; and beyond this one could see lovely, unfashionable mahogany. There was, for instance, a big bureau; its front was open, and its cunning interior was obviously full of secret drawers. But what had caught my wife’s eye and mine was a little oak chest which was exactly what we wanted to go in the big, open-down fireplace at home.

No harm to ask its price. Well, it was cheap, but—no; it would be an extravagance unjustifiable when there was the rent of the bungalow, and … I switched to a fire-bucket, and that was dear and I did not want it. And just as I was wondering whether I must retreat with ignominy, I noticed a big glass ball: green, with white serpentine lines in it, like a vast specimen of the marbles with which I and my sisters played solitaire in my youth.

The old lady who kept the shop was rather scornful: the thing was not authentic—she doubted, even, whether it was solid, it was so light; and it was mine for seven shillings. Such was her scorn that I swore to myself that I had to go straight back and write a short story and devote the proceeds to the purchase of the chest.

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