Tales of the Unexpected

paper.’
    ‘Of course it is, my dear friend. It’s Victorian, late Victorian. About eighteen ninety. Sixty or seventy. years old. I’ve seen hundreds of them. That was a time when masses of cabinet-makers did nothing else but apply themselves to faking the fine furniture of the century before.’
    ‘Listen, Parson,’ Rummins said, pointing at him with a thick dirty finger, ‘I’m not saying as how you may not know a fair bit about this furniture business, but what I am saying is this: How on earth can you be so mighty sure it’s a fake when you haven’t even seen what it looks like underneath all that paint?’
    ‘Come here,’ Mr Boggis said. ‘Come over here and I’ll show you.’ He stood beside the commode and waited for them to gather round. ‘Now, anyone got a knife?’
    Claud produced a horn-handled pocket knife, and Mr Boggis took it and opened the smallest blade. Then, working with apparent casualness but actually with extreme care, he began chipping off the white paint from a small area on the top of the commode. The paint flaked away cleanly from the old hard varnish underneath, and when he had cleared away about three square inches, he stepped back and said, ‘Now, take a look at that!’
    It was beautiful – a warm little patch of mahogany, glowing like a topaz, rich and dark with the true colour of its two hundred years.
    ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Rummins asked.
    ‘It’s processed! Anyone can see that!’
    ‘How can you see it, Mister? You tell us.’
    ‘Well, I must say that’s a trifle difficult to explain. It’s chiefly a matter of experience. My experience tells me that without the slightest doubt this wood has been processed with lime. That’s what they use for mahogany, to give it that dark aged colour. For oak, they use potash salts, and for walnut it’s nitric acid, but for mahogany it’s always lime.’
    The three men moved a little closer to peer at the wood. There was a slight stirring of interest among them now. It was always intriguing to hear about some new form of crookery or deception.
    ‘Look closely at the grain. You see that touch of orange in among the dark red-brown. That’s the sign of lime.’
    They leaned forward, their noses close to the wood, first Rummins, then Claud, then Bert.
    ‘And then there’s the patina,’ Mr Boggis continued.
    The what?’
    He explained to them the meaning of this word as applied to furniture.
    ‘My dear friends, you’ve no idea the trouble these rascals will go to to imitate the hard beautiful bronze-like appearance of genuine patina. It’s terrible, really terrible, and it makes me quite sick to speak of it!’ He was spitting each word sharply off the tip of the tongue and making a sour mouth to show his extreme distaste. The men waited, hoping for more secrets.
    ‘The time and trouble that some mortals will go to in order to deceive the innocent!’ Mr Boggis cried. ‘It’s perfectly disgusting! D’you know what they did here, my friends? I can recognize it clearly. I can almost
see
them doing it, the long, complicated ritual of rubbing the wood with linseed oil, coating it over with french polish that has been cunningly coloured, brushing it down with pumice-stone and oil, bees-waxing it with a wax that contains dirt and dust, and finally giving it the heat treatment to crack the polish so that it looks like two-hundred-year-old varnish! It really upsets me to contemplate such knavery!’
    The three men continued to gaze at the little patch of darkwood.
    ‘Feel it!’ Mr Boggis ordered. ‘Put your fingers on it! There, how does it feel, warm or cold?’
    ‘Feels cold,’ Rummins said.
    ‘Exactly, my friend! It happens to be a fact that faked patina is always cold to the touch. Real patina has a curiously warm feel to it.’
    ‘This feels normal,’ Rummins said, ready to argue.
    ‘No, sir, it’s cold. But of course it takes an experienced and sensitive finger-tip to pass a positive judgement. You couldn’t really be expected to judge this any more than I could be expected to judge the quality of your barley. Everything in life, my dear sir, is experience.’
    The men were staring at this queer moon-faced clergyman with the bulging eyes, not quite so suspiciously now because he did seem to know a bit about his subject. But they were still a long way from trusting him.
    Mr Boggis bent down and pointed to one of the metal drawer-handles on the commode. ‘This is another place where the fakers go to