"Heirloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'I'm real sorry for all the inconvenience. You must believe me.
But, it had to be today.'
'A Sunday,' retorted Sara.
Strangely, Mr Grant nodded, his long mournful face going up and down like a rocking-horse that some child had just abandoned in an upstairs nursery.'Yes,' he said. 'A Sunday.'
At last, we had cleared a way through the furniture in the back of Mr Grant's van. I tried to lift the chair myself, while Grant was kicking aside some loose ropes. Incredibly, I could scarcely lift it off the floor of the van, and I had to let it go. It thumped back into position, and the man-serpent face on the crest of the chairback seemed to be grinning at me in contempt.
Even for solid mahogany, it was a monstrous weight. I'd hefted a solid mahogany wardrobe on my own before now, but this chair was ridiculous. Anyone who wanted to take it home would need a forklift truck.

'I can't believe how heavy this is,' I remarked to Mr Grant.
He turned. He was silhouetted against the sunlight outside of the back of the van. Beyond him I could see Sara standing impatiently amongst the forest of bentwood hatstands, Welsh dressers, bronze statuettes, library steps, and commodes.
Jonathan was sitting on the stone kerb of the driveway a little further off, throwing pieces of bark and looking glum.
'I'll lend you a hand,' said Mr Grant, and came forward to the front of the van to help me. We took one side of the chair each, and gradually shifted it along the floor to the very edge of the tailgate.
'Not exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger the second, are you?'
asked Sara, as I jumped down, sweating, from the back of the van.
'Do you want to try lifting it?' I asked her, annoyed. 'The damn thing weighs a ton.'
'I don't want to have anything to do with it,' she said, lifting her nose into the air into an exaggerated but serious expression of disdain. I knew it was serious because I'd tried before now to tease her out of it. When Sara lifted her nose into the air, you were dead, brother, and that was all there was to it.
'I hope you realise what all this is doing to my marriage,' I grunted, as I helped Mr Grant tilt the chair out of the back of the van, and lower it gently to the ground. 'I'm going to have to buy flowers, and perfume, and a bottle of Napa Valley Brut, and I'm not even sure the pharmacy's still open.'
'Don't worry about your marriage,' said Mr Grant. 'This chair will change your life.'
'Are you a marriage guidance counsellot, as well as a purveyor of second-hand sofas?' Sara asked him, cuttingly.
Mr Grant eased the back legs of the chair on to the ground, and then turned to Sara and took off his cap. 'Mrs Delatolla,' he said, 'I am nothing more than a clearer of houses.'
'You make yourself sound like an exterminator,' she said.
'Sara,' I snapped. 'For Christ's sake. Just leave it alone.'
'All right,' she said. 'I'm sorry. But if we're not ready to leave for the wild-animal park in five minutes, I'm going to take Jonathan to Sea World, and you can stay at home on your own and play with your musty old furniture until you catch woodworm in the brain.'
'Hee, bee,' laughed Mr Grant, unexpectedly. I gave him the coldest stare I could manage but he was still smiling. An unsettling smile - more like a photograph of a smile than a real one.
'Listen,' I asked Sara. 'Can you just tell me what you think of this chair? Your calm, unbiased opinion?'
Sara walked around it. The back was even taller than she was, and she wasn't particularly petite. Five feet six inches in her naked feet. The arms were carved to look like entwined snakes, twisting their way right down to the feet, which were balband-claw. The seat was black leather, with a faint hint of blue, like a raven's wing; and when I pressed into it with my fingertips, it felt almost as if it were upholstered with something warm and alive.
'It's ugly,' said Sara. 'In fact, it's hideous. But I have to admit that it does have something.'
It was the decorated back which fascinated me. The splat - which is the centrepiece between the top of the chair and the seat - was thickly carved with what must have been hundreds of falling people, each of them only two inches long. They formed an intricate cascade of intertwined human bodies, all naked and all with their mouths stretched open in silent screams. I ran my fingers over them and the sensation was extraordinary. They felt bobbly and polished.
At the crest of the splat, the man-serpent face grinned with blind mahogany eyes and a wriggling mass of mahogany vipers for his hair. Two pythons formed the cresting rail along the top of the chair's back, their mouths open to regurgitate a curving stream of carved fruit and wolves' heads, which joined up with the snakelike arms.
'What do you think?' asked Mr Grant. I noticed that, once it was set down on the ground, he didn't touch the chair at all. Most antique dealers lean on their chairs in an easy, proprietorial fashion, as if the chairs actually belong to them; and they almost always tilt their chairs this way and that, just to show you how snugly the frame has been put together, or how well the stretchers have been repaired.
Mr Grant treated the chair as if it were mine already, or at any rate as if it didn't belong to him. Maybe a chair like it only ever belonged to itself, I thought. It had such presence, such silent self-confidence, that it was hard to imagine it fitting easily and comfortably into anybody's home decor.
Jonathan came up and stared at the chair in fascination.
'What are all those people doing?' he asked me, at last, Mr Grant, his hands clasped tightly in front of him, said, 'I believe they are tumbling from Hell into Sub-Hell. They are not very pleased about it, as you can see.'
'Why don't they have any clothes on?' asked Jonathan.
'They're going for a swim,' I put fin. I gave Mr Grant a disapproving tight-lipped look for pre-empting my right to answer the first question. I believe in telling Jonathan the truth, but all that baloney about Hell and Sub-Hell, wherever that was, well, that was all baloney. Rotten baloney, at that.
'May I sit on the chair?' Jonathan said.
'Sure,' I told him.
'No,' said Mr Grant, quickly.
'There's no harm in letting the boy sit on the chair,' I told Mr Grant. 'Don't you ever sit on a chair before you buy it?'
Mr Grant came forward and stood between Jonathan and the chair. He was still smiling, in that peculiar unreal way, but I could see that he wasn't going to let Jonathan go past him, no matter what.
'Why can't he sit on the chair?' Sara wanted to know. 'Are you afraid it's going to fall to pieces or something?'
'It's not a child's chair,' smiled Mr Grant. 'And apart from that, I don't usually allow people to sit on my chairs before they buy.'
'Well, in that case, we'll just have to go without the pleasure,' I replied. 'Do you want me to help you lift the chair back in the van?'
'Excuse me?' asked Mr Grant.
'You heard me,' I told him. 'Do you want me to help you lift the chair back in the van?'
'You're not going to buy it?' His affability vanished like steam off a sidewalk, and he was suddenly, inexplicably, alarmed.
I shook my head. 'No, I don't think so.'
'But - my dear Mr Delatolla - I was quite sure that you would. If I'd known-'
'I'm sorry,' I said, shaking my head. 'It's a very interesting piece. Obviously unique. Late eighteenth-century domestic, I'd guess. Made in Massachusetts or possibly Pennsylvania.
The basic proportions are probably based on designs in Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet Maker' s Director, as far as I can tell. Excellently interpreted, too. And with all this inventive carving around the back and arms... well, that's almost genius.'
'And you don't want it?' asked Grant, aghast.