legends · 4 min read ·
Lot 41
An auctioneer withdraws a lot that has no consignor when the room fills with people who are not bidders.
**Catalogue, Thursday Sale — Ferris & Pell, Fine Furniture and Effects**
*Lot 40. A Victorian mahogany washstand, marble top, some damage. Est. £60–80.*
*Lot 41. A walnut writing slope, c. 1860, brass bound, with fitted interior. Est. £120–180.*
*Lot 42. A set of six Edwardian dining chairs, re-upholstered. Est. £150–250.*
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I have been a salesroom auctioneer for twenty-six years. I could tell you the weight of a silver teapot by looking at it. I know that a bidder with a flat cap is rarely a dealer, and a bidder with a very clean cap is. I know most of the tricks that are played on us, and I know the ones we play, and I thought I knew all the things that could go wrong in a room.
Lot 41 was a perfectly ordinary writing slope. The porters brought it to the rostrum on the Thursday morning and set it on the display table, and I checked it against my sheet. Walnut. Brass corners. Fitted interior with inkwells, a green leather writing surface, a small secret drawer that the cataloguer had noted and that I had opened myself at the viewing. All as described.
What was not on my sheet was its consignor. Every lot has one. Vendor number, name, reserve. For Lot 41 the line was blank. I asked Bernadette in the office and she said it was probably a clerical gap, the sort that happens when a house clearance comes in on the same day as a sale. She looked it up and shrugged. "Cleared from somewhere. We'll sort it."
At two o'clock I came to it.
I opened at a hundred and twenty, as I always do, and I looked for a bid. In the room, the usual Thursday faces, dealers by the wall, a couple of private buyers in the front. The commission book had nothing. The telephone bank had nothing. I was on the point of taking it at a hundred, to get it moving, when I saw a paddle lift at the very back, behind the pillar.
I could not see who held it. A paddle, number 12, a number I knew, because I had never in my life seen anyone register under it. I took the bid. "At a hundred and twenty, thank you, sir, at the back."
The room turned. A bit of murmuring. Then another paddle, this time a dealer I know, a fat, quick man named Hobbs, and for a moment it was an ordinary little contest, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty. I raised my gavel and, in the way you do, I looked past the bidders at the room.
It was full. On a Thursday it never is. Every chair was taken, and there were people standing in the aisles, in dark coats, in the clothes of different decades, men in hats, a woman in a veil, someone in what I think was a shroud of lace, and all of them were looking at me with the kind of attention I have only otherwise seen in a court. Nobody was holding a paddle. None of them was going to bid. They had simply come to see it sold.
The bids stalled at three hundred and sixty. I said, "Against you, sir," to Hobbs, who was looking at the back of the room with the colour gone out of his face. I heard myself say: "Fair warning." I lifted the gavel.
"Three hundred and sixty," I said, "going once."
And from the back, behind the pillar, a voice that I knew, because I had heard it every day of my childhood, quietly said: "Do not let them take it, Michael."
My mother died in 1998.
I stopped with the gavel in the air. The room waited. I felt the sweat running down my back under the jacket. I understood, with a clearness I have never had in my life, that the lot was not the box. The lot was whoever was in it. The secret drawer, the one I had opened myself, which I had found empty. I had been a fool. I had looked at the drawer and not at its depth.
"Withdrawn," I said.
The room made a sound. A long sigh, a hundred and more people letting go of a breath. Hobbs said, "Michael?" and I said, "The lot is withdrawn. It's a clerical error. Apologies, gentlemen." I stepped down from the rostrum while the porters stood there with their mouths open.
I carried the writing slope out to my own car. It was lighter than it looked. I put it in the boot, and I drove it out to the coast, to a quiet stretch of shingle I knew, and I opened the secret drawer, which was empty, and I put the box down on the beach, open, and I left it there with the tide coming in.
When I went back in the morning the box was gone. Where it had been the sand was smooth. I would not have known it had been there at all if it were not for the writing in the shingle beside the place, done with a stick in a hand I recognise, in five large letters: SOLD.