The Possession of Mr Cave Read Online Free

looked
so inhuman they might have been designed by an Italian
sports car manufacturer.
    I went through his school bag and found a letter he never
gave me. It was from his headmaster, informing me that he
had missed two of Mr Weeks' history lessons. The letter dated
from March, before Mr Weeks had lost his job. I remembered
him from the time he had come into the shop with
his wife and his son George, to buy the pine mule chest. A
tall yeti of a man who could have been quite a bully in the
classroom, I imagined.
    It was strange, being in his room. Reuben's presence was so
real, contained as it was in all those objects, those possessions
that reminded me how little I had understood him. With
Cynthia's help we eventually packed a lot of stuff away in the
attic. You helped with some of it, didn't you?
    Though the thing I really need to tell you concerns his
bicycle. As you know, I popped an advertisement in the
window, offering it for twenty-five pounds. Within a day a
woman had called and arranged to come in and buy it for
her son. A Scottish lady with a long face that reminded me
rather of the aboriginal statues on Easter Island.
    I was retrieving the bicycle from the shed when the darkness
crowded around me and I again felt that peculiar sensation
at the back of my brain. Only this time it was stronger. It
was as though someone was turning a dial in my mind,
sliding it across frequencies, trying to find a different station.
The feeling was at its most intense as I patted the saddle
and let the Scottish lady wheel the bicycle away from me. I
stood there for a while, in this kind of vague trance, watching
her roll it down the street. I stayed there until the bicycle
disappeared, and the sensation stopped, leaving my mind
restored to its comforting mode of sadness.
    *

As your former hero Pablo Casals once put it, to be a musician
is to recognise the soul that lives in objects. A soul
that may be made most visible by a Steinway or a Stradivari,
or may be most well expressed by a Bach or a Mozart, but
that is always there, in every thing of substance.
    Of course, I am not a musician. I sell antiques, but the
same knowledge applies. You sit all day in a shop, with
the old clocks and the tables and the chairs, the plates and the
bureaus, and you feel just like them. Just another object that
has lived through events it could not change, crafted and transformed,
forced to sit and wait in a kind of limbo, its fate as
unknown as all the others'.
    A customer came in one afternoon – a bullish man of
the Yorkshire mould. The sort of chap within whom arrogance
and ignorance compete for top billing. He grumbled
his way around from price tag to price tag, telling Cynthia
and myself that he'd be very surprised if we'd get this much
for an art nouveau figurine, or that much for a reading
table.
    'Oh,' said Cynthia. 'But it's rosewood.'
    'Makes no difference,' the man said.
    'And it's early Georgian.'
    'Early Mesopotamian wouldn't justify that price.'
    By that point, I'd had enough.
    'There are two types of customer for antiques,' I told him.
'There are those who appreciate an object's soul, and understand
that, truly, even the smallest items – the sauce ladles,
the thimbles, the silver barrel nutmeg graters – can only ever
be undervalued. These I would call the true aficionados, the
people who appreciate all the lives that have grated with, or
worn, or poured, or sat at, or cried near, or dreamed upon,
or cried against, or fallen in love in the same room as such
things. These are the people who like to frequent an establishment
such as Cave Antiques.'
    He stood there, mirroring Cynthia's widening mouth and
eyes, as unlikely to interrupt as the figure in his hand. The
Girl with a Tambourine, decorated in green and pink enamels.
I had bought it originally as part of a pair. The other one had
dropped and smashed when I had collided with the chest on
my way to reach Reuben, the night he died.
    I continued: 'Whereas the other type, the type I