It is one thing discovering that some of your possessions have a value you never dreamt of*, and another finding out how to realise this.
Neither of my two experiences of selling provides a useful template. The first was when needing the money urgently for house repairs, I fished my mother’s few pieces of jewellery out of the breadcrumb jar (I had not been able to afford to insure them) and after consulting both friends and the Yellow Pages, took them first to one of the big auction houses, then (with an introduction) to the owner of one of the most prestigious Bond Street jewellers, and lastly, because everyone knows about Hatton Garden, to Hatton Garden.
The auction house was awesome. I remember being treated with icy politeness at the reception desk and feeling very out of place until someone slid into view and escorted me to a velvety little side-room, where I was able to get at the shoulder-holster under my shirt and to extract the jewellery, after which the separate pieces were laid on a felt-covered tray and borne away.
An hour or so, and several Tatlers later, I was given a rough estimate of what they were likely to fetch at auction, and told of the preliminary expenses which would include putting one of them – a brooch which a suave young man had recognised as of late-nineteenth century Russian origin – in their catalogue.
The expense of the operation and its uncertain outcome decided me to try my friend’s jeweller friend, and this time I also took with me a clutch of gold coins (legacy of an aunt who only trusted what she could see and feel) and my father’s gold cigarette case. Both, I was now told by X, a soft-spoken, lizard-like creature, should be sold as bullion. He summoned a minion, had them weighed, told me what they would fetch, and said he would be happy to take these off me now. The rest, he would like me to leave and collect in a few days’ time.
I don’t know what made me decide to stuff everything back about my person and say, rather grandly, that I would think about it, but I did, and now made my way to Hatton Garden. Here, I went into one small shop after another. In one of them I was told that the biggest stone (which eventually brought something like £700) was glass. In another, I was advised to take my gold hoard to a bullion house down the road, where I sold it across the counter for considerably more than Mr X had been going to give me an hour or two before.
In the end, not knowing who to believe, I went back to Bonhams and, some months later, got from that august establishment almost exactly what one of the little one-man businesses would have handed me in cash.
My second auction-house experience was when a Turkish friend, who looks more like a holiday-romance fisherman than an aesthete (rather as the recently departed British ambassador to the U.S. looks more like a hill farmer than a diplomat) asked me – he and his current lady love were staying with us – if I would go to Sotheby’s with him to take along a very large and untidy looking parcel that I had noticed among his luggage when he had arrived, unexpectedly, from Antalya. I was pretty sure that he knew what he was about, even though I would have taken the hideous pot he now showed me straight to the nearest charity shop.
Well, we made it to Sotheby’s and were greeted with that same blood-curdling politeness, which would not have bothered K, even had he not been preoccupied with emptying his pockets of various small hard, metal objects which (to my embarrassment) he now handed to the pretty young woman who had been sent to see what we had with us. To my surprise, she was ready to take these, as well as the pot, to be valued. And, before long, we were taken behind the scenes, to be told that they would be pleased to handle everything, but first we would need to establish provenance.
That was the clincher. Not that these were stolen goods. They weren’t. But we had had enough for one day. We walked up to Oxford Street, got on a bus, and came home.
As for the pot, it remained in our attic for many years and then, out of the blue, a phone call from ‘a friend of K’s’, asking if she could collect ‘K’s pot’. She came. It went. One of the small metal things is on the table beside me.
*I found out recently that first editions of Wide Sargasso Sea are now being sold for over £2,000.