‘I have something for you.’
He had found the piece of paper. It had an address on it. ‘Miss Hinchcliffe,’ he said, ‘asked me to give this to you.’
It was only a small piece of paper.
‘She said that there were things you didn’t know, and that when you were twenty-one, she would tell you.’ And he handed Vera the piece of paper. The words constituted nothing more than a house number: 157 Vermeer Place.
Spring, 1945: the war was still on. Vera was long past twentyone, nearly twenty-four. She had, until now no desire to find 157 Vermeer Place. But then one day, she did. This was how she came to understand things now. It was as if she had walked a long, flat road, without knowing what was at the end or if it would end, and then came upon a turn, and took it; yes, of course the road would turn. Once she had turned those years behind her were lost from view, at least from the particular view that had been hers.
It was a neat, small house, with a hectic garden of multicoloured tulips, hyacinth, and daffodils. The scent from the garden pervaded the air as she walked up the pavement. She looked down at the piece of paper she’d kept. Yes, this was the place. Vera stood on the porch, and rang the bell. Perennials. The person who worked this garden had a view for the long run.
She came to the door, Miss Hinchcliffe, with a smile Vera had never seen in the office.
‘My name is Lesley,’ she said. She was on her home ground and she must have known Vera would come eventually. The front room was no less livid with fleshy bloom, these ones violets with furry leaves that seemed vaguely carnivorous. ‘It is kind of you to drop by,’ she said, and went to put the kettle on.
Vera could not define the nature of this visit. Had she come to see an old friend, or an old enemy? Was Hinchcliffe,
Lesley,
as a retainer of her grandfather’s, somehow her charge, or was she hers, still? Her words –
kind of you
– implied that she
required something of Vera. The wordless, contained clatter of crockery from the kitchen and then her inclined head as she sat across the room from Vera, the tea tray on a cart, implied a hearing, an airing of cases. Miss Hinchcliffe had the confidence of a woman who had done her job, and done it well.
Vera remembered how, in the days that now seemed long ago, when her mother died, and then her grandfather, she had hated Hinchcliffe. The fury was gone. Now she felt sad.
Vera sat looking at a painting on the wall. It was of a beach; sky, sand and sea defined it. The sand was sepia and pervasive, and went almost halfway up the canvas. All along the beach were little highly animated figures; it was a great massing of people. They were in turbans and bowler hats, in Her Majesty’s uniforms, in saris, and in rags, in nothing at all. Over this was a merciless hot sun. In the very centre of the painting, the throngs parted and there, in a space by herself, was a child in a ruffled dress holding a red umbrella.
Miss Hinchcliffe saw her staring at it. She smiled.
‘It’s somewhere in India, I believe,’ she said.
‘Ceylon,’ Vera said. ‘Condatchey Bay.’
‘My employer painted it herself. She said it was a memory.’
‘Who is your employer?’ Vera asked. It came back to her then, the mysterious, and irrefutable instructions that Hinchcliffe had alluded to. ‘It’s a
she?
Who is she?’
‘You’d know if you thought about it,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe again, smiling. ‘She’s your grandmother. Sophia McBean.’
Then Vera understood. At last. There is no Mr McBean, Hinchcliffe had said. And there wasn’t. There was a Miss McBean.
‘She was his partner all along? And in her maiden name?’
‘Sophia sent me here to keep an eye on the men. Both of them, really – your father and your grandfather. She made me promise to keep the money safe from Hamilton
Drew. We thought he was a little, shall we say “fast”? Your grandfather – he had no head for business – he was just feckless.’ Vera sat looking at the picture.
That little girl was her grandmother.
How would James Lowinger have told the story had he lived long enough to tell it?
‘I always assumed that my grandmother was dead.’
‘She is – now. She died at the beginning of the war.’
There was Vera’s bitterness again.
‘You mean she could have helped us when my mother died?’
‘I did let her know. But – no. She said she’d never speak to her daughter again, after Belle married. She kept her word, but it killed her. She was very religious, in the end,’ said Hinchcliffe.
Vera looked at the little girl in the picture, with her red umbrella and her white dress. The redoubtable Miss Sophia McBean could have come to them at any time. She knew where Vera was although Vera, the child, had known nothing of her. She grieved for herself as a girl. She grieved for Belle.
‘She must have been awful,’ she burst out, ‘to let a fight, to let my father, whatever they didn’t like about him, to let that get in the way.’
Hinchcliffe did not disagree.
She too looked wordlessly up at the painted girl. ‘She wasn’t very lucid, near the end. But she had an eye for a pearl,’ she murmured.
They sat very quietly, looking at the canvas.
‘When did she paint it?’
‘In the years when Belle was at boarding school. I believe she was lonely, with your grandfather at sea.’
Vera took her eyes deliberately off the picture. ‘How did you get it?’
‘Sophia gave it to me. She grew to dislike it. I suppose you should have it,’ said Hinchcliffe dubiously.
But what was the explanation for Hinchcliffe’s
summoning her here? Perhaps, Vera thought, she intended to apologise. But she did not. They sat and drank their tea. Curiosity was too much for Vera.
‘Why did you never send my father the letters?’
‘I did send them.’
‘But he said he never got them.’
‘I can’t speak to that,’ said Lesley Hinchcliffe. ‘I can only say that I sent them.’
No villains.
But there was a purpose to the visit and Hinchcliffe could not avoid it anymore. Vera could see the woman had no more liking of this task than she did of Vera. She was merely an employee, carrying out her function. James Lowinger had been right about that. But Hinchcliffe was nothing if not responsible. Vera waited for her to speak.
‘I have something for you,’ she said. ‘James left it with me.’ She left the room and returned with a brown folding file with elastic around it. ‘I haven’t retyped it, but I think you can make it out. He pecked away on it a few words at a time on that old Remington beside his desk that he never seemed to use.’ She looked glad to see it leave her hand. ‘He was the only one of the bunch that I could halfway see the heart in.’
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF
JAMES LOWINGER
In my peripatetic life, I learned one thing: far adventurers are the most obstinate of homebodies. The more they travel, the more powerful is their longing to return to the place where they began. To me the homeward urge came late in life and with a vengeance.
But I
had
no home; the England where I grew up was a
distant splotch on the map, and Paris was one square mile with memories of salad days and super abundance, money made and money lost. I couldn’t return like Odysseus to Sophia McBean for God’s sake, we’d long ceased contact. And in any case I had a new wife or wife substitute, one I should have been with all along, except that she wasn’t even born until I was fifty.
I suppose I had not forgotten that last quarrel with Hamilton Drew over his cuckoo pearls, the way after, I said no, finally no, I won’t do business with you, how he’d given me a glance I could not interpret except perhaps to say that even a cad has a human side, and occasionally that love creeps into his greedy heart, ‘Your daughter is sad. She misses you.’ Oh, my deaf ears.
But not entirely deaf. Therefore the ticket to Vancouver, the telegram to Belle saying ‘I’m on my way!’ Only Belle was dead. Now here was an opportunity for desperate lamentation and grief –
drop drop dropping slow
as Ben Jonson said. But I could not dissolve like a pearl in vinegar for there was this child of my child, this waif, standing on the quay, looking up as my ship sailed in. A sugar-haired wretch waiting, and I was all she had.
So for once I did my duty, or tried to, staying with her, and giving her my beautiful diving woman until the old shipmaster gave signals that I had to peg out.
Vera Lowinger Drew, you are the right and proper heir. This may not excite you overmuch when you learn the second part of the message which is, essentially, that there is naught, or nought, or nougat, however you write that – to inherit.
And I will tell you why.
The elusive pearl: a short dissertation. Perfectly round is genuinely rare. And unnaturally hard to hang on to. There are far more baroques and buttons and drop shapes than the law of averages allows. That is because the round ones, the ones that roll, have rolled away. They roll out of the oyster shells
and they roll out of the hands of traders. Men have blunt fingers, and calloused thumbs. In the Café Scosso the one who opens the envelope to show a perfect sphere is a fool. They jump, like Mexican beans. And they are gone. It is as if they wanted to escape. I’ve seen it happen on the deck of a ship. I’ve seen it in a maharajah’s tent when every single eye in the place is on it. The perfect pearl is there, and then it is gone.
The pearls of the oyster are divine. And they are found in the dimmest, deepest place in the world, under the scabbiest, tightest lid. That is their magic. There is a term we use: the quickening. It is a quality of lustre, one that comes alive in the light. It is intimate, and shy, but brilliant. This oncealiveness, this secrecy, this creature light, is the pearl’s true value. But the fortunes made with pearls are as slippery as the creature that mothers them.
Men who moil for pearls all had dreams of making a fortune. They were pitiful dreams, to do with finding a perfectly spherical cream rosée twenty grain pearl, buying it for a song from a deluded diver, selling it for a hundred thousand pounds, and cutting loose. Trouble was
if
a man found the pearl, and
if
he sold it at profit, it only made him want more. Consider him on a carousel – sometimes up, and sometimes down. It’s hard to get off when you’re up and harder when you’re down: you can see the rise coming around the bend. The problem was a thing they now call ego. I think the Greeks called it hubris. Whatever its name, I’d recognise it at midnight in a dark tunnel.
Most of us got off at about the same place we got on. It felt familiar.
I intended to leave on an upswing. After the debacle in Paris I made one last journey to Bombay where, in a bazaar, I found a pearl the size of a blackberry. It was the shape of one too. I forked it over, all of it, my entire life, my future,
my past. It was only a fraction of what the pearl would be worth.
Next stop Hong Kong and a pearl doctor I knew. He walked with an umbrella, gingerly, peering right and left, as if he were a house pet taking himself for a stroll. He was said to be the illegitimate son of a princess who kept him alive on the condition that he spend his whole life under wraps. He looked as if he had. He had long feathery fingers and a monklike air. He looked just the type who could, with his tiny scalpel, his brush, and his pick, shave off the bumps layer by layer and turn the blackberry into a perfect sphere and my fortune.
He weighed the pearl and held it to his ear, in a gesture eerily reminiscent of Sophia. He held it to the light and ran his fingertip around the bottom of it, laid it in his palm and thoughtfully pushed it one way and then the other, as a cat might a dead mouse.
Pearl doctors can take a cut of the proceeds, which means that if the proceeds are nil their wages are nil, or they can be paid a fee, and take no risk: they are paid no matter what. He said he’d like to have a percentage cut of the increase in value he brought to it, and I said no thank you. That would be mine. I would pay him any fee he named.
His fee was steep.
I agreed to pay.
He said he would like to work on it at home under a stronger light and without the din of the street to mar his concentration.
Being a suspicious man, I could envision a scenario where my pearl was perfected and then spirited away, after which he would me give a sob story and a piece of dung. I said if he wanted to retreat to his inner sanctum I would be there.
I sat in his den on floor cushions smoking a pipe. The artist worked away with files and his brush. The pearl lost one skin and was better. There was still a flat bit at the bottom. He
worked away another skin; another year of life in the groin of an oyster fell to the floor. Now it was crushingly near perfect. The pearl that had been worth five hundred was worth fifty thousand.
A Chinese matron emerged from the wall behind my skinner, his nanny probably. She pointed here and there: the lustre is not good. One year the oyster went hungry. She recommended they take off one layer more: then you will have a gem that none can surpass, he said. Set fee, you remember, nothing in it for them but the pursuit of truth and beauty, as Keats said.
I agreed. The pearl winked and lolled on the tabletop, seductive as hell. The street din was small and far away. An hour went by and he had removed yet another skin from the pearl. Now what we saw was a tad less beautiful than what we had before. But the pearl was still large, very large, and we felt we owed it to ourselves to take off one more layer and see what we could get.
Vera dear, you can imagine the rest. It was more terrifying with each skin we discarded: the pearl would grow lustrous but bruised, then fair but dull, then smooth but flattened: it went through a dozen phases and each was close but none was right. It was like attending a slow beheading. I thought I might embarrass myself by shitting or crying out; that all manner of nasty elements of my personality might come to the fore. My monkish skinner was sweating from his brow and temples and his hand was shaking. I felt as if this were happening in a dream, as if it had been foretold. Yet on we went. The pearl that was worth fifty thousand was now worth ten thousand. Neither one of us suggested we should accept defeat.