The Lost and Found Necklace

by Louisa Leaman

  “I should go there again,” she says, eyes wide, jolted, “to check on the place.”

  “Wha—?”

  “To the cabin. I should go to Nancy’s cabin.”

  Tim nods, having not quite followed Jess’s train of thought.

  “Right. Sure.”

  “This week?” she suggests, a sense of urgency rising in her—sensitive to her grandmother’s decline and with a growing compulsion to find out all she can about her family and their necklace before it’s too late.

  “You could come with me?”

  Tim twitches.

  “Um…work. It might be tricky. School term. I can’t just—”

  “Of course. Don’t worry. I’ll go by myself. Maybe I’ll get a train down and—”

  “Really?” Tim stares at her. “On your own?”

  Jess tenses. The thought corkscrews through her mind. True, she hasn’t done anything of significant independence—no long journeys, no heavy-duty days out—since her accident, and certainly not since Tim has known her. In the early days, she wasn’t even able to bathe or move from room to room without help. A trip to Wales all by herself would be a big step, but she feels a little lift in her heart as she thinks of it—that Taylor spirit perhaps? The “OUI” effect? Maybe her adventurous soul can start to be revived, even if her wrecked limbs can’t.

  Tim shakes his head, his brow furrowed with concern.

  “I’m not sure, Jess. How will you cope? I’d be worried. Why not wait until we can go together, so I can be on hand to—”

  “To what?” says Jess, remembering the awkward insinuation back at the care home, that she should “be more careful,” given her physical challenges. Oversensitive perhaps, but the sting is still there. She stares at him from the rim of her glass. She can tell he’s wincing, knows he’s on the spot.

  “It’s just, with your back and hip, you’re…more vulnerable than most.”

  “Vulnerable?”

  Under the table, Jess kicks her walking cane away.

  “I don’t mean… Uh, I’m not explaining this very well. It sounds bad, whatever. You’re not vulnerable. What I’m trying to say is if you go on a trip, you might need help at some point. But if I’m there, I can give you that help. I can carry your bags, help you on the stairs. And if your back starts to throb in that horrible way that makes you yelp, I can massage it for you. Hell, if it comes to it, Jess, and you’re not able to walk at all, I can carry you.”

  Jess knows he’s referring to the epic piggyback, when her hip seized from too much sitting on low grass at a friend’s picnic, and he had to carry her all the way from Victoria Park to Hackney station. How she kept saying “sorry,” but he gleefully, insistently went whole hog.

  “I love helping you, Jess,” he says brightly. “I mean, my mum always told me I was the nurturing type—”

  Jess stiffens.

  “That’s like you’re saying you’re with me just because you can nurture me.”

  “No, Jess, I’m with you because I love you, because you make me happy…because…because having both had our ups and downs with relationships, we now want the same things. We’re ready to settle and grow together. Our lives can grow. That’s it. We can grow, move in, get married, have a family, have everything.”

  Jess knocks back the rest of her drink, crunches an ice cube between her teeth.

  “Thank goodness for my heroic boyfriend, helping me grow, saving me from my wretched self.”

  “Sorry,” says Tim. “I sound like a dick.”

  “It’s okay,” she says, softening. “I kind of know what you mean. We’ve met each other at the right time. I had my wild days. You had your PhD and your evil first wife. We’ve got the kinks out of our systems, and now we’re both in a place where we’re ready to—”

  “Grow.”

  “If you must use that word.”

  They both laugh, then grab hands across the table.

  “And you know what?” says Jess, holding his gaze. “I actually love that you’re a nurturer and that you’re honest and thoughtful. Hell, I’ve had my share of bad boys.”

  “I know. When I asked your sister if she thought it would be a good idea to invite you to move in with me, I got the talk of doom, about how you’re prone to rash decisions, and that because of this, you’ve picked some wrong ’uns. She actually recounted a list of your exes and their failings—”

  “The joker, the philanderer, the man-child, the man-child philanderer, and the escape artist?”

  “Those.”

  “She believes I made poor choices. I say I had a blast.”

  “The escape artist wasn’t so fun, though, was he?”

  Jess looks down.

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Your type?”

  “Not anymore,” she says, with an emphatic smile.

  “We’re a good team.”

  “We so are.”

  ***

  On Aggie’s doorstep, like prom-dating teenagers, they kiss farewell. Jess has an inkling she would like more than a quick makeout session, but Tim has already stated his intention to head back to his own house for an early night, so he can wake up fresh and prepare for his interview. She playfully runs her hand up his inner thigh, curious to see if he can be persuaded, but he grins and pushes away.

  “Not tonight,” he says. “You know I’ve got to be sharp this week.”

  She flickers her lashes, pouts her lips, but it’s just a performance. He’s too sensible to cave. She sighs, steps back.

  “I’ll make it up to you once I’ve got the job, I promise,” he says, then kisses her one more time and strides into the night.

  As Jess enters the darkened Hoppit household, she hears sniffling. She wanders through the hallway to the kitchen-diner, where a single dimmed spotlight is illuminating the forlorn shape of Steph, hunched over the kitchen island, dripping tears onto her smartphone.

  “Hey!” says Jess, concerned. “What’s wrong with my favorite niece?”

  Steph looks up, wipes her sleeve across her nose.

  “My mum is such a cow!” she wails.

  “Uh-oh. What’s happened now?”

  Jess pulls up a seat beside her.

  “I was out with Jared. We weren’t doing anything wrong. He’d planned a picnic for me, down at the clearing. Then she turned up, raging…literally raging. She totally humiliated me, then made me get in the car and go home. He went to soooo much trouble. He even made his own pesto.”

  She bursts into tears. Jess pats her arm.

  “Was there alcohol?”

  “No.”

  “Cigarettes?”

  “No. I keep telling Mum, he’s straight edge now. He’s stopped all that. She just hates him because…he’s more clued in about the world than she is.”

  “Hmm.” Jess ponders this statement, while using the instant-boil tap to fix them both a mug of chamomile tea. She passes one to Steph, then lifts the other to her chin, inhaling its soothing vapors. She has watched Aggie and Steph fight and fight, in the way that only a mother and daughter can, cracking down on each other, cracking up, the fuel of their ire as close to love as it is to anger. All said and done, they’ll always be mother and daughter.

  “Woolly,” Jess says eventually, being careful not to betray her own sisterly bonds. “I think she perceives him as woolly.”

  “Woolly?”

  “The environmental activist thing, the gender-free thing, the drugs should be legalized thing. Plus that whole ‘I don’t believe in money’ conversation you had last week—”

  “So? No one should believe in money. Rabid consumerism is killing society.”

  “True, I know that. You know that. Jared clearly knows that. But your mother, what she cares about most is the tiny details of your life within the bigger picture. Here she is, having created
this comfortable, secure home for you all”—Jess gestures around the kitchen at the Smeg appliances, the sleek countertop, and the Boden apron—“this is the stuff that matters to her. Don’t ask me why, but it’s her idea of a life well lived.”

  “What’s this got to do with Jared?”

  “She thinks Jared, with his—shall we call them ‘liberal’ views—won’t be able to offer you a John Lewis kitchen…and it scares her.”

  “But I’m sixteen. I don’t want a John Lewis kitchen. I want to eat Doritos and stuff that comes out of microwaves. I might never want a John Lewis kitchen. And even if I did”—she suddenly rallies—“I’ll buy it myself.”

  “I’ve no doubt you will,” says Jess.

  “She just wants to control me,” Steph rails on. “She interferes in everything I do. Always telling me what to eat, how to revise, how to do my hair, how much screen time I can have, who I should be seeing. You know she’s obsessed with me hanging out with that moronic Charlie Fitzwilliam kid because his dad’s some big-time property lawyer and she thinks it’ll make her look good. She’s literally a conversation away from arranging a marriage for us—”

  “She’s not trying to control you, Steph. She just wants to…guide you.”

  “But I don’t need guiding. I do fine and I’ve got my own mind.”

  “That you have,” says Jess, feeling all of Steph’s torment threefold.

  They both sip their tea.

  “Where’ve you been anyway?”

  “Out with Tim. I took him to meet Grandma Nancy, then we had supper.” Jess pauses, smiles. “You know he’s asked me to move in with him. What do you think about that?”

  “It’ll please Mum,” says Steph with a shrug. “She’ll buy you a cookie set to match hers.”

  “Huh?”

  “Matching cookie-cutting lifestyles. See what I mean? She wants to control you as well, get you to fit in with her idea of how women should be.”

  “Listen, I’m moving in with Tim because I want to. It’s my choice.”

  “Really?”

  “A hundred percent. I’m well past the age when I should be asking anyone’s permission to do anything, let alone move in with the man I love.”

  Steph shrugs again in that passive-aggressive teenage way that says everything and nothing.

  “What? Don’t you like Tim? I thought you two got on well—”

  “Yeah, he’s nice.”

  “And?”

  “‘Nice’ isn’t fireworks.”

  “No…but eventually a woman learns to value dependability over quick thrills. One day you’ll understand. Hopefully, one day soon.”

  “I don’t think so, Aunty. I’ll never depend on anyone but myself, but thanks for the chat.” She yawns. “I’m off to bed. Don’t tell Mum we spoke, will you? Love you.”

  Jess sighs, smiles, throws her head back in mock despair, realizing she’ll never outsmart the self-possessed guile of youth. She kisses her niece good night and watches her sylphlike form tiptoeing down the hall, long, skinny legs in boxer shorts, young enough not to care which parts of her flesh she exposes and to whom, fiercely idealistic, recklessly sure. Please, Jess thinks, let this fire lead somewhere wonderful for Steph; let all the Jareds of the world become crown princes instead of toads.

  Chapter Seven

  There’s a sale coming, thinks Guy. He can feel it. As Stella gazes at the sea-green butterfly wings, her expression says it all. She’d make an appalling poker player. No game.

  “It’s luscious,” she says, stroking the opalescent moonstone. “Oh, Guy, it’s just what I’ve been looking for. I adore things with insects. How old is it?”

  “It’s art nouveau, early 1900s, so you’re looking at well over a century.”

  “Ooo, let me write that down. You know what I’m like with the facts and figures. But hooray for this… This will get the vintage crowd in a flap.”

  “So you’re interested?”

  “Assuming there’ll be a nice friend’s discount?”

  “For my best client, of course. I bought it for one six, but I reckon it’ll be worth way more in a few years. Art nouveau jewelry is due a resurgence.”

  “Then I’ll have to lead the way. Will you put it on me?”

  She turns, lifts her hair, revealing the gently tanned nape of her neck—holiday leftover from a week in Saint-Tropez. He removes the necklace from its box and places it around her shoulders, then turns her toward the mirror.

  “Love it,” she says.

  Guy nods. As long as Stella’s happy, the world is at peace. But then he pauses, puzzled. With its exquisite butterfly form and luster, the necklace is such a vivacious piece, yet somehow on Stella, it looks dead. He daren’t say this, of course; he needs Stella to love it. Every time she’s photographed wearing one of his finds, his business gets a boost. Like the day she wore that oversize pot-metal and paste 1940s dress clip… He gained five new clients and a two-page spread in Harper’s Bazaar. With something as Instagrammable as the art nouveau necklace, a single Stella Weston power pose could be a game-changer. If this necklace gets the likes and shares it deserves, interest in Guy van der Meer Jewelry will surely proliferate.

  He blinks, flashbacks of childhood briefly zipping to the surface: all those years of disappointment, no one present in his life long enough to notice his quick mind and artistic eye. So many empty days, wasted and broke. In the circles he’d grown up in, it hadn’t been cool or “manly” to be creative. No one gave a damn about jewelry, unless they were nicking it out of other people’s bedside drawers. And school hadn’t added much to the proceedings. That troublemaker label had followed him everywhere—four expulsions and an addiction to smart-arse remarks had meant his teachers had known of his reputation before they’d even met him, then dismissed him as “destined to fail.”

  Here in Stella Weston’s high-ceilinged Chelsea hallway, fears for what his life might have been start to loom. But then Guy catches his bright reflection in the mirror, a sentinel next to Stella—the fashion media superstar who utterly trusts his opinion and knows nothing of his frowzy past—and is reminded that he has built this incredible life for himself, relying on little more than his natural affability and eye for design. He has done it, succeeded; proved the ghosts of his boyhood wrong. Okay, so he’s told a few fibs along the way, but the high-end jewelry trade is a closed group. He’s had to hustle, had to have a reason for them to let him into their tribe. A good name is everything. With a sigh, he compresses the shame and focuses on the gains.

  A prize antique necklace for Stella. It’s a dream deal.

  Yet as he gazes at those tiny plique-à-jour cells, the discomfort of the pairing grates. The bare fact is it doesn’t look right on Stella. To his expert eye, the length of the chain is wrong, the shape of the butterfly clashes with her pointed face, and the color has a dulling effect on her skin. Good jewelry should enhance its wearer’s appearance, not sully it; but there is something else too, an awkwardness, a resistance, almost as though the necklace doesn’t want to be there.

  A thought strikes his soul. The woman who accosted him in his taxi—Jess—she’d laid claim to this butterfly with such fire. Maybe it would look different on her? All that stuff about it being her family’s heirloom… At first he’d shrugged it off, fixated on how much profit he could make selling the necklace to Stella, but what if the necklace knows better? Like Cinderella’s slipper, what if it’s only meant for one person? What, then, would that make him…Prince Charming? He grins, sweeps a hand through his curls.

  All said and done, he appreciates the fact that heirlooms aren’t showpieces. They’re personal, the material remnants of family identity when all the ancestors have gone to dust. He looks down at his emerald-eyed leopard ring. If he ever lost the leopard, he’d be devastated. So he understands. He understands why Jess was mad at him.

  The question is, wi
ll he ever see her again?

  Sure, he’d flirted. He’d asked her for a date, standard behavior for the world he lives in. A dozen flirty rich girls come by, talking about shopping trips to New York and parties in LA, and they expect him to flirt. They’d be insulted if he didn’t. So…he plays the game.

  But this wasn’t flirting. This was something else. Chemistry, perhaps? Is that even a thing anymore? He glances at Stella, who is now distracted from the necklace and is busy inspecting her eyelids for crow’s-feet. Stella, he suspects, has no clue about chemistry—either the romantic or the scientific sort—unless the equation involves super yachts.

  Jess—maybe Jessica—with her cupid lips, bright eyes, and short-girl feistiness, the rightful bearer of the art nouveau butterfly. Looking back, he realizes he had a sense about her the moment she fell into him in the auction room, nearly taking him out with her walking cane. The fact that they ended up going after the same piece of jewelry, well, that was just a freak coincidence. Wasn’t it? He smiles again, eyes sparkling.

  “What are you so merry about?” Stella probes.

  “Nothing,” he says, pushing the smile back inside.

  Jealousy doesn’t rub well between him and Stella. He knows the deal. Stella shares the spoils of her lifestyle, introduces him to useful people. In return, he decorates her with the best of his treasure and gives her his undivided attention.

  ***

  Meanwhile, on the other side of London, Jess sips the rest of her tea in the dim light of the Hoppit kitchen and thinks about Steph and Aggie and their fractious understanding of each other. Aggie, she recalls, was always a perfectionist at school, on time, hard-working, worrying about exam grades. These days her happiness seems to be intrinsically bound to other people’s admiration of her things: her big house, her glossy hair, her clever and talented children. So the idea of her mini-me daughter going rogue with a vegan pansexual hippie whose career plans mostly consist of international fruit picking is a big leap.

  But, really, who is Jess to judge, in the wake of her extended quarter-life crisis? A pang of guilt rises inside at memories of how Aggie took care of her, how she negotiated with doctors, chased the arsehole insurance company, paid a bunch of medical bills and never asked for the money back. But before that, even, how she picked up the pieces whenever Jess had a new broken heart, after the philanderer, the man-child, and the man-child philanderer had done their worst. And before that, when they were children, growing up motherless, with a disinterested father and a difficult grandmother, how Aggie had been the surrogate parent, taking care, making things right, ever patient whenever Jess was in trouble at school.