The Lost and Found Necklace

by Louisa Leaman

  “Oh.”

  Jess cannot hide her disappointment, having hoped for a soul mate with flair for Anna.

  “Didn’t stop his popularity with the young women of the chorus and crew however,” says Ellen. “Since he was young and handsome, they’d collapse into giggles whenever he came near, taking bets on who’d catch his eye. But not Anna. She was a shrewd one. She listened to their gossip, silently fixing their jewels, not letting on she was curious. My guess is she knew an opportunity when she saw it. She listened and watched and got to understand everything she could about Christopher Roderick, then slowly, surely, she positioned herself in his sight line. Bumping into him in the parking lot, being in the right place when he was calling for assistance. Not enough to look overeager but enough to get her noticed.”

  “You think she engineered it?” says Jess.

  “Put it this way,” says Ellen, “Anna joined the set of Descent as a costume junior, but by the time the movie wrapped, she had a ring on her finger. A nice one too, Marti told me. A fine, fat cushion-cut diamond with sapphire insets. Got coverage in all the gossip columns. They celebrated at the Trocadero. Here—”

  Ellen passes Jess another photo, this one of the exterior of the famous Café Trocadero with its Italianate roof tiles, topiary bushes, and red carpet welcome.

  “Definitely an upgrade from the Casa Casanova, which was the Jossop crowd’s usual hangout. The Trocadero was special. The building doesn’t exist anymore, demolished in the name of progress, but in its day, it was the place. Fred Astaire went there. Cary Grant. Lucille Ball. Christopher was friends with all of them.”

  Jess beams, recalling Nancy’s seemingly arbitrary flourish: the gilded toilet handle that Lucille Ball was rumored to have broken. Then she remembers the melancholy that followed, Nancy’s downcast description of sad Anna, lamenting the glamorous life she’d had to leave.

  “So…although Anna and Christopher got engaged, they never actually married,” she says, hopeful that Ellen Jossop can shed more light on the mystery. “Perhaps it was something of a lavender relationship? I heard Christopher ended up with a man called Bernard Almer.”

  Ellen shrugs. “Ah, Bernard, yes, lovely man, the yin to Christopher’s yang. You’re right. I expect the engagement, unfortunately for Anna, had little substance behind it. In the end, the Roderick/Almer pairing was no surprise to anyone, but in the thirties and forties, it wouldn’t have ‘belonged.’ Christopher clearly felt obligated to maintain a straight image, while waiting for Hollywood morality to catch up with itself. As for Anna, whether she understood what she was getting into or not, the engagement certainly gave her the opportunity to quit working twelve-hour days and languish in all the nicest boutiques and restaurants.”

  Jess sighs, frustrated, unsatisfied. She doesn’t deny Ellen’s take on the situation, but surely Anna would have wanted more than a mere illusion of love. In what way was Christopher Roderick her soul mate? Her eye then catches on a crumpled film script, or more specifically, on a doodle scribbled across its back cover: written in pencil, outlined in a childish heart, the initials A. T. and A. J.

  “A. T.?” says Jess, delighted. “Could that be Anna?”

  Ellen picks the script out of the box, smoothing its corners before flicking through the pages.

  “Hmm. It’s from Descent. Could well be Anna.”

  “So who’s the A. J.? Did Christopher Roderick have a nickname?”

  Ellen ponders this, looks thoughtful.

  “A. J.? My guess is that stands for Archie Jossop, Marti’s nephew. He hung around here in the thirties, helped Marti out. Had a five-second dream of becoming an actor. Perhaps he had a crush on your Anna? It’s possible their paths crossed. Nice fellow, full of heart, could talk the hind legs off a very tall donkey. Not in Christopher Roderick’s league though. Archie’s parents were corn farmers.”

  “I see,” says Jess, curious.

  “Who knows?” says Ellen. “Such a long time ago. Dear Archie. We lost track of him when he left the States. He went to Europe to fight during the Second World War, and we never heard what became of him. But take the script if you like. Take it all, the whole box. Doesn’t serve anyone while it’s cluttering up my back office. There are a few bits of Archie’s in there if you’re interested, letters and such. Marti kept them aside, in case the boy ever returned, but…sadly it wasn’t to be.”

  “Thanks,” says Jess, accepting the box eagerly, thinking only of rushing back to her hostel room and pawing through its contents.

  ***

  The hostel is quiet. The afternoon sun streams through the slatted blinds, highlighting the dust in the air, while aromas from the communal kitchen—stir-fry and paprika soup—seep into every space. Jess has paid extra for a private room and is now glad about it because she can rest her back in peace. She creates a nest of cushions on the floor and places Ellen’s box in front of her. With vim in her fingers, she pries off the lid.

  Most of the items are paraphernalia from Jossop’s: impersonal receipts and invoices, a couple of catalogs. At the bottom of the box, however, Jess finds a photo that cheers her: another image of Anna. This time she’s standing next to a fake anchor, and at her side, looking her way, is a tall, scruffy, wide-grinned lad—not Christopher—arm clamped around her shoulders, almost lifting her off her feet. Could this be Archie Jossop? Jess holds the photograph to the light, eager to penetrate its secrets. Through the poor-quality grain, she can see, just about, that Anna is wearing the butterfly necklace, and the sight of this thrills her.

  She digs into the box again and, as Ellen mentioned, finds a bundle of unopened letters held together by a rubber band, addressed to Archie at Jossop’s. She pulls the band off and sifts through them, plucking out flyers for lawn mowers and DIY stores and a few uninspired postcards from someone called Bob Symmons. She is left with a pair of handwritten airmail envelopes, yellowed with age, postmarked from London. The handwriting on both envelopes is the same, although the postal dates are more than a decade apart: June 1949 and February 1961. Her heart thuds. What to do? The envelopes are still sealed, their contents unseen by anyone, let alone their intended recipient. If Jess opens them, she will be the first.

  “Come on, Archie,” she whispers, digging her nail beneath the gummy seal of the earliest of the two. “What have you got for me?”

  As she unfolds the thin sheets of paper inside, she scans straight to the top corner and sees what she’d hoped she see:

  Anna E. Taylor

  Flat 64B Chadwick House

  Dock Road

  Poplar

  London E14

  Her mouth drops open as a deluge of emotion washes through her. Love letters. Please let them be love letters! She steels herself, smiles, and reads on:

  24th June 1949

  My dearest Archie,

  I hope you remember me. Our time together was brief, but it has stayed alive in my thoughts, so I’m writing to jog your memory and see if you might perhaps reply. My name is Anna Taylor. We met in Hollywood before the war, August 1936. You might remember a terrible pirate movie we both worked on called Descent of the Sun? I’d just joined Jossop’s costume department and your uncle Marti, the company’s owner, introduced us. He called me “Miss Anna.”

  Do you remember? You were sitting beneath a studio lamp, eating a baloney sandwich, when he called you over. He joked, saying you were his protégé. He said he’d done you a favor, getting you away from the family farm, that there was no money in crops anymore, “not since those jellybeans on Wall Street bled our economy dry.” He said he’d pulled some strings with the director, got you a gig as Deck Hand Number Twenty-Seven.

  “It’s a start, right, Archie?” he’d said, then he told you to take me across to the Descent set and show me how it all worked. You stood up straightaway and gave me the warmest smile I’d ever seen.

  “So, Miss Anna,” you said, �
��we’re doing a pirate movie. It’s a goddam mess, but the studio brass has it in their heads that if the costumes look good and the leading lady sparkles, no one will notice their crummy script. Soon enough everyone from downtown to upstate will want fake ruby-studded skull brooches. You see, we aren’t just making movies here, Anna. We’re making trends. We’re setting the pace for the rest of world. That’s how it is. You interested?”

  Oh, Archie, I loved your accent, your constant patter.

  You walked me around, and the set was everything I hoped it would be, full of people with purpose. I did my best to keep pace with you, but your legs were almost up to my shoulders and, truly, I could feel my heart beating madly with the excitement of it all. I remember you brushing your hand through a row of frilled shirts, asking:

  “You wanna be an actress?”

  “No,” I said. “Why does everyone assume I want to be in front of the camera?”

  “Because they all wanna be in front of the camera,” you said.

  “But I’m not them. I’m me.”

  Then you turned to me with that wide, easy grin of yours.

  “So you are,” you said, before stumbling into a four-foot fake anchor.

  “Who left that there?” you said, laughing.

  Then your eyes dropped to the necklace at my neck, took in every curve and line. Do you remember that necklace? A sea-green enamel butterfly with a moonstone?

  “Well, that’s the prettiest thing I ever saw,” you said. “You don’t see that no more. Now it’s all about jazz and angles and the plastics. Personally, I like the old style. It’s got class.”

  And I told you that although the necklace was old-fashioned, I loved to wear it because whenever I wore it, I felt its good energy warming my soul. You asked me where I got it, so I explained my mother had given it to me moments before succumbing to typhoid fever, that she called it the True Love Necklace. And you looked at me and you said: “Is that so?” And it was a full minute before we managed to shake off the buzz.

  Jess pauses, looks up. So this was the moment, Anna’s soul-mate moment—the necklace, like a charm, binding and tightening, pulling them into each other’s spheres. She shuts her eyes and imagines the scene, amid the hectic studio clatter: Anna and Archie, just them, only them.

  She returns again to the photo, to the man standing beside Anna. Definitely Archie, she thinks, surveying his height and genial smile. And yes, the butterfly looks outdated, its decorative, nature-inspired art nouveau form too fanciful for a world that was shouting about modernity, with geometric jewelry made from newly invented materials such as Bakelite. Working in the jewelry business, no doubt Anna had her eye on it all—the possibilities and ideas of the art deco era, but still she wore her outdated butterfly necklace.

  Do you remember our first date, Archie? Well, yes, it was our ONLY date, but what a night! I’ll never forget the bumbling way you asked, tripping over your words, sweetly goofy.

  “I don’t want to be forward or nothing,” you said to me, “but there’s this new diner, right on the junction with Gower Street, called the Casa Casanova. It only opened a fortnight ago and it does this brisket and everyone’s raving about it. And you know, on my wage I can just about afford the fries at Hamburger Jack’s, but for a really special girl, I always thought I’d take her to the Casa Casanova. I’d do that for her. Except…I never met this girl. So here I was, thinking I’d never get to taste the goddamn brisket everyone’s so hot about, and then”—you looked at me then, wholeheartedly—“I did! I met her! And now I’m gonna take her to the Casa Casanova! And the wine’s gonna be real nice and the brisket’s gonna be a knockout and the whole world’s gonna be butterflies from now on.”

  And I just stared at you, mouth open.

  “So,” you said, “how about it?”

  “You talk too much,” I said. “Truly. You say everything that’s in your head, and it’s…messy.”

  “I know,” you said, swiping your hand, as though you never considered it a problem. “At least that way, we won’t have those awkward silences. So how about it, Miss Anna? Can we eat brisket together? Tonight?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  You picked me up at seven—every detail is in my head—and in the back of the taxi, you talked. You talked. And you talked. About the streets, the hills, the sky, the stars, the movies, the buildings, the jobless, the president, the banks, the banknotes, the state of Europe, the musicians fleeing Germany, the drawings you did as a child, and the farm in Maryland where you were raised. And then, at the dinner table, where the brisket was indeed succulent and tasty, you talked even more, like a never-stopping train of thought. And something about your chatter, and the candlelight and the cocooning red-velvet walls, made me feel very heady and very happy.

  When you finally tired of talking, you downed your martini and told me it was my turn. So I told you all about my upbringing in North Wales and my home, Pel Tawr. About my father, Emery Floyd, who’d drowned in the Great War after tripping on a gangplank and falling into a muddy sinkhole, and how I liked to think that the reason he’d tripped was because he’d been distracted by something beautiful. You were so kind, Archie, assuring me that this was most certainly the case. And I told you about my mother, Minnie, who’d taught me to grow hollyhocks from seeds and had never been able to marry Emery because she was still married to a mean man from Paris who’d locked her in a bedroom for weeks. And about how the Floyd family had never judged her for this, because they were liberals. And you told me you were a liberal, too, but I had to wonder if you actually knew what that word meant.

  We shared the most enormous ice cream for dessert, and as the band struck up, you grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor. Thanks to a few martinis, you had me learning the steps of the St. Louis shag before I even had time to untuck my napkin. Already I was second-guessing what a future with you would be like. More zest than even I could handle. And as we jigged and spun, I felt joy like I’d never known.

  At the end of the evening, you walked me back to my boardinghouse and wasted no time taking hold of my hand, making it clear how you, too, felt. At the front door, we kissed. It was my first kiss, and it was soft and sweet and everything I’d wanted. I went to bed with the memory of it and the smell of your shirt and the swell of happiness in my stomach. The thought of seeing you the next day at the studio made me quiver. How quickly one falls in love in Hollywood!

  The next morning, with a near skip, I took the streetcar to work. I kept a look out all day, but you were nowhere on set. Eventually I found the courage to ask Marti, who just shrugged and nudged a camera cable with his shoe.

  “He had to leave, Anna, first train this morning. His pa’s taken sick, dying sick. He’s gone back to Maryland.”

  So I asked when you’d be back.

  “Ah, kid,” Marti said, “there’s things to be seen to, a farm to be run. I’d say that’s the end for Archie’s acting career, not that he really had a prospect, with those ears, but hey—”

  Archie, I just stood there, staring into nothing. At midday I took to the powder room, sick. I looked in the mirror, held my hand to my butterfly necklace, and felt it inside, that the best thing ever had just become the best thing that never happened.

  It broke my heart, Archie, the way you left, cutting short our chance. Sure I’ve met other men. I’ve even been engaged. Who is Archie Jossop anyway, I used to say to myself, with his surplus chat and goofy smile? But, you know what, I stopped wearing my necklace after you left. It didn’t seem right and I didn’t want it damaged, so I wrapped it in a silk handkerchief and kept it in my dressing table, every evening making sure it was still there, what with my roommates and their wandering hands.

  Oh, Archie, I hope this letter finds you well. You may think I’m silly to be pining for you like this, a decade later, still clinging to the memory of the few days we spent together. You’re probably thinking
I should get over it, move on, but it would mean so much if you’d just reply. So that, one way or another, I can stop pestering myself with the thought of what could have been.

  With fondest feeling,

  Anna Elizabeth Taylor

  Jess folds the letter, heartbroken for Anna. So what happened to Archie? Clearly he never returned to Jossop’s or received his mail. Because he didn’t want to or because he couldn’t? She reaches for the second letter, postmarked 1961. She presses it between her fingertips, prays that it holds clues to a True Love happy ending.

  14th February 1961

  Dearest Archie,

  I write you again, my Valentine, in the thin hope that this letter will reach you. Since you never replied to my previous letter, I’m at a loss. Of course, there’s always the possibility that you read my last one and dismissed it, but my hunch tells me otherwise. If I know you at all, Archie, I know you have a good heart. And a good heart would reply to my plea, if only to let me down gently. The fact is I still think of you. So much has happened since I knew you, and sometimes I feel quite despairing of it all. I torment myself that if I’d done something more to keep you, followed you to your farm maybe, or made Marti track you down, then I’d be good. Ah, hindsight.

  You know at Jossop’s I made the scrappiest bit of nickel shine like platinum. These days I don’t get the chance to make things. I had to move to London. Here, all I do is try to soothe my boredom with television soaps, but then I just end up shouting at the screen, outraged by all the cheap wigs and ridiculous earrings. At least my creations looked authentic. Jossop’s knew what they were doing.

  So much sparkle and ambition left in the dust. It hurt me, Archie. It physically hurt to walk away from my life in Hollywood. I guess that’s why I still think and talk of it, to keep it alive. Memories are my comfort. The other women on the block where I live mock me. They think I brag. But honestly, if they’d seen that peacock wallpaper, all that good china, those box-fresh crystal champagne coupes, the pool, the cocktail parties. If they themselves had witnessed the sight of Clark Gable eating shrimp in my dining room, they’d put their sneers away.