by Alex Monroe
Later that summer I finally took her to Pin Mill. Barefooted and muddy, we dragged the dinghy down the Grindle, rowlocks clanking, and rowed out to Swallow. The boat now lay on a half-tide mooring up towards Woolverstone, 50 yards out from her winter mud-berth, which we had cut into the loamy bank the previous season.
Denise stayed in the sun on Swallow’s baking deck while I pottered about below. I lit the little gas ring, made us tea and broke off a couple of strips of fruit-and-nut chocolate. We sat on deck and drank from chipped enamel mugs. Then I had to go back down below to check the bilges. A year after our maiden voyage, Swallow still leaked badly. I pumped away, taking in the noise of the river, enjoying the occasional buzz of an engine or the full flap of passing sails out in the channel.
Surfacing from the darkness, I stuck my head up through the hatch to see Denise stretched out naked on the foredeck. She lay on her back with her eyes closed and her arms straight back above her head, basking. I paused, taking in the scene in silence for a few seconds. Red and white sails in the distance, Swallow’s golden mast and neatly furled sails, Denise’s pale white skin and coppery hair, which glowed in the sun like the varnished larchwood of the bulwark. She swung an arm over her eye to squint at me.
I’m hot. How about a swim?
Denise stood up, stepped tip-toe up onto the bulwarks, one hand on the shrouds. Without a backward glace, she dived overboard. Barely a splash. I stared around me, partly in disbelief but also to check the world’s reaction. Nothing else had changed. Sailing boats still tacked upstream, a couple of dinghies with outboards droned against the tide, and far off at the point a steamer was coming in from Long Reach.
A moment later I was treading water beside Denise. We swam right around Swallow and then up against the tide to see Rainbow. Then we floated back down with the current to the boat. We splashed and mucked around until we were cold and when we’d climbed back on board and were stretched out in the sun again, I looked up into the rigging and thought that one day I would marry Denise.
In the basement at Coco de Mer I imagine scented lockets and luscious orchids. Sara asks if I could also make some nipple clamps. I know my way around lockets and pendants, but I’ve never even heard of a nipple clamp before. I don’t know what it might look like or how it works or even quite what it’s for. So I nod cheerfully, go away to do a bit of research online, and discover that I have agreed to make a sex toy, which can be attached to the erect nipples of either men or women to restrict the blood flow.
Ouch.
I get to work on a selection of designs, starting with what I know. There’s a Coco de Mer pendant – a miniature pelvis-shaped nut set with a ruby – and a number of lockets, including a large filigree butterfly with an orchid inside. Spilling from the orchid is a length of red silk, to absorb a scent. The lockets are on longer chains than usual, so that they nestle in the wearer’s cleavage. The nipple clamps are butterflies too, rather like hair-clips, with wings that you squeeze together to open the claws. I sketch out a filigree pattern for the butterfly’s wings, leaving spaces in the shape of a penis. Everyone at Coco de Mer loves the designs. Aesthetics sorted, I’m ready to make the prototypes, and now my challenges are practical and mechanical.
I’ve done some technical drawings and worked out how the hinge should pivot, but the spring is a little more complex. There are myriad springs available: tension springs, compression springs, torsion springs. And then there are different types of wire and thicknesses of wire to consider, and the effects of the degree of deflection, the number of turns, the dimensions of the mandrel, the position of the ends . . . the variables are infinite. I remember my Wednesday afternoons at university, studying metallurgy with the eccentric and brilliantly named Dr Choc. We experimented with hardening and tempering steel, making it soft then springy again, heating it and cooling it, studying its molecular structure. It was fascinating but, as I reflect, not actually that much use to me just now.
I decide that what I really need is a whole bunch of samples to play with. I find a helpful company in Redditch, and as I’m ordering a good selection of small torsion springs – think of an old-fashioned mousetrap, or a clothes peg, perhaps – the man at the other end of the phone asks me what they’re for. I’m briefly thrown. Then I decide to lie and tell him I’m designing a range of hair-clips.
Back at Coco de Mer, I’m greeted by two charming sales assistants. A young woman called Alison tells me that her mother is a big fan of mine, and adores the lovebird locket she bought from the V&A. I’m flattered, and immediately put at ease. While I wait for Sara, I scan the bawdy Edwardian cartoons, framed on the walls alongside a number of retro-looking erotic publications, and keep half an ear on the crooning of Tex Ritter, the singing cowboy, playing in the background. The music seems a little out of place, and I wonder what that new moon over his shoulder is all about. Then a damson-painted door opens and Sara greets me with a kiss. We descend into the basement.
I feel the heat rising to my face as I squirm in my chair. We’ve been joined by three other young women, and the five of us are soon sitting around an overflowing table, surrounded by piles of paperwork, computers and sex toys. I nervously produce the working prototypes of each of my designs, and add them to the chaos. The butterfly, now plated in shimmering gold, looks altogether pretty and innocent. The spring is coiled round its swelling thorax, its six legs are exaggeratedly long and softened with small balls on their ends. Antennae swirl out from the head. The uninitiated would be pushed to guess the object’s function. The penis design in the filigree wings is both blatant and disguised. Everyone leans forward.
Sara and her colleagues each reach for a clamp and immediately clip it onto their knuckle. They’ve done this before. They hold out their hands, backs to the ceiling, like visitors to a butterfly garden. The insects have settled. How long will they stay? I watch the women’s faces. Something is wrong. They are playing with the wings, squeezing them together and repositioning the clamps on their knuckles, frowning. When I’d finished my first prototype and clipped the butterfly on the end of my finger, it had hurt. Worried that I’d made it too firm, I made some more using different springs, softer ones.
Which one is the strongest? asks Sara.
I gently clip the one with the most powerful spring onto the back of Sara’s soft, tanned hand. Her nails are perfectly painted. Everyone leans forward to play with it. It’s lovely, they agree. The butterfly and the design are perfect. But they also all agree that the spring is not nearly hard enough. My eyes start to water as I cross my arms casually over my nipples and say that’s fine. I can use a harder spring. No problem.
It was Christmas 1995. Denise’s mum sat me down on a stool in our front room in Peckham for some spiritual healing. Joan, she was called, but I never actually said it out loud, face to face. It’s amazing how easy it is to avoid using someone’s name. Joan was a medium. It was time for some diplomacy on my part as far as all this was concerned. After half a lifetime of pain in my joints, I was quite happy to play along. What harm could it possibly do?
Joan was short, single, and irrepressible: a proper Scouser. Gold rings adorned her fingers, she had a gold watch on her wrist and several gold chains around her neck. Back in the good old days she had danced while the Beatles played in the Cavern and married a handsome young merchant seaman called Stan. They had three daughters together and she was promptly left to bring them up on her own, turning her hand to anything that paid the bills. Somewhere along the way she had picked up spiritual healing. Now she was in her late fifties, and still an unstoppable force,
The room was painted a dark Russian red, and I sat with the curtains drawn, a couple of nightlights flickering on the mantelpiece and the Christmas lights glowing on the tree. Joan stood behind me. I closed my eyes and did what I was told.
Relax. Focus on your breathing.
I breathed in the pine and shaken-out-match smell and listened to Joan inhaling deeply through her nose behind me. I was aware of her hand
s above my head, not touching me, but flat, like fans, one above the other. Then she slowly exhaled, sounding like a picture of the wind on an old map. I quickly fell into that slightly hypnotic state that I find often comes on when I’m forced to do nothing at all. It’s a treat in itself, hearing everything around you more sharply than usual, almost in your sleep. Joan’s breathing grew more fervent and her hands shook and vibrated above me. It was hard to keep track of time, but after some minutes, maybe ten, everything came to a kind of crescendo, with ever-faster breathing, lots of hand movements, and some other noises. Suddenly it all stopped. With a sharp exhalation of breath, Joan’s hands dropped to her sides.
After a short embarrassed silence I stood up and turned on the lights.
Joan had regained her composure and was bursting to tell me all. A lot of energy, she said. She’d felt a lot of energy, and her hands had grown very hot. And then all her rings had flown off! It was remarkable. Some of them hadn’t been off her fingers for years. I started scrabbling around on the floor to find them. She’d met a lot of friendly spirits on the other side – I had a lot of friends on the other side, apparently, which was reassuring – and a lot of energy. I held up the rings I’d found on the carpet. She put them back on, still full of excitement, and assured me I wouldn’t be suffering from my arthritis any more. Or at least it would be much better in the future. Still on all fours, feeling about under the furniture for the last couple of rings, I thanked her from the floor. It was really very kind of her and what excellent news about the arthritis.
I found an eternity ring with a couple of stones missing, and handed it up to her, saying I felt better all ready. She looked very pleased. And then, arm stretched out full length underneath the sofa, my fingers found the last ring, still warm from Joan’s hand. It was a simple gold band with three quite large diamonds set in a line, the biggest in the middle, all held in crown claw settings. It looked as if it could do with a good clean.
Slightly less than a year later Joan was lying in hospital dying from cancer. She wasn’t daunted. She firmly believed in reincarnation and had already promised her daughters to return in the form of a butterfly. Towards the very end, we were all reluctant to go far from her bedside. At some point, though, Denise and her sisters disappeared for a coffee and in the dimmed light of the air-conditioned room Joan and I had a few minutes on our own. She held my hand and asked me to do something. She didn’t want everyone standing around gawping at her when she died, she told me. It wasn’t how she wanted to be remembered. I promised her I’d see to it.
But I’m afraid I didn’t. It wasn’t much longer before things started going really downhill, and as life slid away from her, I couldn’t help thinking that her daughters’ needs were more important than anything else now. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them her request. So in the end, I left Denise and her sisters alone with their mother, and out in the hospital corridor, I whispered Joan an apology she couldn’t hear.
The funeral was on a crisp December day at a municipal cemetery in Kent. On our way there we all got the giggles and felt horribly guilty. The place had a conveyer-belt feel, with a queue already forming on the opposite side of the chapel for the next lot in as we left. A few days later we went to pick up the ashes. Standing under a tree in the garden of remembrance, we felt our feet shuffle and crunch on the debris of previous cremations. By this time all three girls had started to sob. Then I noticed a splash of colour on a coat. Dark orange and velvet brown, patterned with white spots. A Red Admiral had settled on Denise’s shoulder. It fluttered around the three sisters, alighting on each one for a few moments, and we watched and held our breath. A butterfly so close to Christmas. It was enough to convince us all of a miracle.
Joan hadn’t had much to leave. But when Denise and her sisters found the gold ring set with diamonds, the one I’d retrieved that day from under the sofa, they asked if I could do something with it. That way they could all three have a special keepsake of their mother’s to treasure and pass down in turn in time. We talked, and decided on three butterfly pendants, each one set with a diamond. I’d never had a more personal commission, and probably never will.
Alongside the intimacy and individuality of this task, I found the sense of taking part in a very long tradition in the history of jewellery immensely appealing. Jewels have been handed down through the generations for centuries, repositories of wealth and emotion alike. Sometimes a setting has become damaged, or worn out, or simply looks too dated. Sometimes a collection of family jewellery has to be divided. It’s an art in itself to transform an original piece into something that retains the feeling and sentiment of its past life, yet acquires new value through alteration and new ownership.
The butterflies took me a few years to make, and a good deal of that time was spent pondering over how best to approach the work. I knew that I wanted to pattern or texture the butterfly wings rather than using a filigree technique as I had before. I started experimenting with etching directly onto the silver. Usually, I’d use a sticky stop-out varnish or ground to mask the areas that I didn’t want the acid to erode. Detail appears when you scratch out through the stop-out. But I wanted to draw my pattern by hand this time. I felt it would connect me more directly to Joan and her beliefs, to the hand that I had held in her last days, the hand that had worn this ring for so many years.
I tried using waterproof inks in a Rotring pen. This meant I could draw fluidly and freely, and then immerse the silver in acid to erode the background. I tried several times before I was happy with my design. I decided to cut the wing shapes out in silver first, so the edges would be attacked by the acid and slightly softened. Then I watched them bubble away in the little Pyrex dish of concentrated nitric acid. After several minutes I dragged a pointer across the silver surface to feel the depth of etch, and when it was ready I ran it under the tap and washed the ink off in white spirit.
The rest was easy. I carved the body from a rod of silver, cut a piece of chenier for the diamond to sit in, and soldered it all together. I sent it to the caster’s to be moulded, and cast three in 18-carat gold. When the stones were set and all polished up, and I’d chosen the right chain, I brought home three heavy golden necklaces, a link between Denise, her sisters and their mother that would last for ever.
It’s late afternoon and I’m sitting on the floor of my tiny moss-green dinghy, gently drifting along with the tide on the river Alde by Iken Cliff. She’s called Sweet Pea and her rust-red canvas lugsail is flopping loosely from its spars. There’s no hope of catching a breeze on this side of the river. Here on the southern shore you’re sheltered by the trees, so I can just drift along with the tide until I reach the darker wind-ruffled water upstream, towards Snape. If I hang around I’ll drift back down soon enough: the tide will soon be turning.
On a still summer’s day like this, the shoreline is unrecognisable, but I’m sure I’ve reached the place where I saw my two turtle doves all those years ago. No swamping waves or blackening sky now, no howling wind or stinging spray. No skeleton silhouette of a blasted oak either. My tree must be gone by now. I turn my face to the sun and close my eyes and see orangey-pink and eventually I hear children’s voices. My own three daughters, Verity, Connie and Libby. They’ve come to fetch me with Jessie, our Border collie and they’re standing on the shore and calling me.
I give them a wave, settle the oars in the rowlocks and head back to shore, looking over my shoulder from time to time. The sandy cliff I remember has all but gone, eroded by tides and seasons. As soon as I’m near enough, the girls balance on grassy clumps of loamy mud and pull Sweet Pea in. Together we tie the lugsail to the mast, ship the oars and fasten the painter to a post with a clove hitch. We’re going to walk to Snape for a pint at the Plough and Sail. As so often, we have arranged to meet my mother there, and my sister Debbie. I pull my socks and shoes on over mud-encrusted feet.
Up on the bluff by Jumbo’s Cottage, I can see Denise waiting, but she’s not looking at us. She’s gaz
ing out towards Iken and the church. Through the long reeds and past a couple of old boathouses, and we’ve soon caught her up. If there’s a view that sums up Suffolk for me, it’s this one. The landscape opens up to a vast expanse of mud, water, reeds and sky. Troublesome Reach, where Jumbo himself once kept the withies and marked the shifting channel. The sun picks out the northern shore a good 3 miles away. I can just about see the start of the Black Heath estate, whose land stretches down to Little Japan. But Little Japan itself is a few miles downstream, out of sight, obscured by the headland where Iken Church proudly sits. The square church tower is in full sun, nestled in oak trees on its little peninsula, the odd Scots pine dark against the sky. Out in the river, a family of seals are playing in the muddy water, and sunning themselves on the reedy islands. This is where I used to sail with Ethel and Letty, drinking Long Life beer out of tins kept cool in the bilges and released with a hiss by the sharp triangular point of a pressed-steel opener.
We carry on up the cinder track through gorse and wild plums and turn right before the Anchor, which used to be a pub when the river was busy with boatmen. Through nettles and brambles the kids walk carefully with their arms raised, sometimes stepping over and sometimes squeezing sideways to avoid a sting or a scratch. Then the path opens up and becomes soft underfoot. It’s a carpet of pine needles. We’re almost in a tunnel here, with pines on our left and weather-worn oaks on our right. And then out into sunshine and a field, which gently slopes up away from the river. This is a picnic area now and there are two or three cars parked up at the top end.
The river is ever present off to our right. Through a line of oak trees the thin strip of water snakes its way up to Snape, winding through the reeds with little strings of islands and lagoons ready to disorientate the inexperienced navigator. One bare-branched oak stands in isolation like a great contorted crucifix, reminding me of a necklace I made years ago. Further along, these trees grow sturdier, great grey elephant-skin trunks, around which four people couldn’t link arms.