The Love of Stones

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The Love of Stones Page 21

by Tobias Hill


  * * *

  There are people who say that stones have souls, but they are wrong. There are also people who believe that stones are alive, at least in the way that trees, say, are alive. For the most part, these people are also wrong.

  Cut stones are dead. For the most part. You just have to touch them to know it. They are mined from their source rocks and sheared up into pieces with steel cleavers. The hard nyf, the skin, is cut off them like the scales from a fish. Of course they are not alive.

  But they are dead. It is a particular quality. Nothing is entirely dead without living first. Underground, there are living stones. They are growing, and they are changing all the time, the quartz into amethyst, the opal into chalcedony. Growth and transformation. All of them are, in the simplest sense, alive.

  Cut stones are dead as wooden chairs. But I think that stones are like trees, and that they die in the same grindingly slow way that they live. They are like fallen trunks, which for years put out new leaves. Cut stones are like that, mindless and centennial. It is not what you would call life. It is more like a kind of forgetfulness.

  We had three dogs. They were presents from May on Anne’s eleventh birthday, Edith would never have bought them. Their names were Pudding, Chocolate Pudding and Pudding Now. Anne chose their names. They were spaniels from the same litter. Edith never liked them; there was nothing clean or ordered about them, not even in their names, which Anne refused to explain or change. After a few months no one could remember which was which anyway, and the names stopped mattering. They were all the Pudding, Puddings plural. They smelt of wet fur and warm dog-shit and love.

  I’m walking back from primary school. It’s winter and already dark. Children echo under the wet drip of plane trees. English trees, which I miss when I am away from them: massive in the narrow streets, fountains frozen in their functions. Anne doesn’t walk with me any more, hasn’t done so since she began at the comprehensive. Now it’s her boyfriends who take her home. I keep my eyes on the damp, black pavement. Home is six hundred and eighty-two steps away and closing fast.

  When I get there I have to knock because I don’t have a key. Anne has a key but I don’t. Anne says I might put it in my mouth and swallow it. I did that once with a pencil stub. Edith swears it went in blunt and came out sharp. I don’t know why she doesn’t give me a key.

  I knock again. Inside I can hear a Pudding whining, and already something is wrong because it doesn’t come closer. I can see nothing except the hallway’s darkness, mottled through the textured glass of the door. The world through a cube of ice.

  I sit down in the porch and wait for Anne. The step is damp and it seeps through my dress. It takes less than a minute for me to blame my sister, to hate her for having a key and not being here to use it. There is a spare by the kitchen door. It’s strictly for emergencies.

  I try and imagine where Edith has gone. Working; shopping; swimming; drowning. I rank them in order of probability. Working gets nine, drowning one. It is one-in-ten likely to be an emergency. I go round to the kitchen door and let myself in.

  One Pudding lies by the darkroom door, stretched out like a dog-shaped draught excluder. It whines, and when I come in another starts. They remind me of A Christmas Carol, which is due on BBC1 any week now. The ghosts of Christmas Present, Past and Future. Whooo, says the draught-excluding Pudding.

  The darkroom door is shut. No light shows under it. On the kitchen table a book lies closed. On the sideboard are our clean clothes, one woman’s, two girls’. Bras and vests in separate piles.

  I put the emergency key back, close the door, walk in. I am trying to make no sound and failing. I don’t try because I want to surprise Edith, but because I don’t want her to know I used the emergency key. If I can get upstairs, my entrance will be finessed. The ordinary transformed into the perfectly elegant. I walk round by the washing machine and stop.

  The door to the darkroom is not closed shut. An ordinary, out-of-the-ordinary thing: Edith never leaves the door unlocked. Sometimes, if she is working, the door is left open for air, but there is no sound from inside. I go up to the door and press my face to the crack. There is nothing to see. Only the smell of swimming pools, hospitals, Edith’s hands. Precious and dangerous.

  The Pudding gets up. The door swings back. Edith is sitting in the darkroom chair. Her head is leant forward, she is asleep. Her hands hang at her sides. They have finished all the things they have been doing.

  Laughter bubbles up inside me and I gulp it down. It is four steps to my stool from the door. My heart goes fast. I am playing a game. It is to do with fear and perfection. I take one step. Another.

  Sometimes I think about death. Not often. My head is not a glass dome with my past inside, time kept out. But I think about how the dead survive in people’s minds.

  It reminds me of the way in which stones live. Slow, forgetful, refusing to be gone. I carry the traces of Edith’s death. Not the memories of her alive, which are something to be cherished. I am talking about the death. Glött says the pearl is a function of pain, and there is something in that. I wonder if I am making myself a pearl. Taking a death and turning it into a jewel. Since pearls grow, like small lives.

  Mostly, though, it is not the death that occupies me. Most of the time I think of the Three Brethren. The more I know about the jewel, the clearer its character becomes. The weight of it in the hand, like a second hand. The thin bones of its gold. The warmth of the rubies, the more human beauty of the pearls, and the coldness of the diamond. The occult stare of that one eye. Old stones, mindless, centennial. I want them. It feels as if I always have.

  There are diamond experts who are as precise as wine-tasters. They can recognise which country and mine a crystal is from just from its colour and shape. By the standards of these people I am an amateur, and their standards are not wrong. I know only so much, and only what I have taught myself.

  But then I am a specialist. My field is not all diamonds, but one diamond. Not all rubies, but three rubies. In the company of lapidaries, there are people who recognise this. They taste me on the air, the sour love of my obsession, and they leave me to myself.

  And that is the way it should be. It is a private thing I am doing. It involves only two of us. No one else. There is me, and there is the Brethren. Cam cam’a dêil, can can’a:

  Not glass to glass but soul to soul.

  * * *

  In the morning it is raining and Hassan is playing his flute again. I watch him in the courtyard, sheltering under the thick green eaves of the cedars. Overhead the sky is still that of an arid country – painfully blue – and the rain itself stutters, unsure of its own intentions.

  By the time I go to work it has already stopped. I can still hear the flute, though. It carries clear through the basalt walls of the house, up through the Escher stairwells and yards. It’s as if the stone has become porous overnight, and I think of what I said to Hassan. The air feeling of nothing. Now it seems alive. Hassan, the granter of wishes. I work with the door open.

  It is noon before I come to the last drawer of India. I open it up and pile it on the floor with all the others. Inside is a patch of saffron-yellow cloth sewn with seed garnets, a spent mousetrap, a small pile of paper and a smaller pile of bones. Nothing much for Martin to steal. I find this comforting.

  I rattle the bones in their makeshift coffin. There are mouse teeth and mouse toes, clean and neat as watchworks. The backbone is broken under the trap’s killing bar. I take the papers out and wipe them on my skirt. There are three pages, and the mouse never got to any of them. The top one isn’t paper at all but thick card. It has threads along one edge, old bindings. The other pages are pressed against it. As if the words themselves once exerted their own pressure. To me it looks like a notebook, or the remains of one. I am looking at what my own records will become.

  There is a pattern on the card. I turn it to the light and jerk back. It is as if I have opened a door and found a face pressed against the space beyond, wa
iting for me.

  The image is faint, a sketch executed in lead pencil. There is a triangle the size of a human heart. A rectangle inside each face, a circle at each point. At the centre is a diamond. From the body hangs a tear.

  The flute music stops. The two pages are stuck to the cover and to one another. I sit down on the cold tiled floor and work them apart, carefully, all fingers and nails. When the back sheet comes away it is delicate as a crust of sand. I balance it on my palms and the tips of my fingers, lean forward and read.

  There are only four lines, of English and German. The writing is Glött’s father’s. Not the precise, Gothic script of his public correspondence but a more private hand. Disarranged as the room of stones.

  – Die drei Brüder. Mr Pyke.

  35 Slipper St, Whitechapel – the lower door –

  Mount, Fallowes, Three Diamonds.

  – Der Preis muss noch vereinbart werden.

  ‘The price to be decided.’ Under my breath I repeat the last line, the rhythm of the German. Already, though, I’m thinking of Glött. She told the truth the day I arrived. The knot was sold in London, a century ago. However it was stolen from Victoria, whoever stole it, the jewel still existed sixty years later. And if it was whole then, it can be whole now. I always knew it would be.

  I picture Whitechapel, the East End beyond it, docklands. These are places I know. Even if the street number was written a century ago, it is somewhere to start from. And then there are the names, Pyke and Mount. Buyers or sellers, people or companies.

  My mind creeps over them, and catches. I get up, gather the transaction papers and everything that is mine, and go down through the stone house to my bedroom. My overnight bag is in the same place it has been for a week. I open it up and get out the auctioned lapidary.

  For a small book it is heavy. If I’d been in transit I would have thrown it away days ago. The title page calls it A Definitive Essay on the Indian Origins of the Crown Jewels of Tudor England, by V. J. Joshi, published by Macmillan & Co, 1893. Folded inside the cover is a register for the Bombay & Districts Public Library. The fourth name is written in a thin, oddly characterless script. As if someone were writing without understanding.

  Mr Three Diamonds.

  I go back to the transaction notes. The last sheet is unlike the rest. There is no trace of binding. At the head of the page is a shape, symmetrical, decayed. If I narrow my eyes it could be an address. A crest, even. The paper is badly eaten up by old damp. There is very little writing. I might not have perceived it at all if someone had not already pencilled in the lines.

  – The Mr Levys.

  Wate for me doun at Blackfryers Sures.

  I will hav yr. 3 bretheren.

  It isn’t the handwriting of Glött’s father. The retracing might be his, though it is impossible to be sure. Certainly the style of the original seems older than the turn of the century. The script is clumsy as its wording. There is a signature, but again it is unclear, a child’s imitation. The pen stutters in its ink. The details mean nothing to me. They are, at least, something more than a faded postcode, or the address on a soft-porn calendar.

  I pack quickly. It never takes long. I don’t leave the lapidary behind. When I’m finished I go and look for Eva. The main door is open, and as I pass I see that the courtyard is full of sparrows. There are clouds of them, settling and unsettling in the cedar trees. There is no sign of Hassan. As if he was never there at all, and it is only the birds I’ve heard all morning.

  She is in her day room, trying on pearls. The jet bead curtain clicks itself still behind me. Glött is staring herself down in a full-length mirror, a box of jewels on the sofa beside her. On her two-piece is a brooch of gold wasps encircling a yellow pearl. She has her back to the door, although I can see her face. She doesn’t turn round to look at me because she doesn’t need to. ‘Come! I need your opinion.’

  I walk up beside her. She fingers the brooch. The bag is still in my hand. I don’t put it down. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Of course. You can borrow it, if you wish. But does it suit me?’ We stand side by side. Her face is taken up with the worries of dressing. The angenehme Sorgen, the pleasant dilemmas. I watch myself smile.

  ‘You’re asking if a brooch of wasps suits you? Don’t tempt me.’

  She laughs, high and girlish. Behind us the bead curtain is still moving slightly. I can hear its click, like stone fingers. I unzip the bag and take out the papers. ‘What have you there?’

  ‘What I came for.’ I say it softly, but it pulls her away from the mirror’s viewpoint. She grabs at the papers with her thin hands. Like bird feet, I think. Bird claws. When she is done she stares at me.

  ‘Where did you find them?’

  ‘In the stone room.’ I think of the mouse bones. The old paper, uneaten. Hassan’s gifts. ‘Where did you think they would be?’

  Her head wobbles on its thin neck, once, twice. I don’t know what else I expected. I put my hand out for the transaction papers and she gives them back. When she speaks again her voice is almost timid. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘And if that isn’t the end of it? You made a promise to me.’

  I look back at her. She stands straight-backed. In the mirror’s tilted surface we are giants, like Hassan. Monsters, like the sirrusch. ‘What promise?’

  ‘To catalogue the von Glött collection. You have not finished.’

  ‘That wasn’t it, Eva, and you know it.’ I say it quietly. She shakes her head.

  ‘My God. You always get what you want, I knew it. Selfish girl.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘You have the ethics of a stock market!’ She spits it. All the hardness comes back into her eyes, like blood risen into skin.

  ‘Because it’s my business, Eva. The jewel is my business.’

  She picks up the brooch and throws it hard at me. It misses and hits the remote control, heavy gold, toppling it off. A film starts up on the television. Harrison Ford is shooting at a beautiful woman. She runs through shop windows. Glass and music crash around her.

  ‘You are wasting your life. Martin likes you. We like you, Katharine.’ At her sides, without her realising, Glött’s hands open and close. Mechanical with desire. Beyond her, in his photograph, the first husband watches with his fixed smile.

  I reach out and hug her. It catches her off guard, otherwise I don’t think I would have managed it. The breath goes out of her. This close, I can feel how thin she is under the well-cut clothes. She holds on to me for a moment, reflexively, her hands gripping my shoulders before I let her down. She calls out as I reach the jet curtain. The beads tut behind me. I hear her again as I walk down the corridor to the courtyard, her voice becoming stronger.

  ‘Katharine. Katharine Sterne!’

  The door is locked. I unlock it and walk out of the verandah, past the fountain. Beside the pool Eva’s voice reaches me again. I can hear the tears starting up in it. A pattern, repetitive as birdsong.

  ‘Katharine. Katharine! Katharine!’

  It catches something inside me and tears it open. The shock of it makes me stumble, the bag coming off my shoulder. Inside me it feels as if a door unlocks itself on a cold night. For a second it is blown wide. Then the force swings back. The door is shut.

  I hoist the bag up and look back. Hassan is there. I see his silhouette at a high window. I knew he would be waiting here, or hoped it. The gratitude fills me up, blossoms inside me, and I raise a hand and watch him reflect it, waving back.

  He stops when I stop. At the archway pigeons clatter around me. They are pure black except for clean white breasts. It is as if the stone of Glött’s house has seeped into their nests, their eggs, the veins of their feathers. I start to walk west. I don’t look back again.

  * * *

  I consider the properties of stones.

  They are dead. It is a quality which gives them a certain reliability. I know more about the minerals of the Three Brethren than I will
ever know about myself, my agglomeration of living and dead tissue, solid and liquid, human flux. In twenty-five years every cell in my body barring the substance of my bones has lived and died and been replaced. I’m not the person I was. Whereas the stones of the jewel are unchanged. The ruby ruby, the diamond diamond. I know it like the back of my own hand. Or better. I know, at least, what I am looking for.

  They are desirable. It is to do with beauty: it is to do with money. The two things twist into each other and become inseparable. It means that the love of stones is never a pure thing. It is mutable, good and evil, because jewels themselves possess the property of mutability. We give them that. They are the small wishes of acquisitive people, flights and sex, mansions and palaces. It is the power that money has, the slightest of powers, entirely human. I think of the Brethren and wonder what I am bartering it for.

  They lead you back. This is the last thing, the property I repeat to myself, riddle, mantra, penitence. I remember it now as the plane turns west towards Ankara and London, its thin hull of metal and insulation loud around me. The great jewels are thousands of years old. They pass through the hands of people and often the hands leave no trace, but they are there all the same. They leave impressions, invisible, like atoms of hydrogen drawn to a surface of diamond.

  They lead you back. I watch ice crystallise on the porthole glass and wonder how far I can go.

  4

  Three

  In the late summer of his twenty-second year, Daniel Levy and his brother Salman left Iraq with jewels sewn into their clothes.

  It was 1833 by the Christian calendar. The ninth of September, although there are other ways to calculate time. Hüseyin the Imam would have called it Jumadah II. To Rachel and Daniel, waiting at the docks, it was six days before the Feast of Tabernacles. The eighth year of the two hundred and ninety-fifth lunar cycle, the twenty-third year of the two hundredth solar cycle since the Era of Creation; although what Rachel and Daniel believed of Creation was their own business.

 

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