The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you better start again and tell me who you are.’

  He sits straight-backed in the straight-backed chair as I unzip my bag and take out the ninth notebook. Pressed between the pages is the note from Diyarbak’r. I hold it out to George and talk while he reads the names of people and places. ‘I didn’t lie to you. I didn’t expect you to be dealing in jewels, that’s all. My name is Katharine. I’m looking for this jewel, the Brethren.’

  ‘Slipper Street. That’s a name I haven’t heard in quite a while.’ His hands shake as he reads it. When he’s finished he looks up. ‘Quite a while. It was a pretty little road. No one much wanted the towers. They went up anyway. Why was that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I take the paper out of his hands. ‘Did you live there yourself?’

  ‘For a little while. We moved down into Poonah Street when I was still a little lad. Never went far, though. All the family lived round here.’

  ‘And now there’s just you.’ I regret it as I say it. The old man blinks as if I’ve slapped him. ‘I’m sorry. I…’

  He smiles. It doesn’t go deeper than his face. ‘So you want to find the Three Brothers, do you? You’ll have a job on your hands there, my girl. Put the picture back where it belongs, could you?’

  I get up and stand the photograph in its place on the mantelpiece. Next to it are shots of other people, a girl with soft dimples and brushed black hair, a boy itching to escape from a three-piece suit. All the subjects are young. All the pictures are old. The frames are mock-gold and ebony. Behind me George Pyke talks with his head down. ‘I’ll tell you about the Brothers, if that’s what you want. When my old man got it, he wouldn’t talk about where it was from. That was the first thing. All he’d say was that it was from down the sewers. Now, that caused him a bit of grief. The other mudlarks thought he was holding out. That there was more where the Brothers came from. But there never was. Not that anyone found. Just the jewel in a nice gold box with a scrap of old paper.’

  ‘What happened to those?’

  ‘Sold. The buyers who wanted the Brothers wanted anything to do with it. Paying silly money for old tat. My old man got a bit like that later. That was the second thing.’ He picks up his glass. His throat works at the beer.

  ‘Ah. He couldn’t leave the thing alone, you see. Once he had the Brothers, he couldn’t stop touching it. My mother didn’t stand it. Wouldn’t stand for it, and I could see why, and I was only four. He touched that thing like it was a girl. He let me hold it once myself.’ He peers up at me. A little proud, ashamed of it.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Old. Heavy. Like a gun. But when he touched it, well. It was like he was feeling it up. Excuse me.’ He coughs dryly. ‘So there it was. In the house. Slipper Street. I remember him drawing it. I never saw him do another drawing in his life, or go into a library again neither. Even after he found out what it was, my mother had to nag him into selling it. By law it should have been treasure trove, of course, but then the mudlarks never paid too much notice to that. They had their own connections too. Business contacts, for when they needed to pass along something choice. There was quite a little auction. In the end he sold it to a Japanese gentleman. A collector. Cost him the price of a row of houses.’

  ‘What was he called?’

  He looks up at me, his blue eyes surprised. ‘I thought you knew that. You’ve got it on that paper of yours.’

  ‘Mister Three Diamonds?’

  He nods. ‘Sounds a bit obvious now, doesn’t it? You would’ve thought George Senior or my mother would’ve known something was up. But they thought it was just one of them Oriental names. Little Plum, Three Blossoms. That kind of thing.’

  I sit down and take a sip of the beer. ‘And it wasn’t?’

  ‘They never caught up with him. As far as we was concerned Three Diamonds was the last thing he was. There was something wrong with the money. Gold sovereigns, a great deal of them. It was dirty business. The old man ended up getting three years. Handling false currency. Conspiracy to pervert the course – all that. He couldn’t say where he’d got it all. Wouldn’t say. Or why he had so much of it. That was the trouble. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been such a stretch. After he came out he got a proper job at the docks. Selling meat to the big ships, meat and fruit. But he never stopped talking about the Brothers. Not ever. It changed him. Not for the better, and all.’

  He looks up at me. When he smiles, his eyes fold into their creases and lines. ‘What do you want a jewel like that for, a nice girl like you? You think diamonds are for ever or something?’

  ‘But they are.’

  He leans forward and starts to sing. It catches me off guard. He does it softly, smiling, eyebrows raised. As if it were a lullaby.

  Diamonds are for ever.

  They are all I need to please me.

  They can stimulate and tease me.

  They won’t leave in the night,

  I’ve no fear that they might

  Desert me …

  We laugh together. Watching one another laugh. After a while I have to stop and wipe the tears out of my eyes and the old man goes and gets more beer and a plate of bourbon biscuits. He turns the fire on and we sit, drinking, under the watch of the photographs.

  ‘It sounds as if he did well. Your father. The man with the Midas touch.’

  ‘Not really. Lost the Brothers, didn’t he. Schmidas, more like.’

  ‘King Shmidas?’

  ‘That was him. Everything he touched turned to shit. The whiff off of him when he came in. Cor. Let me tell you.’

  Later he tells me he has to sleep, he’s too old for this, I’ve worn him out. I look at my watch and find it’s past midnight. He offers to let me stay, and when I say yes he goes to get me a pillow. I don’t remember him coming back. In the morning I wake up tucked under a tartan rug that smells of dog breath.

  There is no sound, only the warm quiet of a place where people are sleeping soundly. I wonder if this is how my home would feel. If I could get used to it. It is early, still cold, and I go into the kitchen and warm my hands over the gas stove, holding my bare arms out for inspection. There is bread in the breadbin and pickle in the fridge. I sit by the mutter of the hobs and eat four pieces of Tesco’s white sliced. In the lounge I take out the inscribed turquoise and leave it on the mantelpiece. It sits vivid between the grey photographs, as if it were the stone that were alive and nothing else. Outside I walk back onto the Commercial Road and turn westwards towards the city.

  * * *

  It was a hot summer the year the King died. In winter the Thames stayed frozen for three months, the ice hard as macadam, the eight bridges redundant; but when the thaw came it set in with an unseasonable quickness. By March the river lay rotting on the tide. In the houses of the rich, windows were hung with canvas soaked in chloride of lime, and even the scavengers stayed away from the sewers. The smell of the shit of a million people rose over Limehouse, Ratcliff and Whitechapel, settling into the stitch of clothes and the pores of skin and stone.

  When he was older than Judit, old as the Levys in her stories, Daniel remembered that time by how quickly it had run away from him. The pace of years in Hardwick Place, the slow grind of working days – that had been a lie, he saw. When the changes had come, they had been so fast that nothing could be done about them. Life had fallen away into itself without plot or premonition. Daniel wondered whether that was always so. It was 1920 when he thought this. His mind was boiled down to the hardness of facts. A glass of sweet tea cooled on the bedside table.

  In Iraq he was not alone in thinking of the past. Along the river valleys the old cities had been excavated – Warka, Nineveh, Nippur – Europeans camped among the cane-brakes. The whole world, Daniel thought, was digging for its past. Beside the tea glass lay an old-fashioned watch chain. It was not so far away that he could not have touched it, if he chose. Later he would pick it up and put it on. Not yet.

  He lay turn
ed towards the window. Tamarisks flowered in the garden outside. He recalled the ways in which his time had pivoted away from him. How his life had changed in small instances, sleights of hand, almost without his knowing it. The jar waiting to be cracked open. Fellow and his brother, dancing. The Three Brethren, placed on a table between his aged hands.

  May, 1837. Hardwick Place quietened. The dock trade carriages passed with their windows shut and the curtains hooked down, as if the rank air smelt purer in darkness. It was the eleventh, a Thursday, before Daniel saw a business close for good. He was surprised it took so long.

  He opened the shop blinds at dawn, and saw Matthew Lawrence the salt-bathmaker across the road. A cart was drawn up outside his showroom. Matthew and his son were loading up what they could before the creditors arrived, Martha the streetchild watching dumbly on the pavement. The bathmaker’s smallest daughter was already sitting in the cart, a letter rack in one hand and a milk jug in the other.

  Only once they were safely away did Daniel close the blinds again. He tried to imagine what he would take, given the chance. The gloom of cabinets and counter, waiting for daylight. The rows of jewels, silver and Vauxhall glass, waiting to be wanted. They were nothing without want. Daniel would have left them if he could.

  At the end of the day he took the jewellery from its displays, piece by piece, and locked it in a metal case bought cheap at the docks. When it was done he sat at the counter with the books. Taking stock of the hours already passed. It was dusk when Jane came in. She leaned at the door, watching him, while he lit a candle and went back to work.

  ‘Are you thirsty?’

  He glanced up at her voice. Her head was relaxed back against the wall, the neck exposed. The eyes waiting for him to look. ‘Because if you are I can make you up something.’

  ‘No.’ He smiled. ‘Thank you all the same.’

  She pushed herself upright and came over. Standing beside him as he wrote. Income and spending. Tax and gross. The smell of alcohol was warm on her skin, and with it something stronger and almost foetid. Perfume or smoked opium. ‘No. You are too busy for me, Mister Levy. I can see that. Not like your brother. You are a different kind of man. Do you enjoy this?’ She tapped the accounts. Daniel raised the pen. Closed the book.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. Why do you do it?’

  He could feel her now, the way her skin gave off heat. My brother’s woman, he thought. He sat back. The reek of her breath reached him. A tooth gone rotten. A carriage went past outside, its hoofbeats hollow in the dusk. ‘My brother makes jewels. I sell them. The why of it is my own business.’

  ‘But you have no love of it. Why do you stay with him?’

  Daniel blinked. Not understanding the question, so that the woman above him smiled. ‘Why? He is my brother.’

  ‘He’s a grown man. So are you.’ She leaned over him, pressed against him from navel to mount. ‘Are you not? What is it you want, Daniel Levy?’

  He frowned. Not angry, only working to comprehend what Jane was saying. ‘A family, one day, of course. Perhaps to study. There are universities in this country and in Europe. Academies–’

  ‘But your brother wants so much more.’ She was whispering now. Still smiling, her face beside his. ‘He is all want, your brother Salman. You live in the shadow of his pleasures. Like me.’

  He stood too quickly, so that the candle guttered and Jane had to draw back out of his way. ‘Have I made you angry? Sweet Jesus.’ She laughed, delighted, then went quiet again. Watching him for something. ‘Then I must be right. We have more in common than you think.’

  ‘I think not.’ The candle righted its flame between them.

  ‘Aye, but we do.’ Her voice soft as the spillage of wax. ‘Perhaps you and your brother might have something in common also. Goodnight, Mister Levy.’

  ‘Goodnight.’ He said it when she was already gone. Nothing left behind in the shop but the smells of her breath and her teeth and skin. He stood at the window, a tall shadow behind the glass, unnoticed by the traffic going by.

  *

  Evening. He sat on the yard step while Salman read. Nursing a pipe, looking out towards the river. Before sunset the light caught the water and turned it the chemical silver of Salman’s molten metals. Later, it moved slow and green in the evening heat. Daniel narrowed his eyes against the burn of the tobacco and imagined the distance from London to Basra, the unbroken miles of water between them. That seamlessness. His brother a voice relearning old writings in the language of an alien country:

  ‘“Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me. Unto me men gave their ear, and waited, and kept silence at my counsel. They waited for me as for rain; and they opened their mouth wide as for the latter rain.’”

  ‘I wonder about Rachel.’

  ‘Why? She is well.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She would write if she were not. “When I looked for good, there came evil unto me; and when I waited for light, there came darkness. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion of owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.’” The snap of the pages being shut. ‘It is too bloody hot for this. You read.’

  The Bible fell beside Daniel. He picked it up, dusted it off. Wind snapped at its endpapers. Acts, Hebrews, Revelation.

  ‘In Baghdad the heat was cleaner.’

  ‘No.’ Daniel opened the book and smoothed its onionskin pages. ‘You forget.’

  ‘There is cholera here as much as anywhere. Only more people to survive it. They say the King is dying.’

  ‘They have said so for years.’

  “There will be a new queen, then. Therefore, a new crown. The jewellers in town talk of nothing else. Tell me you have no interest in that. It will be the making of someone.’

  ‘And you think it will be us?’

  ‘Who else has jewels to match ours?’

  ‘Aye, and the queen has only to follow the smell of the Thames to find us.’

  ‘Then we must take ourselves to her. Levy and Levy, Goldsmiths to the Crown.’

  Daniel put down the book. ‘The world will not turn into diamond just for our profit.’

  Salman came out from the workroom. Stepped over his brother, shirtless, wiping the sweat from his broad face. ‘Such a pessimist. And you are mistaken. This is a sign.’

  ‘The King’s dying is a sign?’ Daniel leaned out into the breeze, smiling. My brother is like mercury, he thought. A precious, liquid jewellery. ‘Of what, pray?’

  ‘That our luck is changing.’

  ‘Shall I open up the shop again?’ A flock of sparrows broke from the waste-ground trees. He looked away and back. ‘The Chamberlain may be here this very minute.’

  ‘God speed to him.’ Salman turned. In the corner of the yard Limpus’s dog lay, its yellow eyes unblinking. Salman bent towards it, spreading his arms. ‘God speed to him, Fellow my lad!’

  There was no sound except the quick belling of the chain. Daniel heard nothing else. He looked up, still smiling, and saw Salman stagger back. Only as the two figures turned did he see that the dog was at his brother’s neck.

  It happened so rapidly, so unexpectedly, that in the first long seconds Daniel found he could do nothing but try and believe his eyes. He saw that Fellow’s head looked too white beside Salman’s, the skin pulled far back from its eyes and teeth. Violence made it monstrous.

  There was the sound of harsh breathing. Daniel couldn’t tell if it came from Fellow or from his brother. In the dirt yard they danced together, the dog’s foreclaws braced against the man’s shoulders. In the quickened seconds he thought of the animal’s cold aggression, like a mirror of its mistress.

  He called out as he began to move. Down the steps, into the dirt. He shouted out again as he reached Salman. He saw that his brother had forced the dog’s head back, his left hand around its neck. Daniel gripped the animal’s ribcage. He pulled and the hind legs lost their footing, skittering backwards in the dirt.


  When he looked up again his brother was pressing his free hand against Fellow’s forehead, like a blessing. The animal pushed itself forward and Daniel heard its teeth snap together. He watched as Salman curved his thumb, turned it down and hooked it up into the creature’s white left eye.

  A sound came out of the dog. It was the first and last time Daniel heard it make any real noise of its own. Blood and humour ran down its cheek and Daniel took his hands away and stepped back as it shook itself, fluid flicking into the dust. Its hind legs moved again, as if it meant to run, and as it did so Daniel realised that his brother wouldn’t let it go. He called out again, his voice still not resolving itself into words.

  Salman was pulling the animal now, not forcing it away. In the blind left eye his thumb turned, sunk up to its heel. Daniel put a hand out towards them both.

  As if he could hold his brother back, leashed. It was what Daniel was never capable of doing. In front of him Salman twisted the hook of his extremity up into the animal’s brain.

  He didn’t let it go until it stopped moving. Even then the body twitched where it lay. The foreclaws jerked, Daniel saw, like those of a creature dreaming of flight.

  When he looked up at his brother Salman had already turned away. His right arm was dark. The blood-marks of Fellow’s claws ran back over his arms.

  The world began again. It was as if the violence, the suddenness of it, had left a vacuum into which the air rushed back. Southwards, Daniel could hear seagulls along the river. East, the chip-chop echo of building sites out towards Stepney. He walked over to his brother and lifted his face.

  ‘Dead, is it?’ Salman’s voice was indistinct.

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘I am sorry for it.’

  Daniel let his brother’s face go and began to check the rest of his naked torso. The red chevrons of the shoulder wounds. His voice, beginning to babble.

  ‘Why should it have attacked me? We were just talking of the King. I never trusted it, ‘Phrates, not ever. The dog is dead, long live the dog. Ahaha.’

  ‘All right, is he?’

  Etcher the publican stood at the yard gate with his hat in his hands. Behind him were other people, attracted by the sound of violence, not getting too close. Etcher nodded again. ‘Nasty. I’ve sent my boy next door for Jane. She’ll be here presently.’