Pearls

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

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  Contents

  Celia Brayfield

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Celia Brayfield

  Pearls

  Celia Brayfield

  Celia Brayfield is a novelist and cultural commentator. She is the author of nine novels. The latest, Wild Weekend explores the tensions in a Suffolk village in homage to Oliver Goldmsith’s She Stoops to Conquer. To explore suburban living, she created the community of Westwick and explored mid-life manners in Mr Fabulous And Friends, and the environmental implications of urbanisation in Getting Home. She has often juxtaposed historical and contemporary settings, notably eighteenth century Spain in Sunset, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in White Ice and Malaysia in the time of World War II in Pearls. Four of her novels have been optioned by major US, UK or French producers.

  Her non-fiction titles include two standard works on the art of writing: Arts Reviews (Kamera Books, 2008) and Bestseller (Fourth Estate, 1996.) Her most recent is Deep France (Pan, 2004) a journal of a year she spent writing in south-west France.

  She has served on the management committee of The Society of Authors and judged national literary awards including the Betty Trask Award and the Macmillan Silver PEN Prize. A former media columnist, she contributes to The Times, BBC Radio 4 and other national and international media.

  Dedication

  For Chloe

  Prologue

  Catherine Bourton was so beautiful that men seldom realized she had any other qualities until it was too late. Her oval face, with its creamy olive complexion, was one of the faces of the eighties – so Time magazine had said. But her bronze-brown eyes seemed to know much more than they saw; they hinted at the ancestry of the Bourton family, rich Italians grafted to the British aristocracy by Queen Elizabeth I to dissuade them from bankrolling the Spanish Armada.

  Such beauty made men vulnerable. Even a man like Mr Phillips, the Crown Jeweller of Great Britain, whose daily round was largely devoted to considering the effect of the world’s most famous jewels on the world’s most beautiful women, temporarily forgot the purpose of their meeting in his cramped oval office overlooking Regent Street.

  In the concrete canyons around Wall Street, the presence of Catherine Bourton could render innumerate any of the men who had dollar signs where their wives presumed their hearts to be; in a boardroom in the City of London, captains of industry would meander through their agenda muttering compliments and vying for her attention if Catherine Bourton was among them; the two men in Mr Phillips’gilded candy-box at Garrard’s were lost the instant she joined them.

  The power of her beauty came from the combination of the symmetrical purity of her High Renaissance face with the sensual promise of her mouth. Catherine Bourton’s mouth looked soft and crumpled, as if it had just been kissed and would respond favourably to being kissed again. The top lip was a little wider and fuller than the bottom lip, giving her an ineradicable smile. Time magazine had called her the Mona Lisa of Wall Street. Catherine had not been surprised. She had been called the Mona Lisa of somewhere or other ever since she could remember.

  Nowadays, her reputation came before her. Mr Phillips had first met her when she was a debutante; pretty, he remembered, but not more distinctive among the crop than one of the spring daffodils in Hyde Park. Like many men after him, Mr Phillips had misjudged her. She had seldom been out of the headlines since their first meeting, on so many different counts – her marriage, her divorce, her adventures in the City, her glittering connections, and the suspicion that she was the architect of some of the most conspicuous personal fortunes in the world.

  Since generosity and fair-mindedness were among Catherine’s other qualities, she seldom brought her sexual attraction into play unless all other tactics had failed. She had found that this was also more efficient. She was dressed to underplay her allure, in a plain, black linen suit from Chanel, with her straight brown hair cut in a simple bob.

  She wore square-cut diamond earrings, very fine blue-white stones of the first water, because she knew that a jeweller, even Mr Phillips at Garrard’s, judged people largely on their jewellery. Just as the plain cut of the diamonds only emphasized their quality, so the simplicity of her dress only made her seem more attractive. She considered this Catch 22 typical of the double binds which affect a woman in a man’s world; it left her only two possibilities – to win like a man, or to win like a woman.

  She liked to win; situations in which winning was neither necessary nor possible disturbed her, and she had come to Garrard’s to deal with what she suspected was a major problem of this kind.

  ‘So, Mr Phillips, what can you tell me about our pearls?’ she began, taking the hard upright chair by his desk. ‘I’ve broken my schedule and flown back to London specially to get your opinion. When I spoke to my sister in New Orleans this morning she was dying to know what you’ve found out. It’s not every day we both wake up in the morning and find someone’s hidden a pair of pearls under our pillows. Did the tooth fairy get her deliveries mixed up? Or do you think there’s a logical explanation?’

  She talked about her sister with the same kind of adoration that Mr Phillips associated with young brides talking about their husbands; there could be no doubt that this was the most thrilling, the most precious, the most extraordinary person in her world. Mr Phillips was aware that some of his younger staff, who followed pop music, shared Catherine Bourton’s high opinion of her sister Monty; however, Mr Phillips himself knew nothing about popular music or its stars.

  He was a fine looking man with the military haircut and shiny shoes of all British courtiers, and he opened his dog-eared file with a nervous snuffle. The August heat made his office stuffy and the plastic desk fan which stirred the sticky air also propelled dust into the atmosphere.

  ‘I’ve asked Mr Jerryman, our chief pearl trader, to join us.’ He indicated the wiry, white-haired man at his side, who took a small, polythene envelope from the inside pocket of his black jacket.

  ‘He has examined them and, broadly speaking, the news is that you have a pair of very fine, pink pearls, teardrop shape, probably of oriental origin …’

  ‘And worth?’ Catherine knew t
hat when an Englishman said ‘broadly speaking’and called in a second opinion, she was to be treated to a round of ancient British bullshit.

  ‘The price, you mean?’ Mr Phillips seemed faintly offended that money should be mentioned in the presence of such glorious jewels.

  Mr Jerryman tipped the pearls out of their protective plastic envelope into his hand. Against his papery skin the lustrous gems glowed like living things. ‘Pearls are very hard to price, very hard.’ Mr Jerryman shook his head and smoothed his slicked-down white hair. ‘The great pearls, like La Peregrina, which Richard Burton gave to Elizabeth Taylor, are almost personalities in their own right. They are more or less priceless.’

  ‘Well, how do these two compare to La Peregrina?’ Catherine disliked imprecision, especially about money.

  ‘We think they compare very well.’ Mr Phillips twinkled at her and took off his glasses for emphasis. ‘Don’t we, Mr Jerryman?’

  Cradling the pearls in his palm Mr Jerryman gently pulled a cream silk handkerchief from his pocket and spread it on the small table by the grimy window. ‘We always look at pearls against a pale background such as this,’ he picked the two jewels out of his hand and placed them on the cloth with reverence, ‘because a pearl is a responsive surface, and it tends to take on the colour and texture of whatever it is displayed against. That’s why, of course, pearls look so good against a – er – a lady’s …’ he paused, embarrassed.

  ‘Skin?’ Catherine suggested, amused.

  ‘Quite so. Now the first question to consider is whether these are completely natural pearls, or whether they are cultured. And there is no doubt that these are natural pearls because of their size.’ Catherine gave him her most patient smile. ‘They are each around 200 carats, which means they must be among the largest pearls ever fished – and you simply do not get cultured pearls that large. Only the biggest species of oyster, called Pinctada maxima, can make a pearl of this size, and that species does not take kindly to interference, so they are never used for culturing.’

  ‘And, apart from the size, of course, there are the X-rays.’ Mr Phillips unclipped two small plates, no bigger than dental X-rays, from the file and held them up against the occluded light of the begrimed window. Catherine saw that each pearl showed a succession of faintly marked rings, like the annual rings of a treetrunk. ‘A cultured pearl is achieved by seeding the oyster with a tiny piece of grit.’ Phillips waved his pen over the X-rays with authority. ‘In consequence, that impurity always shows up on the plates – but in this case there’s nothing, so we can be sure they’re natural pearls.’

  ‘And the third check is on the specific gravity,’ the older man resumed. ‘Natural pearls are always just a tiny bit heavier for their size, because they are solid nacre.’

  ‘Nacre, what’s that?’ Catherine enquired pleasantly. Encouraging a display of technical knowledge always gave the boys confidence. Meetings, like everything else about business, were a game to her, and the first rule was to leave the guys their balls.

  ‘Nacre is the stuff the mother oyster makes the pearls with – it’s built up in layers around the centre. See here on the X-ray, these little rings?’ Mr Phillips gestured again with his fountain pen.

  ‘Chemically it is mostly just calcium carbonate – the same as blackboard chalk or the granite kerbstones down there on Piccadilly Circus,’ Mr Jerryman warmed to his favourite subject. ‘The magic ingredient of nacre is something called conchiolin, a protein secreted by the oyster’s tissues to bind it all together.’

  ‘Does it tell you anything?’ prompted Catherine blandly. ‘My sister and I are just longing to know about these pearls. They’re the most mysterious thing that’s ever happened to us.’

  ‘Why, yes, it tells us quite a lot. We can get some idea of the pearl’s age from the nacre, because it builds up at about a thousand layers a year; but any pearl this size will have come from a bed undisturbed for decades.’ Mr Jerryman turned the jewels over on the silk with a gesture of affection. ‘The colour gives us some clues, too – it’s partly due to pigment in the nacre, and partly determined by the way the light is refracted between the outer layers. These are a very rare colour – almost apricot, don’t you think?’

  Mr Phillips unfolded his gold-rimmed half-glasses and put them on again to peer closely at the pearls. ‘Yes, apricot’s about right – creamy-golden with a touch of pink in there.’

  ‘But, what does that mean?’ Catherine gave Mr Phillips’elaborate ormolu clock a marked glance – for how much of this minuet did she have time?

  ‘These must have been made by the gold-lipped sub-species of Pinctada maxima, which narrows down the country of origin for you,’ the white-haired jeweller explained. ‘And you only find the gold-lipped pearl oyster off Burma, Thailand and the Indonesian islands. Now, I have some contacts out there, and I’ve sent a few telexes, but no one’s got any information. Which I regard as highly significant.’ Mr Phillips removed his spectacles to underline the seriousness of his pronouncement, ‘because when a pearl this size is found – which is very rare, maybe once in twenty years – they know about it in every bar in Tokyo by the end of the week. Fishing up a perfect pair like this ought to have been headline news around the world. I’d be most surprised if these two had been traded on the open market.’

  ‘Are you saying they’re stolen?’ The idea did not appear to disturb Catherine Bourton as much as the two men had feared.

  ‘Not necessarily, but they must have been acquired by some private means – unless the tooth fairy has taken up pearl fishing in her spare time.’ They laughed, pleased that the awkward moment had passed.

  ‘And you’re sure they’re quite new – not antique? My sister and I thought perhaps they might turn up in your records somewhere.’

  ‘We checked our ledgers, of course,’ Mr Phillips was anxious not to appear negligently complacent in his expertise, ‘and I’ve checked with Sotheby’s and Christie’s for you as well, but I didn’t expect they would find them. We were sure they hadn’t been out of the sea very long. It’s what we call the lustre, you see, that gleam they have that’s strong and gentle at the same time; it fades if the pearls aren’t worn next to the skin once they’re out of the oyster. I got these others out of our safe to show you what we mean.’ He reached into his desk and pulled out a pair of pearl drop earrings set with diamonds.

  Catherine noticed immediately that the large pale pearls were identical to those worn by a prominent European princess whose signed photograph was half-hidden by the pile of papers on the desk. She also noticed that the pearls were dull, not shiny like the ones she had brought them. She could see her face in those shiny surfaces.

  The Garrard’s ledgers, she knew, recorded almost every major jewel in the world. They were large vellum-paged account books, bound in leather the colour of autumn leaves, which recorded the history of the world’s ruling classes as accurately as any history book. The early volumes, from the first entry in 1730, related to the crown jewels of Great Britain, a hoard increased at each dynastic marriage. Then the wealth of the British Empire appeared, in the form of maharajahs’rubies and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, set in 1853.

  From the turn of the century, the once-crowned heads of Europe came to Garrard’s to sell what jewels they had been able to salvage from their revolutionary deposers. The ledgers even recorded the shameful affair of the Imperial Russian jewel-case, sent for sale, on behalf of the Tsar’s family, by Britain’s Queen Mary only after she had picked the choicest items for herself. Of late, many of the ledger entries recorded the creation of state regalia for the new countries of the third world; but there was still some business accruing from royal patronage – like the diamond and drop-pearl tiara given by the Queen to the Princess of Wales on her wedding.

  ‘See the difference? These were collected by Elizabeth of Bohemia in the seventeenth century. Mind you, don’t say I said that because she tells everyone they were the Empress Josephine’s.’ He glanced at the princess’s photograph. �
��But she won’t wear them, and they’ll never get that shine back now.’ He shook his head, implying that the foolishness of princesses was an occupational hazard.

  ‘Do you think ours have ever been worn?’

  ‘No, frankly, I doubt it. I’ll tell you why. They’re the same weight as La Peregrina, which used to belong to the Duchess of Abercorn, and I remember her telling me that she had to have it bored because it was too heavy to stay in a claw setting and she once lost it down the side of a sofa-cushion in Buckingham Palace. She was always losing it, in fact. These two haven’t been bored, so I doubt they’ve ever been worn. We’d be happy to set them for you, of course. Splendid pair of earrings – had some nice little diamonds in last week, set them off a treat …’

  Catherine smiled with polite regret, and opened her briefcase to take out two white leather jewel-boxes. She reached forward, picked up the pearls, and fitted each one into the little nest of black velvet inside its box, and put them back in the briefcase. ‘But, I’m sure that boring them will reduce their value?’

  The two men nodded as she rose to her feet and moved towards the door.

  ‘And my sister and I would like to find out who gave them to us before we do anything else. Now, if I’ve remembered correctly, we know that these pearls must be newly discovered, from somewhere in Burma, Thailand or Indonesia, and perhaps stolen or at least sold privately, and they’ve never been worn.’

  ‘I’d guess from a small fishery,’ added the older man, tucking his handkerchief back into his breast pocket. ‘They’d never have been able to keep the discovery secret in a big operation.’

  Catherine thanked the two men with such grace that they were at once convinced they had solved the entire mystery of the pearls. Mr Phillips escorted her through the blue-walled enclave which the Garrard’s staff call the royal enclosure and watched as she walked briskly but unevenly out into Regent Street. She had a very slight limp.