The Jewel

by Neil Hegarty

  ‘You are right,’ Ward said, tilting back his chair a little. Charlotte said nothing more, so Ward glanced at Rob. ‘This is the bit you wouldn’t have seen in the files. Ireland has had a couple of notorious break-ins, art thefts; so they’ll be super-touchy about yet another one.’

  ‘Touchy,’ Charlotte echoed. ‘Yes: exactly – I got a definite touchiness on the phone.’

  ‘OK,’ Rob pursed his lips. ‘Anything else?’

  She shook her head. ‘The man, the young chap who almost died: there doesn’t seem to be any extraordinary story there. He was working late: wrong place at the wrong time, just bad luck, really. You saw in the notes that there’s a witness: an older woman, a big cheese in the gallery. They haven’t said much about this side of things.’

  ‘And the painting itself?’

  Charlotte shook her head again. ‘Do they want money, was it a bespoke collector’s theft, only two choices, and we don’t know which. That’s for you to find out.’

  There was a short silence, and then Ward and Rob stirred themselves to leave. They were nearly at the door when Charlotte spoke again.

  ‘Do tread carefully with this one: it really will be ballet shoes all the way. OK?’ She looked at them, looking at her. ‘I hope you’ve packed your ballet shoes, Ward. We don’t want any rows, any quarrels, so be careful.’

  Ward said, ‘Careful with ourselves?’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t care about yourselves. Just be careful with your language. That’s all I mean.’ She waved them away; and that, Ward thought, was an end to that.

  *

  Be careful, be careful. Ward thought about Charlotte’s warning all the way to Heathrow in the taxi, all the way through security, all the way over on the short flight to Dublin. Be careful, be careful.

  Charlotte had not infrequently demonstrated this sort of – sixth sense, or ability to place a talon on a soft piece of flesh, on a scab, on a wound.

  Run the talon along its delicate, reddened, painful surface. Its barely healed surface. Withdraw the talon, having caused just enough pain. Return to business, with a feeling – presumably – of satisfaction.

  Be careful. Of causing annoyance, of inflaming sensitivities: that was all that Charlotte meant. No use taking all this seriously, personally. It was – Ward thought as they banked a little at thirty-six thousand feet over the Mersey and began the long, slow glide across the water to Dublin – hardly a warning in any case. It was more of an admonition. A professional admonition; Charlotte was just doing her job. Probably she said this at the beginning of every new project, and he had never noticed before.

  Be careful. Watch your mouth, your back, watch everything. Mind the long wounds on your body – healed now, but still visible as thin, vertical scarring. All the sorrows that a body can bear.

  Charlotte hadn’t meant anything out of the ordinary.

  Ward ran a hand across his eyes. He thought: don’t be a drama queen.

  Rob had the window seat: and after having left Ward well alone for most of the journey, he poked him now between two ribs.

  ‘There’s Llandudno,’ he said, pointing out of the window and down. ‘We went there for the weekend, once.’

  ‘Not us, you don’t mean.’

  ‘With Jane and the kids; a few days away,’ Rob went on, ignoring him. ‘Ice cream, the beach, the Great Orme.’

  ‘The Great Orme.’ He had been on the Great Orme too. He had gone walking on the Great Orme with Martin once. A weekend in Snowdonia. What, God, six, seven years ago already. ‘That sounds nice.’

  ‘It was nice. It was a lovely few days.’ He paused. ‘And now look at us.’

  Ward said nothing.

  ‘I sometimes wonder what the hell I’m doing, mate,’ Rob went on. ‘I move to the other side of the world; I get married, I get divorced, I don’t see enough of my kids, I just keep moving and moving.’

  Ward nodded. ‘I know.’

  Rob sat back in his seat; the Great Orme drifted away below them.

  A pair of cabin crew, a stewardess, a camp steward, appeared with their trolley, and began to clear away the empty peanut bags, the plastic cups and glasses; the steward looked at Ward, raised an engineered eyebrow, looked away. Ward was too old for these ruthless, fascistic boys even to waste time, to waste a moment looking at, these days.

  He saw Rob watching, smiling briefly, looking away.

  The young guys these days, they plucked and preened at themselves far too bloody much – so Ward reflected now, as the ruthless young steward passed on, as the tray tables were stowed all about him, as the cabin warning lights illuminated and the aeroplane began a new sort of vibration, and slipped through dirty grey clouds.

  The Irish coast was approaching. Grey too at first, and obscured here and there by grey cloud, and then as the plane flew lower and lower and the coast grew closer and closer – suddenly green, as though in a film shifting from black-and-white to colour. The Wizard of Oz. Truly emerald too: a green coast, backed by green hills that faded to purple on their upper slopes, and then vanished into a haze; and the pincer arms of Dún Laoghaire harbour to the north, and now houses and estates, and a slicing motorway, as the mass of south Dublin spread out below. Come out, come out, wherever you are. His memory flashing a scene – from long ago, when he was still living unhappily in Dublin, clad in a transparent plastic poncho and seated in a downpour to watch a public screening of The Wizard of Oz. Come out, come out, wherever you are, said Glinda, and she waved her long magic wand, and all the gays in the audience tittered appreciatively. Only bad witches are ugly, she said, and a long trickle of rain flowed coldly down Ward’s neck and spine, to join the puddle of water he was sitting in, poncho or no poncho. And meet the young lady who fell from a star. The rain was falling as though a high-pressure hose had been trained on them. The house began to pitch, the Munchkins squealed, the kitchen took a slitch. ‘I thought we could go for a pint after this,’ he said through the rain, through the poncho, ‘just the two of us.’ But Briain shrugged. ‘Well, let’s see what the lads are at, will we?’ Ward opened his eyes as the wheels of the plane thumped onto the runway, and the engines roared. How had the evening ended? – not pints with Briain, not pints with anyone, he had gone home to change out of his soaking clothes, to have a shower, to go alone to bed.

  He was aware of Rob glancing at him, glancing again. A growing bustle as their fellow passengers began to stretch, to organise. ‘Here we are,’ Rob said, an eyebrow quirking up; and Ward nodded, said nothing. No wish to be back. He had put Ireland behind him, and thankfully he was in a line of work in which Ireland figured infrequently; and he had always managed to wriggle out of any dealings with the place. He had become an adept. But not this time. A stolen painting and a lonely, ignored Victorian lady artist were dragging him home, and a slashed throat into the bargain.

  Ward blinked as the plane vibrated noisily around him, and then gave up and closed his eyes. Melodrama he hated: give me underplayed, unspoken, he would say, any time. Of course he was aware of it; he wasn’t completely stupid. The irony, that he should end up living in the house on Despard Road with Martin, who was adept at a mocking falsetto, who liked to tell dramatic stories with gusto, who had a taste for the dramatic life. This had been one of the attractions, at first. A certain kind of drama, mingled and blended with what Ward took to be comedy, and signalled by that falsetto voice.

  ‘OK?’ said Rob.

  Martin had slipped into falsetto that very first night – later, when it was just the two of them, in the bar with the heavy, uncomfortable iron chairs, their stomachs filled with Spanish food, their minds and emotions on the tingle for what was still to come. Martin had been mocking some work colleague or other, mimicking this guy’s accent. What had it been? – his Essex tones, it had been all about class, as usual, overlaid by a freakish shrill voice. And drawing attention to the red splotch of birthmark on the man’s neck. ‘It’s a second mouth,’ Martin shrilled. ‘I have a second mouth, when I get tired talkin
g out of my main mouth, I just switch to secondary systems. I’m very lucky in that regard, me.’

  Ward laughed, sat forward in the heavy chair, laughed again.

  ‘Moron,’ added Martin, switching back to his own pleasant tenor. ‘Anyway, that’s work, that’s what I do. Tell me more about you now.’

  That was then.

  Now, he mimicked Ward’s lisp, the little issue he had with the th sound.

  Only sometimes though.

  Behind his closed eyelids, Ward felt the beginning of tears. ‘Yes, fine,’ he told Rob, and opened his eyes.

  They retrieved their cases from the carousel, elbowed their way out into the arrivals hall, and into a taxi. Dublin blurred past: it was mizzling, and the windows of the car were smeared with wet grime, and the outskirts of Dublin were, Ward thought, not exactly Florence; and the combined effect of low skies, grey light, dirty windows and a surfeit of pebbledash made his heart sink.

  ‘Focus up there, mate.’

  ‘I am bloody focused?’

  ‘You’re the opposite of bloody focused, Ward. I need you to translate.’

  Point made: and Ward focused up, or tried to; at any rate, he had his mind on the matter at hand by the time the taxi had inched its way into the city centre and dropped the two men on the street. The place looked much the same: clean eighteenth-century lines messed up by modern shop fronts, the busy intersection, a bus here and a bus there, crowds of pedestrians, and tourists bound for the Book of Kells. Neither smart, in spite of the Georgian brickwork, nor especially scuzzy, but rather carefully middling.

  And there it was. There was the gallery.

  17

  And the funeral was something else. All of Deptford turned out, and the exiles returned from Eltham and Charlton. The church – that his father had never attended – was full, the sun shone yellow through the stained glass, and his mum listened as the vicar spoke the words she understood. ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ She nodded at that. ‘Comfort us again now after the time that thou hast plagued us: and for the years wherein we have suffered adversity. Shew thy servants thy work: and their children thy glory. And the glorious majesty of the Lord our God be upon us: prosper thou the work of our hands upon us, O prosper thou our handiwork.’ She bowed her head.

  An accident on a building site, John told Stella. ‘They rang and told us. I don’t really remember the details: I didn’t ask too many questions.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Stella said quietly. ‘Poor you, and your mother.’

  He nodded.

  A numbness as the vicar ran through the liturgy. The man of the house, they said to him. Which was laughable: but it would have to do.

  ‘I suppose,’ and Stella was silent.

  This was in the Prince Regent – which afterwards was filled to the brim. John walked from group to group, thank you, and thank you, and the old men told him that he was the man of the house now. What house? – he wanted to say. We’ll have no house, soon, for God’s sake. His mother stayed at the centre of the pub, amid a tight group of women. A sherry sat on the table, but she did not drink. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ said the old-time Irish; the English touched her elbow and her shoulder and said little; the party broke up late.

  And when the funeral was over, they made his mother move to a city in the sky. Theirs was the last house on Regina Road to die; within weeks, the houses were scoured away.

  ‘We’ll make the best of it,’ his mother said, and she rolled her hands in her apron, and looked out at the sky and the distant horizon. ‘That’s all we can do.’ At first she went back to Deptford from time to time: a bus and another bus and you were there. But the buses were a nuisance, and the second one was hardly frequent; and with each visit, there were fewer and fewer faces she recognised. The glue was being picked away, and they were being painstaking about it; the old community was scattered across south London. Soon enough, she stopped going, and stayed in her city in the sky, and looked out at her view. There was quite a prospect up there, all the way to the South Downs, and London was green, and filled with the waving crowns of trees. It was pretty, she said, which was as well, because there was precious else to do up there but look, and wait for the day to pass.

  Days passed, and time, and a line was drawn, and now she never went back to Deptford. John did, though, just before the wrecking ball went to work; and then again afterwards, to see the scouring for himself. For a long time, they parked cars where Regina Road had once run; there was a long delay in the building process, they told him, on account of the seam of heavy blue clay that ran underneath the houses and down to and underneath the river. Eventually – though this was years later – they built new council houses. So he heard: he never saw them for himself. After he saw the car park, and the pools of rainwater lying on the rutted ground, he too never went back.

  *

  The banquette squeaked and juddered. The place was so dark: John did not think he had ever seen the actual shade of the plush velvet with which the banquettes were upholstered: a very deep shade of red, he imagined, and set off by golden paint, a gilt look, as though the banquette was in itself a framed piece. Or it might have been a thick black, Coca-Cola black. Who knew? – Mildred was an odd bird. But one thing was for sure: the place was as she wanted it to be, it looked as she wanted it to look. Mildred ran the tightest of ships.

  The banquette squeaked and juddered. Stella had bounced to her feet, the banquette bouncing with her, and gone along to the little girls’ room. ‘Just off to powder my nose,’ she would say. Or, ‘just off to the little girls’ room.’ Or, ‘Oops, a call of nature!’ It was the way of her, to speak thus, to speak in her squeaky little-girl voice, to veil or armour herself, to give the appearance of being what some men called a dolly bird.

  Stella was no dolly bird. It was amazing, the sort of ideas men would accept.

  ‘The girls are coming with me,’ she’d say. Or – standing in front of her swinging wardrobe door in her tiny terraced house at World’s End, which was squashed between shops selling incense and candles and herbal teas – she would glance over her shoulder and say, faux judiciously, ‘Let’s see, let’s see. I’m not planning to be upstaged by the girls tonight.’

  The girls were her breasts – ample, generous, the very best of breasts, in John’s opinion. Voluptuous. John liked to stay away from the clichés, but in this case, only voluptuous would do. The girls completed her, they didn’t upstage her. Though she was only joking about this battle for attention between herself and her girls. Stella and her girls, he could see, had the happiest of relationships. They got along just fine.

  Stella’s careful act fooled the men – or it fooled most of them, the foolish ones who looked no further than her yellow hair and her short skirts. They could or would or did not hear the tick-tick-ticking of her brain; or see the glint in her eye as she in a trice sized up a situation. Men, as she was fond of pointing out to John when they were alone, would not know a suit of armour if it fell on top of them.

  They were fools, really.

  ‘Not you, obviously.’

  What a great act she had going. And it began with her name.

  Her name wasn’t even Stella.

  ‘Begins with a V,’ she said, on that very first evening, ‘see if you can guess.’ This was in his Camberwell digs: a thin, omnipresent scent of gas from the penny-fed fire; an oilcloth on the enormous table which filled the room, which squeezed his narrow bed against one wall, his cheap tin sink against another. ‘I’ll sit here, here’s lovely,’ she said, on her first evening, making the best of it. He had suggested scrambling her an egg, and now he apologised for the place, and asked her to comfy herself up as much as possible.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘But, two eggs, if you have two.’

  Scrambling her an egg? They laughed about that, afterwards. Stella hadn’t been a pick-up job in some b
ar, some club. She had been around the college for some time: at any rate, he had been noticing her for some time, though he wasn’t sure that she had been noticing him. It was the yellow hair, and the girls, that did the job. The other students, the other women (because after he met Stella and talked to her for a little while, a matter of minutes, he could never use the word ‘girls’ again) had black hair, black out of a bottle, offputtingly black. Stella’s yellow hair had help from a bottle too, probably, but it was a good bottle if so. Her hair stood out as though it were lit under a lamp.

  Just noticing, first.

  Then he had – after weeks of this – walked up to her one afternoon, in the college lobby, and asked her to go for a coffee with him.

  ‘Would you like to go for a coffee with me some time?’ had been his pick-up line. He hadn’t even remembered to introduce himself, which was an indication (he admitted later) of his flurried state of mind.

  Yellow hair glimpsed, again and again, in the corridors and studios of the college. Dark-clad, like all the other students, albeit with a bust that ensured she caught his eye – but she nevertheless seemed quite ordinary, just another girl with a chest, dressed in black. There was no shortage of such types. He looked away.

  It took a little while for him to perceive the glow she seemed to emit. Nothing sexual, nothing particularly to do with her attractions. She was wholly self-possessed, or seemed to be so: and this was unusual among such a throng of the ambitious and the image-conscious as they moved through the college. Her ambition and vision seemed to be elsewhere: she seemed happy to drink her coffee on her own, and her eye was not continually on the rove, glancing over shoulders and out of windows for a sight of a better companion or situation. She was just herself, with a steadiness and an almost tangible rootedness, and she shone a little as a result.

  ‘Would you like to go for a coffee with me some time?’