Guy nods wistfully.
“Yeah, it kind of does.”
“My family is very fractured,” she explains. “My mother died young. She had a stroke. I was only six so I don’t remember much about it, but it meant that my sister and I were left with my dad, who hasn’t been the greatest of parents, and with my grandmother, Nancy, who was… Well, let’s just say it was a brusque kind of love—”
“Formative?” says Guy, as he picks up a figurine, examines the base, then places it back.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“And what do you know about your mother?”
“She only got to thirty-three. Shit luck. She was an illustrator like Nancy, worked for a publishing company. Carmen Victoria Barrow née Taylor. I took the Taylor name back when I fell out with my dad. I believe she was talented. I used to like looking at her drawings. God knows where they are now. Probably in a dumpster somewhere. My dad, he had to…purge.”
“Do you remember her well?”
Jess smiles.
“Only in my dreams. I think of her now as this beautiful dark-haired princess with green eyes and perfect teeth. I remember her showing me the necklace—”
“The necklace?”
“The very one,” she says, holding his gaze. “I also just found out I’m possibly related to a Golden Age Hollywood producer—”
“Hollywood? So why are you here? Why aren’t you drinking wheatgrass in Beverly Hills?”
“I don’t like wheatgrass…but I’ll visit one day. I’d love to find out more about my great-grandmother, Anna, about her life there. She made jewelry for the movies apparently.”
“I like her already!”
“Yes, she sounds fascinating. I think maybe she’s the ancestor responsible for my adventurous streak.”
“Adventurous streak? If you have an adventurous streak, then what are you waiting for? Get on a plane and get yourself to Hollywood.”
“What? Just like that? Just go?”
“Ah sorry, maybe you’re not such a fan of planes—”
“No, it’s just”—she sighs, shuts her eyes, runs her hand down her hip—“spontaneity… It’s not really my thing anymore.”
“Nonsense.”
She hangs her head, deflated.
“Look at me. I can’t do things like I used to. My body won’t play ball. I can’t simply jump on a plane and go here and go there. I’d love to, but…I can’t. If I sit too long, I seize up, and if I walk too far, I get exhausted. Everything’s an effort. Everything takes planning. And sometimes…sometimes everything just hurts!”
If Tim were at her side right now, he’d smother her with hugs, tell her she’s safe, and promise to make her happy wherever she is, whatever her limits. Guy, meanwhile, gives a nonchalant shrug.
“Can’t?” he says. “Or won’t?”
Jess tenses, caught by his judgment.
“Seriously,” he continues, cajoling. “Hollywood’s not as far away as it sometimes seems. I go to LA all the time. Stella has a house there. She likes to throw parties—or rather, she likes people to throw parties for her. It’s in the hills, got a great pool.”
“Lucky you. Nice perk.”
“What I’m trying to say is, if you ever want a traveling companion, someone who knows Hollywood like the back of their hand…I’d be happy to oblige. In fact, what I’d do,” he says, eyes lighting up, “is take you to Old Hollywood.”
“Old Hollywood?”
“Trust me, Old Hollywood’s your vibe. You’ll be in costume-jewelry heaven. So many stories. So much decadence. Musso’s. I’d take you to Musso’s. It’s this restaurant on the Boulevard, near the old Egyptian Theatre—you’d love it—called the Musso & Frank Grill. I tell you, Jess, it hasn’t changed in seventy years. It’s like stepping back in time.”
The way he talks, nonstop, with so much enthusiasm, is infectious. It reminds her of someone, but she can’t think whom.
“Sounds amazing,” she says. “And I will go. Eventually.”
“Ah,” he says with a clap of his hands. “Stop the excuses. Go now. There’s no time like now.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she says drily, hobbling on, aware that while a stroll down Portobello Road with Guy van de Meer is an inappropriate flirtation, a rendezvous on another continent is at a whole other level.
Chapter Eleven
Nancy looks thinner than ever. Her breathing is shallow, but her eyes still just about bear that twinkle. At the side of the bed, Jess has the envelope of Nancy’s Denmark Street photographs in her hand, hopeful that the sight of them might stir Nancy’s memory, ignite a reaction. She scatters them on the blanket, those vibrant images of teenage Nancy staring back.
“Look,” Jess whispers. “This is you. This is you, Grandma, as a young woman wearing the necklace! It’s not the actual necklace, I appreciate, but”—she squeezes Nancy’s hand—“I’ve been working on that. I’ll have it soon, I promise.”
She flips one of the photos to reveal the sticker on the back.
“‘Paul Angel Photography, 1954,’” she reads. “Who is Paul Angel, Grandma? Do you remember when these were taken?”
Nancy’s gaze is fixed to the ceiling. Jess waves the photo in front of her, one of the best, in which she’s standing with her arms folded—a hint of her future attitude within that demure fifties circle dress—but there is no discernable response.
“I’ve been squirrelling around,” Jess persists, “seeing what I can find out about our Taylor women. I went to Wales and discovered these photographs in your desk at the cabin. I’d love to know the story behind them. Your cabin’s fine, by the way. Still standing—just. And I met with Bevan Floyd, who sends his best wishes. What a nice human! He showed me around Pel Tawr and told me all about Minnie and Emery and the making of the necklace. He even gave me Minnie’s sketchbook. And he talked about your mother, Anna, about her going off to America. So it’s true? You were born in Hollywood.”
She pats Nancy’s hand, expecting more silence, then suddenly Nancy springs into verbosity.
“Oh yes, on good days, my mother was impeccable,” she exclaims. “She’d set her hair, arrange her jewelry—earrings, brooches, hairpins, bangles…she brought them all with her. On bad days, though, she’d just lie on the sofa, drinking sweet sherry, endlessly lamenting her beloved Zedora—”
“Zedora?”
“Yes, Jessy, with the gilded toilet handle that Lucille Ball was rumored to have broken.”
Jess laughs. “Now you’re really confusing me! What on earth is a Zedora?”
Nancy looks pensive.
“It’s all gone now.”
“What?” say Jess, tensing. “What’s gone, Grandma?”
Nancy sighs.
“Her life. My mother’s glamorous life. All her stories… They became nothing more than stories, from a world we’d never get back. Wake up, I used to think. Face it, move on. I knew better than to join her in the shadows of nostalgia, Jessy, because while those stories always began with jubilance…they finished with tears.”
Jess rests her chin on her hand, puzzled that these remarks don’t match the audacious and vivacious image of Anna she’d had in mind.
“What happened, Grandma, to make her so regretful?”
Nancy scowls.
“That’s Anna’s business.”
“But—”
“We came back to London and lived in a terrible place.”
“Are you talking about the tenement block?” says Jess, remembering how Nancy had sometimes talked of a grimy flat in Poplar, where she’d spent her early teens.
“That place,” she scowls. “The surrounding streets were still pitted with bomb damage. No running water, damp in the walls, TB in the corridors, never a clean sheet, and the only working kitchen facilities were located on the second-floor stairwell, shared w
ith three other families, who had shouty boys who got on my nerves.”
“So what on earth happened to Hollywood?”
Jess leans in, hopeful for an answer, but the way Nancy looks vacantly around her, it’s clear her focus is starting to drift—the scenes of her life ebbing and flowing in no coherent order.
“‘You should marry the grocer’s son,’” she says with a twisted Welsh American accent, which Jess assumes to be an impression of Anna’s. “‘The grocer’s son has something about him. Choose your suitor well, my girl. Don’t make the mistakes I made.’”
Nancy leans toward her photo, taps the necklace with her fingertip.
“My mother thought our butterfly would attract the grocer’s son,” she recounts. “With all her dramatics, she pressed it into my palm and said it would be in my interest to try it out on him.”
“And did you?” says Jess, gripped.
“Absolutely not. I hated that dolt.”
“Oh.”
After a moment, Jess picks up a few more of the Paul Angel photographs.
“So what about these images, Grandma? You’re wearing the necklace in them. What are you here…fifteen…sixteen maybe?”
Nancy grins impishly.
“Yes, I skipped school,” she whispers. “That was my best dress. I wore my best dress so that no one would know I was an O Level student with a Woolworth’s uniform. I skipped school and took a Routemaster to the center of London.”
“To Denmark Street?” says Jess, reading the words on the sign. “The beating heart of the rock-and-roll scene. So did you want to be a musician?”
“Goodness no. I was looking for a pawnbroker.”
“A pawnbroker?”
“My mother was reckless with our finances, wasted everything on nail polish, sherry, and cigarillos. I wanted money she wouldn’t know about so that I could buy food and stockings. I’d heard about the pawnbrokers from neighbors, places you could get quick cash. So when she gave me the necklace, I took it—”
“You pawned the necklace?”
“Not quite.”
Jess puzzles. “Then—?”
“I jumped off the bus at the first shop I saw, on the corner of Denmark Street, only to discover I was too early. Schoolgirl eagerness. The shop wouldn’t open for another hour, so I took the necklace out of my bag, clipped it around my neck, and”—she smiles suddenly—“for just a while, I walked up and down the street, feeling sophisticated. I remember I saw a man with horn-rimmed glasses, guitar strung over his shoulder. He gave me a nod, then disappeared into a tatty building advertising itself as a recording studio. Then I admired a pair of women dressed in matching polka-dot fit-and-flare dresses. They were giggling and singing as they walked along, their voices sweetly harmonious. Glamorous, but in that ragged, haven’t-slept-all-night kind of way… I knew the touch. Then as I crossed the street, I noticed I too was being admired.”
Now there is a fulsome twinkle in her eyes.
“He was there in a trilby hat,” she whispers, “hunched over his camera. He looked up and signaled for me to wait. At first I thought better of it and walked on, but he called after me. His accent was cockney, like my neighbors, and that was reassuring. ‘Don’t rush off!’ he said. He told me his name was Paul, then he threw out his hand and I didn’t know what to do, because I’d never shaken a stranger’s hand before. He said he liked my necklace, asked if he could take a photo of me wearing it. He said he knew the style: turn of the century, art nouveau. ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘it’s due a revival. I bet you, in ten years’ time it’ll be all the rage.’ So I removed it and pushed it into his hands and I told him: ‘My mother wouldn’t want you to take my picture, sir, but if you like my necklace, I’ll sell it to you.’”
“And did that work?”
“He pushed it back to me. But then…he noticed my malnourished limbs and offered to take me to Gideon’s Café to buy me a breakfast. He promised he wasn’t a sleaze, said I could ask anyone on the street. They all knew him. He said he photographed musicians—Petula Clark, Lonnie Donegan, Frankie Vaughan. He told me it was his business to capture them looking sharp, respectable. He said some of them come from the United States, stars like Little Richard and Nat King Cole. So I told him”—she puffs out her chest—“that I was born in Hollywood. He said I’d have to tell him all about it over a fried-egg sandwich.
“As he spoke, he lifted his camera. And I started posing, not sure whether I was doing it right, but doing it nonetheless. And”—she closes her eyes as though reliving the moment in her mind—“I shut my eyes and began thinking about how outraged my mother would be, only to realize I didn’t care. When I opened my eyes again, Paul had lowered his camera and was gazing straight at me. It made me feel quite peculiar, like everything in my soul was leaping. Then as he gazed at me, Jessy, his eyes, huge and blue with long, dusky lashes, I sensed them scanning the necklace at my neck…and that…that, I think, was where the magic happened.”
Jess sighs, entranced.
“So it was Paul Angel,” she whispers. “He was your soul mate. The necklace brought you together. Oh, Nancy—”
Nancy smiles, such a smile, one that Jess has never seen before, an inner radiance shining through.
“What happened to him, Grandma? Did it work out?”
At this, Nancy snaps her eyes shut. She turns away and refuses to speak more, leaving Jess with the feeling she has just acquired more questions than answers.
Chapter Twelve
The travel agent raises his brow.
“Tomorrow?” he asks.
“If possible,” says Jess, crossing her fingers.
The agent taps his computer keyboard. Meanwhile Jess smiles and floats through the moment. The impulse that has carried her here—to Abbotts Travel on the corner of the high road, with its window adverts promising the cheapest flight deals available—hums in her chest. She yearns to find out more about Anna, who now seems rather more complicated than she’d taken her for; to uncover more Taylor secrets while Nancy is still able—just about—to fill in the missing details. Jess knows it’s a risk, that Nancy could decline at any time, but she also knows, given the opportunity, what Nancy would do if she could. She can almost hear her voice in her head: You’re a Taylor! Get on that plane!
“Okay.” The agent strokes his beard and turns the screen to face her. “Leaving what time?”
“Hmm,” says Jess, her thoughts drawn to the Capital Gala at the end of next week; her chances of recovering from jet lag, combined with Nancy’s chances of hanging in there. “I’m kind of on a time limit. Maybe…first thing?”
“Spur of the moment, eh? Good for you.”
They both grin and the hunt for a deal begins.
***
An hour later, Tim matches the travel agent’s surprise.
“Tomorrow?” he says. “Los Angeles? Tomorrow?”
“Real cheap flights,” says Jess, beaming. “I reserved two. The agent can hold them for an hour. I just thought—”
Tim scratches his head, gives a confounded sigh.
“I’m not sure you did think, Jessy. Otherwise, you’d have considered the fact that I simply can’t drop everything and go off for a random week of jollity.”
“But the school holidays have started. Why not have a surprise break? Besides, it’s not a week, just a few days.”
“All that way for a few days?”
“Loads of people do it,” she says, realizing that by “loads of people” she means Stella Weston. “I–I want to do it for Nancy and, well, we hadn’t made any other plans, so—”
“That’s because we’re buying a home, Jess. Normal people don’t splurge on new flats and luxury holidays in the same month. We have to be sensible about this.”
“It’s not luxury,” Jess protests. “The flights were a bargain, and we can stay in a hostel.”
Tim balks.
“I’m forty. I don’t want to stay in a hostel.”
“Oh, come on, it’ll be an adventure.”
Jess sighs. This hasn’t gone the way she’d hoped. Meanwhile Tim paces the floor until, ever considerate, he manages to find something nice to say.
“Thank you for the thought. I do love your spirit, Jess, but ultimately it’s an adventure I wasn’t counting on. You know what I’m like. I need a plan. I need routines. Besides, I’ve entered a cycle series, three races over three weeks—”
Jess twitches, fearful of turning into Aggie, who bitterly complains about being a bike widow, while Ed backs up his calendar with cycling meets, because cycling, he claims, with close-to-the-knuckle humor, is the only time he can be himself and not some dried-up house slave.
“More cycling?”
“I thought you liked me cycling,” says Tim, pulling her close. “What it does to my thighs—”
She casts her eyes to his tight bulked quads, the physical attribute that first got her attention.
“I do like your thighs,” she says, “but I also like having a life.”
“Well, if you really want a holiday, maybe we could go away at the end of the summer, late August? Do something that’ll be easier on your hip? After all, you’re supposed to be resting and healing, not taking last-minute long-haul mini-breaks. In fact, if you fancy it, we could join Collette and her boyfriend. They’ve hired a villa in Portugal, and they said anyone’s welcome to—”
Jess glowers.
“I don’t want to go Portugal with Collette and her boyfriend. I’ve never met her boyfriend. And I have this theory that Collette thinks I’m strange. And, ultimately, I don’t want to rest and heal. I want to live. I want to do it all and go crazy. Think about it…Hollywood!”
“Jess, I can’t.” Now he is churlish. “It’s too last-minute. I can’t get my head around it. And, to be honest, all of this sudden adventure-seeking spirit of yours is frankly rather maverick.”
The Lost and Found Necklace Page 14
