The Lost and Found Necklace

by Louisa Leaman

  “We should definitely get a pet,” he says. “Our first shared love. I’ve heard it’s good practice for parenthood—and good for the nerves.”

  In anticipation of the move, Jess starts packing up her things. With every filled box and suitcase, she feels a step closer to the rest of her life and it feels…good. She even boxes up her jewelry, contemplates the possibility of that teaching post. Aggie is all for it.

  “Very wise to maximize your salary before maternity leave comes around. And think of the pension. Obviously you need your pension sorted out, Jessica.”

  Any lingering enthusiasm for the “charming thrills” end of the boyfriend spectrum is quashed completely when Steph comes home early one afternoon in a flood of tears. At first, fearing a tragedy, Jess suggests she call Aggie—a mother needs to be the first port of call in such circumstances—until Steph begs her not to, then finally explains, between deep, racking sobs, the reason for her anguish.

  “He’s dumped me and gone off with Lina Bird, just because it says on her Twitter that she volunteers for Greenpeace, and he thinks it’ll make him look cool—”

  “Jared?”

  “Yes.”

  More wailing. What should Jess say? There, there. Plenty more fish. It’ll all be okay.

  “What a fucking rat! He doesn’t deserve you, Stephanie Hoppit!”

  “But I’m soooooo in love with him. He’s my one. Always. I’ll never stop loving him.”

  “You will,” says Jess softly. “One day, really soon. You’ll meet someone else, and they’ll show you a different kind of love. And it’ll be a better love. Or maybe it will be worse. But either way, it will teach what you do want in life and what you don’t.”

  Steph wipes her tears with her sleeve.

  “Promise?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Thanks,” sniffs Steph. “But don’t tell my mum, will you? She’ll only say ‘told you so.’”

  “I won’t. But I think you should. Your mum can actually be great in a heartache. Lord knows, she’s nursed me through a few and never once has she said ‘I told you so.’ Well, once or twice, maybe, but—”

  “What about that man at Nancy’s funeral?”

  Jess winces.

  “You know the one I’m talking about, the one you kissed in front of everyone.”

  “I didn’t kiss him, Steph. He kissed me. There’s a difference.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Mum told me I wasn’t allowed to ask you about it, but—”

  “You will anyway.”

  “Were you having an affair?”

  “No. It was… I was… We had a bit of chemistry between us…a lot of chemistry, in fact…but…in the end, it wasn’t to be.”

  “But you got the feels?”

  “Yes. No. Look, if you must know, a few years ago, yes, I would have totally ‘got the feels’ for someone like that, because I used to love freedom and spontaneity and doing crazy shit at 4:00 a.m. But now I want something different. I want to feel grounded.”

  Suddenly she feels it, the sense of herself falling through the air, the parachute above her, the rush of the clouds.

  “I’m happy with Tim.”

  “Oh.”

  Steph looks disappointed.

  “You’ll get it one day,” says Jess. “When you’ve been around the block and learned that shiny exteriors can be quick to tarnish.”

  “It’s just… That kiss, Aunty, it was…proper.”

  Jess stalls.

  “No,” she says with a sigh. “It was a show. Some men like to put on a show. That doesn’t mean we should applaud.”

  ***

  Later that afternoon, when she’s packing jewelry, her heart a little weary, Jess’s father calls. His name and number appearing on her phone is an eerie sight. She resists the urge to answer, having felt the wound of him abandoning her too many times, but then he calls a second time and then a third. Finally, her curiosity caves.

  “Hello?”

  “Jess, oh Jess, you answered. I didn’t know if you—”

  “What do you want?”

  “I realize I may have some explaining to do. I’m sorry I left the wake like that. It wasn’t my plan to. Could…could we meet?”

  Jess exhales, stares at the wall clock.

  “When?”

  “I’m your way this afternoon. I thought, maybe, we could lay some flowers on Nancy’s grave, if…if you’re up for it?”

  “Yes,” says Jess, too tired to battle. “Yes, okay.”

  ***

  They meet at the entrance gates of Abney Park Cemetery, both with bunches of flowers. Jess has assembled some wildflowers and bracken, knowing they were Nancy’s favorites. Her dad clutches some sad petrol-station affair. At least he has made an effort with his jacket and hair, a little less shambolic than before. He smiles at her, then his attention catches on the necklace, which she has worn deliberately, provocatively perhaps.

  “Looks nice on you, Jessy,” he forces himself to say. “Do you wear it a lot?”

  “Yes. It makes me feel close to Nancy.”

  “So where exactly did you find it?” he says, eyeing her.

  “At auction. I’d been spending a lot of time searching auction sites. Nancy described this necklace to me in painstaking detail. She was passionate about it. So for months I kept my eye out, and then one day it popped up on my screen and I kind of knew straightaway, it was the one. Coming home to us. Like it was meant to.”

  “Because I have to tell you, Jess, when I sold it, I never for a second thought I’d see it again. Honestly, I took it to the most obscure backstreet dealer I could find.”

  Jess narrows her eyes.

  “So it was you? You got rid of it? You’re the reason it came out of our family—”

  “Yes.”

  “But it was my mother’s heirloom,” she quarrels. “All that history…it was never yours to sell.”

  “No,” he says limply. “You’re right. It wasn’t.”

  They walk together through the graves, row after row of mossy gray headstones, some elaborate, some simple.

  “So why did you sell it?” she asks, after a moment.

  Her dad sighs.

  “You know your mother believed it was charmed,” he says, “that it had mystical power. She had some daft idea that it lured me to her. Some French nonsense. There’s a word on the back, right?”

  “Yes,” says Jess. “It just says ‘OUI.’”

  “That’s right. She used to say she finally understood the meaning of the word the day she met me, that I made her come out of herself. Carmen was a shy one, you see. Shy and thoughtful. But I gave her confidence. Believe it or not, Jess, I was once a social dynamo.”

  “Hmm.”

  “The thing is she’d had a funny old upbringing, Carmen, after her dad died—”

  “Paul?”

  “Yes, that’s right. He died when she was young, and soon after, Nancy went off to do her own thing, so Carmen was left in the care of her grandmother.”

  “You mean Anna?”

  “Oh. Yes. You know all this?”

  “It’s been of interest, yes.”

  They walk on, the birdsong following them.

  “The thing is, Anna, she had a lot of opinions about how Carmen should be. She was overbearing. Quite a snob, hell-bent on marrying Carmen off to the nearest available banker. ‘Look for cuff links,’ she used to say, as if that meant anything. But two days after Carmen’s fifteenth birthday, Nancy came back into her life, tanned and wrinkled and very different from how Carmen said she remembered her. Apparently her hair was spiked and dyed purple. She’d lost a front tooth, gained an ear piercing. You can imagine what Anna had to say. I mean, how’s that for a mother figure?”

  That’s Nancy, thinks Jess.

  “One thing that
hadn’t changed, however, was that Nancy was still wearing the necklace. Turns out it had traveled around the world with her.”

  At this, Jess tingles, feels the beat of the butterfly’s energy.

  “Then that night,” says Richard, “she gave the necklace to Carmen, said it was her turn, made her promise to wear it.”

  “And did she?”

  “Not straightaway. Under Anna’s influence she was busy with a secretarial course. Then the following summer she enrolled in art college, much more her thing, where she befriended two punks with shaved hair and safety pins on their jackets. They took her to a music festival, told her to dress wild. Since the butterfly necklace was the wildest thing Carmen owned, with a pair of jeans and a cardigan, that’s what she wore.”

  “What festival?”

  “Glastonbury, 1982.”

  Jess blinks. “Glastonbury?”

  “The mud was biblical, Jess. I don’t think Carmen had seen anything like it. Within an hour, she’d lost track of her college friends, so she forced herself through her shyness, bought a pint of cider, and trudged across the mudscape. She came to the main stage, where Jackson Browne was performing—someone she remembered her father talking about, one of the last musicians he’d photographed before he died. She made her way to the front and stared at the stage.

  “She had little more than a trash bag to protect her from the rain, but as the crowds danced and cheered, she was happy. It didn’t matter that she was freezing, soaked, and way out of her depth. She was just so happy. Then someone fell into her, caked from head to toe in gray sludge, as though he’d been bodysurfing in the mud. He looked like one of those, Jess, the class fool who wants everyone’s attention and plays it for laughs. Carmen gasped and backed away, then through the filth, she saw the shine of his piercing green eyes, which then fell to the wings of the necklace poking through her bin-liner cloak. ‘I’m Richard,’ he said and their faces lit up with smiles.”

  “You?” says Jess, amazed. “You met at Glastonbury?”

  She can’t help but smile, the thought of her frumpy, fusty father in a field full of rock music and chai tents.

  “Oh yeah. We were right in the thick of it. Me with my mud suit on, dancing like a maniac, and your mum with her necklace. And that was it for me. In all that rain and mud, there she was, my Carmen, a jewel in the dirt.”

  “But if the necklace brought you together,” Jess presses, her bitterness resurfacing, “why get rid of it the minute she’s dead?”

  Richard bows his head, folds his arms.

  “Perhaps the magic of it wore off,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Because it didn’t remind me of our union in the end. It reminded me of what went wrong. I loved her, Jess. I adored her, but—”

  “Don’t tell me. She met someone else. The necklace somehow led her to her true love, her soul mate…and all the rest.”

  He glares at her.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I get the feeling that’s what the necklace does. Because that’s what all the women in my family have done when in possession of it. They’ve run off and found happiness with some random other man.”

  “No, Jess. It wasn’t your mother who met someone else. It was me. With Eileen. You have to understand… Your mother and I, we were in love, insanely in love, but we grew apart. Having you girls changed me. Suddenly it was all on my shoulders. I stopped being the person she’d first fallen for, the fun, zany guy. I got serious, working all the time, worrying about money, taking it out on her, yelling and sulking.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you sold off her necklace—”

  He stops again, breathes slowly. He looks beaten, she thinks. All this has beaten him.

  “After her death,” he says, “I felt so angry. Angry at the world. Angry at myself. Angry at Nancy who was on at me constantly, clearly blaming me, not for your mother’s stroke, but… Her final year, it wasn’t a happy one. We were arguing a lot. I’d started my thing with Eileen. The marriage became toxic. Honestly, given everything that was going on, it’s a miracle you girls turned out so well—”

  “That’s debatable,” says Jess solemnly.

  “Nancy believed it was my fault that her daughter’s last months were a misery. Of course, I wasn’t to know they were her last months at the time. Oh, Jess, it was all so sudden. One minute she was standing at the sink, washing mugs. The next…” He sighs. “Hindsight, eh? How differently I’d do it if I could go back. Anyway, after she died, that necklace sat in the house, and it was as if it were glaring at me, some kind of cruel souvenir of what we’d had, what we—what I—had thrown away. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore, so I wrapped it in a carrier bag and took it to a dealer on the Commercial Road. Got twenty quid for it, which I drank away in a weekend.”

  “Jesus, Dad! Do you know how much it’s now worth?”

  He shrugs.

  “When Nancy discovered I’d sold it, we had a crazy, crazy argument. Your sister might remember. It all happened in front of her. Nancy called me a coward and a shit, and I told her she was a coldhearted madwoman who’d failed her own daughter. And that was it, the fault line in our relationship. We worked together to do what we could for you girls, but we were never friendly again.”

  “No,” says Jess. “I saw that.”

  “She really resented Eileen and the twins, but maybe one day you’ll understand… For me, that was my chance to put the mistakes behind me, get things right, even if it meant”—he looks down—“failing you girls.”

  As he says this, he steps back, stalled by regret. A storm of emotions whips through Jess’s soul, and she has no idea what one will fly out first. She breathes hard, then she leans forward on the tips of her toes and kisses him once, on the cheek—because in spite of it all, he was, is, and always will be her father. And he has a tear in his eye. And she now knows that he is sorry, truly, deeply sorry.

  A few steps on, they find Nancy in the sun. The earth is still fresh. Jess kneels down and places her flowers at the stone, while her father places his hand on her shoulder.

  “In spite of everything,” he says, “there was something about the old girl I admired. I mean…she was a one.”

  “Yes,” says Jess, “she really was.”

  They walk on together, take the long path around to the exit.

  “Oh, look,” says Richard as they pass the final row of graves. “Talking of the past, that there is your great-grandmother’s headstone.”

  “It is?”

  “Anna Elizabeth Taylor. Like the film actress.”

  Jess blinks.

  “That’s her? That’s Anna?”

  “What? You mean, you didn’t know? I thought that’s why you chose Abney Park Cemetery—”

  “We didn’t,” says Jess. “It was stipulated in Nancy’s will. We didn’t know there was a family connection. You know what Nancy was like. She didn’t talk about the past. So…do you really think that’s our Anna?”

  “Oh yes, your mother brought me here when we were dating. She said it gave her peace to be here. I only knew Anna briefly, but as I said, she was quite a force. Once engaged to a movie producer. And did you know Nancy was—”

  “Born in Hollywood,” they both say together, smiling as they catch each other’s eye.

  Before they move on, Jess kneels beside Anna’s grave, wishes she had more flowers.

  “Anna Elizabeth Taylor,” she reads, “1913–1982.”

  Then her gaze catches on the headstone beside it.

  “Archie Marshall Jossop. 1914–1983. Beloved to Anna.”

  She gasps. Her eyes well up as the resonance sinks in: Anna and Archie, so they were reunited.

  “Oh my,” she says. “Right here. There’s a love story right here.”

  “There certainly is,” says her dad. “Archie was an old boy Anna knew fr
om her Hollywood days. Your mum was rather fond, said he made Anna happy.”

  “Tell me,” says Jess.

  “From what I gather, it happened out of nowhere. Still early days for Carmen and me, so I was on my best behavior, trying to impress. Carmen had been out, back to Denmark Street to sign paperwork for her late father’s business premises. That afternoon she returned to the house with a guest. I remember the moment…the way he walked in beside her. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he said, with his GI Joe accent. ‘If it isn’t Anna Taylor!’ An old boy, he was, face lined, salt-and-pepper gray, eyes near disappeared into wrinkles when he smiled. But how he smiled—and how he talked! ‘Oh, Anna,’ he said, ‘you’re not gonna believe this, but there I was, making my way down Denmark Street!’

  “He claimed he was musically inclined, in the market for a new guitar, that he’d been browsing the shops when he bumped into Carmen. He’d had to look twice because he recognized her face, but couldn’t get the age right in his head. Then he spotted the necklace around her neck. He ran straight after her, asked outright: ‘You’re not related to an Anna Taylor, are you?’ ‘Well, sure,’ said Carmen. ‘She’s my grandmother!’”

  Jess smiles, delighted. “So what happened then?”

  “He came back with Carmen and joined us for tea. ‘Oh, Anna,’ he said, ‘have I had a life!’ He told us all about how he’d taken off from his family farm when the war needed Americans, that he thought he’d be fighting for glory, then found himself running for his life. He said it had messed with his head, and for a while he’d lost his way. When all that nonsense was over, he decided to stay in England, try his luck in the music industry.”

  “So?” says Jess.

  “He was tone deaf. Anyway, he got on with life, got himself a little business, wholesale belts and handbags. Did all right in the end, five warehouses and a nice place in Holland Park. ‘It’s not corn farming, anyhow,’ he told us. Do you know, he’d lived in London for twenty-two years before bumping into Carmen. Married once. Divorced once. Three grown kids. But the way he looked at Anna…even I felt it. He talked to her about brisket, had a lot to say about brisket. But all I could see was Anna smiling from the depths of her soul, flinging her bony, seventy-year-old arms around his shoulders and saying: ‘Archie Jossop, I’ve been waiting for you!’”