The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  What I don’t need I pack away. When I’m finished I put on the leather coat. It has a faint aroma of petrol. The street atlas fits its pocket. I go back out to the shop. The boy is bent over his mobile again, punctuating a silent monologue with grunts of acknowledgement. He stops grunting when I come in. ‘Got what you want?’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll see you.’

  ‘May you live in interesting times.’

  ‘You too. Say hello to your dad from me.’

  He calls out as I get to the door. ‘He’s not my dad.’ I look back and he leers, as if dadness was the last impediment to immediate sexual relations. ‘I heard about you, by the way’

  ‘Good things, I hope.’

  ‘All kinds of things. That you like jewels.’

  I turn in the doorway. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘From Anil. Mister Yogalingam to you.’

  The goldfish watch me from behind their sunken castles. I close the door and step back between them. ‘And where did he hear it?’

  He pats his chest with exaggerated delicacy. ‘I just work here. Yeah? I don’t know who comes here always.’

  ‘Someone came here?’ I walk back up to the counter. The boy scratches the stubble on his throat. His eyes drift down to the cash register on the counter and back up to me, slow and bright as fish.

  I take out my last dollars and put thirty on the counter. Now I’m in England they look out of place, too small and uniformly green. ‘I don’t have a lot of sterling.’

  The boy shrugs. ‘Money’s money.’ He leaves the dollars where I put them. He talks at his own pace. ‘Anil’s in here a few weeks ago, he starts telling me about you. He’s chuffed because someone came in and offered him money. You’re quite a cash cow really, ain’t you? Everybody creams a little off you. They told Anil about you and something about jewels. I don’t remember.’

  A wave of dizziness passes over me. I sit down on the desk. There have always been others looking for the jewel, of course, Tavernier and Victoria, centuries of them. I have followed their traces, trusting their footsteps. But they have never been this close. It feels as if a fault in time has opened. As if Mr Three Diamonds has appeared at my shoulder. I remember the lines of words, surfacing on a blue screen. Years ago now, less threatening with distance: WE WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW.

  ‘They?’ My voice sounds sick.

  “They. He said they.’

  ‘Men or women?’

  He stops to think, twisting his lips. ‘Men.’

  ‘What did they pay him for?’

  He shrugs lazily. ‘Most probably to tell them when you came back.’

  ‘Did he let them go through my things?’

  ‘No.’ His smile fades. I know he’s lying. It reaches him in some way, this detail. Without touching it, I can feel Anne’s envelope in my pocket. Seamed with age.

  ‘They went through my things.’

  ‘Listen.’ He sits forward, frowning as he thinks. ‘I’m not going to tell Anil you was here. All right? I’ll put your gear back in the garage, he won’t know the difference. And when you want to pick it up ring first and ask for me, I’ll sort it out. Here.’

  He writes his name and mobile number on the back of a FishWorld card. All the gesture has gone out of him now. He looks angry, with himself or Yogalingam or with me. I take the card because he wants to give it. I don’t read it as I put it away. I already know I won’t come back here again.

  Outside I make myself stop. My body wants to get away fast and I don’t let it. There is no one to run from here. Across the road three girls head for Camden, laughing, bindis and glitter on their pale skins. A Daewoo goes past with music on, the driver a black black boy with corn-row hair. I find them reassuring, these faces. Seeing them makes me feel as if I’ve come home, though home is the last place I should want to be.

  WE WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW. I have been naive, I think. I have worked as if avidity for jewels was a historical phenomenon, not a human one: as if no one else is capable of doing what I do. Every lost treasure has its own believers. I knew there were others, should have known, should have been more careful. I try to picture the men who are looking for me. Looking for the jewel. Evidently they haven’t found either of us yet.

  ‘Look clever, love.’

  A pensioner in a flat cap shepherds an old woman along the pavement. Her hair is pink as candyfloss. As they pass he nods back at me. Cracks a smile. ‘For a minute there you looked older than us. Only for a minute.’

  When he’s gone I check the time. It’s past eight. Slipper Street can wait until tomorrow. For now I need somewhere to rest; to get my head together, as the FishWorld boy would say. Camden no longer feels like the place for it.

  Chalk Farm is two minutes’ walk. When I get there the Tube lift is out of order, water running down its cagework. The stairs are lit by hooklights. Passing the station axonometric I remember I’ve left the photo albums behind, but that at least doesn’t matter to me. I’m in no danger of forgetting the people I love, even without photographs.

  At King’s Cross the passages are full of music. A saxophonist in a catsuit competes with a sour cellist in tails. The last of the rush-hour crowd edges around them. By the BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS sign they reach for bags and jackets, instinctively, while the pickpockets themselves loiter unseen, waiting for victims to do just that. I cross the road away from them. There are bed and breakfasts here, anonymous places above takeaways. Rooms for arrivals, departures, prostitutions, and nothing more intimate. A hundred yards up the Gray’s Inn Road is a glass-fronted hotel lobby and a sign: Ashlee House Budget Accommodation. I press the security buzzer and go inside.

  The receptionist watches the door lock behind me. There is a scar by her hairline. It would be easy for her to hide it. Instead she wears her black hair pulled back from the forehead, braided tight.

  ‘It’s thirteen pounds for the sixteen-bed dorms, fifteen for the ten.’

  ‘I need a single room.’

  She looks me over, as if I might have the wrong reasons for keeping myself to myself. Something that would break hostel regulations. When she nods I pay her for two nights and she takes me up, her wooden heels slow-clapping on the stone stairs.

  The room is clean and grey as a welfare office. I turn off the light and undress in the dark. Neon winks against the blinds, the colours and words blurred into a mish-mash of light. From the dormitories down the hall comes the sound of arguments in Russian, in English.

  The bed is cool. I curl into myself, face against breasts, hands between thighs. My heat spreads into the trapped London air. I close my eyes and think of Glött. Of myself, growing into her, or something like her. Eva, a continent away, wrapped up in herself like the pain contained inside a pearl.

  * * *

  Mrs Wasp, Essa Wicks, Mrs Etcher. Wives, women with a taste for stone and the money for it. The widow, Mrs Tell, who bought only cut steel. The beggars, Martha and her brothers, only the oldest of five in work, a skivvy at Buckingham Palace. The shopkeepers, Etcher the publican, Scrymgeour the binnacle maker. Sarah Theed the baker, who had carried sixteen children and raised ten. Tobias Carey the scavenger and nightman, who lived next door to the Eastern Jews and never spoke to them, only grinned their way with a hardness that had nothing to do with humour, that was not so different from the smile of an animal. Jane Limpus.

  There were more people on Hardwick Place, Daniel thought, than had lived in the whole of the Island Road. In the quiet of his thoughts, he felt out of place among them. They left him with a sense, not of knowing, but of people falling away, never to be met again. Martha and her brothers a line of eyes at the window, gone by the time he opened the door. It felt as if he himself was falling, not at home in Limpus’s rooms but still, somehow, in transit.

  ‘Mrs Limpus, Mister Levy, has worked for her living,’ said Sarah Theed to Salman, ‘just as I have done. A lacewoman. But not a businesswoman. As you see, you being in the shop now. “Mrs” means a wife.’

/>   She spoke with helpful loudness, although Salman had known both her and English for a year. ‘Or a widow. Jack Limpus has been gone these ten years. Handsome Jack the tar.’ Between them, the sweet warmth of house loaves. Sarah wrapping them in paper. ‘That means a sailor, Mister Levy. Childless, she is.’ Under her breath, ‘Better for her were she a widow.’

  ‘How so?’

  She looked up, startled, flour on the moon of her face. ‘Lord, Mister Levy, your English is improved! It is the learning of the Jews. Any better and you shall read my thoughts before I can speak them. The loaves will be tuppence.’ And he had paid with the thick discs of English coins, smiling, and walked the yards home.

  Jane Limpus. Salman watched her bartering with Etcher or Carey, cabbages and river fish for scavenged goods or bottled ale. She kept no servant. Had nothing to speak of, Theed said, except the house itself and Fellow. Fell, splayed claws big as a child’s hands, eating his waste meat in the yard. Salman felt that she was liked, though she kept to herself and Hardwick Place left her to it. For days she would be gone, the rooms above silent. Then she would reappear without warning, waiting in the morning crowd at the pump. Hauling nightsoil down to the river.

  To Salman, watching her, it seemed that she was removed from the scheme of things. That she had removed herself. She never stopped in for Theed’s oven-hot gossip, or drank at Etcher’s Royal Duke. He wondered why, and what she lived instead of that life, and with whom. Some days he lay for hours on the trundle bed, listening. His eyes following her movements across the floorboards. Walking and eating. Dressing and undressing.

  He looked like a thug in Western clothes. A Brunei, rough-house, soiled overcoat emphasising his thickset body. In the shop he kept to the workroom. Away from the customers. At nights he would work silver repoussé by the light of the crucible while his brother drowsed, the hiss of the wheel insinuating itself into Daniel’s dreams. In the mornings Salman scoured the table for every spore of stone lost from the dop the night before.

  There was a pattern to his days. In the afternoons he would wash and walk into Whitechapel or the West End to look at the jewellers’ showrooms. Just to look, never to buy. He watched them from a distance, Robert Garrard on Panton Street, Rundell’s the Crown Goldsmiths in the cold shadow of St Paul’s. The hothouse creatures of Hanoverian high society, moving behind gaslit glass. It wasn’t ambition that made him go, or jealousy, but something more like longing. In the displays of gilt and jewels he saw a reflection of the life he had promised himself and those that were close to him.

  He never went in. The salesmen wouldn’t have let him if he’d tried. In the evenings he would eat with Daniel, or go alone to the King Lud at the foot of Ludgate Hill, where the apprentices came after the workshops closed. He would listen to their talk of cleaving and bruting, their boasts of balancing the fifty-six facets of a triple brilliant. Their rumours that the King was sickening, and that when he died the new crown would be the making of them all.

  Salman sat and learned the politics of jewels. When the workers came in from Rundell’s, he heard about the men who presided over them. Edmund Rundell and John Gawler Bridge, who the workers called the Young Vinegar and the Young Oil. The acidic jeweller and the unctuous salesman. Salman heard how the Crown Goldsmiths had made their fortune from French diamonds bought cheap from refugees in the war, and how those diamonds had run out when Philip Rundell retired. In the King Lud they said that Philip’s last wish had been to die under his diamond-table, and that Edmund loved jewels more than his uncle ever had. They toasted him, To the Young Vinegar! Baring their teeth as if they hurt.

  He saw Edmund Rundell himself only once. It was autumn. He had been loitering on Ludgate Hill at sundown. A man had come out of the jeweller’s, walking to where a black and gold barouche waited. Two passers-by had whispered his name. Salman had caught only a glimpse of him, the impression of great wealth. Before the coach moved off, a long white hand at the window, hooking the blind.

  The work was hard and he slept well. The dreams he remembered opened onto the desert: lions’ footprints under the tamarisks. Light hurting the eyes. He would wake with a hunger to feel it again and look out southwards onto Shadwell and the Thames, the dreams translated into a vista of marshland and black curlews.

  He was a strong man but brittle, and brittleness is an unforgiving quality. The foreign clothes hung on him as if his shoulders were hunched against them. Once, embracing Daniel after a good sale, Salman found that his brother had begun to smell like an Englishman. Sour with the infantile odours of meat fat, milk and eggs. It surprised him because his own sweat never changed, however much he consumed. It kept its bitterness.

  For twelve months he wrote letters to Rachel, posting them from Charing Cross on the first of each month for one shilling and eleven pence. Parcels and gold every quarter. A reply never came. After a year he sent only the money, turning back into himself and his work. Daniel found him harder to talk to, harder even to argue with, as if they were growing apart.

  Sometimes he would take the jewels from their hiding place. They were still whole. Perfect things. At night, as Daniel slept, Salman would unwrap the turban cloth and hold the precious objects in his hands. He remembered how it had felt to break the jar open, like opening up a skull, and the way the old jewels had caught the light. He pressed them between his fingers. The bolus of the ruby, the slab of the sapphire, the lucid pyramid of the clear jewel.

  June, 1835. He woke after closing time and dressed by the window. Increments of light and shadow crossed the floor from the casement, the oil-lit shop, the darkened room. The days were long now. Outside there was still the remains of daylight. He could see Fellow laid out in the heat. From the shop came the sound of paper. Salman could picture his brother, stooped, hawk-faced. Reading the Illustrated or the Sun. Accounting for the takings, if there were takings to be accounted for.

  He went out into the yard and heard the click of the dog’s claws as it came to him. Over time he had come to like the animal more than he would have expected. He rested his hand on the warmth of its head, feeling the smooth skin over the massive skull, then walked to the pump. Leaning his face under the water. The cold shocking him awake.

  When he shook free Jane was there. She was close, only a step away. It occurred to him that she was always closer than he thought. Against her hip she balanced the weight of a metal basin. Her eyes, watching him, were unreadable.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Limpus. A fine day.’

  ‘Mister Levy.’

  He stepped back, blinking water from his own eyes, looking for the right words in a foreign tongue. Nodded towards the basin. ‘I shall help you.’

  ‘With this? It needs washing yet. I can manage myself.’ She swung the basin away from her hip and under the spout in one habitual, graceful movement. Swilled out its muck, grinned up at him waiting.

  From the river came the sound of the late shift bell at the Imperial Gas Light factory. When Jane was done with the basin she passed it to Salman and washed her hands, slipping the water up her arms. Her skin was too white, he thought. As if she was bloodless under it.

  They walked back together. Salman carried the basin. When he looked at Jane her eyes were already on him. She gestured upwards. ‘Look at the moon. In England we say there is a man living in it. You see his face?’

  He followed her hand with his eyes. His sight was good. He saw no face. ‘Where I come from, Sin is the name of the god in the moon.’

  ‘Sin is a poor name.’

  ‘No, he is – he is good. His beard is blue.’ He spoke up into her laughter, encouraged. ‘The thin moon is his sword and the round moon is his crown.’

  ‘Is that something the Jews believe?’

  ‘That is different.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s no part of my business–’

  ‘No. We are Jews, my brother and I, but Sin is a god of my country. It is an old religion. I believe in him not like a god, more as if – as if he were a face in the moon. O
r fingers to be crossed for luck. Wood to be touched.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ Her eyes had come back to him. ‘The Jews believe in God, do they not?’

  ‘Yes. In God, of course, and more.’ He bent and picked a length of grass from the foot of the yard fence. ‘We believe there is an angel for every blade of grass.’

  She took the blade. Her eyes smiled. ‘Now you’ve killed an angel.’

  ‘No.’ No, but I have found one, he thought. And his eyes said it, and her eyes read it, and when they met his again they looked away.

  They purchased cheap stones, the stock of a jeweller’s in a poor neighbourhood. Marcasite and cairngorms, shipped to London by canal or Company ship. Daniel brought them back from Limehouse and left them on the work table while Salman slept. In August, waiting by the import docks, he saw the Marist missionary who had travelled with the brothers on the Scaleby Castle. Vehement, malnourished from sea journeys, the Frenchman had insisted on giving Daniel his Bible, pressing it into his hands before he was called to board a ship to the Comoros.

  It was their only book. A Christian Bible in the house of Jews, soft leather, supple words, the endpapers marbled the colours of the Union flag. The familiar Torah, Prophets and Writings reworked into an alien order. In the summer evenings, while the light was good, the brothers read to one another. Learning the book’s new language from its old myths and voices.

  ‘“For surely there is a mine for the silver, and a place for gold where men find it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone. Man setteth an end to the darkness, and searcheth out all perfection: the stones of thick darkness and of the shadow of death.’”

  Salman’s voice, stilted with effort. The jug jug of choughs in the sycamore trees.

  “‘He breaketh open a shaft away from where men sojourn. They are forgotten of the foot that passeth by; they hang afar from men, they flit to and fro. As for the earth, out of it cometh bread; and underneath it are the places of sapphires.’”