The Japanese Girl (7 page)

I liked him too – perhaps all the better because he also was poor. But as a Grammar School junior teacher even his prospects, at twenty-three, were better than mine at thirty.

This time I'm talking about, they had been engaged three months, and Bob Loveridge rang me inviting me to his house for the evening.

Just then I'd rented a studio from an equally unsuccessful friend who was trying his luck for a change in Paris, and I was painting hard, having had luck with two things I'd sold to the Grantham Gallery and was feeling generally inspired. I dragged myself away from the easel reluctantly and put on my best suit and went along to the Loveridges expecting a good meal and probably an evening of bridge with him and Lucille and Peter Stevenson. Bob was mad on bridge, and I like it for its orderliness, its formality. But when I got there I was told there was to be an eight. The Mayhews and the Frenches were coming, and we were to play duplicate, which is always a bit more intense.

The Mayhews turned out to be an upper middle-aged, upper middle-income couple from out of town somewhere; she a Jewess, and he a tight-necked, red-faced man with a Battle of Britain scar on his cheek. The Frenches were late and when they came it was only Captain French, his sister having gone down with a migraine.

I disliked French at sight. Perhaps he couldn't be blamed for his defaulting sister mucking up the evening; but he was in a crack regiment, not long out of Sandhurst, and young and suave and far too sure of his own charm. He hardly bothered to apologize for being late or for not letting Bob Loveridge know in time to get an eighth. The fact that he had come himself was apparently in his view a more than adequate recompense.

And straight away he set his sights on Lucille and took a bearing. He talked so much to her at dinner that she might have been the general's daughter. Now Lucille is nobody's fool, and no doubt it had happened to her before; but I suppose his charm really did work for some people, and she was modest enough to be flattered. I could see rocks ahead. Peter Stevenson stood the onslaught on his girl pretty well. He was on his best behaviour, of course, but I had known times when he could be quick off the mark and bull-headed. Humphrey French – and in a way Lucille – were trying him high tonight.

After dinner we drifted into the drawing-room, and the two tables were set for bridge; and all I could see – for three of us anyhow – was ‘ dummy' bridge, which is neither fish, flesh nor fowl, and I was beginning to yawn mentally when Captain French suggested couldn't we play poker instead? What business it was of his to suggest this I never knew, but anyway Bob Loveridge said, why not? if everyone was agreeable, we could make the stakes fairly small.

This we did, pulling the two tables together and settling down, French again beside Lucille; and Peter took the opposite side of the table. By now his face was tightening, like somebody's glove that's a size small.

A humorist once called poker a game of chance. Maybe he was a good player. I am not. Nor is Peter. Or he wasn't that night. But that night it became a sort of private war between him and French, and that made him reckless. French, of course, was cool as an ice-pack and knew his stuff – from long years of practice, no doubt. Anyway, he won all along the line. As for the others, the Mayhews lost a little, but in the good-humoured way of people having an inexpensive evening out. Bob Loveridge was just in pocket. Lucille was very lucky and won quite a lot. This made things more difficult for Peter. By eleven I was £18 down. Peter about £40.

At this stage, Peter said with deadly politeness that he was cleaned out, and the game, in spite of Humphrey French's offer to lend him a fiver, broke up. Well, I was livid both with French and with Bob Loveridge, because Bob must have known if he'd the gumption of a louse that neither of us could afford to lose that kind of money. In spite of my little run of prosperity £18 to me was more than £100 to him, and I could see it might mean me being late with the rent for the studio, an idea I wasn't wild about, seeing there was someone in Paris depending on it for his bread ticket.

And £40 to Peter at this stage must have been quite a fortune. A war orphan since he was three, he'd had a fairly tough life; and the thing that astonished me was that he had that sort of spare folding money spoiling the line of his jacket. (It came out later that an elderly aunt had just died and in the way of old ladies had kept a nest-egg in a tin box under the bed. This had been found by the district nurse and turned over to him that day. As he said to me afterwards, if the party had been a day later the money would all have been out of harm's way helping to reduce his overdraft.)

By this time a bit of the general embarrassment must have penetrated Bob Loveridge's thick skin, and there's no doubt he would later have tried some tactful and roundabout way of making it up to the boy – if it had ever got that far. So would Lucille; but for her it was already a little late. By now Peter's general dislike of the situation was centring not so much on Humphrey French as on her.

It wasn't unnatural. Anyone who's been in love knows that love is about as stable as the bubble in a spirit level. Give it the slightest tilt and you're way off centre and inclining at 45 degrees towards the milder forms of homicide.

So the fraternization between Peter and Lucille after the poker game was strictly nil. Humphrey French was still making a fuss of the girl, but she'd seen the red lights, and did some back-pedalling.

Then I heard Mrs Mayhew ask about the Medici Ear-ring. Bob Loveridge had mentioned it to her at supper, and this started a new trend of talk. He went across to his little safe in the wall and brought back the ear-ring for us to see.

Of course I'd seen it three or four times before, and watched the usual reactions, the exclamations of interest and admiration. I estimate Bob must have had more than his full repayment in entertainment, even if he had bought the thing and paid double its value in some casual sale; but in fact he swore it had been in his family a hundred and fifty years.

‘My great-great-grandfather bought it in Naples from a broken-down nobleman. My great-grandfather in a letter to his brother refers to a parchment that went with the ear-ring, telling how it came to be made and giving a record of its owners, but, whatever it was, it's been lost. All we have is this letter which presumably tells the same story, the way one would write to one's brother about it. The date of the ear-ring is 1494.'

‘Very exact,' said Mayhew, finishing his whisky. ‘Would it be spring or autumn?'

‘Well the exactness is not so silly as it sounds – that's if the story is really true. In fact it would be the autumn.' Bob really enjoyed being able to say this. ‘A pair of ear-rings were made by a Florentine silversmith for one of the Medicis, Pietro the Second. Lorenzo – the great Lorenzo – had been dead only two years and his son Pietro was 23, a brilliant young man but unstable and dissolute. These ear-rings were made to his order for his current favourite, a girl called Giovanna Farenza, and the story is that when they were ready, Pietro insisted he should fit them in her ears himself. But while he was in her room doing this – and who knows what else besides! – news came that the French under Charles VIII were in Italy and advancing on Pisa and Leghorn with 40,000 trained soldiers. Florence was committed by treaty to oppose this invasion, so Pietro up and left Giovanna Farenza on the instant, with one ear-ring in her ear and the other still in his pocket. They never met again. Pietro was outnumbered and turned yellow. He gave in to his enemies and made a shameful bargain with them. When he returned to Florence he was thrown out for his treachery, and the long Medici rule was at an end. Pietro after a few attempts to regain power went south with the French and a few years later was drowned in a river crossing and buried at Monte Cassino … This ear-ring … this is the other one – the one that is supposed to have belonged to Giovanna Farenza …'

It was a pretty trinket, heavy for the modern eye, of chased silver with a pearl inset. It was a pretty story too. Even if the thing had been dreamed up in some silversmith's shop in Naples, it was still picturesque. One felt it
ought
to be true.

‘I should think this is worth quite a lot,' said Humphrey French. ‘The pearl alone.'

‘I've never had it valued,' said Bob. ‘ To me it's just an heirloom that I wouldn't want to be without.'

Captain French said: ‘ What do you think, Nora? You ought to have a pretty good idea.'

It was the first hint I'd got that he and Mrs Mayhew had met before. Nora Mayhew coloured and picked up the ear-ring again.

‘Why you?' said Bob Loveridge, asking the natural question.

‘I've studied antiques,' said Mrs Mayhew. ‘ I used to have a shop in Marylebone Lane. This … Oh, I'd think it was worth …' She felt the pearl between her fingers. ‘Dreadfully difficult to know nowadays, but if the pearl's what it seems, I should say that is worth £300. The whole thing – as an antique – I think if you put it up at Sotheby's you'd be very unlucky to get less than £500 – even without the story.'

Loveridge said: ‘Well, I should never sell it. It's got a sentimental feeling for me – as if Giovanna Farenza were an ancestor of mine.'

‘Perhaps she was,' said Mayhew, chuckling into his tight collar.

‘The other one has never been found, I suppose?' said French. ‘Isn't it worth making a duplicate? You'd look wonderful in them,' he added to Lucille.

‘I've never had my ears pierced. Anyway, I'm not the Italian type. One needs to be dark and tall, with sleek heavy hair.'

Loveridge was called away to the telephone and talk broke out generally. When Bob came back he gave us whiskies all round and under this warming influence things improved.

About midnight the Mayhews said they ought to be going: it was a long ride back, and Mayhew was flying to Paris in the morning. They got up, and others got up, and then Loveridge said:

‘Oh, I'll put the ear-ring away,' and picked up the case and carried it to the safe. At the safe he stopped with his back to us, while Humphrey French told us about a marvellous yachting party he had been on last year. After a minute Loveridge turned and said: ‘By the way, what did I
do
with the ear-ring?'

We all stared at him.

‘What did you think you did with it?' Mayhew asked.

‘Put it back in the case.'

‘Yes, well …'

‘It isn't here,' said Bob. ‘ I happened to open it as I was going to lock it away and …'

We all stared at the case which he held for us to see. It was lined with shiny blue silk and quite empty.

‘It's only by chance I opened it,' he repeated. ‘I was just going to put the case back in the safe and I clicked it open with my thumb …'

‘You dropped it in your pocket, probably,' Lucille said.

‘No.' He felt in his pockets. ‘I never put it in a pocket because it's a bit delicate. Anyway, don't you remember, I was called away to the phone and left it in here.'

Nora Mayhew gave a brief laugh and said, ‘My dear, let's turn out
our
pockets, then. Perhaps somebody here has been absent-minded …'

At once Bob Loveridge was apologetic. Of course, nothing was farther from his thoughts than that anyone here should have pocketed it. In fact, he thought perhaps someone might be joking. Obviously, nothing could be farther from his thoughts …

We searched. We searched the room, we turned out the loose cushions from the chairs, we lifted the rugs, we moved the tables, we searched the study, where the telephone was, we even shook out magazines and newspapers in that rather senseless way one does when all the sensible places have been explored. Nothing. We stood there dusting our knees, not quite sure what the next move was.

Eventually Bob said: ‘D'you know I believe it
is
a joke. One of you is doing this to take the micky out of me.' He smiled. ‘Honestly … it's the only explanation.'

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘Has anyone else been in the study?' I asked. ‘The maid who served the coffee …'

‘No, that was before I took the ear-ring out. And even if I had carried it in there, there's no way into the room except through this one. Violet only came in here to pick up the coffee things. She never went into the study at all.'

‘You should come on one of these yachting parlies sometime.' Humphrey French said to Lucille in an undertone. ‘Fabulous fun. Just people of our own age, you know. Quite a ball.'

Nora Mayhew picked up her bag. ‘We've really got to go, Bob. I'm sorry, but it's a full hour's drive. I don't know what you think about this – this loss, I really don't. It's terribly unfortunate to happen like this –'

‘I'm stumped. Completely and utterly –'

‘But I think I know what I
want
to do,' Mrs Mayhew continued. ‘Or what I
ought
to do, anyhow. What we all ought to do.' She laughed in embarrassment and went to the card table and cleared a space. Then she turned her handbag upside down and the contents fell out with a clatter – lipsticks, compact, hair grips, cigarettes, lighter, money, comb, aspirin, nail boards, eye shadow, safety-pins.

‘My
dear
girl –'

‘It's the only thing, Bob. Really the only thing. Unless you want to call in the police –'

‘Of course not … At least, not in that way, and not yet –'

‘Well, calling them in later won't be much use if one of us is to blame. Really, this is the only sensible thing to do – for our satisfaction, apart from yours. Darling, how
would
we feel if the ear-ring were never found?'

‘It's on the
floor
somewhere,' said Loveridge in exasperation. ‘ It's been dropped, or slipped down …'

‘Well, you do see we can't stay all night, and this is the only other way. The men can turn out their pockets too. Lucille, come and look through these things for me, will you. George, mere's another table over there. Empty your pockets and let everyone see you do it.'