The Jeweller's Skin (4 page)

She straightened, and blinked, and went on cutting carrots.  Now the hard orange roots seemed to resist her; she was aware of needing the strength of her hands, bringing the blade down again and again.  How had it happened that thirty years had gone, and her daughter had lived them somewhere unknown to her, unhappy perhaps, unloved; and she had simply stopped wondering about her?  She tipped the board, and the slices of carrot splashed into the pan; she began again.

I have not fought for her.  I told myself I always wanted her back, but it wasn’t true.  I thought about it, but I never made it happen. 

The knife skeetered; she pulled her finger away just in time.  I abandoned her: that’s what she must feel.  She must want revenge.  The thought seemed to hollow her out with fear.  She will come and shout, ‘How could you?’ and she will be right.

June Ragless lit the gas under a pan.  The smell of braising meat had filled the kitchen, rich and fatty.  I must work, I must work, she thought; and with a great effort became what she had been for a long time, nothing more than a cook in an asylum kitchen, making sure that lunch would be ready for fifteen hundred.

1911

-

1917

In my father’s workshop there was order.  Gold is a soft, biddable metal, and makes no screechings or crashes while being tooled.  My father liked to work without conversation.  His friends, fellow goldsmiths from our small community, knew when they called in to stand quiet, watching my father’s very long light-brown hands, nodding and murmuring in their throats when he achieved some detail that impressed them. 

Many days of my childhood I spent like this, lifted onto a stool beside the work-bench, the light flowing in, men and women passing in the narrow street.  When I was very young I wanted to play with the flexible bright toy; but I learned never to touch it, only to watch.  Once I jumped up eagerly and upset the leather apron fixed under the bench.  The shavings of gold scattered onto the floor, catching the sunlight.  Out of necessity, my father spoke.  Then he knelt on the stone floor, took the hare’s-foot brush and the small dust-pan, and poured the sweepings into a wire sieve.  When he had picked out some fluff, and one of my wavy black hairs, he tapped the gold crumbs into a square wooden box, and closed the lid.  I tried not to weep.

After that I sat tidily on my high stool, hands in my lap, watching him turn a fat slice of gold into a circle, and fit it over the ring triblet, a kind of tapering stick; or drilling holes in the wire frame of a bracelet and setting green stones in it one by one.  When I reached ten or twelve, and spent less time with him, my favourite was the filigree-work, fine glinting wire that he curled into its minuscule frame, a fraction at a time, the pincers steady in his hand.  Later, I longed for a filigree bracelet made by him, all his concentration and wordlessness wound into intricacies to grace my wrist, to show the
little city I mattered to him.  By then I had little patience to watch in silence; I wanted to speak, to understand everything, to be out on the street, past the low stone domes of the ancient hammam, walking down to the river, my long skirt rustling around my ankles.

1911

It was only six weeks until her wedding.  Her father was spending long days in his workshop, while the sun sneaked into the narrow streets of Prizren, and groups of elderly men in their white hats were worrying about the Turkish government.  She knew this because Edwin had been to a meeting, invited by some man he did business with.  They thought he as a foreigner would know something.

The sun ate its way in through the narrow windows, under the doors, into the houses with the thick stone walls.  With her sister and Edwin, she walked along the river, swishing her skirt, knowing the women were all looking at him, her Englishman whom the elders wished to consult.  She showed him the places she loved in the small city, the ancient bridge, the hillside rising behind it.  He had seen them before and still he listened to her.

And all the time she longed to be with her father.  He would not let her into his workshop any more.  At the beginning once she had taken Edwin in, to let him see the alchemical process, the transformation of raw gold into beauty.  Edwin watched in silence as she had told him, the sunlight slanting in on his pale-gold hair.  She stood still, willing him to understand, to be transformed as she was by what he saw.

She was going across all of Europe with this man, and Prizren might soon be viciously attacked, and her silent father closed his door to her.  She wanted to sit on the high stool again, not to talk nor to ask him questions but to be there, the intent observer of his intricate craft, the one who loved what he could do with his hands.  Soon no-one would watch him, and he would step back farther, into his place of silence and manual skill, like a monk illuminating a manuscript that would be taken out of the monastery and sung over by distant unheeding choirs.

The week before the wedding he called her in.  He had made her a necklace,  a looping chain that lay flat on her collar-bones, the glint of the gold reflecting on her cheek; a bracelet that would cover her strong wrist and make it seem as supple as a snake; and a pair of wide reddish-gold wedding-rings.

As a bride she would be the goldsmith’s beloved daughter.  She would wear these pieces and feel his work in them, when she was at home in distant London.

She would have her English husband for company.

She woke in the night, wanting to collect the morsels of gold off the jeweller’s skin, the leather apron fixed under the bench, that caught the fragments left over from his work, and take them with her, hidden in her luggage.

Only once, early in the morning as she was washing, she thought she should stay here in her father’s workshop and make his coffee and keep his house for him.

*

A bell, outside in the dark, the sound trailing away, going up the scale, no longer metallic but a woodwind shriek.  She could almost see it, a circle of white light pulled out in the wake of the train like the tail of a comet.

Above her, Edwin murmured in his sleep, and turned, the high bed creaking under him.  The sleeper smelt of leather, and the coffee they’d had the night before at Zagreb, little cups handed up to them through the window, and a train to Prague stood at the next platform.  Handing back her cup she had split some of the dregs on the carriage floor, and the warmth, she imagined, brought the smell out, a smell of home, her father and his friends around the low table, talking.

And the smell of their bodies, hers and Edwin’s.  She stretched out contentedly under the starched sheet.  Already the pleasure of what they could do with their bodies was part of her, as if they had been doing all these things for years.  Late last night, after the Austrian border, the sleeping-car attendant had come to advise them to lock their door and hang the ladder across it, in case of thieves.  Then Edwin had taken out all her hairpins, so her hair sprang out, freed, down past her shoulders, and brushed it with the silver-backed brush with her initials, her new initials NH, which had been part of his mother’s wedding present.  She had stood in front of him on the rocking train, looking out of the window under the edge of the drawn blind while he brushed her hair, with long even strokes that seemed each time to wake her and put her half to sleep.  ‘You do it very well,’ she said, amazed.  ‘I used to watch the maid do my mother’s hair, when I was little,’ he said, and she saw how strange his life was, how strange hers would be, a bedroom of a shape she couldn’t see, and Edwin’s mother, tall and fair like him, letting her maid plait her hair.  So she turned, and took the brush out of his hand, and kissed him, pressed against him in her shift.

They had made love here, in her bottom bunk, while the train growled and clattered over the tracks, somewhere in Austria she had thought once, briefly, her hand on the top of his head as he reached into her body with his tongue.  Then he had come back up to kiss her mouth, and she could taste her own body as he had.  The narrow bed tilted and rattled under them.  At one point he had sat up, astride her, and banged his head on the upper bunk, and sworn in English and laughed.  ‘What if the thieves came in now?’ she’d said.

The sheet was still damp, cold in one patch by her thigh.  She turned on her side, By breakfast they would be in Germany.  ‘You’ll miss seeing the mountains,’ he’d said and it had mattered, the last sight of a landscape she knew from home.

She knelt on the bunk to peer out of the window, holding the blind an inch or so to the side, so as not to wake Edwin.  A little station sped out of her view.  Otherwise there was nothing, no houses, no fields or hillsides, a great blackness.  The train sounds changed abruptly, a muted roaring, a change in the air and they were in a tunnel, compressed, the train a slick instrument caving its way under great invisible mountains.

She got back under the covers and closed her eyes.  In less than two days they would be in London.  She wondered if Edwin’s family would come to meet them.  Her father, her sister Alma and Aunt Apolonija had come as far as Belgrade, stayed in the hotel and had breakfast with them, and stood on the platform as the train pulled away, Alma waving, her father with his hands in his pockets, sturdy.  ‘It’s so far,’ she’s said the night before, in Alma’s hotel room just before dinner.  Alma and Altin were going to come and stay, perhaps next year if his business was doing well.  As for her father: it would happen that he’d come, it would have to happen.  Prizren, all of Albania was in danger, they all knew that, the old men asking Edwin’s opinion as a foreigner, her father’s friends around the
sofra. 
And Aunt Apolonija had said it, trying to be cheerful about her wedding: ‘At least you’ll be safe over there.’

She tugged the pillow down and held it against her, hard, as she thought of her father, alone in his workshop, working all the time, eating with Aunt Apolonija in the evenings.  She rocked slightly in the bunk.  Her father would miss her.  She had Edwin now, but he had no-one.  Still, Edwin’s work might take him back to Prizren.  It would, she was sure, and she would go with him, and take her father all sorts of gifts from London, some cloth perhaps for an English suit.  Or they could make it up in London, if they had the measurements?  No, it was better to buy cloth and send it to him, tweed like Edwin’s nicest jacket perhaps, and he could find the best tailor to make it up.

The train stopped suddenly, with a rush of steam and a grinding noise.  The compartment rocked forward and then settled.  She heard Edwin breathe out slowly.  So what would her new family be like?  There was his mother and two younger sisters; like her he had only one parent, though he’d been twelve when his father died in his sleep.  ‘Tell me about your mother,’ she had said, and he’d looked sad, solemn almost, perhaps because she couldn’t come to the wedding.

‘My mother has very high standards.’

‘What do you mean?’  They were out walking along the river with Alma and Altin; she’d stopped in front of him, laughing, confident, and a bird had risen slowly from the bank and veered up over the hillside towards the mountains.  ‘Will I meet her standards?’

‘She will think you are the most beautiful girl she’s ever seen.’

Men could say these things easily, she knew that.  Alma had told her: men say all sorts of things, you have to keep your head.  But Edwin was so unlike the men in Prizren.  His looks of course, tall, slim, fair-skinned, with that soft straight hair.  But more than that: compared to the men she’d seen, young men she’d talked to like Alma’s Altin and her cousins, he was quiet, subtle.  He listened to her; when they were walking along, he would bend down carefully to catch what she said, and think about it all and ask her questions.  That was the first thing to take her by surprise.  Her father had brought him home to dinner, and he had asked her about her piano lessons: ‘Tell me, Mademoiselle, what do you most like playing?’  She had been awkward, like a little girl, stupid; but she’d managed to say there was a piece by Mozart, and he had known it and said it was delightful.

The train started again, juddering first, then getting up speed, the now familiar rhythm and clattering.  She should sleep; she wanted to be fully awake tomorrow, to see Munich and the other cities they’d go through.  She settled down under the white sheet.  His mother didn’t speak French; that was a problem.  But she would learn English very soon; already she knew a few words, and his mother would be impressed and charmed.  She imagined the older woman at the station, tall and elegant, with a fashionable hat, kissing her on the cheek and saying welcome.  ‘Welcome to your new family, Narcisa,’ she would say in English, and Edwin would translate.  And she would say – what would she say in return?  ‘Thank you, belle-mère.  I am so excited to be here.’