‘We’ll divide them.’
Hamilton was travelling but that wasn’t unusual. In fact it was preferable. Her grandfather wanted to pass on tricks of the trade, and he never wanted to pass them on to Vera’s father. ‘That’s what the pearl traders do.’
‘What do you mean?’ Vera had asked that first time.
‘Cut means you divide them, and let me pick which portion. Pick means you pick, so I cut.’
Vera couldn’t decide. She had gnawed at her pyjama sleeve. She had quivered. He had watched her and smiled as she stared at the prized sausages. If she cut, she could make sure the halves were exactly even. But if she let him cut, he’d have to try to make them even too. But he might make a mistake. Then one half would be bigger, and she could have it.
‘Pick!’ she had said.
‘Smart girl!’ he had roared, and laughed so that his moustache ends wobbled, which made her laugh. ‘The picking price is always higher than cutting price.’ He had divided the sausages meticulously, leaving one end of the extra longer than the other. ‘Now which do you want?’
Vera had giggled and giggled, picking the bigger portion.
He had set her back down on her own chair.
‘Last time I did that I was sitting on the ground in Bombay in one of those low little shops the Indians have. There was some oily meat involved as I recall, that I sopped up with a piece of delicious bread hot from a stove. The merchant laid out his pearls on the back of his hand.’
‘Did you cut or pick, Grandpa?’
‘I picked. I always picked. And then you know what I did? To bargain with him on the price, I covered my hand with a handkerchief and put out my fingers to say how many hundred rupees I’d pay. Five fingers, five hundred. Whole hand, one thousand. Half a finger–’ he made as if to chop off the end of his finger ‘–What do you think?’
‘She doesn’t like arithmetic, Father,’ Belle had said. She was formal with him.
‘Well I do!’ he had said, spearing his sausages and wolfing them down whole. ‘I like arithmetic these days because I’m making money.’
Today, Vera looked at the four quarters of the Danish.
‘It’s cut already,’ she said.
‘You’re right. I’ll have to let you pick then.’
He smiled. His ruddy skin was growing whiter, and beginning to shine like the inside of a shell. His face was clearing of the weather burns and tobacco stains of decades; he was being tamed. Was it his nearness to an end that made him flirt with girls and waitresses? A growing lightness in his life, that was really an acceptance of death that made him so attractive? They were all in love with him–Hinchcliffe, Vera, Roberta. He was powerful but childlike, immense, and visibly incompetent: he trembled and knocked over the cream pitcher. His body leaked and crumpled. He burped and gagged, laughed gently at himself.
‘And by the way,’ Vera said. ‘You won’t die. Not if I can help it.’ She did not think it would happen, ever. Perhaps because her mother had fretted about it so much: he’ll be lost at sea, he’ll catch beriberi, and he’ll come home to die. But he had proven very durable.
‘Today in school we talked about pearls, Grandfather.’
‘I don’t know why you would. There are no more pearls in the sea. They’ve all been snapped up, every last one of them. Every self-respecting wild oyster has cashed in his chips,’ said Lowinger.
‘I don’t believe that there are no more pearls,’ she teased.
‘You have to believe me, I’m your grandfather.’
She pouted. ‘Then tell me about them.’
‘Pearls are not my favourite topic, Vera dear.’
‘But they are mine.’
‘Are they, my dear?’ Busy with his Danish. ‘Are you catching the disease then?’
Vera crossed her narrow feet and took a strand of her white-blonde hair to curl around a fingertip; her stubborn adolescent expression gave way to the blank, childish look of she who expects a story.
‘Is it catching?’
‘Oh, highly contagious, my dear. You want to stay away.’
‘But don’t you think I’ve already been exposed?’ Her mother had sent her around to the neighbours to sit in the rooms of the children who had scarlet fever and rubella, so that she would catch them and get them over with. So that if she got them later in life they would not kill her.
‘Is that your excuse? Well, it was mine too.’
There was silence for a few minutes while he tore off ragged pieces of his Danish, piece by piece, unrolling it, and popped them in his mouth.
Then, ‘Do you even know what a pearl is?’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘Pearls are formed inside the shell of an oyster when it is irritated by a grain of sand. That’s what they told me at school.’
‘It is not that simple. There are as many explanations put forth for that, my girl, as would take me all day to tell.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘A pearl is nothing but the tomb of a parasitic worm.’ He declaimed with a half smile that made the handlebars of his moustache twitch:
Know you, perchance how that poor formless wretch
The oyster gems his shallow moonlit chalice?
Where the shell irks him or the sea sand frets
He sheds this lovely lustre
On his grief.
‘Who wrote that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do they teach you at school? No proper poetry either I see. It was Sir Edwin Arnold. And do they tell you that a pearl is the result of a morbid condition?’
‘No.’ She knew she had got him going.
‘They don’t. All right. Do they tell you then what Pliny said about the pearl?’
‘No, Grandfather.’
‘Well, they should then. Pliny thought, you see, that pearls were the eggs of the shellfish. That when it came time for these oysters to bring forth young, that their two shells, which are normally closed up tight, only a little gap there for the eyes to look out, you know, that the shells would part and open wide and a little dew would come in. And that this dew was a seed that would swell and grow big and become a pearl, and that the oyster would then labour to deliver this pearl, at which time it would be born, as another oyster.’
He chuckled, and his whitened eye lost a little of its haze. ‘People believed all sorts of things of the pearl. That it was born as a result of a flash of lightning. I rather like that one. And in years when there were very few pearls, that was because there were not very many storms.’
‘That’s stupid,’ she pronounced.
‘Stupid?’ he said, his breath whistling through his moustache. ‘You don’t say that about people’s beliefs. You say that it is magic. That’s what we’re talking about. I suppose because it is difficult to explain, isn’t it, how a small, perfect, beautiful thing can be found in the slime at the bottom of the sea. The Persians believed that pearls came from the sun. The Indians believed they came from clouds. If you listened to the poets, you’d