tried to make this casual, but she could hear the fear in her voice. Oh yes, she could lose him and probably had. To hide the fear she said: ‘Can’t you take a joke, Stanley?’ and laughed.
‘A joke!’
She laughed. Not bad, it sounded all right.
‘I thought you’d gone off your nut, clean off your rocker …’He was breathing in and out, a rasping noise. She was reminded of his hot breathing down her neck and her arms. Her own breath quickened, even while she thought: I don’t like him, I really don’t like him at all … and she said softly: ‘Oh Stan, I was having a bit of a giggle, that’s all.’
Silence. Now, this was the crucial moment.
‘Oh Stan, can’t you see – I thought it was all just boring, that’s all it was.’ She laughed again.
He said: ‘Nice for your parents, I don’t think.’
‘Oh they don’t mind – they laughed after you’d left, though first they were cross.’ She added hastily, afraid he might think they were laughing at him: ‘They’re used to me, that’s all it is.’
Another long silence. With all her willpower she insisted that he should soften. But he said nothing, merely breathed in and out, into the receiver.
‘Stanley, it was only a joke, you aren’t really angry, are you, Stanley?’ The tears sounded in her voice now, and she judged it better that they should.
He said, after hesitation: ‘Well, Maureen, I just didn’t like it, I don’t like that kind of thing, that’s all.’ She allowed herself to go on crying, and after a while he said, forgiving her in a voice that was condescending and irritated: ‘Well, all right, all right, there’s no point in crying, is there?’
He was annoyed with himself for giving in, she knew that, because she would have been. He had given her up, thrown her over, during the last couple of hours: he was pleased, really, that something from outside had forced him to give her up. Now he could be free for the something better that would turn up – someone who would not strike terror into him by an extraordinary performance like this afternoon’s.
‘Let’s go off to the pictures, Stan …’
Even now, he hesitated. Then he said, quick and reluctant: ‘I’ll meet you at Leicester Square, outside the Odeon, at seven o’clock.’ He put down the receiver.
Usually he came to pick her up in the car from the corner of the street.
She stood smiling, the tears running down her face. She knew she was crying because of the loss of Tony, who had let her down. She walked back to her house to make up again, thinking that she was in Stanley’s power now: there was no balance between them, the advantage was all his.
I could begin, There was once a man called Ephraim who lived in … but for me this story begins with a fog. Fog in Paris delayed a flight to London by a couple of hours, and so a group of travellers sat around a table drinking coffee and entertaining each other.
A woman from Texas joked that a week before she had thrown coins into the fountain in Rome for luck – and had been dogged by minor ill-fortune ever since. A Canadian said he had spent far too much money on a holiday and at the same fountain three days ago had been tempted to lift coins out with a magnet when no one was looking. Someone said that in a Berlin theatre last night there had been a scene where a girl flung money all about the stage in a magnificently scornful gesture. Which led us on to the large number of plays and novels there are where money is trampled on, burned, flung about or otherwise ritually scorned; which is odd, since such gestures never take place in life. Not at all, said a matron from New York – she had seen with her own eyes some Flower Children burning money on a side-walk to show their contempt for it; but for her part what it showed was that they must have rich parents. (This dates the story, or at least the fog.)
All the same, considering the role money plays in all our lives, it is odd how often authors cause characters to insult dollar bills, roubles, pound notes. Which enables audience, readers, to go home, or to shut the book, feeling cleansed of the stuff? Above it?
Whereas we are told that in less surly days sultans on feast days flung gold coins into crowds happy to scramble for it; that kings caused showers of gold to descend on loved ministers; and that if jewles fell in showers from the sky no one would dream of asking suspicious questions.
The nearest any one of us could remember to this kingly stuff was a certain newspaper mogul in London who would reward a promising young journalist for an article which he (the mogul) liked, with an envelope stuffed full of five pound notes sent around by special messenger – but this kind of thing is only too open to unkind interpretation; and the amount of ill-feeling aroused in the bosoms of fellow journalists, and the terror in that of the recipient for fear the thing might be talked about, is probably why we stage such scenes as it were in reverse, and why, on the edge of a magic fountain, we slide in a single coin, like a love letter into an envelope during an affair which one’s better sense entirely deplores. Sympathetic magic – but a small magic, a mini-magic, a most furtive summoning of the Gods of Gold. And, if a hand rose from the fountain to throw us coins and jewels, it is more than likely that, schooled as we are by recent literature, we’d sneer and throw them back in its teeth – so to speak.
And now a man who had not spoken at all said that he knew of a case where jewels had been flung into the dust of a public square in Italy. No one had thrown them back. He took from his pocket a wallet, and from the wallet a fold of paper such as jewellers use, and on the paper lay a single spark or gleam of light. It was a slice of milk-and-rainbow opal. Yes, he said, he had been there. He had picked up the fragment and kept it. It wasn’t valuable, of course. He would tell us the story if he thought there was time, but for some reason it was a tale so precious to him that he didn’t want to bungle it through having to hurry. Here there was another swirl of silkily gleaming fog beyond the glass of the restaurant wall, and another announcement of unavoidable delay.
So he told the story. One day someone will introduce me to a young man called Nikki (perhaps, or what you will) who was born during the Second World War in Italy. His father was a hero, and his mother now the wife of the Ambassador to … Or perhaps in a bus, or at a dinner party, there will be a girl who has a pearl hanging around her neck on a chain, and when asked about it she will say: Imagine, my mother was given this pearl by a man who was practically a stranger, and when she gave it to me she said … Something like that will happen: and then this story will have a different beginning, not a fog at all …
There was a man called Ephraim who lived in Johannesburg. His father was to do with diamonds, as had been his father. The family were immigrants. This is still true of all people from Johannesburg, a city a century old. Ephraim was a middle son, not brilliant or stupid, not good or bad. He was nothing in particular. His brothers became diamond merchants, but Ephraim was not cut out for anything immediately obvious, and so at last he was apprenticed to an uncle to learn the trade of diamond-cutting.
To cut a diamond perfectly is an act like a samurai’s sword-thrust, or a master archer’s centred arrow. When an important diamond is shaped a man may spend a week, or even weeks, studying it, accumulating powers of attention, memory, intuition, till he has reached that moment when he finally knows that a tap, no more, at just that point of tension in the stone will split it exactly so.
While Ephraim learned to do this, he lived at home in a Johannesburg suburb;
