Silver Earrings

SILVER EARRINGS.



Anne Bartley was a tall girl with flaming red hair. She wore frameless spectacles and silver jewelry. She wouldn’t be caught dead with a gold earring on.
I ran into her the other day at a restaurant. She had changed. Then, I had, too. So I didn’t find anything unusual about that. I walked up to her after making sure that she was Anne. It was ages since I had last seen her: at school in my hometown. She was on her own at a table for two. So I just sat down beside her. She looked up at me in surprise and slight indignation.
She had her hair tied back loosely and was wearing heavy make up. Two large gold rings hung from her ears.
“Hi! Fancy meeting you here all of a sudden!” I smiled. “Why, don’t you remember me? It’s Clara – Clara Hughes!”
Her brows contracted a little. She frowned at me. “Clara – ”
“School, Anne, school!” I urged.
She smiled now. “Oh! Imagine that! I didn’t recognize you, Clara! I’m so sorry! What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I work at the place opposite! What about you? Never seen you here before.”
“At the newspaper office? Are you a reporter there?”
“Yes. Well, how about you?”
“I’m planning to get a job there. In fact, I’ve already handed in the application form. I’ve come to see if I’ve got the job. Couldn’t wait for the letter.”
“Oh! Then you must be doing that new column on the second page that the boss was talking of. If you are, then you’ve got the job, alright!”
She smiled happily. “Oh, good.”
I looked around for the waiter. “Are you waiting for someone? Otherwise I’ve a good mind to order for both of us. What will you be having?”
“Whatever you prefer. I’m not all that hungry, really. Nerves, I expect.”
“What have you been doing with yourself all these years, Anne?”
“Things.” She replied, her mind on the menu card.
The waiter came and took our order. I looked at her gold earrings.
“Tastes change, Anne?” I asked.
“You don’t know how much, Clara…” She replied mysteriously.
“So, what are you going to do your column on?”
“The supernatural.”
“As in – ghosts?” I couldn’t suppress my smile.
She shook her head sadly, not in denial, but just an expression of sadness, as if she was laughing at me.
“I like your earrings, Clara. Where did you get them from?”
I was proud of my earrings. I’d got them from an old shabby shop that sold valuable trinkets. They were silver. And old floral design crafted beautifully.
“A family heirloom.” I shrugged.
She smiled. Her own gold earrings sparkled in the sunlight coming in through the parted curtains. Suddenly I felt curious about her. All this time she hadn’t ventured any information about herself. And she had changed a lot.
“ Do you mind if I ask you about your earrings?” I stammered.
“ A gift.” She smiled. “From my husband.”
“When did you get married?” I asked, sitting up.
“Ten years.”
“And your husband, what does he do?” It was being exceedingly difficult to keep up the conversation. I was asking all the questions and she was giving short direct answers, not making any effort to prolong the conversation. I felt like a lawyer questioning a witness.
She sighed. “He died three years ago.” She said, not looking at me but at our approaching meal.
The waiter laid down spotless clean plates in front of us and served the steaming hot stew.
“I’m sorry,” I said. She shrugged, blowing over her spoon to cool it down.
“The earrings –” she said, laying her spoon down on her saucer and pointing at my ears. ‘Will you give them to me once?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No, just let me hold them.” She smiled, reassuringly. “I’ll show you something.”
Bewildered, and not at all sure of her intentions, I slipped each earring off my ears, one at a time, and held them out to her. She took them from my hand.
“Didn’t you say you didn’t believe in ghosts?” She asked, her head cocked to one side like a parrot’s.
“I didn’t say that exactly but, well, I don’t think I do.”
She was pleased with my reply. She sat up, eagerly, holding my silver earrings on the palm of her outstretched hand, where they glittered like moonlight in the sun.
“I have a theory.” She started, looking down at my earrings. “When a person dies, he leaves behind a part of himself in this world. Understand, though, that it isn’t he himself that remains behind, but his trace, his shadow, his ghost, if you would call it that. And this part of a man doesn’t live – it can’t, it has no life. It’s just the dust of a burnt out fire, scattered over the fireplace where the fire was once lit – the remnants of a thing that no longer exists, at least, in this world. And like the dust in the fireplace, this part also remains clouded around things that belonged to the man. Not things like his money or his office. But things which were really his, so to speak. His house, his clothes, his shoes, his comb, which he saw everyday, used everyday. Things like earrings, if it comes to a woman. Earrings, you see, are my specialty. I can read through their aura. And yours, Clara, are really very interesting.
“They tell me that they belonged to a woman. A very wealthy woman whose wealth dried out, little by little. She was fair and tall. Her auburn hair fell to her waist in soft curls. Her eyes were green – a deep clear green. She was headstrong and powerful. She inherited a fortune from an aunt and was used to all the luxuries of life. These earrings were given to her by her father.
“They were a wedding present. Her husband had a title but was poor. Every attempt at business on his part failed miserably. They started with a large house. A huge house too big for two people, too large for three even, if you counted her baby son. Also they kept a horde of servants to manage it. The servants disappeared one by one. The husband flaunted her money extravagantly. He went on long, expensive holidays, gambled, drank and slowly ate into her wealth. The house had to be sold soon – they couldn’t manage it anymore.
“They moved into a small bungalow on a street which belonged to the less fashionable area of the city. They didn’t keep any servants anymore. She slaved day in and day out cooking cleaning and looking after her ungrateful husband. He didn’t make any changes for her. He still went on about his life the same way as before. The money they had left dwindled. He started going to her father for loans. Her father couldn’t refuse them.
“One night her father was returning from a vacation. Her husband was supposed to meet him at the station. He didn’t show up. He got drunk at a party thrown by one of his friends and forgot about his father-in-law. It rained heavily that night. Her father couldn’t possibly know that her husband wasn’t coming and waited for hours in the rain. When he finally staggered into her house he was soaked to the skin and very ill. He died the next week.
“What money she inherited from him was used up in a year. A lot of it went in clearing her husband’s debts and the rest of it in gambling. They were penniless. She spent days sitting in her house wondering what to do. Everyday he went out with his friends drinking at their expenses.
“One night he came home really drunk. He entered the house and slumped down on the sofa in the drawing room and fell off to sleep. Her little son came into the room crying for some reason. He woke up angrily, slapped him as hard as he would a grown man who had slighted him, and went off growling to sleep once more. She lost her temper. Her kitchen knife was lying nearby. She picked it up and plunged it through his heart. He was dead before she flung the knife away. Then, slowly, systematically, she brought a pen and some paper out from a closet, sat by her husband’s gruesome dead body and wrote a letter to her cousin, asking him to take care of her son and left him her silver earrings to give to his son’s wife when her son grew up.
“Then, she placed the letter in her son’s hand and retired to her room. She hanged herself from the ceiling, her dead body dangling lifeless and limp, a cord taut around her neck, her eyes open, staring and dead.
“Her cousin sold these earrings to a shop after they found them still on her ears. He wasn’t going to care for the child, whom he sent to an orphanage. The child was sickly and weak and died soon after the incident.
“So you see, Clara. You didn’t inherit these lovely silver things as a family heirloom. No, you bought them at a shop, a shop that sells little trinkets. That is why when I see these earrings I don’t see them on any of your ancestors but on the pale ears of a dead body – the body of a strangled blue woman hanging limply from a ceiling.”
My stew was cold. I hadn’t touched it. I didn’t feel like eating anymore. Trying to think for a good excuse, I got up and pushed my chair in. Clara smiled up at me, the earrings still in her hand. “Going so soon?”
“Sorry, I have to get back. I lost track of the time talking to you. The boss will be getting angry and I still have to see to the evening edition. It was lovely meeting you after all these years. Do call when you’re free. We’ll have lunch together again perhaps.” Throwing some money for our meal down on the table I hurried out the door before Anne could realize that I hadn’t given her my number. I wanted to be well locked up inside my department before she went to the office with those horrible earrings that I’d dared to call mine.
The sun was high in the western sky and the heat was almost intolerable. The sunlight forced its way into every open window into every shadowy lane. The office building was exactly opposite the small restaurant. On either side of it small flower shops were lined up, closed for lunch. The flowers in the window drooped in the sullen heat of the early afternoon, their otherwise vibrant colours dull in the orange bright glow of the midday sun.
I hurried in through the open doorway and ran up the stairs, my leather bag dangling from my shoulders. The office was relatively empty. Everybody hadn’t come back from lunch yet. I was early. Technically, I hadn’t even had lunch. A few people were sitting idly about, eating packed meals and chatting. I sat down with them.
“Back early, Clara?” George Farthing asked, looking up from his computer screen. George was a little too serious about his work. He worked through meals and coffee breaks. “Looking anxious, too? Lunch been too expensive for you?”
“At least I can afford to eat everyday, unlike you.” I replied, turning towards the door. The boss had just come in. He was a short stumpy little man with nervous manners and a nose that could twitch in the funniest manner at odd times.
He looked at George, craning his neck to look over the monitors.
“The new employee’s just arrived. She’s standing outside. Would – would you show her around, George?”
George nodded briskly, getting up. “That would be Mrs. Clive, I presume.”
The boss nodded, turning to leave.
“Excuse me, sir,” I burst, surprised. “That wouldn’t, by any chance, be the woman who’s to write the new column for the second page of the paper, would it?”
He looked back at me with an annoyed frown. “Why, of course. Mrs. Clive’s going to write on ‘managing a house’. Or something the like, if I remember rightly.”
“And Miss Bartley?” I ventured. “Anne Bartley?”
“Never heard of her.”
“She’s not going to join here?”
“I’ve told you already, Hughes, I’ve never heard of her! How many new people do you expect me to employ in a day?”
“She has written to you, hasn’t she, asking for a job?”
He looked at me with a queer expression on his face.
“I haven’t had any letter asking for employment in the last eighteen months. No one by that name has ever written to me in my life, I can guarantee that.”
I grabbed my bag and ran towards the door, excusing myself.
“Mad as a hatter,” I heard George mutter after me.
I flew down the stairs and rushed out of the building into the heat. From across the street, it looked as if the table I had had lunch at that day was still occupied. I hurried into the restaurant. An unknown family, dressed shabbily, was sitting at our table by the window.
I stood still for sometime, wondering what had just happened. A sudden thought made me walk out the door and hail the nearest taxi I could find. I wasn’t going to give up till I knew.
The sun was much less aggressive when the taxi pulled up outside the dingy old shop. Its reddening rays seeped through the dark stained glass onto a large dirty-looking tray laden with jewelry and little trinkets in the window. The artificial stones glowed softly and, somehow, mysteriously in the dull light. The faded letters above the doorway were almost unreadable – paint peeling off the rusty board.
I walked into the shop, feeling nervous. As I pushed open the door, a bell attached to it tinkled softly, its sound bringing out an old wrinkled man to match the old wrinkled shop out from somewhere behind the old wrinkled counter. He nodded feebly at me, his small but magnified bright blue eyes peering out from behind his thick glasses. He recognized me from my previous visits.
“And what are we here to buy today?” He smiled, half of his yellow blackened teeth missing.
“Mr. Shepherd,” I asked, hesitatingly, “do you remember the silver earrings I bought a few days ago?”
He nodded at a moth-eaten tapestry hanging on the wall behind me for a few minutes, processing my question in his mind, slowed down by his years.
“The flower – ” His face broke into a thousand more wrinkles as he smiled. “Aye. That was a beautiful one. What would you like to know about that one, lass?”
“Where did you get them from?”
Once again, his balding head bobbed on his thin weak neck, his eyes on the tapestry. This time, he took longer and I waited, my heartbeat loud in my ears. At last he broke off from his stupor, looking at me with another wrinkled smile.
“That would be from a little girl, lass, only ten or thereabouts. She sold them to me. It’s my belief she told me she was gifted them from a rich uncle and she didn’t want no jewelry – only a book she’d seen in some shop. She bought it with the money she got from me.”
“You didn’t get them from a man whose cousin died a few days earlier?”
“Why no, missy,” He broke into a laugh. “Who’s been scaring you with wrong ideas? Those earrings were beautiful. What would you like today? I’ve never seen a gal with better taste, no sir. No one saw those earrings before you and I’d kept them in the center of the window for all the world to see. This lady saw them too and she’d be about your age. Poor thing. She hadn’t the money to buy them. Not them and not any others in my shop, though I have them so cheap. The only things she could afford were a pair of large false gold rings. And she had taste, too. What this world will come to, I don’t know, lass. Ah me, look there she is outside. Talk of the Devil – ”
I whirled around. I was too late to catch more than a glimpse of Anne’s face. She was pressed to the window, her eyes wide in shock at seeing me there, a silver glint beneath each of her ears. Then, in a swirl of flaming red hair she was gone, with my earrings. I rushed out the door as fast as I could. The only thing I was in time for was the sound of running feet. The street was empty.
I never saw Anne Bartley or my earrings again.