The Lost and Found Necklace by Louisa Leaman

The Lost and Found Necklace by Louisa Leaman

Author:Louisa Leaman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-04-23T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter Eleven

Nancy looks thinner than ever. Her breathing is shallow, but her eyes still just about bear that twinkle. At the side of the bed, Jess has the envelope of Nancy’s Denmark Street photographs in her hand, hopeful that the sight of them might stir Nancy’s memory, ignite a reaction. She scatters them on the blanket, those vibrant images of teenage Nancy staring back.

“Look,” Jess whispers. “This is you. This is you, Grandma, as a young woman wearing the necklace! It’s not the actual necklace, I appreciate, but”—she squeezes Nancy’s hand—“I’ve been working on that. I’ll have it soon, I promise.”

She flips one of the photos to reveal the sticker on the back.

“‘Paul Angel Photography, 1954,’” she reads. “Who is Paul Angel, Grandma? Do you remember when these were taken?”

Nancy’s gaze is fixed to the ceiling. Jess waves the photo in front of her, one of the best, in which she’s standing with her arms folded—a hint of her future attitude within that demure fifties circle dress—but there is no discernable response.

“I’ve been squirrelling around,” Jess persists, “seeing what I can find out about our Taylor women. I went to Wales and discovered these photographs in your desk at the cabin. I’d love to know the story behind them. Your cabin’s fine, by the way. Still standing—just. And I met with Bevan Floyd, who sends his best wishes. What a nice human! He showed me around Pel Tawr and told me all about Minnie and Emery and the making of the necklace. He even gave me Minnie’s sketchbook. And he talked about your mother, Anna, about her going off to America. So it’s true? You were born in Hollywood.”

She pats Nancy’s hand, expecting more silence, then suddenly Nancy springs into verbosity.

“Oh yes, on good days, my mother was impeccable,” she exclaims. “She’d set her hair, arrange her jewelry—earrings, brooches, hairpins, bangles…she brought them all with her. On bad days, though, she’d just lie on the sofa, drinking sweet sherry, endlessly lamenting her beloved Zedora—”

“Zedora?”

“Yes, Jessy, with the gilded toilet handle that Lucille Ball was rumored to have broken.”

Jess laughs. “Now you’re really confusing me! What on earth is a Zedora?”

Nancy looks pensive.

“It’s all gone now.”

“What?” say Jess, tensing. “What’s gone, Grandma?”

Nancy sighs.

“Her life. My mother’s glamorous life. All her stories… They became nothing more than stories, from a world we’d never get back. Wake up, I used to think. Face it, move on. I knew better than to join her in the shadows of nostalgia, Jessy, because while those stories always began with jubilance…they finished with tears.”

Jess rests her chin on her hand, puzzled that these remarks don’t match the audacious and vivacious image of Anna she’d had in mind.

“What happened, Grandma, to make her so regretful?”

Nancy scowls.

“That’s Anna’s business.”

“But—”

“We came back to London and lived in a terrible place.”

“Are you talking about the tenement block?” says Jess, remembering how Nancy had sometimes talked of a grimy flat in Poplar, where she’d spent her early teens.

“That place,” she scowls. “The surrounding streets were still pitted with bomb damage.



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