The Ten-Word Game by Jonathan Gash

Author:Jonathan Gash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

16

Nervous at having to deputise for Henry Semper in his chat, I was relieved when only twenty or so passengers turned up. They’d never heard of me, and I wasn’t famous June Milestone or good old TV star Henry Semper. I decided to speak on jewellery. The shops had some on sale. I recognised a few faces. Delia Oakley and her friend Fern, of course, with Lauren along presumably to suss out the opposition (me). One old lady came wearing every bauble she had.

The ship’s newspaper listed seventeen different entertainments in competition. I was glad. A salesgirl came with trays of trinkets. She put pendants and rings out on velvet. For a few minutes I spoke about the problems of wearing baubles.

“Think what a jewel is,” I said, once I’d got going. “It’s only a bit of something we value. Like, when aluminium was purified by a Dane in 1825 it was the same price as gold, even though it’s Planet Earth’s commonest metal and the Ancient Babylonians used its compounds in medicines and dyes. See? Now, it’s stacked in every rubbish tip. We’d laugh to see an emerald set in aluminium, but the Victorians thought that beautiful.”

I asked the salesgirl to uncover her trays of jewellery.

“Hands up those who use spray perfumes, aftershaves and the like.” They all did. “Everybody? Well, you want locking up. And who keeps their rings on when washing up? Everybody? You’re under arrest. Even diamonds are affected by washing liquids supposedly gentle to your hands, as the advertising slogans say.”

Somebody interrupted. “But a gemstone can’t be destroyed, can it?”

“Untrue, missus. Want an example? Remember those bonny marcasite brooches? There have been instances when they’ve been left in an ordinary box. Years later, you find the box holds nothing but powder. It hasn’t been stolen – the marcasite has simply oxidised to powder. And marcasite is pure crystalline iron sulphide.”

“Diamonds are indestructible, though, aren’t they? They’re the hardest substance known.”

“Almost true. In Australia and South Africa, old miners believed in the sledgehammer test. If they whacked a gemstone with a sledgehammer and it didn’t break, they thought it proof the gem was a real diamond. Not necessarily true. They must have shattered hundreds of genuine diamonds, right from the moment little Erasmus Jacobs found his ‘sparkling stone’ in South Africa in 1866 and diamonds became everybody’s darling. A diamond is more vulnerable than you might think. It has planes of cleavage.”

“Which gemstones are most easily damaged?” That was Delia.

“Organic gemstones. Spray perfumes are a real risk, especially to pearls. The pearl’s nacre – the shiny outer coat you pay for – gets dissolved at the pearl’s equator. You can never get it back. It’s the same with mother-of-pearl. I once was in a lady’s … er, room. She had a beautiful mother-of-pearl inlaid box for her jewellery, eighteenth century, on her, er, coffee table. It was blotchy. She often used one of those spray perfumes, see?”

“Why did she have it on her coffee table and not in her bedroom?” a lady demanded.

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