When the Great War began in 1914, everyone hid their pearls in the family safe. But by 1916, while governments that were at war were sinking, other fortunes were being made. And on it went.
But by the end of the Great War, the oysters were having their revenge. The owners were desperate, and the shell-openers devious. A good pearl had five people bidding on it. One night, James stood on the long Chinese pier on Jolo Island and stared into the sky. The dancing stars promised their piercing entry into some place of glory. The tents were folding on this particular circus, and he knew it. The wizened old women with their skinny dugs and skin sores from swimming in rotting oyster flesh had lost their charm. To stroll the beach of Pearltown, Anywhere, and watch a lugger come in with the flag at half-mast and the crew unload a dead diver quite frankly depressed him.
He returned to Japan and spared a day to visit Mikimoto. Standing on the beach, looking out at the islands that his energetic friend had colonised with hundreds of thousands of pregnant oysters, he gave a passing thought to his bride. The last time he had been on this spot, she had been at his side. It was the one time he had seen Sophia McBean at a loss for words. The
ama
had sculled in, with faces full of the joy of life and bodies like sleek mermaids. Sophia was agape. She knew she was beaten.
Beaten at one game, but not at another, by the end of the honeymoon Sophia was pregnant, and after a predictable time gave birth to the little girl they called Belle. The child was not quite two when Sophia packed herself off to England with the excuse that one could not bring up a child properly in this place. James pointed out that the Japanese did it on a regular basis. She stomped her buckled shoe: that was exactly her point. She was not Japanese and she would never be and if that was what he wanted he should just get himself a Japanese wife.
She was prescient, that woman. And indeed, in England she joined a cult of psychics, or so he heard. He never doubted she would have great success. How Sophia spent her time he did not ask. The girl went to boarding school. He often wondered how she grew, what was the colour of her hair, and what she was learning at school. For a long time he heard nothing from home.
Then one day, as if summoned by regret, Sophia cabled Yokohama, as if she knew he’d be there.
Come immediately. Paris. Hotel Drouot. Sophia.
He didn’t hesitate for a moment.
Will arrive first option of travel.
He was there within sixteen days.
‘You took your time,’ Sophia said. She had ensconced herself in the 9th arrondissement near the Boulevard Haussman on the Rue Rossini. Antique sales were held every day at the Hotel Drouot. The bar chairs had round seats and were upholstered with a bright pink, the walls, too were pink. It was like a bordello. But he felt as if he were seeing a sister, not a wife.
‘Apparently you are still in the business,’ he said.
‘No, I am in the business again.’
‘What happened to your mind-reading?’
She smiled. ‘I still practise.’
A tall, pale young woman entered the bar and came toward them. She had unsettling blue eyes and looked as if she had never seen the sun.
‘This is Belle. Belle, your father.’
‘My God,’ said James Lowinger. It occurred to him that it had been cruel to leave the girl with the redoubtable Miss McBean all this time. Why had he done it? He was afraid of the woman, if the truth be known. It was easier to take on the bandits of Bombay.
He bent to kiss his daughter’s hand. ‘You are lovely, my dear,’ he said.
The girl cried out and snatched her hand away. James looked at Sophia, confused. Was the girl simple?
Now Sophia had a proposal. They should be together as a family. Belle was finished at school, and no doubt before many years she would marry. They would make up for lost time, as a family. Try though James did to locate that wild passionate woman of the Kuwait houseboat in her hands, or her eyes, he could not.
James said that he would think about it.
He walked along the Boulevard Montmartre. He took a turn and found his way to the Seine. It was wide, dark and full of eddies. You could drown in there. He was afraid as he’d never been afraid before. He strolled past the bookstalls and found the printmakers. Belle caught up with him while he was studying a few
ukiyo-e
that had turned up on one of the barrows. Suddenly she was at his elbow.
‘I don’t remember Japan,’ she said, ‘although I’m told I was born there.’
He turned to her, his heart in his mouth. She took his arm and they walked together over the bridge to Notre Dame and through the flower market. They crossed again and had tea in a café overlooking the Hotel de Ville. Belle was sober and sad; he felt tender toward her. She walked without speaking much, her face lifted to the gale; brave but battling: what was she battling? Her sadness, it seemed. That was the boarding school, Sophia had said. These girls have a certain sameness, she said, as if Belle were an article of clothing turned out from a pattern.
But James lost no time in adoring her now. He was father to a supple white-haired girl so unlike her mother. Still, in moments
of clarity he could say to himself, I am being reined in. This is the reining in of James Lowinger.
They had to have a home, and so they got one, a flat on the rue Rossini that was supposed to make them all happy: James, Sophia, their daughter, and an English housekeeper named Miss Hinchcliffe. Belle appeared to be content to be picturesque and walk with Miss Hinchcliffe in the filthy little parks, the way all the other marriageable young women did.
Paris was the centre of the pearl world. It had no right to be: France had no pearl grounds in its empire and never had. But never mind: it had style, and experts. The buyers came here and so too did the sellers. The rue du Bac was the heart of it. The dealers stood outside on the pavement. Everybody came to them, the rich ladies and their husbands, the gem merchants who wanted to buy wholesale and the guys who’d bought gems from the markets in Dubai and wanted to sell. They clustered like flies on the kerb. Every so often the French cops would tell them to make way. But they just gathered again.
They spoke French, but they weren’t French. They were all trying to get their nationality down on paper, sitting down with the French officials to try to get a passport. They came from the sub-continent, from Spain, the Arab world or Russia.
James took a little office, upstairs from the Café Scosso, just a room with a carpet from the desert and a wide flat table on which a perfect pearl would roll for ever, if given a nudge, and an imperfect pearl would stall, and give itself away. On the corner of the desk he placed his sieves, for sizing, and his corn tongs.
From his window, he watched the street. The dealers paced. They had the goods and had to sell. Or they had to make a snap decision on the value, and bid. The brokers slid between buyer and seller, in an oily way, and made the transaction work. They had the gift of the gab, whatever their native language.
The traders handed around paper packets, little bundles wrapped up with pearls in them. There were no receipts; everyone was watching. Sooner or later, egged on by a broker, one of the dealers pulled out a roll of banknotes and peeled off a few. He
gave some to the other dealer, some to the broker. Then he went farther along the kerb to call a taxi, one arm raised –
Voiture! Voiture!
His buyer was somewhere, waiting.
James decided that it was best to keep to the high ground, in his office. In the family were two of the oldest English pearling names. So Lowinger and McBean was born. He had it painted on the door. The firm took on the big gems, the risks, and the tricky sales no one else could make.
And this was the way it worked. A dealer made his way up in the lift with his questionable packet. ‘I can get …’ he began.
James put a magnifying lens in his eye.
‘Can’t offer you any more for this, my dear sir –’
‘I wouldn’t even consider it but I need the money quickly –’
‘You’re in the wrong business, I have to say then, with all respect. You know you can’t unload a perfect pearl on the first merchant you find with cash.’
‘With respect, that’s why I came to you, the pre-eminent, the largest, the only one, frankly, I know, who could afford to pay cash for such a find –’
‘Then may I assume I have the luxury of naming my price?’
James asked to keep the pearl for two hours and took a taxi to the flat. Sophia worked the estate auctions. Whenever a countess or a film star died, jewellery came under the hammer. ‘You are home, my dear,’ he’d say, surprised every time.
‘The general public got into the bidding, so it was time to get out,’ she would grumble.
‘What do you think of this?’
She would roll the pearl between her fingers. She would put the pearl in the palm of her hand, and hold the palm at the level of her eyes and gaze steadily into the centre of the pearl with her lips pursed. It was as if the pearl were a feather and she could blow it into the air. She held it to her eye, she put it beside her ear and rolled it some more, which he considered an affectation, because what could you hear in a pearl?
‘Where did this pearl come from?’
‘The Arabian Gulf, I’m told, by way of Bombay.’
‘I sense pain. I hear wailing.’
That was safe. They always wailed, those Arabs.
‘And weariness, great weariness. This is an old pearl.’
Hokey and phooey, thought James Lowinger, though he never said so. The door between their two rooms remained firmly closed. Occasionally he wondered if she had any sexual feelings at all. Usually he decided not, and that she was a crackpot. But she was never wrong about the value of a pearl.
‘What do they want?’
‘Five hundred.’
‘What is it? Fifty grains?’
‘A little more.’ Actually, she had it just about exactly right.
‘Buy it,’ she would say. ‘You can sell it for one thousand francs, just now. Sell it quickly. I have a feeling of haste.’
She would stand and walk with her arms crossed, hugging her waist.
‘How so?’ he’d say.
‘Something’s coming,’ she would say. ‘Some disaster. I feel it.’
‘Monsoons in the Straits of Manaar?’
‘No,’ she would say.
There were rumours that the Japanese pearls would soon hit the market. ‘This is going to kill us,’ she would say, whenever the topic came up.
The year was 1920. Pearls were in fashion and fashion was ruthless. Women wore them on their necks and wrists and fingers and ankles; they made cocktail dresses of them and handbags and shoes. Happy or tragic as the events of the day were, they could only help the pearl market. Every key event had its echo in sales. Insurrection, invasion or stock-market slump was reflected a few months later in the business. Pearls were luxury items, and on top of that, they couldn’t be traced.
The Persian Gulf produced by itself forty to fifty million pearls, one quarter of all the production. The big French jewellers were out in Bahrain trying to buy direct from the fishers without going through Bombay. The maharajas and mandarins were selling the treasures from their family sepulchres. Hundreds of pounds of
big pearls were coming out of Panama and Costa Rica. Even freshwater pearls from America, that had only been on the market a few years, and used to be had for a few thousand francs a sack, were expensive. Still James couldn’t get enough of them.
How long could it last? And why didn’t the benefits make their way into the oceans? You would think the lot of the poor divers would improve. But the very opposite was the case. Still the fishers of pearls died poor and died of hunger when the fishing was poor. These fishermen would not stand it for ever. The oyster population would not stand it for ever.
12
Nuki-uchi
Drawing upward, cutting down
Mikimoto’s pearl farm first sent gems to London for sale in 1919 at a discount of twenty-five per cent because they were not natural. They were of faultless colour, shape and lustre. They caused a furore. The next year Japanese pearls went to France.
James’s colleagues on the rue du Bac were spitting with venom. They offered their views, in the coffee shops along the street, and on the pavement.
‘Does this man Miki – what is it? – Mikimo – think he can domesticate the oysters, discipline the spat and ask them to make pearls at fixed hours, according to his will?’ one of them asked. ‘He hasn’t got a hope.’
‘If you saw the women who do the domesticating, you might think again,’ James said.
‘So he has succeeded in provoking the oyster by inserting an irritant into its belly. Is it a pearl the oyster produces? No, it is a little ball of pearly matter that looks like a pearl, but it is not a pearl.’
‘The pearl is the victim of science.’
Connoisseurs ventured that the lustre was ‘false’, that it was ‘anti-natural’ and that it ‘deceived’ the eye. All of this James Lowinger enjoyed; he only wished he could come upon dear Mikimoto himself balancing his umbrella upright on the tip of his chin, to have a chat about it. He sat in his office while the other dealers and the brokers came in to complain.
‘It will be the end of us,’ said the man with the smashed nose he’d got buying shell in a back alley in Broome. ‘No one could tell the difference between a natural and a cultured pearl without cutting one in half.
‘Mikimoto never actually said they were the same. He is perfectly straightforward about the way they’re grown,’ said James.
Some dealers swore there was a difference in the colour. But the Japanese could make them in greenish yellow, whitish gold, rosee and pure white. Others swore the perfection of the sphere was a giveaway. Nature rarely created a perfectly round pearl. They said you could tell the difference: but the only difference was in the core and that, even an X-ray could not determine. The nucleus was laid down in a shell, not on a grain. So that, instead of being spherical, it is flat at right angles. There were ways invented to see this by drilling a hole and passing a mirror through, but once you were done you’d ruined the pearl.