The tarnished heart-shaped silver pendant rests pleasingly in the palm of my hand, like a cool coin. There’s something kind of kitsch, sweet, about its form. For an object I know little about, it’s taken on meaning, certainly beyond its value, which is surely insignificant, as it’s fallen into my path over the years. As a young girl it appealed to me much more than the strings of Venetian glass and carved-wood beads entangled with it in Mum’s jewellery box. I recall a tiny diamond Scottie dog among the colourful spaghetti, which granny used to wear pinned to her lapel, but even as a little girl that struck me as childish. This heart pendant, however, was to be taken more seriously – plain silver, a little worn, weighty. The last time it revealed itself to me was a few years ago, in a drawer in her bedroom, when we were organising her belongings.
When I sit down to write, I place it in my left hand and look at it nestled there in my palm, in proximity to my wedding and engagement rings. It strikes me that it’s now close to something that Mum never knew for me – she didn’t get to see those rings on my finger, the fourth finger that ancient Greeks and Egyptians believed contained a vein that ran all the way to one’s heart, thus making a fitting home for wedding rings. I wonder if I have changed, or perhaps not at all and things around me have changed, and now here she is checking in to chat and mull over the events of these strange and seismic past few years. Is that mad? Probably. Does it feel good? It does.
The physicality of objects can be stifling, inhibiting and also comforting. The Stoics believed that nothing really belongs to us, and yet, while I do subscribe to much of their rationale, in this moment I feel closer to Mum again. I know almost nothing about this necklace, but I imagine it to be from the 1970s, a time I most associate with her (even though I wasn’t around to enjoy her then), when she would have worn it with her long skirts and Biba hats. I know this necklace touched her skin, and I can’t say for certain, but I like to think of it clanging against her chest as she rode her horse, or bouncing against her polo neck as she strode up Lexington Avenue or carried bags of groceries home from Earl’s Court market.
I ring her great friend Tash and sister Georgie. Do they recognise it? Not at all. I suspect she picked it up at a thrift fair for a song and tucked it away in a drawer. There is nothing inside of it, no place to fasten miniature photographs; it’s just hollow enough to hold a lock of hair, although something so morbidly 18th-century would not have been her move. The box-link chain needs cleaning, the latch is loose. I suspect that it’s not in fact silver – there’s no stamp – and at some point I will get it looked at and have its clasp fixed. But I am loath to get it smartened up, for risk of polishing mum further away. Just as it is, it’s hers. It’s her.
Illustration by Lawrence Mynott
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