Chapter 8
Sometimes the universe does you a favor.
When that happens, I’ve always thought you should just go with it, accept it without asking too many questions.
Once in a while a piece of good luck falls in your lap, the cosmic dice fall the right way, and you end up with double sixes.
That was my first thought when I heard our offer on the house had been accepted—it had only been an opening bid, a borderline-cheeky offer that was supposed to be the starting point for negotiation.
It was still near the very top of our price range, but I expected a bit of haggling at least. It didn’t occur to me that first offer would be accepted without a quibble.
As I said: for whatever reason, or no reason at all, sometimes the universe just does you a favor.
Which is also what I’m thinking after ten minutes in the jeweler’s shop.
It was a flash of inspiration, really, a sudden thought as I’d been about to leave the house. Work bag over my shoulder, jacket on, car keys in hand, that sick feeling of dread still rolling in my stomach as I tried to work out how we’d pay for the new furniture.
And then it came to me: the watch.
A few hours later, I’m standing at the counter in a small jeweler’s shop in town, a little backstreet place with two reinforced window displays filled with rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings—and watches.
There’s an outer door and inner door to the shop, a cramped “airlock” of sorts between the two with cameras scrutinizing your arrival.
More cameras, contained within half-spheres of clear plastic, are discreetly mounted in each corner behind me; another behind the main counter that points its lens directly at the front door out onto the street.
There is no way of entering this shop without being caught on at least two of them.
I’ve been here once before to get Jess a gift after Daisy was born, a platinum eternity ring set with three small rubies. The owner, then and now, still seems to run the place almost single-handed. Finally, she takes out the eyepiece and lays the Rolex watch back down on a cloth pad on the counter.
“Four,” she says finally. She’s a slight, fiftyish woman with a cloud of wiry graying hair and half-moon spectacles on a gold chain around her neck.
I wait for her to elaborate but she doesn’t say anything more.
“Four… what?”
“Thousand,” she says tersely. “I can give you four thousand for it.”
For a moment, I’m thrown. A quick look on eBay in a Starbucks this morning had suggested it might be worth a bit, but I hadn’t really believed it, hadn’t really believed this was the same type, same model.
Because four thousand pounds seemed like a ridiculous amount.
And why would anyone leave something so valuable behind; why would they leave it in a drawer like so much junk?
“Right,” I say. “OK.”
Four. Thousand. Pounds.
A flare of shame accompanies the next thought: perhaps I won’t try too hard to track down the previous owner after all.
It was mine, in any case. It was in my house—so legally it belonged to me, right?
At least I’d been honest with the little phone; I’d done the right thing to try getting in touch with the previous owner. I had tried and that was that.
My original plan had been to give the watch back too.
Or at least mention it, when—or if—we ever got a call back from the mystery number.
Although it can’t have meant that much to the previous owner if they left it unworn, unwound, unloved in a forgotten drawer for God knows how many years.
I’m reminded of something else the estate agent said to me: People are as honest as they can afford to be.
What was it about moving house that brought out the worst in people?
Money, I supposed. More money than they would ever spend on anything else.
The jeweler takes my hesitation for reticence, fixing me with a weary stare over the top of her glasses.
“You might see more for a piece like this online and if you think you can get more for it elsewhere, take your chances on eBay or wherever, be my guest.”
“I actually didn’t realize—”
“The inscription on the back.” She flips it over, indicates the engraving EJS 11–29–75 in the gold casing. “Any kind of personalization, as a rule, will tend to decrease an item’s value to a general buyer.”
“Of course,” I say. “I understand.”
“So: four thousand,” she says again. “Cash now. Yes?”
“Yes,” I say. “That would be great, thanks.”
“Family heirloom, is it?”
I nod. “Something like that.”
She slides the watch off the counter and disappears into a back room.
In her place a blonde teenager appears, presumably to keep an eye on me while her boss is busy.
She’s wearing black jeans and a white blouse, a chain around her neck with the word Holly in swirling silver script.
We exchange tight smiles and I let my eyes wander over the displays beneath the glass countertop.
Prices range from ninety-five pounds to three thousand five hundred for a gold bracelet inlaid with pale blue stones.
The manager reappears with a thick square book of carbon-copy forms, pink copy on top, yellow and blue copies beneath.
She hands me a pen to fill in the blanks.
Name, address, phone number—landline and mobile—email, date of birth, date of sale, date of acquisition, agreed sale price, and so on and so on.
A tick box that reads: “I declare this is my property to sell.”
I hesitate, pen hovering over the thin carbon paper. “Didn’t realize there would be so much paperwork.”
“Provenance,” she grunts, writing out a separate receipt longhand on another sheet of paper. She has gold rings on every finger, a gold bracelet on one wrist, and a gold watch on the other. “In case any queries arise in the future over the origin of the item.”
“In case it’s stolen, you mean?”
She shrugs as if the answer is obvious. “These are the rules.”
“Are they strictly necessary, all the details requested on this form?”
She stops what she’s doing, peering at me over her half-moon glasses with unblinking eyes.
“Have you changed your mind about wishing to sell the watch?”
“No.”
“Then the answer is yes, they’re necessary.”
She goes back to her own paperwork, black ballpoint scoring hard into the old-fashioned receipt.
“Unless you want to sell for two-and-a-half, then we can perhaps dispense with the form-filling.” She doesn’t miss a beat as she says it, doesn’t look up at me, her pen still moving across the form with rapid strokes. Almost as if she hasn’t spoken at all.
“That’s OK,” I say. “Four thousand is fine.”
When I’ve finished filling in the form, she disappears into the back room again, returning to count the money out in front of me, all red fifties, before smoothing the notes into a hefty quarter-inch stack, and putting them into an envelope.
I slide it into my jacket pocket, the money a solid mass resting against my heart during the nervous five-minute walk down to Lower Parliament Street where I pay it into my bank.
I haven’t made a cash deposit for years and the rigmarole of it—find a counter with a pen that works, fill in the deposit slip, stand in the queue for a cashier—feels like an echo from a different century.
I start to relax as the cashier stamps the slip and hands me the stub.
Maybe it was karma, I told myself. A little balancing of the cosmic books after my trouble at work. I had told Jess that my boss is fine with me working flexibly while we settle into the new house, as long as team targets are hit.
The truth is slightly more complicated than that.
The truth is that I don’t have targets anymore. Or a boss.
It was a fortnight before we were due to move that the redundancy notice came around, the email landing like a bomb in my inbox.
A confidential invitation to the human resources department at 9 a.m. the next day to receive a white envelope with my name on it and a meaningless ten-minute chat full of HR doublespeak.
It was a restructuring, a downsizing, a reallocation of staff and resources in light of changes in project requirements.
And regrettably some difficult choices had to be made.
All the usual corporate weasel words for when the accountants get nervous and a certain number of employees get singled out to walk the plank.
This time, it had been my turn, along with half a dozen other software developers on my team.
Pretty awful timing, to be honest, and a statutory minimum payout, which meant I needed to get another job lined up as soon as possible.
The second time it’s happened, too.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I ask too many questions; I don’t like being deceived. That was certainly the case first time around. And this time? Who knows.
Maybe it wasn’t just bad luck that got me singled out.
It’s ironic because for most of the time Jess and I have been together, she has earned more than me. It was only last year, when I’d gotten this job, that I finally overtook her and we started to think about moving out of our cramped semi-detached house so we could give the children a bedroom each.
I didn’t tell her. I still haven’t.
I’ll tell her when I get a new job, but until then, there’s no point in freaking her out with the news that we’re one salary down when she has enough on her plate with her own job, with the kids, the new house, and everything else.
When she’s spent so long looking forward to this move and creating the dream home we have always talked about.
At least her job seems pretty secure. People will always need insurance.
It’s not as if we could have pulled out at that stage anyway.
We had already signed on the dotted line—we were going to move, whatever happened.
Just bad timing, that’s all. It’ll be fine.
We’ll be fine. The money I made in the jeweler’s shop will help us make the first credit card payment for the furniture Jess has ordered; it will help me keep my side of the mortgage payments going for at least another month, enough to bridge the gap between my old job and the next one.
The house, the watch—the little hidden room on the top floor—would help me keep my secret until then.