Serpent's Tooth (2006)

'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is ...', King Lear Once, he brought home a pair of gold and emerald earrings, two small jewelled clips he found at a market in Hong Kong. He picked them up out of their gilded leather box and put them in her open hand. His fingers left a heat-smudge on the metal that made the earrings slippery and hard to open. She managed to snap them shut against her earlobes, then turned her head to see herself in the mirror. She saw him there in the reflection, behind her, smiling. The mirror was hers. She had bought it because it reminded her of a Charles Macintosh design, and because the glass made everything look golden. In their dark Victorian cottage dining room, barely more than an alcove off the wood-panelled hall, the mirror made a warm pool of light. Later, it was one of the few things she took away. She wrapped it carefully to make sure it didn't break and joked to friends that at least she'd forestalled another seven years' misfortune. The earrings were made up of two tiny palms pressed together, one bare, the other bright with tiny green jewels. That night he took her out to dinner and ordered old French wine. The pink table-cloth was so stiff with starch that it scratched her thigh. It didn't bother her that he first asked what she wanted to eat then ordered for her anyway. In those days, she admitted, she didn't know how to choose. To him she was a young enchantress, a nymph, hardly a woman at all. He saw only her beauty, her tawny charisma and taste for beautiful things. She wore a jade silk dress and he said that the green of the dress and the emeralds made her hazel eyes look like semi-precious jewels. He invented a name for her that night: the Priestess of Green Light. She didn't know what he meant by it, and although she smiled and tried to look appropriately mysterious, secretly she felt uncomfortable, as if he was trying to force her into something she didn't like. It must have been spring then, because the next day she noticed that the green of her emeralds matched the buds on the beech tree outside. It surprised her that new leaves were so bright, so green. If she'd ever known that, she'd forgotten. After that she watched the tree every day as the buds grew bigger and began to unfurl, tiny elf ears gradually unrolling, becoming broad-handed and strong. They were not the kind of earrings she usually wore: ivory drops inherited from an early colonial ancestor, long narrow Lapis beads from Istanbul, or the delicate Indian silver sprays that fell apart one night, as she held a microphone in her hand. The string that had held them together finally decayed and with one sudden movement of her head, the particles scattered away like a light passing through a prism. She'd been asked to give a lecture for a Creative Writing course at the university and chose to speak about the relationships for a writer between the short story and the novel. The emeralds occurred to her as metaphor. She told the students that a short story was like jewellery: one or a few hard sparkling moments, but that a novel was a kind of journey that took you to places you could never previously have imagined. Several people in the auditorium nodded. Years later she changed her mind, when everything she wrote began to feel like an unspeakable journey, sometimes to places she wished she had never gone. The Indian earrings were made up of many fine silver components, slender wires wound into tiny springs, five tiny pointed spears and the two intricate hoops from which they had swung for so many years against her neck. She uttered a cry as they fell apart. It was a loss, not of the earrings themselves nor any particular event or memory, but of something that had been part of her, and had now been displaced by the far more valuable but unfamiliar emerald palms. Some of the creative writing students immediately rushed forward to gather up the bits, so that she felt compelled to stop the lecture and help them, if only to save time. …