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‘Because he shaved that beard off, didn’t he?’ she says with a wink. ‘I know what that means, even if you don’t.’
Before I can ask her what she thinks it means, she’s helping Gerry over to her car, and Ilídio appears from across the road, wiping his hands on a rag. He must have been in the workshop.
‘You boomeranged back here already, Gerry?’ he says.
‘Yes, and I’ll be back in a few days to check you’re doing your cabinet joints the way I taught you, young man,’ Gerry says, waving a finger at Ilídio, contorting his face into a pretend scowl. Ilídio laughs.
Once Sandy and Gerry have driven away, I ask Ilídio, ‘How’s my commission coming along?’
‘Come and see,’ he says, beckoning me to follow him back across the road to the workshop.
He shows me the bare bones of what he has made, and I feel excited about how it’s going to look, how much I hope Ted will like it.
Looking over at the window, I wander across to the workbench where the soldering iron stands, running my hand across the pockmarked wood, covered in scratches and imprints from tools. How many things must have been created here over the years. The creations of Mum’s I loved the most were the necklaces she made from soldering together solitary earrings that had been bereft of their other halves. This gnarled workbench makes me think of her – of the hours she committed to breathing new life into lonely old stones.
Then I think of the Ukrainian man’s bird carvings in the rafters of Sans Ennui. How wrong it feels that whoever buys the house might not know they are there, that the only remaining physical evidence of the man’s story could be lost. On impulse, I ask Ilídio, ‘Could I use this workbench?’
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘keep me company.’
‘Do you have any silver wire?’ I ask.
‘I have everything,’ says Ilídio, walking over to a tall chest of drawers. I follow him and watch as he searches through a cabinet full of tools, buttons, hinges, and cardboard boxes. He pulls out some brown paper bags and inside one finds a coil of silver wire. ‘I keep all sorts. You never know what you might need. Use whatever you like.’
‘I can pay for whatever I use.’
He shakes his head as he gives me the wire.
‘Comes with the commission.’
The porch door of Sans Ennui is open. Ted told me they rarely lock the house, which feels so alien to me, a Londoner with two security bolts on my front door. Inside, I call out his name, though I know he’s not there because the drive is still empty. I pick up the shoebox, which is sitting on a window ledge, waiting for me to take it, and then, on a whim, I pick up the jar of sea glass too. My veins pulse with a long-forgotten feeling, the anticipation of what I might create.
Back at the workshop, I show Ilídio the box of jewellery.
‘What will you do with it?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know yet,’ I say. ‘Do you ever feel like you just need to channel your energy into making something with your hands?’
Ilídio smiles and cracks his knuckles. ‘Every day, Laura. Every damn day.’
Until now, anything related to jewellery making has felt almost macabre to me, too steeped in loss. Picking up tools would have felt like wearing Mum’s clothes or sleeping in her unwashed sheets. But now, something new bubbles its way to the surface, as though these feelings have been brewed and distilled into something else entirely. The watch and the book and the music; I clung to them as though they were physical totems of love, but here in my hands I have something real that Mum gave me: her love of making things. She taught me how to find the quality beneath the tarnish, how to bend and melt and thread and polish and pick things apart. I might never be as good at it as she was, but not doing it at all would be like nailing up the attic on those birds.
Ilídio and I set to work in companionable silence, he at his workbench and me at mine. As I unpack the treasure trove from the shoebox in front of me, feeling the textures of metal and stone in my hands, the familiar clinking of tangled chains, I feel a flush of energy, the creative part of myself waking up. It’s lain dormant for a long time, too tired from work, too busy online or scrolling on my phone, too tinged with the sadness of association. Yet, here, now, it holds no sadness.
I wrap green sea glass in silver wire, then solder each droplet of glass to a vintage chain bracelet. From Ted’s box, I take a simple necklace of silver mesh, mend it, and then weave a layer of sea glass through it. It takes on a life of its own once I’ve started, like a wave of silver, with all the secrets of the sea caught in its motion. Dee has always encouraged me to create things. I cannot wait to show her this necklace – once she is talking to me again.
Time disappears into the place it goes when you are in creative flow. When I next look up through the workshop window, I realise it is dark outside. I must have been sitting here for hours. Ilídio has gone. A coffee cup is on the bench behind me with a Post-it note stuck to it: ‘Didn’t want to disturb you, stay as long as you like. Put key under pot.’ He must have crept away to bed. I must go myself. Before I leave, I lay out my creations on the bench, put the sea glass bracelet around my wrist, and feel something I haven’t felt in years: pride.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ I say softly.
She led me here, to what I needed.
