Roundabout
Pink Diamond
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN used fictionally : Ruby in Ruby Gentry, Sapphire in
THE fascination of jewels must have something shady about it. Look at the way jewel names are
Sapphire, Amber trying to be as forever as diamonds— let alone Sir Jasper in melo- drama. Maybe it is the en- trancing thought of all that money tied up in such a small space, so easy to hide or steal. And watching the jewels actually changing hands for large sums has an enormous attraction. Sotheby's sale rooms were packed to the picture rail last week, for their cost- liest jewel sale since the war. There were the rich women—two beautiful ones looking as if they had married it, plenty of others who looked as if they had inherited it—the dealers, the stray onlookers. There was Gulbenkian, orchid and eye-glass and all; and even the newsreels, with cameramen perched up among the old masters.
'We'll see some money today,' said a South African woman gloatingly.
To begin with, however, what we saw was very mere: great-aunt's jewellery of little in- terest; everyone gossiped straight through. In front of me, a woman was wearing largo blue ear-rings to match her hair: I craned rudely to see if they were real; decided they could not be; and was told by the man next me that they were worth at least £4,000. It is sad to think how imitations have altered the instincts of the in- expert : one recoils instinctively even from the pearls of the Queen Mother.
Well to the front there were two ageing women whose rings cut deeply into their fingers. There is something irresistible about jewels on old people: the flesh decaying, crumbling away, and the hard stone shining out all the stronger.
The gossip stopped and the atmosphere grew taut when the unset gems came on. Within an oblong of green baize tables, the porter took them round : tiny chips of crystal, in little plastic boxes that looked more suitable for baby's first tooth. A ruby fetched £8,000; an 'important sapphire' was knocked down to the phrase 'No more than £7,500?' An improbably enormous emerald brooch went for £4,500. And at last they came to the prize piece : Lot 100, the size of a postage stamp : faintly pink : the diamond.
Half the people stood up : the room quietened; the throng near the door propped their chins on each other's shoulders to peer forward. Bidding started at £20,000. A few programmes moved; a few hands came up and went down. Almost nothing seemed to happen, yet in two minutes the diamond was sold for £46,000.
The pink diamond was advertised as just The Property of a Gentleman' (the irony of a cata- logue sequence like 'Property of Mrs. Bloggs- Property of Mrs. Smith—Property of a Lady'
does not disturb Sotheby's). So no one will say who owned it last; but one of the directors told me it certainly came at one time from an Indian Maharajah, and is an Indian stone.
Anyone who wants to boycott South African diamonds this spring can do so without loss of quality : some of the loveliest diamonds in the world, it seems, are Indian. Indian cutting is, or was, substantially different from European : the inexpert cutters simply try to remove as little of the stone as possible, the skilled ones cut to fol- low the natural beauty of the stone, as a carver follows the grain in wood. Western cutting is more formalised : the Koh-i-noor had been 186 carats for 4,000 years, before it came to Britain to be whittled down to 106 carats to suit Queen Victoria.
Presumably it lost nothing in value. But the whole question of value is a quicksand. Value never exists on its own; what is interesting is what is mixed with it. Power, if you have in- dustrial holdings; security and ancient pride, if you buy land. Diamonds and Impressionists have a value based on beauty—yet half the really valuable ones spend their time in strong-rooms, their beauty a dead loss. Rarity is probably the oddest mixture: one cannot be in Sotheby's an hour without reflecting how intensely ugly some objects of value can be. The most valuable piece
of jewellery they ever sold—the Westminster d Tiara, that went for £110,000—is hideous cony pared to the Shrewsbury emerald necklace that s fetched a mere £27,000. (Any impression nne ( might get that the old families are almost , drained of their jewels is apparently quite wrong: ! one jeweller who stores pieces for his customers told me that the old families 'have literally Mil' ; lions of pounds' worth salted away.) Scarcity is certainly what keeps diamond prices up (though a scarce piece of granite, say. would i hardly fetch a jewel price). There was a bad scare a few years ago that Russian diamonds were going to flood the market : but the Russians and I the big diamond men came to a sensible agree' ment, and they have remained untouchable as a girl's best friend.
'Women,' said a jeweller I was talking to, 'have a remarkably good idea what their Pieces are worth. Perhaps they know how much the men paid for them.' Perhaps, •sometimes, they know how much they paid for them: one of the saddest scenes in literature is where the girl ill Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Finds Out about imitation jewellery : `So it really makes a girl feel depressed to think a girl could not tell that it was nothing but an imitation. I mean a gentle' man could deceive a girl. . . Value, there, is all of one kind. The other sari for beauty atone, is more elusive. Possibly the purest pleasure one ever gets with jewellery is as a. child, with small bits of glass and clear stones straight from the sea. You can get the feeling back with beads and glass and baubles; but it must take a very great deal of money indeed te feel that way with real stones.
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