Skin and Other Stories

'Yes, he is.'

'I would like to see him privately for a few minutes, if I may. My name is Sandy.'

'Just a minute, please.' The woman disappeared through a door at the back, but in thirty seconds she returned and said, 'Will you come this way, please.'

Robert Sandy walked into a large untidy office in which a small, oldish man was seated behind a partner's desk. He wore a grey goatee beard and steel spectacles, and he stood up as Robert approached him.

'Mr Gold, my name is Robert Sandy. I am a surgeon at The Radcliffe. I wonder if you can help me.'

'I'll do my best, Mr Sandy. Please sit down.'

'Well, it's an odd story,' Robert Sandy said. 'I recently operated on one of the Saudi princes. He's in his third year at Magdalen and he'd been involved in a nasty car accident. And now he has given me, or rather his father has given me, a fairly wonderful-looking diamond.'

'Good gracious me,' Mr Gold said. 'How very exciting.'

'I didn't want to accept it, but I'm afraid it was more or less forced on me.'

'And you would like me to look at it?'

'Yes, I would. You see, I haven't the faintest idea whether it's worth five hundred pounds or five thousand, and it's only sensible that I should know roughly what the value is.'

'Of course you should,' Harry Gold said. 'I'll be glad to help you. Doctors at the Radcliffe have helped me a great deal over the years.'

Robert Sandy took the black pouch out of his pocket and placed it on the desk. Harry Gold opened the pouch and tipped the diamond into his hand. As the stone fell into his palm, there was a moment when the old man appeared to freeze. His whole body became motionless as he sat there staring at the brilliant shining thing that lay before him. Slowly, he stood up. He walked over to the window and held the stone so that daylight fell upon it. He turned it over with one finger. He didn't say a word. His expression never changed. Still holding the diamond, he returned to his desk and from a drawer he took out a single sheet of clean white paper. He made a loose fold in the paper and placed the diamond in the fold. Then he returned to the window and stood there for a full minute studying the diamond that lay in the fold of paper.

'I am looking at the colour,' he said at last. 'That's the first thing to do. One always does that against a fold of white paper and preferably in a north light.'

'Is that a north light?'

'Yes, it is. This stone is a wonderful colour, Mr Sandy. As fine a D colour as I've ever seen. In the trade, the very best quality white is called a D colour. In some places it's called a River. That's mostly in Scandinavia. A layman would call it a Blue White.'

'It doesn't look very blue to me,' Robert Sandy said.

'The purest whites always contain a trace of blue,' Harry Gold said. 'That's why in the old days they always put a blue-bag into the washing water. It made the clothes whiter.'

'Ah yes, of course.'

Harry Gold went back to his desk and took out from another drawer a sort of hooded magnifying glass. 'This is a ten-times loupe,' he said, holding it up.

'What did you call it?'

'A loupe. It is simply a jeweller's magnifier. With this, I can examine the stone for imperfections.'

Back once again at the window, Harry Gold began a minute examination of the diamond through the ten-times loupe, holding the paper with the stone on it in one hand and the loupe in the other. This process took maybe four minutes. Robert Sandy watched him and kept quiet.

'So far as I can see,' Harry Gold said, 'it is completely flawless. It really is a most lovely stone. The quality is superb and the cutting is very fine, though definitely not modern.'

'Approximately how many facets would there be on a diamond like that?' Robert Sandy asked.

'Fifty-eight.'

'You mean you know exactly?'

'Yes, I know exactly.'

'Good Lord. And what roughly would you say it is worth?'

'A diamond like this,' Harry Gold said, taking it from the paper and placing it in his palm, 'a D colour stone of this size and clarity would command on enquiry a trade price of between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars a carat. In the shops it would cost you double that. Up to sixty thousand dollars a carat in the retail market.'