“What? I’m getting married, not a pet.”
He looked down at Baby J, who was currently distracted by all the sparkly things in the window. “You had a bad experience once, and you’re afraid it’ll happen again. But past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
I think that was meant to be reassuring. And if I’d been investing in a stock portfolio, it might have been. Or maybe I was unreassurable right now. After all, part of the reason I’d asked James Royce-Royce to come with me, instead of anyone else I could have asked, is that I knew I could rely on him to give me an opinion that wasn’t overbearingly romantic （like Bridget or James Royce-Royce） or crushingly cynical （like Priya or, well, me）。
“Come on, then,” I said with about as much conviction as I could summon. “Let’s put a ring on it. By which I mean buy a ring that I can give to Oliver, which he can wear if he wants. Maybe. If it doesn’t need resizing, which it probably will.”
Pushing open the door, we stepped into that churchy hush that all jewellers seemed to cultivate, as if they were trying to instil a sense of inadequacy that could be dispelled only by spending more than you could afford.
I was instilled with a sense of inadequacy.
And my credit was nowhere near good enough to dispel it.
To quell my rising panic, I peered into one of the counters, as if I knew what the fuck I was doing. Except I didn’t. I wasn’t even looking at rings.
“Can I help you, sir?”
I looked up to see a slender, ashen-faced man in a three-piece suit who somehow looked like he had a pencil moustache, while also being completely clean-shaven. “Um,” I said. “Um.”
The unaccountably intimidating shop assistant folded his hands behind his back. “And what might sir be looking for?”
Somehow, he made sir sound like an insult.
“I guess,” I tried. “Um. A ring?”
“Estate? Eternity? Wedding? Puzzle? Promise? Semi-mount?
Signet? Cocktail? Cluster? Claddagh?”
Oh my God, I’d walked into the lair of the riddling jeweller. Any second now he was going to say, My first is in diamond, but isn’t in heart. “Engagement,” I squeaked.
“Ah.” In one syllable, he managed to express more disappointment than any of my schoolteachers or university lecturers had ever managed.
I visibly cringed. “Is that okay?”
Without another word, he bent at the waist and drew forth a velvet tray that he laid in front of me very much with the air of someone casting pearls before swine.
Which, as it turned out, he definitely was. Because, looking at the price tags, I couldn’t afford anything.
“Do you,” I asked, with a disproportionate amount of shame for someone who, at the end of the day, was still about to shell out about five hundred quid in his guy’s shop, “by any chance have anything…cheaper?”
The man cleared his throat and took way too long replacing the tray of shit I couldn’t afford with a tray of twenty-five-pound cubic-zirconia tat.
“Oh, come on.” I made a gestural Oh, come on to underscore my verbal Oh, come on in the hopes of articulating quite how much of an Oh, come on situation this was. “Something in the middle.”
“The first tray was in the middle, sir.”
I tried to remember that working in customer service was unrewarding and people had to take their entertainment where they could. “Okay, something just under the middle, then. Something below average. Because I am a below-average person, as you have so clearly implied.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?” said the gaslighting fuck on the other side of the counter.
James Royce-Royce stepped forward. “We want to see a selection of men’s engagement rings in the five-to-eight-hundred-pound range.”
I don’t know how James Royce-Royce, despite having a still faintly Muppet-esque baby strapped to his chest, managed to have more gravitas than me, but he did. And approximately forty seconds later, we were poring over a tray of exactly the type of rings I’d been looking for in exactly the range of prices I’d been expecting to pay for them. They were, in a lot of ways, quite similar. Because this was one of those areas where men’s fashions followed some pretty strict rules, though fortunately those rules more or less matched what I knew of Oliver’s taste. Which was to say classic, masculine, and non-ostentatious.
I turned to James Royce-Royce. “How did you…”—I gave a nonspecific hand wave—“for James?”