Precious Things (37 page)

Auction houses speak of shady characters and intrigue to me – the true drama of life – which felt like a brilliant premise for a novel. Why do people part with their treasures? It's usually unwillingly or with a touch of tragedy involved.

And so I came up with the idea of Maggie, an auctioneer who works in London. The daily life of the auction house forms the background setting for Maggie's narrative, as well as her southwest London home, and I have reimagined and woven many of my friend's stories throughout
Precious Things
. Maggie's profession is important, because I needed the coronet to enter the story in a plausible way. At the beginning of the novel
,
Maggie is promoted to Head Auctioneer at Bonninghams and on the same day she finds the coronet in a dusty job lot of discarded linens and wonders where it might have come from.

Like me, Maggie thrills to the challenge of finding treasure in other people's trash. Anyone who loves old things – whether it be silver or books or fine vintage frocks – is aware that you need to put in many hours of hunting through rubbish before finding gold. Maggie is a seasoned hunter. When she finds the coronet, she knows it's almost ruined but can see some of the fine craftsmanship and beauty behind its tatty appearance. She resolves to reinvent it, carrying out her ‘specialised form of CPR', as she calls it.

Maggie enjoys pairing old things with new owners, and feels like a matchmaker of sorts in this regard. She loves the weekly renewal her job exposes her to, and the reinvention of vintage items which might otherwise have ended up as landfill. The least favourite part of her job is being exposed to more about people's lives than she would really like to know, but she's sensitive and curious, and enjoys helping people move on from the three Ds that often bring them into her orbit: death, divorce and disaster. Her favourite part of the job is getting to revel in her passion for collecting and history.

I recognise myself in Maggie and hope readers will find her familiar too. I lived in the UK for several years and felt the same yearning for connection and stability as Maggie does, as well as that utterly human urge for renewal and shaking things up a bit. Maggie is a young woman with so very much that's good in her life and a tonne of responsibilities to juggle, but she's always dreaming of something more. In this way, I think she's a very modern sort of protagonist.

Down the rabbit hole: inspiration and research

My favourite part of writing
Precious Things
was researching all the historical sections, and in the end I wrote many more chapters than eventually made it into the book (the story of Faustine, Aimée's maid, is one we excised because it didn't really add to the story – just one example of a chapter that didn't make the cut). I loved envisaging how the coronet might have come into all the various women's lives; what it meant to them, how they wore it, and what else they wore at the time.

I didn't deliberately set out to write the historical sections as they appear. Instead I chose some of my favourite times and places and my imagination was sparked by long-held passions and what I was seeing or reading at the time.

Bella, my 1950s goddess and artist's muse, came from my love of Fellini's 1960 film,
La Dolce Vita
, and the pictures of the film's star, Anita Ekberg, all creamy décolletage and voluptuous curves, looking like a sex-bomb siren in the Trevi Fountain. Bella's character was also fleshed out for me after I saw an exhibition of Francis Bacon's artworks. I wanted to feature an artist of some sort, but reading about Bacon's muse, Henrietta Moraes, really sparked something, and got me thinking about what kind of world Bella might operate in. Henrietta worked as an artist's model and became the inspiration for many artists of the Soho scene in the 1950s and 1960s. She was also known for her marriages, love affairs and hedonistic lifestyle, which saw her ending up in Holloway Prison after a failed burglary attempt. I wondered how nasty and duplicitous might it get if an artist's muse like Henrietta decided to make a departure from her role. Time spent in Rome only helped clarify Bella's story in my mind, and the ruined decadence of that city became the perfect backdrop for her narrative.

The ruined decadence of Rome

I also knew I wanted to include a character who was a circus performer. Ever since I saw Wim Wenders' wonderful film
Wings of Desire
, read Sara Gruen's
Water for Elephants
and first started collecting vintage performance costumes, I had dreamed of the circus as a setting for a story. During the research for
Precious Things
I read many non-fiction books about Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and pored over a Taschen book simply titled
Circus.
I scoured the markets for old costumes, and spent days lost in an Etsy wormhole researching vintage dresses and dancing paraphernalia from the 1800s through to the 1920s. I also made a trip to the Victoria & Albert costume museum in London, and one to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney for a special Circus exhibition they held there.

The wonderful glass chandelier in the foyer of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, mentioned in
Precious Things

Lexi, my circus performer, is a trapeze artist. Her story is set in 1920s Paris and Shanghai, and I had so much fun envisaging her caravan, her life in the circus and especially her costumes! Her husband, Dariusz – the circus' resident strongman – buys the collar for her from a flea market in Paris, which is then incorporated into one of her spectacular costumes. Like me (and Maggie), Lexi imagines little stories about what she's wearing. In the novel, one of the costumes she designs and wears is an Icarus-inspired jumpsuit with snow-white feathery wings. Another of her costumes has a sequinned, bleeding heart which reminds her of Jesus; the coronet is her crown of thorns.

A trip to Paris (purely research purposes, of course)

Travels in rural France

Trip to a French Brocantes

The internet was a wonderful tool for researching place names and the tiny, innocuous details that really added to the story, such as where the circus grounds would be located in Paris in 1926, and the name of the wine Bella is drinking at dinner in Rome in 1953. I also visited many clothing exhibitions and fashion retrospectives during the time I was writing, and immersed myself in the styles of different eras by reading a tonne of fashion books. I have visited each of the places mentioned in the book, which helped me to imagine them in earlier times. The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, which Ulrika encounters in the seventies, has a similarly dreamy effect on her as it did on me the first time I visited it, although the fear she later experiences there is all imagined.

Spices from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul

Ulrika the model was a standout character for me because I got to write about her at two very different points in her life: in her formative years as a model and also much later, as an older woman. For inspiration on the younger Ulrika, I pictured the shoots that
US Vogue
's Grace Coddington writes about in her memoir,
Grace
, and again went to the internet to find fashion stories from the 1970s when Coddington initially made her mark. For the older Ulrika I pictured Veruschka, the iconic 1960s supermodel, gone grey – as an experienced, soulful older woman.

I hoped to give a flavour for the different eras from a personal perspective rather than ticking off important moments in history, but the influence of the world wars was important; it shaped the way everything worked during those times and so both wars are mentioned in Lexi's and Lily's stories.

Truth disguised as fiction

There are several instances in the book where I wove in real-life events and embellished them to enrich the narrative.

Lily's character is inspired by my Croatian grandmother on my mother's side, who was placed in a concentration camp during World War II. Her family wasn't Jewish but they were locked up for being sympathisers, and separated when they were sent to work in the various camps. Apart from one brother she reunited with two decades later, she never saw her parents or other siblings again. Her husband, a soldier, was also killed during the fighting.