'The summer night had been cool when they came home and her finger was slender'.

Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir by Marina Warner (William Collins, 2021)

How do you enter into a story that is strange and foreign? How do you make yourself at home within a strange sentence, a strange culture? Most of us cling to signs and symbols; we make ourselves at home that way. But superstition is at the heart of much curation of meaning and superstition is much of the fuel of fairytales.

The sentence above is a postscript to a chapter that tells of a young, newly married Italian girl, making her home in England. She has just discovered that - after an evening out visiting local neighbours - she has lost two precious rings: her diamond wedding band and her engagement ring. Both sparkle.

The story begins at night; the night, in a sense, is the story, the cool night in relation to the delicate finger. The night exists in the past perfect continuous ‘had been’, whilst the finger hovers in the simple past, ‘was.’ In terms of the story, this is the night when the young girl learns something unforgettable about herself and her environment as she walks home down country lanes, passing from one house to another, in her role as visitor. ‘Home’ is her destination, attached to the conjunction, ‘when’; and ‘home’ is anchored in time, but the finger is not. Indeed, the slender finger is an afterthought, added on after the ‘and’ - a conjunction free of time — and so the finger floats free down the country lane of its own accord, you might say, with a mind of its own.

When an object takes on such significance as this free-floating finger does, I sense we have moved into the realm of fairytale, where heroines associate with magical objects in order to transform their unfortunate circumstances: Cinderella with her glass slipper leads her to her prince, but only because the slipper fits. The anxiety in this fairytale is that the ring does not fit the slender finger - something is not properly adjusted — the too-slender frame of the young Italian girl is not sufficiently adjusted to the embodied (dark and unknown) realties of England. Simply put, the young girl is wearing the wrong body. Something must be altered.

This is a strange sentence, which is why it grabs my attention, and tells me something else is going on than simple historical memory-work; the story, I sense, is transforming itself into another realm. It is transposing itself, carrying itself away, on that floating finger. The finger is in search of symbols, because, as it turns out, these symbols have been lost; they have slipped from the girl’s finger and disappeared into the dark night, now goodness knows where down those dark country lanes, filled, no doubt, with obstreperous, tangled briars and hedges (the imagination begins to wander as it looks to locate these lost symbols: those orphaned rings must be somewhere). As the narrator tells us, the loss of the rings is indeed a ‘bad omen’. Those rings mean a great deal in the scheme of things.

And the scheme is this: that the young newly wed risked wearing outside (in the dark country lanes) her most expensive items because she wanted to display the emblems of her cultural legitimacy. She wished to show Lady Joan Colville and her husband that she too had aristocratic leanings (diamonds and sapphires); that she was in fact a princess in disguise, even though Joan Colville, so we learn, dresses in frayed shirts and threadbare cardigans. It is a comic, almost pantomimic reversal, and yet, it leads to at least one Shakespearean plot: The Merchant of Venice with its lost-ring plot (in Shakespeare’s play it is the foolish husbands who misplace their wedding rings). And it is also a Cinderella plot, because this young woman has, until her arrival in England, ‘known little else but scarcity and graft.’

These rings are gifts from her husband (it really is The Merchant of Venice altered), a husband who assures her that the rings will be safe down dark country lanes because ‘someone will see ‘em’ because they sparkle. Rare jewels sparkle in the dark, and that is their virtue, so he tells her. In England, sparkle leads to honest actions, whereas in the Italy of her youth, it would lead to the police. It is the husband’s conviction in his culture’s unassailable virtue and good fortune - so we are lead to believe - that leads to the rings being found the following day by a kindly neighbour out walking:

A neighbour walking down the lane nearby saw something winking in the pale low morning light slanting through the hedge, and picked up one diamond ring, and then, a little further on, another.

Those rings, so the story goes, then made their way to the local bobby, who returned them to their owner; and so harmony and order are restored as the floating finger is reunited with its precious property and its person. Finally, the husband then goes off to have the rings tightened and so the necessary adjustments are made: in the end, the young girl learns that her newly adopted country is a place of benevolence, honesty and good faith.

The title of this story lies in the middle of this mysterious sentence: ‘when they came home’, which means as much the rings as it does the people. Fairytales end happily because the magical objects do their good work of transforming unhappy and often unjust circumstances into beneficial ones. The finger is still slender, but in the meantime, a small but vital adjustment has been made to the mental and material world of the diamond-ringed girl. Her outsized symbols, those she depended upon as a passport to this new world, have been reduced to size because her test is over: she has survived the cool summer nights and dark lanes of the English countryside. This space has turned out to be beneficent and kind, magical even.