Silver fern-leaf necklace

The Silver fern-leaf necklace is a small piece of jewelry whose successive changes of owner make it a record of Fern Woolbright’s relationships with James Frobisher and Charlie Treadaway. Given to Fern Woolbright by James Frobisher as a Christmas present, it becomes the gift she chooses to give Charlie Treadaway, the object she removes from him during a night of anxiety, and the keepsake she recovers after his family arrives. Its path from one neck to another gives the necklace an emotional history more complicated than its delicate appearance suggests.

The Christmas Gift

Between pudding and coffee, James Frobisher presents Fern Woolbright with a professionally wrapped square parcel. The gold-and-silver-striped paper and curled scarlet ribbon seem familiar to her from the jeweller’s on the High Street. Inside a dark-blue velvet box, nestled in crimson satin, she finds a delicate silver necklace shaped like a fern. She likes it and recognizes it as very much her style; she expects to wear it every day and feels lucky to have received it.

The pleasure of the gift does not settle the unease in the scene. As James Frobisher fastens the clasp behind her neck, Fern Woolbright feels again an inexplicable urge to turn and bite him. The gesture is tender and careful, but her physical response resists the neat meaning of a romantic present. The necklace thus enters the story already carrying a tension between what a gift is meant to signify and what Fern Woolbright actually feels.

After the gift is fastened, the piano player begins performing If You Were the Only Girl in the World, and elderly diners clap while Fern Woolbright tries to hide her embarrassment. James Frobisher is due to return to his barracks the next day, so their parting gives the necklace an added association with absence. Outside Three Paddocks, he kisses Fern Woolbright before she goes in; when a light appears in the kitchen window, he abruptly draws away rather than risk upsetting her parents. The necklace remains on her, but the relationship it marks is shaped by restraint as much as affection.

From Fern Woolbright to Charlie Treadaway

Fern Woolbright later gives the necklace to Charlie Treadaway. After he has spent the night on her bed, hung over and fully dressed, she puts the pendant around his neck before he leaves for London. She presents it as a reminder of her: each time he touches it, she says, he will be touching her. Her theatrical declaration makes the jewelry a substitute for the closeness they will lack while apart.

The transfer also carries a concealed complication. Fern Woolbright is fairly sure Charlie Treadaway does not know that James Frobisher bought the necklace for her. She thinks that, if he did know, he might break it or throw it out of the window. She cannot give him her grandmother’s pearls, which she thinks would look ridiculous on him, but the fern pendant suits him: feminine, in her estimation, without being too feminine. Charlie Treadaway loves it. In giving it to him, Fern Woolbright turns a present from one relationship into a token of another, while keeping the first relationship’s origin secret.

That hidden provenance sharpens into jealousy when Fern Woolbright thinks about Charlie Treadaway wearing the necklace during sex with Fabiana. The thought that her necklace might touch Fabiana’s skin disgusts her. The object has become intimate in a way its original presentation did not dictate: it is no longer only something James Frobisher gave Fern Woolbright, or something she gave Charlie Treadaway, but a point of contact between people whose entanglements make its meaning difficult to control.

Removal and Recovery

During a later night spent beside Charlie Treadaway, Fern Woolbright lies awake while he seems almost unconscious. A telephone rings on the landing at one o’clock; she suspects Fabiana might be calling, and paranoia runs through her. In the silence that follows, Fern Woolbright unfastens the necklace from the back of Charlie Treadaway’s neck. His Adam’s apple moves as he reacts in his sleep, but he does not wake. She lays the pendant on the bedside table, where its brightness stands out among the accumulated disorder of his life.

This quiet removal reverses the earlier act of fastening it on him. What Fern Woolbright had offered as a promise of continued presence is now taken away while Charlie Treadaway sleeps, amid fear and uncertainty rather than a conversation between them. The necklace’s clean, gleaming surface beside the room’s detritus also makes the object conspicuous: it is a carefully chosen keepsake in a setting associated with the mess of Charlie Treadaway’s life.

After the police come for Charlie Treadaway and the case is closed, Fern Woolbright feels that she has crossed into a life divided into a before and an after. She remembers that she needs to retrieve the necklace and uses the brass key kept on top of the fuse box beneath the stairs to enter Charlie Treadaway’s room. There, the pendant is still where she left it. Sitting on his bed, Fern Woolbright breathes in the faint smell of him on the pillow, with an even fainter trace of herself. The necklace belongs to the same intimate landscape of absence: a recognizable object and a lingering scent are what remain accessible to her.

The Necklace After Charlie Treadaway

Before Fern Woolbright can take the necklace away, Rob brings Edwina Treadaway and Rowena Treadaway into Charlie Treadaway’s room. Fern Woolbright attempts to explain her presence by saying she has come for something accidentally left there. The chain slips from her grasp, and Edwina Treadaway picks it up and hands it to her. Fern Woolbright snatches it back and flees upstairs, blushing and hyperventilating. When she has calmed down, she fastens the silver pendant around her own neck again.

The brief exchange makes the necklace part of Fern Woolbright’s first encounter with Charlie Treadaway’s mother and sister. Its former owner is James Frobisher, its previous wearer was Charlie Treadaway, and now Edwina Treadaway momentarily holds it before returning it to Fern Woolbright. The object passes through the hands of people linked to Charlie Treadaway without its history being explained. Fern Woolbright’s hurried excuse and flight show how exposed she feels in the room, while reclaiming the necklace gives her a concrete action amid a situation she cannot control.

From the upstairs window, Fern Woolbright watches Rowena Treadaway load bags into a large grey estate car as more of Charlie Treadaway’s belongings are taken away. The necklace is no longer on him or left behind in his room; Fern Woolbright has recovered it and put it back around her own neck. As Charlie Treadaway’s possessions disappear from the house, the pendant remains with her, a portable remnant of intimacy that has changed hands but cannot restore the person who wore it. Its repeated transfers make material what the story’s separations leave behind: not a stable emblem of one romance, but a keepsake altered by each attachment and loss.