He took the Tube from Charing Cross.
He had converted three thousand of his remaining twenty thousand galleons into pounds which came out to around sixty thousand. One galleon true worth in muggle money was around 20 pounds. However students from muggle families could exchange up to 100 galleons per year which is enough to get school supplies at 5 pounds to the galleon due to ministry subsidies. Shop prices remain the same for everyone and is not subsidised. Any extra galleons have to be exchanged at the 20 pound rate
He also got muggle identification made using gringotts services for an adult version of himself. That had been surprisingly cheap at 10 galleons
The aging potion had been straightforward: he bought it at the apothecary after getting out of gringotts, the result approximately eight years on a casual assessment. Someone who looked carefully would notice the bone structure was still a teenager's, but he was not asking anyone to look carefully. He was asking them to see a young man with a clear sense of what he wanted and the means to pursue it.
The Porsche dealership in Mayfair had the atmosphere of a place that understood its customers were paying for the experience as much as the machine. Six cars on the showroom floor, each lit like something between a jewel and an argument. The salesman who appeared had the trained warmth of someone who could read a customer's budget from the way they walked through the door.
Ron looked at the 968 coupe on the end stand. It was priced around 45000 pounds or 2150 galleons
He had read about it in a Muggle magazine his father kept in the stack under the kitchen sink, which Arthur Weasley treated with the same reverence he gave ancient enchantments. The 3.0-litre four-cylinder, the torque that arrived not with a shout but with a steady escalating commitment, the integrity of a machine built to be exactly itself and nothing else. The coupe, not the cabriolet. Dark blue, almost navy but not quite.
'That one,' Ron said.
The salesman recalibrated. Ron gave him the business address — the Diagon Alley solicitor's office in EC1, perfectly ordinary to the Muggle eye, fully accustomed to receiving correspondence for wizard clients — and said cash equivalent, bank transfer, today.
The salesman became, in the way of good salespeople encountering clarity, entirely cooperative.
Between the Porsche dealership and the Tube station there was a jeweller on a narrow street off Berkeley Square that he had noted on the walk in.
He went back to it.
The window had the confidence of a shop that knew what it was --- not the theatrical abundance of a place trying to impress, but a small, precise collection of things that had been chosen rather than accumulated. He stood at the glass for a moment and looked.
He had been thinking about this since Uganda, in the unfocused way he thought about things that weren't yet fully formed. His mother had the Weasley family heirlooms, such as they were, and the things his father had given her over the years with the particular generosity of someone for whom money had always been a question but love had never been one. What she did not have was anything that was simply beautiful, chosen for no reason except that it was hers.
Inside, the jeweller --- a small, unhurried woman who had clearly been running this shop for a long time and had no interest in performing enthusiasm --- showed him three pieces when he described what he was looking for. Not dramatic. Not statement jewellery. Something that would be worn on an ordinary Tuesday.
The second one was correct.
A silver chain, fine but substantial, with a single pendant --- a small amber stone, the colour of late afternoon light through a kitchen window, set simply without ornamentation. The amber had inclusions, which the jeweller explained with the ease of someone who considered inclusions evidence of the real rather than flaws to be apologised for. It was warm when he held it. It had the quality of something that had taken a long time to become itself and was not going to be anything other than what it was.
He paid for it and had it wrapped and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
He thought, on the Tube to Fulham, about giving it to her. Not at dinner, not as a presentation. He would leave it on the kitchen table in the morning, the small wrapped parcel beside her tea, and let her find it. She would know it was from him. There would not need to be a conversation about it unless she wanted one, and she might not want one, and that would be entirely alright.
He thought about his mother at the kitchen table in the March photograph, reading his letter with the expression she had when she was reading something from one of her children that told her, in the specific way she needed to know it, that they were alright. He thought about the September platform in the first photograph of the album, her in her apron watching the train go, holding the wave until the train was gone.
The amber was the colour of that light.
He got off at Fulham Broadway and found the dealership.