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.