It had been a prestige 21st gift from my luxury-loving dad – until I had it valued

My father liked jewellery, for himself, and for his women: his beautiful wife, his only daughter, and the other ones we didn’t know about at the time. We were all beneficiaries of his largesse and enthusiasm for luxury goods and the status he believed they conferred.

As a child, I was festooned with gold charms and chains like a little Buddha. I kept favourite beachcombing treasures gathered on holidays in the pale blue Tiffany boxes that held birthday gifts: my first brooch, when not yet a teenager, was a gold wishbone, a reminder of my Sunday roast-chicken-pulling ritual.

By adulthood, I was luxe literate and knew, as soon as I saw the red calfskin box with gilded trim waiting for me on my 21st birthday, that it was from Cartier, signalling a Serious Present. My father, who had an eye for a trend, had bought me the newest thing, a “Love” bracelet: the gimmick was that it came with a golden screwdriver and two tiny rivets to secure it for eternity.

Given the tempestuous relationship I had with my authoritarian but generous father, the symbolism was awful: it represented control and imprisonment, reinforced by the screw motif stamped into it. It was nothing more than an expensive manacle. My father wielded the screwdriver with enthusiasm to bolt it on. I loathed it, but the damn thing was so fiddly to remove, I mostly pulled down my sleeve so as not to see it.

After he died, I decided I might sell the bracelet, taking it first to Cartier to be professionally polished and valued. A week later, it was ready for collection. I noticed a slight rudeness in the voice of the salesperson on the phone, but put it down to prestige-brand haughtiness. After all, I only had the plain band, not the one studded with diamonds that came later.

Inside the hushed boutique, a salesperson pulled me discreetly to one side and presented me with my bracelet in a zip-lock bag, like evidence from a crime scene. Everyone else seemed to be getting much fancier packaging.
The salesperson did not waste time on niceties. “It’s a fake,” she hissed. “Gold-plated.”

I protested that it could not possibly be – that my father had purchased it from Cartier in New York where he was a frequent customer. The salesperson shook her head. “If you try to sell it as a Cartier item, you will be prosecuted,” she added, handing me a letter to that effect while guiding me briskly towards the door. Stunned, I stood on the pavement, unable to compute the information she had delivered.

My father was not a bargain hunter; he did not go for knock-offs. He loved the deference that went with luxury shops, the fawning service, the elaborate rituals of wrapping and promises of eternal service and repair, the extras for loyal customers. Over the years, he had often asked me about the bracelet: was I keeping it in good condition, was it in a safe when I was not wearing it?

Would I tell my mother or keep her in the dark?

He obviously believed that he had purchased the genuine article. The mystery threw into question not only everything I knew of my father as a shopper, but his entire identity. Where had he bought the bracelet? How was he duped?

Years later, my elderly mother gave me a necklace my father had given her in the early days of their marriage. I remembered her wearing it on many occasions, an elegant fringe of tooled gold that sat well on her fine collarbones, especially when she had her hair up in a heavy chignon. I had never asked her about its provenance, but now she brought it out of her safe in a large, flat Cartier box and suggested I have it valued.

I went into its new, much flashier, flagship store with confidence, proud of this heirloom piece. I had borrowed it once for a posh dinner, but my life now was so different I could not imagine wearing it and had no one to pass it on to, so perhaps I would sell it one day. Laying the necklace on a velvet tray, the salesperson inspected it with an eyeglass. “A beautiful piece,” she murmured in appreciation, asking if I had any documentation for it. I explained that it had been a gift in either London or Paris in around 1960, so I had nothing.

A week later, I went to collect it. The salesperson was polite but apologetic. “It is not one of ours,” she said, sadly as if announcing a bereavement. “We sent images of it to our archives in Paris and New York, but we cannot find any reference to this design.”

She presented it to me in bubble wrap without offering to put it into one of their smart gift bags, and bid me a pitying farewell. Once more, I stood on the pavement, reeling. I had so many questions: if it did not come from Cartier, where had my father bought it, and why had it come in a Cartier box? Had he believed he was buying the real thing?

This time, the piece was not a fake. It was a solid 18-carat gold necklace, but it had no narrative, no origin story. Would I tell my mother or keep her in the dark? One thing was certain: my father’s weakness for luxury brands had fooled him once, if not twice, and made him vulnerable to scams. Many years later, this would lead to him almost gambling away everything he had achieved while leading a secret life, which included buying jewellery for other women. But that is another story.

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