Trust your hunches for they are usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. A lot of us rely on this strategy and have not been let down. We have called a spade a spade even when it looked remarkably like a shovel and were proved right. We have seen ‘hearts’ in a romance/relationship when everyone else has clearly seen ‘clubs’ and, mercifully, come through unscathed. Thanks to those silent guides, ‘the hunches’.

On occasion, though, a hunch can lead one astray. You do a Robert Frost on yourself. That is, you take the road not taken, or the road less travelled. You make a left turn and end up at the cemetery gates, when you ought to have turned right, which is where Career Avenue lay all along. It was a hunch and it didn’t pay off.

On the odd occasion you see a diamond, you know it is yours for you bought it with your hard-earned money. For days, months, years you look at it, wear it around your neck, everybody comments on it, you comment back and not once do ‘the hunches’ say anything. This is probably because when you trust so implicitly, the voices, or the tongues of insight, become stilled, stifled, struck dumb. Trust overrides everything.

Shakespeare, in All’s Well That Ends Well, says: ‘Love all, trust a few.’

When Myrtle met Joyce in 1990, an instant chemistry swung into action. Two personalities, so dissimilar on the surface, made an instant bonding. Myrtle, reserved and quiet; Joyce, bubbly, bouncy, the talkative one that never ran out of breath or amusing anecdotes.

Over the years that followed, their friendship took on the framework of a saying by the noted existentialist writer, Albert Camus: ‘Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.’

The two friends — both in their early 40s — worked different jobs. Joyce, at the checkout counter of the big supermarket; Myrtle held two jobs, both at nursing homes. Hers was an exhausting schedule — showering and tending elderly and fragile residents — but it made Saturdays and Sundays all the more worthwhile. Plus, it allowed her to indulge in her own private philosophy, which was: “I’ll work as hard as I can to buy all the things I like.” Travel and jewellery, really.

With her savings, she and her husband had been on two cruises. She and her best friend Joyce had taken a cruise, too, along the Balkan coast. It had been a holiday that defines all holidays, as Myrtle put it on her return, in the late 90s.

After the cruise, the girls had taken a coach trip across England and into Italy, had gone trekking, sightseeing and in the evenings engaged in a few sessions of fine dining, dressed to the nines.

Cultured grey pearls

Myrtle remembers an evening in Florence. She’d just fastened the clasp on the necklace around her neck — a necklace of cultured grey pearls obtained from Japanese Akoya oysters — when the door opened and Joyce entered, asking: “Would you be a darling, Myrtle, and let me use your diamond necklace tonight?” “I’ll never lend my jewels to anyone else darling, but for you, anything, take what you like,” said Myrtle.

Four years passed too quickly. On her silver wedding anniversary, at the evening celebration with close friends, Myrtle decided that after all these years she’d wear her diamonds.

“These stones have dulled considerably, give them to me and I’ll have them restored to their natural lustre,” observed her cousin Wade, himself a jeweler, when coffee was being served. A day later, Myrtle was gripping the home phone.

“You sure?” she pleaded.

“Absolutely, one hundred per cent,” replied Wade, “they are zircons, someone’s had the diamonds replaced. The setting’s been tampered with if you look closely.”

As Isaac Watts said, learning to trust is one of life’s most difficult tasks. He probably meant hunches, too.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney.