The Pen Friend

Wherever you are

As I write to you, Nina, a surveillance helicopter is poised motionless in the sky to the east of Ophir Gardens, and the windows of my study tremble to its broadcast reverberant din. There have been many changes in Belfast since you left in 1984, though of course you might well have returned at intervals without my knowledge, and for all I know you might be in Belfast now. Your card is postmarked Paris, but that was last week. If you are here — the possibility disturbs me — you might have noticed that your old MO2 offices have been turned into penthouse apartments, and the ground floor of the building is now the Linen Warehouse Restaurant and Bar. In the side streets are cafes, gyms, aromatherapy boutiques and retro clothing stores. Belfast is booming, and not with bombs. Yet beyond the bright clatter of the lattes and Manhattans, the gleaming dishes, silverware and linen, are dark recalcitrant zones where July bonfires have been smouldering for days, and the reek of burning tyres sometimes infiltrates the inner city. Above the fragile periphery the helicopters maintain their desultory watch, scanning the ruined terraces, the blasted interfaces and the paint-bespattered Peace Walls. Every summer the Loyalist housing estate on the other side of the Cavehill Road from Ophir Gardens blooms with paramilitary regalia, flags that become tatters over the winter.

It was not always so: the estate went up in the late Seventies, built on a former allotment site which I imagine had been established during the last war, given the shortage of fresh vegetables. By the time we moved to the district in 1955, it was already semi-derelict, a few little ordered plots surviving among the encroaching brambles, nettles and chickweed, gooseberry bushes and tall rhubarb plants gone to seed, tumbledown potting-sheds overgrown by convolvulus and ivy. It was a kind of paradise for us children, where we could get pleasurably lost in war games. Later, when I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and thought myself to be James Joyce, I posed before a derelict greenhouse wearing an outfit bought in the Friday Market — a Forties jacket and waistcoat and white duck trousers that emulated his turn-of-the-century gear — and had my photograph taken by Paul Nolan, who thought himself to be Cartier-Bresson. You met Nolan once or twice: a good fellow. Like me, he took early retirement, a victim of the creeping bureaucracy that finally overwhelmed our vision of what we thought we were doing.

I remember telling you how the allotments had been swept away, and you said yes, your grandfather in Delft had kept an allotment, and grew cucumbers, lettuces and cabbages. Dill, too, that your grandmother would use for pickling the cucumbers. As you spoke, I thought of cool tiled pantries, and could see the tidy Dutch allotments, occupying strips of ground by the sides of roads and canals, the sheds painted in bright greens and reds, like toy houses, the rows of flowers and vegetables. I had not been to Holland then, and much of my conception of it was based on Dutch painting, which I loved, and the postcards sent to my father by his pen friend in Delft. I thought again how appropriate it was that my father should have learned Esperanto from a Dutchman, for the Netherlands seemed to me, as it did to him, a peaceable realm in which tolerance for one’s neighbours was both desirable and necessary. These were Esperantist virtues, said my father. The people of the Netherlands, he said, not having been granted much land by God, made land for themselves; but realising they could never make enough, they made space for each other. I was somewhat disappointed that Johann Wouters, like my father, was a devout Catholic, not an Orange Protestant, and that they hence had much in common to begin with. The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church was itself a kind of Esperanto, for you could hear the same Mass in exactly the same language anywhere in the world; and when the Latin Mass, under the New Liturgy of the 1960s, was abandoned for a multitude of vernaculars, my father regretted the change. But like a good Catholic, he submitted himself to it. I think it was about the time of the New Liturgy that he threw himself even more wholeheartedly into Esperanto, as a substitute for the universality of Latin. As for me, I never properly learned Esperanto. Much as I admired it, I was uncomfortable with its dream of universal brotherhood.

Only after my father’s death did I begin to examine the history of Esperanto. I discovered that Ludwig Zamenhof had been given the Jewish name Lejzer, or Lazarus, at his circumcision, but had adopted the Christian name Ludovic, or Ludwig, in his teens, following the custom of the aspiring Jewish middle class of his milieu. Likewise, his father, a teacher of languages, had changed his name from Mordecai to Marcus. Ironically, Mordecai itself, then perceived as wholly Jewish, was once a disguise too, for in the Book of Esther it is the name of the Chief Minister of Ahasuerus, or Xerxes, the despotic king of Persia: it was the custom then of the exiled Jews to mask themselves in names familiar to their captors.

So what’s in a name, Nina? If I am Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation, you are Miranda by another name, the admirable maiden of The Tempest. But it would also seem that names can mean anything you want them to mean, for the rabbis say that concealed in the pagan name Mordecai are the syllables for ‘pure myrrh’, and so it bears a holy perfume, an incense I remember from the Latin Masses of my childhood. I daresay Marcus Zamenhof would have been aware of this nominal labyrinth, for his own father was a noted Talmudic scholar, well used to pondering the intricacies of the Word, and Marcus himself became a teacher of languages. He also became an atheist, and in 1857 married Rozalia Zefer, the pious daughter of a Bialystok Jewish tradesman. Lazarus — Ludwig, as he would become — was the first of their eight children. Bialystok, as I mentioned in my first letter, was then in Polish Lithuania, and part of the Russian Empire. The town was a Babel. The native upper classes spoke Polish, the lower Lithuanian; a population of Yiddish-speaking Jews had long been established; there was a substantial German mercantile class; the administration and the army were Russian, and the golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church shone in the main square. The language of the Zamenhof household was mainly Russian, because Marcus believed it an essential tool to their progress. But Yiddish was also spoken, and by his teens Ludwig had also a fair command of Polish, German, and Lithuanian, as well as the Hebrew and Greek taught to him by his father. From an early age, said Ludwig Zamenhof, I was anguished that men and women everywhere looked much the same, yet spoke differently, and thought themselves to be Poles, or Russians, Germans, Jews, and so on, instead of human beings. Thinking that grown-ups were omnipotent, I resolved that, when I was grown up, I would abolish this evil; for no one, he said, can feel the misery of barriers as strongly as a ghetto Jew, and no one can feel the need for a language free from a sense of nationality as strongly as the Jew who is obliged to pray to God in a language long since dead, receives his education and upbringing in the language of a people who reject him, and has fellow-sufferers around the world with whom he cannot communicate, said Zamenhof.

As you might imagine, Nina, I am not penning these words in a smooth consecutive flow. Zamenhof’s words are not ingrained in my memory, the history of Esperanto is not at my fingertips, and I have to interrupt my writing every so often to rediscover passages scrawled in notebooks a good few years ago, when I began my Esperanto project, or to consult more fully drafted pieces, stored on the computer. And, as I transcribed Zamenhof’s words from the screen before me, in pen and ink, I felt, as my hand moved across the page, that it was somehow guided by the spirit of Zamenhof, that I felt as he felt, knowing just a little of the linguistic despair that was his, that his words were both his and mine, though written in a different language, for he had written them in Esperanto, not English. And, rewriting those words by hand, I began to see nuances in them I had not hitherto suspected, for my view of them is different now that you have re-entered my life. So much has changed.

While still at school, I had written on the computer, Zamenhof began thinking of a universal language, and by 1878 he had invented one. Five years previously his father had moved with his family to Warsaw, where, in order to supplement his income as a teacher of German in the Veterinary Institute, he took on extra work as a state censor. In 1879, when Zamenhof went off to study medicine in Moscow, he left his extensive notes for the new language in his father’s care. Immediately recognising the danger of possessing such documents, written in a secret language by a poor Jewish student, his father burned them. In Moscow, Zamenhof became involved with Zionism, but grew disillusioned with the movement, which he found too exclusivist. He returned to Warsaw, and to his dream of an international language. Finding it destroyed, he reconstructed it from memory.

In 1886, the year in which he matriculated in ophthalmology, he became engaged to Klara Zilbernik, the daughter of a prosperous businessman. For two years Zamenhof had unsuccessfully sought a publisher for a booklet in which he which described the new language. Klara’s father, impressed by the idealism of his future son-in-law, offered to have the book printed at his expense. This was done; the proofs were held for two months in the censor’s office, but fortunately the censor was a friend of Zamenhof’s own father, who by now had withdrawn his objections to the project. On 14th July 1887 the censor authorised the booklet, and it was published in Russian; Zamenhof soon afterwards translated it into Polish and German. An early follower translated it into French under the title La Langue Internationale.

These editions all contained the same introduction and reading-matter in the international language: the Lord’s Prayer, a passage from the Bible, a letter, poems, the complete grammar of sixteen rules, and a vocabulary of 900 roots. The work was signed with the pseudonym ‘Doktoro Esperanto’ — esperanto meaning ‘one who hopes’ — and the new language, by general usage, became known as Esperanto. Dr Esperanto and Klara Zilbernik were married on 9th August 1887, and the first few months of their life together were spent promoting Esperanto, putting the booklet describing the new language into envelopes and posting them to foreign newspapers and journals. It was known as the Unua Libro, the First Book.

There was no English translation for some time; Zamenhof considered his own English insufficiently adequate for the task. A German friend did produce one, which Zamenhof published, but English speakers found it incomprehensible.

In the autumn of 1887, a certain Richard Henry Geoghegan read an article about the new language. The Geoghegan family lived for many years at 41 Upper Rathmines Road, Dublin. Richard’s father was a doctor who emigrated in 1863 from Dublin to Birkenhead in England, where Richard was born on 8th January 1866. At the age of three he suffered an accident which left him crippled for the rest of his life; but the good Lord, as my father might have said, by way of compensation, gave him extraordinary linguistic gifts: he had a perfect command of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, and became a noted expert in Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and other oriental languages. He considered himself an Irishman: he spoke and wrote fluent Irish, and often visited the land of his fathers. In the autumn of 1887 he happened to read an article about the new international language and wrote in Latin to Zamenhof, who sent him the German edition of the Unua Libro. Geoghegan immediately learned the language from it. When Zamenhof sent him the English translation, Geoghegan pointed out its many shortcomings, and undertook to translate the book himself, publishing it in 1889. The German — English translation was withdrawn.

So began the Esperanto movement in Britain and Ireland. Geoghegan and Zamenhof became lifelong correspondents and friends. Geoghegan also had a hand in the adoption of the green star as the Esperanto emblem. Years later, Zamenhof wrote:

About the origin of our green star I no longer remember very well. It seems to me that Mr Geoghegan drew my attention to the colour green, and from that time I began publishing my works with a green cover. About one brochure, which I quite by chance published with a green cover, he remarked to me that this was the colour of his homeland, Ireland. Then it came into my head that we could well regard this colour as a symbol of Hope. As for the five-pointed star, it had already been adopted as representing the five continents; and so the green star was born.

As I write to you, Nina, I have before me a postage stamp bearing that very emblem. You know I was a stamp-collector in my youth, and so, when researching the Esperanto story, I was interested to see what Esperanto-themed stamps might exist. I acquired a little collection of such stamps, issued by countries sympathetic, or once sympathetic, to Esperanto: Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Brazil, China, Croatia, Germany. Many of them bear an image of Zamenhof. This particular one is the Belgian commemorative of 1982, issued to coincide with the 67th World Esperanto Congress, which was held in Antwerp that year, the year that we first met. It features the smaller of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s two versions of the Tower of Babel. Above the Tower is a green shooting star bearing a rainbow-coloured tail, whose trajectory suggests it has come not from the heavens, but from Earth. And I am tempted to address this letter simply to Miranda Bowyer, Earth, and use this stamp for its delivery. But that would be wishful thinking. Instead, I affix it to this page, in the less forlorn hope that we might once more meet each other in the flesh.

As for your postcard of July 2005, it has been sent from Paris, and bears a French stamp commemorating the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, who thought that association, the coming together of peoples for a common purpose, would bind America to an idea of nation larger than selfish desires. It was he who said that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. It was he who said that all those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it. And the image on your card was made not long after the war. The caption reads

RenéeThe New Look of DiorPlace de la Concorde, Paris, August 1947

I wonder if Renée is the name of the model, or a reference to the New Look, since it means ‘reborn’ in English. Perhaps both? I look again at the New Look, Dior’s response to the austerity of wartime, an extravagant look, the soft-shouldered, slim-waisted jacket and the voluminous, exuberantly swirled skirt of the model contrasting with the almost military deportment of the three young men, whose eyes have just swivelled right to take in the gorgeous apparition.

Place de la Concorde. We were there in Easter 1983. We might have walked in the very footsteps of the model, or those of the three young men. You had had your hair cut in a Leslie Caron fringe, and you wore an outfit that was a kind of homage to the New Look, a dark plum-coloured alpaca waisted jacket over a flared ivory cambric skirt, high heels very like the one visible beneath the hem of the model’s skirt in the photograph.

Earlier that day, I was moved by a nostalgia for the Catholic ritual of my childhood, and we had gone to Easter Sunday Mass at Saint-Eustache, that strange architectural mix of the classical and Gothic which flanks one side of Les Halles. It was beautiful. From the inside the church seemed even taller, more vertically compressed, the Gothic columns soaring up to arch and meet each other in their slender trajectories, and the Easter light fell in shafts through the high windows of the clerestory. Here dozens of pigeons had roosted, and, as organ music announced the beginning of the ceremony, some of them flew from one alcove to the other, their wings beating against the dusty light. A choir sang. A chinking thurible dispensed a smoky perfume. The priest delivered a sermon in an elegantly modulated French that spoke of the mysteries that lie beyond language: l’homme est comme un paysage dans le brouillard, he said, Man is like a landscape lost in fog, which is pierced by the light of the heavens, by the redeeming light of the resurrection, and as he spoke, we could hear the pigeons chirping and cooing behind his words. Je suis toujours avec vous jusqu’à la fin du monde, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Then came triumphant organ music, the bright peal of the treble sailing above the reverberant thunder of the bass, and the pigeons scattering everywhere. We emerged stunned into the sunlight. Some time later we found ourselves in Place de la Concorde.

Until today I had little idea of the history that lay behind Place de la Concorde. When I looked it up on the Internet I discovered that it was called Place Louis XV when completed in 1763, for it was Louis XV who had commanded it to be built, and an equestrian statue of himself to be placed at its centre. In 1770, 133 spectators were trampled to death at a huge fireworks display on the occasion of Marie Antoinette’s wedding to the Dauphin. In 1792, the equestrian statue was removed, and the Place became Place de la Révolution, home to the guillotine that beheaded, according to various accounts, some 1,200, 1,800, or 2,800 people, among them Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, Danton, Charlotte Corday, and Robespierre. In 1797 it was renamed Place de la Concorde; in 1814 Place Louis XVI; in 1828 Place Louis XV; and in 1830 it was finally designated Place de la Concorde.

More importantly, perhaps, I found what you surely must have meant me to discover, that the architect of Place de la Concorde was called Jacques-Ange Gabriel. Angel, you’d said, Gabriel, I’m glad you took me to Mass. I could nearly become a Catholic myself, you said. But I’m not one, I said. Oh yes you are, you said, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. It’s ingrained in you, you said. But can’t we change ourselves? I said. The way we change our names? Why do we have to be what we were born into? Oh, let’s not argue about what we might be, you said, que sera sera, let’s enjoy ourselves as we are now, this moment, and you kissed me, and I remember the soft wool aroma of your jacket warmed by sunshine. I will always remember it, wherever you are.

Wherever you are, you had written on the New Look card. Besides the caption, there was an acknowledgement:

Printed by Rapoport Printing Corp.© Fotofolio, Box 661 Canal Sta., NY, NY 10013

and I realised that the photograph was not so much of Paris, as by Richard Avedon who was of New York. Very possibly you had bought it there. Wherever you are. I thought of the jazzy green Wearever pen I used for my first letter, and thinking again of our time in New York, I remembered another detail I had put to the back of my mind since then. At the Embassy reception you’d been standing chatting to a blue-suited, red-faced man with pendulous blue jowls, or rather, he was chatting to you, maybe even chatting you up, he had that chatting-up stance, legs apart, wineglass in one hand, the other supporting the elbow. I made my way nonchalantly over and he made a neat little demi-pirouette as I came from behind him, and then, Gabriel Conway! he exclaimed, has it been years, or what? and it took me some interminable seconds to put a name to the face. Tommy Geoghegan! he cried, just as it was on the tip of my tongue. Of course! I cried back, how could I not know you?

In truth, he had changed somewhat, and the Tommy Geoghegan I once knew was buried like a ghost in the flesh of this other. His accent had changed, too, from broad Belfast to more than a touch of Dublin 4. A waiter was passing by, and with one fluid movement he knocked back the remains of his wine, placed the empty glass on the waiter’s tray, and helped himself to a full one. There was something about this gesture, at once graceful and transgressive, that made me see him more clearly as he was. He had been an athlete once, a good footballer by all accounts, and a Celtic supporter, the only one in our A-level class. The only football supporter of any kind; sport was not in vogue in our literary set. The trouble was, Geoghegan also read books, voraciously, and could more than match any of us in his enthusiasms for Joyce, or Beckett, or Dylan Thomas, whose verse he loved especially for its sonorous obscurity. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ he would intone in a passable imitation of Dylan’s plummy voice, ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ And, true to his old form, without further preamble, he put a hand on his heart, held his glass aloft, and declaimed, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my old age …’ Well, we’re not getting any younger, are we? he said. I was just telling Miranda how much I liked her muted Irish theme — you know Miranda, I take it? Everyone knows Miranda. I nodded uncomfortably, and tried to catch your eye, but you refused to meet mine. Yes, the subtle wearing of the green, said Geoghegan, to which I’ve made my own little contribution, and he thrust forward his jacket lapel, in which was embedded a tiny green star. I didn’t know you spoke Esperanto, I said. Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t, said Geoghegan, though I can read it a bit, the old school Latin does come in handy, but I feel obliged to wear it every so often in honour of the Geoghegan connection, let’s say it’s a conversation piece, and he proceeded to tell me something of what I now know, but didn’t know then, about Richard Henry Geoghegan’s contribution to Esperanto, and of Tommy Geoghegan’s discovery that he was a distant relation of the great man.

It was back in ’79, he said, I was sent to Alaska, such is the life of the diplomatic aide, don’t you know, I had to attend the official opening of the new Fairbanks Public Library, quite a big deal in that neck of the woods. So I’m introduced to the Chief Librarian, and he says, Geoghegan, you wouldn’t be anything to the famous Richard Henry? He was quite a figure here, you know. Harry Geoghegan, secretary to Judge James Wickersham back in the Noughties. Judge James ‘The Terrible’, they called him, ruled the territory with a rod of iron, says the Chief Librarian. We’ve got all Geoghegan’s journals here, says he, written in Esperanto, we had an Esperanto chap here a couple of months ago to translate them.

And Tommy Geoghegan proceeded to give me an account of his distant relative’s life — quite a tall story, it seemed to me at the time, but I have since found it to be more or less true. Father a doctor, lived in Rathmines, he said. Funny, I used to live there myself, then went to Liverpool, Harry was born there, fell down the stairs at the age of three, broke his leg, seems the doctor father set it wrong, cripple ever since. Then he goes to Oxford, studies Chinese, wants to join the Foreign Service, must run in the family, the diplomatic Geoghegans, don’t you know, but then he finds out they won’t take him on because of his bad leg, then his father dies, he’s got his mother and six siblings to support, so they hear there’s great opportunities in Canada, and they move there lock, stock and barrel, steamer across the Atlantic, train across to Vancouver, must have taken them months, then another steamer to Orcas Island, have you heard of it? I hadn’t. They get themselves a homestead there, do some farming, but Harry Geoghegan’s not cut out for that kind of thing, so he moves to Seattle, various clerical jobs, stenography mostly, they say he knew all the various shorthand systems, could transcribe two at a time, one with each hand, incredible, like he’s got two brains. And all this time he’s learning languages — Russian, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Korean, Swahili, Arabic, Khmer, Lepcha — Lepcha, for Christ’s sake, I don’t even know what Lepcha is — they say he knew two hundred languages, seems he had a photographic memory, had only to look at a word and he’d remember it, and of course all the time he’s working away at the old Esperanto connection, corresponding with Zamenhof. Gives him the idea for the green star. 1904, he goes to Alaska, meets up with The Terrible Judge, the circuit takes them all over Alaska, husky dogs, sleds, real Jack London story, said Tommy Geoghegan. As for the journals in the Fairbanks Library, he went on, seems there were quite a lot of fairly graphic bits in there, Harry was quite a ladies’ man, stuff about his relationships with the Fairbanks line girls, as they called them, gammy leg doesn’t seem to have affected him much in that department, sort of Toulouse-Lautrec figure, you might say. Seems he taught them a little Esperanto, made up words for specialities of the house, that kind of thing. So I thought I’d have a bash at the old Esperanto myself, being a Geoghegan and all, said Geoghegan. Not that I got that far with it. But listen, must dash, chap over there I’ve been trying to talk to all night, great to see you, and he wandered off into the crowd.

Quite the diplomat, Tommy Geoghegan, I said drily to you, Nina. Oh, he’s not so bad if you get to know him, you said, that clumsy manner of his, it’s part of his charm, people tell him things because they think he’s guileless. Whether what they tell him is true, that doesn’t really matter. It’s all information, people reveal as much about themselves by their lies as they do the truth. Anything we know, at any given time, it’s as much disinformation, or misinformation, as it is information. More, sometimes. The edges are always fuzzy. Bluff and fuzz. Tommy Geoghegan fits very well into that picture. That’s why he’s one of us. One of you? I said. Yes, you said in a mock conspiratorial whisper, we have our people everywhere.

And then there’s Declan Tierney, you said, the time you told me about Tony Lambe’s tie emporium. He’s one. Declan Tierney? I said, the art dealer? Well, he’s the only Declan Tierney I know, you said. And, when I thought about it, I wasn’t entirely surprised. Declan Tierney had arrived on the art scene in Belfast seemingly from nowhere. Began dealing in those terrible Markey Robinson rip-offs, stylised Connemara landscapes, whitewashed cottages, doe-eyed Madonnas in shawls, that sort of thing, not that Markey himself was that much better than his rip-offs, but then Tierney moved on, got in with Gerry Byrne, went to all the graduate shows, began putting together a stable of young artists, cutting-edge stuff. Though there was always something dodgy about him, he tried to sell me what he called a Gerard Dillon once, claimed he picked it up from one of the Friday Market dealers who’d just made a house clearance in West Belfast. Maybe he did. But the painting wasn’t right. There’s a faux-naïf thing about Dillon’s brushwork, but this was just plain amateurish. Declan Tierney? I said, well, I suppose that figures.

And then there’s Archie Chambers, you said. Archie Chambers the ventriloquist? I said. Archie’s dummy was called Bernie Buttons, he was one of those Champagne Charlie dummies, with a rather predictable line in double entendres. You know the routine, Bernie says to Archie, May I have a goodbye kiss? And Archie says, Well, I can’t see any harm in that, and Bernie comes back with, Oh, I wish you would, a harmless kiss doesn’t sound very thrilling. Yes, Archie and Bernie both, you said, you’d be surprised how many of us there are. For instance, for all you know, you might be one too. Without my knowing it? I said. Yes, you said, without your full knowledge. Or consent, for that matter, you said. You’d learned to twin those words from me, it’s a Catholic concept, a mortal sin can only be committed with full knowledge and complete consent. Does anybody really know who they are? or what they are? you said. Billie Holiday was playing in the background, I can’t remember what song, but it occurs to me now, as I write, that ‘Wherever You Are’ is the title of a Billie Holiday song, recorded in 1942. Not her best song: the lyrics are trite, the music slightly incongruous, but, given what I presume to be their purpose — to offer comfort to American troops in Europe — perhaps the song is redeemed by that very banality, that all-inclusive ‘you’ which is both singular and plural:

Everywhere in every homeHope is burning brightWhile millions of heartsAre kneeling, saying, TonightWherever you areOur hearts are with you.

Wherever you areOur prayers are with you tooAll through the darknessOur faith is your guiding starMay God bless you allWherever you are.

So, wherever you are, Nina, I know that this wartime song must have been in your mind when you wrote those words to me. And wartime must have been in your mind when you booked us into the Hôtel Scribe in Paris, for in 1944 it was the HQ of the Allied press corps, which included Lee Miller, erstwhile model, photographer, a war correspondent for Vogue magazine, and one of your great heroines. And with all that in mind, I’ve been writing this letter with two pens, alternating them according to whatever voice I have in mind. One is a French pen, which came in a box bearing the inscription Porte-Plume Réservoir, which I take to be an elaborate synonym for the more usual word for fountain pen, stylo. The pen itself has no name stamped on the barrel, as is customary with good pens, but the classy 18 carat gold nib has ‘Paris’ engraved on it, and, in a diagonal cartouche, the initials D & D. Whatever they might stand for, I like their doubleness. It is a very elegant pen, and again, like the Swan, it is done in a mottled red and black wood-grain pattern, le rouge et le noir, that bears a striking resemblance to the Dinkie you wore when first we met. The other is an English pen, a Conway Stewart Scribe in Green and Black Candle-flame. Both were made in wartime. That first night in the Hôtel Scribe, before we went out for dinner, you dabbed a little perfume on your breast and wrists. The casement windows of our room on the fourth floor were open and the voile curtains billowed gently in that breeze that comes on at dusk, you’d ordered a great bunch of Easter lilies to be placed on the windowsill, and their scent mingled with yours, a bittersweet tang of aniseed and musk followed by jasmine, rose and bergamot, and, as I write this in blue ink, the colour of eternity, the nib of my French pen whispers across the page till it falls silent after these words, L’Heure Bleue.