Exchange Place

Morning Star

We’ll do another sitting next week, said Harland. I put the notebook away … I wrote in the current notebook. I was pondering my next sentence when who should I see coming towards me down Ann Street but John and Jo, John Beringer the watchmaker that is, and his partner Joanna Leavey. Jo did face-painting for schools. They made a stylish couple, and you could see them coming a long way off, he in a slate-blue leather knee-length coat, nicely distressed, a green and red Tootal scarf at his neck, she in a 1960s navy check box jacket and a burnt orange silk scarf. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three o’clock; it was Wednesday, and I knew from of old that they took coffee at Caffè Nero around three on Wednesdays, regular as clockwork, you might say. We often bumped into each other accidentally on purpose. They had first met each other in Caffè Nero, two years back. She was sitting, pen in hand, doing the Guardian crossword. He was sitting, pen in hand, doing the Guardian crossword. As Jo lifted her eyes from the crossword, pondering a clue, John did likewise; their eyes met, and after that it was plain sailing. They’d both been looking at the same clue. And what was the clue? I asked, when I heard of this marriage of minds. Seven down, said Jo, Believe in the proposed route, say, in passing, 2,3,3. By the way, said John.

John Beringer, Joanna Leavey, I said. John Kilfeather, they said, what gives? So I told them the story of my displacement. And Beringer told me this story. It was what, twenty, thirty years ago, he was living in a flat beside the Waterworks. I was watching Top of the Pops, I’d smoked a bit of dope, he said, and I goes into the kitchen to raid the fridge and this blue flash comes out of nowhere, like sheet lightning, more of a flicker, the glass door of the kitchen blows in, then I hear the bang, there’s been a bomb in the entry behind the house. I must have blinked or something, when I look again the whole kitchen’s covered in this fine layer of dust, the colours are all bleached out, it’s like some kind of simulacrum, you know, a projection from another world, the room’s not the room it was before, I’ve just walked into another universe. So after a while the cops arrive on the scene, all blue flashing lights and sirens, and I’m out in the entry looking at the yard door, it’s been blown off its hinges, I’ve just taken a drag of dope, and this cop comes up to me and asks if I’m all right, and I blow a lungful of Mexico’s finest in his face, and I says, perfectly all right, officer, and he looks me in the eye, and he says, I haven’t seen you, son, and he walks on. Good cop.

Speaking of which, said Beringer, anything on the go? Oh, the usual, I say, Black Rose, or there’s a nice bit of Silver Haze if you like, nice mellow smoke, nice airy feel about it. So he orders half an ounce and we talk a bit about dope, and Jo says how she used to love looking into a flower-head with a magnifier, it was like entering a magic forest, and she talks pretty knowledgeably about THC and DBD, the high and the stony. I don’t know Joanna that well, and I say, You seem to know your way around a flower-head, and she says, Yes, I know, the Little Weed, and why wouldn’t I, I used to deal dope from the cloakroom of the Ulster Museum when I worked there. So she tells me how the client would come and leave his or her coat with her, payment in a designated pocket, take a stroll around the museum, and when the client leaves, the deal’s in the same pocket. And she’d maybe tell the client to go and look at the John Lavery painting, you know, the one with Lady Lavery kneeling at a big window, there’s aircraft in the sky over London, and to look at it sideways to see what they might see.

I knew the painting well. Back in the seventies John Harland had introduced me to James Conn, the Keeper of Art at the museum. Conn was going blind from diabetes at the time, diabetic retinopathy, they call it, but he held down his job for some years even when he’d gone completely blind, it seemed his memory for paintings had improved since he lost his sight, he could see practically every work he’d ever seen, in his mind’s eye, he could still direct purchases when something appropriate came up for sale. And Conn told me to go and look at the Lavery some time when I had the chance, The Daylight Raid from My Studio Window, 7th July 1917, Lavery called it. It records the occasion when twenty-one German Gotha biplanes bombed London for the second time, the same Gothas that Proust had seen bombing Paris in Time Regained, Le temps retrouvé. Lavery’s wife is depicted from the back, kneeling before a blackout curtain, seemingly observing the action. The blackout curtain is the key, you need to look at it sideways, said Conn. Look for a Virgin Mary, he said. I knew that Lavery, a Belfast Catholic, had indeed painted Hazel Lavery as the Virgin Mary on occasions, but I couldn’t see its relevance to this painting.

So I went and looked at it. Sideways. And there, obscured by the putative blackout curtain, on the windowsill, if you squinted at it in a certain light, was a darker, keyhole-shaped patch, and when you looked at it with the Virgin Mary in mind it looked like one of those statues, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, as if the kneeling Lady Lavery is praying to the Madonna in the hour of danger. Or mirrors Her. I remembered the Litany of Our Lady from childhood. Tower of David, House of Gold, Mirror of Justice, Gate of Heaven, Mystical Rose, Morning Star. So what’s the story? I asked Conn. And I’m trying to remember what he told me, through the fog of all those years, the bombings, the drinking in pubs that were liable to be bombed at any minute, the blanks in memory, the obliterated buildings, the people who had died or disappeared, or who had been disappeared. I’d like to quiz him about it now, but he’s been dead for years. I know the painting was one of a number Lavery gave to the Belfast Municipal Art Gallery, as it was then, in 1929. Like practically all public institutions in Northern Ireland, the gallery was run by unionists, some of whom, not to put too fine a point on it, were anti-Catholic. Did Lavery black out the Madonna himself? He was known as a painter of royalty, knighted in 1918. But then he had painted Michael Collins and Roger Casement. And the blackout curtain was a slapdash piece of work, not like Lavery at all, it was one of the things that had drawn Conn’s attention to it. Was it the work of another hand? Whatever the case, a murky story lay behind this detail invisible to all but those who had been told what to look for, or to those who had, like Conn, looked carefully enough, without being told. There was no mention of it in the art histories. I’d never heard anyone speak of it again, until now.

So how come you knew about the Lavery? I asked Jo. Oh, I was in Paris, said Jo, can’t remember what year, I met this guy in a bar, English accent, bit of a dandy, said he used to live in Belfast, John Bourne, that was the name, I remembered it, you know, because of The Bourne Identity, he told me about the Lavery. And there was something dodgy about him, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, as if he’d been spinning me a yarn, but when I got back to Belfast I checked it out, and he was right, the Lavery was dodgy.