Exchange Place

A Yellow Beam

So what brings you to Paris? said Gordon. Kilpatrick told him his story. As for Gordon, he was with the Irish Diplomatic Service, First Secretary to the Ambassador, with a special brief for Culture. Had been in Paris for two years. Before that, in many places: Colombia, Baghdad, El Salvador, to name some. In Beirut he had been involved in the negotiations to free the hostage Brian Keenan, who had travelled to Lebanon under two passports, British and Irish — a dual nationality that might well have been instrumental in his release, though there was no way of knowing for sure. Kilpatrick thought of Brian Keenan, and the other one, what was his name, McCarthy, John McCarthy, an Irish name, though he was English, the pair of them chained to a radiator telling each other stories to keep their spirits up. Singing songs. What’s that song of Dylan’s, said Gordon, we used to sing in the old days, back in Sixth Form? The keeper of the prison, he asked it of me, how good, how good, does it feel to be free? And Kilpatrick replied, And I answered him most mysteriously, are the birds free in the chains of their skyways? He thought of the vast flocks of starlings that wheeled over the Seine at dusk, moment by moment changing from wisp of smoke to tumbling cloud, bewildering the eye with the speed of their movements. The same starlings over Belfast, over Manchester. Similar yet everchanging patterns.

But what brings you here, specifically, said Gordon, Hôtel Nevers? I don’t think you got that far in your story. Yesterday in the James Joyce, said Kilpatrick, I met a man with a black briefcase. Before Kilpatrick could name the man in question, Gordon said, Freddy Gabriel, and he asked you along to the Modiano do. Of course you know Freddy Gabriel’s a spy, said Gordon. Nice Oxford don-type spy, but still a spy, at least in a manner of speaking. Everyone knows he’s a spy. For all we know he might be letting us know. Part of his game. That briefcase of his, for instance, hidden camera, mike. You can buy them online, for Chrissake. Everyone can be their own James Bond these days. Or think it. But as we know, it’s not about the information. It’s how you use it. Or what you think it is. What you think it’s worth. It’s about the deal. There’s always something under the table. You have to ask yourself how well you know who’s sitting on the other side. If they are who they say they are, or who they represent. There’s always doubletalk. You watch the body language. They hide their hands under the table, usually they’re hiding something. But then they might want you to think that. And then we have to ask ourselves who we are, and who or what we represent. Funny the way I took you for John Bourne. Some say his real name is Harland, but somehow I can’t see him as a Harland. Much too practical, if you think of Harland & Wolff. And he laughed. Kilpatrick thought of asking if this Bourne might be the Bourne he knew, and as Gordon talked Kilpatrick was beginning to rehearse the story he might tell Gordon, but he thought better of it, and bade his time.

I guess I took you for him because of the clothes, said Gordon. Did you know that in the diplomatic service they train you to look at clothes? Le style, c’est l’homme, that sort of thing. Part of the cultural discourse. No, Bourne dresses like you. Or you like him. Dapper. The sort of man who thinks about textures and colours. And John Bourne has an uncanny feeling for such things, considering he’s blind. Blind? said Kilpatrick. He tried to see the Bourne he knew gone blind. Yes, what is it, diabetic retinopathy? said Gordon. One of those things they diagnose when it’s too late. You have diabetes, the blood vessels at the back of the eye start to leak. Anyway, Bourne can take a piece of material between finger and thumb, gauge the weight, the fabric, the colour even. Says his sense of touch has improved dramatically since he lost his sight. And he’s become more intimately acquainted with the cut of clothes, he says. He can run his hand over a suit and tell to within a fraction whether it will fit. And then there’s his painting. Painting? said Kilpatrick. Yes, said Gordon, Bourne paints. He was a painter before he went blind, and when he went blind he was in despair, I believe, but something made him get back into it again. Honestly, if you saw his work you wouldn’t believe it was done by a blind man. I met him through Freddy Gabriel, of course, Freddy has a way of finding these characters, all part of his network. I think he thinks Bourne has some kind of extrasensory perception, sees things the normal person can’t see, which makes him a good candidate for spy-work. You should talk to Freddy about him. Un autre Ricard? Kilpatrick nodded.

As Gordon went up to the bar Kilpatrick remembered Bourne talking about portraiture. What do we know of ourselves? he would say. Or of anything? Conscious perception is only a fraction of what we know through our senses. By far the greater part we get through subliminal perception. When I paint a face, am I painting the person I see before me, or the person I have in mind from all those times of seeing him before? Am I painting a figment of a figment? What do we remember of ourselves? A few fleeting fragments, which we make into shifting histories of ourselves. A kind of interior monologue. Sometimes we dramatize ourselves in the third-person. You know George Orwell’s essay, ‘Why I Write’? He describes how from early adolescence he made up a continuous story about himself, a kind of diary existing only in his mind. For minutes at a time, says Orwell, this kind of thing would be running through his head: He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the ink-pot. He moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf … and so on and so forth. I like the detail about the tortoiseshell cat, said Bourne. But anyway, the point is, through language we make up a fictive self, we project it back into the past, and forward into the future, and even beyond the grave. But the self we imagine surviving death is a phantom even in life. A ghost in the brain. As for painting what’s before my eyes, said Bourne, sometimes I like to shut my eyes and let the brush take over.

Kilpatrick knew the Orwell essay, an apologia for his political writing. In a peaceful age, said Orwell, he might have written ornate or merely descriptive books; as it was, after five years serving in Burma as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police, a profession to which he was entirely unsuited, he was moved to write out of a sense of political injustice. Then came the Spanish Civil War. And yet, said Orwell, he never wanted to abandon the world-view he acquired in childhood. So long as he remained alive and well, he would continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Gordon came back with the drinks. Kilpatrick and Gordon poured the water into the Ricard and watched it go cloudy.