The Pen Friend

Look for a long time at what pleases you

Nothing is ever truly lost, my father used to say, for every thing in the universe is in the place where it finds itself, and is observed by God, who sees everything. By the same token, though I have so far failed to come across an equivalent of the red and black Dinkie pen that first attracted you to me, I know that my quest is not fruitless. I don’t know how many thousands Conway Stewart made of this particular model, but, scattered as they might be across the world, some of them broken and cast aside, buried in landfills or in the backs of sofas, perhaps ground underfoot in a purposeful or careless moment, I trust that enough remain for one of them, one day, to find its way to me. Not that it will be identical to yours, for the parameters of each design allow for random variations that make each pen subtly individual.

The taxonomy of Conway Stewart pens is complex: serial numbers run from No. 1 to No. 1216, but the system is not chronological, for many of the higher numbers are early models, and vice versa; and each model comes in a range of colours and designs and sizes, with different caps, clips, bands, levers and nibs, so that the permutations run into the many thousands. Your Dinkie, for example, is a 540, but that number comprises over a hundred variations, of which your ring-top Red and Black Mottled Vulcanite is only one. I’m writing this with a Dinkie 540, as it happens, not a ring-top like yours, but one with a pocket-clip. I bought it from an eBay seller in Hong Kong, who told me it came from the last effects of a lady widowed by a colonial administrator, and its Peacock Plumage livery — a spilled petrol swirl of violets, emeralds, mauves, purples, sapphires, tortoiseshells and black, also known as Butterfly Wing — has an Oriental shot silk iridescence. It’s too small for me to hold altogether comfortably, so it’s difficult to control, but that makes me form my words all the more deliberately, watching the letters as they appear on the page to form these sentences. As a tribute to one of its many colours, I loaded the Dinkie with violet ink, and its unfamiliar smell reminds me that there are little perfume atomisers made to look like fountain pens: unscrew the cap, and instead of a nib you find a button that releases a glazed rainbow of scent when pushed — ‘Parfum Exotique’, aromas standing in for words. You remember, Nina, reciting Baudelaire’s poem as we stood by his grave in Montparnasse. It was Easter Monday, Cemetery Monday, as I dubbed it, for we had then gone on to the necropolis of Cimetière Père Lachaise, wandering the long avenues and intersecting alleyways between the graves and vaults and sepulchres of bankers and statesmen and princesses and movie stars and artists, mausoleums shaped like pyramids and beehives and gazebos, adorned with baroque marble angels and imposing statues of those interred beneath them.

We visited the grave of Oscar Wilde, which was fronted by a massive block bearing a winged Egyptian deity, its plinth covered with lipstick kisses. Marcel Proust’s grave was an unexpectedly plain, flat, black marble slab. It seemed unvisited, but the equally simple grave of Colette — Colette who, like Lee Miller, was one of your heroines — was covered with fresh cut flowers, and, as we approached, a young woman, whose frizzy hennaed hair shone like a beacon above her plum-coloured velvet dress, added a single tuberose lily. You know what the French say about the tuberose, you whispered. No, I said, what do they say? They say a young girl should not breathe its fragrance after dark, in case it might prove dangerous to her chastity. Colette was very fond of the tuberose. What is it she wrote? a cloud of dreams bursts forth and grows from a single, blossoming stem, you said. And it seemed that of all the flowers there the tuberose gave out its scent the most, a heady, almost luminous aroma. Though I don’t know what it does to the cats, you said. The cats? I said. Yes, they say that cats visit her grave in droves every night, because she was very fond of cats, time spent with cats is never wasted, she used to say. I would have expected Lee Miller to have mentioned the cats when she visited Colette, but she didn’t, you said, and you went on to recall Lee Miller’s Colette piece, which appeared in the March 1945 issue of Vogue.

You’d imagined yourself there in Lee Miller’s shoes, you’d memorised whole sentences of her Vogue piece, as if you had stepped back in time up the dark staircase into Colette’s third-storey apartment in the Palais Royal gardens. Colette’s sitting up in a bed covered with tawny furs, her frizzy hair like a halo against the cold light from the tall windows, you said. She talks about the black market, the end of the war, the erratic electricity supply, and then she enters her past, darting here and there to choose an object, or a book, but never leaving the bed, for I’m an extension of her body, her hand guiding my arm to reach an envelope of pictures from a high shelf, none of them in order, and they slither out all over the bed and off the bed as she skims through them, each summoning up an anecdote, which in turn attracts another object, a souvenir, a keepsake, a letter from Proust or a portrait of her by Man Ray, towards the bed. She’s what, seventy-one, seventy-two, and her many lives run through my mind’s eye like sepia flashbacks, you said, Colette the siren, the gamine, the lady of fashion, the diplomat’s wife, the mother, Grand Officer of the Légion d’Honneur, Colette the author of the Claudine books which inspired a stage play and a whole range of products, Claudine cigars, Claudine uniform, Claudine soap and perfume, though Colette’s own cosmetics shop went bust, and there’s a many-layered aura in the tall-windowed room that’s lined with bookshelves and alcoves, there’s butterflies in picture-frames, and glass-domed jars with votive offerings in them, little floating hands and ships and acrobats, sealed in holy water. There’s glass paperweights with flamboyant marble swirls in them, and snowstorms, and crystal balls.

Then she shows me the manuscripts, you said, the early ones neatly written in school exercise books, pink and blue printed covers labelled in purple ink. The later ones are a labyrinth of scrawls and crossings-out and arrows, from which she makes fair copies with big spaces between the lines, which in turn fill up with more alternatives and second or third thoughts, you said, more cancellations, and so the whole process of spinning the yarn begins again. Until I read Lee Miller on Colette I had no idea that Colette, the natural writer, as I’d thought of her, the mistress of the spontaneous phrase, worked in so laborious a manner. She shows me her pens, seven of them standing in a big blue jug. There’s ones with broad soft nibs for first drafts, and ones with fine hard points for writing between the lines, and a special one bought by a special someone for her in the Twenties, that she uses when she’s stuck. She keeps trying the switch by her bedside but the electricity’s been off all day, and when I leave it’s almost dark. I remember the last glimmers of light imprisoned in the crystals, and the iridescent blue of the framed butterflies, and the whites of Colette’s eyes, you said, as if repeating a long-rehearsed quotation.

I take it you spoke French to her, I said. Well, Lee Miller did, her French was nearly perfect, you said. As is yours, I said, and you gave a self-deprecating shrug, but it was true, your French was much better than mine. I could read French with only occasional recourse to a dictionary, and I had felt a glow of self-congratulation when I discovered I could follow most of the Easter Sunday sermon in Saint-Eustache, but then the priest’s enunciation had been exquisite, and I knew the theme — of darkness, light and resurrection — well enough from similar childhood sermons. It was familiar territory, and I knew the signposts. And I thought I could speak French reasonably well, but when I did, my collocutor, assuming I knew French well, would unleash a torrent of words in which my comprehension would immediately flounder. But you, Nina, were never out of your depth: French was a second element to you. Your whole body language would change as you spoke, adopting a vocabulary of Gallic shrugs, pouts, frowns and gesticulations, as if you were clothed by French, and became someone other than the one I thought I knew. I loved and admired you for it, and wondered sometimes if I envied you, if envy ever entered into love, for both are emotions, whereas admiration is dispassionate. And, half-jokingly, I’d propose that the whole world should indeed have learned Esperanto, for then we would not need to learn the languages of different nations in order to communicate with them. But that’s precisely the point, you’d say, the point is the difference. Vive la différence, as they say. When I speak French, when I listen to French, I think differently, and I say things other than what I’d say, were I speaking English, you said. And of course I knew this myself, for Irish, after all, was my first language, and I not only thought differently in it, but felt differently. Or at least I did once, for now my Irish is like a ghost of itself behind my more accustomed English. As it was then.

We’d gone to Montmartre one day. From the steps of Sacré-Coeur, we gazed down at Paris, radiantly clear in the meticulous April light. I always think that Paris is like the French language, you said, the way it’s departmentalised, as you pointed out the various districts, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Tuileries, the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse, the Invalides, the Marais. Of course the boundaries, the definitions, have been eroded over the years, but then so has the language, if you’re to believe the academicians. But the old fabric is still there under all the changes. Look, over there, and you pointed to a green space in the distance, that’s the Jardin des Plantes, rue Mouffetard’s not far off, you can’t see it, but we’ll have to go there, they have a brilliant market, it’s been on the go for centuries. It’s this steep narrow street, it’s packed with shoppers, stalls along the pavements, open shop fronts with their awnings out, butchers, trays of calves’ liver and tripe and the lovely pot roasts they do, all parcelled up with butcher’s string, it’s a work of art, and those yellow chickens with the heads and feet still on them, then there’s the greengrocers, big fat knobbly tomatoes, all kinds of fresh salad stuff, and the fishmongers, marble slabs awash with cod and halibut and sea-bream and ray and conger eel and lobsters and sea urchins, and God knows what other kinds of creatures, I know what they are in French, but I couldn’t tell you the English for them. And the cheese counters are really unspeakable, I don’t know how many hundreds of kinds they have, and you have all these smells wafting around, between the cheese and the fish and the fruit and vegetables and flowers, the smell of anchovies and olives and Gitanes. Then you come to the end of the street, you turn a corner, go down an alleyway, and you’re in an empty Roman amphitheatre, it’s been there since Paris was, if not before.

That’s what I love about Paris, you never know what’s round the next corner, you said; and from my small experience of the city, it seemed true. I remember especially the evening we dined early in one of the streets off rue Montorgueil. Chez Bibi, that was the place, we were the first customers, and Madame Bibi herself, as we supposed her to be, engaged us, or rather you, in a long colloquy regarding the merits of the food we were about to eat. And the food was good, if a little heavy, solid Bordelaise cooking with wine-reduced sauces, and the wine was good too. By the time we stumbled out, satisfied and half-dazed, rue Montorgueil was thronged with people out for the night, the restaurants and cafés overflowing on to the pavements, and the cool evening air was resonant with conversation and clinking glasses.

We walked north, we crossed a boulevard; suddenly, as if a curtain had descended, the buzz of rue Montorgueil died behind us and we entered a silent zone, a maze of grey deserted streets and alleyways, which turned out to be the garment district. You remember, Nina, how entranced we were by the window displays, the cards of loom elastic, buttons, needles, pins and hair-clips, reels of cotton thread displayed like colour charts, long fat bolts of pink and blue and green cloth, the dresses that seemed thirty years out of date, the tailor’s dummies posed in attitudes of faint surprise? I never knew this place existed, you said, and I was somehow pleased that we were both foreigners now, explorers of a strange new world.

We turned a corner and for the first time we saw people: two women in their forties, maybe, each followed by a string of youngsters. Each carried a pillowslip. The bins outside the shops were overflowing with scrap material and oddments, and these families, we realised, were rag-pickers. Each would stop at a bin and rummage it quickly and professionally, choosing some pieces, discarding others, stuffing them into the bulging pillowslips. There was obviously a hierarchy of stuff, whether chiffon, organdie, tulle, lace, gauze, poplin, whether plain or patterned, whether this pattern or that, and we wondered why some pieces were deemed more valuable than others, for they all appeared equal to our eyes. And where did they all end up, what patchwork did they make? It’s like something out of Victor Hugo, you whispered. We walked on, and in about two minutes we entered the red light district of Porte Saint-Denis to a swirl of competing perfumes.

Paris did indeed seem intricately classified, and had I known then what I now know about the history of artificial languages, I might have expanded your analogy of the city as language. For the earliest attempts at a universal language arose from the medieval idea that man, by reconciling himself to the City of God, in which everything had its proper place and purpose, might attain to a perfect knowledge of the universe. The whole sum of things might, it was thought, be brought by division and subdivision within an orderly scheme of classification. To any conceivable thing or idea capable of being expressed by human speech might therefore be attached a corresponding word, like a label, on a perfectly regular and logical system. Words would therefore be self-explanatory to any person who had grasped the system, and would serve as an index or key to the things they represented. Say you want to find a book in a library. You look it up in a catalogue, where you find its reference number — say, PZ0477.f.26D. If you have learned the system of classification of that library, the reference number would tell you where to find that particular book out of millions; moreover, it would indicate what kind of book it was. The initial P would at once place the book in a certain main division, and so on with the other numbers, till those at the end of the series would lead you to a particular bookcase, a particular shelf, and finally to the book itself.

Just so, a word in a philosophical language. I was not altogether surprised to learn that one of the most interesting of such languages was invented by a Frenchman, Jean François Sudre, a musician educated at the Paris Conservatory. Walking the city as a student, he had been struck by its many sounds, from the tolling of the church bells to the screech of a knife-grinder’s stone. It struck him that all these had a musical value, which could be expressed by the seven notes of the scale, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. As the city broadcast itself, so everything in the city, everything in the world, everything in the known universe, could be expressed as a series of musical notes, whether played or written. So he proceeded to make up his vocabulary from the seven syllables of the scale, according to principles of philosophical classification. Initial do indicated a class of key, that of Man, moral and physical; dodo gave a sub-class, religion; dododo a third sub-division, and so on. The other major classifications were re, clothing, household, family; mi, human actions, bad qualities; fa, country, agriculture, war, sea, travel (fafa stood for sickness and medicine); sol, arts, sciences; la, industry, commerce; and si, society, government, finance, police. By shifting the accent from one syllable to another, he formed within a single stem the verb, the noun of the thing, the noun of the person, and the adverb corresponding to a given idea.

Sudre published the principles of his language in 1817, calling it Solrésol, which meant ‘language’ in Solrésol, and he thought its resources practically unlimited, not least because such a system lends itself to all possible forms of graphic, phonetic, and optical expression. If the seven notes of the musical scale are pronounced in the ordinary way, you can speak the language like any other; but you can also sing it, or play it on an instrument; with bells and horns, you can communicate to a ship in distress; substitute the seven colours of the rainbow for the seven notes of the scale, and you have an optical language, to be spoken by means of flags, lanterns or rockets.

Enthusiasts of Sudre’s language — they included Jules Verne and Victor Hugo — thought that elaborate works of oratory might be produced by means of son et lumière, or poems in the form of banquets, for the system could as easily appeal to the sense of taste. And it did not stop there, for perfumes might as easily be employed. The coloured knots of a textile rug could be a literal text, the pattern in a dress a commentary on its own style. To a speaker of Solrésol, birdsong might contain unintended meanings. I do not know, Nina, whether Baudelaire knew Solrésol, but it seems to lie behind that poem you used to quote to me, ‘Correspondances’, in which Baudelaire speaks of the trees of the forest giving forth confused words, of perfumes that are like the skin of babies, or green meadows, or oboe music; a world in which perfumes, colours, sounds, all correspond. Thus everything in the universe is meaningful. There are messages to be read in the stars, in the stones of the road, in the coloured lichens on a stone wall, if you look long enough.

Which brings me to your postcard, and what it says: Look for a long time at what pleases you. It’s like something you might find in a fortune cookie. A bon mot in the bonbon. And I’ve looked at your postcard for a long time, because it pleases me to try to unravel its meaning. Dolls, 1690–1700, Lord and Lady Clapham in formal dress, Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, according to the caption. I know these dolls, for I too saw them in the V & A Museum, where you must have bought this card, but then I did not look at them as messages from you. It was my last birthday, you remember, just last October, I was there, perhaps you too were there, when you bought this card and the other of Two Dutchmen and Two Courtesans, did you share the same gallery space as me, and breathe the air I breathed, did you brush against me unwittingly, unseeingly, or with full knowledge and complete consent? Would you have known me, whatever I’d become since last we met, or not? Whatever the case, the two cards must be connected. Because they both come from the same source, and they both come from you. Even when we buy postcards as souvenirs or decorative objects, we have a possible recipient in mind. And you must have been thinking of me then, you must have been thinking of us. Perhaps the Two Dutchmen and Two Courtesans, poised in their tentative minuet, could stand for the first stages of our relationship, our getting to know each other, wavering between ourselves as singletons, ourselves as couple; and Lord and Lady Clapham might be what we were towards the end, or rather — the thought has only now occurred to me — what we might have become, these two ensconced in their elaborate high-backed chairs, impassive and self-satisfied, their attitudes and dress unaltered through the centuries, had you not left me as you did. And as we become them, their dress becomes us well: I picture myself in the red coat with the over-big, redundant buttons, the nonchalantly tied silk cravat, the brocaded waistcoat, the wig of human hair; your outfit is slightly more modest, but the expression given to your face, it seems to me, is more circumspect, more calculating, that of a lady who is one step ahead of her consort, though convention demands her to be placed slightly behind. She takes the longer view of their mutual history. Is this how it ended up between us? Or is this what time might have done to us?

The Dinkie, being a Dinkie, doesn’t hold a lot of ink, and it ran out on me two sentences ago, if questions are sentences. If you are reading this now (and I hope one day you shall) you’ll have noticed the broken flow in the writing, where the last few words petered out and I had to go over them again, like picking up a dropped stitch in a piece of knitting, except of course with knitting you’d be using the same needles, whereas I welcomed the break as an opportunity to change pens, for my hand was getting cramp from the small Dinkie.

I pondered my choice for some time. Should it be the American Wahl Eversharp Doric in Silver Grey Web, an important, legal-looking instrument, whose twelve-sided columnar design recalls the Doric porticos of American courthouses, and which one can picture in the hand of a judge, signing procedural documents, or sentences? Or another Onoto made in the year of my birth, this one with a transparent amber barrel that shows what ink remains? Or the 1939 Conway Stewart 175, which, because of its dull and unprepossessing photograph on eBay, I was able to pick up for a song, hoping that a better pen lay behind its poor image, and so it proved, as a thorough cleaning brought out the glowing splendour of its Toffee Swirl with Rose and Mauve Inclusions body, while the gold trim shone up like new? Eventually I settled on this much plainer pen, one which could not be further from the gemlike iridescence of the Dinkie I laid down for it. It’s a big black Croxley, made just after the War by the stationery manufacturers John Dickinson Ltd, and named after Croxley Mills in Watford. Here, in 1830, the original John Dickinson had set up his new ‘continuous web’ mechanised paper manufacturing process, which replaced the handmade techniques of the day. Dickinson had first made his name in the Napoleonic Wars, when he came up with a paper for cannon cartridges that did not smoulder after firing, thus preventing the many fatal premature explosions which occurred when a new charge was rammed down the barrel. Today John Dickinson plc is among the largest stationery manufacturers in the world. I wrote my notes for the Esperanto book in their Black n’ Red notebooks. And, as it happens, I’m writing this on Dickinson Croxley Script A4 paper; you can see the watermark if you hold it up to the light. But this is all by the bye, for I only discovered this information a few minutes ago, after a Google search on John Dickinson, before I began writing this with the Dickinson Croxley pen. The reason why I chose it is because engraved on its barrel are the words

MANCHESTER UNITY OF ODDFELLOWSThe best Friendly Society

and, intrigued by this inscription when I first saw it on eBay, I could not resist buying it. I got it for a few pounds: Croxleys, though they are very solidly made, with great nibs, are not deemed to be as collectable as some other English pens, and the black colour, together with the inscription, lowers the value of this one even further. The Oddfellows, as I discovered, are an organisation akin to the Freemasons, claiming like them a leading role in the French Revolution, and an ancestry stretching back to biblical times, in this instance the expulsion of the Israelites from Babylon in 587 BC. And it struck me, in the course of remembering our relationship, that perhaps the organisation you worked for was a kind of Oddfellows, once a clandestine organisation with code-names and passwords, which had evolved into one which, ostensibly at least, worked for the greater good of society.

I remember your quoting to me a saying of Talleyrand’s, La parole a été donnée à l’homme pour déguiser sa pensée, words were given to man to disguise his thoughts, and perhaps that is true, for though my writing here, as you can see, is as calm and measured as my choice of words, it would not have been so had I written to you first thing yesterday morning after seeing the Irish stamp on your card, and the Dublin postmark. Then, my hand would have trembled had I put pen to paper, for Dublin, as you know, was a turning point in our relationship, like a door that closes off one prospect and opens up another; and I did not know whether to feel pleasure or pain that you were on the same island as me. It was some hours before I could calm myself sufficiently to write. But at other times I have not so deferred the moment, I have responded immediately and honestly, you can see how my writing is wavered by excitement or emotion, the hurried scrawl of my words as they struggle to keep pace with my thought. And then again, because I sometimes do not know what to feel or think, I write slowly to discover what those thoughts or feelings might be, finding them sometimes to turn out quite differently to what I had expected, for whatever happened in the past, even the immediate past, is changed when viewed in retrospect.

We had gone to Dublin for the weekend to celebrate my promotion to Head Keeper of Irish Art at the Belfast Municipal Gallery. We’d known each other for a year. Six months before, the Assistant Keeper, Sam Catherwood, had dropped dead of a stroke; and some months after that Freddy Burrows, the Head Keeper, took early retirement. Although I was next in line, I didn’t really expect to get the job; posts like this usually went to outsiders, so I was pleasantly surprised when I was told hours after the interview that I had been successful.

We stayed at the Shelbourne Hotel. I toyed with the idea of booking Room 217, where JFK and Jacqueline had stayed in 1958 during his presidential campaign, but it proved a little beyond even the means of my new salary. As it was, I managed to get 412, the number of Lee Miller’s room in Hôtel Scribe, telling the desk not to let you know that I had asked for it in advance. So when the key was handed over, you were delighted. Great number, you said to the concierge, and you turned to me and laughed, and he smiled discreetly and said, Yes, madam, it’s a very good room, overlooks the Green, I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable there. Imagine, Angel, of all the rooms they could have given us, they give us Lee Miller’s number in Hôtel Scribe, isn’t that amazing? you said. Yes, I said, and did you know that James Joyce used to drink both in the Hôtel Scribe, and in the Shelbourne? Really? you said, and I said, Yes, really, though I didn’t know it for a fact, it was more of a likely possibility, a way of letting you know that this was my territory now.

My job often brought me to Dublin, and I knew it well, whereas you’d only been there fleetingly. We ended up that night in Mulligans pub in Poolbeg Street, where Joyce set a scene from one of his Dubliners stories, ‘Counterparts’, it’s one of those dark pubs where the light seems filtered through nicotine and settling Guinness, and the Guinness there is really very good, you remember? That paradoxical edge of bitterness behind the creamy-buttermilk-thick black. Do you know ‘Counterparts’? I said, and you said, No. Well, it’s rather a depressing story, really, there’s this clerk in a law firm, Crosbie & Alleyne, Farrington, he’s called, and he’s supposed to be copying out this contract between these two parties, Bodley and Kirway, they’re called, you know how it was in those days, dip pens and inkwells, no photocopying, and he’s not really on the job, he’s the kind of man who slips out for the odd jar every now and again, and his boss, that’s Alleyne, he’s got this broad Belfast accent, comes in and says, Where’s the Bodley and Kirway contract? and Farrington makes some poor kind of excuse, he says, But Mr Shelley said, sir, he says, and Alleyne mimics him, he says, Mr Shelley said, sir, well, kindly attend to what I say and not to what Mr Shelley says, sir, says Alleyne, and when Farrington tries another excuse, Alleyne says, Do you take me for a fool? Do you think me an utter fool? and Farrington looks round him at all the other clerks, and pauses for effect, and says, I don’t think, sir, he says, that that’s a fair question to put to me, and all the clerks titter nervously at this impertinence, so of course the boss really flies off the handle then, and it ends up that Farrington has to make an abject apology to him, and he knows that from here on out his life is going to be hell in the office.

He badly needs a drink after all this, but he’s just spent his last penny on the glass of Guinness he’d slipped out for when he was supposed to be copying the Bodley and Kirway contract, so he pawns his watch, he gets six shillings for it, and he goes on a pub-crawl, he meets these various cronies on the way, and he tells them the story of how he faced down the boss, he acts Alleyne shaking his fist in his face, then he acts himself delivering the smart remark, and who should come in but another crony, so he has to tell the story again, only better this time. And all this time he’s standing the rounds, no one else seems to have any money.

Anyway, they end up in Mulligans, the small parlour at the back, we were in one off the snugs just off the front bar, and I gestured with the hand that wasn’t holding my pint, down there, I said, they made it into an Art Deco bar in the thirties, it’s really rather special in its own way, but this, and I gestured again, to the dark surroundings of the front bar, this hasn’t changed since Joyce’s time, and anyway, I said, two young women with big hats and a young man in a check suit come in, Joyce is very good on dress, one of the women’s wearing an immense scarf of peacock-blue muslin wound round her hat, it’s knotted in a great bow under her chin, and she’s wearing primrose-yellow gloves up to the elbow, and Farrington starts to make eyes at her, he thinks she’s making eyes back at him, but then when the party gets up to go she brushes against his chair and says, O, pardon! in a London accent, and he realises she’s way beyond his class anyway, and he starts to think of all the money he’s spent on his so-called friends, there’s nothing he hates more than a sponge, and then someone proposes an arm-wrestling match, and Farrington gets beat twice by the one of the cronies he was standing drinks for, a mere stripling, and he ends up getting the tram home by himself, past the barracks, it’s dark and cold and wet, he doesn’t know what time it is, his watch is in the pawn, he’s spent all his money that wasn’t even his in the first place, and he doesn’t even feel drunk, and when he gets home his dinner’s cold and the fire’s out, one of his boys tells him his wife’s out at the chapel, and he starts to mimic him, Out at the chapel, at the chapel if you please! And he takes a walking-stick and starts to beat him, and the boy cries out, O, pa! Don’t beat me, pa! I’ll say a Hail Mary for you if you don’t beat me, pa, if you don’t beat me, I’ll say a Hail Mary, and that’s the end of the story.

You grimaced. Poor boy, you said, I don’t suppose the Hail Mary did him any good. What a funny religion. Yes, I said, Joyce thought so too, but then who would he have been without the Catholic Church? You know, Introibo ad altare Dei. Speaking of which, I think we need another pint, and I went up to the bar for another two, and I was standing with a five-pound note in my hand trying to catch the barman’s eye when someone brushed against me, and said, Sorry, and then took a little step back and said, Gabriel, Gabriel Conway! Despite the summer heat he was wearing a donkey jacket, and one of those Bob Dylan caps, he’d a beard, you remember him, and it took me a few seconds to place him, it was Hughie Falls, I hadn’t seen him from university days, he’d been in the PD then, the People’s Democracy, we’d gone on Civil Rights marches together, or at least he’d been on the same marches as me, so I ended up including him in the round, I was feeling expansive, and to tell you the truth, maybe I wanted to show you off to him, you were looking really well that night, sky-blue linen jacket, white linen knee-length skirt, red slingback open-toed shoes.

Anyway, we joined you in the snug, I introduced you to him, and in retrospect I think his eyes narrowed a little when he heard the name, Miranda Bowyer. Pleased to meet you, he said, and, leaning confidentially across the snug table, he started to engage me in a reminiscence of the old days, of the great victories we had won and the tragic setbacks we had suffered, and when the pints were finished he insisted on buying a round of half-uns, and these were going down nicely when he got round to asking me how I was doing. So I told him about the promotion, and his eyes definitely did narrow this time. So, he says, part of the establishment, is it? The cultural wing of the British war machine? And I took it for a typical Belfast heavy slagging, no real malice intended. Yes, I said, fully-fledged capitalist running-dog lackey, and went up for another round of whiskeys, or rather, just the two, you put your hand over your glass when I asked if you wanted another, and when I came back, Hughie Falls and you were engaged in some kind of animated discussion, and when I put the drinks down he began talking to me in Irish, bad West Belfast Irish, mangled grammar, terrible pronunciation, and I realised that he was quite drunk, not that we were entirely sober. And I also began to realise that his remarks before had been serious, or that the drink had made him serious, that and the bad Irish, for it wasn’t the kind of Irish that could handle any subtlety of expression.

So I played along with it a bit, answering him in Irish, realising as I did that much of it was lost on him, I might as well have been talking Swahili, and then I got fed up with it and started to answer him in English, and this really set him off, he began to rant about how I’d betrayed my birthright, me above all people, who had the good fortune to have Irish as a first language, people would give their eyeteeth to have had that opportunity, or at least he said what he thought the equivalent might be in Irish, it came out something like the teeth of their eyes, and then he said, Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste, better broken Irish than clever English, it was one of those tired old saws that Irish fanatics always ended up coming out with, and I said to him in English, Oh, piss off, Hughie, you know that’s nonsense, and by the way, your broken English isn’t much easier to follow than your broken Irish, and with that he slammed his glass down, the whiskey jumped out on to the table, Well, fuck you, Conway, he said in English, when the day comes you’ll be one of the ones they string up from the lamp-posts, and he left.

What was all that about? you said. Oh, the usual, I said, that I’m a Castle Catholic, a collaborator with the occupying forces, you know, what he was saying when he first sat down, we thought it was a bit of a joke. Yes, you said, when you were up at the bar he asked me what I did, and when I told him, he more or less accused me of being a spy for the Brits, he brought up the imperialist war machine again. But of course if you see it from his point of view, well, maybe you are a bit of a Castle Catholic, don’t you think so? Bought and sold for English gold? And I saw a glint in your eye I found difficult to fathom. Oh, come on, Nina, I’m just doing a job, and I do it well, I’m good at what I do, I said. Oh, no one doubts your ability, Angel, you said, but you know as well as I do that ability wasn’t enough to get intelligent Catholics like you a job in the old days. Before you went out on those Civil Rights marches, back in the Sixties. When did you start in the Gallery? Oh, what year was it, 1975, I said. And what were you doing before that? you said. Well, nothing much, Nina, I left university in 1971, went on the dole for a year, did a clerking job for a year, saved up enough to go round Europe for a few months, came back, went on the dole again, read a lot of books. Quite typical for people of my generation, I said.

And then you got this nice job, you said, how did that happen? Well, I said, a bit exasperated, the way it usually happens, I saw the ad, I applied, I went for the interview, I got the job. Oh, come on, Angel, surely there was more to it than that, you said. No one encouraged you to go in for it? No, I said. You wouldn’t by any chance have met a man in a bar? you said, you know, just a week or so before? Someone connected to the Gallery? Like John Bradbury? John Bradbury? I said, the collector, sits on the Board of Trustees, that John Bradbury? Yes, you said, I don’t know any other John Bradbury. Well, now that you mention it, yes, I happened to meet him in the Wellington Park, you know, in the back bar, some of us used to gather there, I forget who introduced me to him, might have been John Hewitt, you know, the poet. Yes, you said, and you had a long and interesting conversation with him, did you not? Oh, come on, Nina, I said, what are you getting at? As it happens, I found him very charming, and he knew his art, unlike a lot of the others on the Board. He knew Gerard Dillon, we had a great conversation about him, and Bradbury was very interested to know my father knew him. As a matter of fact, he even knew my father, spoke highly of him, was knowledgeable about Esperanto. Knew a bit of Irish, for that matter, and what little he knew was better than Hughie Falls’s Irish. So what? I said.

Well, you said, you wouldn’t be where you are now had John Bradbury not happened to bump into you that night, you said. Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Nina, we didn’t even discuss the Gallery, it was just talk about art. Just talk about art, you said. He didn’t mention the job at all? Well, I said, and I was struggling to remember that evening, we’d both ended up well jarred, and as I thought about it, I knew you were right, just before he left he said to me, I really enjoyed our chat, Gabriel, and oh, by the way, we’re looking for someone in the Gallery, there’ll be an ad in the Irish News next week, look out for it, won’t you? He said something like that, I said. Yes, you said. That’s because John Bradbury is MO2, you said. And so are you. So maybe Hughie Falls isn’t that far off the mark. Don’t be ridiculous, Nina, how can I be MO2 when I don’t even know it? I said. You mean without your full knowledge and complete consent? you said. Well, Angel, you said, it’s like this. Some of us know from the beginning what we’re getting into, and we consent to it, and others don’t, because it takes them a while to arrive at full knowledge, and when they do, either they give complete consent, or they don’t. Some of them quit, the ones who take a long time take early retirement, whatever. Everyone of us has to make that decision, it just takes longer for some to arrive at it.

So now you know, what are you going to do about it? you said, and I didn’t know how seriously to take you, I realised that you too were a more than a little drunk. I hesitated, and before I could reply, you said, You see, Gabriel, you really are rather naïve. You really do think that art exists in some superior realm, untouched by politics, without the intervention of the Powers That Be. But I’m different, I know what I’ve got into, and I go along with it, I’ve made that compromise, but you think of yourself as being uncompromising, and uncompromised. I’ve made my decision, but you think there’s no decision to be made. You’re undecided, even though you don’t know it. But if it takes me to make a decision, then I make it, just as I could walk out the door of this pub now if I wanted to, you said. But you don’t want to, I said weakly. No? you said, and you got up and walked out. I sat there for a few long seconds, stunned, thinking this was only play-acting, that you’d be back immediately. Then I got up and went after you.

It was pouring rain outside, one of those July thunderstorms. I thought I glimpsed the heel of your red shoe disappearing down a side street, and I ran after you, but when I turned the corner, the street was dark and wet and empty. I ran on anyway, thinking maybe there’d be an alleyway you might have taken, and there was, I ran down that alleyway, and down another, but you were nowhere to be found. Then I went back to the pub, thinking you might have relented and returned, I went up to the barman and asked him if you had come back, you know, the good-looking girl with the dark hair I was sitting with, she was wearing a light blue jacket, white skirt, and he looked at me pityingly and said, no, she hadn’t been back, but you never know, would I like another drink in the meantime. And I said, yes, I’ll have a large Powers, for I could think of nothing else to do, and I still held out hopes that you might return, and I sat there drinking until closing time.

I stumbled along the corridor of the fourth floor of the Shelbourne and jiggled the key in the keyhole of Room 412, trying it this way and that until eventually it swung to. A bedside lamp was on and you were lying in bed with your eyes open. It took you a long time to come back, Angel, you said. And I lay down with you, and after a while we entered that realm which is so familiar yet so strange, where we lose each other in ourselves, and wonder if we are who we are, or someone else, and then we fall asleep still not knowing. Now I remember the perfume you put on that night before we went out, and the square-shouldered black bottle that it came in, Fracas by Germaine Cellier, 1948, a needle-sharp tang of bergamot above a shadowy musky stink of tuberose. And now I remember the corollary of that phrase of yours I read two days ago, Look for a long time at what pleases you. You’d quoted it to me in Paris when you talked about Colette, apropos of what I can’t recall. You know what Colette says? you said, and I said, No, what does Colette say? and you said, Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.