The Pen Friend

In dreams begin responsibilities

I realise that my last letter was somewhat longer than those I had previously written. So many connections are beginning to occur to me, and that letter could have been even longer. I failed to mention, for example, that your postcard bore not just one Irish stamp, but two, one of them a 4c, the other a 48c, whose combined value, I thought, must exceed that required for a postcard to Northern Ireland, so your choice of them must have been deliberate. As you know, I was a stamp-collector in my teens, specialising in the stamps of Ireland, which appealed to me not only out of nationalistic sentiment, but because Irish stamps have always had a tradition of good design. These are no exception: they belong to the Irish Wild Flowers series of 2004, designed by the artist Susan Sex, and feature elegantly simple representations of the Violet (4c), the Dandelion (5c), the Primrose (48c), the Hawthorn (60c), the Bluebell (65c), Lords and Ladies (€2) and the Dog Rose (€5). That your card should bear a violet was especially significant, for you knew that it would remind me of John Donne’s poem ‘The Ecstasy’, which we used to quote to each other:

Where, like a pillow on a bedA pregnant bank swell’d up to restThe violet’s reclining head,Sat we two, one another’s best.I would begin, and you would reply withOur hands were firmly cementedWith a fast balm, which thence did spring;Our eye-beams twisted and did threadOur eyes upon one double string …

and so on, till, holding hands and staring into one another’s eyes, we would recite the last verse in unison. As for the primrose, it symbolises resurrection, among other things, but ‘the primrose path of dalliance’ also springs to mind. So you flit between alternatives, following the butterfly nature of your star sign. But you knew I would pick up on the stamps, for you were slightly bemused when I told you of my teenage passion for stamps; and perhaps you remembered Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘Stamp Shop’, which I’d quoted to you as evidence that stamp-collecting could be an intellectually respectable pursuit. To someone looking through old piles of letters, says Benjamin, a stamp that has been long out of circulation on a torn envelope often says more than a reading of dozens of pages. And, further on: Stamp albums are magical reference books; the numbers of monarchs and palaces, of animals and allegories and states, are recorded in them. Postal traffic depends on their harmony as the motions of the planets depend on the harmony of the celestial numbers, said Benjamin.

Perhaps it was not entirely unexpected that the son of a postman should have become a stamp-collector: my very first collection was of the foreign stamps my father would bring home, having begged them from the addressee, and I still remember the pleasure given to me by those glimpses of exotic lands, the black swan and the lyrebird of Australia, the springboks of South Africa, the tigers of Malaya. You remember, I told you how one day he arrived home with a rare item, a postcard he had discovered at the back of the dead-letter box, bearing an Edwardian stamp with a 1903 postmark, and the phrase, in what looked like a woman’s handwriting, See you tomorrow, usual place and time, Yours, ever, N. Those were the days, said my father, when you could post a card in the morning and be sure that it would arrive by that afternoon. He was an occasional reader of science fiction, and suggested playfully that the box had a slit in its back which was a portal to another universe, parallel to ours, but sixty years behind, through which the card had slipped. And I wondered who N might have been, whether in this universe or that, and what the consequences of her correspondent’s likely failure to attend the assignation. At any rate, the card, with its implications of alternative existences, led my father to remember Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe, who had been elected as Chairman of the Irish Esperanto Association when it first met in 1907, and whom my father met towards the end of his life. He was very old, said my father, but he still radiated a powerful intelligence, an extraordinary man, both his Irish and his Esperanto were perfect, and poetic.

Fournier d’Albe was indeed an extraordinary figure, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Vice-President of the Radio Association, and the author and translator of numerous scientific books. He shared the year of his birth, 1868, with James Connolly. He was a fluent speaker of German, French, Italian, Irish, Manx and Esperanto, and had published an Irish — English dictionary and phrase-book. In 1912, the year of the sinking of the Titanic, he invented the type-reading optophone, which, by converting the light refracted from a page of printed matter into musical notes, enabled a blind person to read. He was responsible for the transmission of the first wireless picture — of King George V — on 24th May 1923; and in 1926, at the 18th World Congress of Esperanto, held in Edinburgh, he delivered a paper on ‘Wireless Telegraphy and Television’. In 1907 he published Two New Worlds, ‘an attempt to penetrate the mystery of time and space with the help of the most modern resources of scientific research’: in it, he proposed a hierarchical clustering model for the structure of the universe which anticipated modern fractal theory. Fournier’s fractal can be visualised if we take one of a pair of dice and look at the side representing the number 5, known as ‘Phoebe Snow’ in gambler’s slang. Four of the dots are located at the corners of a square and the fifth is located at the centre. Let us imagine that each dot is really a miniature Phoebe Snow, and further, that each dot of the miniature Phoebe Snow is a microscopic Phoebe Snow. This constitutes three scales of the self-similar structure; but Fournier d’Albe went much further and imagined the pattern repeating ad infinitum, in a dizzying blizzard of self-replication. Worlds lay within worlds in nested frequencies. Atoms and stars, electrons and planets, cells and galaxies all moved to the same measure. Clouds, coastlines, earthquakes, the fluctuations of the stock market, all corresponded. A flag snaps back and forth in the wind, and a column of cigar smoke breaks into an anxious swirl. A pirouette of litter on a street corner heralds a tornado. A pin drops in an auditorium, a bomb goes off. Like patterns were apparent everywhere. The All was immutable, but the detail was ever new. The event, the incident, the individual was unique, unprecedented, irrecoverable; but the equilibrium was eternal.

In addition to his other achievements, Fournier d’Albe was a noted investigator of paranormal phenomena. While he recognised that the vast majority of these were spurious, a matter of imposture and the desire of many people to believe in an afterlife, or to believe in anything, there nevertheless remained some instances that were inexplicable to science; and he thought that these might be accounted for by some kind of slippage between the infinite worlds proposed by his theory. He was familiar with the work of W.J. Crawford and had corresponded with him briefly before his suicide in 1920. In May 1921 he travelled to Belfast, where he took up lodgings for four months, during which time he conducted an intensive study of the phenomena produced by the Goligher circle. After observing a séance at the Morrison home, and another at the late Crawford’s, Fournier d’Albe rented an unfurnished attic at 40 Fountain Street, in the city centre, to which he transferred the equipment used by Crawford; and here he conducted investigations into a further eighteen sittings, summarising his findings in a monograph, The Goligher Circle, published by John Watkins of London in 1922.

He had gone to Belfast hoping to find a medium who was somehow in touch with an alternative reality, a correspondent with another universe. But as he subjected Kathleen Goligher to more and more rigorous controls it became apparent that trickery was being used, and he came to ‘a definitely unfavourable conclusion regarding the whole of the phenomena’. A final sitting on 29th August produced no results. Kathleen Goligher indicated that due to indisposition she would not be giving any sittings to Fournier d’Albe, or to anyone else, for at least twelve months; and she never again submitted herself to scientific scrutiny. Fournier d’Albe had found the Goligher Circle to be ‘an alert, secretive, troublesome group of well-organised performers’. He seemed to have proved conclusively that the ‘operators’, far from being agents of a world beyond the grave, were none other than the members of the Goligher Circle themselves. Yet Fournier d’Albe’s findings were disputed by those who wished to believe, and to this day there were still those who believe in Kathleen Goligher’s ability to produce ectoplasmic rods and cantilevers, just as there are those who believe in Uri Geller, or the reality of alien visitations.

D’Albe kept a meticulous record of his dealings with the Goligher Circle, going so far as to note the weather at the time. I learned that the summer of 1921 was a typical Irish one: 1st June, for example, was showery and cool, while 6 June was hot and sunny. I was much taken by the coincidence that 40 Fountain Street, where the sittings took place, is the current location of the XL Café, and, as I read these brief reports of the weather, I imagined myself walking along the street one of those June days, feeling the breeze or the rain or the sun on my face, before going in for a cup of tea, where I might meet your counterpart. Then it occurred to me that the circumstances might not have been so idyllic.

D’Albe’s stay in Belfast coincided with a period of civil unrest that came to a head shortly after the opening of the first parliament of Northern Ireland on 22nd June, when Catholics were driven en masse from their homes and jobs by the UVF. There must have been gunshots to be heard as well as the rappings produced by the Goligher Circle, for the UVF had attacked Catholic homes in the New Lodge Road, not far from the city centre. My own father’s father had been expelled from his job as a fitter in Harland and Wolff’s, the shipyard that built the Titanic. In an attempt to discipline the loyalists, the government in Westminster recruited a Special Constabulary, but when a number of them joined Protestant mobs in Belfast on 10 July, they came to be regarded as enemies of the Catholic community. Plus ça change. The Specials were part of the loyalist mob which infamously attacked the Civil Rights march at Burntollet Bridge on 4th January 1969. Hughie Falls was there, among the injured, and his photograph appeared in the Irish News. Long-haired, bearded, eyes staring wildly, blood pouring from a head wound, he cut a heroic, Christ-like figure, and for many months afterwards did not lack female companionship.

Is that the Hughie Falls you knock about with? my father asked me when he saw the picture. Yes, I said, not being inclined to deny him. Well, said my father, he might be a hero, but his father, Tommy Falls, was a rogue. How’s that? I said. He was a scab, said my father, he broke a postal workers’ strike back in the Thirties. And how did the strike end up? I said. My father sighed. Oh, we had to go back, without a penny more than what we started with. So it was pointless anyway, I said, whether Tommy Falls was a scab or not. Not pointless, said my father, it was a matter of principle. Of comradeship. And that was the end of that conversation.

You knew my father a bit, Nina, you knew he was a man of principle. And yet. You remember that time he bumped into us in the XL Café? He had taken quite a shine to you, you know, I think sometimes he even flirted with you a little. There’d been a little item in the paper about him that morning, about his work with Irish and Esperanto, how he’d kept them going when it was neither profitable nor popular, that kind of thing, and you complimented him on it, wondering how he’d found the time for it when he was working — he’d been retired a year by then — that his job as Inspector in the Post Office must have quite demanding. Oh, not at all, he said, I was a bit of a straw boss, you know, I just put in an appearance every now and again, and I could nip out whenever I wanted to, like now. The postmen did the real work, the way I used to.

It’s like this, he said, I was given an offer I couldn’t refuse. Gabriel’s mother put me up to it, it was all her fault, he said, and he winked ruefully at me, for I knew the story well. Yes, he said, it was just after the War, the top brass approached me, said if I went for Inspector, I’d have no problem, only I’d have to go on a training course to London. And the last thing I wanted to do was to go to London, you see, conscription was still in force then, on the mainland as they call it, and I didn’t want to risk that, being a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces, it would go against everything I believed in, said my father. But you went anyway, you said. Yes, said my father, it was either that or a lifetime of misery from Gabriel’s mother. But you escaped, you said. By the grace of God, said my father. But you work for Her Majesty’s Royal Mail, you said boldly, raising your eyes to the Crown insignia on his peaked cap. But I don’t carry a gun for her, said my father, the pen is mightier than the sword, and anyone can hold a pen freely, be he Irish or English or Catholic or Protestant. It was the Irish who brought the pen all over Europe, the monks who held the flame of learning aloft throughout the Dark Ages. In this sign shall you conquer. That’s what I’ve tried to teach Gabriel. Do you think I’ve succeeded, Miranda? Oh yes, Mr Conway, I’m sure you have, you said, and you fondled the little Dinkie that dangled at your breast. Nice pen, said my father.

When he left, I told you the other side of the coin, that my father had been interned for six weeks in 1941, suspected of being a member of the IRA, which in Belfast at that time consisted of a few dozen militarily incompetent idealists. I think the Powers That Be thought they might be in league with the Nazis, which maybe wasn’t too far from the truth in the case of the more fanatical elements, I said. Maybe your father’s promotion was a quid pro quo for his imprisonment, you said. First they give him the bad news, then they give him the good news, you know, bad cop, good cop routine. That’s a bit far-fetched, Nina, I said. There was what, a seven-year gap between his internment and his promotion, do you think they work that far ahead? Or that far in retrospect? Well, you never know, you murmured. No, I said, the interesting thing was, it was a case of mistaken identity, my father had nothing to do with the IRA, the person they wanted was his twin brother, Gerry, they lifted George instead of Gerry. Anyway, they got Gerry too. He was in for the duration, they let him out in 1945, I said. And what happened to him? you said. Oh, he died in 1964. Heart attack. It was the first time I saw my father cry. When the news came — this uncle of mine, Joe Marley, they called him the Angel of Death, because he always got the job of breaking the bad news when there was a death in the family, or in a neighbour’s family, for that matter — he came to the door, my father answered it, and he knew by the expression on the Angel’s face, he didn’t have to be told, that Gerry was dead. And he burst into tears, he sobbed for a good half hour.

He died young, you said. Yes, I said, after Gerry got out of prison, it was difficult for him to get work, as you might guess, just the odd casual job working in the bakery or the docks. He’d give most of his wages to my Auntie Maureen, and save a little for himself, enough to go on a monthly binge. He wasn’t a heavy drinker, you understand. It was a very controlled thing, once a month for years, he’d go out on a tear, all the pubs of the Falls Road, or quite a few of them, for there were a great deal of pubs in the Falls then, each with their own wee quirks and characters. Joyce would have had a field day there. And my Uncle Gerry would come home speechless with drink, and fall into bed and sleep all the way through the next day. Then he’d get up as if it never happened, the monthly oblivion. But I like to think he had some crack along the way. He was a great storyteller, like my father, and like him he read a lot of books, taught me to play chess. And oh, yes, he collected stamps. He gave me his stamp album before he died. A more innocuous man you couldn’t imagine.

They put the Tricolour on his coffin when they buried him, I helped to carry the coffin, I still remember the weight of it and the way it cut into my shoulder, I was only sixteen. And perhaps I never fully understood then why my father had been so deeply affected, but now I think he must have felt guilty, because Gerry had done real time for Ireland, and he hadn’t. And my father was the Irish speaker, Gerry wasn’t. Gerry was a foot soldier, but my father must have admired him for the stupid courage of his convictions, Gerry who was just as intelligent as him, if not more so. My father had done well in life, George had done well, and Gerry hadn’t. George had compromised with the Powers That Be, and Gerry hadn’t. George took the King’s shilling; Gerry remained penniless, I said. But your father was right, to take the opportunity to advance himself, you said. But he didn’t particularly want to advance himself, it was my mother who wanted him to advance himself, I said. And you, Angel, what about you? you said. What about me? I said. Well, isn’t there some kind of parallel of compromise here, like father, like son? you said. And we began to rehearse an argument which by now had become familiar.

When I began this letter yesterday I had a suspicion I would get round to my uncle’s story sooner or later, so I’ve been writing this using two pens alternately, a paragraph in one, a paragraph in the other. One is a Kingswood in Pearlised Blue Onyx, which demanded to be chosen not for its attractive colouring, but because engraved on its cap is the inscription

WALDRON WELCOME HOME1939–45

from which I presume that it was one of a batch given to the homecoming soldiers of Waldron, a village in East Sussex which lay in Bomb Alley, where German aircraft would drop their bombs on their way to and from London. Most of its young men went to the war, and twenty-two of them died in action. Those that survived were given a pen, mightier now than the sword, as they entered civvy street. I wonder how many of those pens found employment; this one, at any rate, has seen some action, for there is a ghost of a personalised scratch to its nib as I write, and it sends a shiver up my spine to think that I touch what he once touched, that I hold in my hand an instrument held by the hand of a soldier. The other pen is a Conway Stewart Scribe made in 1941 or so, in green and brown patchy swirls veined with black, a pattern known as Camouflage. If you lost this pen in a field, it would be difficult to find. But the pen led me to discover that the Surrealist artist Roland Penrose had been one of the Chief Advisors to the Camouflage Development and Training Centre set up in 1940 by the War Office, and was the author of The Home Guard Manual of Camouflage. He was also, at that time, conducting an affair with Lee Miller, whom he married in 1947. He had painted his own car in a disruptive pattern, and on one occasion had experimented with a matt green camouflage cream, which he smeared on the naked body of his lover as she lay on the grass of a friend’s garden, covered with netting taken from the raspberry patch. Penrose was delighted with the results, declaring that if you could hide such eye-catching attractions as hers from the invading Hun, smaller and less seductive areas of skin would stand an even better chance of becoming invisible.

Penrose was not the only artist involved with camouflage; in fact, its principles had first been outlined in 1897 by the American painter Abbott H. Thayer, in an article called ‘The Law which Underlines Protective Coloration’. The spectator, he said, seems to see right through the space really occupied by an opaque animal. Nature, he believed, acts like an artist, and the study of these optical effects belongs to the realm of pictorial art and can only be interpreted by painters. For art and camouflage are two sides of the same coin: art makes something unreal recognisable, the other makes something real unrecognisable. Thayer also thought that the concept might have military applications, but these were not followed through until the First World War, when Lucien Victor Girand de Scévola, an artist serving in the French infantry, established the first Section de Camouflage. He was influenced in his approach by the Cubist work of Picasso, in which familiar things — bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, the paraphernalia of café life and conversation — were taken apart and put together again in a series of flat, intersecting planes, sometimes showing different aspects of the same thing simultaneously. I well remember at the beginning of the war, wrote Gertrude Stein, being with Picasso on the boulevard Raspail, when the first camouflaged truck passed by. It was night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it, and Picasso, amazed, looked at it, saw it, and then cried out, Yes, it is we who made it, that is Cubism. And a playful remark made by Picasso to Jean Cocteau, that the army would better dazzle the enemy if they were dressed in harlequin costumes, might have led indirectly to the concept known as ‘dazzle painting’.

Developed by the marine painter Lieutenant Commander Norman Wilkinson in 1917, dazzle painting, rather than trying to blend in with the sea and sky, which are visually inconstant, used a system of stripes, blocks, zigzags and disruptive lines to confuse enemy observers. The intention was not to hide the object, but to make it unfamiliar. For much of our ability to identify what we see is based on our experience of seeing similar things in the past. Vision depends on memory. In our memory is stored a vast thesaurus of images, to which we constantly refer when looking at the world, so that we can identify a thing quickly without spending time working out what it is. And the art of illusion depends on this visual process: Roland Penrose, for instance, had collaborated with the stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, who was practised in making his audience see things that were not there, and not to see things that were there. W.J. Crawford, examining the phenomena produced by the Goligher Circle, jumped to the wrong conclusions because he already knew what he wanted to see; he was led astray by his expectations, and possibly his desire, for his attraction to Kathleen Goligher is evident in his writings. He was beguiled by love and memory, just as we retain the image of the loved one long after she has gone from our sight. And Nina, I never lost sight of you through all these years of your absence from me, much as I tried to. Oh, after three or four years I thought I had forgotten you, but then you would appear to me in dreams, unbidden, and I would consent to the reality of your presence, even when I knew I was dreaming.

We can easily suspend our disbelief in dreams because they are so wonderful. When I was younger I would fly in my dreams, soaring and swooping like an angel above the city, seeing it spread below me like a map, and when sometimes it occurred to me that it was impossible, that I must be dreaming, I used that lucidity to revel in the experience, and I would fly with even more spectacular agility.

So it was when I dreamed of you. Most of the dreams took place in cities that resembled Belfast, or cities I had visited with you, like New York, Paris, Dublin and Berlin, or cities I had visited alone, like Lisbon, Rome, and Prague, or cities I had never visited, like Tokyo and Madrid. I would be walking along a crushed cinder path by a dark canal in the shadow of a semi-derelict factory when I would catch a glimpse of the heel of your red shoe vanishing under the arch of a bridge, and I would hurry to catch up with you, half-walking, half-running, till I came to a flight of stone steps, I could hear the click of your heels as you ascended and the steps became an alleyway between high blank walls that led to a street of closed shops, which led in turn to a row of mean houses with incurious pale children loitering by the doorways, who barely took you under their notice as you passed by, for I can see you clearer now as the gap between us closes, you are wearing an apple green 1920s jacket with a pink floral print pleated dress that sways a little against the sway of your hips as you turn off into an entry that takes you into a close, and I follow you through a doorway into a gloomy room, it looks like a workshop, for it smells of oil and metal and a massive lathe gleams in the corner, and now you pause at the foot of the stairs, and turn towards me, and I see your face for the first time, and you smile wordlessly, beckoning with your eyes as you lead me up the stairs to a bare attic with a mattress on the floor, where you take off the jacket and the dress and the 1920s flesh-tinted bra and pants and garter-belt and stockings, we both lie down, and we are about to embrace each other when I wake.

It now occurs to me that the attic resembles the attic where the Golighers held their séances. Here, W.J. Crawford had conducted experiments that proved to his satisfaction that Kathleen Goligher could extrude psychic matter, or ‘plasm’ from her body — from the join of the legs, as Crawford delicately put it — to form semi-flexible rods and cantilevers which could lift a small table, manipulate hand-bells and trumpets, and create various sound effects which gave coded answers to questions asked of the unseen ‘operators’ of the structures. The operators, according to Crawford, were independent spirits who, having passed through the portal of physical death, wished to communicate to us that death was not the end of being, but the beginning of a new life. The world in which they lived was contiguous to ours, and very like it in many respects, for it had mountains, lakes and rivers, as real to them as ours were to us, so much so that many of the operators referred to our world as the shadow world, and theirs as the real one. The psychic structures were a link between the two worlds. Crawford, after numerous experiments, succeeded in obtaining impressions caused by these structures in a dish of clay. He discovered that when Kathleen Goligher wore stockings, the impressions were lined with stocking marks.

The common-sense explanation for this phenomenon, that the marks had indeed been made by a stockinged foot under cover of the darkness of the séance room, was contemptuously dismissed by Crawford. He had taken every conceivable precaution against any such imposture. The medium’s hands were held firmly by other members of the Circle, while Crawford tied her legs to her chair with a variety of ligatures, including whipcord and black silk bands. He theorised that the psychic structures were covered by a film of matter which oozed round about the interstices of the stocking fabric. Being of a glutinous, fibrous nature, it assumed almost the exact form of the stocking fabric. It was then pulled off the stocking by the operators, built around the end of the psychic structure, which, when placed in the dish of clay, naturally left an imprint similar to a stocking. But the thing that left the mark was not a foot in a stocking, said Crawford.

Convinced that he was on the brink of something extraordinary, nothing less than a scientific proof of immortality, Crawford went over his findings again and again. He began to experiment with different types of stockings, and more elaborate restraints. He purchased brown stockings, blue stockings, white stockings, and grey stockings for the medium, made out of different fabrics — wool, cotton, silk. Sometimes he had her wear stockings of a different design on each leg. He encased her legs in high boots. He made a special box with a bar which was locked over her feet; a piece of wood was then tightly fitted around the tops of her ankle and screwed into the top of the box. Nevertheless the plasm was able to force its way up the foot and leg of the medium, between her stocking and the tightly laced long-legged boot.

When he asked the operators to levitate the table they did so with ease. He filled a tin dish with a very watery white clay, and asked them to dip the end of a structure in the clay and leave marks on the floor. Soon afterwards, he heard them do just that. The dipping sounded exactly like a cat lapping up milk. Crawford had a fine ear for acoustic textures. Sometimes ‘peculiar fussling noises’ were heard in the region of the feet just prior to phenomena. He noticed that when the medium wore thin silk stockings the noises were accentuated. They occurred in spasms, and were caused, thought Crawford, by the friction of the psychic particles on the stocking fabric. Many people interested in psychic matters, said Crawford, assumed the evolution of the plasma to be a quiet and tranquil affair; but of course nothing could be wider of the mark. Considerable labour attended the production of the phenomena, and the medium was sometimes heard to groan as if undergoing birth-pangs. Crawling under the table in the dark, he had felt her feet at such moments, and had noted a whirlpool of internal muscular movement round foot and ankle and the lower part of the calf. He also felt a flow of material particles from the medium’s ankles and legs, cold and disagreeable to the touch. Further, when he placed his hands on the outside of her haunches, he could feel little round packets of psychic stuff filling in on the backs of the thighs; and when he felt her breasts during the occurrence of psychic action, they became very hard and full.

Crawford’s posthumous publication, The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle, is comprehensively illustrated. There are many photographs of stockings, the fabric of some showing signs of being ruffled and distended, as though severely mauled by the transit of the psychic matter through the extremely narrow passageway between boot and stocking, thought Crawford. It was well known that photography would show up faint processes invisible to the naked eye, and enable minute comparisons to be made, he said. Photographs of imprints made by real stockings in clay were compared to those made by psychic simulacra of stockings, and found to be remarkably similar. Enlarged, these impressions took on curiously abstract forms, as the white clay, like the surface of a moon, was dented, hollowed, dimpled, ribbed, and pitted by the fabric. Strangest of all is the series of twenty-six photographs which conclude the book. These purport to show the psychic structures extruded from the body of Kathleen Goligher. To a disinterested observer, however, the structures look like strips of white fabric — linen, perhaps, for the Golighers worked in the Belfast linen mills. Crawford has labelled the photographs, from A to Z, and provided explanatory captions, for example, ‘A plasmic column under the table, used when very powerful levitations are required’. For all the world it looks as if someone has tied a bandage to Kathleen Goligher’s ankle, and pinned the other end to the underside of the table. The other photographs, ‘Plasma collected near the feet of the medium forms into a lump and advances along the floor’, ‘Plasma inside the medium’s shoe’, and so on, are no more convincing. If anything, they are proof that Crawford was deceived by a cheap conjuring trick, the whole business quite literally fabricated.

And there is something deeply disconcerting about the photographs. As I tried in vain to see how they might be amenable to Crawford’s interpretations, it struck me that their atmosphere of pathological derangement lies in how they contravene the rules of portraiture. They show a female figure seated in a Windsor chair against a black backdrop, the upper half of her body draped with a black cloth. They are, presumably, photographs of Kathleen Goligher. But all except one have been taken in such a way as to exclude the sitter’s head. And that one has been cropped. A neat square has been cut out of the top left-hand corner, where Kathleen Goligher’s face should be, and I wondered if this was a form of vengeance. Elsewhere — in Crawford’s first book, The Reality of Psychic Phenomena — there are photographs which do show Kathleen’s Goligher’s face, notably the studio portrait used for the frontispiece. She is an attractive young girl of about seventeen. Her long hair, parted on the right, is tied at the back with a ribbon and draped in three ringlets to the left of the open neck of her sailor blouse. With her long nose, her full lips and the rather mysterious myopic gaze behind the rimless glasses, she bears more than a passing resemblance to the young W.B. Yeats, and I now recall that your phrase, In dreams begin responsibilities, is a quotation from Yeats. And I wonder how much that phrase says about the peculiar relationship between Crawford and Kathleen Goligher, five whole years during which she permitted herself, with the collusion of her family, to be examined forensically by him, or, to put it bluntly, to be groped by him. What on earth was going on?

The relationships of others are often unfathomable to us, Nina. I wonder if Crawford did love Kathleen Goligher, whether consciously or not, and if she somehow returned his love by keeping up the charade for those long years, wanting his dream to be a reality for him. Perhaps, attracted by Crawford’s picture of her as a gifted medium, she came to believe that she had indeed extraordinary powers, or was persuaded to think so by the other members of the Circle. If a reputable scientist, far above her in social status — for the Golighers were poorly paid textile workers — could believe in her, why could she not believe in herself? Or perhaps the whole thing was done for money, though there is no mention of money ever changing hands. And what happened at the end, what caused Crawford to kill himself? Who was responsible, in what dream did that responsibility begin? Did Kathleen Goligher, exhausted by the pretence, reveal her pretence to him, whether consciously or not? Did she tell him the truth out of love, or pity, or contempt? We shall never know.

I can still see the attic room of my dream that resembles the Goligher séance room, the bare boards with nail-heads glinting in them, and the faded blue striped wallpaper with faded pink roses on it, as photographed by Crawford, except Crawford’s photographs are black and white, and in any case I had this dream several times before I ever set eyes on Crawford’s books. I think the wallpaper was a throwback to that of my childhood bedroom. The chronology of such dreams is always confusing, for they repeat themselves with terrible familiarity, and the same motifs recur again and again as the long past resembles the immediate past. At other times, I would meet you in Warsaw. I would be walking in the Old Town, remembering how it had been razed by the Germans in the war, and was now a copy of the Old Town, painstakingly reconstructed from the rubble, from old photographs, architectural plans, and memories. I am in one of those streets that specialise in amber jewellery, and you are peering into a shop window, when you turn, and we see each other face to face. It’s been a long time, Nina, I would say, and you would say, No matter, Angel, the past is past, we’re living in this moment, now, come here and look, how beautiful these things are. And you would take my arm and, like children at a sweetshop window, we would feast our eyes on necklaces and earrings and pendants, and we would remark on the fantastic centrepiece, a great chunk of raw amber that had a millions-of-years-old butterfly imprisoned in its glowing candy-coloured depths. And we would be so engaged when suddenly there would be an almighty explosion, a shop at the end of the street would collapse under a column of smoke, and then the next shop would explode, and the next, and I would realise how implicated Belfast was with Warsaw, the whole row collapsing like dominoes, the series of explosions getting nearer, nearer, until, as we stood rooted to the ground, we were swept into oblivion, and I woke.

I look again at your postcard captioned, Sunlit interior of Grand Central Terminal, c. 1940, and your message, In dreams begin responsibilities. When it arrived the day before yesterday it struck me that it was similar in style to your first postcard, that of the Empire State Building being struck by lightning. When I compared them, I now saw that both indeed had come from the same source. Both had the heading, New York Flashbacks, and both were copyright of the Underwood Photo Archives Ltd, San Francisco. Moreover, I now realised that they must have come from a booklet of postcards, for, when I looked at them more carefully, I could see that both had a serrated edge where they had parted company with their spine, leaving behind residual little blips of paper hardly perceptible to a recipient more concerned with the message than with such forensic details: both were leaves from the same book. And I pictured you flicking through the series, thinking of me, appropriating these two from a number unknown to me, but not entirely unimaginable, for I vaguely recalled seeing booklets like this in metropolitan bookshops, of some two dozen or thirty postcards, and black-and-white photographs titled The Statue of Liberty, Times Square, and Ice-skating in Central Park flashed through my mind.

I wondered if you had chosen both at the same time, premeditatedly, having already decided that your one-sided correspondence with me would be a long one, that each card would be a significant link in a chain, that the whole sequence was pre-planned and orchestrated, or if the second New York postcard had only occurred to you at some later stage, or if, indeed, it had been chosen on impulse that very day, the day before the day before yesterday, when you sat down to write my name and address, and the message, In dreams begin responsibilities.

No, hardly an impulse, I then thought, for the card bore an Irish stamp, and it seemed unlikely that you would have taken the whole booklet with you from London, but then maybe again you did, intending perhaps to select one of the images contained in it, not necessarily this one, for a purpose not entirely decided when you embarked for Ireland. For all I knew, you had a whole stack of cards to choose from. Whatever the case, the photograph is a beautiful and mysterious one, the interior of the station like a vast antechamber to another realm. Shafts of light striated by the glazing bars of the great half-moon windows stream down onto the concourse, where little knots of people have gathered accidentally or purposefully caught between arrival and departure, and one figure stands bathed in a pool of light as if waiting to be beamed up into another dimension. And I know that you would have intended this image as a reference to a dream I once had when I was going with you.

I told you about it the next morning. I was about to board a train bound for New York from Great Victoria Street station in Belfast — a journey entirely feasible in dreams — when you came running up to me and I said, Nina, what a lovely surprise, I thought you were in London. I was, you said, but I was speaking to your father on the phone, and he told me that you had just left for New York, so I thought I’d join you, we’d a lovely time when we were there before. So we boarded the train and went straight to the dining car, where we had a lovely candlelit dinner, caviar and oysters and lobster and champagne, and then we met a nice American couple, we played whist with them for a while before retiring to berth in the sleeping car for the night. We climbed into bed and let ourselves be rocked a while by the rhythm of the train, imagining its plume of smoke trailed like a line of foam as it sped across the dark Atlantic, and then I realised I was dreaming, and said, Nina, this is a dream. And you said, Yes, I know, but let’s stay in it for a while, it’s such a nice dream, and then I woke to find you lying beside me in my bed in Ophir Gardens. This is just as good as the dream, you said, and I said, Yes, but we’ll have to be very quiet, my father’s sleeping next door. Then the door opened, my father walked in, and I woke.

What a convoluted dream, you said, and how very Catholic. Well, it’s got a lot of perspectives in it, I said, maybe that’s what Catholic means, it reminds me of a Gerard Dillon painting, it’s called Self Contained Flat, he painted it in London in the early Fifties, I think he got the idea from one of those medieval paintings in the National Gallery, you know, where they show the same saint doing different things in the same panel, as if the different bits of a narrative all happen in the same space, in the same time, a kind of God’s-eye view. Well, Dillon shows his little bedsit in London, crammed with different perspectives, there’s a bit of Cubism in it too, here’s Dillon walking in the door, and here’s the same door opening on to a little garden where Dillon’s digging potatoes, here’s the poky kitchen with the gas stove and a little table with a blue milk jug, and a daffodil in a water-glass, and so forth, and the cat perched on the windowsill above the door, and Dillon in the foreground at a table with a blow-torch and a bottle of meths and pair of pliers and a screwdriver, he liked to show himself as a worker artist, though he’s wearing a very raffish blue check shirt and a nice waistcoat, and there’s a naked figure lying prone on the bed in the top right corner, you know the Gauguin painting, Spirit of the Dead Watching? it’s a reference to that, the woman lying on the bed with her head turned to one side, looking at us with her eyes closed, as if Dillon’s whole painting was maybe dreamed by her. It’s a very happy painting, I said, someone who’s pleased with himself and his little self-contained world, but it’s got that touch of melancholy in it.

There was more than a touch of melancholy in some of my other dreams about you, Nina. Sometimes I would find myself wandering a Belfast with bits of London embedded in it, such as Leadenhall and Threadneedle Street, an area of monumental banks and churches. You would step out from behind a column of a gloomy portico, looking as beautiful as ever, if a little older than when we were going together, you’re wearing a navy wool suit with a knee-length skirt, and an electric blue Art Deco scarf tied round your throat, and little sapphire stud earrings, and dark blue stockings and black ankle boots with a Cuban heel, and I would say, Nina, you’ve come back, I knew you would come back, and a panic-stricken look would come across your face, and you would say, No, no, Angel, I don’t know what I’m doing here, in these clothes, you must be dreaming, you must have summoned me to appear in your dream, you must stop it, Angel, I can’t be here.

And then I knew I was dreaming, but I wanted the dream to continue, so overpowered was I by your beauty, so overwhelmed by your palpable presence, for I reached out and touched your cheek, I could feel the warmth of your flesh, and I said, No, Nina, please, stay with me in the dream for a while. What can it matter to you, if it’s only a dream? We can be happy for while in the dream, it can be just as it was in the old days, and then you can go back to your own life, I won’t bother you again, just give me this one night, I said. And tears would well in your eyes, and you would shake your head dumbly, and I would go on, Please, Nina, just one night, I’ll take you to this lovely restaurant I’ve just found, for just then I remembered the restaurant from another dream of Belfast-London, where there were better restaurants than in the real Belfast, and I could picture it in my mind’s eye, it was in one of those alleyways off Corporation Square, Bologna, it was called. You’d really like it, Nina, it’s a real find, just very good simple Italian food, they do this tricolore salad with mozzarella and tomatoes and basil and olive oil, just that, with a grind of black pepper and a pinch of salt, and the tomatoes burst with flavour against the milky mozzarella, little pillows of mozzarella, perfumed with basil, and then the grassy peppery tang of the oil, and then there’s the lamb chops, they’ve been marinaded in olive oil and lemon juice and rosemary, all they do is char them on both sides on an iron griddle, they’re oozing with pink juices inside, or maybe you could have the roast pork, shoulder of pork that they do on a spit over a fire of juniper branches, and then their divine zabaglione, some espresso and a grappa, I said, the grappa’s really special, and then we could go to the 77 Club, they’ve got this brilliant singer, she does Billie Holiday numbers, well, yes, I know what you’re going to say, no one can do Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday, but this woman, she’s something special, she does it with respect, no false histrionics, and she gives the songs her own edge, she puts her own experience into them, as well as what she understands of Billie’s experience, it’ll be just like you told me, Nina, how you imagined it, I can see her with that white gardenia in her hair, you said, isn’t it strange how the song makes you see the singer, she’s standing in a spotlight in a bar in New York, you said, and it’s dark but there’s those little tea-lights in faceted glass holders on the tables and you can see hands holding cigarettes and cocktail glasses, a face or two maybe, the smoke curling up and drifting into the spotlight, and we’ll be there, Nina, it’ll be like that, Nina, I said.

And you shook your head sadly, and said, No, Gabriel, it won’t be like that, I’ve changed since then. Is that what I said to you? I can’t remember, it’s such a long time ago, I’ve forgotten so much, you said. Please, Nina, I said, you can’t have changed that much, just be what you were to me then, just a little, just for this one night. And you said, Perhaps I never was that person, Gabriel, perhaps even then you made me up, perhaps you were in love with a dream of me, and not the real me. And then I would remember how you had said that to me in real life. Goodbye, Gabriel, you said, and you stepped back into the shadows, and I would wake with my eyes full of tears.

Last night, inspired by your postcard, I dreamed of you again. The happy dream this time, where we take the Belfast train for New York. Just as you settled in your seat you sprayed a little perfume on your wrists. What’s that? I said. Chamade, you said, by Jean Paul Guerlain, 1969. I always liked the word, it’s after Françoise Sagan’s novel, La Chamade, a double-edged word. Son coeur battait la chamade, her heart was beating wildly. But la chamade is also a drumbeat signalling retreat. And so the dream proceeded as it had before, except when I found you in my bed in Ophir Gardens, my father did not come in, for he has been dead these seven years. And you were about to surrender to me when I really did wake. You were not there, but it seemed to me your perfume lingered on the pillow for a good half-hour: Spanish lilac, hyacinth and tuberose, calmed by murmurs of amber, jasmine, lily of the valley. Then a lingering, coffiny base of cedarwood.