The Pen Friend

N

Again I find I’m playing catch-up with myself, for I had intended to dwell a little on the fact that your last card, that of Grand Central Terminal, had also been posted in Dublin, and bore a 60c Hawthorn stamp. Again, the face value of the stamp seemed high. It, too, must have been deliberately chosen. In Irish folklore, the hawthorn is the fairy tree, especially a lone hawthorn, for under it you may find a portal to the fairy world which lies contiguous to ours. And I am reminded of your description of your mother’s perfume, Après l’Ondée, hawthorn and violets doused in rain, how perfume can so magically evoke the presence of someone no longer in this world. As for your latest postcard, it’s been posted in Drogheda, with a 65c Bluebell stamp, and I had written a good few sentences in response to that when my pen malfunctioned.

I had only myself to blame. I had recently acquired a Wasp Clipper made in the US in the thirties by Sheaffer, quite a beautiful pen in a layered olive green and silver-grey web pattern shot through with sparkling gold threads that create an illusion of extraordinary depth. But the nib had lost most of its iridium, and was an unsatisfactory, scratchy writer. And I wanted this lovely pen to be a working pen, so I thought I would take the good nib from a Parker pen that had lost its cap, and substitute it for the poor Clipper nib. As it turned out, when I disassembled the two pens and tried out the marriage, it wouldn’t work: the Parker nib was just that much bigger than the Clipper, and I couldn’t get both nib and feed to fit the section. So I rummaged around in my spares box and eventually found an old Conway Stewart feed that was a little narrower than the Parker feed, and tried that, and lo! the combination worked perfectly. I filled up the Wasp Clipper Parker Conway Stewart, and began to write. The line was nice and smooth, if a trifle wet, and I was writing quite pleasurably with my Frankenstein’s monster of a pen when it dried up on me. I shook it, and tried it again; nothing happened, so I shook it little more violently, whereupon it spat out a series of blots across my words.

That marriage wasn’t quite right either: the feed was just that little bit too narrow. I crumpled the ruined page into a ball and binned it, and took up a 1940s Wyvern Perfect Pen in Rose Pearl and Black instead, which I knew to be more reliable. The whole experience made me reflect on my gradual and somewhat reluctant discovery that many vintage pens, considered purely as writing instruments, are far from perfect. Oh, they look beautiful, but they leak, they blot, they flood, they skip, they scratch, or the filler mechanisms don’t work — worst of all is the plunger filler invented by Sweetser, the roller-skating transvestite, which gives all sorts of trouble because it depends on a very precise vacuum seal, and even if you replace a worn seal, you can never trust them to fill satisfactorily again. Whereas a cheap modern cartridge pen by Parker or Sheaffer will last you for years, and write unhesitatingly with a consistent line every time you pick it up.

When I was last in London I bought a Japanese Muji cartridge pen in their Tottenham Court Road shop — it cost just ten pounds — for purposes of comparison with my vintage collection. Any time I’m in London I usually end up buying something there, and I’ve just looked up Muji on the net to remind myself of their products. At the heart of Muji design, says their website, is the Japanese concept of kanketsu, the concept of simplicity … Muji’s simple, anonymous, unostentatious products subtly blend in with their background and bring a quiet sense of calm into strenuous everyday lives. My life is not that strenuous, but I especially like Muji’s stationery range — steel rulers, mini tape-measures, acrylic hole punches, brightly coloured paper clips and bulldog clips, aluminium business-card holders, credit-card cases, and various other little receptacles and boxes which are good to look at and feel good in the hand. I like their inexpensive notebooks, which take fountain pen ink very well despite their low price, and I like their clothes: I’m wearing a white linen Muji shirt today, very simple classic design, very cool. And I’ve just picked up the Muji pen, I’m writing with it right now. It really is very well designed, a simple brushed aluminium tube with a nice circumferential groove in the end of the barrel into which you can securely post the cap, cap and barrel appearing seamlessly joined, as they do when the pen is closed. Granted, the stainless steel nib has a little fancy scrollwork on it, possibly imitating a Mont Blanc nib, but the Muji bears no other markings beyond the words ‘iridium point’.

I like the fact that it bears no name, that it is confident enough to let the design speak for itself, but it’s ever so slightly boring. The nib has been made to write like a ballpoint to suit modern hands, with an unvaryingly inflexible line: admirable in its own way, efficient, but characterless. And I love the quirks and idiosyncrasies of my vintage pens, none of which write the same, even when made by the same maker, with the same nib. I love their differences, their implications of alternative ways of writing.

So I return the Muji to its drawer and look at my pen collection again. There are spaces vacated by three pens I sent away for the kinds of repair I couldn’t manage with my novice skills, one of them a black Celluloid Mabie Todd Blackbird Topfiller with a translucent amber upper barrel which enables you to check the ink level. It was a lovely writer when it worked, but then it developed a tendency to flood, and leak on my finger and thumb, due to a faulty seal between section and barrel. It’s been gone for over a month; pen repair shops often have this kind of waiting list. But its absence reminds me that I was wakened again this morning by the song of my neighbourhood blackbird; and then I remembered the dream I’d been wakened from, which concerned my father, and which causes me to now write with a Silver Grey and Black Marble Blackbird.

I was walking down a white road that led to a blue sea. I could smell turf-smoke, and knew I was in Donegal. It had just rained. Water gurgled in the ditch, and tinkled down the limestone ruts of the road, its music echoing the song of an unseen blackbird. Then I saw my father, standing by the yellow bungalow, and I thought, he must have retired to live here, he was always very fond of The Yellow Bungalow. But then I saw the broken windows, and the weeds sprouting from the thatch. My father was holding a packet of letters in his left hand, and writing something on them. Return to sender, I thought. He began to walk away from me down the limestone road between the grey stone walls past the ruined houses and the rusted farm machinery lying in the fields, walking with that slightly swaggering postman’s gait, he stopped, looked over his shoulder at me, and smiled, and entered the graveyard through the creaking gate, and I ran to follow him, and I’d almost caught up with him when he lay down on a flat gravestone, took off his peaked cap and laid it on this chest, and crossed his arms, and, as I watched, his body in the blue-black uniform began to shimmer, merging with the gravestone, and by the time I reached him he was gone, and I could not even make out the name on the stone, for it was covered with moss and lichen. Then I heard the blackbird singing again, and I woke to hear the real blackbird singing.

You knew my father, Nina, you remember that swaggering walk of his. And you remember how he used to run a Saturday afternoon Esperanto class in an upstairs room of The Compass Bar in Ireland’s Entry, near the Law Courts. He’d tried to persuade you to sign up for the course, you know he’d taken quite a shine to you. And one day in the XL Café you seemed to go along with it for a while, but then, very diplomatically it seemed to me, you wriggled out of it. When he had gone, I said I thought you’d handled the situation very well. Can you see me as an Esperantista? you said. Why not? I said. Well, I just don’t think it’s the kind of movement that attracts women, for one thing, seems more like an old boys’ club to me, you said. And I conceded that I didn’t know many women who were involved in the movement, but I knew that some marriages had been made through Esperanto, and that there were several hundred Esperanto speakers in the world whose first language it was. What a bunch of oddballs they must be, you said. But don’t you think it admirable that two people should fall in love through an ideal, and that they’re prepared to follow that ideal though, by teaching it to their children? I said.

You laughed. Like you, Angel, the way you were brought up in Irish? Don’t you think you’re just a little bit of an oddball yourself? Not that I don’t love you for it. But you don’t seriously believe that these minority pacts are going to change the course of history, these people going around with green stars in their eyes. And speaking of stars, you’re a typical Libra, Angel, you’ll do anything for a quiet time, go with whatever the flow is, you weigh things up and make sure you’re always on the right side of the scales. And maybe it’s not only the stars made you that way, it’s the way you were brought up, between Irish and English. Maybe you don’t really believe in anything, because you know the world is different in Irish than it is in English, you can never decide on what the world really is, or what it should be, you said.

But you know that too, I said, your French is nearly as good as your English, you think in French sometimes. But it’s not native to me, you said, I chose to learn French. Whereas you had no choice, your parents made that choice for you. Then again, maybe it was in their stars, you said. But by the same token, Nina, maybe it was in your stars that you should learn French. Oh, don’t be silly, Angel, you know I really don’t believe in all that stuff, it’s only a metaphor, but if I did, I could say that the stars only give a general picture, it’s up to the individual to fill in the detail, the devil is in the detail, or God, for that matter, wasn’t it Flaubert who said, Le bon Dieu est dans le détail? Not that he ascribed his own writing to God, he meant that whatever one does, one should do it thoroughly, as best as one can, that’s why he spent days looking for le mot juste, you said.

Well, Nina, Flaubert said a lot of things, didn’t he say that of all lies, art is the least untrue? I could go along with that, I said. Yes, you said, but you think that what you see in art should be true for everybody. And Flaubert said, there is no truth, there is only perception, you said. Oh, for God’s sake, let’s stop this, Nina, we’re starting to sound like Mutt and Jeff, I said. More like Abbott and Costello, you said. Abercrombie and Fitch, I said. Marks and Spencer, you said. Jeeves and Wooster, you said. Gilbert and Sullivan, I said. Lennon and McCartney, you said. Chang and Eng, I said. Who? you said. You know, the Siamese Twins, I said, Yin and Yang. Oh, all right then, Thompson and Thompson, you said. Who? I said. You know, the twins in Tintin, you said. Tintin and Snowy, I said. Dorothy and Toto, you said. Tom and Jerry, I said. The Owl and the Pussycat, you said. Leda and the Swan, I said. Lady and the Tramp, you said. Bubble and Squeak, I said. I don’t see the connection, you said. Well, you can imagine a pair of dogs called Bubble and Squeak, can’t you? I said. Oh, all right then, if you’re going to allow that kind of thing, Fish and Chips, you said. Rhubarb and Custard, I said. Crosse and Blackwell, you said. Smith and Jones, I said. You gave me a querying look. As in Alias, I said. Bonnie and Clyde, you said. Barrow and Furness, I said. What do you mean, Barrow and Furness? you said. You know, the shipbuilding place, like the Clyde, I said. That’s a bit thin, you said, but all right, Samson and Delilah. Samson and Delilah? I said. Yes, Harland and Wolff’s, the two big cranes, they’re called Samson and Goliath, isn’t that right? All right then, Antony and Cleopatra, I said. Abelard and Héloïse, you said. Hero and Leander, I said. Scylla and Charybdis, you said. A rock and a hard place, I said. Gin and tonic, you said, on the rocks. Jekyll and Hyde, it’s a cocktail, I said. First I ever heard of it, you said, I think you’re making it up. But it would be a good name for a cocktail, I said. So would Punch and Judy, for that matter, you said. Or Tom and Jerry, I said. We already had that one, Angel, and besides, I’m tired of this game, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

You remember, Nina, we used toy around with pub names, too, though we tried to avoid those silly English names, like The Rat and Parrot, or The Slug and Lettuce, though the disease had crept into Belfast too, there was The Whip and Saddle bar in the Europa Hotel, the most bombed hotel in Europe, where all the foreign correspondents would hang out. No, we tried to make our names plausible, along the model of real Belfast bars like The Elephant, or The Fly, or The White Fort, or The Compass itself, for that matter, whose navigational connotations derived from its being built on the site of a former open dock that was filled in back in the 1870s. Joy’s Basin, they called the dock, it was built by one of the Joy family of Belfast. Joy’s Basin? you said, that would make a good name for a pub. Yes, I said, but maybe a bit in bad taste, the United Irishman Henry Joy came from the same family, they hanged him in Cornmarket in 1798, not too far away. About fifty paces from where the Abercorn Restaurant used to be, I said, remembering that there was still a dock called the Abercorn Basin. At any rate, we came up with The Meridian, and The Plimsoll Line, and The Foremast (there was already a Crow’s Nest), and The Tug, and The Clipper, and Long Haul, and would have considered The Starry Plough, but for its political implications. From there it was an easy step to The Green Star.

My father, in his introductory session, would have delivered to The Compass class a brief biography of Ludwig Zamenhof, mentioning the Irish origins of the green star that was the Esperantist emblem. And he would have outlined to them how Zamenhof arrived at the fundamental principle which was to guide his new language, how one day, when he was seventeen or eighteen, in about 1876 or so, he had been walking to school in Warsaw when suddenly he noticed a sign which read ŠVEJCARSKAYA, meaning place of the porter; in other words, a porter’s lodge; and then he saw another sign which read KONDITORSKAYA, place of sweets, in other words a sweetshop, or confectioner’s. And then, envisioning all the various places of trade and business in Warsaw, the hundreds of grocers and butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers and hairdressers and restaurants and public houses, he saw how by means of a suffix, — skaya, the many could be made one, that one word could be made into other words that need not be separately learned, and hence one did not require a multiplicity of words for the multiplicity of things in the world. A ray of light fell upon those huge, terrifying dictionaries, said Zamenhof, my father would say, and they began to dwindle rapidly before my eyes. So Zamenhof began constructing his language with a basic stock of root words to which a series of prefixes and suffixes could be attached to generate a wealth of different meanings. My father would add that Zamenhof’s Jewishness and his knowledge of Hebrew might also have led him to this illumination, for a logical economy of root consonants is common to both languages. And, my father would proceed, when you come to The Compass class, when we assemble in this upper room, I don’t care whether you are Jew or Catholic or Protestant or Mohammedan, for as Esperantists we are all brothers — and there were indeed no sisters, you were quite right, Nina, in your stylish dress you would have looked out of place among these drab-suited old men and young men who looked older than their age — and though we are few in number, my father would continue, we may, by the grace of the one God that made us all, and by our own efforts, spread the gospel of Esperanto throughout the world.

He would finish by giving an account of the first Esperanto Congress, held in Boulogne on Saturday 5th August 1905, when the new Esperanto flag, a green rectangle with the green star in a white quarter in the upper left-hand corner, flew together with the French tricolour from the flagstaffs and windows of the Municipal Theatre. It was the first time Zamenhof had spoken in public; he did not even know if his words would be understood by the seven hundred or so delegates who came from many different countries, each perhaps with their own notions of how the language should be pronounced. He began nervously, but his confidence grew as he saw his audience respond with nods of comprehension and appreciation. This present day is sacred, he said. Our meeting is humble; the outside world knows little about it and the words spoken here will not be telegraphed to all the towns and villages of the world; Heads of State and Cabinet Ministers are not meeting here to change the political map of the world; this hall is not resplendent with luxurious clothes and impressive decorations; no cannons are firing salutes outside the modest building in which we are assembled; but through the air of our hall mysterious sounds are travelling, very low sounds, not perceptible by the ear, but audible to every sensitive soul; the sound of something great that is now being born. Mysterious phantoms are floating in the air; the eye does not see them, but the soul sees them; they are the images of a time to come, a new era. The phantoms will fly into the world, will be made flesh, and assume power, and our sons and grandchildren will see them, will feel them, and take great joy in them.

Zamenhof spoke on, realising that his audience, so willing to understand, was hanging on his every word; and when he ended by reciting a prayer he had composed for the occasion, a prayer not directed to the God of any national or sectarian religion, but to some mysterious Higher Power, a thunderstorm of acclamation broke out in the hall, and complete strangers embraced, and shed tears of joy. And my father would then conclude his introduction to Esperanto by telling how Ludwig Zamenhof, heartbroken by the events of the First World War, died on 14th April 1917. It was my father’s first birthday, and Zamenhof was fifty-seven, the age, Nina, that I am now.

It’s taken me some time to respond directly to your latest card, but I seem to have spent years in my mind since it arrived just yesterday. I note the stamp, the 65c Bluebell, a flower also known as wild hyacinth, behind which lies one of those Ancient Greek stories concerning the jealous cruelties of the gods, which so much resemble our own. It concerns the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, who was loved by both Apollo, the Sun-God, and Zephyrus, the God of the West Wind. But Hyacinthus preferred Apollo, and Zephyrus looked for revenge. So one day, when Apollo and Hyancinthus were throwing the discus, Zephyrus blew it out of its proper course, striking Apollo’s lover on the head and killing him instantly. Apollo, stricken with grief, raised from his blood a purple flower, on which the letters, Ai, Ai, were traced, so that his cry of woe might live forever on the earth. But since the bluebell that is native to these islands bears no such message, it was called Hyancinthus nonscriptus, not written on.

And your postcard is barely written on, just my name and address, and the initial of your name, that I last saw twenty years ago, the slanted ascender of your N beginning on a curlicue and rising to an apex with the downward sweep of the diagonal, then rising again to end as it began in a matching curlicue. It is an elegant N that makes me think of the N we saw emblazoned on the bridges, monuments and state buildings of Paris, N that stands for Napoleon, whose remains are enclosed, like the last of a series of Russian dolls, within six coffins locked within a massive tomb of porphyry. You remember, Nina, how we thought N might more happily stand for Jules Verne’s Nemo, the captain of the Nautilus, Nemo meaning Nobody, whose underwater realm knew no boundaries of nation, or language for that matter, for Nemo and his crew communicated among themselves in a kind of Esperanto.

Language takes many forms, as witnessed by your postcard, THE LANGUAGE OF STAMPS, a vintage curiosity, perhaps some eighty or ninety years old, which purports to show how the position of a stamp on an envelope or card can bear a coded message: upside down in the bottom left, DO WRITE SOON; right way up in the top left, DO YOU LOVE ME; slanted in the same corner, I SEND YOU A KISS; right-hand side of the surname, FORGET ME NOT; and so on. You’ve placed your Irish Bluebell in the top right-hand corner, which could mean either HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME, or nothing at all, since this nowadays is the conventional position for stamps, and we are not used to seeing any other. More meaningful to me is the fact that you were in Drogheda when you posted it the day before yesterday, some thirty miles nearer to me than you were. I know that you would have been thinking of my father, for you could not have forgotten my telling you that, when I was ten, he had taken me on a pilgrimage to Drogheda to see the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett. The Blessed Oliver Plunkett, my father had often told me, was the Archbishop of Armagh at a time of relentless persecution of Catholics. He had set up a college in Drogheda in 1670, which was razed to the ground a year later. In 1679 he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of fomenting rebellion; and in 1681 he was executed at Tyburn in London by hanging, disembowelling, quartering and beheading, the head and forearms being salvaged soon afterwards, hidden in two tin boxes, and thence transported to Ireland, while the rest of the body remained in England.

It was December, the anniversary of Plunkett’s beatification, and bitterly cold. It was early afternoon when we arrived, and already it was getting dark. It was a long way from the railway station; as we walked the grey streets I knew that we were in a foreign town. The clothes in the shop windows looked different, and the butchers displayed unfamiliar cuts of meat. A fine rain was beginning to fall when we got to the church, which was strangely empty. There was an odour of wax and decaying incense. My father and I were the only ones who knelt by the shrine in a side-chapel, where the head of the Blessed Oliver was displayed, blackened and unrecognisable as having belonged to a human being, seeming to float in the gloom that was lit only by a few guttering candles; and for weeks afterward the head occupied my dreams, hanging bodilessly in a dark space that was at once remote and claustrophobic, like that inside a confessional box.

You’d asked me about Confession, you were intrigued by the concept. You have to make what’s known as an examination of conscience, where you review the past week, and see what sins you might have committed, we used to go to weekly Confession back then, I said. What sort of sins? you said. Well, that I was disobedient to my parents, or that I stole something, or, when I was old enough to have them, that I had impure thoughts, thoughts about girls that is. And how old were you then? you said. Oh, you’d be surprised, Nina, you can have impure thoughts when you’re ten or eleven, maybe younger. And did you steal, Angel? Well, not much, I said, maybe I shoplifted a few sweets, that kind of thing, or I’d take a few coppers from my father’s pockets when he lay sleeping on the sofa after doing a night shift. What they call venial sins, that you don’t get sent to hell for, you only have to do time in purgatory, I said. But what if you didn’t commit any sins, what then? Oh, sometimes you made them up, I said, because if you said you hadn’t committed any sins since your last Confession, the priest would be reluctant to believe you, and he would say, Are you sure, my son? For instance, you wouldn’t have picked a fight with your brother or sister, or you wouldn’t have been tempted to steal an orange or an apple from a greengrocer’s display, when no one was looking, or maybe you’d be reading one of your mother’s magazines, and you’d see a picture of a woman, and you’d have impure thoughts about that woman, the priest would say, and you’d think about it? And you would say, Maybe I did, Father, because it was entirely possible that you would do such a thing, or think such a thing, and the priest would give a little sigh of satisfaction, and say, Ah, I thought so, my son, we’re none of us perfect, and then he’d absolve you from this imagined sin, I said. But that’s bizarre, Angel, you said, it’s like something out of Kafka. Oh, don’t knock it, Nina, I said, it was a good exercise in contemplation, good exercise for the memory, trying to remember what you might or might not have done in the course of that week, reliving those dubious encounters with oranges and apples and women’s magazines. And it did teach you to examine your conscience, to realise that everything you do, every decision you make, every thought, or every thought you imagined you’d had, or might be tempted to have in the future, is important, that it is judged by some absolute standard of morality. That anyone can be guilty of something, if one looks hard enough at oneself. It taught you to know yourself, I said.

I say this now, Nina, knowing how I judged you, you whom I once thought wholly guilty, and yet I still don’t know who you are, Nina, and that is why I still love you. I know I might have pictured you wrongly in the past, and you must forgive me for trying to picture what you might have become, imagining what experiences have lined your face, and where, whether the creases in the forehead, the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes and mouth, what weight you might have put on, and how it might suit you. I need to hold on to some picture of you, even as I know I might be wrong. And when sometimes, leafing through a history of costume or a vintage fashion magazine, I picture you in this outfit or that, dressing you like a doll in eighteenth-century petticoats and flounces, or in an elaborate Japanese kimono, or a 1920s coat and dress ensemble of Art Deco printed silk, you must forgive me for that too, as you must forgive me for sometimes picturing you naked, for you must have known in advance that such thoughts would occur to me, and you must have allowed for that, when you entered into correspondence with me again, with your full knowledge and complete consent, just three months ago, though it seems a lifetime. I think we should spend some time away from each other, you said, the second-last time we met face to face. It was June 1984. We’d just come back from a weekend in London where we’d quarrelled endlessly, you remember, it began when we went to the National Gallery, I expressly wanted to look again at Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, a painting I’d always loved. The narrative that lies behind the picture, as I recounted it to you, is Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Ovid begins by telling the outcome of the story first, as if assuming it to be already familiar to his audience — this is the story of Actaeon, he says, upon whose brow strange horns appeared, and whose dogs greedily lapped their master’s blood. And if you look for the truth of the matter, you will find it in the fault of fortune, and not in any crime of his, says Ovid. Anyway, Actaeon and his comrades have been hunting since dawn. It’s high noon, and their nets are dripping with their quarry’s blood, says Ovid, so they call it a day.

Then he cuts to another scene, to a beautiful grotto with a stream, and a waterfall, where Diana, the goddess of the woods, is wont to bathe after hunting. On this particular day she’s just come back from the chase, and she lets herself be divested by her nymphs of her robe, her spear, her quiver, and her unstrung bow. And while the nymphs are pouring water over her naked body from big Grecian urns, Actaeon has lost his way, wandering through the unfamiliar woods with unsure footsteps, as Ovid has it. And he enters the grotto, covered in spray from the waterfall, whereupon the nymphs begin to beat their breasts and scream at the sight of him, and they crowd around Diana, trying to hide her body with their own, but Diana stands head and shoulders above them, and her cheeks are as red as the rosy dawn as she stands in full view without her robes. And not having her bow and arrow to hand, she dips her hand into the stream, and throws water into Actaeon’s face, and says to him, Now you can tell everybody that you saw Diana naked — if you can tell.

And, though he doesn’t know it yet, horns begin to sprout on Actaeon’s head, his arms become legs, and his hands feet, his clothes and his skin turn into a spotted hide. Then she puts fear into his heart, and he begins to run, wondering why he has become so swift of foot. And then he sees himself reflected in a pool, he sees the stag’s head, and the horns, and he tries to speak, but all that comes out is a groan. What can he do now? For though he’s got the body of a stag, he’s still got the mind of a man, and he’s thinking, I can’t very well go back to my palace now, I’d be too ashamed, but then again, I’d be very afraid if I stayed out here in the woods. So he’s standing there dithering when his sees his dogs running towards him — Ovid’s got these great names for the dogs, Nina, I said, like Hunter, Fury, Barker, Growler, Gazelle, Catcher, Gnasher, Spot, Runner, Soot, Whirlwind, Wolf, and so on — and he starts to run, the whole pack chasing him, and he wants to cry out, I’m Actaeon, I’m your master! but no words will come, and then the lead dog sinks his teeth into his shoulder, and the rest of the pack pours onto him, tearing at him till his whole body is one great wound, and the worst thing is, his comrades have got wind of what’s going on, they catch up with the dogs and urge them on, all the time shouting for Actaeon, and complaining that he’s missing all the action, and Actaeon lets a groan out of him, not quite a human cry, not quite the cry of a deer, and then he dies.

There was a lot of debate after the event, says Ovid, some saying that Diana was more cruel than she was just, others saying that when it comes to defending one’s virginity, strong measures are needed; and both sides had their arguments well marshalled. But as for Ovid himself, he says the whole thing was just an unfortunate accident, that Actaeon was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, I said.

And what do you think, Angel? you said. Oh, I don’t know, I said, but it would seem that the gods, or the goddesses, have as little control over circumstances as human beings, and as little control over their passions. I prefer to look at the painting, I said. By now we were standing before Titian’s Death of Actaeon. It’s a big painting, almost six feet by six and a half, and I had stood before it alone many times, imagining myself to enter the dark wood of its landscape, never fully able to resolve its blurs and ambiguities. In a significant departure from the Ovid story, Titian shows Diana present at Actaeon’s metamorphosis, standing in the left foreground, almost life-size, holding a bow which lacks a string. It’s as if she’s part of the action, and yet not, I said, maybe she’s a projection of herself, or maybe Actaeon’s fate is her dream. At any rate, Titian made a lot of changes to the painting, and some people think it’s unfinished. It’s an autumnal painting, all those sepias and russets, the leaves of the trees beginning to turn. Maybe the unfinished look is the point. The dogs especially, the way they emerge out of a flurry of brushstrokes, made up of contradictory layers of paint. They’re a series of afterthoughts, a kind of ongoing process. You know, Nina, The Death Of Actaeon is always at the back of my mind, I carry it around in my mind, but I can never see it clearly enough, it shimmers and changes as I try to imagine it. And when I go to see it for real, like now, I realise that even then I can’t see it clearly enough, it’s as if the painting has changed since I last saw it. And every time I look at it, I see things I never saw before. Or maybe I did see them, but never noticed them. Maybe I’ve forgotten seeing them, I said.

So the painting’s really about your own thought processes, you said. Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, Nina, but maybe it is, I said. But then it would seem to exclude whatever I might think of it, you said. I mean, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that it might mean something different to me. Well, you didn’t venture to tell me, Nina, I said. And you didn’t venture to ask, you said. You were too busy with your own analysis, your self-analysis. But you might as well know that in 1965, just after my mother died, they brought us to the National Gallery on a school trip, I was fifteen, remember? And Titian wasn’t really on the agenda, we were going to look at the Rembrandts, the self-portraits, and we were just passing the Actaeon en route, when it caught my eye, and I stopped and looked at it. Maybe I only stopped for a few minutes, they had to send someone back for me, I don’t know how long I looked at it. But I could see my mother in the Diana figure, the way she held herself with such disinterested aplomb, such gravity. And afterwards, when I read up on the background, the painting seemed more than ever to be about what can happen between men and women, when they stumble on some terrible revelation about the other. I could see the story of my mother and father in Titian’s painting, you said. But it was your mother who suffered most, not your father, I said. How do you know? you said. Who are you to say who suffered most? I prefer to think of her as being empowered by her death. Like Diana, unleashing the invisible arrow. The Death of Actaeon means something to me, Angel, but all it is to you is a talking-point, a conversation piece. And you carry a picture of it around in your head for years, you weigh its pros and cons, never arriving at any conclusions. You’re very good at pictures, Angel, you picture this, you picture that, but it really hasn’t much to do with the real world, has it? Art, for you, is a little safe haven. Like your father’s beloved Esperanto, a cosy little back room where a dozen or so oddballs talk about changing the world, when they all know the whole thing was doomed to failure about fifty years ago, it’s all cloud-cuckoo-land. Don’t you think you’re like that, Angel, like your holier-than-thou father, ever so slightly pompous, with your useless pictures of the world? you said, and I was taken aback that you should speak of my father in this way.

And you, I suppose you’re going to change the world? I said. Nobody changes the world, you said, history isn’t a matter of personalities, of kings and statesmen making the big decisions, history’s the manufacture of consent. That’s what MO2 does, we’re in the Chinese whispers game. But at least I’ve no illusions about it. I consent to it. And I take pleasure in what I do, because I like to create beautiful things, you said. Isn’t that what I do? I said. No, you said, you think your pleasure is morality, you think you’re better than the next person because you can appreciate something they can’t. And you’ve made a picture of me, Angel, you carry it around in your mind like an icon, and for all I know you might adore it, but it’s the wrong picture, Gabriel, it’s not me. It’s a kind of fake, you said, and I’m tired of tramping around galleries looking at pictures with you, be they real or fake, and with that you turned on your heel and left.

We made it up a little afterwards, when I came back to the hotel room and found you were wearing L’Heure Bleue, as if to remind me of our time in Paris, or to remind yourself of our time in Paris. But it began again in Belfast, or rather it ended in Belfast. We’d gone out for dinner, to Restaurant 77, the best restaurant in town, it was your idea. The condemned man’s last meal. Afterwards, we were, as I thought, about to get a taxi to your place when you said, I think we should stop seeing each other for a while. What do you mean, stop seeing each other? I said. It was a circumstance I had never envisaged. Oh, I knew we had had our difficulties, but they consisted of mere ideological differences, easily resolved, and this struck me like a bolt from the blue. You were silent for a moment. What do you mean, stop seeing each other? I said again, less confidently this time. Yes, Angel, maybe if we stop seeing each other we’ll learn to see each other better. We both need a little time and space away from each other, you said.

I felt as if my world had turned upside down. You can’t mean it, Nina, I said. You mean everything to me, I said. I can’t live without you, I said. How can you say that, I said, after all we’ve done together, after all we’ve said to each other, you said you loved me, I said. We say a lot of things, Angel, and they’re true for when we say them, but things change, you said. But it’s not over, is it, Nina? It can’t be over, you’ll come back to me, won’t you? Give me some hope that you’ll come back, Nina, I said. Oh, Angel, I don’t know my own mind at the moment, I live in hope as much as you, don’t press me too hard, you said. And I said more, and you said more, and I could not change your mind. I have to leave now, you said. You’ll be in touch? I said. I’ll write, you said. You kissed me gently on the cheek, and left me.

When I woke the next morning I thought it had all been a bad dream, and when I realised you had indeed said what you said, I felt bereaved. I had not felt like this since the death of my mother, nor would I feel like that again until the death of my father. And, remembering that time, I am writing now with a funereal black Waverley pen made in the 1920s, whose unusual spear-shaped nib has a teardrop vent-hole. Like the Dutch pens, the Merlin and the CIBA that I used to describe our happier times, the Waverley had never been inked until it came to my hands. It is like new, this pen that is almost as old as my father was when he died.

You remember my father, Nina. He must have been in your mind when I saw you for the last time. It was Saturday 30th June 1984, a week after our last meal together; I had arranged to meet him for a drink after his Esperanto class in The Compass, and I had just stepped from the sunlight of High Street into that maze of alleyways that lies between it and the Law Courts, when you stepped out from a dark colonnade, and said, Angel, Gabriel. My heart leapt. Nina, I said. And we stood awkwardly for some long seconds. Well, fancy meeting you like this, you said. Yes, fancy that, I said. How are you, Gabriel? you said. How do you think I am, Nina? I said. Oh, don’t be hard on me, Gabriel, I’ve thought about little else since that night, I’ve thought about my whole life, what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to be doing, you must give me some time, you said, and you proceeded to tell me an elaborate story of how your boss, Callaghan, had taken you to lunch at Restaurant 77 one day — isn’t that an irony? you said ruefully — and had suggested to you that perhaps it was time for a change of scene, that Eastern Europe was the coming thing now, that you had done very well in Belfast, but that maybe Warsaw would suit your talents better at this particular time, and my heart gave a lurch as I heard this. You mean you might be leaving altogether? I said. Oh, I don’t know any more, Gabriel, I don’t know what I’m doing, you said. And then I saw you look at your watch, and you said, Gabriel, I really must be going. I’ll be in touch, I promise, I will write, and you left.

I looked at my watch; I had arranged to meet my father at five o’clock, and it was now five past. And then I heard an almighty explosion. You know the rest, Nina. You must have pictured me running towards The Compass Bar, standing aghast before the smoking rubble, being restrained by the police and army, waiting for what seemed like an eternity before I saw my father being carried out, weeping tears of relief when I saw that he was still alive, though I could see that one of his legs was shattered. As it turned out, they had to amputate.

My father managed well enough; even when he suffered phantom limb syndrome, he used to joke about it, or perhaps it wasn’t a joke. After Nelson lost his arm at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, said my father, he could feel fingers digging into the missing limb, and Nelson thought this was direct evidence for the existence of the soul. And I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with an English admiral, said my father. What hurt him more was the thought that the cause of Esperanto had been directly attacked by the bomb. It was just like the persecution of Esperantists in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, he said. There were dark forces abroad, said my father, who would do anything to keep the Irish people apart from one another, and he would quote from his beloved Zamenhof. When I was still a child in the town of Bialystok, said Zamenhof, I gazed with sorrow on the mutual hostility which divided the people of the same land and the same town. And I dreamed then that after some years everything would be changed for the better. And the years have passed; and instead of my beautiful dream I have seen a terrible reality. In the streets of my unhappy town savages armed with hatchets and pickaxe handles have flung themselves at those who practise another religion, or speak a different language to themselves. For there will always be those whose interests are to foster such hatred, said my father.

No one ever claimed responsibility for The Compass Bar bombing that killed five people, three Catholics and two Protestants. Some said it was a rogue Republican element. Some said it was a rogue Loyalist element. And quite a lot of people said that whoever was responsible, it could not have happened without the collusion of rogue elements within the security forces, whether actively or by omission, that it had been sanctioned at some level in the maze of clandestine operations that lay behind official government policy.

It took me some days to put two and two together. Until then, I’d thought of MO2 as just another of those well-meaning and ultimately pointless local business development agencies. But the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to me that you must have known, that MO2 had prior knowledge. You knew I met my father most Saturdays after his class, you knew my movements, you knew how to intercept and delay me. And if that were so, you saved me, but you did not save the others, and I could not forgive you for that.

Your brief letter, sent from Paris ten days later, only served to confirm my suspicions. You had left MO2, you said, you could not bear to live with it any longer, you had taken up a new life in Paris, you hoped that I was well, and that I would forgive you for what you had done, but it was all over between you and me, you could not bear the pain of looking me in the eye again. Words to that effect. Later that day, 9th July 1984, I learned that York Minster had been struck by lightning, and its South Transept razed by the subsequent fire. And in the days that followed, I heard how the four-hundred-year-old stained glass of the great Rose Window, made to commemorate the defeat of the House of York in the Wars of the Roses, had been riven into some forty thousand fragments, though the panels had miraculously stayed intact within their embrasures, having been releaded some years previously; and in the months that followed, I heard how restoration began, as adhesive plastic film was applied to the crazed mosaic of the glass panels, which were then removed one by one, disassembled, and reassembled, tessera by tessera, using a specially developed fixative which had the same refractive index as the old glass, whereupon the completed work was sandwiched between two layers of clear glass for added security, and mounted back in place: which intervention means we will never again see what was seen before the fire, the dims and glows of stained glass unmitigated by an added medium, however clear. And I remembered how we two had once seen the glass as it was, as it had been.

As I cast my mind back now, Nina, I no longer know the truth of what we were together, or what you were to me. I look at your last postcard again. HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME, the stamp says, or it might say nothing. I trace the N of your name with my finger, and, as I put my hand to my face, I seem to catch a whisper of some perfume. What is it, Nina, Je Reviens, or Vol de Nuit? But it escapes me, I can find no name for it, and I do not know what message your next card will bring.