The Pen Friend

Nina

Dear Gabriel, you wrote. I had looked at your letter for some time before I opened it. The stamp bore a Belfast postmark, and I was filled with hope and trepidation because we now breathed the air of the same city, or had done yesterday at least. My name and address was in blue ink, the colour of eternity, but also of death, and I thought of the blue vein in your wrist, how you would often raise it to my face for me to smell whatever perfume you were wearing. Eventually, with trembling hands, I took a knife and slit open the thick cartridge-paper envelope. A postcard fell out; I would look at it later. For now, I was more concerned with your many words.

It’s been a long time, you wrote, and I hardly know where to begin. But when I wrote those words on the first postcard I sent you, I remembered how you used to sing that Rolling Stones song, ‘Long Long While’. You remember?

Baby, baby, been a long, long timeBeen a long, long time, been a long, long timeI was wrong girl and you were right.

It was the B side of ‘Paint It Black’, 1966, you said, you liked it better than the A side because it had less pretensions about it. Very simple lyrics, but Jagger sings them with real emotion, you loved that little off-key catch in his voice, you said. I hadn’t realised then that you were such a Rolling Stones freak, and you would say you weren’t, it was just if you had a choice between the Beatles and the Stones, you’d go for the Stones any day. More edge. But I knew you liked Mick’s style in general, and, despite your protestations, I think you were fascinated by that English middle-class bad boy thing, you liked the fact that he read books as well as listening to the blues, and you liked the clothes. Not that you dressed like Mick Jagger, but you had just a little touch of flamboyance. That first time I saw you in the xl Café, the first thing I noticed, beyond your face, was the tie you were wearing, looked like a Forties tie, pale grey with a washed-out pink diamond pattern, went nicely with the Donegal tweed jacket. I think maybe I fell in love with you a little just then, because it seemed that you wore the clothes almost at a distance from yourself, you didn’t seem to be a natural dresser, it was something more considered, as if you had a picture in your head of how you should look, or how you might look to others. And, as I got to know you, I thought it was a little bit like how you looked at paintings, admiring but not fully entering them, and I liked that hesitancy in you, the way you adjusted your tie as I looked at you from the corner of my eye.

Anyway, it’s been a long, long time, and you’ll want to know why I started this whole thing, this correspondence. And I hardly know myself. But it must have started with the cards, I’d buy postcards in whatever place I’d be, not to send to anyone, but as mementoes, or just because I liked the pictures. I stored them in a shoebox, a men’s shoebox, Church’s brogues, you could still smell the leather off the cardboard. Years of postcards. And I was flicking through them one day when I saw that one I began with, the Empire State Building struck by lightning, I couldn’t even remember where I bought it, but it reminded me of us in New York, you remember, how excited we were, lightning flickering above the skyline of the city, us laughing in the downpour. We’d taken shelter in one of those dives off Bleecker Street, you remember, it was like something from the 1940s, there was a black girl doing Billie Holiday numbers, standing on a little raised platform under a spotlight, and those little tea-lights in faceted glass holders on the tables, you could see hands and cigarettes and cocktail glasses, a face or two, and the smoke drifting up into the spotlight. And she was really good, she sang the songs with respect, but she put her own heart and soul into them too, and when I glanced at you over the tea-lights I could see that there were tears in your eyes, and then tears came to my eyes too.

So when I saw the lightning in New York postcard, I thought of you, and of our time there, and thought it might have been possible that you’d been in my mind when I bought it, however subliminally. And then I started going through the shoebox again and I began to find a pattern, this card or that would remind me of this or that time we’d spent together. So many memories began to well up. Like Colette when Lee Miller met her, you know, going through her photographs. And I could have chosen others, too, besides the ones I ended up with. There’s a lovely 1950s 3-D one of the Chrysler Building, all metallic greens and silvery blues, and I remembered how you’d talked about its automotive architecture, it had never occurred to me that the Chrysler Building had anything to do with cars, and you said, Well, that’s one for your little red book, Nina, you’re always looking for these little style details, maybe you could do something with that, and I said, Yes, it’s like the way those big American cars with the big bench seats were made for the dresses, the big flared skirts and petticoats, and I wrote down ‘Chrysler Building haute couture’ with my Dinkie pen that first brought us together, you remember …

Dear Nina, how could I forget? I’d been looking for a match for that pen ever since it occurred to me to begin collecting. And I found it just last week, or perhaps it found me. I’d had a couple of long-standing requests in with Beringer, you remember Beringer, his shop in Winetavern Street? One of them was for the Dinkie, the other for a Parker Royal Challenger, 1939, I’d just missed one on eBay, and the more I’d looked at its photograph, the more I wanted one, I loved the Art Deco stepped clip, very Chrysler. So I called in with Beringer on the off-chance. Ah, Mr Gabriel, he said, the Royal Challenger, he said, and he took the pen from his breast pocket and handed it to me, barrel first. It was indeed lovely, brown pearl bodywork with a black chevron pattern that matched the clip, it’s another take on the Parker arrow emblem. How much do I owe you? I said, and he named a price, I named a lower price, he came down a little, I came up a little, and so on, till we met halfway, as we knew we would. Ah, you drive a hard bargain, Mr Gabriel, he said, but I’ll tell you what, just to show there’s no hard feelings, here’s a little luckpenny, and he shot his cuffs, held open his two hands before me, made fists of them, and said, Pick a hand. I looked at him somewhat sceptically, and touched his left hand, and when he opened it, lying on his palm was the twin of your Dinkie. Of course it wouldn’t be an identical twin, Conway Stewart never made two of these black and red mottled rubber models alike, but as it looked as near to yours as I could remember, I was delighted.

I didn’t know you did magic, Beringer, I said. Oh, only for special customers, Mr Gabriel, it wouldn’t do to let the general public know that an antiques dealer has stuff like this up his sleeve. As a matter of fact, I learned that one from your late father, God rest his soul, he said, and I suddenly remembered that when I was a child my father had a whole repertoire of these tricks, making things appear from nowhere. So here I am now, writing with the Dinkie that came from nowhere — though Beringer, true to form, did give me an elaborate account of its provenance. When I saw it I realised it wasn’t quite as spectacular-looking as some of the pens I’d acquired before it — the Oriental Peacock Dinkie, for example — but nevertheless its colours glow with the intensity of my memory of them, and it gives me pleasure to write with a pen that resembles yours so closely, as I here transcribe the words of your letter, knowing that by writing them again in my own hand, following the loops and curves of your thought, I will gain a better understanding of them.

… you remember, red and black, you wrote, le rouge et le noir, I wrote all those letters to you then with my Conway Stewart Dinkie. I don’t know who started that business, writing to each other practically daily sometimes, whether it was you or me. You used to joke about it, said it would be good training for mo2, all those memoranda I had to write, or was supposed to write. But when I began sending the postcards, I knew I couldn’t write at any length, I had to work up to it, for I didn’t entirely understand myself what had happened. You must know that after I left you I was very confused. ‘Paint It Black’ kept going through my head

I see a red door and I want it painted blackNo colours any more I want them to turn black …

So I got out, I’d saved up quite a bit from my business, enough to last me a good few months, and I went to Paris, where I knew I could get a job with my French, the French like Englishwomen with a bit of style who can speak good French, though I had to tone down my French accent a bit, make it more English, for that’s the whole point, that you’re an Englishwoman speaking French.

And for six months I did nothing, I got a little apartment near Les Halles, in rue Montmartre, I’d just go for long walks, trying to forget how we’d been in Paris together. Then I got a job in a fashion photography agency. And I fell for one of the photographers, and it took me a while to realise that it was because he reminded me of you, he looked at things in that admiring way, without quite engaging with them, he saw the world in terms of photographs, though he wasn’t half as good as he thought he was. So I dropped him. And I hesitated about telling you this, but you might as well know, because everything I’ve done since I left you has led to this moment where I write to you again, now, after twenty years.

After the photographer, I took up with a married man, one of those minor French politician-intellectuals, oh, nothing physical, in fact I think he was a closet gay, it was a business arrangement if you like, I was his escort, the kind of woman his kind of man likes to be seen with in discreet restaurants. He was very charming, and very well read, we’d have this French Symbolist thing going, matching quotations from Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and eating with him was a real pleasure, if a trifle analytical, you know that way the French have to talk their food as well as eat it. He admired me, and I him. And I enjoyed the mutual flattery for a while, not to mention the discreet restaurants, but then it seemed to me he was flaunting me a little too much, I was becoming too much of an ornament, so I got out of that relationship too. And there were others, but nothing to write home about.

And you, you were like a ghost that would sometimes appear in my dreams, and I would dream of you being with other women, other ghosts perhaps. So very slowly I began to think of getting in touch again, but I deferred it for years, until I went through that shoebox full of postcards. And the more I thought of you, the more I thought of how we’d been together in different places, and how you saw the world, sometimes as I saw it, but sometimes quite differently. You used to joke, dear Angel, how I was always one step ahead of you, but if I was, you had a more considered view of the landscape. I always wanted to see what was round the next corner, while you took time to look at what was present. So I thought I’d send the postcards from different places, somewhere we had been together, others not. For I wanted to imagine what you would have made of those places, like Stroud, where I’d never even been myself, but I knew you would remember how I told you of my father’s stint in the Erinoid factory at Lightpill, how I would dream of him driving the night train home to London, to me, his face lit by the glow from the open fire-box door, steam hissing from the brass pipes, the smokestack bearing its long plume of smoke through the darkness.

Of course Stroud had changed a lot from my father’s time, the Erinoid factory had long since closed down, but that was the point, I was seeing it anew, through your eyes, as I imagined. They had set up a little Erinoid museum, you would have loved it, they had displays of Erinoid buttons, mock ivory and tortoiseshell, all the colours of the rainbow, door handles, umbrella handles, radio cabinets, the plastic rods that they used to drill out pen casings from, in fantastic marble effects. What they didn’t have was the smell, though they told you about it, milk curd and formaldehyde, what a stink that must have been. And I remembered how my father’s clothes would smell funny when he got home, I thought it was the smell of coal-smoke and steam from the engine. I think that’s why I sent you the Berlin postcard, the one of the steam engine on the viaduct over Friedrichstrasse, but also because we got lost on the S-Bahn, you remember, we got off at the wrong stop and ended up in Kreuzberg, and we came across that little antique shop where you bought the Russian icon, I hadn’t the courage to tell you I thought it was a fake, and what did it matter anyway, you were so delighted by it. And the subject was so fitting, an Annunciation, the Angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin, you especially liked the blue of her cloak, it was like an Yves Klein Blue, you said, it was remarkable how it had kept its colour over all that time. You mean the blue he used to paint naked women with, and have them roll them around on a canvas? I said, and you looked at me suspiciously, thinking I was winding you up …

I’d quite forgotten about that icon, Nina, I probably still have it lying at the back of a drawer somewhere. Maybe the blue’s faded by now. But your mention of blue leads me to take up another pen, for the small Dinkie, as I knew it would, is beginning to tire my hand, so I’ve gone for a Cobalt Blue Esterbrook with a 9556 Fine Writing nib, it’s got a much firmer feel to it than the flexible Conway. It’s a very trustworthy pen. That’s the thing about vintage pens, or at least vintage pens of this low-to-medium price range, you don’t often get fakes. There’s no point in faking something like a Conway Stewart or an Esterbrook, the bother and expense you’d have to go to would be counter-productive. Oh, of course I’ve bought things on eBay that turn out not to be what I thought they were, but that’s because I read too much into the poor description, or was inveigled by the eloquent description, or the photograph presented it in a flattering light, or I imagined it might be better than the unflattering photograph. I was the victim of my own wishful thinking. Most sellers are not dishonest, it’s just that sometimes they don’t know what they’re selling, and describe it wrongly, or don’t know how to describe it. I still get annoyed when I see someone call a dip pen a fountain pen. In any case, the buyer should always beware. As it turned out, I got the Cobalt Blue Esterbrook for what seemed to me a bargain price of some twenty dollars from a seller in Canton, Ohio, and, as I loaded it with blue Quink, I remembered the postcard you’d enclosed with your letter. It had fallen to the floor face down; there was nothing written on it, but the image on the other side had words enough. It was a photograph of a New Testament with a bullet embedded in its back, and a caption below, handwritten in block letters:

THIS TESTAMENT SAVED THE LIFE OF PTE. W. HACKET 1ST WOR. REGT. AT ARMENTIERS. AUG. 20 — 1915 — NOW IN 2ND GEN. EASTERN HOSPITAL DYKE RD. BRIGHTON — BULLET PASSING THROUGH OUTER COVER AND ALL THE LEAVES AND STOPPED AT THE LAST PAGE.

And I knew that you must have been thinking of a story my father told you once, how he knew someone whose life had been saved in the same manner, a Belfast man who had been in the Battle of the Somme. He had seen the hole in the Testament with his own eyes, though the bullet was missing. And you replied that you’d heard of a similar incident concerning a soldier in the American Civil War, except that the bullet destined for his heart was stopped by a steel plate engraved with a portrait of his sweetheart. I looked at the photograph more closely. The bullet in fact entered the Testament back to front, from Revelation to Matthew, and the Testament is lying open at Revelation 22, the last chapter of the Bible, you can see THE END at the foot of the page, and my eye is caught by Verse 13, which reads, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last’. Then I read Verse 12, which says, ‘And behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be’.

And I take it that you meant these words for me.

In fact, you continued, I’d thought of sending you a postcard of the Yves Klein Blue painting in the Tate, it would have done as well as any other, because I knew how fond you were of this blue, I knew what associations it held for you, the blue of the sea when we had that magical weekend in Donegal, and we stayed in the Yellow Bungalow, the blue of the Paris street signs, and of the Côte d’Azur, where you had never been, but knew from Yves Klein’s writings. That’s why I sent you a card from Nice, you had always wanted to go there, but we never managed, so I went proxy, I wanted to imagine it through your eyes. Yes, the one of the Turbine Room in the Bankside Power Station, before they turned it into the Tate. Sometimes I’d go to look at Klein’s painting, I’d stand there for long minutes, getting lost in that deep blue, and sometimes I’d have the uncanny feeling you were looking over my shoulder at it, and I’d turn around, but the someone standing there would not be you. It was like that when I chose the postcards.

You remember you told me about the Library Angel, how if you were doing a piece of research for a paper on some artist or other, you’d go to the stack in the library, and lift a book at random, and open it at a page, and it would contain precisely the information you’d been looking for, except you didn’t know it until then? You’d say you’d been guided by the Library Angel. It was like that, Angel, you were my Library Angel when I flicked through the shoebox full of postcards, I felt your hand guiding mine. And as I did so, I’d think of what you must have thought of me when we last saw each other, the day of The Compass Bar bomb. Let’s say I did go deliberately to intercept you, but without full knowledge as to why I was doing it. And before that day, I’d been thinking long and hard about the whole mo2 thing for a couple of months, things were beginning to change.

And two weeks or so before that Saturday, Callaghan, my boss, had taken me out for lunch, a rare event, he’d pretty much kept his distance up till then, let us all get along with whatever we were doing, he was very much into benign non-intervention. All that stuff I’d told you about mo2, well, it was basically true, but you knew I was ever so slightly winding you up when I gave it that conspiratorial spin. For really, I thought it was basically just a glorified local enterprise development agency, until that lunch with Callaghan. So, anyway, we talked of this and that, and then we’ve just ordered coffee when Callaghan says, Oh yes, Miranda, and how are getting along with that young man of yours, Conway, Gabriel Conway is it? And I said, Oh, fine, fine, though of course it wasn’t so fine between us then, wondering why this had come up, he’d never expressed any interest in my personal life until then, in fact I didn’t even think he knew I had one. Well, well, marvellous, says Callaghan, that’s good to hear. Father runs an Esperanto class, George Conway, isn’t that right? says Callaghan, Compass Bar? Yes, I said. Well, says Callaghan, we’re thinking of putting one of our chaps in there, very bright, he’d pick up the lingo in no time at all, good community relations project, don’t you think? Paul Eastwood, so happens he went to school with that Gabriel of yours, you might know him. Anyway, it’s like this, I hope you don’t go wanting to learn Esperanto yourself, it would look a bit cluttered, don’t you think, two of our people there at the same time? He’s starting, oh, Saturday week, says Callaghan.

And of course I told him I’d no intention of going to your father’s class, which was true, but I thought it all a bit strange that Callaghan should be telling me this, and then Callaghan says, Oh yes, Miranda, and talking about new projects, you might be interested to know there’s a very good British Council job in Warsaw coming up, we think it might suit you very well, Cultural Affairs Officer. Not that we’re not pleased with your work here, far from it, but sometimes we get the feeling that you could be doing with broader horizons. Job satisfaction, and all that. Anyway, you’ll think about it, won’t you? says Callaghan. And that was the end of that interview. I’d a very uneasy feeling about the whole thing, call it instinct if you want. So I wanted to talk to you about it, but didn’t quite know how, I wasn’t even sure myself what I knew or didn’t know, I couldn’t very well have rushed into The Compass Bar and told everyone to get out, I think something funny is going on here. And I when was talking to you I realised how nebulous the whole thing was, though it didn’t seem so nebulous after the bomb, and I was consumed with guilt afterwards. But I’m none the wiser now, after twenty years, whether mo2 was involved or not, and whether or not I was involved by implication.

So there you have it. It’s taken me twenty years to try to pick up the pieces, and I don’t even know what the pieces were. The only thing I knew was you. You remember our first time away from Belfast together, that weekend we spent in York? We’d gone to the Minster, you remember how dazzled we were by the stained glass? Oh, I’d been there once or twice as a child, but my memory of it was dim, and now I saw it through your eyes as well as through my own, the way the light broke and shimmered on the edges where the glass was framed by stone, little rainbows playing on the stone tracery, so that it seemed the stone was glass. And we stood for an age before the great East Window, which depicts the beginning and the end of the world, from Genesis to Revelation and the Last Judgment. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light, you said. So God must have spoken in the dark, I said. I told you that my mother had told me that during the War, the blackout, they’d taken all the glass from the windows bit by bit and stored it away for safekeeping, and when the War was over, they’d pieced it all together again. And I thought you hadn’t heard what I said, so rapt were you in looking, but afterwards you mentioned that during the War they’d also taken all the paintings from the National Gallery in London and stored them deep underground in a Welsh slate mine. They had to enlarge the entrance to the mine for the Gallery’s biggest painting, you said, it was a Raising of Lazarus, you couldn’t remember the artist’s name. Stored in a dark tomb for so many years. And so many more years have gone by since we two set eyes on each other.

I’d kept all your letters from the time we’d been together, and after I went through the postcards, I went through the letters, not in any chronological order, for they were all mixed up, though I knew the early ones from the yellowed envelopes that once were plain white, and the later ones that were mauve and pale green and lilac, I’d bought them for you in a little papeterie in the Île Saint-Louis, remember, and I saw myself as I was when I first read those letters back then, as if I were looking over my own shoulder at myself, and I thought I caught a whiff or perfume from each one, whatever scent I had been wearing when I read them first, and though I knew I must be imagining it, it nevertheless summoned up those times for me again. It’s as if we’re beginning all over again. I’ll be in the xl Café next Saturday at noon. After all that has happened, I can’t be sure that you’ll be there too. If you are, you’ll know me. I’ll be wearing the Dinkie pen that first brought us together.

And I will be there, Nina, as surely as I now take up your Dinkie pen again to write the last words of your letter.Ever, Nina.Ever, Angel.