The Pen Friend

All manner of service in the field

Of course you knew I’d recognise the image immediately — Jan Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, which hangs in the National Gallery in Dublin. And you knew I would think immediately of the bizarre set of circumstances which preceded its being placed there. In April 1974 Bridget Rose Dugdale, daughter of Lieutenant Colonel James Dugdale, a wealthy landowner and former chairman of Lloyd’s, led a gang of three armed IRA men to Russborough House, the home of Sir Alfred Beit, whose family had made its fortune in partnership with Cecil Rhodes in the De Beers Consolidated Mines of South Africa. Beit and his wife, Clementine, were dragged by them to the library, where they were bound and gagged. The gang then proceeded to cut nineteen paintings from Beit’s priceless collection from their frames. Among them were works by Goya, Rubens, and Gainsborough, and the most valuable of all, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid. Dugdale had already achieved some notoriety: a year previously she had received a suspended sentence for her part in an art theft from her family’s country house near Axminster; and she was wanted by the police in Northern Ireland for her suspected involvement in the hijacking of a helicopter which had bombed an RUC station in Strabane, in January 1974.

Following the raid on Russborough House, the thieves demanded the release of the Price sisters, imprisoned in England for their part in a London car-bombing, and a ransom of £500,000 in exchange for the paintings. Eleven days later the paintings were found in the boot of a car at a rented cottage in Glandore, County Cork. Dugdale was arrested, charged and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment. The paintings were returned to Russborough, and two years later Beit established a trust to retain the house and its collection for the Irish state, and the National Gallery thus became the custodian of the Vermeer, though it was still in situ in Russborough. Twelve years later, in May 1986, twelve masked and armed men, led by the notorious Dublin criminal Martin Cahill, aka The General, broke into Russborough and stole fifteen paintings, including the Vermeer. In September 1993 a cache of stolen paintings was discovered in the boot of a car at Antwerp airport. The Vermeer, somewhat scratched and dented, was among them. It was given to Andrew O’Connor, the chief restorer at the National Gallery of Ireland, to repair the damage.

I look at your postcard again. A long dark green curtain seemingly has been withdrawn as if to invite us to gaze into the room, where a woman sits writing intently at a table covered with an oriental rug. The bodice of her dress is pale green, her sleeves and cap snowy white; she is wearing pearl earrings. Behind her, and to her right, more plainly dressed, stands a woman whom we take to be her maid. She gazes as if her mind has wandered out the tall leaded window, her mouth showing the glimmer of a smile. On the tiled floor in the right foreground is a little still life which includes a letter with a crumpled wrapper, a stick of sealing-wax, and a red wax seal. The seal, which was only discovered during O’Connor’s restoration of the painting, is a typical Vermeer conundrum, for it invites us to consider if a seal could remain unbroken if the letter we imagine it belongs to has been ripped open and discarded with such apparent haste — and recently, for we imagine the efficient-looking maid would have dealt with the mess on the floor. Perhaps the seal betokens a miraculously intact virginity. And why the empty chair in the foreground, which has not been tidied away against a wall, as it should in a Dutch household of that period? It looks as if a person unknown to us has been here not that long ago, a guest or messenger whose annunciation the writing woman is about to answer.

I turn the card over. It’s postmarked Berlin, which leads me to suspect that your previous card contained implications I failed to grasp. And it took me a while to arrive at the source of this message, which read, All manner of service in the field. The expression had an archaic, familiar ring to it. I looked at the Vermeer again for clues. The painting of a painting on the rear wall of the room is a message within a message, a depiction of The Finding of Moses. I turned to the Bible, to Chapter 2 of the Book of Exodus, which contains the story of how the Pharaoh commanded every Israelite male child to be killed at birth; but one mother consigned her boy to a vessel made of rushes and pitch, and laid him in the weeds by the river’s brink, where he was discovered by the daughter of Pharaoh, and she called him Moses, because Moses means ‘saved’. Moses is like a message in a bottle, delivered from his mother’s womb into the bosom of the Pharaoh’s daughter, who is a surrogate Madonna; and he will later become a messenger, as he delivers the Commandments to the people of Israel, all of which is appropriate to Vermeer’s painting. We take it that the maid will be asked to deliver her mistress’s letter: she is thus a messenger, a kind of Gabriel, for Gabriel is the messenger of God. And in the Dutch tradition, Moses represented God’s ability to unite opposing factions, which had some relevance to my own divided city of Belfast.

As I pondered your card and its manifold implications, I began to think of myself as an angler fishing a stretch of canal in the shadow of a dark semi-derelict factory leaking steam from a rusted exoskeleton of piping, who, after hours of inaction, feels his line bite, and, his excitement mounting, begins to reel in as his rod is bent by the gravity of what must be an enormous catch — a whale of a pike perhaps, glutted by its meal of barbel, perch, or one of the plump rats that scuttle through the soot-encrusted weeds of the canal banks — when to his consternation he finds he has snagged a smoothing-iron, which he discovers to be only the precursor of a series resembling a gargantuan charm bracelet dripping green-black beards and tendrils of slime, as the iron is followed by a sewing-machine, an ironing-board, a shopping trolley, a tangle of barbed wire, bits of corrugated iron fencing, rusted automatic weapons, a wire mesh security shutter, and a string of police motor-cycles, like stuff spewed from the maw of some legendary behemoth, a galleon or two with their full complements of cannon, barrels of biscuit and nail and wine and shot and oil, cases of carpenters’ tools and swords and needles and astrolabes and viols and pistols and flutes and crucifixes, and I still had not got to the bottom of your message.

Another detail besides the wax seal was discovered during the restoration of the Vermeer. Before its return to Ireland, the painting had been stored in Antwerp, where O’Connor was working on it when he was visited by Jorgen Wadum, conservator in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Wadum had long been dissatisfied with the theory that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve his almost photographic perspectives. When he examined Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid he found a pinhole at the centre of the writing woman’s left eye. On an impulse he fished in his bag, found a piece of string, and, holding one end to the eye, ran the string along the various lines of perspective. The lines met at the pinhole. Vermeer, he immediately conjectured, had rubbed chalk on a string, snapped it onto the canvas, and used those lines as a guide. And when I fish out a Perspex ruler from my drawer and try the same experiment, I find that it is so. The woman’s eye is concentrated on her writing, yet radiates invisible lines out into the room and beyond the window of the room, embracing the outside world to which her letter soon will be delivered, and, imagining the faint whisper of her quill upon the paper, I see you sitting in a Berlin café, perhaps, writing this card to me, All manner of service in the field, and I think of me fixed in your inner eye as you write my name and address on the card, Gabriel Conway, 41 Ophir Gardens, Belfast …

I turned to Exodus again, and found the source in Chapter 1. Verses 13–14 read, ‘And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour: And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field’. I took this to be an ironic reference to what you did. You described yourself as a Field Officer, Nina, though the bondage, I assumed, was voluntary. And what exactly is your field? I’d asked you. Well, it’s more like the field, you said. The field of information, you said, the field of enquiry, if you will, though of course we all have our own field. Like a spy ring, I said jokingly. Like a spy ring, you said, though we’re perfectly open about what we do. The best place to hide a thing is in full sight, you said. The early Mass Observation surveys were criticised because of their seemingly covert methods. The lower classes felt they were being spied upon by the upper. In MO2 we gather information, yes, but it’s no different from the kind of information anyone would gather in the course of their work, be they postmen or publicans or seamstresses or clerks or whatever. Every job implies a field of social and economic relationships.

As for my job, well, I spent a good few weeks looking out the window, you said. They’d given us the top floor of an old linen warehouse in Bedford Street, you know, at the back of the City Hall. My room overlooked the street, five storeys below, and I used to amuse myself by tracking the pedestrian traffic — people-watching, if you like. Monitoring the flow, the little knots and eddies, accidental encounters, people bumping into each other in the street, I’d see their backward steps of surprise, and imagine them saying, How are you, I haven’t see you for years, what have you been doing? And I took a special interest in people window-shopping. You know Lazenblatt’s antique shop, beside the Ulster Hall? you said. Yes, I said, those terrible Irish landscapes, The Bridge at Cushendun, Fair Head on A Summer’s Day, that kind of thing. But he’s got some nice stuff, too, though a bit outside my price range. I’d seen a snuff-box there the other week that Beringer was selling for half the price. Anyway, you said, I’d watch Lazenblatt’s over the course of a day, see who would stop at the window, while others wouldn’t give it a second look. There was one guy I remember, oh, dressed a bit like you, Gabriel, nice Donegal tweed jacket, green and grey fleck, good brogues, he stopped one morning and looked in the window for about five minutes, then he was back later in the afternoon, looked in the window again for quite a while. And the next day, the same thing, and the next. It took him four days to go into the shop, and then he came out empty-handed. Unless, of course, he’d bought something small, some kind of trinket, maybe a watch for himself, maybe a brooch for his girlfriend, who knows? and it was in his pocket.

Then again I’d sometimes look across the way, there was a building with an office floor just below my eye-level. There was one office, man at a desk, grey suit, every morning about eleven he’d take a chair and place it opposite his on the other side of the desk, then a secretary would come in, she’s in a grey suit too, except with a skirt, knee-length, hair in a bun, he’d gesture to her to sit down, she’s got a notebook ready, and he’d dictate to her. When you said this, I thought of the rapid whisper of her shorthand pen, and visualised an Edward Hopper scene, sunlight falling into an almost empty room. Office in a Small City, 1953, perhaps.

I could see his lips moving, you said, and we must have then discussed the various surveillance devices which were known to be in use throughout the city. The laser voice interceptor, specifically, which I’d learned about from McWhirter, you met him once, the computer buff at the Gallery, they’d brought him in to develop a cataloguing system, very advanced stuff for 1982. It’s really very simple, said McWhirter, like everything else we think is new, the Victorians had a version of it, they called it the photophone. It’s really a telephone, except you use light instead of electricity to project the information. Alexander Graham Bell, he hooked up a mouthpiece to a diaphragm that’s a mirror, so it vibrates to the sound of a voice, and that modulates a beam of sunlight aimed at the diaphragm by another mirror. Then you get a photovoltaic cell and an earpiece, that’s your remote receiver, you position it in the beam, and away you go. The sound comes over the light-beam.

And as McWhirter told me this I remembered manipulating a piece of mirror glass as a boy to dazzle the eyes of neighbours, aiming the blip of light through the windows of rooms to dance mysteriously across the walls and ceilings.

Of course, said McWhirter, it was very weather-dependent. No sunlight, no communication, and I imagined rain-spattered voices flickering and fading as a scud of April cloud passed overhead, and thought that dust-motes falling through the beam might produce a background drizzle like that on old cylinder recordings. Then, in the Sixties, said McWhirter, Bell Laboratories — quantum electronics chap, Charles Towne — developed the laser. Acronym. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Ordinary light’s like white noise, the photons are all over the place. But your laser releases all the photons in one direction, at one frequency. It’s a sine wave, pure, coherent tone. Beam of tightly packed light, razor-sharp, nearly incorruptible. Like a magic wand. Point it at a window. The window is your diaphragm, you see. And the room’s an acoustic chamber. The sound waves generated by conversation will cause the glass in the window to vibrate ever so slightly. If you bounce your laser beam off the window, the reflection gets modulated by the vibrations. Then all you need to hear what’s being said is some kind of demodulating thingamajig to extract the audio from the reflected laser beam. And there you have it. Your laser voice interceptor. Mind you, it’s not one hundred per cent perfect. Proximity of fluorescent lights, neon, sodium, might cause a buzz, that kind of thing. Air currents, strong winds, you get an effect like blowing into a mike. And direct sunlight can swamp the beam. But you’d be surprised at what you can hear from a couple of hundred feet away. And beyond that, well, you can hook it up to a telescopic gunsight, mount it directly on to the laser housing. Pretty accurate for a mile or two, said McWhirter. And you really think they’re using this device in Belfast? I said. McWhirter looked at me over his glasses and gave me a pitying smile. What do you think? he said.

So there I was staring out the window one day, you said, I’d been there about a month, and Callaghan comes in, he’s the boss of the outfit, if you could say there was a boss, because everyone seemed to be doing their own thing. At least, he was the person who recruited me. Recruited? I said. Well, of course we all had to go through the motions of an interview process, the jobs were advertised, and all that, though not very well. Anyway, I was recruited, if that’s what you call falling into conversation with a man in a hotel bar who ends up telling you you’re perfectly cut out for a job in his firm, you said, and you think nothing more of it till a few days later he gives you the call, like he said, that you thought he wouldn’t. So Callaghan comes in and says, We feel it’s about time you made your differentiation. Differentiation? you said. Yes, says Callaghan, we let people find their feet for about a month or so, and then they do their differentiation. Ask Tony Lambe how it’s done, he’ll put you right. Tony Lambe? I said, the guy we met at the City Hall that day? When I found out you were called Miranda? Yes, you said, and you had the grace to blush a little. Baa Lambe’s one of you? And how many are you, exactly? Oh, there’s quite a few of us, you said, I’ll get round to that in a while.

So anyway, what’s this differentiation business all about? I said to Tony Lambe. Oh, it’s just another name for project management, forward work plan, whatever you want to call it, says Tony. You differentiate between what you want to do, and what you don’t want to do. And what do you do? I asked Tony. Oh, basically, I’m in menswear, I sell ties, he says. Ties? I said. Yes, you know, neckwear, says Tony, ties, cravats, you know I’m a bit of neckwear freak, Miranda. And this has been a great opportunity for me, developing my own brand of ties. Lavelle & Smyth? Well, maybe you haven’t heard of us, we’re very discreet, says Tony, but I can assure you a lot of the top people are wearing Lavelle & Smyth ties. Our Irish poplin line is doing very well. Poplin, the Pope’s linen, though we don’t advertise the etymology, says Tony, but really, a lovely material for ties, nice ecclesiastical feel to it, pure silk on the outside, woollen worsted yarn on the inside, you get the best of both worlds, the sheen of the silk and the elasticity of the wool, a poplin tie keeps its shape wonderfully. Then we’ve got a lovely line in Japanese handwoven silk, said Tony.

As you know, I wasn’t much into expensive ties then, Nina, not on my salary, I tended to buy the few I wore in charity shops, or in the Friday Market, ties from the Forties and Fifties, but I did know Lavelle & Smyth’s shop in Crown Entry, and had sometimes paused before its window to admire its many-coloured display, ties in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, ties in needle stripes and pinstripes and wide stripes, and ties with diamonds and gleaming lozenges, and delicate pink flowers on a deep blue ground, and peacock’s eyes set amid glowing russet silk, they were really beautiful if unaffordable ties, and I marvelled that Tony Lambe should be their commissioner, Baa Lambe who when I knew him had hardly an eye in his head for such things, but then I suppose people change, or are changed, or can be made to change.

Anyway, you said, Tony explained this differentiation thing. Essentially you just draw up what you want to do, a business plan, cost it all out, give them a budget, he said. I’ve never known them to turn one down. Once you’re recruited, you stay recruited, says Tony, they’ll give you what you ask for, and more, they’ll disburse a little of their largesse. Compared to the millions they spend on Northern Ireland, it’s pin money. And what do they get out of it? you asked. Well, you have to file a report once every so often, customer profiles, that kind of thing, nothing that you wouldn’t be doing anyway, says Tony. They’re not too demanding, they’re happy if you’re happy. The main thing is to get to know your clients, find your niche. And what’s your niche, Nina? I asked. Interior design, corporate events styling, that kind of thing, you said. And have I heard of you? I said. Oh, probably not, you said, I’m Fawcett & Jones, they like us to have those kind of joint-venture names, gives an impression of class. Or music-hall double-acts, I said, like Conway & Stewart? Yes, you said, like Smith & Wesson. And you toyed with the Conway Stewart Dinkie that hung from the mauve silk lanyard about your neck.

I didn’t have to think twice about which pen to write this with, for it arrived in the post together with your card. It was an eBay item I’d been expecting for some days, and to tell you the truth I barely glanced at your card before attacking the package. I took a box-cutter to the layers of parcel tape, slicing through them with some difficulty before I could open the cardboard box which spilled a good few of its white polystyrene packing beans among whose remnants I discovered a section of plastic piping, taped at both ends, which contained, swaddled in kitchen roll, the pen. I wish you were here now to see it, for the red and black marbled wood-grain effect of its body would remind you of your Dinkie. This is a Swan, made in England in the 1920s by Mabie Todd and Co., and it’s got a stylised swan engraved on the barrel and a white swan in intaglio on the top of the cap. At five and a half inches capped, and seven inches with the cap posted, it’s a longer pen than most, slender, elegant, dignified. It was made without a pocket clip, perhaps to sit impressively on the desk of a person of discernment. I took it out to the better light of the back garden and I was holding it up to let the sun play on it, turning it this way and that to admire the patterning, when two swans — a pen and a cob — flew overhead honking mournfully to each other, and I knew then that I was obliged to write this letter with the Swan.

I watched the swans till they were out of sight, thinking of the story of the Children of Lir, who were turned into four swans by their jealous stepmother. My father had often told it to me as a child, and I can hear the slow-quick-slow narrative pulse of his voice, and I see in my mind’s eye again the snow softly falling on the grey waters of the Sea of Moyle as the Children of Lir flew between Rathlin and Erin, uttering their mournful songs, for they still retained their human voices. And I wondered why a female swan should be called a pen, when it was from the wings of geese that one commonly obtained feathers for quills. My father, indeed, had shown me how to make a quill pen when I was in my teens, and how to make the oak-gall ink used by the medieval Irish scribes.

The oak-gall, or the oak-apple, is an excrescence formed on some species of oak by the larvae of gall-wasps, the females of which lay their eggs in punctures made into the bark. As the larvae grow, the gall develops and forms a home for them, until they finally eat their way out. To make ink, you grind the tannin-rich oak-galls, and add water, ferrous sulphate and gum arabic; and the whole process, from wasp to ink, as my father explained, was a symbol of the transformation of the soul through writing. A wasp is an inverted bee, he said, and as the bee represents the Virgin Mary, and goodness, so the wasp means evil. The wasp, unlike the bee which spreads good by pollinating, merely scavenges and lays its eggs. But the oak tree where it lays its eggs is the sacred tree of the Druids, a repository of deep and aged wisdom, said my father. So when the wasp lays its eggs in the tree, the tree winds its fibres of wisdom around them to protect itself, and thus evil is transformed into good.

He showed me how to grind the oak-galls. Slowly, slowly, he said, use your whole arm, not just the wrist, and relax, take your time, imagine you’re saying a rosary, breathe steadily, for you’re putting your whole body into it. Now add the water. Remember that water is life, the life of the spirit. Now add the ferrous sulphate, he said, and as I did so, I watched the thick brown mud of the ground oak-galls turn magically black. Ferrous sulphate, that’s iron and sulphur mixed. The alchemists used sulphur in their quest for making gold, said my father, but they did not realise that the real gold is God’s word, which is spread by this ink we’re making now. Now the gum arabic, that’s a binder, it binds the body of the ink to its soul, and it binds it to the parchment. Well, of course we must make do with paper. And he would get me to transcribe a few verses of the Bible with the quill pen and the oak-gall ink.

My father was one of the few Catholics I knew who habitually read the Bible, not only in English, but in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and in Esperanto, and when two Mormons would call at our door, he liked nothing better than to invite them into this study to engage in a bout of theological wrangling; and when they spoke of God’s word as represented in the Bible, he would say, which Bible? I used to hear him sometimes trying to convert them to the cause of Esperanto, citing Zamenhof as if he were a Christian prophet, or a Catholic saint, and not the agnostic son of an atheistic Jewish father. And I, with my quill and oak-gall ink would transcribe from the King James Bible, Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Not that I am writing now in oak-gall ink. The gum arabic in the recipe would irremediably clog the feed of a fountain pen, and the ferrous sulphate — also known as copperas or green vitriol — would corrode the rubber ink-sac and the metal nib. There is no green vitriol in this modern chemical ink. Nevertheless, as I pour these words on to the page, you must believe that they are imbued with the urge of the medieval scribe to realise the unity of all things. And yet, how hard it is to write the truth sometimes, to make everything connect, to give an accurate account of what was said or done. I realise, for example — since my father never spoke anything but Irish to me — that when I here report his words I must be translating them, and thus interpreting them. Not that I do so consciously, for my memory is not so much of the words themselves, but of the flow of the words, the thoughts communicated by the words, and the images aroused by them.

For I see the Children of Lir in their lonely flight from one abode to the next, and the snow falling softly on the dark, mutinous waves of the Sea of Moyle, without considering what language they are couched in. They are swans in any language. So I think. I wonder if it were so for my father. In many respects, he had a better command of Irish than of English, having come to it with the zeal of a convert who takes nothing for granted. He learned his stories from master storytellers, and learned them properly, complete with the ornate, alliterative leitmotifs that ran as mnemonic and rhythmical devices throughout the narrative, which could not but affect his everyday speech, so that when I transcribe or translate his instructions to me, they appear overly stilted or formal in English; but it was not so in Irish, because those mechanisms are part of the inherited grain of Irish speech. Irish was not his first language, but he spoke it better than I, whose first language it was, and who took it for granted.

As I write with the Swan it makes a little whispery music as it traverses the page. Every pen, every nib is different, and sometimes I fancy I can identify each pen in my collection from its sound alone, the different faint scratches and squeaks they make. And I think of the room depicted in the twice-stolen Vermeer, silent but for the faint music of the quill. Vermeer never sold this painting in his lifetime: after he died penniless on St Lucy’s Day, 1675 — the darkest day of the year — it was one of several given by his widow to the local baker in exchange for a long-overdue bread bill. It then passed through a series of ownerships, some unknown. During its restoration in 1993, it was discovered that not only the wax seal but the stick of sealing-wax had been overpainted, perhaps at the request of a previous owner who considered these to be untidy details. And, thinking of these thefts and veilings and revelations, I now remembered that Gerry Byrne, the artist whose show I curated in Berlin, had made his reputation by reinterpreting iconic works of Irish art: to a mountain landscape by Paul Henry, for example, he would add British army watchtowers, and helicopters in the sky — helicopters, in particular, became a kind of signature of his, an emblem of surveillance.

Byrne was particularly fascinated by the work of Sir John Lavery, who had donated some thirty paintings to my employers, the Belfast Municipal Gallery, in 1929. Among these was the work entitled The Daylight Raid from My Studio Window, 7th July 1917. It commemorates the occasion when twenty-one German Gotha biplanes carried out the second aerial bombing of London, and were engaged by aircraft of the Royal Naval Service and the Royal Flying Corps. It is a big painting, some six feet by three. Lavery depicts his wife, Hazel, at a window, which, given the scale of things, would be about fifteen feet by eight in real life. When I was first shown this painting by my father I thought the window looked like a real window in the wall of the gallery, giving out on to another world. Hazel Lavery is kneeling at the windowsill, apparently watching the aircraft swirled like insects in the sky beyond.

I seem to remember that the scene prompted my father to embark on a reminiscence of the Belfast Blitz of 1941, but I might be wrong on that point. What I do know is that neither of us were then aware of the painting’s most curious feature, which was pointed out to me by Gerry Byrne some time in about 1979 or 80. See here, said Byrne, and he grasped me by the elbow, you can’t see it unless you’re low down, you have to get the light hitting it at the right angle. See here? and he pointed to an area of the painting which I had always taken for a rolled-down blackout curtain, just above the windowsill. And, as I squinted at it, I could see a darker patch on the putative curtain, shaped a bit like a keyhole. Do you know what he did? said Byrne, there used to be a statue of the Virgin Mary there, he painted it out before he gave the picture to the Gallery, back in the Twenties, and to hide that, he made up a blackout curtain, first curtain I ever saw that rolls from the bottom up. Stroke of genius, or what? and he laughed ironically. And, as he spoke, the keyhole blotch assumed a ghostly figural presence, and there flashed into my mind a vision of just such a statue — Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, to be precise — which had adorned my childhood bedroom. I could see her blue robes, her hands extended in that archetypal gesture of maternal comfort. Old bugger, I suppose he couldn’t have the good Unionist trustees of the Belfast Gallery thinking he really was a Catholic, and his lovely wife a Catholic too, kneeling before an idol of the Madonna, said Byrne.

For I knew that Sir John Lavery had been born in Belfast of impoverished Catholic parents in 1856 or so. The exact date of his birth is unknown. Orphaned at an early age, he was taken into care by relatives in Scotland. He began his working life in a Glasgow studio, retouching photographs, but when the studio burned down he began painting. His reputation was made when he was commissioned by Queen Victoria in 1888 to paint her state visit to Glasgow. Thereafter he moved in the highest echelons of British society. I had thought myself something of an expert on Lavery’s work, and I was a bit piqued when Byrne told me of this sleight of hand. But how did you spot it? I asked him. Oh, I always thought there was something fishy about the blackout curtain, you know, it’s very sloppy painting, unlike the rest of it. So I asked Burrows about it. Burrows? I said. This was Freddy Burrows, the Keeper of Irish Art, my boss; we’d never got on, and he made a point of telling me as little as possible. After all, Conway, he’d say, we’re not here to educate you, I think you’re well able to educate yourself, so just get on with it. Yes, Burrows, I got him over a couple of drinks, and he spilled the beans, said Byrne. I’d always thought of Burrows as an archetypal Presbyterian, certainly not one given to casual drinking. Oh, said Byrne, you’d be surprised, everyone’s got a guilty secret, and he tittered meaningfully. So we’ll have to put things to rights, said Byrne, and over the next few months he worked on a version of The Daylight Raid, painting a garish Madonna on the windowsill, and replacing the German bombers with British helicopters. He called it The Daylight Raid by Sir John Lavery, 1929.

But of course, Nina, much of this was known to you, for when I mentioned it before our trip to Berlin in the winter of 1982, you said, Burrows? Yes, he’s a client of mine. Charming man, if you get to know him. You were wearing an unfamiliar perfume that day. What’s that? I asked. What’s what? you said. Your perfume, I said. Oh, Vol de Nuit, you said, Night Flight, by Guerlain, 1933. You offered me your wrist and I caught a burst of orange, then cool wood and balsam notes followed by an enigmatic hint of spice.