Exchange Place (10 page)

Morning Star

We’ll do another sitting next week, said Harland. I put the notebook away
… I wrote in the current notebook. I was pondering my next sentence when who should I see coming towards me down Ann Street but John and Jo, John Beringer the watchmaker that is, and his partner Joanna Leavey. Jo did face-painting for schools. They made a stylish couple, and you could see them coming a long way off, he in a slate-blue leather knee-length coat, nicely distressed, a green and red Tootal scarf at his neck, she in a 1960s navy check box jacket and a burnt orange silk scarf. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three o’clock; it was Wednesday, and I knew from of old that they took coffee at Caffè Nero around three on Wednesdays, regular as clockwork, you might say. We often bumped into each other accidentally on purpose. They had first met each other in Caffè Nero, two years back. She was sitting, pen in hand, doing the
Guardian
crossword. He was sitting, pen in hand, doing the
Guardian
crossword. As Jo lifted her eyes from the crossword, pondering a clue, John did likewise; their eyes met, and after that it was plain sailing. They’d both been looking at the same clue. And what was the clue? I asked, when I heard of this marriage of minds. Seven down, said Jo, Believe in the proposed route, say, in passing, 2,3,3. By the way, said John.

John Beringer, Joanna Leavey, I said. John Kilfeather, they said, what gives? So I told them the story of my displacement. And Beringer told me this story. It was what, twenty, thirty years ago, he was living in a flat beside the Waterworks. I was watching
Top of the Pops
, I’d smoked a bit of dope, he said, and I goes into the kitchen to raid the fridge and this blue flash comes out of nowhere, like sheet lightning, more of a flicker, the glass door of the kitchen blows in, then I hear the bang, there’s been a bomb in the entry behind the house. I must have blinked or something, when I look again the whole kitchen’s covered in this fine layer of dust, the colours are all bleached out, it’s like some kind of simulacrum, you know, a projection from another world, the room’s not the room it was before, I’ve just walked into another universe. So after a while the cops arrive on the scene, all blue flashing lights and sirens, and I’m out in the entry looking at the yard door, it’s been blown off its hinges, I’ve just taken a drag of dope, and this cop comes up to me and asks if I’m all right, and I blow a lungful of Mexico’s finest in his face, and I says, perfectly all right, officer, and he looks me in the eye, and he says, I haven’t seen you, son, and he walks on. Good cop.

Speaking of which, said Beringer, anything on the go? Oh, the usual, I say, Black Rose, or there’s a nice bit of Silver Haze if you like, nice mellow smoke, nice airy feel about it. So he orders half an ounce and we talk a bit about dope, and Jo says how she used to love looking into a flower-head with a magnifier, it was like entering a magic forest, and she talks pretty knowledgeably about
THC
and
DBD
, the high and the stony. I don’t know Joanna that well, and I say, You seem to know your way around a flower-head, and she says, Yes, I know, the Little Weed, and why wouldn’t I, I used to deal dope from the cloakroom of the Ulster Museum when I worked there. So she tells me how the client would come and leave his or her coat with her, payment in a designated pocket, take a stroll around the museum, and when the client leaves, the deal’s in the same pocket. And she’d maybe tell the client to go and look at the John Lavery painting, you know, the one with Lady Lavery kneeling at a big window, there’s aircraft in the sky over London, and to look at it sideways to see what they might see.

I knew the painting well. Back in the seventies John Harland had introduced me to James Conn, the Keeper of Art at the museum. Conn was going blind from diabetes at the time, diabetic retinopathy, they call it, but he held down his job for some years even when he’d gone completely blind, it seemed his memory for paintings had improved since he lost his sight, he could see practically every work he’d ever seen, in his mind’s eye, he could still direct purchases when something appropriate came up for sale. And Conn told me to go and look at the Lavery some time when I had the chance,
The Daylight Raid from My Studio Window, 7th July 1917
, Lavery called it. It records the occasion when twenty-one German Gotha biplanes bombed London for the second time, the same Gothas that Proust had seen bombing Paris in
Time Regained, Le temps retrouvé
. Lavery’s wife is depicted from the back, kneeling before a blackout curtain, seemingly observing the action. The blackout curtain is the key, you need to look at it sideways, said Conn. Look for a Virgin Mary, he said. I knew that Lavery, a Belfast Catholic, had indeed painted Hazel Lavery as the Virgin Mary on occasions, but I couldn’t see its relevance to this painting.

So I went and looked at it. Sideways. And there, obscured by the putative blackout curtain, on the windowsill, if you squinted at it in a certain light, was a darker, keyhole-shaped patch, and when you looked at it with the Virgin Mary in mind it looked like one of those statues, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, as if the kneeling Lady Lavery is praying to the Madonna in the hour of danger. Or mirrors Her. I remembered the Litany of Our Lady from childhood. Tower of David, House of Gold, Mirror of Justice, Gate of Heaven, Mystical Rose, Morning Star. So what’s the story? I asked Conn. And I’m trying to remember what he told me, through the fog of all those years, the bombings, the drinking in pubs that were liable to be bombed at any minute, the blanks in memory, the obliterated buildings, the people who had died or disappeared, or who had been disappeared. I’d like to quiz him about it now, but he’s been dead for years. I know the painting was one of a number Lavery gave to the Belfast Municipal Art Gallery, as it was then, in 1929. Like practically all public institutions in Northern Ireland, the gallery was run by unionists, some of whom, not to put too fine a point on it, were anti-Catholic. Did Lavery black out the Madonna himself? He was known as a painter of royalty, knighted in 1918. But then he had painted Michael Collins and Roger Casement. And the blackout curtain was a slapdash piece of work, not like Lavery at all, it was one of the things that had drawn Conn’s attention to it. Was it the work of another hand? Whatever the case, a murky story lay behind this detail invisible to all but those who had been told what to look for, or to those who had, like Conn, looked carefully enough, without being told. There was no mention of it in the art histories. I’d never heard anyone speak of it again, until now.

So how come you knew about the Lavery? I asked Jo. Oh, I was in Paris, said Jo, can’t remember what year, I met this guy in a bar, English accent, bit of a dandy, said he used to live in Belfast, John Bourne, that was the name, I remembered it, you know, because of
The Bourne Identity
, he told me about the Lavery. And there was something dodgy about him, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, as if he’d been spinning me a yarn, but when I got back to Belfast I checked it out, and he was right, the Lavery was dodgy.

A Yellow Beam

So what brings you to Paris? said Gordon. Kilpatrick told him his story. As for Gordon, he was with the Irish Diplomatic Service, First Secretary to the Ambassador, with a special brief for Culture. Had been in Paris for two years. Before that, in many places: Colombia, Baghdad, El Salvador, to name some. In Beirut he had been involved in the negotiations to free the hostage Brian Keenan, who had travelled to Lebanon under two passports, British and Irish – a dual nationality that might well have been instrumental in his release, though there was no way of knowing for sure. Kilpatrick thought of Brian Keenan, and the other one, what was his name, McCarthy, John McCarthy, an Irish name, though he was English, the pair of them chained to a radiator telling each other stories to keep their spirits up. Singing songs. What’s that song of Dylan’s, said Gordon, we used to sing in the old days, back in Sixth Form? The keeper of the prison, he asked it of me, how good, how good, does it feel to be free? And Kilpatrick replied, And I answered him most mysteriously, are the birds free in the chains of their skyways? He thought of the vast flocks of starlings that wheeled over the Seine at dusk, moment by moment changing from wisp of smoke to tumbling cloud, bewildering the eye with the speed of their movements. The same starlings over Belfast, over Manchester. Similar yet everchanging patterns.

But what brings you here, specifically, said Gordon, Hôtel Nevers? I don’t think you got that far in your story. Yesterday in the James Joyce, said Kilpatrick, I met a man with a black briefcase. Before Kilpatrick could name the man in question, Gordon said, Freddy Gabriel, and he asked you along to the Modiano do. Of course you know Freddy Gabriel’s a spy, said Gordon. Nice Oxford don-type spy, but still a spy, at least in a manner of speaking. Everyone knows he’s a spy. For all we know he might be letting us know. Part of his game. That briefcase of his, for instance, hidden camera, mike. You can buy them online, for Chrissake. Everyone can be their own James Bond these days. Or think it. But as we know, it’s not about the information. It’s how you use it. Or what you think it is. What you think it’s worth. It’s about the deal. There’s always something under the table. You have to ask yourself how well you know who’s sitting on the other side. If they are who they say they are, or who they represent. There’s always doubletalk. You watch the body language. They hide their hands under the table, usually they’re hiding something. But then they might want you to think that. And then we have to ask ourselves who we are, and who or what we represent. Funny the way I took you for John Bourne. Some say his real name is Harland, but somehow I can’t see him as a Harland. Much too practical, if you think of Harland & Wolff. And he laughed. Kilpatrick thought of asking if this Bourne might be the Bourne he knew, and as Gordon talked Kilpatrick was beginning to rehearse the story he might tell Gordon, but he thought better of it, and bade his time.

I guess I took you for him because of the clothes, said Gordon. Did you know that in the diplomatic service they train you to look at clothes?
Le style, c’est l’homme
, that sort of thing. Part of the cultural discourse. No, Bourne dresses like you. Or you like him. Dapper. The sort of man who thinks about textures and colours. And John Bourne has an uncanny feeling for such things, considering he’s blind. Blind? said Kilpatrick. He tried to see the Bourne he knew gone blind. Yes, what is it, diabetic retinopathy? said Gordon. One of those things they diagnose when it’s too late. You have diabetes, the blood vessels at the back of the eye start to leak. Anyway, Bourne can take a piece of material between finger and thumb, gauge the weight, the fabric, the colour even. Says his sense of touch has improved dramatically since he lost his sight. And he’s become more intimately acquainted with the cut of clothes, he says. He can run his hand over a suit and tell to within a fraction whether it will fit. And then there’s his painting. Painting? said Kilpatrick. Yes, said Gordon, Bourne paints. He was a painter before he went blind, and when he went blind he was in despair, I believe, but something made him get back into it again. Honestly, if you saw his work you wouldn’t believe it was done by a blind man. I met him through Freddy Gabriel, of course, Freddy has a way of finding these characters, all part of his network. I think he thinks Bourne has some kind of extrasensory perception, sees things the normal person can’t see, which makes him a good candidate for spy-work. You should talk to Freddy about him.
Un autre Ricard
? Kilpatrick nodded.

As Gordon went up to the bar Kilpatrick remembered Bourne talking about portraiture. What do we know of ourselves? he would say. Or of anything? Conscious perception is only a fraction of what we know through our senses. By far the greater part we get through subliminal perception. When I paint a face, am I painting the person I see before me, or the person I have in mind from all those times of seeing him before? Am I painting a figment of a figment? What do we remember of ourselves? A few fleeting fragments, which we make into shifting histories of ourselves. A kind of interior monologue. Sometimes we dramatize ourselves in the third-person. You know George Orwell’s essay, ‘Why I Write’? He describes how from early adolescence he made up a continuous story about himself, a kind of diary existing only in his mind. For minutes at a time, says Orwell, this kind of thing would be running through his head: He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the ink-pot. He moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf … and so on and so forth. I like the detail about the tortoiseshell cat, said Bourne. But anyway, the point is, through language we make up a fictive self, we project it back into the past, and forward into the future, and even beyond the grave. But the self we imagine surviving death is a phantom even in life. A ghost in the brain. As for painting what’s before my eyes, said Bourne, sometimes I like to shut my eyes and let the brush take over.

Kilpatrick knew the Orwell essay, an apologia for his political writing. In a peaceful age, said Orwell, he might have written ornate or merely descriptive books; as it was, after five years serving in Burma as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police, a profession to which he was entirely unsuited, he was moved to write out of a sense of political injustice. Then came the Spanish Civil War. And yet, said Orwell, he never wanted to abandon the world-view he acquired in childhood. So long as he remained alive and well, he would continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Gordon came back with the drinks. Kilpatrick and Gordon poured the water into the Ricard and watched it go cloudy.