Exchange Place (20 page)

The Found Hour

As I stood in the vestibule of 14 Exchange Place, lost for a moment in a lost time, I heard the Albert Clock tolling the hour as it had done, hour by hour, for the fugitive protagonist of
Odd Man Out
. I counted three strokes. I looked at my watch. It read four. Spring forward, Fall back. I realised I’d forgotten to turn the clock back last night, the last Sunday in October, Hallowe’en as it happened. Today was All Saints’ Day. Then I remembered that the same thing had happened to me when I wrote in the missing notebook, when was it? One or two or three years ago, years that had passed in a blur so that it seemed to me only yesterday. I could hardly tell one year in the past decade or two from another; as we age, subjective time accelerates. The summers of our childhoods seem to stretch forever; now they seem over before they have begun. On the other hand, when we are abroad, away from our routine existence, time seems to slow; every day is full of incident, new things to see, and a week seems a month. And indeed, the three days of my enforced absence from home, when I was abroad as it were, seemed much longer than that. As it was, I had an hour to kill. I set my watch to three o’clock, the Omega likewise, sat down on the stairs, and took Harland’s notebook from my briefcase. It was still pouring rain outside.

I opened the notebook at random and glanced at the handwriting that was still familiar to me after all these years, a formal miniscule out of character with his ostensibly open face, and the broad strokes and swirls of his painting. I had remarked on it to Harland once and he said he had modelled it on the tiny handwriting of Walter Benjamin. He said it disciplined his thoughts, and he then showed me a book he was reading, written by a Lisa Fittko, who had helped Benjamin escape through the Pyrenees. Benjamin had spent some time in Lourdes before embarking on that fatal journey. The hotels and boarding houses of the town, usually catering almost exclusively to Catholic pilgrims, were packed with refugees, many of whom were Jewish: one of those bizarre displacements that happen in times of war. It was September 1940. Benjamin had already tried and failed to escape through Marseilles, a city in whose apocalyptic atmosphere, said Fittko, there were new stories every day about absurd escape attempts; plans involving fantasy boats and fictitious captains, visas for countries not found on any map, and passports issued by nations which no longer existed. She referred to Benjamin as ‘Old Benjamin’ – she didn’t know why, since Benjamin was only forty-eight or so, she said, the age that Harland and I were at the time, and we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as old. Yet the photograph of Benjamin in the book showed a man who looked much older and wiser than us, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, his hair rising from the high brow in a shock of convoluted waves shot with grey, the very image of an intellectual.

Benjamin had a heart condition, and his ascent through the mountains was arduous. He was carrying a heavy, black leather briefcase which contained his new manuscript. Timing himself with his gold watch, he would stop every ten minutes to rest for one minute. At the time Fittko had only a vague idea of Benjamin’s reputation, and to her the briefcase was a superfluous burden, ‘a monstrosity’. But he would not be parted from it. He dared not lose it, the manuscript was more important than himself, he said. Of course we all know what happened then, said Harland, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine when he arrived in Portbou, and the manuscript vanished. Years later scholars searched high and low in Portbou for the manuscript, descending even into the catacombs of the town. But it was never found, though the briefcase was entered in the death register, with the notation, ‘and some papers of an unknown content’. So the briefcase became a relic made all the more potent by its disappearance. There’s another twist not mentioned by Fittko, said Harland. Benjamin was buried not as a Jew but as a Christian, in the Catholic cemetery of Portbou; the death certificate was made out in the name of Doctor Benjamin Walter, and the parish records contain a receipt for payment of a Mass for the dead man’s soul, and the rent of the cemetery niche. So in death Benjamin became someone else, a reversal of his name, said Harland.

Death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell, Benjamin has written elsewhere. And I reflected, in this hour granted to me by an arbitrary act of temporal authority, on Benjamin’s saying that Marcel Proust was most aware of his approaching death when he was writing, as the syntax of his prose enacted, step by step, parenthesis by parenthesis, his fear of suffocating through asthma: a counterpoint of ageing and remembering, not what he experienced, but what he recollected. A fugue in other words, left necessarily incomplete by the author’s death; Proust, when alive, and dying, was constantly revising in the light of what he had written since, and there could be no end to the enterprise. And when Benjamin suggests that Proust’s celebrated involuntary memory is much closer to forgetting than to remembering, I think of how little remains to me of my times with Harland, from sober encounters to drunken, ecstatic nights when we lived life to the full, whose details were almost entirely forgotten by us the next day, and faded into nothingness thereafter. When Proust in a well-known passage described the hour that was most his own, he did it in such a way that everyone can find in it his own existence. We might almost call it an everyday hour, a lost twittering of birds, a breath drawn at the sill of an open window. And I remember sunlight falling through stained glass windows at a certain hour of an afternoon, what year it is I do not know, and sunlit bubbles rising through a glass of beer as Harland raises the glass to me and to himself. What did I, Kilfeather, really know of Harland? I did not even know where he came from. When I would hazard a question as to his previous existence, the answers were always ambiguous or vague. We lived in a present of which I remember only some fragments. I see him painting me, or painting himself, and can no longer remember which was which.

It is late at night, and it is dark, but a shaft of moonlight falls through the dormer window of the studio, illuminating Harland’s pale face as he draws on the Black Rose, then hands it to me. We listen to the Albert Clock toll the hour. Twelve strokes. Ask not for whom the bells tolls, I said. Not quite, said Harland,
never send to know
for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. John Donne, ‘Meditation XVII’. He got up from the chair, lifted a book from a shelf, and riffled through the pages. Ah yes. And just before that, we have this passage: All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. One John to all the others, said John Harland.

The Raleigh Bicycle

Before Kilpatrick knew it, Paul Gordon vanished. A dim light came on and Kilpatrick saw John Bourne for the first time in, what was it? ten, twenty, thirty years. He was seated in a high-backed armchair. He seemed scarcely aged. The grey Prince of Wales check suit he was wearing was one that Kilpatrick knew from before. Bourne was wearing a brown fedora hat with the brim pulled over his eyes and he wore a wry smile. Seeing is believing, is it not, said Bourne. You have been looking for me, and what do you see? Something that I always was, albeit that for some time I did not know that thing. And who are you? he said to Kilpatrick. I am John Kilpatrick, said Kilpatrick. That remains to be seen, said John Bourne. We come to everything in time, and what is time? As John Donne would have it, is it in ‘Meditation XIV’? If we consider time to be motion, then it has three stations, past, present and future; but the first and last of these is not, because one is not now and the other is not yet; and that which you call present, is not now the same that it was, when you began to call it so. So we flit eternally into the future, infinitesimal split second by second. In like manner a hierarchy of angels can dance upon a pinpoint. What are you then? said Kilpatrick. I am you, I am anybody, said Bourne. Before I lost my sight I was blind, and now I see. I see the legions that are each of us hovering about us as if watching over us, for all that they are blind to our existence. Only I have retrospection for them, and that enables me to see. But let me show you who you are. Bourne raised himself and gestured to a cheval mirror that stood beside him. What do you see? said Bourne. Kilpatrick walked over to the mirror and regarded himself. I see John Kilpatrick, he said, the man I am. Well and good, said Bourne, but what do you see behind you in the mirror? I see a door, said Kilpatrick. To see you we must go and open it, said Bourne.

They walked to the door which led them to a large bright chamber. Welcome to the Memory Palace, said Bourne. He gestured to the shelves and alcoves which lined the room, each of them filled with a miscellanea of objects. Third shelf, top right, you’ll see a tin toy submarine, a little rusted. That was Stanley, who thought himself someone else until he touched the toy, or it him. This alcove here on the left, a bookcase made out of an orange crate, you can still smell the oranges, that was Burgess, same story. He swept his arm around the room. Kilpatrick saw an old Clydesdale radio, a red and white enamel tricycle, a pottery owl, a cricket bat, a cast-iron mangle, a frayed blanket. There were hundreds of objects arrayed in no apparent order. I know where everything is, said Bourne. All the things you see here I see too, because I link them to the people, and their stories of who they were, and who they might have been. And I see the things too because I have touched them all, and they me, and I know their aura. For all of them were loved deeply in their day, and were alive to them that loved them. So let me show you who you were, because you are what you always were. Next room.

There you are. Raleigh tourer, 1959 model, Sturmey-Archer gears, said Bourne, I think you’ll find it all in order. Kilpatrick’s heart stopped for a second as he looked at the bicycle. He recognized it instantly in the deep blue enamel livery set off by the whitewall tires, and the proud worn leather of the seat, and the butterfly curve of the handlebars, everything about it that he so loved, and he was thirteen again. What do you see? said Bourne. I see a boy of thirteen, said Kilpatrick. It is a beautiful June morning with fair weather clouds scudding in the blue sky and I am riding my bicycle down a country lane. Suddenly I feel as if I have lived this moment before, in the same place, though I have never travelled this road before. An extraordinary feeling of stillness comes upon me. This summer afternoon has always existed. Everything is quivering and streaming upwards in a kind of ecstasy, my body is vibrating to everything around me, said Kilpatrick, and I am unbearably happy because in this endless moment I do not know who I am because I am everything around me.

So it is written in the book, said Bourne, the book of all our lives. What is your name? Kilpatrick hesitated. The bicycle, man, look at the bicycle, said Bourne. And then Kilpatrick knew who he was. He turned the bicycle round and there, in white paint on the seat tube in a boy’s careful schoolboy script, was written J. Kilfeather. So now you know, said Bourne, as I once got to know. You know what got me? No, not the cricket bat. I played that one well at the time. Top left shelf, seventh object along. Kilfeather found himself staring at pair of navy women’s court shoes, late 1940s style, stacked heel. My mother’s shoes, said Bourne, I wore them one Hallowe’en when I was what? four or five, and I clattered around in the dark in them and a long dress, seeing fireworks go off all around me. Funny the way things move you. You suffer from migraine in your teens? Kilfeather nodded. A lot of us did, said Bourne, with others it’s epilepsy. It’s all in the aura, don’t you see? It changes the world for you, or rather it changes you for the world, because the world is always what it is no matter what. When I realized that I really started to paint. The other thing was just something I did for the Other Side unbeknownst to myself, when they put the fugue on me, just like they did on you. The fugue? said Kilfeather. You know your classic fugue, said Bourne. Yes, said Kilfeather, from
fugere
, to flee. Yes, said Bourne, variant of temporary global amnesia, person thinks he’s someone else, often found in migraineurs, normally it only lasts a matter of months or weeks, but the Other Side found a way of inducing it to last for years. It was only when I was born again that I remembered the chair, the helmet with the electrodes, like one of those hair salon hairdryers. Not that it was unpleasant. Far from it, something like sinking into black velvet. I heard a voice in my head speaking of green fields. Then I was gone, and John Browne the printer woke up in another city as John Bourne the painter. The Other Side don’t like their alters to be too disjunctive. I kept the name Bourne, a bit more class to it, don’t you think? Though you may call me Browne. So there you are: you’re an alter too. But there’s a twist to the plot. The Other Side have planted another alter in Belfast, a John Kilfeather who is masquerading as you, unbeknownst to himself. Not to mention the fact that he’s introduced a character dangerously close to me, courtesy of the Other Side again, calls him John Harland. We must redress the balance, said John Browne, and Kilfeather knew he was speaking the truth. What must I do? he said.

First we must kit you out, said Browne. The suit is excellent, of course, what an operation though, overkill if you ask me, our people in Belfast had the neighbourhood closed down with a bomb scare for three days just to get into the house. You won’t need the book, we’ve already been through it with a fine-tooth comb. Interesting propositions if fanciful at times, doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. In any event it’s a copy, we needed the fake Kilfeather to have the original for continuity purposes, and of course you will have access to that when the time comes. The only thing you really need is the gun. The gun? said Kilfeather, and Browne handed him the Luger pistol.