The Pen Friend (10 page)

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.