The Pen Friend (18 page)

Just so, a word in a philosophical language. I was not altogether surprised to learn that one of the most interesting of such languages was invented by a Frenchman, Jean François Sudre, a musician educated at the Paris Conservatory. Walking the city as a student, he had been struck by its many sounds, from the tolling of the church bells to the screech of a knife-grinder’s stone. It struck him that all these had a musical value, which could be expressed by the seven notes of the scale, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. As the city broadcast itself, so everything in the city, everything in the world, everything in the known universe, could be expressed as a series of musical notes, whether played or written. So he proceeded to make up his vocabulary from the seven syllables of the scale, according to principles of philosophical classification. Initial
do
indicated a class of key, that of Man, moral and physical;
dodo
gave a sub-class, religion;
dododo
a third sub-division, and so on. The other major classifications were
re
, clothing, household, family;
mi
, human actions, bad qualities;
fa
, country, agriculture, war, sea, travel (
fafa
stood for sickness and medicine);
sol
, arts, sciences;
la
, industry, commerce; and
si
, society, government, finance, police. By shifting the accent from one syllable to another, he formed within a single stem the verb, the noun of the thing, the noun of the person, and the adverb corresponding to a given idea.

Sudre published the principles of his language in 1817, calling it Solrésol, which meant ‘language’ in Solrésol, and he thought its resources practically unlimited, not least because such a system lends itself to all possible forms of graphic, phonetic, and optical expression. If the seven notes of the musical scale are pronounced in the ordinary way, you can speak the language like any other; but you can also sing it, or play it on an instrument; with bells and horns, you can communicate to a ship in distress; substitute the seven colours of the rainbow for the seven notes of the scale, and you have an optical language, to be spoken by means of flags, lanterns or rockets.

Enthusiasts of Sudre’s language – they included Jules Verne and Victor Hugo – thought that elaborate works of oratory might be produced by means of son et lumière, or poems in the form of banquets, for the system could as easily appeal to the sense of taste. And it did not stop there, for perfumes might as easily be employed. The coloured knots of a textile rug could be a literal text, the pattern in a dress a commentary on its own style. To a speaker of Solrésol, birdsong might contain unintended meanings. I do not know, Nina, whether Baudelaire knew Solrésol, but it seems to lie behind that poem you used to quote to me, ‘Correspondances’, in which Baudelaire speaks of the trees of the forest giving forth confused words, of perfumes that are like the skin of babies, or green meadows, or oboe music; a world in which perfumes, colours, sounds, all correspond. Thus everything in the universe is meaningful. There are messages to be read in the stars, in the stones of the road, in the coloured lichens on a stone wall, if you look long enough.

Which brings me to your postcard, and what it says:
Look for a long time at what pleases you
. It’s like something you might find in a fortune cookie. A bon mot in the bonbon. And I’ve looked at your postcard for a long time, because it pleases me to try to unravel its meaning.
Dolls, 1690–1700, Lord and Lady Clapham in formal dress, Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum
, according to the caption. I know these dolls, for I too saw them in the
V
&
A
Museum, where you must have bought this card, but then I did not look at them as messages from you. It was my last birthday, you remember, just last October, I was there, perhaps you too were there, when you bought this card and the other of
Two Dutchmen and Two Courtesans
, did you share the same gallery space as me, and breathe the air I breathed, did you brush against me unwittingly, unseeingly, or with full knowledge and complete consent? Would you have known me, whatever I’d become since last we met, or not? Whatever the case, the two cards must be connected. Because they both come from the same source, and they both come from you. Even when we buy postcards as souvenirs or decorative objects, we have a possible recipient in mind. And you must have been thinking of me then, you must have been thinking of us. Perhaps the
Two Dutchmen and Two Courtesans
, poised in their tentative minuet, could stand for the first stages of our relationship, our getting to know each other, wavering between ourselves as singletons, ourselves as couple; and Lord and Lady Clapham might be what we were towards the end, or rather – the thought has only now occurred to me – what we might have become, these two ensconced in their elaborate high-backed chairs, impassive and self-satisfied, their attitudes and dress unaltered through the centuries, had you not left me as you did. And as we become them, their dress becomes us well: I picture myself in the red coat with the over-big, redundant buttons, the nonchalantly tied silk cravat, the brocaded waistcoat, the wig of human hair; your outfit is slightly more modest, but the expression given to your face, it seems to me, is more circumspect, more calculating, that of a lady who is one step ahead of her consort, though convention demands her to be placed slightly behind. She takes the longer view of their mutual history. Is this how it ended up between us? Or is this what time might have done to us?

The Dinkie, being a Dinkie, doesn’t hold a lot of ink, and it ran out on me two sentences ago, if questions are sentences. If you are reading this now (and I hope one day you shall) you’ll have noticed the broken flow in the writing, where the last few words petered out and I had to go over them again, like picking up a dropped stitch in a piece of knitting, except of course with knitting you’d be using the same needles, whereas I welcomed the break as an opportunity to change pens, for my hand was getting cramp from the small Dinkie.

I pondered my choice for some time. Should it be the American Wahl Eversharp Doric in Silver Grey Web, an important, legal-looking instrument, whose twelve-sided columnar design recalls the Doric porticos of American courthouses, and which one can picture in the hand of a judge, signing procedural documents, or sentences? Or another Onoto made in the year of my birth, this one with a transparent amber barrel that shows what ink remains? Or the 1939 Conway Stewart 175, which, because of its dull and unprepossessing photograph on eBay, I was able to pick up for a song, hoping that a better pen lay behind its poor image, and so it proved, as a thorough cleaning brought out the glowing splendour of its Toffee Swirl with Rose and Mauve Inclusions body, while the gold trim shone up like new? Eventually I settled on this much plainer pen, one which could not be further from the gemlike iridescence of the Dinkie I laid down for it. It’s a big black Croxley, made just after the War by the stationery manufacturers John Dickinson Ltd, and named after Croxley Mills in Watford. Here, in 1830, the original John Dickinson had set up his new ‘continuous web’ mechanised paper manufacturing process, which replaced the handmade techniques of the day. Dickinson had first made his name in the Napoleonic Wars, when he came up with a paper for cannon cartridges that did not smoulder after firing, thus preventing the many fatal premature explosions which occurred when a new charge was rammed down the barrel. Today John Dickinson plc is among the largest stationery manufacturers in the world. I wrote my notes for the Esperanto book in their Black n’ Red notebooks. And, as it happens, I’m writing this on Dickinson Croxley Script A4 paper; you can see the watermark if you hold it up to the light. But this is all by the bye, for I only discovered this information a few minutes ago, after a Google search on John Dickinson, before I began writing this with the Dickinson Croxley pen. The reason why I chose it is because engraved on its barrel are the words

MANCHESTER UNITY OF ODDFELLOWS

The best Friendly Society

and, intrigued by this inscription when I first saw it on eBay, I could not resist buying it. I got it for a few pounds: Croxleys, though they are very solidly made, with great nibs, are not deemed to be as collectable as some other English pens, and the black colour, together with the inscription, lowers the value of this one even further. The Oddfellows, as I discovered, are an organisation akin to the Freemasons, claiming like them a leading role in the French Revolution, and an ancestry stretching back to biblical times, in this instance the expulsion of the Israelites from Babylon in 587
BC
. And it struck me, in the course of remembering our relationship, that perhaps the organisation you worked for was a kind of Oddfellows, once a clandestine organisation with code-names and passwords, which had evolved into one which, ostensibly at least, worked for the greater good of society.

I remember your quoting to me a saying of Talleyrand’s,
La parole a été donnée à l’homme pour déguiser sa pensée
, words were given to man to disguise his thoughts, and perhaps that is true, for though my writing here, as you can see, is as calm and measured as my choice of words, it would not have been so had I written to you first thing yesterday morning after seeing the Irish stamp on your card, and the Dublin postmark. Then, my hand would have trembled had I put pen to paper, for Dublin, as you know, was a turning point in our relationship, like a door that closes off one prospect and opens up another; and I did not know whether to feel pleasure or pain that you were on the same island as me. It was some hours before I could calm myself sufficiently to write. But at other times I have not so deferred the moment, I have responded immediately and honestly, you can see how my writing is wavered by excitement or emotion, the hurried scrawl of my words as they struggle to keep pace with my thought. And then again, because I sometimes do not know what to feel or think, I write slowly to discover what those thoughts or feelings might be, finding them sometimes to turn out quite differently to what I had expected, for whatever happened in the past, even the immediate past, is changed when viewed in retrospect.

We had gone to Dublin for the weekend to celebrate my promotion to Head Keeper of Irish Art at the Belfast Municipal Gallery. We’d known each other for a year. Six months before, the Assistant Keeper, Sam Catherwood, had dropped dead of a stroke; and some months after that Freddy Burrows, the Head Keeper, took early retirement. Although I was next in line, I didn’t really expect to get the job; posts like this usually went to outsiders, so I was pleasantly surprised when I was told hours after the interview that I had been successful.

We stayed at the Shelbourne Hotel. I toyed with the idea of booking Room 217, where
JFK
and Jacqueline had stayed in 1958 during his presidential campaign, but it proved a little beyond even the means of my new salary. As it was, I managed to get 412, the number of Lee Miller’s room in Hôtel Scribe, telling the desk not to let you know that I had asked for it in advance. So when the key was handed over, you were delighted. Great number, you said to the concierge, and you turned to me and laughed, and he smiled discreetly and said, Yes, madam, it’s a very good room, overlooks the Green, I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable there. Imagine, Angel, of all the rooms they could have given us, they give us Lee Miller’s number in Hôtel Scribe, isn’t that amazing? you said. Yes, I said, and did you know that James Joyce used to drink both in the Hôtel Scribe, and in the Shelbourne? Really? you said, and I said, Yes, really, though I didn’t know it for a fact, it was more of a likely possibility, a way of letting you know that this was my territory now.

My job often brought me to Dublin, and I knew it well, whereas you’d only been there fleetingly. We ended up that night in Mulligans pub in Poolbeg Street, where Joyce set a scene from one of his
Dubliners
stories, ‘Counterparts’, it’s one of those dark pubs where the light seems filtered through nicotine and settling Guinness, and the Guinness there is really very good, you remember? That paradoxical edge of bitterness behind the creamy-buttermilk-thick black. Do you know ‘Counterparts’? I said, and you said, No. Well, it’s rather a depressing story, really, there’s this clerk in a law firm, Crosbie & Alleyne, Farrington, he’s called, and he’s supposed to be copying out this contract between these two parties, Bodley and Kirway, they’re called, you know how it was in those days, dip pens and inkwells, no photocopying, and he’s not really on the job, he’s the kind of man who slips out for the odd jar every now and again, and his boss, that’s Alleyne, he’s got this broad Belfast accent, comes in and says, Where’s the Bodley and Kirway contract? and Farrington makes some poor kind of excuse, he says, But Mr Shelley said, sir, he says, and Alleyne mimics him, he says, Mr Shelley said, sir, well, kindly attend to what I say and not to what Mr Shelley says, sir, says Alleyne, and when Farrington tries another excuse, Alleyne says, Do you take me for a fool? Do you think me an utter fool? and Farrington looks round him at all the other clerks, and pauses for effect, and says, I don’t think, sir, he says, that that’s a fair question to put to me, and all the clerks titter nervously at this impertinence, so of course the boss really flies off the handle then, and it ends up that Farrington has to make an abject apology to him, and he knows that from here on out his life is going to be hell in the office.