The Pen Friend (19 page)

He badly needs a drink after all this, but he’s just spent his last penny on the glass of Guinness he’d slipped out for when he was supposed to be copying the Bodley and Kirway contract, so he pawns his watch, he gets six shillings for it, and he goes on a pub-crawl, he meets these various cronies on the way, and he tells them the story of how he faced down the boss, he acts Alleyne shaking his fist in his face, then he acts himself delivering the smart remark, and who should come in but another crony, so he has to tell the story again, only better this time. And all this time he’s standing the rounds, no one else seems to have any money.

Anyway, they end up in Mulligans, the small parlour at the back, we were in one off the snugs just off the front bar, and I gestured with the hand that wasn’t holding my pint, down there, I said, they made it into an Art Deco bar in the thirties, it’s really rather special in its own way, but this, and I gestured again, to the dark surroundings of the front bar, this hasn’t changed since Joyce’s time, and anyway, I said, two young women with big hats and a young man in a check suit come in, Joyce is very good on dress, one of the women’s wearing an immense scarf of peacock-blue muslin wound round her hat, it’s knotted in a great bow under her chin, and she’s wearing primrose-yellow gloves up to the elbow, and Farrington starts to make eyes at her, he thinks she’s making eyes back at him, but then when the party gets up to go she brushes against his chair and says, O, pardon! in a London accent, and he realises she’s way beyond his class anyway, and he starts to think of all the money he’s spent on his so-called friends, there’s nothing he hates more than a sponge, and then someone proposes an arm-wrestling match, and Farrington gets beat twice by the one of the cronies he was standing drinks for, a mere stripling, and he ends up getting the tram home by himself, past the barracks, it’s dark and cold and wet, he doesn’t know what time it is, his watch is in the pawn, he’s spent all his money that wasn’t even his in the first place, and he doesn’t even feel drunk, and when he gets home his dinner’s cold and the fire’s out, one of his boys tells him his wife’s out at the chapel, and he starts to mimic him, Out at the chapel, at the chapel if you please! And he takes a walking-stick and starts to beat him, and the boy cries out, O, pa! Don’t beat me, pa! I’ll say a Hail Mary for you if you don’t beat me, pa, if you don’t beat me, I’ll say a Hail Mary, and that’s the end of the story.

You grimaced. Poor boy, you said, I don’t suppose the Hail Mary did him any good. What a funny religion. Yes, I said, Joyce thought so too, but then who would he have been without the Catholic Church? You know,
Introibo ad altare Dei
. Speaking of which, I think we need another pint, and I went up to the bar for another two, and I was standing with a five-pound note in my hand trying to catch the barman’s eye when someone brushed against me, and said, Sorry, and then took a little step back and said, Gabriel, Gabriel Conway! Despite the summer heat he was wearing a donkey jacket, and one of those Bob Dylan caps, he’d a beard, you remember him, and it took me a few seconds to place him, it was Hughie Falls, I hadn’t seen him from university days, he’d been in the
PD
then, the People’s Democracy, we’d gone on Civil Rights marches together, or at least he’d been on the same marches as me, so I ended up including him in the round, I was feeling expansive, and to tell you the truth, maybe I wanted to show you off to him, you were looking really well that night, sky-blue linen jacket, white linen knee-length skirt, red slingback open-toed shoes.

Anyway, we joined you in the snug, I introduced you to him, and in retrospect I think his eyes narrowed a little when he heard the name, Miranda Bowyer. Pleased to meet you, he said, and, leaning confidentially across the snug table, he started to engage me in a reminiscence of the old days, of the great victories we had won and the tragic setbacks we had suffered, and when the pints were finished he insisted on buying a round of half-uns, and these were going down nicely when he got round to asking me how I was doing. So I told him about the promotion, and his eyes definitely did narrow this time. So, he says, part of the establishment, is it? The cultural wing of the British war machine? And I took it for a typical Belfast heavy slagging, no real malice intended. Yes, I said, fully-fledged capitalist running-dog lackey, and went up for another round of whiskeys, or rather, just the two, you put your hand over your glass when I asked if you wanted another, and when I came back, Hughie Falls and you were engaged in some kind of animated discussion, and when I put the drinks down he began talking to me in Irish, bad West Belfast Irish, mangled grammar, terrible pronunciation, and I realised that he was quite drunk, not that we were entirely sober. And I also began to realise that his remarks before had been serious, or that the drink had made him serious, that and the bad Irish, for it wasn’t the kind of Irish that could handle any subtlety of expression.

So I played along with it a bit, answering him in Irish, realising as I did that much of it was lost on him, I might as well have been talking Swahili, and then I got fed up with it and started to answer him in English, and this really set him off, he began to rant about how I’d betrayed my birthright, me above all people, who had the good fortune to have Irish as a first language, people would give their eyeteeth to have had that opportunity, or at least he said what he thought the equivalent might be in Irish, it came out something like the teeth of their eyes, and then he said,
Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste
, better broken Irish than clever English, it was one of those tired old saws that Irish fanatics always ended up coming out with, and I said to him in English, Oh, piss off, Hughie, you know that’s nonsense, and by the way, your broken English isn’t much easier to follow than your broken Irish, and with that he slammed his glass down, the whiskey jumped out on to the table, Well, fuck you, Conway, he said in English, when the day comes you’ll be one of the ones they string up from the lamp-posts, and he left.

What was all that about? you said. Oh, the usual, I said, that I’m a Castle Catholic, a collaborator with the occupying forces, you know, what he was saying when he first sat down, we thought it was a bit of a joke. Yes, you said, when you were up at the bar he asked me what I did, and when I told him, he more or less accused me of being a spy for the Brits, he brought up the imperialist war machine again. But of course if you see it from his point of view, well, maybe you are a bit of a Castle Catholic, don’t you think so? Bought and sold for English gold? And I saw a glint in your eye I found difficult to fathom. Oh, come on, Nina, I’m just doing a job, and I do it well, I’m good at what I do, I said. Oh, no one doubts your ability, Angel, you said, but you know as well as I do that ability wasn’t enough to get intelligent Catholics like you a job in the old days. Before you went out on those Civil Rights marches, back in the Sixties. When did you start in the Gallery? Oh, what year was it, 1975, I said. And what were you doing before that? you said. Well, nothing much, Nina, I left university in 1971, went on the dole for a year, did a clerking job for a year, saved up enough to go round Europe for a few months, came back, went on the dole again, read a lot of books. Quite typical for people of my generation, I said.

And then you got this nice job, you said, how did that happen? Well, I said, a bit exasperated, the way it usually happens, I saw the ad, I applied, I went for the interview, I got the job. Oh, come on, Angel, surely there was more to it than that, you said. No one encouraged you to go in for it? No, I said. You wouldn’t by any chance have met a man in a bar? you said, you know, just a week or so before? Someone connected to the Gallery? Like John Bradbury? John Bradbury? I said, the collector, sits on the Board of Trustees, that John Bradbury? Yes, you said, I don’t know any other John Bradbury. Well, now that you mention it, yes, I happened to meet him in the Wellington Park, you know, in the back bar, some of us used to gather there, I forget who introduced me to him, might have been John Hewitt, you know, the poet. Yes, you said, and you had a long and interesting conversation with him, did you not? Oh, come on, Nina, I said, what are you getting at? As it happens, I found him very charming, and he knew his art, unlike a lot of the others on the Board. He knew Gerard Dillon, we had a great conversation about him, and Bradbury was very interested to know my father knew him. As a matter of fact, he even knew my father, spoke highly of him, was knowledgeable about Esperanto. Knew a bit of Irish, for that matter, and what little he knew was better than Hughie Falls’s Irish. So what? I said.

Well, you said, you wouldn’t be where you are now had John Bradbury not happened to bump into you that night, you said. Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Nina, we didn’t even discuss the Gallery, it was just talk about art. Just talk about art, you said. He didn’t mention the job at all? Well, I said, and I was struggling to remember that evening, we’d both ended up well jarred, and as I thought about it, I knew you were right, just before he left he said to me, I really enjoyed our chat, Gabriel, and oh, by the way, we’re looking for someone in the Gallery, there’ll be an ad in the
Irish News
next week, look out for it, won’t you? He said something like that, I said. Yes, you said. That’s because John Bradbury is
MO
2
, you said. And so are you. So maybe Hughie Falls isn’t that far off the mark. Don’t be ridiculous, Nina, how can I be
MO
2
when I don’t even know it? I said. You mean without your full knowledge and complete consent? you said. Well, Angel, you said, it’s like this. Some of us know from the beginning what we’re getting into, and we consent to it, and others don’t, because it takes them a while to arrive at full knowledge, and when they do, either they give complete consent, or they don’t. Some of them quit, the ones who take a long time take early retirement, whatever. Everyone of us has to make that decision, it just takes longer for some to arrive at it.

So now you know, what are you going to do about it? you said, and I didn’t know how seriously to take you, I realised that you too were a more than a little drunk. I hesitated, and before I could reply, you said, You see, Gabriel, you really are rather naïve. You really do think that art exists in some superior realm, untouched by politics, without the intervention of the Powers That Be. But I’m different, I know what I’ve got into, and I go along with it, I’ve made that compromise, but you think of yourself as being uncompromising, and uncompromised. I’ve made my decision, but you think there’s no decision to be made. You’re undecided, even though you don’t know it. But if it takes me to make a decision, then I make it, just as I could walk out the door of this pub now if I wanted to, you said. But you don’t want to, I said weakly. No? you said, and you got up and walked out. I sat there for a few long seconds, stunned, thinking this was only play-acting, that you’d be back immediately. Then I got up and went after you.

It was pouring rain outside, one of those July thunderstorms. I thought I glimpsed the heel of your red shoe disappearing down a side street, and I ran after you, but when I turned the corner, the street was dark and wet and empty. I ran on anyway, thinking maybe there’d be an alleyway you might have taken, and there was, I ran down that alleyway, and down another, but you were nowhere to be found. Then I went back to the pub, thinking you might have relented and returned, I went up to the barman and asked him if you had come back, you know, the good-looking girl with the dark hair I was sitting with, she was wearing a light blue jacket, white skirt, and he looked at me pityingly and said, no, she hadn’t been back, but you never know, would I like another drink in the meantime. And I said, yes, I’ll have a large Powers, for I could think of nothing else to do, and I still held out hopes that you might return, and I sat there drinking until closing time.

I stumbled along the corridor of the fourth floor of the Shelbourne and jiggled the key in the keyhole of Room 412, trying it this way and that until eventually it swung to. A bedside lamp was on and you were lying in bed with your eyes open. It took you a long time to come back, Angel, you said. And I lay down with you, and after a while we entered that realm which is so familiar yet so strange, where we lose each other in ourselves, and wonder if we are who we are, or someone else, and then we fall asleep still not knowing. Now I remember the perfume you put on that night before we went out, and the square-shouldered black bottle that it came in,
Fracas
by Germaine Cellier, 1948, a needle-sharp tang of bergamot above a shadowy musky stink of tuberose. And now I remember the corollary of that phrase of yours I read two days ago,
Look for a long time at what pleases you
. You’d quoted it to me in Paris when you talked about Colette, apropos of what I can’t recall. You know what Colette says? you said, and I said, No, what does Colette say? and you said, Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.

In dreams begin responsibilities

I realise that my last letter was somewhat longer than those I had previously written. So many connections are beginning to occur to me, and that letter could have been even longer. I failed to mention, for example, that your postcard bore not just one Irish stamp, but two, one of them a 4c, the other a 48c, whose combined value, I thought, must exceed that required for a postcard to Northern Ireland, so your choice of them must have been deliberate. As you know, I was a stamp-collector in my teens, specialising in the stamps of Ireland, which appealed to me not only out of nationalistic sentiment, but because Irish stamps have always had a tradition of good design. These are no exception: they belong to the Irish Wild Flowers series of 2004, designed by the artist Susan Sex, and feature elegantly simple representations of the Violet (4c), the Dandelion (5c), the Primrose (48c), the Hawthorn (60c), the Bluebell (65c), Lords and Ladies (€2) and the Dog Rose (€5). That your card should bear a violet was especially significant, for you knew that it would remind me of John Donne’s poem ‘The Ecstasy’, which we used to quote to each other:

Where, like a pillow on a bed

A pregnant bank swell’d up to rest

The violet’s reclining head,

Sat we two, one another’s best.

I would begin, and you would reply with

Our hands were firmly cemented

With a fast balm, which thence did spring;

Our eye-beams twisted and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string …

and so on, till, holding hands and staring into one another’s eyes, we would recite the last verse in unison. As for the primrose, it symbolises resurrection, among other things, but ‘the primrose path of dalliance’ also springs to mind. So you flit between alternatives, following the butterfly nature of your star sign. But you knew I would pick up on the stamps, for you were slightly bemused when I told you of my teenage passion for stamps; and perhaps you remembered Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘Stamp Shop’, which I’d quoted to you as evidence that stamp-collecting could be an intellectually respectable pursuit. To someone looking through old piles of letters, says Benjamin, a stamp that has been long out of circulation on a torn envelope often says more than a reading of dozens of pages. And, further on: Stamp albums are magical reference books; the numbers of monarchs and palaces, of animals and allegories and states, are recorded in them. Postal traffic depends on their harmony as the motions of the planets depend on the harmony of the celestial numbers, said Benjamin.

Perhaps it was not entirely unexpected that the son of a postman should have become a stamp-collector: my very first collection was of the foreign stamps my father would bring home, having begged them from the addressee, and I still remember the pleasure given to me by those glimpses of exotic lands, the black swan and the lyrebird of Australia, the springboks of South Africa, the tigers of Malaya. You remember, I told you how one day he arrived home with a rare item, a postcard he had discovered at the back of the dead-letter box, bearing an Edwardian stamp with a 1903 postmark, and the phrase, in what looked like a woman’s handwriting,
See you tomorrow, usual place and time, Yours, ever, N
. Those were the days, said my father, when you could post a card in the morning and be sure that it would arrive by that afternoon. He was an occasional reader of science fiction, and suggested playfully that the box had a slit in its back which was a portal to another universe, parallel to ours, but sixty years behind, through which the card had slipped. And I wondered who N might have been, whether in this universe or that, and what the consequences of her correspondent’s likely failure to attend the assignation. At any rate, the card, with its implications of alternative existences, led my father to remember Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe, who had been elected as Chairman of the Irish Esperanto Association when it first met in 1907, and whom my father met towards the end of his life. He was very old, said my father, but he still radiated a powerful intelligence, an extraordinary man, both his Irish and his Esperanto were perfect, and poetic.

Fournier d’Albe was indeed an extraordinary figure, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Vice-President of the Radio Association, and the author and translator of numerous scientific books. He shared the year of his birth, 1868, with James Connolly. He was a fluent speaker of German, French, Italian, Irish, Manx and Esperanto, and had published an Irish–English dictionary and phrase-book. In 1912, the year of the sinking of the
Titanic
, he invented the type-reading optophone, which, by converting the light refracted from a page of printed matter into musical notes, enabled a blind person to read. He was responsible for the transmission of the first wireless picture – of King George V – on 24th May 1923; and in 1926, at the 18th World Congress of Esperanto, held in Edinburgh, he delivered a paper on ‘Wireless Telegraphy and Television’. In 1907 he published
Two New Worlds
, ‘an attempt to penetrate the mystery of time and space with the help of the most modern resources of scientific research’: in it, he proposed a hierarchical clustering model for the structure of the universe which anticipated modern fractal theory. Fournier’s fractal can be visualised if we take one of a pair of dice and look at the side representing the number 5, known as ‘Phoebe Snow’ in gambler’s slang. Four of the dots are located at the corners of a square and the fifth is located at the centre. Let us imagine that each dot is really a miniature Phoebe Snow, and further, that each dot of the miniature Phoebe Snow is a microscopic Phoebe Snow. This constitutes three scales of the self-similar structure; but Fournier d’Albe went much further and imagined the pattern repeating ad infinitum, in a dizzying blizzard of self-replication. Worlds lay within worlds in nested frequencies. Atoms and stars, electrons and planets, cells and galaxies all moved to the same measure. Clouds, coastlines, earthquakes, the fluctuations of the stock market, all corresponded. A flag snaps back and forth in the wind, and a column of cigar smoke breaks into an anxious swirl. A pirouette of litter on a street corner heralds a tornado. A pin drops in an auditorium, a bomb goes off. Like patterns were apparent everywhere. The All was immutable, but the detail was ever new. The event, the incident, the individual was unique, unprecedented, irrecoverable; but the equilibrium was eternal.

In addition to his other achievements, Fournier d’Albe was a noted investigator of paranormal phenomena. While he recognised that the vast majority of these were spurious, a matter of imposture and the desire of many people to believe in an afterlife, or to believe in anything, there nevertheless remained some instances that were inexplicable to science; and he thought that these might be accounted for by some kind of slippage between the infinite worlds proposed by his theory. He was familiar with the work of W.J. Crawford and had corresponded with him briefly before his suicide in 1920. In May 1921 he travelled to Belfast, where he took up lodgings for four months, during which time he conducted an intensive study of the phenomena produced by the Goligher circle. After observing a séance at the Morrison home, and another at the late Crawford’s, Fournier d’Albe rented an unfurnished attic at 40 Fountain Street, in the city centre, to which he transferred the equipment used by Crawford; and here he conducted investigations into a further eighteen sittings, summarising his findings in a monograph,
The Goligher Circle
, published by John Watkins of London in 1922.

He had gone to Belfast hoping to find a medium who was somehow in touch with an alternative reality, a correspondent with another universe. But as he subjected Kathleen Goligher to more and more rigorous controls it became apparent that trickery was being used, and he came to ‘a definitely unfavourable conclusion regarding the whole of the phenomena’. A final sitting on 29th August produced no results. Kathleen Goligher indicated that due to indisposition she would not be giving any sittings to Fournier d’Albe, or to anyone else, for at least twelve months; and she never again submitted herself to scientific scrutiny. Fournier d’Albe had found the Goligher Circle to be ‘an alert, secretive, troublesome group of well-organised performers’. He seemed to have proved conclusively that the ‘operators’, far from being agents of a world beyond the grave, were none other than the members of the Goligher Circle themselves. Yet Fournier d’Albe’s findings were disputed by those who wished to believe, and to this day there were still those who believe in Kathleen Goligher’s ability to produce ectoplasmic rods and cantilevers, just as there are those who believe in Uri Geller, or the reality of alien visitations.

D’Albe kept a meticulous record of his dealings with the Goligher Circle, going so far as to note the weather at the time. I learned that the summer of 1921 was a typical Irish one: 1st June, for example, was showery and cool, while 6 June was hot and sunny. I was much taken by the coincidence that 40 Fountain Street, where the sittings took place, is the current location of the
XL
Café, and, as I read these brief reports of the weather, I imagined myself walking along the street one of those June days, feeling the breeze or the rain or the sun on my face, before going in for a cup of tea, where I might meet your counterpart. Then it occurred to me that the circumstances might not have been so idyllic.

D’Albe’s stay in Belfast coincided with a period of civil unrest that came to a head shortly after the opening of the first parliament of Northern Ireland on 22nd June, when Catholics were driven en masse from their homes and jobs by the
UVF
. There must have been gunshots to be heard as well as the rappings produced by the Goligher Circle, for the
UVF
had attacked Catholic homes in the New Lodge Road, not far from the city centre. My own father’s father had been expelled from his job as a fitter in Harland and Wolff’s, the shipyard that built the
Titanic
. In an attempt to discipline the loyalists, the government in Westminster recruited a Special Constabulary, but when a number of them joined Protestant mobs in Belfast on 10 July, they came to be regarded as enemies of the Catholic community.
Plus ça change
. The Specials were part of the loyalist mob which infamously attacked the Civil Rights march at Burntollet Bridge on 4th January 1969. Hughie Falls was there, among the injured, and his photograph appeared in the
Irish News
. Long-haired, bearded, eyes staring wildly, blood pouring from a head wound, he cut a heroic, Christ-like figure, and for many months afterwards did not lack female companionship.

Is that the Hughie Falls you knock about with? my father asked me when he saw the picture. Yes, I said, not being inclined to deny him. Well, said my father, he might be a hero, but his father, Tommy Falls, was a rogue. How’s that? I said. He was a scab, said my father, he broke a postal workers’ strike back in the Thirties. And how did the strike end up? I said. My father sighed. Oh, we had to go back, without a penny more than what we started with. So it was pointless anyway, I said, whether Tommy Falls was a scab or not. Not pointless, said my father, it was a matter of principle. Of comradeship. And that was the end of that conversation.

You knew my father a bit, Nina, you knew he was a man of principle. And yet. You remember that time he bumped into us in the
XL
Café? He had taken quite a shine to you, you know, I think sometimes he even flirted with you a little. There’d been a little item in the paper about him that morning, about his work with Irish and Esperanto, how he’d kept them going when it was neither profitable nor popular, that kind of thing, and you complimented him on it, wondering how he’d found the time for it when he was working – he’d been retired a year by then – that his job as Inspector in the Post Office must have quite demanding. Oh, not at all, he said, I was a bit of a straw boss, you know, I just put in an appearance every now and again, and I could nip out whenever I wanted to, like now. The postmen did the real work, the way I used to.

It’s like this, he said, I was given an offer I couldn’t refuse. Gabriel’s mother put me up to it, it was all her fault, he said, and he winked ruefully at me, for I knew the story well. Yes, he said, it was just after the War, the top brass approached me, said if I went for Inspector, I’d have no problem, only I’d have to go on a training course to London. And the last thing I wanted to do was to go to London, you see, conscription was still in force then, on the mainland as they call it, and I didn’t want to risk that, being a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces, it would go against everything I believed in, said my father. But you went anyway, you said. Yes, said my father, it was either that or a lifetime of misery from Gabriel’s mother. But you escaped, you said. By the grace of God, said my father. But you work for Her Majesty’s Royal Mail, you said boldly, raising your eyes to the Crown insignia on his peaked cap. But I don’t carry a gun for her, said my father, the pen is mightier than the sword, and anyone can hold a pen freely, be he Irish or English or Catholic or Protestant. It was the Irish who brought the pen all over Europe, the monks who held the flame of learning aloft throughout the Dark Ages. In this sign shall you conquer. That’s what I’ve tried to teach Gabriel. Do you think I’ve succeeded, Miranda? Oh yes, Mr Conway, I’m sure you have, you said, and you fondled the little Dinkie that dangled at your breast. Nice pen, said my father.