The Pen Friend (24 page)

There was a lot of debate after the event, says Ovid, some saying that Diana was more cruel than she was just, others saying that when it comes to defending one’s virginity, strong measures are needed; and both sides had their arguments well marshalled. But as for Ovid himself, he says the whole thing was just an unfortunate accident, that Actaeon was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, I said.

And what do you think, Angel? you said. Oh, I don’t know, I said, but it would seem that the gods, or the goddesses, have as little control over circumstances as human beings, and as little control over their passions. I prefer to look at the painting, I said. By now we were standing before Titian’s
Death of Actaeon
. It’s a big painting, almost six feet by six and a half, and I had stood before it alone many times, imagining myself to enter the dark wood of its landscape, never fully able to resolve its blurs and ambiguities. In a significant departure from the Ovid story, Titian shows Diana present at Actaeon’s metamorphosis, standing in the left foreground, almost life-size, holding a bow which lacks a string. It’s as if she’s part of the action, and yet not, I said, maybe she’s a projection of herself, or maybe Actaeon’s fate is her dream. At any rate, Titian made a lot of changes to the painting, and some people think it’s unfinished. It’s an autumnal painting, all those sepias and russets, the leaves of the trees beginning to turn. Maybe the unfinished look is the point. The dogs especially, the way they emerge out of a flurry of brushstrokes, made up of contradictory layers of paint. They’re a series of afterthoughts, a kind of ongoing process. You know, Nina,
The Death Of Actaeon
is always at the back of my mind, I carry it around in my mind, but I can never see it clearly enough, it shimmers and changes as I try to imagine it. And when I go to see it for real, like now, I realise that even then I can’t see it clearly enough, it’s as if the painting has changed since I last saw it. And every time I look at it, I see things I never saw before. Or maybe I did see them, but never noticed them. Maybe I’ve forgotten seeing them, I said.

So the painting’s really about your own thought processes, you said. Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, Nina, but maybe it is, I said. But then it would seem to exclude whatever I might think of it, you said. I mean, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that it might mean something different to me. Well, you didn’t venture to tell me, Nina, I said. And you didn’t venture to ask, you said. You were too busy with your own analysis, your self-analysis. But you might as well know that in 1965, just after my mother died, they brought us to the National Gallery on a school trip, I was fifteen, remember? And Titian wasn’t really on the agenda, we were going to look at the Rembrandts, the self-portraits, and we were just passing the
Actaeon
en route, when it caught my eye, and I stopped and looked at it. Maybe I only stopped for a few minutes, they had to send someone back for me, I don’t know how long I looked at it. But I could see my mother in the Diana figure, the way she held herself with such disinterested aplomb, such gravity. And afterwards, when I read up on the background, the painting seemed more than ever to be about what can happen between men and women, when they stumble on some terrible revelation about the other. I could see the story of my mother and father in Titian’s painting, you said. But it was your mother who suffered most, not your father, I said. How do you know? you said. Who are you to say who suffered most? I prefer to think of her as being empowered by her death. Like Diana, unleashing the invisible arrow.
The Death of Actaeon
means something to me, Angel, but all it is to you is a talking-point, a conversation piece. And you carry a picture of it around in your head for years, you weigh its pros and cons, never arriving at any conclusions. You’re very good at pictures, Angel, you picture this, you picture that, but it really hasn’t much to do with the real world, has it? Art, for you, is a little safe haven. Like your father’s beloved Esperanto, a cosy little back room where a dozen or so oddballs talk about changing the world, when they all know the whole thing was doomed to failure about fifty years ago, it’s all cloud-cuckoo-land. Don’t you think you’re like that, Angel, like your holier-than-thou father, ever so slightly pompous, with your useless pictures of the world? you said, and I was taken aback that you should speak of my father in this way.

And you, I suppose you’re going to change the world? I said. Nobody changes the world, you said, history isn’t a matter of personalities, of kings and statesmen making the big decisions, history’s the manufacture of consent. That’s what
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does, we’re in the Chinese whispers game. But at least I’ve no illusions about it. I consent to it. And I take pleasure in what I do, because I like to create beautiful things, you said. Isn’t that what I do? I said. No, you said, you think your pleasure is morality, you think you’re better than the next person because you can appreciate something they can’t. And you’ve made a picture of me, Angel, you carry it around in your mind like an icon, and for all I know you might adore it, but it’s the wrong picture, Gabriel, it’s not me. It’s a kind of fake, you said, and I’m tired of tramping around galleries looking at pictures with you, be they real or fake, and with that you turned on your heel and left.

We made it up a little afterwards, when I came back to the hotel room and found you were wearing
L’Heure Bleue
, as if to remind me of our time in Paris, or to remind yourself of our time in Paris. But it began again in Belfast, or rather it ended in Belfast. We’d gone out for dinner, to Restaurant 77, the best restaurant in town, it was your idea. The condemned man’s last meal. Afterwards, we were, as I thought, about to get a taxi to your place when you said, I think we should stop seeing each other for a while. What do you mean, stop seeing each other? I said. It was a circumstance I had never envisaged. Oh, I knew we had had our difficulties, but they consisted of mere ideological differences, easily resolved, and this struck me like a bolt from the blue. You were silent for a moment. What do you mean, stop seeing each other? I said again, less confidently this time. Yes, Angel, maybe if we stop seeing each other we’ll learn to see each other better. We both need a little time and space away from each other, you said.

I felt as if my world had turned upside down. You can’t mean it, Nina, I said. You mean everything to me, I said. I can’t live without you, I said. How can you say that, I said, after all we’ve done together, after all we’ve said to each other, you said you loved me, I said. We say a lot of things, Angel, and they’re true for when we say them, but things change, you said. But it’s not over, is it, Nina? It can’t be over, you’ll come back to me, won’t you? Give me some hope that you’ll come back, Nina, I said. Oh, Angel, I don’t know my own mind at the moment, I live in hope as much as you, don’t press me too hard, you said. And I said more, and you said more, and I could not change your mind. I have to leave now, you said. You’ll be in touch? I said. I’ll write, you said. You kissed me gently on the cheek, and left me.

When I woke the next morning I thought it had all been a bad dream, and when I realised you had indeed said what you said, I felt bereaved. I had not felt like this since the death of my mother, nor would I feel like that again until the death of my father. And, remembering that time, I am writing now with a funereal black Waverley pen made in the 1920s, whose unusual spear-shaped nib has a teardrop vent-hole. Like the Dutch pens, the Merlin and the
CIBA
that I used to describe our happier times, the Waverley had never been inked until it came to my hands. It is like new, this pen that is almost as old as my father was when he died.

You remember my father, Nina. He must have been in your mind when I saw you for the last time. It was Saturday 30th June 1984, a week after our last meal together; I had arranged to meet him for a drink after his Esperanto class in The Compass, and I had just stepped from the sunlight of High Street into that maze of alleyways that lies between it and the Law Courts, when you stepped out from a dark colonnade, and said, Angel, Gabriel. My heart leapt. Nina, I said. And we stood awkwardly for some long seconds. Well, fancy meeting you like this, you said. Yes, fancy that, I said. How are you, Gabriel? you said. How do you think I am, Nina? I said. Oh, don’t be hard on me, Gabriel, I’ve thought about little else since that night, I’ve thought about my whole life, what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to be doing, you must give me some time, you said, and you proceeded to tell me an elaborate story of how your boss, Callaghan, had taken you to lunch at Restaurant 77 one day – isn’t that an irony? you said ruefully – and had suggested to you that perhaps it was time for a change of scene, that Eastern Europe was the coming thing now, that you had done very well in Belfast, but that maybe Warsaw would suit your talents better at this particular time, and my heart gave a lurch as I heard this. You mean you might be leaving altogether? I said. Oh, I don’t know any more, Gabriel, I don’t know what I’m doing, you said. And then I saw you look at your watch, and you said, Gabriel, I really must be going. I’ll be in touch, I promise, I will write, and you left.

I looked at my watch; I had arranged to meet my father at five o’clock, and it was now five past. And then I heard an almighty explosion. You know the rest, Nina. You must have pictured me running towards The Compass Bar, standing aghast before the smoking rubble, being restrained by the police and army, waiting for what seemed like an eternity before I saw my father being carried out, weeping tears of relief when I saw that he was still alive, though I could see that one of his legs was shattered. As it turned out, they had to amputate.

My father managed well enough; even when he suffered phantom limb syndrome, he used to joke about it, or perhaps it wasn’t a joke. After Nelson lost his arm at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, said my father, he could feel fingers digging into the missing limb, and Nelson thought this was direct evidence for the existence of the soul. And I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with an English admiral, said my father. What hurt him more was the thought that the cause of Esperanto had been directly attacked by the bomb. It was just like the persecution of Esperantists in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, he said. There were dark forces abroad, said my father, who would do anything to keep the Irish people apart from one another, and he would quote from his beloved Zamenhof. When I was still a child in the town of Bialystok, said Zamenhof, I gazed with sorrow on the mutual hostility which divided the people of the same land and the same town. And I dreamed then that after some years everything would be changed for the better. And the years have passed; and instead of my beautiful dream I have seen a terrible reality. In the streets of my unhappy town savages armed with hatchets and pickaxe handles have flung themselves at those who practise another religion, or speak a different language to themselves. For there will always be those whose interests are to foster such hatred, said my father.

No one ever claimed responsibility for The Compass Bar bombing that killed five people, three Catholics and two Protestants. Some said it was a rogue Republican element. Some said it was a rogue Loyalist element. And quite a lot of people said that whoever was responsible, it could not have happened without the collusion of rogue elements within the security forces, whether actively or by omission, that it had been sanctioned at some level in the maze of clandestine operations that lay behind official government policy.

It took me some days to put two and two together. Until then, I’d thought of
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2
as just another of those well-meaning and ultimately pointless local business development agencies. But the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to me that you must have known, that
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had prior knowledge. You knew I met my father most Saturdays after his class, you knew my movements, you knew how to intercept and delay me. And if that were so, you saved me, but you did not save the others, and I could not forgive you for that.

Your brief letter, sent from Paris ten days later, only served to confirm my suspicions. You had left
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, you said, you could not bear to live with it any longer, you had taken up a new life in Paris, you hoped that I was well, and that I would forgive you for what you had done, but it was all over between you and me, you could not bear the pain of looking me in the eye again. Words to that effect. Later that day, 9th July 1984, I learned that York Minster had been struck by lightning, and its South Transept razed by the subsequent fire. And in the days that followed, I heard how the four-hundred-year-old stained glass of the great Rose Window, made to commemorate the defeat of the House of York in the Wars of the Roses, had been riven into some forty thousand fragments, though the panels had miraculously stayed intact within their embrasures, having been releaded some years previously; and in the months that followed, I heard how restoration began, as adhesive plastic film was applied to the crazed mosaic of the glass panels, which were then removed one by one, disassembled, and reassembled, tessera by tessera, using a specially developed fixative which had the same refractive index as the old glass, whereupon the completed work was sandwiched between two layers of clear glass for added security, and mounted back in place: which intervention means we will never again see what was seen before the fire, the dims and glows of stained glass unmitigated by an added medium, however clear. And I remembered how we two had once seen the glass as it was, as it had been.