The Pen Friend (3 page)

I open our past like a fan. Angel, you used to call me, for I had been named for the Angel Gabriel. Gabriel, the messenger of God, sent by Him to Mary to proclaim the mystery of the Incarnation, is patron saint of the postal services, and of stamp collectors: my father had been appointed Inspector in the Royal Mail, a rare achievement for a Northern Ireland Catholic, shortly before my birth. And you too were a messenger, not of one god but of many, so I called you Rainbow, Iris, that was what I called you then. Iris Bowyer. You remember?
It’s easy to remember
. We’d been going out together for two or three weeks. You’d taken me up on my offer to take you to the Gallery on one of my days off. I’d met you in the
XL
Café first. You were wearing a lovely pre-war men’s jacket, pale green linen, that you’d bought in Second Chance. I thought they only sold women’s stuff there, I said, and you said, No, if you go upstairs there’s a good few rails of men’s, there’s a very nice 1940s suit there, single-breasted, dark blue check tweed, about your size, it’d look great on you, though maybe you wouldn’t wear it as a suit too often, too formal. But you could buy it for the jacket alone, not to mention the waistcoat. Wear them as separates. You put your hands to your lapels as if draping yourself in another, invisible jacket, and I envisaged myself wearing it, the soft fall of the tweed.

Under the linen jacket you’d one of those Indian silk tight bodices that were in at the time, a retro hippy look, bottle-green with red embroidery, and you were wearing loose white linen trousers with red wedge-heeled one-strap sandals. And what else? Yes, you were wearing a new perfume, it was like amber smoke over green leaves after a shower of rain. What’s it called? I said. Ee, you said, and I thought this to be one of your Yorkshire turns of speech, and you laughed and said, Ee, maybe I should have said Why, you said, it’s the letter Y. Ee as in Yves St Laurent. Ee, French for there. So here we are, I said, and you’re wearing a perfume called There. You remember. A scent for every occasion, I said, you’re like Andy Warhol’s calendar of perfumes, I said, and you said, What? Not quite a calendar, more like a memory-bank, I said. He bought a different perfume every day or so and stored them in a writing-desk. Then he’d open a bottle every so often, maybe one from a couple of months ago, or last year, and sniff the perfume, get that powerful olfactory hit, just to remind him of that time, that period which was already history, or maybe he just wanted to remember when he’d bought them, there and then, the bright aura of that particular transaction. Warhol loved buying things. And selling things, of course. I do business, not art, he used to say, I said. You could say he sold souvenirs, you said, that’s why they place the perfume department, the illuminated signs for Coty and Givenchy, Guerlain, Lancôme, Elizabeth Arden, at the entrance to the big stores, because the perfumes and the names remind you of the last time you were there, and all the other times, all those layers of pleasurable smells. And you want to buy that again and again, you said. Even though you pay mostly for the name, and not the thing itself. You remember?

And we talked a little more about Warhol. I’d been working on a rather fanciful essay linking Gerard Dillon and Warhol. Of course their methods were radically different. But it seemed to me that neither could be fully understood without reference to their Catholic backgrounds. Warhol, born in Pittsburgh, where he was raised as Andrew Warhola, was of intricately European ancestry. His parents had emigrated from Ruthenia, then in Czechoslovakia; they were neither Czech nor Slovak, and spoke a Carpatho-Rusyn dialect. They were devout Byzantine Catholics. From his childhood Warhol was continually in the presence of icons, and in a manner of speaking all his paintings are icons. As for Dillon, he came from the Catholic Falls Road district of Belfast, and he too was deeply influenced by Catholic iconography. My father and he were born in 1916, within a few days of each other, I said, within a few days of the Easter Rising in fact, and they went to school together. Slate Street School. You wouldn’t believe it, I said, but my father learned to write on a slate, they still used them then. You shivered. Oh, I could never bear that squeak. Like chalk on blackboard. I imagined you writing on a blackboard as a child, standing on tiptoe, your careful embryonic handwriting. Yes, I said, and Gerard Dillon used to paint on slate. He’d paint on anything, old bits of cardboard or discarded timber. When he left school he was apprenticed to a house-painter. Learned to burn off old paint with a paraffin blow-lamp, scrape off wallpaper with a shave-hook, mix the paints, that kind of thing. He’d paint on the bare walls before they were re-papered. I’m sure there’s still a few houses standing in the Falls Road that have early works by Gerard Dillon on their walls, and nobody knows it. And at home he begged his mother to teach him how to use a needle and thread. He did a few tapestries in the early fifties.

Both Warhol and Dillon, I said, were devoted to their mothers, and both were homosexual, Warhol more ostentatiously so, not that my father ever mentioned Dillon’s sexuality. For him, Gerard Dillon was the painter of the Falls Road, and of the West of Ireland, and of icons. A good Catholic. There’s a lot of death both in Dillon and in Warhol, I said, death and resurrection. The image as a way of circumventing death. Warhol’s repeated takes on Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, for instance. Their very repetition makes us remember them. And Warhol’s obsessive repetitions are a refusal to let go of the image, an insistence that we look again and again, that we do not forget. It doesn’t matter whether the image is of a soup can, or a Coca-Cola bottle, or a shoe, or a Chanel No. 5 bottle. Warhol also made repeated images of electric chairs, car crashes, race riots, the atomic bomb, he did portraits of murderers and movie stars, and they are all about death and memory, they glorify the image of the thing or the person. The memorable icon that outlasts its subject, or that represents eternal subjects.

And we can’t imagine Warhol without his use of silkscreen printing. Silkscreen is actually a very fine nylon mesh, a gauze almost. You apply the ink with a squeegee and the ink is squeezed through the tiny holes in the screen to make the image. A surface of endless silkscreen dots which the viewer sees as a can of beans, a Coca-Cola bottle, a Marilyn, whatever. Imagine your skin’s a silkscreen, and we wrap you in a winding-sheet, and you sweat blood or whatever on to the fabric. A kind of Turin Shroud effect. Not that you’d get too many prints out of it. A very limited edition. But you can print any number of copies off a silkscreen without the image deteriorating too much. But for all that, every print is unique, because the ink is applied a little differently each time, you get an uneven inking of the roller, or the screen slips a little. Warhol liked that degree of routine error, the porosity and seep and bleed of silkscreen. All my images are the same, he said, but very different at the same time. Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves? he said. And Warhol liked to quote Edvard Munch, who said, We see with different eyes at different times. We see one thing in the morning, and another in the evening, and the way one views things depends on the mood we’re in. That’s why one subject can be seen in so many ways, and that is what makes painting so interesting. I believe he said something like that, I said.

We were walking past the City Hall by now, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary band was playing in the grounds, their silver instruments shimmering and blaring in the heat. We were hand in hand, swinging along to the beat of the music. They were playing the First World War marching song, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. As we threaded in and out of the crowds a man jostled accidentally against me, apologised, then took a little formal back-step of astonishment and exclaimed, Gabriel! Gabriel Conway! How long has it been! How are you? and then, as he registered your presence, another back-step, side-step rather, he cried, Miranda! and we disengaged our hands and moved apart a little, the whole sequence like a figure in a minuet, an intricate toing and froing, Miranda Bowyer! Well, well, fancy meeting you together! Small world, or what!

I stared at him, then at you, dumbfounded. I’d been trying to place him – the face was familiar, but the name eluded me – and now all that ran through my mind was Miranda, Miranda, Iris, Rainbow, and I stood not hearing your conversation, as the police band music dimmed and swelled around it through the buzz of the crowd. I felt weak. Miranda. In a kind of trance I noted his clothes, the charcoal chalk-stripe suit, a little heavy for the weather, but nicely cut, the blue silk tie with a muted silvery grey diamond pattern, the faint blue herringbone shirt, a legal kind of look. He had cupped his hand to his chin and was smiling at whatever you were saying, I caught a glimpse of a cuff and cuff-link, a black stone set in silver, and then, turning to me, he said, And you, Gabriel, still in the Gallery? I nodded. You? Oh, communications, that kind of thing, we should get together some time, I’ll tell you all about it, but for now, must dash, do let’s keep in touch. Gabriel. Miranda. And he vanished into the crowd.

Well, I said to you, so what’s all this? Miranda, I said with heavy irony. Or Iris. Or whatever you might be. Oh, Angel, you said, don’t be silly, you’re not upset, are you? And I put my hands in my pockets and lowered my head and pouted my lip in a classic huff, and said nothing. But Angel, you said, what should it matter what I’m called? And am I not Rainbow, anyway? No, I brought myself to say, how can you be Rainbow, when you’re Miranda? If Miranda you are. Or did you lie to him? And then it came back to me who he was; he was Tony Lambe – Baa, we called him, he’d been in my year at university, but he’d dropped out and gone to London, what, eleven, twelve years ago, he certainly seemed to have gone up in the world. Miranda’s the name on my birth certificate, you said, but so what? Well, you didn’t tell me the truth, that’s what, I said. You didn’t tell me your name. No, you said, it was you who told me, remember? And weren’t you pleased that you were able to tell me my name? I was pleased that you were pleased, so I let it go. I quite liked being Iris. And then, with vehemence, you said, Why should we be bound by our names? Can’t we be anyone we please to be?

I’m still writing this with the Merlin pen. Merlin the bird of prey, the little falcon, merlin that is related to the French or Scots word merle, a blackbird, Merlin the wizard and the architect of Camelot. To be precise, it’s a Merlin 33 – I have another Merlin, in marbled grey and black swirls, called Merlin Elegant – and when I first got the 33 I wondered if this number were chosen for some esoteric or cabalistic significance. Pythagoras says that the world is built on the power of numbers: I discovered that in classic numerology the numbers 11, 22 and 33 are master numbers, not to be reduced to a single digit if they correspond to an individual’s name, and that the number 33 is that of avatar. More interestingly, I learned that the Merlin was the last of a series of aircraft engines designed by Rolls-Royce, which included the Kestrel and the Buzzard; that versions of the Merlin engine had powered the Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft that were instrumental in winning the Battle of Britain; and that the Merlin 33, specifically, had been used in the De Havilland Mosquito night-fighter and reconnaissance aircraft which made forays into Dutch and German territory during the latter course of the war. It had also been used as a transport aircraft for the Dutch Resistance. So it was entirely possible that the Merlin 33 fountain pen, designed in the Netherlands in 1948, the year of my birth and of Arie Bouwer’s marriage to Nell Birtwhistle, was a tribute to those missions, and to the engine which made them possible. The pen as bird of prey, the pen as aerial observer and communicator. And I wondered what connection your father – Harry the spy, as he was known to some – might have had with all this.

I discovered after some hours searching the Internet that on 11th April 1944 a group of six De Havilland Mosquitoes of 2 Group, 2nd Tactical Air Force, armed with five-hundred-pound incendiary/high explosive bombs, flew to The Hague. Their target was the Gestapo-controlled Dutch Central Population Agency, which
PAN
had ordered to be destroyed to prevent identification of the false
ID
s that were so crucial to their clandestine operations. The Agency was located beside the Peace Palace, which, as home to the Court of International Justice created by the League of Nations in 1922, enjoyed extra-territorial status, and was not considered to be part of the Netherlands. Great precision was required on the part of the bombers. In the event, the pilot of the second Mosquito reported that he clearly saw the bombs dropped by the first skip in through the doors of the target. The Peace Palace was unscathed, and the Mosquitoes, powered by their Merlin 33 engines, escaped with only minor damage to one aircraft. The Agency was totally destroyed, and with it the official identities of the entire Dutch population. In a footnote to the article which detailed this information, the name of the
PAN
agent who passed on the order was given as ‘Harry’.

So what’s in a name? you said. A rose by any other name, is that it? I said. It was true, I had felt rather pleased with myself when I named you; and now I realised the emptiness of that gesture. I’m sorry, I said. Rainbow. Miranda. The police band was playing ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, and, as the chorus came round, we both burst into song together, Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile. And smile we did, if a little wryly. But I felt that both of us had betrayed ourselves, that we had participated a mutual confidence trick. And I didn’t know whether to call you Rainbow or Miranda. Both seemed somehow false now.

Some days later I called into Isaac Beringer’s antique shop in Winetavern Street. I’ve known Beringer for almost as long as I can remember, and he doesn’t look much older than he did when I was a child, when I was introduced to him by my father. Beringer has a photographic memory, and knows not only the present contents of his shop, but can relate the history of every piece, clocks, watches, pendants, snuff-boxes, rings, spoons, anything that has passed through his hands over the years, its provenance, its defining characteristics, its current market value. I once asked him how he did it. Oh, it’s very simple, Mr Gabriel, he said. I’ve been born into this shop – and it was true, his father, Isaac the Elder, had kept the shop before him – and I know it as well as myself. Better, maybe. Every display case, every shelf, every drawer, every cubbyhole – and he gestured around him – I can see them with my eyes shut. And I know where everything is. Where everything was. I’ve got them all filed away. You might say they’re like people, and I remember their faces, and I have little stories for them, so one reminds me of another, the way you say so-and-so is like so-and-so. Take this piece, for example – and here he picked up a silver snuff-box – nice box, made by David Pettifer in Birmingham, 1854. Year of the Crimean War, Charge of the Light Brigade, got it last week for a song in the Friday Market. And I see this snuff-box in the pocket of an English officer, a tall man with big moustaches, you’d know him anywhere. In another pocket he’s got his father’s watch, nice movement by Barwise, 1790s, I sold it six months ago. You see how it works? I just make up stories about them.