The Pen Friend (4 page)

But the watch wouldn’t have been in the officer’s pocket before you had the snuff-box, I said. No, said Beringer, I had another story for the watch then, involved an antique pistol, the case had a little dent in it when I got it, so I thought maybe there’s been a duel, the watch belongs to this brash youth, you know the sort, all piss and vinegar, and the other chap’s bullet hits the watch, youth escapes unscathed, you know the kind of thing that happens in stories. Or sometimes in real life, I said. True, said Beringer. That’s why the stories change. Because things in real life change all the time, even when they stay the same. Depends on the way you look at them.

And what happened to the other chap? I said. Oh, said Beringer, brash youth, he’s shitting himself, pistol all over the place, but he manages to get your man in the leg. Wound went septic, had to amputate. Chap’s a cripple for the rest of his life. Most unfortunate, really, brash youth was in the wrong, chap hadn’t been looking at his woman at all. But then there’s never really much justice in these things, is there?

So there I was in Beringer’s shop and I said I was looking for something special. For a lady. Lady friend? said Beringer. Well, acquaintance, I said, and Beringer gave me the ghost of a wink. Well, he said, maybe you wouldn’t want to get too close then. A pendant wouldn’t do. Certainly not a ring. Nor earrings. Now here’s something – and he pulled open a drawer and took out a scent bottle – Lalique glass, he said, lovely thing,
L’Air du Temps
by Nina Ricci, 1948. He handed me the bottle. It was indeed lovely, with a swirled bowl of pale yellow, the stopper in the form of two intertwined doves in opalescent frosted glass. Yes, said Beringer,
L’Air du Temps
, Spirit of the Times, just after the war, you know. Love and peace, that kind of thing. Of course it’s empty, but you can still smell the perfume. I unstoppered the bottle and put my nose to its mouth. Sandalwood, rose and jasmine breathed out at me. I thought of the paintings of Botticelli, of Venus emerging from the waters on her scalloped shell. So I bought the bottle, and I gave it to you. Of course you knew what it was at once, and you were delighted.
L’Air du Temps
by Nina Ricci, 1948, the year my parents married. The Lalique bottle came later, 1950. Thank you so much, Angel, do you know I used to call myself Nina when I was a child, because Miranda was such a mouthful, and my father called me Nina, though my mother would insist on Miranda. So you became Nina then, and you are Nina still to me. And I wonder if you still have the
L’Air du Temps
bottle, and if its perfume still lingers.

But so hard to forget

When two similar and unlikely, or at least unexpected, events happen in relatively quick succession they achieve a certain equilibrium, a reciprocity: they are the two sides of an equation, and complement each other, like Yin and Yang. So it was with your first two messages:
It’s been a long time, It’s easy to remember
. But three? Three is a perfect number, the triangle of the Trinity, but triangles are notoriously tricky in human relationships, and I think again of the little accidental minuet we danced with Tony Lambe when I heard him call you Miranda. Nina. I write your name again this time in order to address you. Your third postcard was postmarked Stroud, Gloucs., a name which meant little to me. I looked it up in the atlas and found it to be a small town on the Welsh border, not far from Bristol, and I wondered what you were doing there. But then I used to wonder what you were doing wherever you were when you were not with me, when you were not in Belfast, away on one of your trips.

Stroud meant nothing to me, but the image on the postcard brought tears of recognition to my eyes.
Belfast 1954
, the caption on the back reads,
John Chillingworth, ©
BBC
Hulton Picture Library
. It shows a back street in Belfast. It could be Sevastopol Street, where I spent the first six years of my life before we moved to Ophir Gardens, but it is not. Nevertheless this grey pavement is familiar to me, the corner shop, the lamp-post, the water running down the pavement from a broken gutter. 1954. I would have been five or six. I could be one of these five boys in the foreground, wearing wellington boots, or I could turn a corner and appear in the picture any time soon. A game is in progress, Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Indians, for the smallest two of the boys are wielding toy guns, drawing in on a third who is hidden from their view by a street corner; a fourth, evidently a passer-by and not part of the game, looks at the fugitive with amusement, and, from the eager expression on the face of the leading gunman, seems to have given the game away; the fifth boy, who might or might not be involved, is looking elsewhere. And I wonder what this little drama, so accidental, so inevitable in outcome because seen in retrospect, might have to say about our relationship.

I turn the card over. It took me a few readings of your brief message before I realised the link between it and your preceding one.
But so hard to forget
, those were your words, and suddenly I heard Billie Holiday singing, as you must have intended. It was you who introduced me to Billie Holiday.

Your sweet expression, the smile you gave me,

The way you looked when we met

It’s easy to remember, but so hard to forget

I hear you whisper, I’ll always love you,

I know it’s over and yet

It’s easy to remember, but so hard to forget.

And more than that, I heard her singing my favourite Billie Holiday song, as you must have intended, ‘Gloomy Sunday’. It’s playing on the
CD
player as I write, and I am hearing it, not now in my study at 41 Ophir Gardens, but in your flat at 70 Eglantine Avenue as I heard it over twenty years ago; for music, like perfume, has the power to abolish intervening time. The flat is more of a maisonette, the two top floors of a big three-storey Victorian house. We’re sitting in what would have been the drawing-room. It’s summer dusk, the curtains of the great bay window have not yet been drawn, and a tree bows and scrapes against the glass in the breeze which rises at dusk when the air grows chill; there’s a bright fire burning in the grate. The only other light is the deepening amethyst of the sky beyond the trees and a dim lamp which shines on the hi-fi system. There’s a gleam on the black undulating disc like silvery moonlight on a black ocean, and Billie’s voice emerges from the speakers the ghost of a beat ahead of the backing, but slowly, skimming above the melancholy horns, dipping and soaring then slowing as she pauses on the last word of a line before letting it go into a temporary silence, and the band comes to the foreground for a second or two, echoing the phrase before last, then fades back behind her.

Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless

Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless

Little white flowers will never awaken you

Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you

Angels have no thoughts of ever returning you

Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?

Gloomy Sunday.

And I see the drawing room in its entirety, the big Kazak rug, faded reds and yellowed greens on the black-painted floorboards, the shelves of books, the framed Japanese fans, the Art Deco dressing table. You had another in the bedroom; this one was more of a display unit for your collection of scent bottles. I hadn’t known, when I bought you the
L’Air du Temps
bottle, that you were a collector, and it pleases me to see its pair of intertwining doves here now, even if perhaps you only brought it out because you knew I was coming. Either way, you had me in mind. On the dressing table you’ve arrayed bottles of cut glass and blown glass and marble-swirl glass and opalescent milk glass and Limoges porcelain and rose quartz and green opaline, square-shouldered bottles and round bottles and cylindrical bottles, bottles with stoppers of ruby glass and silver and guilloche enamel and diamond-faceted glass, stoppers in the shape of lilies and roses and pineapples, bottles shaped like pineapples and translucent pears and apples. Here is an especially beautiful one, with a reverse-painted Japanese scene showing two boys playing hide-and-seek. There are bottles shaped like domes and spires and cupolas, ranged like the buildings of a city reflected in the triptych mirror of the dressing table, glowing and winking in the firelight. Then there are the accessories, the atomizers with beaded bulbs and the hairbrushes with tortoiseshell backs, the enamelled powder compacts. I asked you what drove you to collect these things, and you said, Because they’re beautiful, and as I write these words I think of my own collection.

I open the pen cabinet in my mind’s eye to see the pens like jewels, no two of them alike, the Conway Stewarts in casings of Teal Blue with Green Veins, Blue Cracked Ice, Autumn Leaves, Peacock, Grey Jazz, Candy-stripe Relief, Red Jazz, Blue Jazz, Blue Rock Face, Moss Agate, Pink Moiré, and Salmon Pink with Grey-green Flecks, to name but some.

I have a tray of Pelikans, like German burghers in their uniforms of black tops and trouser-barrels of striped green, brown and blue and grey, and the long Pelikan beak-shaped clip sitting against the black top like a gold tie with an upturned tip. I have a block of Parker Vacumatics in silver blues and greys, and if you stand them on end they look like skyscrapers at night with patterned strips of lit windows. I have a sheaf of Sheaffers and a quiverful of Swans and Blackbirds.

I’m writing this with an Onoto, which I chose because its Tiger’s Eye pattern of iridescent tawny browns and ambers matches the back of a hairbrush on your dressing-table. I got it from Beringer when I was starting off collecting, one of the first pens I bought. Lovely thing, Mr Gabriel, attractive name too, said Beringer, Japanese, wouldn’t you think? But no, English as Brighton rock. Made by Thomas De La Rue and Company, London, best printers in the world, Queen Victoria grants them a licence to print the stamps of the Empire. Immensely wealthy. Literally printed money. Banknotes, run your fingers over them, you can feel the engraving. Made diaries, too, stationery, playing cards, that kind of thing. It’s 1905, they decide to make pens. Fountain pens a new-fangled thing, expanding market. Logical step. So they look around for a new angle, most fountain pens were what they call eyedroppers, you had to unscrew them and fill them with an eyedropper. Messy business. So they get hold of this inventor chap, George Sweetser, comes up with a patent for a plunger mechanism, piston if you like, steam engine technology – here, I’ll show you – and Beringer showed me how to unscrew the blind cap on the end of the barrel and pull out the plunger. Funny thing is, said Beringer, you push it in, it fills on the downstroke, not what you’d expect. Vacuum system, ingenious. Opposite of a syringe. And of course you use ink instead of blood. You won’t be going signing your name in blood, Mr Gabriel? Funny thing about Sweetser, too, he was a roller-skating champion, did a music-hall act dressed up as a woman. If you made it up people wouldn’t believe you. Anyway, 1905, they buy Sweetser’s plunger pen. The same year, Battle of Tsushima, Admiral Togo blows the Russian fleet out of the water. End of Russo-Japanese War. So De La Rue thinks, fair play, better keep in with the Land of the Rising Sun, British interests in the Pacific, don’t you know. So they call the pen Onoto, Japanese ring to it. They have a sun logo on some of their pens, not this one. Here’s a thing – he rummaged under the counter – novel by Onoto Watanna, real name Winnifred Eaton, English father, Chinese mother, born in Canada. Dresses herself up in kimonos, does the whole Japanese thing, Americans think she is Japanese. He proffered me the book.
The Heart of Hyacinth
, he said,1903, not that rare mind you, they printed a couple of hundred thousand, and not great literature, to tell you the truth, but a big hit in its day, and a nice genre piece. Lovely illustrations, I’ll tell you what, I’ll throw it in with the pen. Two Onotos for the price of one. Oh yes, said Beringer, the pen’s a 1948 model. Year that you were born, if my memory serves me right. It does, I said.

So here I am in Eglantine Avenue in 1982, the 1950 Lalique bottle with the intertwining doves is on your drawing-room dressing table, and the hi-fi is playing ‘Gloomy Sunday’. They called it ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’, you said. Two Hungarians wrote the original, Rezso Seress the music, Laszlo Javor the lyrics, in, oh, 1933. The story goes that after it came out there was a spate of suicides among young lovers in Hungary. They’d find them dead in their apartment or whatever, empty syringe beside them, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ on the record player. Or the neighbours hear gunshots and when they burst in the record is still playing. Or the lovers leave a suicide note with ‘Gloomy Sunday’ written on it, nothing else. Well, it’s the Depression after all, and Hungary’s got the highest rate of suicide in the world, the song is in the air, so maybe there’s some truth in the story. Then an English version came out in the States, about 1936, and the same thing began to happen, so they say, lovers killing themselves all over the place. They say they banned it from the airwaves, the
BBC
banned it, but no one seems to have been able to come up with any hard evidence. They say this, they say that. Maybe the whole thing’s an urban myth. All we can be sure of, Seress jumped to his death from his apartment block in 1968. That’s, what, thirty-five years later, very delayed reaction, I would have said. As you spoke, I thought of Andy Warhol’s images of suicides, one in particular where the victim looks asleep amid the sculpted marble drapery of a baroque tomb; but when we look closer, we find her bed is the crumpled metal sheet of the car roof she has landed on. Yet she seems to have found some repose and grace, as if Divine mercy has been shown.

Soon there’ll be candles and prayers that are sad, I know

Let them not weep, let them know that I’m glad to go …

Funny thing is, you went on, the English lyrics are nothing like the Hungarian. Not that my Hungarian is up to much, but I came across a translation once, oh, something like, it is autumn and the leaves are falling, all love has died on earth, people are heartless and wicked, there are dead people on the streets everywhere, that kind of thing. Billie’s version came out in 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor. Not the happiest of times, in any event. And they say that Billie’s third verse was an afterthought, a kind of palliative to lighten the gloom of the first two.

Dreaming, I was only dreaming

I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart, dear

Darling, I hope that my dream never haunted you

My heart is telling you how much I wanted you

Gloomy Sunday

It’s dark by now and I’m in Ophir Gardens casting my mind back to Eglantine Avenue over the dark gulf of intervening time, and it’s dark by now there too. The record comes to an end and I think how there seemed to be more hiss and crackle on your vinyl copy, more of the atmospherics of lost time, forty years since Billie laid the track down and I imagine the dust of 1942 sifting down into the grooves of the recording back then, getting into the voice and the instruments, and making that slight lisp in her enunciation all the more poignant.

You got up and drew the curtains and the noise of the wind in the trees outside died to a whisper. I can see her with that white gardenia in her hair, you said, isn’t it strange how the song makes you see the singer, she’s standing in a spotlight in a bar in New York, you said, and it’s dark but there’s those little tea-lights in faceted glass holders on the tables and you can see hands holding cigarettes and cocktail glasses, a face or two maybe, the smoke curling up and drifting into the spotlight, and I think how strange it is that your few words,
But so hard to forget
, should make me see you as you were then, or what you have become to me since then. I see the blue vein in the back of your hand as you write and you go over to lift the needle from where it’s bumping at the end of the last track. You know, she took her name from Billie Dove, you said, her favourite movie star, her real name was Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her father was Holiday but she hardly ever saw him, I think she took his name as a kind of accusation, or revenge. Not that you’d ever know from her autobiography, they say she made half of it up, you said. Billie Dove.