The Pen Friend (9 page)

And then I remembered your third card had been posted in Stroud, and wondered how I could have forgotten the Stroud connection. But then we were more than a little drunk by then, that night in New York when you told me of your mother’s suicide, and the next morning I had forgotten some of the salient details. After the war, you said, your father emigrated from the Netherlands to take up a position in the London branch of Philips, and it was in London that he met your mother. In 1958 or so – you were seven or eight – your father was assigned to the Lightpill factory in Stroud to oversee the production of a new design of light-switch; he worked there for two years, sometimes staying all week, sometimes commuting home in the evenings, for London was only two and half hours from Bristol on the Great Western Railway, and as I try to piece together your story from my fragmentary recollection, more lines from Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ come into my head:

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,

Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,

Receipted bills and invitations

To inspect new stock or visit relations,

And applications for situations

And timid lovers’ declarations …

and I think of the train bearing its long plume of smoke through the darkness.

Where’s Daddy? you used to ask, when you woke from one of your nightmares. You slept badly for those two years. Daddy’s in Lightpill, your mother would reply, and you would envisage him standing in a pool of light, near yet far away, bent over a workbench, and he would turn his head as if he heard something, and look into the distance with a puzzled look, and then he would smile as if he had seen you, and he would wave his hand. And sometimes you thought Lightpill was a holiday resort, like Blackpool, and you were angry with him because he’d gone on holiday without you. Daddy’s in Lightpill, your mother would say, he’s just telephoned to say he’s working late. That was in the days when you said ‘telephoned’, you said. Sometimes the phone would ring when you were still up, and you would answer it, and he would say, I’m sorry I can’t be at home, Nina, darling, but I’ll be home soon, and he would tell you stories about Stroud. Did you know that the man who wrote the
Thomas the Tank Engine
stories came from Stroud? you said. The Reverend Wilbert Awdry. My father would tell me how the Reverend Awdry used to live beside the railway depot at Stroud as a child, and he would lie awake at night listening to the groans and clanks of the goods trains, their whistles sounding in the dark like cries of happiness or sadness, and how he imagined personalities for them, and made up stories for them, you said. It was funny, because as a child I never thought of the stories as having an author, you said. And when I remember these details I find it difficult to understand how I could have forgotten Stroud. Then your mother would come in and say, Miranda, is that your father? And she would talk to him then, but sometimes not for long.

Sometimes she would appear upset, but maybe that’s only in retrospect, you said, after I got the postcard. The postcard? I said. It was long after my mother’s death, you said, about 1975, eight, nine years ago, I got a card from Stroud. I hadn’t thought about Stroud for about fifteen years, you know? A typical postcard image, it showed the vicarage and church in Stroud, very idyllic, and on the back it read,
Dear Nina, maybe see you some day
. And that was all, it was creepy, no signature, but it was a woman’s writing. No one else called me Nina, only my father, and by then he was dead too. And then I began to think that maybe he hadn’t always been working late in Lightpill, you said.

I look at your own postcard again, trying to glean what I can from the image.
Berlin. Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. Berlin/ Historisches Stadbilt, 1930
, it says on the back. The station is thus in Berlin, not East Berlin as it would become. The stamp hadn’t been postmarked, it was one of those that sometimes slips through the franking machine, so I had no idea where you were when you sent it. We’d gone together to West Berlin in November 1982, I was curating a show by a young Belfast painter, Gerry Byrne, at an obscure gallery called Kunstwerkstatt, run by a group of West Berliners who had contacts with the East, and they managed to get us into East Berlin for a day. You remember. It is a summer’s day in 1930 in the photograph. On the viaduct above Friedrichstrasse a massive steam locomotive is about to pull a train out of Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. Because I come from a city in which there are no elevated tracks, such a sight always seems magically incongruous to me, it adds another dimension to the cityscape. The train has a massive, spectacular presence, and I study it for some time before my eye is drawn to the details of the street. There is a
Parfumerie
in the left foreground, and I wonder what fragrances were in vogue in Berlin in 1930, and further on in, in the shade of the viaduct, is a Foto sign, and a row of boutique windows, and a stream of passers-by, and when I examine their clothes and their faces through the loupe, the closer I get the more abstract they become, because everything – shops, people, signs, traffic, clouds – is composed of the same matrix of black and white dots, yet I am still convinced of the solidity of that world as it registers the light that fell on it then, that summery moment in 1930 when the number 10 bus is passing under the viaduct, with the word
JUNO
inscribed on its brow. I take it to be a brand name rather than a destination. Soap, perhaps. But Juno is also the moon-goddess, wife of Jupiter. She is the goddess of war, but also of married women and of children born in wedlock. And in East Berlin we’d been taken to the Pergamon Museum. You’d been impressed by a sculpture of the Babylonian fertility goddess Astarte, with whom Juno is associated, and you bought a postcard of it, you remember. Wedlock, you said, what a strange word. I take it you were born in wedlock, Gabriel. Oh, my father and mother wouldn’t have had it any other way, I said. My father especially was a devout Catholic. Tell me about him, you said, I wonder if he was anything like my father. Remember?

As I write this with the Conway Stewart pen I am reminded that casein has one weakness as a material: it becomes unstable when it comes into prolonged contact with moisture. In the manufacturing process, the casein is laid down in very thin slabs like sedimentary rock, at the rate of one millimetre per week, so it takes sixteen weeks to build up the sufficient thickness required for a pen casing. The material is then hardened by placing it in a solution of dilute formaldehyde, the chemical used for embalming; this can take up to five months, so that the whole process, like human gestation, takes nine months. If a casein pen is placed in water for any length of time, it will soften and warp, as it tries to return to its original slab shape, to the womb of the vat in which it was formed. Casein has a memory. I write through the layers of intervening time, and find it difficult to separate what I might have told you about my father then, or what I might have already told you, or what you might have known without my telling you, from what I know now. So much has been laid down in the meantime.

My father, like others of his social class, left school at fourteen and joined the Post Office. It was there that he first heard Irish spoken by two fellow workers. By eighteen he was fluent in Irish and began teaching the language. He met my mother, Mary Ellen Hanrahan, in 1942 when she began attending his classes, and they married in 1944, just before the end of the Second World War. They brought up their children in Irish, so Irish was my first language, though I hesitate to say that it is my first language now, so deeply am I imbued with English. In the meantime my father had learned Esperanto. A certain Willie Tomelty, an Esperantist, came to my father’s Irish class. He kept badgering my father to learn Esperanto but my father had no initial interest. However: Tomelty had lots of pen-friends throughout Europe, one of whom was a Dutchman, Johann Wouters, who lived in your father’s native town of Delft. As you know, Delft is a small place, and I wonder if Wouters and your father knew each other.

After a while the Dutchman began to express an interest in Irish affairs, and he asked Tomelty to teach him Irish through the medium of Esperanto. Tomelty was ashamed to admit he was only a beginner at Irish himself, so one day he asked my father if he would teach Irish to the Dutchman. My father agreed; Tomelty gave his address to the Dutchman, and the next week my father got a letter, in English, from the Dutchman, saying he hoped my father had English, and if my father would teach him Irish, the Dutchman would teach him Esperanto as a recompense. So they began to write to each other. In a couple of months my father had learned Esperanto, he sported the Esperantist green star on the lapel of his postman’s uniform, and Johann Wouters was making good progress in Irish. English was soon dispensed with. They corresponded for some fifty years.

As I write this account I wonder, as I have always done, what sort of single-minded young man my father was. To learn Irish was regarded as eccentric then, even among the Nationalist population; Esperanto even more so. And Esperanto brought my father into contact with some strange people, notably Harry Foster, a spiritualist whom my father would engage in endless theological wrangles in the study of Ophir Gardens, where I am writing now. My father, as a fervent Catholic, subscribed to the Church’s orthodoxy that the supposedly paranormal phenomena produced by spiritualism were cheap conjuring tricks devised for the gullible, and that in the few instances where the phenomena were inexplicable by science, they were likely to be the work of the devil. Yet my father, as a Catholic, believed in the communion of saints, and looked forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come, a position, it seemed to me even then, to be not so far removed from that of the spiritualists. The relationship between Foster and my father was complicated by Foster’s claim that Esperanto was making great progress in the afterlife, and that the spirits of the dead had spoken in Esperanto to him and to others through Foster’s wife, a medium of some repute in spiritualist circles. And I wondered if the green star was in heaven as it is on earth, an emblem of the communion that is still possible after the fall of Babel.

And now I remember what perfume you wore that night in New York, chosen to go with the muted Irish theme. It begins as a powerful evocation of newly cut grass, a flower-strewn field of oakmoss, bergamot and orange blossom, sandalwood and fern, and there’s a whisper of a breeze carrying it elsewhere, a spicy note of cinnamon that clings as the bright green image fades:
Vent Vert
by Pierre Balmain. Green Wind. Though Green Breeze would sound better.

All manner of service in the field

Of course you knew I’d recognise the image immediately – Jan Vermeer’s
Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid
, which hangs in the National Gallery in Dublin. And you knew I would think immediately of the bizarre set of circumstances which preceded its being placed there. In April 1974 Bridget Rose Dugdale, daughter of Lieutenant Colonel James Dugdale, a wealthy landowner and former chairman of Lloyd’s, led a gang of three armed
IRA
men to Russborough House, the home of Sir Alfred Beit, whose family had made its fortune in partnership with Cecil Rhodes in the De Beers Consolidated Mines of South Africa. Beit and his wife, Clementine, were dragged by them to the library, where they were bound and gagged. The gang then proceeded to cut nineteen paintings from Beit’s priceless collection from their frames. Among them were works by Goya, Rubens, and Gainsborough, and the most valuable of all, Vermeer’s
Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid
. Dugdale had already achieved some notoriety: a year previously she had received a suspended sentence for her part in an art theft from her family’s country house near Axminster; and she was wanted by the police in Northern Ireland for her suspected involvement in the hijacking of a helicopter which had bombed an
RUC
station in Strabane, in January 1974.

Following the raid on Russborough House, the thieves demanded the release of the Price sisters, imprisoned in England for their part in a London car-bombing, and a ransom of £500,000 in exchange for the paintings. Eleven days later the paintings were found in the boot of a car at a rented cottage in Glandore, County Cork. Dugdale was arrested, charged and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment. The paintings were returned to Russborough, and two years later Beit established a trust to retain the house and its collection for the Irish state, and the National Gallery thus became the custodian of the Vermeer, though it was still
in situ
in Russborough. Twelve years later, in May 1986, twelve masked and armed men, led by the notorious Dublin criminal Martin Cahill, aka The General, broke into Russborough and stole fifteen paintings, including the Vermeer. In September 1993 a cache of stolen paintings was discovered in the boot of a car at Antwerp airport. The Vermeer, somewhat scratched and dented, was among them. It was given to Andrew O’Connor, the chief restorer at the National Gallery of Ireland, to repair the damage.

I look at your postcard again. A long dark green curtain seemingly has been withdrawn as if to invite us to gaze into the room, where a woman sits writing intently at a table covered with an oriental rug. The bodice of her dress is pale green, her sleeves and cap snowy white; she is wearing pearl earrings. Behind her, and to her right, more plainly dressed, stands a woman whom we take to be her maid. She gazes as if her mind has wandered out the tall leaded window, her mouth showing the glimmer of a smile. On the tiled floor in the right foreground is a little still life which includes a letter with a crumpled wrapper, a stick of sealing-wax, and a red wax seal. The seal, which was only discovered during O’Connor’s restoration of the painting, is a typical Vermeer conundrum, for it invites us to consider if a seal could remain unbroken if the letter we imagine it belongs to has been ripped open and discarded with such apparent haste – and recently, for we imagine the efficient-looking maid would have dealt with the mess on the floor. Perhaps the seal betokens a miraculously intact virginity. And why the empty chair in the foreground, which has not been tidied away against a wall, as it should in a Dutch household of that period? It looks as if a person unknown to us has been here not that long ago, a guest or messenger whose annunciation the writing woman is about to answer.

I turn the card over. It’s postmarked Berlin, which leads me to suspect that your previous card contained implications I failed to grasp. And it took me a while to arrive at the source of this message, which read,
All manner of service in the field
. The expression had an archaic, familiar ring to it. I looked at the Vermeer again for clues. The painting of a painting on the rear wall of the room is a message within a message, a depiction of The Finding of Moses. I turned to the Bible, to Chapter 2 of the Book of Exodus, which contains the story of how the Pharaoh commanded every Israelite male child to be killed at birth; but one mother consigned her boy to a vessel made of rushes and pitch, and laid him in the weeds by the river’s brink, where he was discovered by the daughter of Pharaoh, and she called him Moses, because Moses means ‘saved’. Moses is like a message in a bottle, delivered from his mother’s womb into the bosom of the Pharaoh’s daughter, who is a surrogate Madonna; and he will later become a messenger, as he delivers the Commandments to the people of Israel, all of which is appropriate to Vermeer’s painting. We take it that the maid will be asked to deliver her mistress’s letter: she is thus a messenger, a kind of Gabriel, for Gabriel is the messenger of God. And in the Dutch tradition, Moses represented God’s ability to unite opposing factions, which had some relevance to my own divided city of Belfast.

As I pondered your card and its manifold implications, I began to think of myself as an angler fishing a stretch of canal in the shadow of a dark semi-derelict factory leaking steam from a rusted exoskeleton of piping, who, after hours of inaction, feels his line bite, and, his excitement mounting, begins to reel in as his rod is bent by the gravity of what must be an enormous catch – a whale of a pike perhaps, glutted by its meal of barbel, perch, or one of the plump rats that scuttle through the soot-encrusted weeds of the canal banks – when to his consternation he finds he has snagged a smoothing-iron, which he discovers to be only the precursor of a series resembling a gargantuan charm bracelet dripping green-black beards and tendrils of slime, as the iron is followed by a sewing-machine, an ironing-board, a shopping trolley, a tangle of barbed wire, bits of corrugated iron fencing, rusted automatic weapons, a wire mesh security shutter, and a string of police motor-cycles, like stuff spewed from the maw of some legendary behemoth, a galleon or two with their full complements of cannon, barrels of biscuit and nail and wine and shot and oil, cases of carpenters’ tools and swords and needles and astrolabes and viols and pistols and flutes and crucifixes, and I still had not got to the bottom of your message.

Another detail besides the wax seal was discovered during the restoration of the Vermeer. Before its return to Ireland, the painting had been stored in Antwerp, where O’Connor was working on it when he was visited by Jorgen Wadum, conservator in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Wadum had long been dissatisfied with the theory that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve his almost photographic perspectives. When he examined
Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid
he found a pinhole at the centre of the writing woman’s left eye. On an impulse he fished in his bag, found a piece of string, and, holding one end to the eye, ran the string along the various lines of perspective. The lines met at the pinhole. Vermeer, he immediately conjectured, had rubbed chalk on a string, snapped it onto the canvas, and used those lines as a guide. And when I fish out a Perspex ruler from my drawer and try the same experiment, I find that it is so. The woman’s eye is concentrated on her writing, yet radiates invisible lines out into the room and beyond the window of the room, embracing the outside world to which her letter soon will be delivered, and, imagining the faint whisper of her quill upon the paper, I see you sitting in a Berlin café, perhaps, writing this card to me,
All manner of service in the field
, and I think of me fixed in your inner eye as you write my name and address on the card,
Gabriel Conway, 41 Ophir Gardens, Belfast
…

I turned to Exodus again, and found the source in Chapter 1. Verses 13-14 read, ‘And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour: And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field’. I took this to be an ironic reference to what you did. You described yourself as a Field Officer, Nina, though the bondage, I assumed, was voluntary. And what exactly is your field? I’d asked you. Well, it’s more like
the
field, you said. The field of information, you said, the field of enquiry, if you will, though of course we all have our own field. Like a spy ring, I said jokingly. Like a spy ring, you said, though we’re perfectly open about what we do. The best place to hide a thing is in full sight, you said. The early Mass Observation surveys were criticised because of their seemingly covert methods. The lower classes felt they were being spied upon by the upper. In
MO
2
we gather information, yes, but it’s no different from the kind of information anyone would gather in the course of their work, be they postmen or publicans or seamstresses or clerks or whatever. Every job implies a field of social and economic relationships.

As for my job, well, I spent a good few weeks looking out the window, you said. They’d given us the top floor of an old linen warehouse in Bedford Street, you know, at the back of the City Hall. My room overlooked the street, five storeys below, and I used to amuse myself by tracking the pedestrian traffic – people-watching, if you like. Monitoring the flow, the little knots and eddies, accidental encounters, people bumping into each other in the street, I’d see their backward steps of surprise, and imagine them saying, How are you, I haven’t see you for years, what have you been doing? And I took a special interest in people window-shopping. You know Lazenblatt’s antique shop, beside the Ulster Hall? you said. Yes, I said, those terrible Irish landscapes,
The Bridge at Cushendun
,
Fair Head on A Summer’s Day
, that kind of thing. But he’s got some nice stuff, too, though a bit outside my price range. I’d seen a snuff-box there the other week that Beringer was selling for half the price. Anyway, you said, I’d watch Lazenblatt’s over the course of a day, see who would stop at the window, while others wouldn’t give it a second look. There was one guy I remember, oh, dressed a bit like you, Gabriel, nice Donegal tweed jacket, green and grey fleck, good brogues, he stopped one morning and looked in the window for about five minutes, then he was back later in the afternoon, looked in the window again for quite a while. And the next day, the same thing, and the next. It took him four days to go into the shop, and then he came out empty-handed. Unless, of course, he’d bought something small, some kind of trinket, maybe a watch for himself, maybe a brooch for his girlfriend, who knows? and it was in his pocket.

Then again I’d sometimes look across the way, there was a building with an office floor just below my eye-level. There was one office, man at a desk, grey suit, every morning about eleven he’d take a chair and place it opposite his on the other side of the desk, then a secretary would come in, she’s in a grey suit too, except with a skirt, knee-length, hair in a bun, he’d gesture to her to sit down, she’s got a notebook ready, and he’d dictate to her. When you said this, I thought of the rapid whisper of her shorthand pen, and visualised an Edward Hopper scene, sunlight falling into an almost empty room.
Office in a Small City
, 1953, perhaps.

I could see his lips moving, you said, and we must have then discussed the various surveillance devices which were known to be in use throughout the city. The laser voice interceptor, specifically, which I’d learned about from McWhirter, you met him once, the computer buff at the Gallery, they’d brought him in to develop a cataloguing system, very advanced stuff for 1982. It’s really very simple, said McWhirter, like everything else we think is new, the Victorians had a version of it, they called it the photophone. It’s really a telephone, except you use light instead of electricity to project the information. Alexander Graham Bell, he hooked up a mouthpiece to a diaphragm that’s a mirror, so it vibrates to the sound of a voice, and that modulates a beam of sunlight aimed at the diaphragm by another mirror. Then you get a photovoltaic cell and an earpiece, that’s your remote receiver, you position it in the beam, and away you go. The sound comes over the light-beam.

And as McWhirter told me this I remembered manipulating a piece of mirror glass as a boy to dazzle the eyes of neighbours, aiming the blip of light through the windows of rooms to dance mysteriously across the walls and ceilings.

Of course, said McWhirter, it was very weather-dependent. No sunlight, no communication, and I imagined rain-spattered voices flickering and fading as a scud of April cloud passed overhead, and thought that dust-motes falling through the beam might produce a background drizzle like that on old cylinder recordings. Then, in the Sixties, said McWhirter, Bell Laboratories – quantum electronics chap, Charles Towne – developed the laser. Acronym. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Ordinary light’s like white noise, the photons are all over the place. But your laser releases all the photons in one direction, at one frequency. It’s a sine wave, pure, coherent tone. Beam of tightly packed light, razor-sharp, nearly incorruptible. Like a magic wand. Point it at a window. The window is your diaphragm, you see. And the room’s an acoustic chamber. The sound waves generated by conversation will cause the glass in the window to vibrate ever so slightly. If you bounce your laser beam off the window, the reflection gets modulated by the vibrations. Then all you need to hear what’s being said is some kind of demodulating thingamajig to extract the audio from the reflected laser beam. And there you have it. Your laser voice interceptor. Mind you, it’s not one hundred per cent perfect. Proximity of fluorescent lights, neon, sodium, might cause a buzz, that kind of thing. Air currents, strong winds, you get an effect like blowing into a mike. And direct sunlight can swamp the beam. But you’d be surprised at what you can hear from a couple of hundred feet away. And beyond that, well, you can hook it up to a telescopic gunsight, mount it directly on to the laser housing. Pretty accurate for a mile or two, said McWhirter. And you really think they’re using this device in Belfast? I said. McWhirter looked at me over his glasses and gave me a pitying smile. What do you think? he said.