The Pen Friend Read online

  I think The Yellow Bungalow is the first painting I ever really saw, I said. My father would bring me to the Gallery as a child. The Mummy in Antiquities was the big draw that had everyone peering over her glass case to see her blackened features and her flaxen hair. I can remember standing on tiptoe to look at her, and thinking she looked nothing like the picture on her coffin. Sarcophagus, my father would say, and proceed to tell me how the ancient embalmers drew the brain out through the nostrils with a hook, and would then discard it, believing it unnecessary to the reanimation of the body in the next life. The heart, the centre of intelligence, was left in place. After seeing the Mummy we would go to view The Yellow Bungalow, and I still remember the glow with which it hit me first. Though of course we don’t know how many layers of remembering have been built on to that, I said to you. My father would point out how the three fishes were a reference to the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. The woman was a type of Madonna. As for the boy, who did I think the boy would be? Oh, the boy with the concertina, I said, as if there were another boy. Melodeon, said my father, it’s a melodeon. And I should have known better than to call it a concertina, for my father played the melodeon himself, and I realised I had been trying to be clever.

  So my father would lecture me on the importance of names, and when we emerged into the Botanic Gardens, he would point to the broad lawn surrounded by chestnut trees in blossom and ask me how many blades of grass I thought there might be on the lawn, and I said, I don’t know, hundred of thousands, maybe, millions? We can be sure that it is a great many, said my father, but every one is different from its neighbour, because nothing in the world is the same as anything else. Because if any one thing was identical to another thing, then it would occupy the same space as that thing, and be that thing. And because God sees everything, we may be sure He has enumerated those blades of grass, and every blade of grass in the world. And in a like manner He knows all the names that Man has given to things, in every language, in order to distinguish one thing from another.

  The trees swayed in the breeze like a line of galleons and I thought of the blue strip of sea in The Yellow Bungalow where ships of the Armada might well have foundered. Of course it was a melodeon, I said, and I could hear my father playing it on Sundays, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, I said, with the slightly wonky treble notes shimmering above the dark bass, and my reverie was interrupted when my father said, Gabriel, are you listening to me?

  So I’m writing this with the Wearever and I can feel the pen writing. The tip of the steel overlay of the nib is slightly upturned, allowing the gold point underneath some play, while keeping it in check when too much pressure is applied. If this were a car, you’d say it had a comfortable suspension. The writing has a spring to it, a bounce which I found difficult to control at first, accustomed as I was to the rigid point of a ballpoint pen or rollerball. But from the beginning I’ve enjoyed using the Wearever, writing whatever came into my head, practising my signature with it just for the feel of the nib and the measured flow of ink on paper. I’m writing this with the Wearever, I’d write, nice Wearever nib to use Wherever wears forever, before moving on to more elaborate nonsense – the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Or, driven by fountain-pen-induced nostalgia, I’d carefully delineate my name and address, as written in my school copy-books a good half-century ago, Gabriel Conway, 41 Ophir Gardens, Belfast, County Antrim, Ireland, Europe, The Northern Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System, The Universe, and wonder, as I did then, what came next in that hierarchy. Or did I write Northern Ireland? I can’t remember. Wherever.

  That’s all very well, you said, but you can’t expect everyone to know what you know when you’re looking at a painting. And what do you know of what I knew when I looked at that painting? The Yellow Bungalow, whatever you want to call it. Don’t you think The Yellow Bungalow is just a bit too easy, too descriptive? Why not The Cat and Fishes? What does it matter, if you’re looking at it with your own eyes? you said. You bring yourself to a painting, you said.

  So what brought you to write to me again? You remember our letters? We used to write to one another even if we were to meet that day, letters as addenda to whatever we’d discussed or fought about the night before, letters as agenda for the next day, adumbrations of the pros and cons, retractions or advancements of positions taken, communiqués that opened up the possibility of renegotiation or compromise; for we believed that written words were sometimes a more accurate record of our thoughts and feelings, because more pondered, whereas spoken words are often ill-advised or ill-considered, and once uttered cannot be retracted; but letters can be drafted and redrafted until they sit better with our thought than the words which first come to mind; moreover, as we write, trying to articulate ourselves, unexpected thoughts sometimes occur to us, that were not part of our original intention, and we change our minds as we write, arriving at conclusions wholly other than those we first envisaged, so that writing to each other, we discovered what we thought. We were the authors and protagonists of an epistolic novel. Meeting in the XL Café, we would read each other’s letters in each other’s presence, silently, as a long-established couple might read the morning papers. Then we would discuss our written statements, seeking clarification on this point or that, like negotiators of a ceasefire or a post-war treaty.

  I used a Pentel rollerball then; I’d abandoned writing with a fountain pen some years before. I’d always disliked the slippery feel of a ballpoint, and the Pentel seemed to have more tooth when put to paper. I liked the firm black line laid down by its point, and its thick green plastic flat-topped casing, a classic design that remains unchanged to this day, for I saw one yesterday. And it seems to me now to have been inspired by the classic Parker Duofolds and flat-top Sheaffers of the 1920s, which leads me to put down the Wearever I’ve been writing with till now, and pick up a Gatsby era Sheaffer’s ring-top pen in jade celluloid with little milky flecks in it – the ring would have been attached, as was your Dinkie, to a lanyard to hang from a lady’s neck. As I write, I find myself touching my free hand to my neck for an invisible lanyard, and I think for a moment I could be you, toying with your Dinkie, red and black marble swirls and not this near-translucent green jade.

  Made for and presumably used by a lady’s hand, the Sheaffer sits tolerably well in mine, though I must hold myself somewhat differently, and there is only the ghost of a scratch to its nib as I write. The point is finer and more rigid than that of the Wearever, and it seems to discipline my writing to a different mode as the words come forth, and I wonder whose hand held this pen before me, what assignations it communicated, its jade cylinder resting on a dressing table between words, among scent bottles of pale amethyst and frosted lilac and delicate opal. It carries a perfume which is not ink alone, a residue of someone else, of chiffon scarves of coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange billowing in the slipstream of a Duofold Mandarin Yellow open-topped tourer, colours dappling the faces of the laughing foursome as they drive through a leafy tunnel and faint jazz music ebbs and flows down through the trees from the white ocean-liner of a house built on the cliff edge.

  I try to picture the face of the woman who held this pen before me, eighty years ago, and instead see your face, as you might imagine, for you knew I would be thus intrigued when you wrote that single phrase, that slender horizontal lightning-bolt, It’s been a long time. I see you as you were then, but also as you might be now. You were two years younger than me, so you’re fifty-five. I put lines in your brow, and guess what wrinkles might have accrued at the corners of eyes and mouth, and flesh out the neck a little, and add some pouches to the cheeks, streaks of grey to the black hair, and it is still you, what you have become. In any case I’d know you by the amber fleck in that left eye of yours, not so much flaw as beauty-spot. I’d know you anywhere.

  When York Minster was struck by lightning in 1984, and its South Transept razed by the subsequent fire, it was discovered that 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. Restoration began. 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. We two saw the glass as it was, as it had been.

  I write to try to see you as you were, or what you have become. You left no forwarding address: that was part of your intention. For when we wrote those letters to each other all those years ago, we wrote as much for ourselves as for each other; as much to ourselves as to each other. Promising to be in touch, you drifted out of the XL Café. Your perfume lingered. Arpège, that’s what it was, not L’Air du Temps. Jasmine and rose borne by musk with a hint of sparkling green in its depths.

  It’s easy to remember

  I had spent a week planning a new approach to my Esperanto book (it would be written in longhand with various fountain pens for one thing, each appropriate to a particular strand of the narrative) when your second card arrived, and threw me somewhat out of kilter. Lightning does strike twice. I remember hearing, in 1983, midway through our time together, of the death of the man – an American park-ranger – who had been struck by lightning seven times in his life. And statistics show that it is more likely for a person to be struck by lightning in the United Kingdom, than to be the victim of a terrorist attack; though whether that applied to Northern Ireland in the 1980s, and to Belfast in particular, might well require another computation. In any event I did not know whether to be more surprised by your second missive than by the first. On reflection, perhaps I had subconsciously expected it. Viewed by itself, that first postcard was unprecedented; or, retrospectively, it was a postscript, an addendum to our previous correspondence, however protracted the interval, the culmination of a long concatenation of mental processes which did not necessarily include me, of circumstances beyond your ken perhaps, of planetary influences for all I know, which led inexorably to your decision to communicate yourself to me again through those few words; and when I thought about it, I realised that when we say, It’s been a long time, we usually intend it as the preamble to a mutual reminiscence, queries as to how the other party has been faring all those months or years. It opens up a conversation. And when we part we say, We must keep in touch.

  This message was equally laconic: It’s easy to remember, you wrote. Again, you left no signature. The stamp was postmarked London, one week after the first. I pondered the words for some time, thinking that there are many things which are not easy to remember, that there are things so forgotten as to be beyond recall, or that there are things whose implications will be fully realised only in the future, and even then perhaps not by the person whom they most concern. Be that as it may, I was more struck by the image on your postcard than by your words, as I presume you had intended. The caption on the back bottom left reads thus: Two Dutchmen and Two Courtesans, Hanging Scroll, ink and colours on paper, Japan (Nagasaki), about 1800. And on the bottom right, V & A Encounters, the meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800, sponsored by Nomura.

  The image was familiar to me because I had seen its original in that very exhibition, held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in the autumn of 2004. On 9th October, to be precise, on which day I attained the age of fifty-six: it was my birthday gift to myself to spend a few days in London, a city I have always loved, a city that you loved. And it struck me that you might have been there that day in the V & A, that you might have seen and known me, however changed I was, whatever I’d become, you might have shared the same gallery space as me, and breathed the air that I breathed. We might have brushed against each other unwittingly, or unseeingly. I had visited the museum shop at the end of my visit. Perhaps you bought the postcard then, one of a batch as aides-mémoire of the exhibition, which had lain forgotten in a drawer until now. Or it was meant for someone else, and thinking twice you thought better of it. Perhaps it was intended for me all along, that even then you planned it. I could have bought that very card myself, but was distracted by a book on eighteenth-century costume; and perhaps as I browsed its colour plates of elaborate brocades you were paying for this card I keep flicking my eyes to as I write, and I was oblivious to the beep of the till that signalled the transaction.

  Two Dutchmen and Two Courtesans: when we went out for our first meal together, you insisted it should be a Dutch treat, and when I demurred, you said it was only proper, since you were half-Dutch. I saw a glint in your amber-flecked eye. The name on your birth certificate was Bouwer, you said, and you had changed it to Bowyer by deed poll when your father died. Bouwer meant ‘builder’ in Dutch; you had always disliked it. Your father, Arie Bouwer, had been active in the resistance movement known as PAN – Partisan Action Netherlands – founded in 1943 in Eindhoven, where he was an electronics engineer in the Philips factory. As you told me something of his story, an image of the Philips Bakelite radio I used to listen to as a child flickered in and out of my mind’s eye, and I saw myself spinning the needle past the lit linear blips of the stations, Athlone, Hilversum, Warsaw, Moscow, to a storm of gabbled languages and machine-gun bursts of Morse and static. The partisans, you said, had been organised into cells which communicated chiefly by telephone, and your father had been instrumental in further refining the system by linking it to the underground cabling of the Eindhoven factory. Everyone in PAN had a nom de guerre; when they did meet face to face they wore masks. No member knew the identities of the others, beyond their being agents of a common cause. And what was your father’s nom de guerre? I asked. He was known as Harry, you said, and when I queried the efficacy of an alias that was so close to the original, you replied that the best place to hide a thing was in plain sight, and referred me to the Edgar Allan Poe story, ‘The Purloined Letter’, where the letter in question has been stuck by the thief in a letter rack, under the noses of the investigating constabulary, and only the private consultant Dupin – the precursor of Sherlock Holmes – has the eyes to see that the letter has been disguised as itself.

  Given the Dutch connection, I thought it only proper to write this with a Merlin pen, made in the Netherlands in about 1948, the year of my birth and of your father’s marriage to a Yorkshire woman, Eleanor Birtwhistle. You showed me a photograph once of her when she was your age, and you have her dark hair, her high cheekbones and slightly flattened, up-tilted nose, the same broad smile, the same assured stance. She is a Chief Executive Officer in the Imperial Civil Service, a rare achievement for a woman at that time. She is wearing a salt-and-pepper tweed suit with a box jacket; on a lanyard around her neck she wears your Dinkie pen, and its red and black candle-flame seems to glow against her white blouse, even though the photograph is in black and white. As for this pen I hold now, it is in mint condition, one of a number of new old stock recently discovered in a Delft stationer’s. It had never been inked when I received it, and it is a paradoxically uncanny feeling, to be writing with a pen as old as I am when there are no ghosts of other hands behind it, as if I were writing when it was new, and I am born.

  The body of the Merlin is patterned in shimmery layered feathery lines of tawny brown and cream, like the plumage of the bird it was named for; and I consider again how many fountain pens there are of avian nomenclature – for pen, after all, is from Latin penna, a feather, or a quill, an etymology I did not fully realise until I became, as it were, a fully-fledged collector of pens. There are pens called Swan, Jackdaw, Swallow, Blackbird, Eagle, Condor, and Wing-Flow. The c
ompanies that made them are all defunct. There is a pleasant story behind the German firm of Pelikan, still producing fine pens today. It was founded in 1878 by Gunther Wagner, whose family crest of a pelican was adopted as the logo of the company, to symbolise a familial allegiance to its employees, for the pelican is famously protective of its brood. The family pelican was depicted with three chicks; but another was added to the Pelikan logo at the last moment, when it was found that Wagner’s wife was expecting their fourth child.

  Some months ago I stumbled on a rare find in Smithfield Market, a Staffordshire ceramic quill-stand which more fully illustrates the pelican legend. In Christian art, the pelican is a symbol of charity; it is also an emblem of Christ the Redeemer. St Jerome gives the story of the pelican restoring its young destroyed by serpents, by feeding them with its own blood, and his salvation by the blood of Christ. The misconception as to the pelican’s feeding habits apparently arose from the fact that the parent bird macerates small fish in the large bag attached to its under-bill, whereupon, pressing the bag against its breast, it transfers the macerated food to the mouths of the young. The quill-stand consists of just such a family group, with holes for two quills on either side, though apparently its makers have never seen a pelican, for the bird lacks its characteristic long beak; but it is clearly identified by the salient features of its legend. The pelican pecks angrily with its diminutive nib at a green snake coiled around its body; its breast is red with blood, and at its feet lie three pink featherless chicks, yet to be revived. Jerome, as the translator of the Bible into Latin, is the patron saint of translators and interpreters, and elsewhere he draws an explicit parallel between blood and ink: translation by transfusion, as it were. I am reminded that solemn covenants are often signed in blood, that thousands of Ulstermen did so in 1912, swearing allegiance to the King, and to oppose the plans to set up a Home Rule government in Dublin; and that four years later thousands of those Ulstermen would die in the blood-bath of the Somme.