The Pen Friend

by Ciaran Carson

  Anyway, there’s just the two of them, we’re in Callaghan’s office. Lovely room, he’s got the original warehouse wide-planked flooring sanded and waxed – nothing so crude as that polyurethane varnish – and he’s got a few Persian tribal rugs scattered on them, and there’s some lovely Art Nouveau furniture, a burr walnut drinks cabinet with a sunburst motif on it, nice settee and chairs in cut moquette, that kind of thing. Good art on the walls, you’d like it, Gabriel, there’s a Maurice Wilks landscape, and a Paul Henry, one of those Connemara ones which is mostly sky, clouds tumbling all over the place. There’s a nice Colin Middleton from his Surrealist phase.

  Callaghan pours us all a good glass of brandy to begin, and offers me a cigarette from a cedar box, though he knows I don’t smoke, it’s all very informal. Bentley lights up a pipe, and Callaghan gestures for me to sit on the settee. Bentley and himself sprawl out in these easy chairs. Well, says Callaghan, Miranda, if I might call you Miranda, we’ve looked at your differentiation outline, and it’s very good, very well thought out, says Callaghan. Yes, very well thought out, says Bentley in a cut-glass Oxford accent, and the way he says it, it’s not like he’s repeating what Callaghan said, he’s adding to it, he puts a different spin on it, and Bentley smiles meaningfully as he says this, and then Callaghan says, Yes, we’d just like to explore it a bit further, get a clearer picture of what you have in mind. Yes, says Bentley, a clearer picture. Of what you have in mind, says Bentley, and again this seems to mean something else to what Callaghan meant. But first, says Callaghan, purely procedural matter, don’t you know, let’s be sure we’ve got the right woman, and he laughs as if he’s just made a joke, and Bentley says, between puffs of his pipe, Yes. The. Right. Woman.

  So Callaghan’s got this dossier on his lap, and he opens it and says, Miranda Bowyer. Born London, 11th June, 1951, parents Arie Bouwer, Dutch national, and Eleanor Bowyer, née Birtwhistle, and so on, the dossier’s got where I went to school, my university career, what I subsequently did, they’ve got everything, they’ve got things about me that I’d forgotten, maybe things about me I didn’t even know. And every so often he looks up at me and says, Correct? And I nod, and Bentley says, Yes. Correct. Well, that’s good, says Callaghan, we like to know who we’re dealing with, and he laughs again. And this time Bentley doesn’t echo his words, but he says, Well, Miranda, if I might call you Miranda, we’ve looked very carefully at your outline, it’s excellent, design consultancy, it’s a good niche market thing, we’ll go into all that later in more detail, but for now, it seems to me that the best way to advance this little session is for you perhaps to give us a broader understanding of your role in the organisation, well, not so much that, but we’d like you to be clear about what we do. I mean, what do you think we do? says Bentley, and Callaghan says, Yes, what do you think we do?

  So I’m a bit put out by this. And oh, do take your time, they both say together then, and they look at each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and I’m beginning to feel like Alice in Wonderland, so I start talking off the top of my head, and I says, Well, I’m looking at the art on the wall here, and it seems to me it must be representative in some way of what you do. You’ve been very careful in researching my background, and I’m sure the organisation is equally meticulous in its design choices. Take the Maurice Wilks, now. And Callaghan and Bentley crane their necks to look at it, as if they’d never seen it before, it’s one of those Bridge at Cushendun pieces, but a good cut above the normal, nice scumbling to the clouds, Wilks, born when, 1911, 1912, year of the UVF gun-running operation, Protestant background, son of a linen designer, why, his father might have worked in these very premises, I said, and Callaghan and Bentley nod sagely at this, and Maurice goes to the local College of Art, he’s a star pupil, exhibits at the RHA when he’s only nineteen. Starts to specialise in landscapes, spends a lot of time in the Glens of Antrim, Connemara, Donegal, those kinds of Irish landscapes, mountains and skies. It’s ostensibly very conventional, the kind of thing the art-conscious Ulster middle classes like to hang on their walls, but there’s a nice touch of French Impressionism there too, and it’s very well painted. Young artists these days, they could learn a lot from Wilks. And Wilks sees himself more as an Irishman than an Ulsterman, I’d say, though I’ve never met him. Isn’t he living in Dublin now? So the Wilks sends out a message that art can transcend political allegiances, that there are things that are important beyond this fiddle.

  The Paul Henry, much the same kind of thing, but the Middleton, it’s a bit more challenging, and I go on about the cultural traffic between Belfast and Paris, I throw in a mention of Sir John Lavery, and they like that. Isn’t that the Lavery that painted the Royal Family? says Bentley. Yes, says Callaghan, and those rather dashing paintings of the Orange parades, great colour sense, don’t you think, those vibrant oranges and purples. Then I talk about the furniture a little. Drinks cabinet by Anderson & McAuley, when they were the big department store in Belfast, top of the range piece, made for linen merchants, shipbuilders. Same kind of design that went into the Titanic. Ditto the suite and the rugs, and I gabble on a bit more about the décor, you said, and I can see Callaghan and Bentley exchanging approving glances, so I see I’m on the right track, and I end up making a great speech about how communities can only be reconciled by pursuing common interests, that living with beautiful things must necessarily work against narrow sectarian interests, you know, kind of William Morris philosophy, and that MO2 is the kind of organisation that seeks harmoniously to integrate its objectives with the aspirations of the majority of the citizens of Ireland both North and South, it’s all a bit of tautology really, or codology, but it seems to go down well with Callaghan and Bentley. So they say, Well, Miranda, consider yourself differentiated, and I say, Is that it? and they smile and nod. And the budget I gave them in advance, it’s approved in a matter of days, and I begin setting myself up. And here I am, Fawcett & Jones, at your service, Angel.

  I didn’t know you knew so much about Irish art, Nina, I said. You gave me one of your looks. That’s because I usually listen to you talk about it, Angel, you said, you do it very well. And anyway, when I started off, I didn’t know that much, but then I made it my business to know. That’s the challenge of the job, there’s always something new to learn, you said, and I didn’t know whether you spoke tongue in cheek, or not.

  As I write, Nina, it is Thursday 28th July 2005, precisely three weeks after the bombing of London by radical Islamic terrorists, and the IRA has just made a statement calling upon all its units to ‘dump arms’ by four o’clock this afternoon, and instructing its volunteers to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means. In other words, the IRA has said that its war is over, without using those precise words. And I wonder if the helicopter last night had anything to do with that announcement. For helicopters are about being seen and heard, as much as they are about seeing and hearing. They’re a signal that something’s happening, or about to happen. Part of the choreography, an audio-visual aid, if you like. The IRA statement was delivered on a DVD in a quiet Belfast accent by a former IRA prisoner, Seanna Walsh, a name which was pronounced variously by the political commentators, and to tell you the truth, I was not familiar with this supposedly Irish name myself. But that a real person should be assigned such a role was in itself significant, for previously all IRA statements had been issued by the pseudonymous P. O’Neill. Walsh was standing against a backdrop of green ivy in what I took to be his back garden, and I could hear a child crying and a blackbird singing behind him as he spoke the momentous words. So it seemed appropriate for me to write this letter with a Blackbird Self-Filling Pen, made by Mabie Todd & Co. Ltd of London in 1938, who also made Swan, Jackdaw and Swallow pens. It’s a green Blackbird, done in various hues of marbled green, with black inclusions, the logo of a stylised blackbird in flight stamped on the body and the head of the clip. The gold nib glitters as I write. Any time I have a Blackbird in my
hand I cannot help but think of the Early Irish poem my father taught me. You remember, Nina? I used to recite it to you:

  int én bec

  ro léc feit

  do rinn guip

  glanbuidi

  fo-ceird faíd

  ós Loch Laíg,

  lon do chraíb

  charnbuidi.

  It was, I explained, a piece of marginalia, inscribed by a monk in the margin of his ecclesiastical text as he was distracted by the beauty of the moment. Or a piece of graffiti, you said, someone who wanted to say, I was here. Perhaps, I said, except that the someone is anonymous. And yet maybe we feel that we do know him, for all that he’s nameless. It sounds beautiful, you said, what does it mean? Oh, it’s untranslatable, of course, I said, and I’ve tried it different ways, all with their own failings. But it might go something like this:

  the little bird

  that whistled shrill

  from the nib of

  its yellow bill:

  a note let go

  o’er Belfast Lough –

  a blackbird from

  a yellow whin.

  Whin, you said, we have that word in Yorkshire too. The whinny moors of Yorkshire. Somehow it’s not the same as gorse, is it? No, I said, we speak a different language to the Southern English. And I went on to say that this was the first piece of writing – apart from practice runs – that I’d ever done on a typewriter. I wanted to see how it might look spaced out in regular type, for all that it had originally been done with a goose-quill and oak-gall ink.

  I’d bought the typewriter, an Imperial Portable, in Woolworth’s in 1972, Saturday 4th March, to be precise. For some time it had been a custom for three or four of us to meet for coffee on Saturday afternoons in the Abercorn Restaurant, just across the street from Woolworth’s. Paul Nolan would be there, we’d gone on Civil Rights marches together in the late sixties – 1968, the year of revolution, we saw ourselves as Belfast equivalents of the Paris students. And in 1968 we thought the thing would be over in a matter of months, things would change for the better, and everyone could get on with living their lives in a just society. Little did we know. Four years later we’d meet in the Abercorn and talk literature and art and politics, wondering where it was all going to end. It wasn’t a regular date, but most Saturdays there’d be a casual gathering. Anyway, on this Saturday, as it happened, I was so engrossed by my Imperial Portable, excited by the prospect of trying it out, that I gave the Abercorn a miss. And so, for one reason or another, did my friends. Most Saturdays we’d be there; this particular Saturday we were not. At about four o’clock I was just about to board the bus home, the blackbird poem was in my mind, and I was visualising myself pecking out the words on the unfamiliar keyboard, when I heard an almighty explosion. The IRA never claimed responsibility for the Abercorn bomb that killed two young women – they happened to be Catholics – and injured more than seventy; but it was widely accepted that it was indeed the IRA, and it was one of the atrocities cited today as commentators cast their minds back over the years of the Northern Ireland conflict.

  So the typewriter saved you, you said. The Imperial Portable. Who knows? I said. Maybe my father and mother saved me, when they taught me Irish. Maybe the Irish monk who wrote the poem saved me. Maybe the blackbird saved me, as it sang in a whin bush eleven hundred years ago. Maybe the worm it had just fed on saved me. When something terrible happens, everyone has their story about how they were saved – they’d forgotten their passport, and had to turn back for it, and so missed the plane that crashed a matter of hours later, how their bicycle had a puncture, if that splinter of glass had not been lying on the road at that precise spot, had the drunk not smashed his empty bottle on the pavement the night before, had the landlord not served him that last bottle to take out, why, they’d have been cycling past the scene of the explosion at about that time, they’d very likely be blown to bits, how they had a premonition, and decided to take the bus instead of the tube, how in hindsight they now knew what that dream they’d had two weeks ago meant, how in a vision they’d seen blood run down the glass of an aeroplane window, how they’d got drunk last night and called in sick that day, this or that random or purposeful interference with the normal pattern of their lives, tiny blips that become meaningful under the pressure of the extraordinary event, and so a series of coincidences, or what now seem to be coincidences, is made into a narrative that makes some sense of what is beyond normal sense. But the stories only skim the surface. Who can say what circumstantial chain lies behind our actions, and our thoughts? Yes, you said, I often think of that, when I think of how my mother died. Because in many ways it seemed so unnecessary, so gratuitous. But then it is always difficult for us to imagine why someone should take their own life, you said.

  As the noise of the helicopter dwindled away into the distance I heard a blackbird singing in the garden of Ophir Gardens, and I wondered what went on in the blackbird’s mind, as it broadcast its lovely aria of loops and spirals, whether it merely delivered a territorial claim, or if it too revelled in the beauty of its song. I was still in that heightened state which sometimes accompanies lack of sleep when your postcard arrived, and it took me only a matter of minutes to recognise the source of your message. Only an infinite present. It was, again, a reference to Yves Klein. On 9th April 1951, he was in Madrid when he witnessed a display of American supersonic aircraft. They appeared like silver knives in the blue sky, he wrote in his diary that day, and traversed the hemisphere in a split second. Soon time will be conquered, and then we will no longer have past nor future, only an infinite present. I am determined to put all that I write, as well as all that I say, in the present – a perpetual present, said Klein. Later, when he presented his monochrome blue paintings to the public, he responded to accusations of charlatanism by saying, In the atomic era, where all material things can suddenly disappear – blasted out of existence – leaving room for only the most abstract things imaginable, one might be permitted to recount the following story, from ancient Persia:

  One day, a flute-player began to play only a single continuous note. After he had repeated this performance for some twenty years, his wife suggested he might profitably listen to some other flute-players, who produced a range of sounds – high notes, low notes, notes in sequences, and so on – that might perhaps be more interesting and melodious. To this, the flute-player replied that he should not be blamed for finding the one note that others still sought.

  And it sometimes occurs to me that all these letters of mine are but an attempt to discover one note, the one blue note that might explain why you did what you did, why you left me the way you did, because the more I think of it, the more inexplicable does it become to me. More inexplicable than it was then, for you were wholly guilty to me then, and so I burned your letters, because I wanted you to be dead to me. But little by little your postcards have begun to change all that. For you are very much alive, and I wonder what made you choose this card, of Barkston Gardens Hotel, Earls Court, London, a photograph taken at noon on a summer’s day – the trees are in full leaf, the sun almost directly overhead, as I can see by the shadow of one of the parked cars – a scene of almost spellbinding banality. Yet there is something eerie, almost sinister about it. It is noon, yet the street is deserted. Out of curiosity I looked up the hotel on the Internet, and I see it is still a going concern, though it is now described as being in South Kensington, which I daresay is more fashionable than Earls Court. But this place looks like a location for a noir spy thriller, photographed at a time which must long predate our relationship. As you know, I am not expert in cars – I didn’t drive when I knew you, though I did learn, after my father’s death – but, apart from the venerable convertible parked in the right foreground, the cars have a mid-1960s look about them. Let’s say 1965. And then I remembered your telling me that your mother ended her life in 1965 in an Earls Court hotel, that she had been saving her medication for months, that she had booked herself into the hotel for
a weekend, that she had said goodbye to you that Friday morning as you left for school – no, she had kissed you, something she kept only for special occasions, you thought it strange at the time – and had taken an overdose later that night. She was found the next morning when the maid came to do up the room.

  I cast my mind back to that night in New York when I thought you bore the aura of your mother’s perfume, hawthorn blossom after rain, and you told me of your father’s time in the Erinoid factory at Lightpill, how 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 then he would hear the triumphant shriek of the Great Western express as it rushed past on its way to London, the long plume of its smoke borne like hawthorn blossom against the night sky. And he would think of you then, and of your mother. He didn’t really speak about it until a couple of weeks afterwards, you said, and even then I wonder if he was speaking about her at all. You know, Nina, he said, one has to follow one’s instincts. And he told you a story, how during the War he was faced with a choice, like that presented to a bomb-disposal expert, whether to cut this wire or that, except in this instance he had to decide quickly whether a telephone message received from a known double agent was a bluff or a double-bluff, whether the information was true or false. The decision he made resulted in the death of four men. I trusted my instinct, he said, and I cut the wrong wire, in a manner of speaking. But I had to trust myself, because if you don’t trust yourself, who will? And there will be times when you are wrong, but at least you can say that you are true to yourself, Nina, said your father. I took it that he referred to some other wrong choice in his personal life, or to my mother’s suicide, you said. Or that perhaps the two were connected.