The Pen Friend

by Ciaran Carson

  He had gone to Belfast hoping to find a medium who was somehow in touch with an alternative reality, a correspondent with another universe. But as he subjected Kathleen Goligher to more and more rigorous controls it became apparent that trickery was being used, and he came to ‘a definitely unfavourable conclusion regarding the whole of the phenomena’. A final sitting on 29th August produced no results. Kathleen Goligher indicated that due to indisposition she would not be giving any sittings to Fournier d’Albe, or to anyone else, for at least twelve months; and she never again submitted herself to scientific scrutiny. Fournier d’Albe had found the Goligher Circle to be ‘an alert, secretive, troublesome group of well-organised performers’. He seemed to have proved conclusively that the ‘operators’, far from being agents of a world beyond the grave, were none other than the members of the Goligher Circle themselves. Yet Fournier d’Albe’s findings were disputed by those who wished to believe, and to this day there were still those who believe in Kathleen Goligher’s ability to produce ectoplasmic rods and cantilevers, just as there are those who believe in Uri Geller, or the reality of alien visitations.

  D’Albe kept a meticulous record of his dealings with the Goligher Circle, going so far as to note the weather at the time. I learned that the summer of 1921 was a typical Irish one: 1st June, for example, was showery and cool, while 6 June was hot and sunny. I was much taken by the coincidence that 40 Fountain Street, where the sittings took place, is the current location of the XL Café, and, as I read these brief reports of the weather, I imagined myself walking along the street one of those June days, feeling the breeze or the rain or the sun on my face, before going in for a cup of tea, where I might meet your counterpart. Then it occurred to me that the circumstances might not have been so idyllic.

  D’Albe’s stay in Belfast coincided with a period of civil unrest that came to a head shortly after the opening of the first parliament of Northern Ireland on 22nd June, when Catholics were driven en masse from their homes and jobs by the UVF. There must have been gunshots to be heard as well as the rappings produced by the Goligher Circle, for the UVF had attacked Catholic homes in the New Lodge Road, not far from the city centre. My own father’s father had been expelled from his job as a fitter in Harland and Wolff’s, the shipyard that built the Titanic. In an attempt to discipline the loyalists, the government in Westminster recruited a Special Constabulary, but when a number of them joined Protestant mobs in Belfast on 10 July, they came to be regarded as enemies of the Catholic community. Plus ça change. The Specials were part of the loyalist mob which infamously attacked the Civil Rights march at Burntollet Bridge on 4th January 1969. Hughie Falls was there, among the injured, and his photograph appeared in the Irish News. Long-haired, bearded, eyes staring wildly, blood pouring from a head wound, he cut a heroic, Christ-like figure, and for many months afterwards did not lack female companionship.

  Is that the Hughie Falls you knock about with? my father asked me when he saw the picture. Yes, I said, not being inclined to deny him. Well, said my father, he might be a hero, but his father, Tommy Falls, was a rogue. How’s that? I said. He was a scab, said my father, he broke a postal workers’ strike back in the Thirties. And how did the strike end up? I said. My father sighed. Oh, we had to go back, without a penny more than what we started with. So it was pointless anyway, I said, whether Tommy Falls was a scab or not. Not pointless, said my father, it was a matter of principle. Of comradeship. And that was the end of that conversation.

  You knew my father a bit, Nina, you knew he was a man of principle. And yet. You remember that time he bumped into us in the XL Café? He had taken quite a shine to you, you know, I think sometimes he even flirted with you a little. There’d been a little item in the paper about him that morning, about his work with Irish and Esperanto, how he’d kept them going when it was neither profitable nor popular, that kind of thing, and you complimented him on it, wondering how he’d found the time for it when he was working – he’d been retired a year by then – that his job as Inspector in the Post Office must have quite demanding. Oh, not at all, he said, I was a bit of a straw boss, you know, I just put in an appearance every now and again, and I could nip out whenever I wanted to, like now. The postmen did the real work, the way I used to.

  It’s like this, he said, I was given an offer I couldn’t refuse. Gabriel’s mother put me up to it, it was all her fault, he said, and he winked ruefully at me, for I knew the story well. Yes, he said, it was just after the War, the top brass approached me, said if I went for Inspector, I’d have no problem, only I’d have to go on a training course to London. And the last thing I wanted to do was to go to London, you see, conscription was still in force then, on the mainland as they call it, and I didn’t want to risk that, being a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces, it would go against everything I believed in, said my father. But you went anyway, you said. Yes, said my father, it was either that or a lifetime of misery from Gabriel’s mother. But you escaped, you said. By the grace of God, said my father. But you work for Her Majesty’s Royal Mail, you said boldly, raising your eyes to the Crown insignia on his peaked cap. But I don’t carry a gun for her, said my father, the pen is mightier than the sword, and anyone can hold a pen freely, be he Irish or English or Catholic or Protestant. It was the Irish who brought the pen all over Europe, the monks who held the flame of learning aloft throughout the Dark Ages. In this sign shall you conquer. That’s what I’ve tried to teach Gabriel. Do you think I’ve succeeded, Miranda? Oh yes, Mr Conway, I’m sure you have, you said, and you fondled the little Dinkie that dangled at your breast. Nice pen, said my father.

  When he left, I told you the other side of the coin, that my father had been interned for six weeks in 1941, suspected of being a member of the IRA, which in Belfast at that time consisted of a few dozen militarily incompetent idealists. I think the Powers That Be thought they might be in league with the Nazis, which maybe wasn’t too far from the truth in the case of the more fanatical elements, I said. Maybe your father’s promotion was a quid pro quo for his imprisonment, you said. First they give him the bad news, then they give him the good news, you know, bad cop, good cop routine. That’s a bit far-fetched, Nina, I said. There was what, a seven-year gap between his internment and his promotion, do you think they work that far ahead? Or that far in retrospect? Well, you never know, you murmured. No, I said, the interesting thing was, it was a case of mistaken identity, my father had nothing to do with the IRA, the person they wanted was his twin brother, Gerry, they lifted George instead of Gerry. Anyway, they got Gerry too. He was in for the duration, they let him out in 1945, I said. And what happened to him? you said. Oh, he died in 1964. Heart attack. It was the first time I saw my father cry. When the news came – this uncle of mine, Joe Marley, they called him the Angel of Death, because he always got the job of breaking the bad news when there was a death in the family, or in a neighbour’s family, for that matter – he came to the door, my father answered it, and he knew by the expression on the Angel’s face, he didn’t have to be told, that Gerry was dead. And he burst into tears, he sobbed for a good half hour.

  He died young, you said. Yes, I said, after Gerry got out of prison, it was difficult for him to get work, as you might guess, just the odd casual job working in the bakery or the docks. He’d give most of his wages to my Auntie Maureen, and save a little for himself, enough to go on a monthly binge. He wasn’t a heavy drinker, you understand. It was a very controlled thing, once a month for years, he’d go out on a tear, all the pubs of the Falls Road, or quite a few of them, for there were a great deal of pubs in the Falls then, each with their own wee quirks and characters. Joyce would have had a field day there. And my Uncle Gerry would come home speechless with drink, and fall into bed and sleep all the way through the next day. Then he’d get up as if it never happened, the monthly oblivion. But I like to think he had some crack along the way. He was a great storyteller, like my father, and like him he read a lot of books, taught me to play chess. And
oh, yes, he collected stamps. He gave me his stamp album before he died. A more innocuous man you couldn’t imagine.

  They put the Tricolour on his coffin when they buried him, I helped to carry the coffin, I still remember the weight of it and the way it cut into my shoulder, I was only sixteen. And perhaps I never fully understood then why my father had been so deeply affected, but now I think he must have felt guilty, because Gerry had done real time for Ireland, and he hadn’t. And my father was the Irish speaker, Gerry wasn’t. Gerry was a foot soldier, but my father must have admired him for the stupid courage of his convictions, Gerry who was just as intelligent as him, if not more so. My father had done well in life, George had done well, and Gerry hadn’t. George had compromised with the Powers That Be, and Gerry hadn’t. George took the King’s shilling; Gerry remained penniless, I said. But your father was right, to take the opportunity to advance himself, you said. But he didn’t particularly want to advance himself, it was my mother who wanted him to advance himself, I said. And you, Angel, what about you? you said. What about me? I said. Well, isn’t there some kind of parallel of compromise here, like father, like son? you said. And we began to rehearse an argument which by now had become familiar.

  When I began this letter yesterday I had a suspicion I would get round to my uncle’s story sooner or later, so I’ve been writing this using two pens alternately, a paragraph in one, a paragraph in the other. One is a Kingswood in Pearlised Blue Onyx, which demanded to be chosen not for its attractive colouring, but because engraved on its cap is the inscription

  WALDRON WELCOME HOME

  1939–45

  from which I presume that it was one of a batch given to the homecoming soldiers of Waldron, a village in East Sussex which lay in Bomb Alley, where German aircraft would drop their bombs on their way to and from London. Most of its young men went to the war, and twenty-two of them died in action. Those that survived were given a pen, mightier now than the sword, as they entered civvy street. I wonder how many of those pens found employment; this one, at any rate, has seen some action, for there is a ghost of a personalised scratch to its nib as I write, and it sends a shiver up my spine to think that I touch what he once touched, that I hold in my hand an instrument held by the hand of a soldier. The other pen is a Conway Stewart Scribe made in 1941 or so, in green and brown patchy swirls veined with black, a pattern known as Camouflage. If you lost this pen in a field, it would be difficult to find. But the pen led me to discover that the Surrealist artist Roland Penrose had been one of the Chief Advisors to the Camouflage Development and Training Centre set up in 1940 by the War Office, and was the author of The Home Guard Manual of Camouflage. He was also, at that time, conducting an affair with Lee Miller, whom he married in 1947. He had painted his own car in a disruptive pattern, and on one occasion had experimented with a matt green camouflage cream, which he smeared on the naked body of his lover as she lay on the grass of a friend’s garden, covered with netting taken from the raspberry patch. Penrose was delighted with the results, declaring that if you could hide such eye-catching attractions as hers from the invading Hun, smaller and less seductive areas of skin would stand an even better chance of becoming invisible.

  Penrose was not the only artist involved with camouflage; in fact, its principles had first been outlined in 1897 by the American painter Abbott H. Thayer, in an article called ‘The Law which Underlines Protective Coloration’. The spectator, he said, seems to see right through the space really occupied by an opaque animal. Nature, he believed, acts like an artist, and the study of these optical effects belongs to the realm of pictorial art and can only be interpreted by painters. For art and camouflage are two sides of the same coin: art makes something unreal recognisable, the other makes something real unrecognisable. Thayer also thought that the concept might have military applications, but these were not followed through until the First World War, when Lucien Victor Girand de Scévola, an artist serving in the French infantry, established the first Section de Camouflage. He was influenced in his approach by the Cubist work of Picasso, in which familiar things – bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, the paraphernalia of café life and conversation – were taken apart and put together again in a series of flat, intersecting planes, sometimes showing different aspects of the same thing simultaneously. I well remember at the beginning of the war, wrote Gertrude Stein, being with Picasso on the boulevard Raspail, when the first camouflaged truck passed by. It was night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it, and Picasso, amazed, looked at it, saw it, and then cried out, Yes, it is we who made it, that is Cubism. And a playful remark made by Picasso to Jean Cocteau, that the army would better dazzle the enemy if they were dressed in harlequin costumes, might have led indirectly to the concept known as ‘dazzle painting’.

  Developed by the marine painter Lieutenant Commander Norman Wilkinson in 1917, dazzle painting, rather than trying to blend in with the sea and sky, which are visually inconstant, used a system of stripes, blocks, zigzags and disruptive lines to confuse enemy observers. The intention was not to hide the object, but to make it unfamiliar. For much of our ability to identify what we see is based on our experience of seeing similar things in the past. Vision depends on memory. In our memory is stored a vast thesaurus of images, to which we constantly refer when looking at the world, so that we can identify a thing quickly without spending time working out what it is. And the art of illusion depends on this visual process: Roland Penrose, for instance, had collaborated with the stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, who was practised in making his audience see things that were not there, and not to see things that were there. W.J. Crawford, examining the phenomena produced by the Goligher Circle, jumped to the wrong conclusions because he already knew what he wanted to see; he was led astray by his expectations, and possibly his desire, for his attraction to Kathleen Goligher is evident in his writings. He was beguiled by love and memory, just as we retain the image of the loved one long after she has gone from our sight. And Nina, I never lost sight of you through all these years of your absence from me, much as I tried to. Oh, after three or four years I thought I had forgotten you, but then you would appear to me in dreams, unbidden, and I would consent to the reality of your presence, even when I knew I was dreaming.

  We can easily suspend our disbelief in dreams because they are so wonderful. When I was younger I would fly in my dreams, soaring and swooping like an angel above the city, seeing it spread below me like a map, and when sometimes it occurred to me that it was impossible, that I must be dreaming, I used that lucidity to revel in the experience, and I would fly with even more spectacular agility.

  So it was when I dreamed of you. Most of the dreams took place in cities that resembled Belfast, or cities I had visited with you, like New York, Paris, Dublin and Berlin, or cities I had visited alone, like Lisbon, Rome, and Prague, or cities I had never visited, like Tokyo and Madrid. I would be walking along a crushed cinder path by a dark canal in the shadow of a semi-derelict factory when I would catch a glimpse of the heel of your red shoe vanishing under the arch of a bridge, and I would hurry to catch up with you, half-walking, half-running, till I came to a flight of stone steps, I could hear the click of your heels as you ascended and the steps became an alleyway between high blank walls that led to a street of closed shops, which led in turn to a row of mean houses with incurious pale children loitering by the doorways, who barely took you under their notice as you passed by, for I can see you clearer now as the gap between us closes, you are wearing an apple green 1920s jacket with a pink floral print pleated dress that sways a little against the sway of your hips as you turn off into an entry that takes you into a close, and I follow you through a doorway into a gloomy room, it looks like a workshop, for it smells of oil and metal and a massive lathe gleams in the corner, and now you pause at the foot of the stairs, and turn towards me, and I see your face for the first time, and you smile wordlessly, beckoning with your eyes as you lead me up the stairs to a bare attic with a m
attress on the floor, where you take off the jacket and the dress and the 1920s flesh-tinted bra and pants and garter-belt and stockings, we both lie down, and we are about to embrace each other when I wake.

  It now occurs to me that the attic resembles the attic where the Golighers held their séances. Here, W.J. Crawford had conducted experiments that proved to his satisfaction that Kathleen Goligher could extrude psychic matter, or ‘plasm’ from her body – from the join of the legs, as Crawford delicately put it – to form semi-flexible rods and cantilevers which could lift a small table, manipulate hand-bells and trumpets, and create various sound effects which gave coded answers to questions asked of the unseen ‘operators’ of the structures. The operators, according to Crawford, were independent spirits who, having passed through the portal of physical death, wished to communicate to us that death was not the end of being, but the beginning of a new life. The world in which they lived was contiguous to ours, and very like it in many respects, for it had mountains, lakes and rivers, as real to them as ours were to us, so much so that many of the operators referred to our world as the shadow world, and theirs as the real one. The psychic structures were a link between the two worlds. Crawford, after numerous experiments, succeeded in obtaining impressions caused by these structures in a dish of clay. He discovered that when Kathleen Goligher wore stockings, the impressions were lined with stocking marks.

  The common-sense explanation for this phenomenon, that the marks had indeed been made by a stockinged foot under cover of the darkness of the séance room, was contemptuously dismissed by Crawford. He had taken every conceivable precaution against any such imposture. The medium’s hands were held firmly by other members of the Circle, while Crawford tied her legs to her chair with a variety of ligatures, including whipcord and black silk bands. He theorised that the psychic structures were covered by a film of matter which oozed round about the interstices of the stocking fabric. Being of a glutinous, fibrous nature, it assumed almost the exact form of the stocking fabric. It was then pulled off the stocking by the operators, built around the end of the psychic structure, which, when placed in the dish of clay, naturally left an imprint similar to a stocking. But the thing that left the mark was not a foot in a stocking, said Crawford.