Exchange Place

by Ciaran Carson

  Through a Glass Darkly

  Kilpatrick felt a tap on the back of his hand. Kilpatrick? said Gordon. Kilpatrick looked up and met Gordon’s eyes. For the first time he noticed that they were green. You can stop listening now, said Gordon gently. Kilpatrick came to. Where was I? said Gordon. Yes, said Gordon, I was speaking of the interlocutors. The members of the club. As it happens, I picked up an odd volume of Emerson’s essays the other day in Passage des Panoramas, and when I opened it my eye fell on a sentence that seemed very apropos. Library angel sort of thing, you feel some higher power has intervened. Call it coincidence if you will, but then in our line of business there is no such thing as coincidence. Anyway, essay entitled ‘Clubs’. Discourse, says Emerson, when it rises highest and searches deepest, when it lifts us into that mood out of which thoughts come that remain as stars in our firmament, is between two. We apply that sentiment as a rule. Tête-à-tête that is. You spoke of a John Bourne earlier, said Kilpatrick. Ah yes, Bourne, said Gordon, a long story. Tell you what, why don’t we do this in the spirit of Les Caves, said Gordon, you can tell me your story first, then I’ll reciprocate. You did know a John Bourne in Belfast, did you not? Kilpatrick nodded, took a sip of absinthe, and began.

  I seemed to know John Bourne before I met him, said Kilpatrick. I guess there would have been prior talk of him in the circles I moved in, so maybe that’s how I picked up that impression. From elsewhere rather than from myself. We are wont to do that, are we not? And Gordon nodded sympathetically. At any rate when I did meet him, and really got to know him, I was beguiled by him, said Kilpatrick. About my height, about five foot eight, dark hair flopping over one eyebrow, somewhat sallow skin, a Roman nose a trifle too prominent for his face, ears likewise, he was not conventionally handsome, but he had presence, and when he smiled that broad smile of his, it seemed to illuminate one’s own face besides his own. I first met him in the Crown Bar in the seventies, I spoke of it before. And one thing led to another. I became his friend, he mine. Perhaps everything seems inevitable in retrospect, but so it was. Why was I attracted to him? I can only answer, because it was he, because it was myself. We were each other’s fate.

  Your Bourne is an artist, you say. So is mine. I used to frequent his attic studio at Exchange Place in Belfast. Have you ever been to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin? Some years ago the entire contents of Francis Bacon’s attic studio at 7 Reece Mews in London, from the very plaster of the walls down to the floorboards, were removed and painstakingly reconstructed in Dublin, the floor ankle-deep in archaeological layers of printed materials, photographs, posters, champagne boxes in various states of decay, torn, crumpled or trodden on; everything, including the walls and door, spattered with paint, pots of paints and brushes here and there amid the chaos. When I visited the gallery last year I was forcibly reminded of Bourne’s studio. One of the features of the Bacon studio is a big round art deco mirror propped on a table, the glass covered in hundreds of pockmarks where the silvering has degraded. When Bourne went to view the attic room at 14 Exchange Place, he was delighted to find in situ an old art deco dressing table with a round mirror similarly dimmed and pockmarked. I saw myself through a glass darkly, said Bourne. It confirmed that this was the place for him. He was very influenced by places, by the atmosphere of a room, and it seemed to him he had been here before, perhaps as someone else.

  At any rate, when Bourne asked me to write a piece for the catalogue of a show he was putting together, I was flattered, said Kilpatrick. I spent long hours watching him paint, his eyes darting from subject to canvas and back again in a fugue of rhythmic glances, his eyes at times so narrowed as to appear shut, eyelids flickering as if in REM sleep. I see him now in his painting clothes, floppy-collared indigo denim workman’s jacket, yellowed white flannel trousers, white boots, all spattered and smeared with a myriad of colours. When I remarked on the white trousers and boots, Bourne replied that he had once played a bit of cricket; they were relics of his varsity days. And I remembered that in the summer months he would often have the radio in the studio tuned to the cricket, one of those big old Echo, or was it EKO valve radios, ee-kay-oh that is, all hiss and static, Bourne would keep fiddling with the knob, but I gather that the bad reception had more to do with relative wavelengths than with any fault in the receiver. According to Bourne, light was the fastest wavelength in the spectrum, and given ideal cricketing weather, long bright sunlit days, it would interfere with the slower radio waves. And indeed, as the light began to fade, so reception would improve. The improved reception seemed to clarify one’s inner vision of the match, and as I heard the commentators speak of what was happening, I could see the white-clad figures poised in their fielding positions on the greensward and the sun setting behind a bank of mauve and russet cloud; hearing the pock of bat on ball, I saw the batsmen flickering between the wickets. In lulls of play there would be discussion of the weather conditions, or the state of the pitch, where it might be breaking up as the fast bowlers further wore down an already worn patch for the spin bowlers to take advantage of. I knew little about cricket, said Kilpatrick, and Bourne’s talk was an education for me. Cricket was a game of many dimensions including chance and skill. Temperature, wind, the ambient humidity of the air, all affected the flight of the ball. No one, neither bowler nor batsman, could predict how a ball might spin off a breaking wicket as it landed on a bump, hollow or fissure in the earth. It was the bowler’s job to enlarge the parameters of unpredictability, to keep the batsman guessing. And again Bourne would quote Bacon, The hinges of form come about by chance.

  So when I came to write the catalogue essay, said Kilpatrick, I used some cricketing analogies. Bourne had talked about cricketers of the past and how he used to try to emulate them. When he was a boy he read of how the great Don Bradman would, when he was himself a boy, repeatedly hit a golf ball with a cricket stump against the curved brick base of the family water tank, trying to anticipate the unpredictable angle as it bounced back, the boy Bourne copying the boy Bradman, except in Bourne’s case it was an ancient garden wall covered in mosses and lichens. He dreamed of being Bradman, as if he remembered being him in another life, on the other side of the world. In sport as in art one learns by imitation; one can only be oneself by first trying to mirror another. Bourne was indebted to Bacon; through that emulation he had become someone he would never otherwise have been.

  Most interesting, said Gordon. I am reminded of the Meno of Socrates, where Socrates says to Meno that all enquiry and all learning is recollection. You already know what seems unknown; you have been here before, but only when you were someone else.

  Because It Was He

  The accordion music of the Maigret theme faded. I could feel the Black Rose wearing off and decided to roll another. I keep my stash in a vintage Peek Frean biscuit tin with a bas-relief of a coral reef stamped into its lid, exotic multicoloured fish, sea anemones and urchins, the tin secreted in one of the drawers of the miniature burr walnut chest where I also keep my notebooks; and on top of the chest is a Bose Wave Radio/cD player which I bought some years ago, inveigled by the language of its advertising, reproduced in the accompanying manual, from which I quote: ‘Extensive research in the fields of speaker design and psychoacoustics – the human perception of sound – led to the groundbreaking 901®Direct/Reflecting® speaker system in 1968. Acoustimass® speaker technology reshaped conventional thinking about the relationship between speaker size and sound, enabling palm-sized speakers to produce audio quality previously thought impossible from speakers so small.’ And I thought of music resonating from the big wire grille of John Harland’s EKO radio or from the suitcase-sized Dansette record player. I couldn’t remember when I had last listened to the Bose. I switched it on, and recognized the sound immediately. It was Glenn Gould playing Contrapunctus XIV. I couldn’t remember when I had last been playing it, but the display showed it had been some five minutes into the twelve minutes eighteen seconds of the track when I cut it abruptly short, well before t
he track itself comes to the staccato stop of its predestined, unfinished ending, followed by a silence like a gunshot. And I recalled how Bach’s autograph of the music bore a note in his son Carl Philippe Emmanuel’s hand saying, ‘At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH (the notes, that is; in English notation, B flat-A-C-B sharp) in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died’ – a claim disputed by modern scholars, some of whom suggest that Bach finished the piece on another sheet of paper, referred to in the literature as ‘fragment X’. But if fragment X ever existed, it has been lost.

  When I had rolled the joint I lit it, turned the Bose back to the beginning of the track, and sat down to listen. How often had I listened to this playing of Contrapunctus XIV, ever since I first heard it in John Harland’s studio all these years ago? I have no way of knowing. Many times in the studio itself, no doubt, and again I pictured Harland painting to that music, and tried to remember what might have then gone through my mind, or what had subsequently transpired that day, or on another. I had listened to Contrapunctus XIV many times on the car radio, sometimes immersed in it while I drove on automatic pilot to a destination I had been to many times, sometimes not fully listening as I drove an unfamiliar route; or I would find myself in a reverie prompted by the music, perhaps a fragment of a memory of being elsewhere on a previous listening, a landscape I had forgotten driving through until once more I heard the music I had been listening to then, a dark, nameless avenue without end. By now, after so many listenings, albeit mostly forgotten by my conscious mind, I have a fair enough outline of the piece, and can anticipate to some extent what comes next, and vocalize along with it, somewhat as Gould did himself; and as I do, I think how feeble my memory of the piece must be, compared to that of Glenn Gould, who could sight-read anything – whole orchestral pieces – and memorize on sight. He could read music before he read words, and had only to hear a piece or glance at the page of a score to retain it indefinitely, and I wondered if he could do the same with books.

  Certainly, I could not; and, glancing around the shelves of the book-lined room in which I write, I wonder how many of these hundreds of volumes I could trace in my memory to their point of sale. Lately I have bought many books on the internet, but my library has come mostly from physical shops, many or perhaps most of them now vanished. And as I glance again, a ray of sunlight falls upon a stack of shelves, illuminating the many-hued spines of dictionaries, art books, novels, books of science and philosophy, books about books. My memory draws a blank with most of them. But here I see a row of vintage Baedekers in shades of faded red, and I remember, in an alleyway off Charing Cross Road in London, a second-hand bookshop specializing in travel books. On the shelf above is a Robinson Crusoe in an eighteenth century binding which I found in the Excelsior Bookshop in Smithfield, and I remember standing in the smouldering ruins of Smithfield after it had been firebombed how many years ago I cannot tell, remarking how difficult it was to burn books, for between the charred covers they still retained their inner core of text. And sandwiched between Jean Cocteau’s Diary of an Unknown and Paul Valéry’s Idée Fixe is the three-volume Everyman edition of Montaigne’s Essays, translated by John Florio, given to me by John Harland for my fiftieth birthday, or the day after it rather, for he had mistaken the date. From one John to another – Harland to Kilfeather, he had written on the flyleaf.

  And I wondered again about the circumstances in which John Harland had vanished so mysteriously how many years ago I cannot tell, circumstances of which I was able to piece together some fragments over those years without ever coming to a conclusion. One thing was sure: he left knowing he was to leave, and never told me a thing about it. I only found out some months later when I bumped into an old school acquaintance – I cannot say friend – who had risen to some eminence in the legal profession, let’s call him Holmes. We exchanged the usual pleasantries of two people who have not met for some time and would not care too much if they ever met again. I cannot remember how Harland’s name came up, I must have mentioned it for whatever reason, and Holmes said, Harland? Yes, we all miss him terribly, said Holmes, took us all by surprise. And as the conversation developed it transpired that Holmes had received a note from Harland the day before he vanished, a note which said, Urgent business, will be away for some time, and that was all, said Holmes. Of course he was rather eccentric, said Holmes, and I nodded, and that was that. I walked for some time not knowing where I was and when I came to I saw that I had come to the door of 14 Exchange Place, which door I had tried many times in the past without success, until I abandoned all hope of seeing John Harland again. I had lost the key.

  I lift the three volumes of Montaigne from the shelf, books that had been touched by Harland’s hand. In my memory I undo a parcel of blue cartridge paper, not knowing what it might contain. Harland is looking at me and when he sees me smile he smiles too and it lights up the room. It is a very nice edition, 1928, the green cloth binding yellowed, more so now than then, with the passing of those years. I open a volume at random, and in The Firste Booke Chap. XXVII, ‘Of Friendship’, I happen on this reply given by Montaigne whenever he was asked why he so loved Steven de la Boitie: Because it was he, because it was myselfe.

  Je est un autre

  You have been here before, but only when you were someone else, said Gordon. As he spoke, the green wall lamps began to pulsate and the ambient music changed to a monotonous beeping. But hark! said Gordon, theatrically, lifting an index finger, the children of the night! And then, in a more soothing voice, Relax, my dear boy, merely our early warning system for one of those tiresome police raids, we get to know they’re coming a good half hour in advance. We have our people everywhere, in all walks of life. They wear the appropriate uniform or garb, they take on the gestures and the speech of those whom they represent. Judges, bankers, art dealers, bookmakers, et cetera. The police of course. We have our friends in Quai des Orfèvres. If the world is a stage, they are consummate actors, becoming that which they are perceived to be. Only at night do they become that which they perceive themselves to be. We could talk about this all night, said Gordon, but for now, we can talk for as long as it takes us to finish our drinks. Gordon raised his glass. Kilpatrick reciprocated. As for what Gordon said thereafter, Kilpatrick, when he came to summarize it the next morning in his notebook, would have put it something like this:

  Gordon said that in our walk through life we change, footstep by footstep, as irrevocably we are drawn towards our destiny and are altered by the glance of others. We glimpse a face in a crowd we think we have seen before, déjà vu or not, and we are changed by that apparition. We make our way through the crammed tunnels of the Métro brushing against or avoiding each other, and our bodies are altered by those negotiations whether we know it or not. A pickpocket sidles through the carriage and unbeknownst to you relieves you of something that was yours, and when you look for it you believe it to be lost by some inexplicable negligence on your part, or else you see in retrospect the man standing opposite you swaying sympathetically, his face buried in the pages of Le Monde, you remember how the motion of the train brought you for a split second into the most delicate of contacts, and the man pardoned himself as did you, you would never have revisited that moment had you not fumbled in a pocket and then gone through all your pockets for that which no longer was there, patting hip and breast as if conducting a body search on a person who was you. Gordon said that all our turnings cannot be otherwise than what they were, when we look at them or at what we remember of them in retrospect. With hindsight. And hindsight blinds us to all the other possibilities, which are myriad, said Gordon. And we are not one but many, we are the sum of all we are to others whether dead or living, for the dead have preceded us in our journey, and they have mapped out its territory in advance.

  There was more in this vein which Kilpatrick could not remember. They drank the last of the green spirit and left by a secret staircase as the police were entering by another. They emerged on an e
mpty street in Paris. It was dawn and a pale moon hung in the sky. The black limousine was parked some fifty paces ahead of them, engine ticking over. As he walked towards it Kilpatrick thought his footsteps made no sound as they glided over the pavement, or else Gordon’s footsteps were so perfectly synchronized with his that both sounded as one. Odilon the chauffeur stood to attention holding open the cabin door of the vehicle. Kilpatrick boarded and Gordon followed him into the interior. Hôtel Chopin, said Gordon, Monsieur Kilpatrick will be tired after his long day. Had Kilpatrick told Gordon that he was staying at Hôtel Chopin? He could not remember. He sank into the long leather bench. Gordon? he said. Yes? said Gordon. You were about to tell me about John Bourne, said Kilpatrick. You are tired after your long day, said Gordon, we’ll do something better than that. I’ll bring you to see him tomorrow night. Would that suit your purpose? said Gordon. I regret I have another appointment tomorrow, said Kilpatrick. Ah yes, said Gordon, one of those unexpected invitations one sometimes receives when abroad. Surprise is one of the pleasures of travelling, is it not? But the night after tomorrow will be fine. Odilon will come to your hotel at seven o’clock and we’ll proceed from there. Would that suit? Kilpatrick nodded. Suddenly he felt very tired and he fell asleep to the swish of the limousine tyres along an empty boulevard.