Exchange Place (2 page)

The Found Watch

Like most citizens of Belfast who have lived through the Troubles, I have learned to be wary. I look and listen, since you never know who might be watching or listening in on you. And, as a dealer, I have learned to look at things all the more closely. I can scan a market stall and, in a matter of seconds, home in on the gold among the dross: the unprepossessing little cup that turns out to be Meissen; the grimy, pocket-sized, wood panel that is an eighteenth century icon; the vintage Omega Constellation concealed in the depths of a job lot of second-hand watches from various hands. Admittedly, such finds have become rarer as the public becomes more educated by
TV
antiques programmes, but there is still a world of once-discarded things out there waiting to be discovered. All you have to do is look; yet how many times have you heard that member of the public on
Antiques Roadshow
, when his or her attention is drawn to a maker’s mark, or a signature on a canvas, say, Oh, how interesting, I never noticed that before? Most people simply don’t look at things, especially things they have owned for years. They are blinded by habituation.

I watch people. I listen in on them. Yesterday I was sitting outside Café Harlem with an espresso when two men in Hugo Boss suits and cheap shoes sat down a table away from me. They plonked their BlackBerries on the table, opened their briefcases, and took out some spreadsheets. Their talk was loud and I wasn’t so much eavesdropping as overhearing.
The implications of the team costs should be borne by the financial model …
I had just taken out my notebook and jotted down this sentence when I saw a blind man coming towards me, waving his long white wand from side to side like the antenna of a mine-detector. There was a faint metallic tick as it struck a bollard. I saw him adjust his step a fraction in response, and I reckoned he had just pinpointed his whereabouts. The bollard was a signpost, his whereabouts a sonic map, buzzing with echoic input. Ambient noise bouncing off surfaces, muffled by others. On the other hand, I surmised, he might not be blind at all, his accoutrements of cane and dark glasses a disguise. The Troubles might have ameliorated, but I guessed that no one really knew how much surveillance still went on. He negotiated his way through the opening of the sectioned-off pavement area. Tapping the legs of the aluminium furniture, he found the next table to me, sat down, and folded his cane. I took out a packet of American Spirit and rolled a cigarette. When I lit it with a vintage Dunhill lighter he tilted his head towards the rasp of the flint. Blind or not, he saw me in his own way. I got up and left. By now the businessmen were engrossed with their BlackBerries. All this time they had acted as if we did not exist.

When I hear the word BlackBerry I still think of the tangle of blackberry. Bramble. Berries that stain the hands and the lips. You won’t find me on Facebook, and I don’t do much email, though I find the internet useful for all kinds of research. I deal mainly by word of mouth and I like to meet my clients face to face, whether in public or private places. Besides the antiques, I deal in beneficial herbs, as Howard Marks calls them, though I’m no Howard Marks, with thirty-odd identities and paperwork to match; mine is a modest business, a private club that operates on personal recommendation. The herb is ethically and organically home-grown, on an intimate scale that puts it beyond the interests of the paramilitaries. I don’t look like a dope-dealer. Yesterday I was wearing a navy-blue herringbone 1960s Burton suit with a white linen handkerchief stuffed in the breast pocket, white Oxford shirt with a sky blue stripe, brown knitted silk tie, oxblood Oxford shoes, and a grey fur-felt trilby. I am sixty-one. I’d taken to wearing handkerchiefs and hats a good few years ago, somewhat apprehensively at first, thinking my appearance would attract derision, especially from the young; but gradually I realised that the young have eyes only for themselves and that people my age are largely invisible. No one really sees that dapper gent, and I proceed through the city unmolested.

I’m trying to remember what I was wearing that evening outside the Morning Star when I last wrote in the missing notebook. It was October, and the Burton, cut from a heavy, pre-central-heating cloth, would have done well on that occasion. When I took it to Lazenbatt, the last tailor in Belfast, to be altered – it was an inch too big in the chest and waist – he remarked admiringly that the trousers could stand up on their own. But I hadn’t yet bought the Burton suit. I cast my mind back and see myself at one of my wardrobes, selecting a burgundy knitted wool tie with a light blue Oxford shirt, navy and tan houndstooth Shetland wool jacket, grey flannels, and Crockett & Jones tan brogues. I stuffed a blue and yellow paisley silk handkerchief in my breast pocket, took a final look at myself in the cheval mirror, went downstairs, and strode out the door of 41 Elsinore Gardens. I’d be drinking later, so I took the bus into town.

As well as the Muji notebook and Waterman’s pen, I was carrying the watch I had promised to show to my client, 1954 vintage, but in lovely condition, signed Longines and bearing the famous winged emblem. Ten-carat gold-filled rectangular case, about one and a half inches by one. Vintage watches are much smaller than modern ones, and people think they must be ladies’ watches, but not so. This would have been worn by a man of some means. Dial with vertical stripe textured finish, raised gold-coloured cursive Arabic numerals at twelve, three, six and nine o’clock, the other hours marked by batons. Subsidiary seconds dial with cross-hairs, just above the six. Elegant gold lance-style hands. Original crystal, clean and clear. Snakeskin strap. I came across it in a zipped inner compartment of a ladies’ 1950s snakeskin handbag on a stall at the Friday market, and was tempted to ask the dealer how much he wanted for the bag, and keep schtum about the watch; but I have my ethics, so I drew his attention to it. Well, well, he said, fancy that, I never thought to look inside. One of those old wind-up jobs, he said, let’s say, twenty pounds? He looked hopeful. I knew he was doubling his estimate, so I made a face, offered him ten and we settled on fifteen. He thought he’d done well from the deal. Later I would offer it to my client for four hundred. He would say three, we’d settle on three-fifty, and the client would be well pleased. I’d paid Beringer, my watchmaker, sixty pounds to service it, so I’d made a tidy profit. But in truth my buyer would have made a good investment; not that he would ever sell it. So everyone was happy.

On the bus I took the watch from my pocket and checked the time against my own, another Longines, 1948, the year of my birth. Both read two minutes past three, and I was to meet my client at Muriel’s bar at four.

Rapid Eye Movement

I replaced the Longines watch in my jacket pocket, took out my notebook, and read what I’d written the day before yesterday in the smoking area of Caffè Nero in Ann Street. I’d driven into town on one of my vintage clothes shopping expeditions. Ann Street has a couple of vintage shops, and there’s another, Bang Vintage, round the corner in Church Lane where Muriel’s is situated. Since the missing notebook remains missing, I cannot be certain as to what exactly I wrote in that notebook then, but I think it concerned an experience I sometimes have when I switch on the car radio and hear nothing beyond the ambient hum of the apparatus. I have it more or less permanently tuned to Radio 3 for the classical music, and know that the nothing signifies a lull between the movements of a piece, or the silence that follows the announcement of a piece, perhaps a live performance, and you can imagine the performer’s hands poised over the keyboard of his instrument, about to approach the piece, readying himself for the onset – you can almost hear the expectant hush in the audience – or, if it is indeed that break between movements, and it is live, the silence might be betrayed by a muted fusillade of coughs, a rustling of chairs or shuffling of feet until there is complete silence, and then you hear the opening bars of the next movement emerging from the silence. At any rate, this is what I wrote the day before yesterday:

I’d just passed the Waterworks when I switched on the radio and got silence. Then the piece began, and as it proceeded I knew I was listening to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s
Contrapunctus XIV
from
The Art of Fugue
. I pictured Gould, famously eccentric in his dress as in other aspects of his life, clothed in overcoat, muffler, hat and mittens even in midsummer, and then saw him hunched over the keyboard seated on the old chair his father had made for him, which he used even when the seat had completely worn through and his bottom was supported by nothing but the frame, swaying to the music, and as I listened to him playing I could hear the familiar background vocalizations, an almost coital groaning and crooning, ebbing and flowing and quavering with the dynamic of the music; his mother had told him to sing everything he played; he said his singing was unconscious, and increased proportionately with the inability of the piano in question to realize what he had in mind, the repeated or mirrored or inverted themes of
Contrapunctus XIV
intertwining, unfolding, recapitulating, as they had always done; and I wondered how many times I had heard this piece and where I was at the time, or what I was doing at the time, if anything, and as always I remembered the first time I had heard it, and who it was who introduced me to it, and where I was, and I wondered as I always did where he might be now, or what had become of him whether living or dead.

My
CD
of Gould’s playing of
Contrapunctus XIV
lasts twelve minutes eighteen seconds, and I knew the piece had a good few minutes to go when I got to the top deck of Castle Court car park. I let the engine run because if I switched it off I’d lose a few seconds of the performance. I knew how the piece ended, if that is the right word for a fugue which Bach never finished, and I see the video of Gould’s playing
Contrapunctus XIV
, the camera close in to show the eyes behind the big square horn-rimmed glasses, the eyes sometimes open, half open or closed, the eyelids fluttering as if in
REM
sleep, dreaming the music, the mouth grimacing and smiling ecstatically, camera panning out to show all of Gould on the stage, until
Bang
! he punches out the final note before the shock of silence, a blank that strikes one almost bodily, and Gould throws up an arm as if shot, his index finger pointing to the heavens.

I turned off the engine. The radio stopped. I sat in the aftermath of the music for some minutes. I felt I had been somewhere else. In a state of fugue as it were, that temporary amnesia in which one loses the sense of oneself and takes on a life as another before coming to oneself again months or years later. Fugue, from Latin
fugere
, to flee.

When I got to Caffè Nero I wrote this all down, or what I remembered of it, knowing I’d written or thought of it many times before, thinking this time it might serve as a beginning or preamble to the book I had in mind, and again I try to picture the words I wrote in the missing notebook, but all I see is the rain-spattered page, all illegible splashes, blots and asterisks. And, as I write now in another notebook in 41 Elsinore Gardens, I try to see myself sitting outside the Morning Star, and I hear the rain drumming down on the awning and picture myself hunched over the missing notebook, cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, scribbling whatever words I wrote then. My eyes are wide open but it is as if I am dreaming. I am inside my mind floating outside myself looking down at myself, a disembodied mental eye or camera lens, I find I can pan round and see myself from different angles, and it is as if I see myself as someone else, the way that something I wrote years ago looks written by another; and in any event we never really see ourselves, all we see of ourselves is what we see in the mirror, ourselves reversed, which is not how others see us, we can never walk around ourselves and see what we look like from the back, so I float down and hover at my back and look over my shoulder at what I am writing, or what the other me was writing before the wind gusted a flurry of raindrops over the words, but try as I might the words swim and dissolve into splashes, blots and asterisks.

I pull myself away and see the other customer two tables away from me sitting before his pint. The brim of his trilby is pulled down so I can’t see his face, but his body language looks familiar and I think maybe that is only because I have tried to picture him many times before, perhaps all I am remembering is a memory of a memory, or a speculation rather. In any event one could posit a relationship between these two figures brought together by whatever happenstance, a previous history in which they met each other in some other existence, that the man who was me, John Kilfeather, had met this man, let us call him Mr X, on some other occasion or several occasions, though I am pretty certain we had never met before. I suppose that at a certain point Mr X will come over to me and introduce himself to me as a stranger, and he will ask me what I am writing in my notebook, and I will not tell him the truth, for that would be too convoluted, and perhaps embarrassing, or seemingly pretentious, and in any event why should I tell him the truth, for the odds are that I and Mr X will never meet again, or perhaps we might, so I make up a story that will suit should we ever meet again. I could even give myself another name.

Rue des Boutiques Obscures

He was walking along Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle in Paris, thinking of what had just happened to him in Rue du Sentier. It was cold and dark and foggy and the street lamps glowed dimly through the fog, their light shimmering in puddles on the street. He was wearing a double-breasted camel overcoat, red and white polka dot scarf, grey trilby, navy-blue corduroys, tan brogues and burgundy leather gloves. He was carrying a scuffed briefcase with the initials R.E.M. stamped on the flap above the brass lock. The initials were not his, as evidenced by the passport in his briefcase, which bore the name John Gabriel Kilpatrick and a photograph which did not look like him, taken four years previously. Also in the briefcase were a red, blue and green striped Kenzo scarf, three Muji
A
6
notebooks, a Muji
A
5
notebook, three Muji 0.5mm ink gel pens in black, blue and red, a map of Paris, an
Eyewitness Travel Guide
to Paris reprinted in 2005, and therefore five years out of date, a 1910
Baedeker Paris
, and a novel by the contemporary French writer Patrick Modiano: John Kilpatrick was a travel writer and was in Paris for two weeks researching a book he intended to write about Paris which would feature extracts from books, fictional or otherwise, set in Paris, whether by writers living or dead. It was cold and he was glad of the burgundy leather gloves and he liked the feel of the hard leather briefcase handle in the soft leather grip of the glove and the feel of the cashmere lining on his hand within the glove. It was comforting to have that feeling after what had just happened to him in Rue du Sentier not ten minutes ago.

Earlier that day Kilpatrick had risen early in his hotel of choice, Hôtel Chopin in Passage Jouffroy off Boulevard Montmartre. The rooms were small but comfortable and the location was exceptional. Passage Jouffroy was one of the first such glass-roofed arcades in Paris, built in 1847, and contained an array of small retail outlets, among them Boutiques des Tuniques, selling blouses, shirts, robes, kimonos, scarves; Segas, walking-canes and theatrical antiques; Au Bonheur des Dames, embroidery; and Cinédoc, specializing in cinema books, posters and memorabilia. There was an entrance to the Musée Grevin, the waxworks museum on Boulevard Montmartre, though Kilpatrick had never ventured beyond its doors. Waxwork figures disturbed him.

After breakfast he went out for the day. It was a pleasant October morning, bright with a frosty nip in the air, and the soles of his brogues clacked musically on the hard pavement. He walked at random. Yesterday he had put in a good stint of research, visiting the Musée des Arts et Métiers and writing detailed descriptions of some of the architectural models on display, miniature simulacra of actual buildings in Paris, wonderful in the precision of their construction. He felt he deserved a break. Towards midday he found himself on the Rive Gauche in Le Bon Marché department store, designed by Gustave Eiffel and opened in 1852. It was warm indoors and he took off his red, blue and green striped Kenzo scarf and put it into the briefcase he was carrying. As he did so he thought this was an opportunity to buy a new scarf. He liked to buy at least one item of clothing in any location he might be visiting, items which would serve as souvenirs or aides-memoire, tangible connections with the past, redolent with association. The Rome shirt, the Berlin hat, the New York wingtip shoes which every time he put them on reminded him of the manhole covers of New York, massive antique cast-iron shields embossed with their makers’ names, Abbott Hardware Company Ironworks, Marcy Foundry, Etna Iron Works, Madison Ironworks, Cornell’s Iron Works, the words making themselves felt underfoot when he walked on them.

He proceeded to Soldes Mode Hommes and after a perusal of the neckwear department chose a heavy silk red and white polka dot scarf with a cashmere backing. He had just left the store when he thought of the other scarf he might have bought instead, a blue and gold paisley that might have gone better with the camel coat, though it cost somewhat more. He put the thought behind him. He put on the red and white polka dot scarf.

That afternoon, at Librairie Jean Tuzot on Rue Saint Sulpice, Kilpatrick bought a book by Patrick Modiano,
Rue des boutiques obscures
, and leafed through it before buying it, as he knew he would. He had first come across Modiano some time ago and had since bought four of his books from online French booksellers. Though they all seemed to be versions of each other, he was attracted by their fugue-like repetition of themes and imagery, their evocation of a noir Paris in which the protagonists were endlessly in search of their identities. He put the book in his briefcase.

Towards nightfall he was walking vaguely in the direction of the hotel, up Rue du Sentier in the garment district, when the thought of the scarf came to him again, and he pictured himself wearing the paisley silk, seeing it gleam against the soft wool and cashmere of the camel coat. By now it was cold and dark and foggy and the street lamps glowed dimly through the fog, their light shimmering in puddles on the street, and as he pictured himself in the scarf he saw a man walking down the other side of Rue du Sentier. The man was wearing a double-breasted camel overcoat, blue and gold paisley scarf, grey trilby, navy-blue corduroys, tan brogues and burgundy leather gloves. He was carrying a briefcase.

The man in question stopped at a shop window under a streetlamp as if window-shopping. Kilpatrick stopped too. The man turned and looked at Kilpatrick. His face was half-hidden by the brim of his hat. Then, with the gesture of a magician who has come to the end of his stage act, he swept off the hat, made a low bow, and vanished into the darkness beyond the oasis of lamplight. Kilpatrick walked over to the window. There was no-one there. The glass was dusty and the only item on display was a mannequin dressed in the fashion of the Sixties – slim-cut Prince of Wales windowpane check suit, tab-collar shirt and narrow knitted tie, a snap-brim trilby at a tipsy angle on its head. Its arms were thrown out and one leg had buckled under it. It was the kind of shape one might cut in a sixties dance, thought Kilpatrick. The Frug or some such. Several dead flies lay at the mannequin’s feet and Kilpatrick wondered who had last set foot in the place. He looked at the impassive features of the mannequin, and thought of the face he had just seen. Kilpatrick thought of the face of his erstwhile friend John Bourne, who had vanished some years ago, and had not been seen since by anyone of Kilpatrick’s acquaintance. Kilpatrick entered the shop doorway and tried the handle of the door. The door was locked.