The Pen Friend (17 page)

There is an avenue Mac Mahon in Paris, one of those which leads to the Arc de Triomphe. We did not walk it when we were there, but we did stroll along boulevard Magenta, and, scanning the blue signs of the intersecting streets, we could not resist taking rue de la Fidelité, which led us into rue de Paradis, where we found the Musée du Cristal. You remember, Nina, the displays of crystal urns and wine-glasses and baroque candlesticks and glass flutes and punchbowls multiplied a hundredfold in the mirrored rooms, the fantastic tinkling chandeliers composed of a thousand multifaceted pieces, chandeliers reflected by my later memory of those that glittered overhead that evening in New York at the Ambassador’s reception. And I thought of Tommy Geoghegan, whom we met a few days later, quite by accident it seemed, in one of those dark lobby bars off Washington Square, all polished oak and brass and discreet waiter service. The violently blue suit he’d worn at the reception had been replaced by a light tweed jacket and a polo shirt, his red face had toned down to a healthy pink, and the mild boorishness he’d displayed that night now seemed like brash charm. I could see why people, as you’d said, would take him into their confidence. And he was intelligent. He’d begun by enquiring after my father. I didn’t know you knew my father, I said. Yes, he said, I met him at one of those Esperanto conferences, in Dublin. Marvellous man, almost convinced me that Esperanto, by replacing English as an international language, would provide a shield for minority languages such as Irish. Quoted James Connolly the Irish rebel to me, did you know Connolly spoke Esperanto? said Tommy Geoghegan, and I confessed I didn’t. Well, it fitted very well with Connolly’s socialism, or communism, call it what you will, said Geoghegan, and of course it fitted very well with your father’s ideas. What was it? for smaller nations to consent to the extinction of their language, would not hasten the day of a universal language, but would rather lead to the intensification of the struggle for mastery between the languages of the greater powers, I think Connolly said something like that. And of course Zamenhof thought the same, he had a vision of a world united by a mutual respect in which the smaller nations could participate as readily as the great powers. And, if you look at it, it’s not unlike what we in
MO
2
are trying to achieve, even out the differences, said Geoghegan. I must say, Gabriel, I’m glad to see you with Miranda, a very special woman – you’d gone to the powder room by this stage – but then you don’t need me to tell you that, he said, leaning forward confidentially, and I caught a whiff of his Old Spice aftershave.

Afterwards, I remarked on it disparagingly to you. Oh, I don’t know, you said, it’s a very underrated scent, very clean and smooth, nice lemon and lavender notes above the sandalwood, you shouldn’t be put off by the name. Or the bottle. You remember the ad,
Girls like it – is there any better reason to wear Old Spice
? I’ve worn it myself, you said. Have you? I said, I hadn’t noticed. Then it must have been when I wasn’t with you, Angel, you said.

Look for a long time at what pleases you

Nothing is ever truly lost, my father used to say, for every thing in the universe is in the place where it finds itself, and is observed by God, who sees everything. By the same token, though I have so far failed to come across an equivalent of the red and black Dinkie pen that first attracted you to me, I know that my quest is not fruitless. I don’t know how many thousands Conway Stewart made of this particular model, but, scattered as they might be across the world, some of them broken and cast aside, buried in landfills or in the backs of sofas, perhaps ground underfoot in a purposeful or careless moment, I trust that enough remain for one of them, one day, to find its way to me. Not that it will be identical to yours, for the parameters of each design allow for random variations that make each pen subtly individual.

The taxonomy of Conway Stewart pens is complex: serial numbers run from No. 1 to No. 1216, but the system is not chronological, for many of the higher numbers are early models, and vice versa; and each model comes in a range of colours and designs and sizes, with different caps, clips, bands, levers and nibs, so that the permutations run into the many thousands. Your Dinkie, for example, is a 540, but that number comprises over a hundred variations, of which your ring-top Red and Black Mottled Vulcanite is only one. I’m writing this with a Dinkie 540, as it happens, not a ring-top like yours, but one with a pocket-clip. I bought it from an eBay seller in Hong Kong, who told me it came from the last effects of a lady widowed by a colonial administrator, and its Peacock Plumage livery – a spilled petrol swirl of violets, emeralds, mauves, purples, sapphires, tortoiseshells and black, also known as Butterfly Wing – has an Oriental shot silk iridescence. It’s too small for me to hold altogether comfortably, so it’s difficult to control, but that makes me form my words all the more deliberately, watching the letters as they appear on the page to form these sentences. As a tribute to one of its many colours, I loaded the Dinkie with violet ink, and its unfamiliar smell reminds me that there are little perfume atomisers made to look like fountain pens: unscrew the cap, and instead of a nib you find a button that releases a glazed rainbow of scent when pushed – ‘Parfum Exotique’, aromas standing in for words. You remember, Nina, reciting Baudelaire’s poem as we stood by his grave in Montparnasse. It was Easter Monday, Cemetery Monday, as I dubbed it, for we had then gone on to the necropolis of Cimetière Père Lachaise, wandering the long avenues and intersecting alleyways between the graves and vaults and sepulchres of bankers and statesmen and princesses and movie stars and artists, mausoleums shaped like pyramids and beehives and gazebos, adorned with baroque marble angels and imposing statues of those interred beneath them.

We visited the grave of Oscar Wilde, which was fronted by a massive block bearing a winged Egyptian deity, its plinth covered with lipstick kisses. Marcel Proust’s grave was an unexpectedly plain, flat, black marble slab. It seemed unvisited, but the equally simple grave of Colette – Colette who, like Lee Miller, was one of your heroines – was covered with fresh cut flowers, and, as we approached, a young woman, whose frizzy hennaed hair shone like a beacon above her plum-coloured velvet dress, added a single tuberose lily. You know what the French say about the tuberose, you whispered. No, I said, what do they say? They say a young girl should not breathe its fragrance after dark, in case it might prove dangerous to her chastity. Colette was very fond of the tuberose. What is it she wrote? a cloud of dreams bursts forth and grows from a single, blossoming stem, you said. And it seemed that of all the flowers there the tuberose gave out its scent the most, a heady, almost luminous aroma. Though I don’t know what it does to the cats, you said. The cats? I said. Yes, they say that cats visit her grave in droves every night, because she was very fond of cats, time spent with cats is never wasted, she used to say. I would have expected Lee Miller to have mentioned the cats when she visited Colette, but she didn’t, you said, and you went on to recall Lee Miller’s Colette piece, which appeared in the March 1945 issue of
Vogue
.

You’d imagined yourself there in Lee Miller’s shoes, you’d memorised whole sentences of her
Vogue
piece, as if you had stepped back in time up the dark staircase into Colette’s third-storey apartment in the Palais Royal gardens. Colette’s sitting up in a bed covered with tawny furs, her frizzy hair like a halo against the cold light from the tall windows, you said. She talks about the black market, the end of the war, the erratic electricity supply, and then she enters her past, darting here and there to choose an object, or a book, but never leaving the bed, for I’m an extension of her body, her hand guiding my arm to reach an envelope of pictures from a high shelf, none of them in order, and they slither out all over the bed and off the bed as she skims through them, each summoning up an anecdote, which in turn attracts another object, a souvenir, a keepsake, a letter from Proust or a portrait of her by Man Ray, towards the bed. She’s what, seventy-one, seventy-two, and her many lives run through my mind’s eye like sepia flashbacks, you said, Colette the siren, the gamine, the lady of fashion, the diplomat’s wife, the mother, Grand Officer of the Légion d’Honneur, Colette the author of the Claudine books which inspired a stage play and a whole range of products, Claudine cigars, Claudine uniform, Claudine soap and perfume, though Colette’s own cosmetics shop went bust, and there’s a many-layered aura in the tall-windowed room that’s lined with bookshelves and alcoves, there’s butterflies in picture-frames, and glass-domed jars with votive offerings in them, little floating hands and ships and acrobats, sealed in holy water. There’s glass paperweights with flamboyant marble swirls in them, and snowstorms, and crystal balls.

Then she shows me the manuscripts, you said, the early ones neatly written in school exercise books, pink and blue printed covers labelled in purple ink. The later ones are a labyrinth of scrawls and crossings-out and arrows, from which she makes fair copies with big spaces between the lines, which in turn fill up with more alternatives and second or third thoughts, you said, more cancellations, and so the whole process of spinning the yarn begins again. Until I read Lee Miller on Colette I had no idea that Colette, the natural writer, as I’d thought of her, the mistress of the spontaneous phrase, worked in so laborious a manner. She shows me her pens, seven of them standing in a big blue jug. There’s ones with broad soft nibs for first drafts, and ones with fine hard points for writing between the lines, and a special one bought by a special someone for her in the Twenties, that she uses when she’s stuck. She keeps trying the switch by her bedside but the electricity’s been off all day, and when I leave it’s almost dark. I remember the last glimmers of light imprisoned in the crystals, and the iridescent blue of the framed butterflies, and the whites of Colette’s eyes, you said, as if repeating a long-rehearsed quotation.

I take it you spoke French to her, I said. Well, Lee Miller did, her French was nearly perfect, you said. As is yours, I said, and you gave a self-deprecating shrug, but it was true, your French was much better than mine. I could read French with only occasional recourse to a dictionary, and I had felt a glow of self-congratulation when I discovered I could follow most of the Easter Sunday sermon in Saint-Eustache, but then the priest’s enunciation had been exquisite, and I knew the theme – of darkness, light and resurrection – well enough from similar childhood sermons. It was familiar territory, and I knew the signposts. And I thought I could speak French reasonably well, but when I did, my collocutor, assuming I knew French well, would unleash a torrent of words in which my comprehension would immediately flounder. But you, Nina, were never out of your depth: French was a second element to you. Your whole body language would change as you spoke, adopting a vocabulary of Gallic shrugs, pouts, frowns and gesticulations, as if you were clothed by French, and became someone other than the one I thought I knew. I loved and admired you for it, and wondered sometimes if I envied you, if envy ever entered into love, for both are emotions, whereas admiration is dispassionate. And, half-jokingly, I’d propose that the whole world should indeed have learned Esperanto, for then we would not need to learn the languages of different nations in order to communicate with them. But that’s precisely the point, you’d say, the point is the difference.
Vive la différence
, as they say. When I speak French, when I listen to French, I think differently, and I say things other than what I’d say, were I speaking English, you said. And of course I knew this myself, for Irish, after all, was my first language, and I not only thought differently in it, but felt differently. Or at least I did once, for now my Irish is like a ghost of itself behind my more accustomed English. As it was then.

We’d gone to Montmartre one day. From the steps of Sacré-Coeur, we gazed down at Paris, radiantly clear in the meticulous April light. I always think that Paris is like the French language, you said, the way it’s departmentalised, as you pointed out the various districts, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Tuileries, the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse, the Invalides, the Marais. Of course the boundaries, the definitions, have been eroded over the years, but then so has the language, if you’re to believe the academicians. But the old fabric is still there under all the changes. Look, over there, and you pointed to a green space in the distance, that’s the Jardin des Plantes, rue Mouffetard’s not far off, you can’t see it, but we’ll have to go there, they have a brilliant market, it’s been on the go for centuries. It’s this steep narrow street, it’s packed with shoppers, stalls along the pavements, open shop fronts with their awnings out, butchers, trays of calves’ liver and tripe and the lovely pot roasts they do, all parcelled up with butcher’s string, it’s a work of art, and those yellow chickens with the heads and feet still on them, then there’s the greengrocers, big fat knobbly tomatoes, all kinds of fresh salad stuff, and the fishmongers, marble slabs awash with cod and halibut and sea-bream and ray and conger eel and lobsters and sea urchins, and God knows what other kinds of creatures, I know what they are in French, but I couldn’t tell you the English for them. And the cheese counters are really unspeakable, I don’t know how many hundreds of kinds they have, and you have all these smells wafting around, between the cheese and the fish and the fruit and vegetables and flowers, the smell of anchovies and olives and Gitanes. Then you come to the end of the street, you turn a corner, go down an alleyway, and you’re in an empty Roman amphitheatre, it’s been there since Paris was, if not before.

That’s what I love about Paris, you never know what’s round the next corner, you said; and from my small experience of the city, it seemed true. I remember especially the evening we dined early in one of the streets off rue Montorgueil. Chez Bibi, that was the place, we were the first customers, and Madame Bibi herself, as we supposed her to be, engaged us, or rather you, in a long colloquy regarding the merits of the food we were about to eat. And the food was good, if a little heavy, solid Bordelaise cooking with wine-reduced sauces, and the wine was good too. By the time we stumbled out, satisfied and half-dazed, rue Montorgueil was thronged with people out for the night, the restaurants and cafés overflowing on to the pavements, and the cool evening air was resonant with conversation and clinking glasses.

We walked north, we crossed a boulevard; suddenly, as if a curtain had descended, the buzz of rue Montorgueil died behind us and we entered a silent zone, a maze of grey deserted streets and alleyways, which turned out to be the garment district. You remember, Nina, how entranced we were by the window displays, the cards of loom elastic, buttons, needles, pins and hair-clips, reels of cotton thread displayed like colour charts, long fat bolts of pink and blue and green cloth, the dresses that seemed thirty years out of date, the tailor’s dummies posed in attitudes of faint surprise? I never knew this place existed, you said, and I was somehow pleased that we were both foreigners now, explorers of a strange new world.

We turned a corner and for the first time we saw people: two women in their forties, maybe, each followed by a string of youngsters. Each carried a pillowslip. The bins outside the shops were overflowing with scrap material and oddments, and these families, we realised, were rag-pickers. Each would stop at a bin and rummage it quickly and professionally, choosing some pieces, discarding others, stuffing them into the bulging pillowslips. There was obviously a hierarchy of stuff, whether chiffon, organdie, tulle, lace, gauze, poplin, whether plain or patterned, whether this pattern or that, and we wondered why some pieces were deemed more valuable than others, for they all appeared equal to our eyes. And where did they all end up, what patchwork did they make? It’s like something out of Victor Hugo, you whispered. We walked on, and in about two minutes we entered the red light district of Porte Saint-Denis to a swirl of competing perfumes.

Paris did indeed seem intricately classified, and had I known then what I now know about the history of artificial languages, I might have expanded your analogy of the city as language. For the earliest attempts at a universal language arose from the medieval idea that man, by reconciling himself to the City of God, in which everything had its proper place and purpose, might attain to a perfect knowledge of the universe. The whole sum of things might, it was thought, be brought by division and subdivision within an orderly scheme of classification. To any conceivable thing or idea capable of being expressed by human speech might therefore be attached a corresponding word, like a label, on a perfectly regular and logical system. Words would therefore be self-explanatory to any person who had grasped the system, and would serve as an index or key to the things they represented. Say you want to find a book in a library. You look it up in a catalogue, where you find its reference number – say, PZ0477.f.26D. If you have learned the system of classification of that library, the reference number would tell you where to find that particular book out of millions; moreover, it would indicate what kind of book it was. The initial P would at once place the book in a certain main division, and so on with the other numbers, till those at the end of the series would lead you to a particular bookcase, a particular shelf, and finally to the book itself.