The Pen Friend (22 page)

And then I knew I was dreaming, but I wanted the dream to continue, so overpowered was I by your beauty, so overwhelmed by your palpable presence, for I reached out and touched your cheek, I could feel the warmth of your flesh, and I said, No, Nina, please, stay with me in the dream for a while. What can it matter to you, if it’s only a dream? We can be happy for while in the dream, it can be just as it was in the old days, and then you can go back to your own life, I won’t bother you again, just give me this one night, I said. And tears would well in your eyes, and you would shake your head dumbly, and I would go on, Please, Nina, just one night, I’ll take you to this lovely restaurant I’ve just found, for just then I remembered the restaurant from another dream of Belfast-London, where there were better restaurants than in the real Belfast, and I could picture it in my mind’s eye, it was in one of those alleyways off Corporation Square, Bologna, it was called. You’d really like it, Nina, it’s a real find, just very good simple Italian food, they do this tricolore salad with mozzarella and tomatoes and basil and olive oil, just that, with a grind of black pepper and a pinch of salt, and the tomatoes burst with flavour against the milky mozzarella, little pillows of mozzarella, perfumed with basil, and then the grassy peppery tang of the oil, and then there’s the lamb chops, they’ve been marinaded in olive oil and lemon juice and rosemary, all they do is char them on both sides on an iron griddle, they’re oozing with pink juices inside, or maybe you could have the roast pork, shoulder of pork that they do on a spit over a fire of juniper branches, and then their divine zabaglione, some espresso and a grappa, I said, the grappa’s really special, and then we could go to the 77 Club, they’ve got this brilliant singer, she does Billie Holiday numbers, well, yes, I know what you’re going to say, no one can do Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday, but this woman, she’s something special, she does it with respect, no false histrionics, and she gives the songs her own edge, she puts her own experience into them, as well as what she understands of Billie’s experience, it’ll be just like you told me, Nina, how you imagined it, I can see her with that white gardenia in her hair, you said, isn’t it strange how the song makes you see the singer, she’s standing in a spotlight in a bar in New York, you said, and it’s dark but there’s those little tea-lights in faceted glass holders on the tables and you can see hands holding cigarettes and cocktail glasses, a face or two maybe, the smoke curling up and drifting into the spotlight, and we’ll be there, Nina, it’ll be like that, Nina, I said.

And you shook your head sadly, and said, No, Gabriel, it won’t be like that, I’ve changed since then. Is that what I said to you? I can’t remember, it’s such a long time ago, I’ve forgotten so much, you said. Please, Nina, I said, you can’t have changed that much, just be what you were to me then, just a little, just for this one night. And you said, Perhaps I never was that person, Gabriel, perhaps even then you made me up, perhaps you were in love with a dream of me, and not the real me. And then I would remember how you had said that to me in real life. Goodbye, Gabriel, you said, and you stepped back into the shadows, and I would wake with my eyes full of tears.

Last night, inspired by your postcard, I dreamed of you again. The happy dream this time, where we take the Belfast train for New York. Just as you settled in your seat you sprayed a little perfume on your wrists. What’s that? I said.
Chamade
, you said, by Jean Paul Guerlain, 1969. I always liked the word, it’s after Françoise Sagan’s novel,
La Chamade
, a double-edged word.
Son coeur battait la chamade
, her heart was beating wildly. But
la chamade
is also a drumbeat signalling retreat. And so the dream proceeded as it had before, except when I found you in my bed in Ophir Gardens, my father did not come in, for he has been dead these seven years. And you were about to surrender to me when I really did wake. You were not there, but it seemed to me your perfume lingered on the pillow for a good half-hour: Spanish lilac, hyacinth and tuberose, calmed by murmurs of amber, jasmine, lily of the valley. Then a lingering, coffiny base of cedarwood.

N

Again I find I’m playing catch-up with myself, for I had intended to dwell a little on the fact that your last card, that of Grand Central Terminal, had also been posted in Dublin, and bore a 60c Hawthorn stamp. Again, the face value of the stamp seemed high. It, too, must have been deliberately chosen. In Irish folklore, the hawthorn is the fairy tree, especially a lone hawthorn, for under it you may find a portal to the fairy world which lies contiguous to ours. And I am reminded of your description of your mother’s perfume,
Après l’Ondée
, hawthorn and violets doused in rain, how perfume can so magically evoke the presence of someone no longer in this world. As for your latest postcard, it’s been posted in Drogheda, with a 65c Bluebell stamp, and I had written a good few sentences in response to that when my pen malfunctioned.

I had only myself to blame. I had recently acquired a Wasp Clipper made in the
US
in the thirties by Sheaffer, quite a beautiful pen in a layered olive green and silver-grey web pattern shot through with sparkling gold threads that create an illusion of extraordinary depth. But the nib had lost most of its iridium, and was an unsatisfactory, scratchy writer. And I wanted this lovely pen to be a working pen, so I thought I would take the good nib from a Parker pen that had lost its cap, and substitute it for the poor Clipper nib. As it turned out, when I disassembled the two pens and tried out the marriage, it wouldn’t work: the Parker nib was just that much bigger than the Clipper, and I couldn’t get both nib and feed to fit the section. So I rummaged around in my spares box and eventually found an old Conway Stewart feed that was a little narrower than the Parker feed, and tried that, and lo! the combination worked perfectly. I filled up the Wasp Clipper Parker Conway Stewart, and began to write. The line was nice and smooth, if a trifle wet, and I was writing quite pleasurably with my Frankenstein’s monster of a pen when it dried up on me. I shook it, and tried it again; nothing happened, so I shook it little more violently, whereupon it spat out a series of blots across my words.

That marriage wasn’t quite right either: the feed was just that little bit too narrow. I crumpled the ruined page into a ball and binned it, and took up a 1940s Wyvern Perfect Pen in Rose Pearl and Black instead, which I knew to be more reliable. The whole experience made me reflect on my gradual and somewhat reluctant discovery that many vintage pens, considered purely as writing instruments, are far from perfect. Oh, they look beautiful, but they leak, they blot, they flood, they skip, they scratch, or the filler mechanisms don’t work – worst of all is the plunger filler invented by Sweetser, the roller-skating transvestite, which gives all sorts of trouble because it depends on a very precise vacuum seal, and even if you replace a worn seal, you can never trust them to fill satisfactorily again. Whereas a cheap modern cartridge pen by Parker or Sheaffer will last you for years, and write unhesitatingly with a consistent line every time you pick it up.

When I was last in London I bought a Japanese Muji cartridge pen in their Tottenham Court Road shop – it cost just ten pounds – for purposes of comparison with my vintage collection. Any time I’m in London I usually end up buying something there, and I’ve just looked up Muji on the net to remind myself of their products. At the heart of Muji design, says their website, is the Japanese concept of
kanketsu
, the concept of simplicity …
Muji’s simple, anonymous, unostentatious products subtly blend in with their background and bring a quiet sense of calm into strenuous everyday lives
. My life is not that strenuous, but I especially like Muji’s stationery range – steel rulers, mini tape-measures, acrylic hole punches, brightly coloured paper clips and bulldog clips, aluminium business-card holders, credit-card cases, and various other little receptacles and boxes which are good to look at and feel good in the hand. I like their inexpensive notebooks, which take fountain pen ink very well despite their low price, and I like their clothes: I’m wearing a white linen Muji shirt today, very simple classic design, very cool. And I’ve just picked up the Muji pen, I’m writing with it right now. It really is very well designed, a simple brushed aluminium tube with a nice circumferential groove in the end of the barrel into which you can securely post the cap, cap and barrel appearing seamlessly joined, as they do when the pen is closed. Granted, the stainless steel nib has a little fancy scrollwork on it, possibly imitating a Mont Blanc nib, but the Muji bears no other markings beyond the words ‘iridium point’.

I like the fact that it bears no name, that it is confident enough to let the design speak for itself, but it’s ever so slightly boring. The nib has been made to write like a ballpoint to suit modern hands, with an unvaryingly inflexible line: admirable in its own way, efficient, but characterless. And I love the quirks and idiosyncrasies of my vintage pens, none of which write the same, even when made by the same maker, with the same nib. I love their differences, their implications of alternative ways of writing.

So I return the Muji to its drawer and look at my pen collection again. There are spaces vacated by three pens I sent away for the kinds of repair I couldn’t manage with my novice skills, one of them a black Celluloid Mabie Todd Blackbird Topfiller with a translucent amber upper barrel which enables you to check the ink level. It was a lovely writer when it worked, but then it developed a tendency to flood, and leak on my finger and thumb, due to a faulty seal between section and barrel. It’s been gone for over a month; pen repair shops often have this kind of waiting list. But its absence reminds me that I was wakened again this morning by the song of my neighbourhood blackbird; and then I remembered the dream I’d been wakened from, which concerned my father, and which causes me to now write with a Silver Grey and Black Marble Blackbird.

I was walking down a white road that led to a blue sea. I could smell turf-smoke, and knew I was in Donegal. It had just rained. Water gurgled in the ditch, and tinkled down the limestone ruts of the road, its music echoing the song of an unseen blackbird. Then I saw my father, standing by the yellow bungalow, and I thought, he must have retired to live here, he was always very fond of
The Yellow Bungalow
. But then I saw the broken windows, and the weeds sprouting from the thatch. My father was holding a packet of letters in his left hand, and writing something on them. Return to sender, I thought. He began to walk away from me down the limestone road between the grey stone walls past the ruined houses and the rusted farm machinery lying in the fields, walking with that slightly swaggering postman’s gait, he stopped, looked over his shoulder at me, and smiled, and entered the graveyard through the creaking gate, and I ran to follow him, and I’d almost caught up with him when he lay down on a flat gravestone, took off his peaked cap and laid it on this chest, and crossed his arms, and, as I watched, his body in the blue-black uniform began to shimmer, merging with the gravestone, and by the time I reached him he was gone, and I could not even make out the name on the stone, for it was covered with moss and lichen. Then I heard the blackbird singing again, and I woke to hear the real blackbird singing.

You knew my father, Nina, you remember that swaggering walk of his. And you remember how he used to run a Saturday afternoon Esperanto class in an upstairs room of The Compass Bar in Ireland’s Entry, near the Law Courts. He’d tried to persuade you to sign up for the course, you know he’d taken quite a shine to you. And one day in the
XL
Café you seemed to go along with it for a while, but then, very diplomatically it seemed to me, you wriggled out of it. When he had gone, I said I thought you’d handled the situation very well. Can you see me as an Esperantista? you said. Why not? I said. Well, I just don’t think it’s the kind of movement that attracts women, for one thing, seems more like an old boys’ club to me, you said. And I conceded that I didn’t know many women who were involved in the movement, but I knew that some marriages had been made through Esperanto, and that there were several hundred Esperanto speakers in the world whose first language it was. What a bunch of oddballs they must be, you said. But don’t you think it admirable that two people should fall in love through an ideal, and that they’re prepared to follow that ideal though, by teaching it to their children? I said.

You laughed. Like you, Angel, the way you were brought up in Irish? Don’t you think you’re just a little bit of an oddball yourself? Not that I don’t love you for it. But you don’t seriously believe that these minority pacts are going to change the course of history, these people going around with green stars in their eyes. And speaking of stars, you’re a typical Libra, Angel, you’ll do anything for a quiet time, go with whatever the flow is, you weigh things up and make sure you’re always on the right side of the scales. And maybe it’s not only the stars made you that way, it’s the way you were brought up, between Irish and English. Maybe you don’t really believe in anything, because you know the world is different in Irish than it is in English, you can never decide on what the world really is, or what it should be, you said.

But you know that too, I said, your French is nearly as good as your English, you think in French sometimes. But it’s not native to me, you said, I chose to learn French. Whereas you had no choice, your parents made that choice for you. Then again, maybe it was in their stars, you said. But by the same token, Nina, maybe it was in your stars that you should learn French. Oh, don’t be silly, Angel, you know I really don’t believe in all that stuff, it’s only a metaphor, but if I did, I could say that the stars only give a general picture, it’s up to the individual to fill in the detail, the devil is in the detail, or God, for that matter, wasn’t it Flaubert who said,
Le bon Dieu est dans le détail
? Not that he ascribed his own writing to God, he meant that whatever one does, one should do it thoroughly, as best as one can, that’s why he spent days looking for
le mot juste
, you said.

Well, Nina, Flaubert said a lot of things, didn’t he say that of all lies, art is the least untrue? I could go along with that, I said. Yes, you said, but you think that what you see in art should be true for everybody. And Flaubert said, there is no truth, there is only perception, you said. Oh, for God’s sake, let’s stop this, Nina, we’re starting to sound like Mutt and Jeff, I said. More like Abbott and Costello, you said. Abercrombie and Fitch, I said. Marks and Spencer, you said. Jeeves and Wooster, you said. Gilbert and Sullivan, I said. Lennon and McCartney, you said. Chang and Eng, I said. Who? you said. You know, the Siamese Twins, I said, Yin and Yang. Oh, all right then, Thompson and Thompson, you said. Who? I said. You know, the twins in Tintin, you said. Tintin and Snowy, I said. Dorothy and Toto, you said. Tom and Jerry, I said. The Owl and the Pussycat, you said. Leda and the Swan, I said. Lady and the Tramp, you said. Bubble and Squeak, I said. I don’t see the connection, you said. Well, you can imagine a pair of dogs called Bubble and Squeak, can’t you? I said. Oh, all right then, if you’re going to allow that kind of thing, Fish and Chips, you said. Rhubarb and Custard, I said. Crosse and Blackwell, you said. Smith and Jones, I said. You gave me a querying look. As in Alias, I said. Bonnie and Clyde, you said. Barrow
and
Furness, I said. What do you mean, Barrow and Furness? you said. You know, the shipbuilding place, like the Clyde, I said. That’s a bit thin, you said, but all right, Samson and Delilah. Samson and Delilah? I said. Yes, Harland and Wolff’s, the two big cranes, they’re called Samson and Goliath, isn’t that right? All right then, Antony and Cleopatra, I said. Abelard and Héloïse, you said. Hero and Leander, I said. Scylla and Charybdis, you said. A rock and a hard place, I said. Gin and tonic, you said, on the rocks. Jekyll and Hyde, it’s a cocktail, I said. First I ever heard of it, you said, I think you’re making it up. But it would be a good name for a cocktail, I said. So would Punch and Judy, for that matter, you said. Or Tom and Jerry, I said. We already had that one, Angel, and besides, I’m tired of this game, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

You remember, Nina, we used toy around with pub names, too, though we tried to avoid those silly English names, like The Rat and Parrot, or The Slug and Lettuce, though the disease had crept into Belfast too, there was The Whip and Saddle bar in the Europa Hotel, the most bombed hotel in Europe, where all the foreign correspondents would hang out. No, we tried to make our names plausible, along the model of real Belfast bars like The Elephant, or The Fly, or The White Fort, or The Compass itself, for that matter, whose navigational connotations derived from its being built on the site of a former open dock that was filled in back in the 1870s. Joy’s Basin, they called the dock, it was built by one of the Joy family of Belfast. Joy’s Basin? you said, that would make a good name for a pub. Yes, I said, but maybe a bit in bad taste, the United Irishman Henry Joy came from the same family, they hanged him in Cornmarket in 1798, not too far away. About fifty paces from where the Abercorn Restaurant used to be, I said, remembering that there was still a dock called the Abercorn Basin. At any rate, we came up with The Meridian, and The Plimsoll Line, and The Foremast (there was already a Crow’s Nest), and The Tug, and The Clipper, and Long Haul, and would have considered The Starry Plough, but for its political implications. From there it was an easy step to The Green Star.

My father, in his introductory session, would have delivered to The Compass class a brief biography of Ludwig Zamenhof, mentioning the Irish origins of the green star that was the Esperantist emblem. And he would have outlined to them how Zamenhof arrived at the fundamental principle which was to guide his new language, how one day, when he was seventeen or eighteen, in about 1876 or so, he had been walking to school in Warsaw when suddenly he noticed a sign which read
ŠVEJCARSKAYA
, meaning place of the porter; in other words, a porter’s lodge; and then he saw another sign which read
KONDITORSKAYA
, place of sweets, in other words a sweetshop, or confectioner’s. And then, envisioning all the various places of trade and business in Warsaw, the hundreds of grocers and butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers and hairdressers and restaurants and public houses, he saw how by means of a suffix,
-skaya
, the many could be made one, that one word could be made into other words that need not be separately learned, and hence one did not require a multiplicity of words for the multiplicity of things in the world. A ray of light fell upon those huge, terrifying dictionaries, said Zamenhof, my father would say, and they began to dwindle rapidly before my eyes. So Zamenhof began constructing his language with a basic stock of root words to which a series of prefixes and suffixes could be attached to generate a wealth of different meanings. My father would add that Zamenhof’s Jewishness and his knowledge of Hebrew might also have led him to this illumination, for a logical economy of root consonants is common to both languages. And, my father would proceed, when you come to The Compass class, when we assemble in this upper room, I don’t care whether you are Jew or Catholic or Protestant or Mohammedan, for as Esperantists we are all brothers – and there were indeed no sisters, you were quite right, Nina, in your stylish dress you would have looked out of place among these drab-suited old men and young men who looked older than their age – and though we are few in number, my father would continue, we may, by the grace of the one God that made us all, and by our own efforts, spread the gospel of Esperanto throughout the world.