Ciaran Carson - The Pen Friend

THIS TESTAMENT SAVED THE LIFE OF PTE. W. HACKET 1ST WOR. REGT. AT ARMENTIERS. AUG. 20 — 1915 — NOW IN 2ND GEN. EASTERN HOSPITAL DYKE RD. BRIGHTON — BULLET PASSING THROUGH OUTER COVER AND ALL THE LEAVES AND STOPPED AT THE LAST PAGE.

And I knew that you must have been thinking of a story my father told you once, how he knew someone whose life had been saved in the same manner, a Belfast man who had been in the Battle of the Somme. He had seen the hole in the Testament with his own eyes, though the bullet was missing. And you replied that you’d heard of a similar incident concerning a soldier in the American Civil War, except that the bullet destined for his heart was stopped by a steel plate engraved with a portrait of his sweetheart. I looked at the photograph more closely. The bullet in fact entered the Testament back to front, from Revelation to Matthew, and the Testament is lying open at Revelation 22, the last chapter of the Bible, you can see THE END at the foot of the page, and my eye is caught by Verse 13, which reads, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last’. Then I read Verse 12, which says, ‘And behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be’.

And I take it that you meant these words for me.

In fact, you continued, I’d thought of sending you a postcard of the Yves Klein Blue painting in the Tate, it would have done as well as any other, because I knew how fond you were of this blue, I knew what associations it held for you, the blue of the sea when we had that magical weekend in Donegal, and we stayed in the Yellow Bungalow, the blue of the Paris street signs, and of the Côte d’Azur, where you had never been, but knew from Yves Klein’s writings. That’s why I sent you a card from Nice, you had always wanted to go there, but we never managed, so I went proxy, I wanted to imagine it through your eyes. Yes, the one of the Turbine Room in the Bankside Power Station, before they turned it into the Tate. Sometimes I’d go to look at Klein’s painting, I’d stand there for long minutes, getting lost in that deep blue, and sometimes I’d have the uncanny feeling you were looking over my shoulder at it, and I’d turn around, but the someone standing there would not be you. It was like that when I chose the postcards.

You remember you told me about the Library Angel, how if you were doing a piece of research for a paper on some artist or other, you’d go to the stack in the library, and lift a book at random, and open it at a page, and it would contain precisely the information you’d been looking for, except you didn’t know it until then? You’d say you’d been guided by the Library Angel. It was like that, Angel, you were my Library Angel when I flicked through the shoebox full of postcards, I felt your hand guiding mine. And as I did so, I’d think of what you must have thought of me when we last saw each other, the day of The Compass Bar bomb. Let’s say I did go deliberately to intercept you, but without full knowledge as to why I was doing it. And before that day, I’d been thinking long and hard about the whole mo2 thing for a couple of months, things were beginning to change.

And two weeks or so before that Saturday, Callaghan, my boss, had taken me out for lunch, a rare event, he’d pretty much kept his distance up till then, let us all get along with whatever we were doing, he was very much into benign non-intervention. All that stuff I’d told you about mo2, well, it was basically true, but you knew I was ever so slightly winding you up when I gave it that conspiratorial spin. For really, I thought it was basically just a glorified local enterprise development agency, until that lunch with Callaghan. So, anyway, we talked of this and that, and then we’ve just ordered coffee when Callaghan says, Oh yes, Miranda, and how are getting along with that young man of yours, Conway, Gabriel Conway is it? And I said, Oh, fine, fine, though of course it wasn’t so fine between us then, wondering why this had come up, he’d never expressed any interest in my personal life until then, in fact I didn’t even think he knew I had one. Well, well, marvellous, says Callaghan, that’s good to hear. Father runs an Esperanto class, George Conway, isn’t that right? says Callaghan, Compass Bar? Yes, I said. Well, says Callaghan, we’re thinking of putting one of our chaps in there, very bright, he’d pick up the lingo in no time at all, good community relations project, don’t you think? Paul Eastwood, so happens he went to school with that Gabriel of yours, you might know him. Anyway, it’s like this, I hope you don’t go wanting to learn Esperanto yourself, it would look a bit cluttered, don’t you think, two of our people there at the same time? He’s starting, oh, Saturday week, says Callaghan.

And of course I told him I’d no intention of going to your father’s class, which was true, but I thought it all a bit strange that Callaghan should be telling me this, and then Callaghan says, Oh yes, Miranda, and talking about new projects, you might be interested to know there’s a very good British Council job in Warsaw coming up, we think it might suit you very well, Cultural Affairs Officer. Not that we’re not pleased with your work here, far from it, but sometimes we get the feeling that you could be doing with broader horizons. Job satisfaction, and all that. Anyway, you’ll think about it, won’t you? says Callaghan. And that was the end of that interview. I’d a very uneasy feeling about the whole thing, call it instinct if you want. So I wanted to talk to you about it, but didn’t quite know how, I wasn’t even sure myself what I knew or didn’t know, I couldn’t very well have rushed into The Compass Bar and told everyone to get out, I think something funny is going on here. And I when was talking to you I realised how nebulous the whole thing was, though it didn’t seem so nebulous after the bomb, and I was consumed with guilt afterwards. But I’m none the wiser now, after twenty years, whether mo2 was involved or not, and whether or not I was involved by implication.

So there you have it. It’s taken me twenty years to try to pick up the pieces, and I don’t even know what the pieces were. The only thing I knew was you. You remember our first time away from Belfast together, that weekend we spent in York? We’d gone to the Minster, you remember how dazzled we were by the stained glass? Oh, I’d been there once or twice as a child, but my memory of it was dim, and now I saw it through your eyes as well as through my own, the way the light broke and shimmered on the edges where the glass was framed by stone, little rainbows playing on the stone tracery, so that it seemed the stone was glass. And we stood for an age before the great East Window, which depicts the beginning and the end of the world, from Genesis to Revelation and the Last Judgment. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light, you said. So God must have spoken in the dark, I said. I told you that my mother had told me that during the War, the blackout, they’d taken all the glass from the windows bit by bit and stored it away for safekeeping, and when the War was over, they’d pieced it all together again. And I thought you hadn’t heard what I said, so rapt were you in looking, but afterwards you mentioned that during the War they’d also taken all the paintings from the National Gallery in London and stored them deep underground in a Welsh slate mine. They had to enlarge the entrance to the mine for the Gallery’s biggest painting, you said, it was a Raising of Lazarus, you couldn’t remember the artist’s name. Stored in a dark tomb for so many years. And so many more years have gone by since we two set eyes on each other.