Eine kleine nachtmusik
I wonder what you wonder, when you wonder how your postcards might affect me. After your last card I was tempted to buy a flacon of Après l’Ondée, to experience your mother’s perfume, but that would have been trespass, and I am content to make do with your remembered words, for I think you must intend me to find a narrative in your semi-disconnected messages, and so arrive at an understanding of our time together that has long been hidden deep in my memory. And your fifth card made me remember something I had forgotten. For when I read the words, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, I heard them playing the acoustic perfume of Mozart that night in New York, and I could hear the top-note clarity of newly rinsed hawthorns and violets shimmering over the bass cellos of the musk-roses that crowded the great bay window. And when you told me of your mother’s suicide, I imagined I could smell her perfume, emanating from you as you spoke those words, as if you had enfolded her aura within you, and had taken on her spirit as it left her.
The classical ensemble had been hired by you, as style consultant for the evening. You had stipulated that there was to be no Irish music. We want to throw them off balance a little, you said, skew the received ideas a little. It’ll be warm, but we won’t have the air-conditioning all the way up as they come in, we want it just a little sultry, and then when it starts to feel a little stuffy, we’ll turn it up, and introduce a little apple-blossom scent into the air, it’ll be like an Irish spring evening. We want muted Irish, no Paddywhackery. I’ll have a little pale shamrock motif in the table-linen, more apple-green than shamrock, you said. You chose the flowers, the silverware, the menu. It was to be a stand-up buffet affair, you wanted good circulation, when people have to juggle drink and food and talk they’re put off their dignity a little, you said, and if a little champagne is spilled so much the better. Helps them unwind.
I’d been sceptical of your plans. These are not only hard-nosed businessmen, I said, but sentimental bigots, they don’t want their preconceptions upset. Yes, you said, so we won’t give them any. But we’ll give them something else, an aesthetic experience. No one is immune to beauty. You had the whole place lit with candles, candelabras with real candles that formed cataracts of wax as the evening progressed, and the scent of candle-wax and apple-blossom wafted through the pools of light and shade in the room and flickered on the silverware and linen with an almost ecclesiastical aura, and it occurred to me that some of these hard-nosed businessmen would have been altar-boys once and that you had taken that into consideration. Yes, you said, I want to remind them of the numinous, the things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Let them think they are cardinals, you said, not gombeen men, as I watched them form little dark-suited groups and eddies of conspiracy, well-fed faces nodding and smiling in the shadows and oases of light thrown by the candles amid the cut-glass vases full of white gardenias.
And, thinking of your mother’s otherworldly perfume, I was reminded of the nineteeth-century mediums who specialised in olfactory effects. The Rev. Moses Stainton, for one, who in the course of his séances would produce liquid scents, sometimes of familiar perfumes, such as jasmine, heliotrope, verbena, sandalwood, new-mown hay, sometimes of perfumes unrecognised. Sometimes it appeared sprayed from the air, sometimes poured as if from a vial into the cupped palms of the sitters; often it would be found oozing from the medium’s head and running down into his beard. Stainton was also capable of introducing objects into the room, seemingly from mid-air — pearls, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, as well as more common objects such as books, opera-glasses, gloves, pin-cushions, shells, thimbles, snuff-boxes, kitchen knives, and candlesticks. The celebrated medium Mrs Guppy once asked each of the nineteen people present at a séance to wish for a fruit. First a banana appeared, then two oranges, a bunch of white grapes, a bunch of black grapes, a cluster of filberts, three walnuts, thirteen damsons, a slice of candied apple peel, three figs, two apples, an onion, a peach, five almonds, four very large grapes, three dried dates, a potato, two Conference pears, a pomegranate, two crystallised greengages, a pile of dried currants, a lemon, and a bunch of raisins, all in the order in which they had been wished for.
There were various theories to account for these phenomena: some thought them to be ectoplasmic emanations, or that they had been transported from another corner of the universe, or from another plane, or that they had been produced from Platonic forms. Whatever the case, the raps and levitating tables of the Goligher Circle paled beside these baroque manifestations. Yet the Goligher phenomena were perhaps all the more mysterious for their banal austerity. After examining them closely for some six years, W.J. Crawford claimed to have found no evidence of imposture. However, on 30th July 1920 he committed suicide, and the suspicion that his action had something to do with a discovery about the Golighers is unavoidable. A few days before his death he wrote to a friend:
My psychic work was done when my brain was working perfectly. I derived great happiness from it, and it could not be responsible for what has occurred. Possibly some anatomical change has suddenly taken place in the brain substance which would have occurred in any case. We are such complicated bits of mechanism that it does not require much to put us out of action. I wish to reaffirm my belief that the grave does not finish all. I trust that I will find myself with a renewed energy, and able still to further the work in which we are both interested. With regard to my present condition, I feel there is absolutely no hope. The breakdown is making further way and I am getting worse daily. I feel that in a short time I might become a danger to those I love. You may think it strange that all this could take place inside a couple of weeks, but so it is. But what I wish to affirm now with all my strength is that the whole thing is due to natural causes and that the psychic work is in no way responsible.
Crawford had been found lying dead on the rocks of the foreshore of Belfast Lough, a blue poison bottle beside him, and I remember the little silver-mounted blue glass salt cruets you had placed on the table like sacramental receptacles that evening in New York.
I cannot remember what scent you wore that night, so firm is my recall of those imaginary musk-roses, violets and hawthorns. But I can see your jade pendant with the amber fleck in it that matched your eye, and the faint sheen of your pale green linen suit, and I was proud of you as you flitted in your Gemini mode from group to group, directing the waiters with discreet attention, chatting to the musicians when they took a break. And though, as a Libra, I am one who always seeks another for balance, I knew from experience when to leave you alone, and when to wait for you to come to me, for a Libra, according to the books, is also harmonious, diplomatic, and peacemaking — ambassadorial qualities, though I doubt if I ever could have made an ambassador. I was, however, tempted to write this letter with an Ambassador pen, made in the USA in the late 1930s or early 40s, to judge from its looks. Not that any ambassador would be seen dead with such a pen: like the Wearever De Luxe, this Ambassador’s name belies its low cost. It might be a Dollar Pen, maybe a dollar fifty. It’s modelled on the much more expensive Conklin pens of the same era, with a streamlined cap reminiscent of the nose of an airplane or a locomotive; but the clip is a little flimsy, brushed with a gold wash rather than gold-plated, and the nib, too, is gold-washed steel, rather than solid gold.
Nevertheless, like the Wearever, it has a lovely bright jazzy feel to it, the body patterned in black ‘railroad tracks’ laid on to an iridescent red ground. But I chose instead a Conway Stewart 58, top of their range in the late 1950s, as being more appropriate to your ‘muted Irish’ theme: the pattern is called Green Hatch in the catalogues, and it’s a patchwork of subtle Connemara marble greens overlaid with wavy black cross-hatched lines. It’s chunkier and heavier than most Conways, and the three gold bands on the cap give it a magisterial air: I can see this pen clipped into the breast pocket of a 1950s Irish senator or ambassador, and I wonder what pen, if any, the Irish Ambassador sported that night of the reception in New York. If I could go back in time, with what I now know, I would know, but I would not have known then. I was not a collector then, and, beyond your Dinkie, I was oblivious to pens, and what they might signify about their owners.