I have the icon before me as I write, Nina, the icon that we placed against the mirror of the vanity unit in Room 412 in Hôtel Scribe, admiring it at intervals throughout our week in Paris. Lee Miller had stayed in Room 412, David Scherman was next door, 410 or 414, you didn’t know which. Though I expect it must have changed since then, you said, and in any event, maybe this 412 is not what 412 was then, because when you asked the concierge if this was Lee Miller’s room, the Lee Miller who was here during the liberation, he shrugged, and said, Who knows? The Liberation was a long time ago. But try and picture it as it was then, you said, pretend it is Lee Miller’s room. There’s her camera case hanging on the door knob, can’t you see it? It’s a Rolleiflex case, the camera itself is on the dressing table, over there, among the jars and bottles of perfume and chemicals, and there’s a table in the middle of the floor with a Hermes Baby typewriter on it, and a half-empty bottle of cognac, and a full ashtray, and piles of paper, there’s all sorts of junk overflowing from the drawers and wardrobes, cases of K rations piled up against the walls, cases of cognac and fine wines, the whole lot buried under cartons of flash bulbs, you said, and I began to join in the game. There’s loot everywhere, I said, everything from lace to leather, the iron bed is strewn with books and German military crests and silver ashtrays with swastikas on them, and binoculars and pistols and bayonets, and there’s a pair of jackboots in the corner, and a silver candelabra. And there’s half-a-dozen jerrycans of petrol out on the balcony. Petrol? you said. Oh, I am sorry, Lee, I meant gasoline, I said. I’d been putting on an American accent. I guess I’ve been too long away from good old Uncle Sam, I said. And who might you be? you said. Why, if you’re Lee Miller, then I must be David Scherman, I said. Don’t be too sure of that, you said, Lee Miller had a lot of lovers. And for a moment I was piqued. Then I caught the mischief in your expression, and I said, Well, can I be Monsieur X, then? And you said, Who shall I be then? Madame Y? No, you can keep on being Lee Miller if you like, I said. Snap, you said, and you winked at me with your left eye. The L’Heure Bleue you’d put on earlier had faded, and we went to bed in an imagined aura of cognac, photographic fluids, cardboard boxes, gasoline and gunmetal. Parfum Exotique.
Only an infinite present
Leonardo da Vinci observes that if you look at a damp-stained wall long enough, you will begin to see landscapes in it, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, valleys, and so on. And you will also see fleeting figures, and strange expressions of faces, and people dressed in outlandish costumes. The effect, says Leonardo, is like listening to a carillon of bells, in whose clanging you may discover every name and every word you can imagine. So when last night a surveillance helicopter perched itself for some hours in the sky above Ophir Gardens, I could hear the syllables of your name, Nina, repeated in the washing-machine spin-cycle noise of its engines. Then I would hear my own name, Gabriel, then both our names together, Gabriel, Nina, Gabrellianina, till they would become scrambled and garbled back into the meaningless chaos from whence they had come.
Just after dawn the helicopter swooped away and dwindled into silence. I was left with the not unfamiliar feeling that I had somehow been drained of my identity by this infringement of my acoustic space. And I was reminded again of how, in the 1970s, young Catholic men like me would be routinely stopped by British army patrols, spread-eagled against a wall, and interrogated for some hours as to our identities. Our names. Where we lived. What we did for a living, if anything. Our parents’ names. Those of our relatives, our friends, our colleagues, our associates. We soon learned that these details were already known anyway, as they were checked by a field-radio link to a central database; so these regular interrogations seemed a gratuitously thorough exercise. Some names, though, Irish names, proved difficult for the English soldiers: Fintan, for example, would be pronounced by them as Victor, Ciaran as Karen, and Manus as Menace. Fiach was Fake. Then there were the Irish-speaking zealots who would refuse to respond to questions put in English, though they spoke it better than they did Irish, and would demand an interpreter to be present at their interrogations: but this procedural difficulty was often easily circumvented, as an Irish-speaking companion would provide that service, the two acting as interpreters for each other. I was once forced to become one half of such a double act myself, having been latched on to by a drunk, Irish-speaking acquaintance of my father, on the way home from the pub one night.
Such episodes were clearer in my memory when I related them to you, back in 1982 and 1983. Isn’t it extraordinary, I’d say, that the Powers That Be seem to know everything about everyone — or at least the Catholic population, I could not speak for the other side, though it did seem their identities were not so thoroughly examined — yet they can’t identify who really is who, and who’s doing what. Well, you’d say, so-called intelligence is one thing; knowing what it means is another, and the same information can be used to draw very different conclusions by different parties, with different vested interests. It depends how you look at it, you’d say. That’s why they invented MO2, because we don’t draw any conclusions, we just exist. The information is what we are. And again I would try to get to the bottom of what precisely you were, or what you and your colleagues did. Let me put it like this, you said. When I was brought up for my differentiation, as they called it, it was a kind of interview, Callaghan was there and he had this side-kick I’d never seen before. Callaghan introduces him as ‘my esteemed colleague Mr Bentley’. Bentley’s this chap in a lovely suit, really dark blue with a faint grey chalk stripe, must be Savile Row, he’s wearing Crocket & Jones black Oxfords, but he’s also got this unconventional touch, floppy-collared linen shirt, light blue with a pink needle-stripe, and quite a stunning tie, deep russet moiré silk, and Callaghan, he’s wearing his usual baggy professorial tweeds.
Anyway, there’s just the two of them, we’re in Callaghan’s office. Lovely room, he’s got the original warehouse wide-planked flooring sanded and waxed — nothing so crude as that polyurethane varnish — and he’s got a few Persian tribal rugs scattered on them, and there’s some lovely Art Nouveau furniture, a burr walnut drinks cabinet with a sunburst motif on it, nice settee and chairs in cut moquette, that kind of thing. Good art on the walls, you’d like it, Gabriel, there’s a Maurice Wilks landscape, and a Paul Henry, one of those Connemara ones which is mostly sky, clouds tumbling all over the place. There’s a nice Colin Middleton from his Surrealist phase.
Callaghan pours us all a good glass of brandy to begin, and offers me a cigarette from a cedar box, though he knows I don’t smoke, it’s all very informal. Bentley lights up a pipe, and Callaghan gestures for me to sit on the settee. Bentley and himself sprawl out in these easy chairs. Well, says Callaghan, Miranda, if I might call you Miranda, we’ve looked at your differentiation outline, and it’s very good, very well thought out, says Callaghan. Yes, very well thought out, says Bentley in a cut-glass Oxford accent, and the way he says it, it’s not like he’s repeating what Callaghan said, he’s adding to it, he puts a different spin on it, and Bentley smiles meaningfully as he says this, and then Callaghan says, Yes, we’d just like to explore it a bit further, get a clearer picture of what you have in mind. Yes, says Bentley, a clearer picture. Of what you have in mind, says Bentley, and again this seems to mean something else to what Callaghan meant. But first, says Callaghan, purely procedural matter, don’t you know, let’s be sure we’ve got the right woman, and he laughs as if he’s just made a joke, and Bentley says, between puffs of his pipe, Yes. The. Right. Woman.