I cast my mind back to that night in New York when I thought you bore the aura of your mother’s perfume, hawthorn blossom after rain, and you told me of your father’s time in the Erinoid factory at Lightpill, how he would lie awake at night listening to the groans and clanks of the goods trains, their whistles sounding in the dark like cries of happiness or sadness, and then he would hear the triumphant shriek of the Great Western express as it rushed past on its way to London, the long plume of its smoke borne like hawthorn blossom against the night sky. And he would think of you then, and of your mother. He didn’t really speak about it until a couple of weeks afterwards, you said, and even then I wonder if he was speaking about her at all. You know, Nina, he said, one has to follow one’s instincts. And he told you a story, how during the War he was faced with a choice, like that presented to a bomb-disposal expert, whether to cut this wire or that, except in this instance he had to decide quickly whether a telephone message received from a known double agent was a bluff or a double-bluff, whether the information was true or false. The decision he made resulted in the death of four men. I trusted my instinct, he said, and I cut the wrong wire, in a manner of speaking. But I had to trust myself, because if you don’t trust yourself, who will? And there will be times when you are wrong, but at least you can say that you are true to yourself, Nina, said your father. I took it that he referred to some other wrong choice in his personal life, or to my mother’s suicide, you said. Or that perhaps the two were connected.
Years later, when I suspected that he had been unfaithful to my mother during those two years in Stroud, I thought it unlikely that she would have condemned him for it; she was not given to those sort of moral judgements. But she did pride herself on her judgement of character, her judgement of situations, and the parameters that people set themselves. She’d made a career out of it. That’s what her colleagues used to say about her, that she had great judgement, a great instinct for doing the right thing. I used to wonder what that meant, maybe it’s some kind of epitome of what you are, that every choice is a summary of all the decisions you make in the past, you said, and I was struck by your use of the present tense, as if the past were somehow revisited, perhaps continually revised, by present thoughts, words, or deeds. Let’s assume she finds out about my father’s infidelity, if that indeed were the case, you said. I think she would have judged herself more harshly than him, because she had misjudged his character, someone she thought she knew as well as herself. That was what disturbed her most. And who am I to question that? How can we question our parents’ instincts? you said. For it was those instincts that brought us into being.
Prompted by the memory of your father, I’ve taken up another Dutch-made pen, one from the same batch of ‘new old stock’ that included the Merlin. Like the Merlin, it languished in the time capsule of a Delft stockroom for some fifty-seven years, never inked until it came into my hands, and, apart from some gibberish written as a test run, these words concerning itself are the first it has written in its life, its purpose unfulfilled until now, as I inscribe its name, CIBA, on this page. It’s an elegant little pen, given an almost funereal dignity by its black and pearl-grey livery, and I am reminded of standing at the grave of my own father, as I did two months ago on the anniversary of his death, gazing at the silver-grey lettering engraved on the black marble tombstone: Seoirse Mac Connmhaigh, as he styled himself, not the George Conway of his birth certificate. Through Irish he had become another person.
At the funeral it was remarked, by family friends and relatives I had not seen for years, how much I looked like Seoirse, or George, depending on what side they came from; it had never struck me, for I always thought I took after my mother. But when I looked in the mirror that night I could see a resemblance I had never seen before, and saw in my own face his bone structure, the grey eyes that were like his eyes looking back at me. I’d been given the privilege of casting the first spadeful of earth into the grave, and, as it pattered on the lid of the coffin, I thought of an expression that sometimes occurred in the old Irish stories he told me as a child. Fód a bháis, the sod of his death: the place where the hero is destined to die, explained my father. I imagined a patch of ground the size of a boot-sole which when trod upon opens a portal to the next life. Later on, I thought of a landmine. There is no avoiding one’s sod of death, no matter what road we take in this, the journey of our lives, whatever purposeful meanderings or deviations, whatever U-turns or whatever sidetracks we make, the sod of death awaits us all, as surely as the CIBA pen, by whatever chain of tiny accidents, has reached my hand. Nor would I have looked for the CIBA, had I not been moved to become a collector of pens that day I saw my father’s Conway Stewart, or one which resembled his, in the dusty annexe of an auction room.
CIBA is an acronym of the Swiss company Chemische Industrie Basel, whose Dutch subsidiary in Maastricht no longer makes pens, but it does still produce a wide range of electronic materials, inks, graphics, paper, plastics and rubber. It began its life in Basel in the 1850s producing fuchsine, a new chemical dye derived from coal-tar, so called because of its resemblance to the deep purple red of the fuchsia flower. In 1859, after the Battle of Magenta in Italy, in which the Franco-Sardinian alliance defeated Austria, the new colour was named magenta. The victorious general, Marie Edmé Patrice de Mac Mahon, was created Duke of Magenta by Napoleon III, and later became President of France. His ancestor Mac Mahon from Clare was one of the ‘Wild Geese’, the army of Patrick Sarsfield which, after its defeat at the Battle of Aughrim, and under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick of 1691, left Ireland for France.
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 MO2 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.