Afterwards, I remarked on it disparagingly to you. Oh, I don’t know, you said, it’s a very underrated scent, very clean and smooth, nice lemon and lavender notes above the sandalwood, you shouldn’t be put off by the name. Or the bottle. You remember the ad, Girls like it — is there any better reason to wear Old Spice? I’ve worn it myself, you said. Have you? I said, I hadn’t noticed. Then it must have been when I wasn’t with you, Angel, you said.
Look for a long time at what pleases you
Nothing is ever truly lost, my father used to say, for every thing in the universe is in the place where it finds itself, and is observed by God, who sees everything. By the same token, though I have so far failed to come across an equivalent of the red and black Dinkie pen that first attracted you to me, I know that my quest is not fruitless. I don’t know how many thousands Conway Stewart made of this particular model, but, scattered as they might be across the world, some of them broken and cast aside, buried in landfills or in the backs of sofas, perhaps ground underfoot in a purposeful or careless moment, I trust that enough remain for one of them, one day, to find its way to me. Not that it will be identical to yours, for the parameters of each design allow for random variations that make each pen subtly individual.
The taxonomy of Conway Stewart pens is complex: serial numbers run from No. 1 to No. 1216, but the system is not chronological, for many of the higher numbers are early models, and vice versa; and each model comes in a range of colours and designs and sizes, with different caps, clips, bands, levers and nibs, so that the permutations run into the many thousands. Your Dinkie, for example, is a 540, but that number comprises over a hundred variations, of which your ring-top Red and Black Mottled Vulcanite is only one. I’m writing this with a Dinkie 540, as it happens, not a ring-top like yours, but one with a pocket-clip. I bought it from an eBay seller in Hong Kong, who told me it came from the last effects of a lady widowed by a colonial administrator, and its Peacock Plumage livery — a spilled petrol swirl of violets, emeralds, mauves, purples, sapphires, tortoiseshells and black, also known as Butterfly Wing — has an Oriental shot silk iridescence. It’s too small for me to hold altogether comfortably, so it’s difficult to control, but that makes me form my words all the more deliberately, watching the letters as they appear on the page to form these sentences. As a tribute to one of its many colours, I loaded the Dinkie with violet ink, and its unfamiliar smell reminds me that there are little perfume atomisers made to look like fountain pens: unscrew the cap, and instead of a nib you find a button that releases a glazed rainbow of scent when pushed — ‘Parfum Exotique’, aromas standing in for words. You remember, Nina, reciting Baudelaire’s poem as we stood by his grave in Montparnasse. It was Easter Monday, Cemetery Monday, as I dubbed it, for we had then gone on to the necropolis of Cimetière Père Lachaise, wandering the long avenues and intersecting alleyways between the graves and vaults and sepulchres of bankers and statesmen and princesses and movie stars and artists, mausoleums shaped like pyramids and beehives and gazebos, adorned with baroque marble angels and imposing statues of those interred beneath them.
We visited the grave of Oscar Wilde, which was fronted by a massive block bearing a winged Egyptian deity, its plinth covered with lipstick kisses. Marcel Proust’s grave was an unexpectedly plain, flat, black marble slab. It seemed unvisited, but the equally simple grave of Colette — Colette who, like Lee Miller, was one of your heroines — was covered with fresh cut flowers, and, as we approached, a young woman, whose frizzy hennaed hair shone like a beacon above her plum-coloured velvet dress, added a single tuberose lily. You know what the French say about the tuberose, you whispered. No, I said, what do they say? They say a young girl should not breathe its fragrance after dark, in case it might prove dangerous to her chastity. Colette was very fond of the tuberose. What is it she wrote? a cloud of dreams bursts forth and grows from a single, blossoming stem, you said. And it seemed that of all the flowers there the tuberose gave out its scent the most, a heady, almost luminous aroma. Though I don’t know what it does to the cats, you said. The cats? I said. Yes, they say that cats visit her grave in droves every night, because she was very fond of cats, time spent with cats is never wasted, she used to say. I would have expected Lee Miller to have mentioned the cats when she visited Colette, but she didn’t, you said, and you went on to recall Lee Miller’s Colette piece, which appeared in the March 1945 issue of Vogue.
You’d imagined yourself there in Lee Miller’s shoes, you’d memorised whole sentences of her Vogue piece, as if you had stepped back in time up the dark staircase into Colette’s third-storey apartment in the Palais Royal gardens. Colette’s sitting up in a bed covered with tawny furs, her frizzy hair like a halo against the cold light from the tall windows, you said. She talks about the black market, the end of the war, the erratic electricity supply, and then she enters her past, darting here and there to choose an object, or a book, but never leaving the bed, for I’m an extension of her body, her hand guiding my arm to reach an envelope of pictures from a high shelf, none of them in order, and they slither out all over the bed and off the bed as she skims through them, each summoning up an anecdote, which in turn attracts another object, a souvenir, a keepsake, a letter from Proust or a portrait of her by Man Ray, towards the bed. She’s what, seventy-one, seventy-two, and her many lives run through my mind’s eye like sepia flashbacks, you said, Colette the siren, the gamine, the lady of fashion, the diplomat’s wife, the mother, Grand Officer of the Légion d’Honneur, Colette the author of the Claudine books which inspired a stage play and a whole range of products, Claudine cigars, Claudine uniform, Claudine soap and perfume, though Colette’s own cosmetics shop went bust, and there’s a many-layered aura in the tall-windowed room that’s lined with bookshelves and alcoves, there’s butterflies in picture-frames, and glass-domed jars with votive offerings in them, little floating hands and ships and acrobats, sealed in holy water. There’s glass paperweights with flamboyant marble swirls in them, and snowstorms, and crystal balls.
Then she shows me the manuscripts, you said, the early ones neatly written in school exercise books, pink and blue printed covers labelled in purple ink. The later ones are a labyrinth of scrawls and crossings-out and arrows, from which she makes fair copies with big spaces between the lines, which in turn fill up with more alternatives and second or third thoughts, you said, more cancellations, and so the whole process of spinning the yarn begins again. Until I read Lee Miller on Colette I had no idea that Colette, the natural writer, as I’d thought of her, the mistress of the spontaneous phrase, worked in so laborious a manner. She shows me her pens, seven of them standing in a big blue jug. There’s ones with broad soft nibs for first drafts, and ones with fine hard points for writing between the lines, and a special one bought by a special someone for her in the Twenties, that she uses when she’s stuck. She keeps trying the switch by her bedside but the electricity’s been off all day, and when I leave it’s almost dark. I remember the last glimmers of light imprisoned in the crystals, and the iridescent blue of the framed butterflies, and the whites of Colette’s eyes, you said, as if repeating a long-rehearsed quotation.