So I got out, I’d saved up quite a bit from my business, enough to last me a good few months, and I went to Paris, where I knew I could get a job with my French, the French like Englishwomen with a bit of style who can speak good French, though I had to tone down my French accent a bit, make it more English, for that’s the whole point, that you’re an Englishwoman speaking French.
And for six months I did nothing, I got a little apartment near Les Halles, in rue Montmartre, I’d just go for long walks, trying to forget how we’d been in Paris together. Then I got a job in a fashion photography agency. And I fell for one of the photographers, and it took me a while to realise that it was because he reminded me of you, he looked at things in that admiring way, without quite engaging with them, he saw the world in terms of photographs, though he wasn’t half as good as he thought he was. So I dropped him. And I hesitated about telling you this, but you might as well know, because everything I’ve done since I left you has led to this moment where I write to you again, now, after twenty years.
After the photographer, I took up with a married man, one of those minor French politician-intellectuals, oh, nothing physical, in fact I think he was a closet gay, it was a business arrangement if you like, I was his escort, the kind of woman his kind of man likes to be seen with in discreet restaurants. He was very charming, and very well read, we’d have this French Symbolist thing going, matching quotations from Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and eating with him was a real pleasure, if a trifle analytical, you know that way the French have to talk their food as well as eat it. He admired me, and I him. And I enjoyed the mutual flattery for a while, not to mention the discreet restaurants, but then it seemed to me he was flaunting me a little too much, I was becoming too much of an ornament, so I got out of that relationship too. And there were others, but nothing to write home about.
And you, you were like a ghost that would sometimes appear in my dreams, and I would dream of you being with other women, other ghosts perhaps. So very slowly I began to think of getting in touch again, but I deferred it for years, until I went through that shoebox full of postcards. And the more I thought of you, the more I thought of how we’d been together in different places, and how you saw the world, sometimes as I saw it, but sometimes quite differently. You used to joke, dear Angel, how I was always one step ahead of you, but if I was, you had a more considered view of the landscape. I always wanted to see what was round the next corner, while you took time to look at what was present. So I thought I’d send the postcards from different places, somewhere we had been together, others not. For I wanted to imagine what you would have made of those places, like Stroud, where I’d never even been myself, but I knew you would remember how I told you of my father’s stint in the Erinoid factory at Lightpill, how I would dream of him driving the night train home to London, to me, his face lit by the glow from the open fire-box door, steam hissing from the brass pipes, the smokestack bearing its long plume of smoke through the darkness.
Of course Stroud had changed a lot from my father’s time, the Erinoid factory had long since closed down, but that was the point, I was seeing it anew, through your eyes, as I imagined. They had set up a little Erinoid museum, you would have loved it, they had displays of Erinoid buttons, mock ivory and tortoiseshell, all the colours of the rainbow, door handles, umbrella handles, radio cabinets, the plastic rods that they used to drill out pen casings from, in fantastic marble effects. What they didn’t have was the smell, though they told you about it, milk curd and formaldehyde, what a stink that must have been. And I remembered how my father’s clothes would smell funny when he got home, I thought it was the smell of coal-smoke and steam from the engine. I think that’s why I sent you the Berlin postcard, the one of the steam engine on the viaduct over Friedrichstrasse, but also because we got lost on the S-Bahn, you remember, we got off at the wrong stop and ended up in Kreuzberg, and we came across that little antique shop where you bought the Russian icon, I hadn’t the courage to tell you I thought it was a fake, and what did it matter anyway, you were so delighted by it. And the subject was so fitting, an Annunciation, the Angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin, you especially liked the blue of her cloak, it was like an Yves Klein Blue, you said, it was remarkable how it had kept its colour over all that time. You mean the blue he used to paint naked women with, and have them roll them around on a canvas? I said, and you looked at me suspiciously, thinking I was winding you up …
I’d quite forgotten about that icon, Nina, I probably still have it lying at the back of a drawer somewhere. Maybe the blue’s faded by now. But your mention of blue leads me to take up another pen, for the small Dinkie, as I knew it would, is beginning to tire my hand, so I’ve gone for a Cobalt Blue Esterbrook with a 9556 Fine Writing nib, it’s got a much firmer feel to it than the flexible Conway. It’s a very trustworthy pen. That’s the thing about vintage pens, or at least vintage pens of this low-to-medium price range, you don’t often get fakes. There’s no point in faking something like a Conway Stewart or an Esterbrook, the bother and expense you’d have to go to would be counter-productive. Oh, of course I’ve bought things on eBay that turn out not to be what I thought they were, but that’s because I read too much into the poor description, or was inveigled by the eloquent description, or the photograph presented it in a flattering light, or I imagined it might be better than the unflattering photograph. I was the victim of my own wishful thinking. Most sellers are not dishonest, it’s just that sometimes they don’t know what they’re selling, and describe it wrongly, or don’t know how to describe it. I still get annoyed when I see someone call a dip pen a fountain pen. In any case, the buyer should always beware. As it turned out, I got the Cobalt Blue Esterbrook for what seemed to me a bargain price of some twenty dollars from a seller in Canton, Ohio, and, as I loaded it with blue Quink, I remembered the postcard you’d enclosed with your letter. It had fallen to the floor face down; there was nothing written on it, but the image on the other side had words enough. It was a photograph of a New Testament with a bullet embedded in its back, and a caption below, handwritten in block letters:
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.