Some days later I called into Isaac Beringer’s antique shop in Winetavern Street. I’ve known Beringer for almost as long as I can remember, and he doesn’t look much older than he did when I was a child, when I was introduced to him by my father. Beringer has a photographic memory, and knows not only the present contents of his shop, but can relate the history of every piece, clocks, watches, pendants, snuff-boxes, rings, spoons, anything that has passed through his hands over the years, its provenance, its defining characteristics, its current market value. I once asked him how he did it. Oh, it’s very simple, Mr Gabriel, he said. I’ve been born into this shop — and it was true, his father, Isaac the Elder, had kept the shop before him — and I know it as well as myself. Better, maybe. Every display case, every shelf, every drawer, every cubbyhole — and he gestured around him — I can see them with my eyes shut. And I know where everything is. Where everything was. I’ve got them all filed away. You might say they’re like people, and I remember their faces, and I have little stories for them, so one reminds me of another, the way you say so-and-so is like so-and-so. Take this piece, for example — and here he picked up a silver snuff-box — nice box, made by David Pettifer in Birmingham, 1854. Year of the Crimean War, Charge of the Light Brigade, got it last week for a song in the Friday Market. And I see this snuff-box in the pocket of an English officer, a tall man with big moustaches, you’d know him anywhere. In another pocket he’s got his father’s watch, nice movement by Barwise, 1790s, I sold it six months ago. You see how it works? I just make up stories about them.
But the watch wouldn’t have been in the officer’s pocket before you had the snuff-box, I said. No, said Beringer, I had another story for the watch then, involved an antique pistol, the case had a little dent in it when I got it, so I thought maybe there’s been a duel, the watch belongs to this brash youth, you know the sort, all piss and vinegar, and the other chap’s bullet hits the watch, youth escapes unscathed, you know the kind of thing that happens in stories. Or sometimes in real life, I said. True, said Beringer. That’s why the stories change. Because things in real life change all the time, even when they stay the same. Depends on the way you look at them.
And what happened to the other chap? I said. Oh, said Beringer, brash youth, he’s shitting himself, pistol all over the place, but he manages to get your man in the leg. Wound went septic, had to amputate. Chap’s a cripple for the rest of his life. Most unfortunate, really, brash youth was in the wrong, chap hadn’t been looking at his woman at all. But then there’s never really much justice in these things, is there?
So there I was in Beringer’s shop and I said I was looking for something special. For a lady. Lady friend? said Beringer. Well, acquaintance, I said, and Beringer gave me the ghost of a wink. Well, he said, maybe you wouldn’t want to get too close then. A pendant wouldn’t do. Certainly not a ring. Nor earrings. Now here’s something — and he pulled open a drawer and took out a scent bottle — Lalique glass, he said, lovely thing, L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci, 1948. He handed me the bottle. It was indeed lovely, with a swirled bowl of pale yellow, the stopper in the form of two intertwined doves in opalescent frosted glass. Yes, said Beringer, L’Air du Temps, Spirit of the Times, just after the war, you know. Love and peace, that kind of thing. Of course it’s empty, but you can still smell the perfume. I unstoppered the bottle and put my nose to its mouth. Sandalwood, rose and jasmine breathed out at me. I thought of the paintings of Botticelli, of Venus emerging from the waters on her scalloped shell. So I bought the bottle, and I gave it to you. Of course you knew what it was at once, and you were delighted. L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci, 1948, the year my parents married. The Lalique bottle came later, 1950. Thank you so much, Angel, do you know I used to call myself Nina when I was a child, because Miranda was such a mouthful, and my father called me Nina, though my mother would insist on Miranda. So you became Nina then, and you are Nina still to me. And I wonder if you still have the L’Air du Temps bottle, and if its perfume still lingers.
But so hard to forget
When two similar and unlikely, or at least unexpected, events happen in relatively quick succession they achieve a certain equilibrium, a reciprocity: they are the two sides of an equation, and complement each other, like Yin and Yang. So it was with your first two messages: It’s been a long time, It’s easy to remember. But three? Three is a perfect number, the triangle of the Trinity, but triangles are notoriously tricky in human relationships, and I think again of the little accidental minuet we danced with Tony Lambe when I heard him call you Miranda. Nina. I write your name again this time in order to address you. Your third postcard was postmarked Stroud, Gloucs., a name which meant little to me. I looked it up in the atlas and found it to be a small town on the Welsh border, not far from Bristol, and I wondered what you were doing there. But then I used to wonder what you were doing wherever you were when you were not with me, when you were not in Belfast, away on one of your trips.
Stroud meant nothing to me, but the image on the postcard brought tears of recognition to my eyes. Belfast 1954, the caption on the back reads, John Chillingworth, © BBC Hulton Picture Library. It shows a back street in Belfast. It could be Sevastopol Street, where I spent the first six years of my life before we moved to Ophir Gardens, but it is not. Nevertheless this grey pavement is familiar to me, the corner shop, the lamp-post, the water running down the pavement from a broken gutter. 1954. I would have been five or six. I could be one of these five boys in the foreground, wearing wellington boots, or I could turn a corner and appear in the picture any time soon. A game is in progress, Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Indians, for the smallest two of the boys are wielding toy guns, drawing in on a third who is hidden from their view by a street corner; a fourth, evidently a passer-by and not part of the game, looks at the fugitive with amusement, and, from the eager expression on the face of the leading gunman, seems to have given the game away; the fifth boy, who might or might not be involved, is looking elsewhere. And I wonder what this little drama, so accidental, so inevitable in outcome because seen in retrospect, might have to say about our relationship.
I turn the card over. It took me a few readings of your brief message before I realised the link between it and your preceding one. But so hard to forget, those were your words, and suddenly I heard Billie Holiday singing, as you must have intended. It was you who introduced me to Billie Holiday.
Your sweet expression, the smile you gave me,The way you looked when we metIt’s easy to remember, but so hard to forgetI hear you whisper, I’ll always love you,I know it’s over and yetIt’s easy to remember, but so hard to forget.
And more than that, I heard her singing my favourite Billie Holiday song, as you must have intended, ‘Gloomy Sunday’. It’s playing on the CD player as I write, and I am hearing it, not now in my study at 41 Ophir Gardens, but in your flat at 70 Eglantine Avenue as I heard it over twenty years ago; for music, like perfume, has the power to abolish intervening time. The flat is more of a maisonette, the two top floors of a big three-storey Victorian house. We’re sitting in what would have been the drawing-room. It’s summer dusk, the curtains of the great bay window have not yet been drawn, and a tree bows and scrapes against the glass in the breeze which rises at dusk when the air grows chill; there’s a bright fire burning in the grate. The only other light is the deepening amethyst of the sky beyond the trees and a dim lamp which shines on the hi-fi system. There’s a gleam on the black undulating disc like silvery moonlight on a black ocean, and Billie’s voice emerges from the speakers the ghost of a beat ahead of the backing, but slowly, skimming above the melancholy horns, dipping and soaring then slowing as she pauses on the last word of a line before letting it go into a temporary silence, and the band comes to the foreground for a second or two, echoing the phrase before last, then fades back behind her.