Exchange Place (9 page)

Ball and Socket

I am still homeless. The telephone call to a local newspaper, accompanied by a recognized code-word, had indicated the general location of the bomb, a half-mile stretch of the Antrim Road, but nothing specific. The search for the device is ongoing. I am writing this outside Caffè Nero in Ann Street. I have just come from Miss Moran’s tobacconist’s in Church Lane, adjacent to Muriel’s bar. I was running out of tobacco – so disconcerted had I been when evacuated from my home, I forgot to take the two spare packs of American Spirit I kept in the right-hand drawer of my desk. I thought of the empty house. I pictured the desk strewn with papers in the light of the art deco lamp, and myself sitting there rolling a cigarette, about to write some words. But then I would not be the person I am now. What I would write would not be this. There has been no bomb, and I have never stayed in the Adelphi Hotel. I bought the tobacco and wandered up Church Lane, into Bang Vintage round the corner, but such was my mood that I could not look at the clothes with any pleasure. I felt like a lost soul. I thought of the jacket I had bought there last week, in another world it seemed, 1960s chocolate brown hopsack with a faint charcoal stripe, Ivy League style, lovely roll to the lapel, nice drape to the material, I’d been looking for such a jacket for years. When I tried it on before the mirror it looked made for me. The shop owner knew me of old. It’s very you, he said, when I saw it on you, I thought it was your own. I was pleased that he said so, though for all I knew he was giving me a sales pitch. And I too thought the jacket was very me, or what I would like to be. But today I do not feel as if I am very me.

I roll a cigarette. I have been coming to this quarter regularly for some years now, two days a week, taking the same route every time, and I see myself in my mind’s eye retracing my steps again and again. I drive into Little Donegall Street and park the car in a cobbled yard. I lock the car and walk away from it. I turn right at the car park exit and walk past a windowless building, Shroud Manufacturers Ltd. Then a row of shut shops, their names and windows blanked by steel roller shutters covered in graffiti. Further on down is the cavernous loading bay of the
Belfast Telegraph
newspaper offices. Men in overalls are standing outside it smoking, others are unloading hay-bale-sized rolls of paper from a lorry. The street here smells of paper, cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes. Across the street is a nameless building, windows bricked up, formerly the Flying Horse bar, where I had my first drink, a bottle of Blue Bass. I cross the street and turn right, down Royal Avenue, past the Victorian neoclassical facade of the Belfast Central library, on whose steps I smoked my first cigarette, a John Player’s.

I cross Royal Avenue; half the buildings are festooned with To Let signs. I turn left into Lower North Street, past the Northern Ireland Tourist Office, which occupies the site of the former Alhambra Picture House, where I saw my first film,
Around the World in Eighty Days
. Some time in the 1960s it was converted into a Chinese restaurant, though still retaining much of the Moorish splendour of its interior, and I ate my first Chinese meal there in 1967, and visited it several times again before it was demolished after being fire-bombed in the 1970s. Today it occurs to me to take a little detour from my beaten track. I am about to make the short cut through North Street Arcade into Lower Donegall Street when I notice that the entrance is sealed by a steel roller shutter covered in graffiti, and now I remember, the arcade mysteriously burned down in 2004. Six years later the site remains undeveloped. As I take another route to my destination, Exchange Place, I see myself, as I have many times, entering Exchange Place to gaze up at the high mansard window of John Harland’s studio, imagining myself floating up invisibly to glide through the glass and look over his shoulder at what he is painting.

He is painting me. I am seated before him in a Windsor chair. He is standing at the easel and he throws little glances at me from time to time, sizing me up, eyes darting from face to canvas and back again, or taking a step towards his palette, which is on a table between him and me. The palette is level with my eye. It looks like a landscape, pigments daubed and pushed and dragged into puddles and crests, mountains of emerald green and thunderous purple collapsing into carmine lakes, hillsides of yellow ochre, fields of violet. Beside the palette is a tray filled with curled-up tubes of paint. A name catches my eye. I stretch out and lift one of the tubes. Phthalocyanine Turquoise. Lovely name, I say to Harland, do you mind if I write it down? Write away, says Harland, you might want to look at the others, there’s a phthalocyanine family, Green Lake, Blue Lake, Yellow Lake. And here’s a nice one, Unbleached Titanium Dioxide, nice buff colour, I put a touch in here and there to damp down a stronger colour. I take out my notebook and begin writing. That’s good, says Harland, keep writing, that’s very you. And I keep writing as Harland paints, writing down what he says from time to time. I’m using an old canvas here, a trial run for another piece, he says, paint over it, I like working with a set of old marks, not to care too much. I like the paint to work by itself, with just a little help from me. Make a mark, see where it takes you. The hinges of form come about by chance.

I knew from of old, or in retrospect, that Harland was an admirer of the work of Francis Bacon. Like Bacon, he believed in happenstance, how what you are painting depends on the circumstances, what comes next. You never quite know how oil paint is going to behave. Different viscosity at different times, depending on the atmosphere, temperature, humidity. Sometimes the paint is slow to move, at other times it glides on to the canvas. Bacon, said Harland, believed in luck, or his own luck. When he lived in Monte Carlo he was obsessed by the casino. He’d spend whole days there, and he used to think he heard the croupier calling out the winning number at roulette before the ball had fallen into the socket. And he used to go from table to table. One afternoon he was playing on three tables, and he heard these echoes. And chance was very much on his side, because he ended up with sixteen hundred pounds at the end of the afternoon, an enormous amount of money for him then. Well, he immediately took a villa and stocked it with food and drink, though this chance didn’t last very long because in ten days’ time he could hardly buy his fare home to London. But it was a marvellous ten days and he had an enormous number of friends.

Harland took a step back from his painting. I think I’ll stop now, he said. I’m at the stage now where I don’t want to fuck it up, I’d be deliberating too much, and we don’t want that. Accident, not direction. He took the canvas from the easel and held it before me like a mirror. What do you think? The image was a thing of daubs and patches bleeding or blurring into one another, but I had to admit he had caught something of me, some fugitive expression I recognized. It was very me, very John Kilfeather.

Double Take

Kilpatrick could not wait to see the tie. He found a café in Rue Danielle Casanova and took a window seat. He unwrapped the package. The tie came encased in a mauve cardboard sleeve marked Charvet, and was further wrapped in a layer of tissue paper, mustard yellow this time. The tie was navy-blue herringbone silk with a muted orange diagonal stripe, and when he draped it on his hand the colours glowed and rippled in the sunlight. It would go well with the jacket he was wearing under the camel overcoat, chocolate brown with a faint orange windowpane check, William Hunt of Savile Row, he’d picked it up in TK Maxx in Belfast, down from four hundred to seventy pounds, he didn’t know how they managed it. He’d wear it with a pale blue Turnbull & Asser shirt he’d bought in a sale in their Jermyn Street shop when he was last in London. He remembered the statue of Beau Brummell on Jermyn Street, facing the Piccadilly Arcade, poised theatrically with one hand on his hip, the other holding his hat and cane. One of those generic bronzes that seemed to be springing up everywhere to obstruct pavements, it looked nothing like Kilpatrick’s mental picture of the Beau. But the pose reminded him of how, by all accounts, Brummell’s style inclined towards pure theatre.

The neck-cloth especially, and how it was tied. The Beau’s admirers would sometimes be invited to his dressing room to watch the procedure at close quarters. The neck-cloth was a triangle of fine Irish muslin, cut diagonally from a square yard and plainly hemmed. This was folded twice over at its widest point and wrapped carefully round the neck. Brummell stood at the mirror keeping his chin in the air before tying the tail ends in one of several manners. Each of these were in themselves signifiers of allegiance or taste. The next trick was to slowly lower the chin in a series of small ‘declensions’ that rucked down the cloth; the aim was to hold the contours of the neck rather than bulging out or folding inwards: a sort of self-sculpting, framing the face and defining the angle of the head. The folds emulated those in the clothing of Greek statuary. The line was understated, classical, seemingly effortless; the effect was nevertheless sometimes difficult to achieve. Brummell’s valet, Robinson, was once noted coming down the stairs with ‘a quantity of tumbled neck-cloths under one arm’. Upon enquiry, he replied, ‘These, sir? These are our failures.’ This too, was a manoeuvre, a piece of stagecraft. Robinson had no need to go out of his way to show the rumpled linen in public. He had been directed by his master to do so.

Kilpatrick stood before the mirror in Room 36 of the Hôtel Chopin, tying the Charvet necktie. For years he had employed a Windsor knot before reverting to the four-in-hand knot taught to him as a child. The Windsor was too square, symmetrical, bulky, the preferred knot of footballers. The aim of the four-in-hand was asymmetry, just that little bit of skew to give an air of nonchalance. The dimple, too, was essential, for without the dimple, the tie hung flat and inert against the chest, instead of making an elegant arch. Kilpatrick had spent months practising the dimple, spending hours in front of the mirror. Different ties required subtly different techniques. Different fabrics – wools, silks, cottons – had different tensile strengths. Some had better memories, held their shape better. Even now he had the occasional failure. But the Charvet tie knotted perfectly first time.

It is six o’clock and Kilpatrick is in the empty bar of Hôtel Nevers on Rue du Bac. He takes out the note the concierge of Hôtel Chopin had handed him earlier on. Forgot time, 7 at Rue du Bac, yours, Freddy G, written in Freddy Gabriel’s flamboyant italic. The paper is expensive, cream laid, matching envelope. Did he give Gabriel his address? He must have done. Kilpatrick is seated in a dark alcove. On the opposite wall is an Egyptian Empire Revival-style mirror, elaborate ormolu frame, the glass tarnished, speckled at the edges. He sees himself darkly. He adjusts the knot of the Charvet tie. His drink arrives. Ricard, a little ceramic carafe of water on the side. He pours the water into the Ricard. He likes this moment of anticipation, when it turns from clear to cloudy. He remembers the old Regency Hotel in Belfast where Bourne bought him his first
pastis
, a Pernod. Kilpatrick had never heard of it till then, had never witnessed that transformation. When Bourne poured the water into the two glasses it looked like a magic trick. Why does it do that? he asked. And he gathered from Bourne that the alcohol contained insoluble particles of aniseed oil, different density to that of water. You add water to the oil, it won’t dissolve. Instead it forms an emulsion. The light passing through the glass is scattered through internal reflection and refraction, that’s why it’s cloudy. Leave it long enough, it’ll separate out again, the oil will settle to the bottom. Nice green, said Bourne, eau-de-nil. If you had a glass of Nile water it would do the same, you end up with a glass of silt and water. Like oil paint, leave it long enough and the oil floats to the top, the pigment settles.

Kilpatrick looked at his watch. A quarter past. He ordered another Ricard. He’d have another one after that, it would set him up for the evening. The drink arrived. A man walked in and stood at the bar. Out of the corner of his eye Kilpatrick saw the man glance at him. He turned away, turned back again and glanced at him again. He heard him ordering a Ricard. The man poured water into his Ricard, watching it go cloudy. Again he glanced at Kilpatrick. As he did so, it occurred to Kilpatrick that he knew the man from somewhere. He was wearing a blue and gold paisley scarf, black and white herringbone overcoat. He was hatless, going bald, sideburns, florid face, moustache. He searched his memory. He saw a thinner, angular man within the flesh – boy, rather, for he hadn’t seen him since he left school, in what? 1967, over forty years ago. It came back to him: Chinese Gordon. Kilpatrick struggled to remember his proper name. Paul Gordon, that was it. Paul Gordon who was expelled for smoking dope, but then went on to Trinity to read Classics. He hadn’t seen him since. The nickname was inevitable after they learned in history class of General Charles George Gordon, dubbed ‘Chinese’ after his exploits in the Opium Wars. Come to think of it, with the moustache he looked a little like his namesake now, in his old age. Kilpatrick rose from his seat and Chinese Gordon came over slowly to him. We seem to know each other from somewhere, he said. Yes, said Kilpatrick, Chinese Gordon, I presume. Gordon laughed. Chinese indeed, he said, haven’t heard that for years. And you, I know you, but for a minute I thought you were someone else, but you couldn’t have been, for the someone else is somewhere else, I had to take a double take. You’re, forgive me, it’s been what? Forty years? Kill something, he said. You’re Kilpatrick, John Kilpatrick. He extended his hand. And who did you take me for? said Kilpatrick. Oh, someone I met in Paris, said Chinese Gordon. You’d hardly know him. Calls himself John Bourne.