The Pen Friend Read Free Page B

negotiators of a ceasefire or a post-war treaty.
    I used a Pentel rollerball then; I’d abandoned writing with a fountain pen some years before. I’d always disliked the slippery feel of a ballpoint, and the Pentel seemed to have more tooth when put to paper. I liked the firm black line laid down by its point, and its thick green plastic flat-topped casing, a classic design that remains unchanged to this day, for I saw one yesterday. And it seems to me now to have been inspired by the classic Parker Duofolds and flat-top Sheaffers of the 1920s, which leads me to put down the Wearever I’ve been writing with till now, and pick up a Gatsby era Sheaffer’s ring-top pen in jade celluloid with little milky flecks in it – the ring would have been attached, as was your Dinkie, to a lanyard to hang from a lady’s neck. As I write, I find myself touching my free hand to my neck for an invisible lanyard, and I think for a moment I could be you, toying with your Dinkie, red and black marble swirls and not this near-translucent green jade.
    Made for and presumably used by a lady’s hand, the Sheaffer sits tolerably well in mine, though I must hold myself somewhat differently, and there is only the ghost of a scratch to its nib as I write. The point is finer and more rigid than that of the Wearever, and it seems to discipline my writing to a different mode as the words come forth, and I wonder whose hand held this pen before me, what assignations it communicated, its jade cylinder resting on a dressing table between words, among scent bottles of pale amethyst and frosted lilac and delicate opal. It carries a perfume which is not ink alone, a residue of someone else, of chiffon scarves of coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange billowing in the slipstream of a Duofold Mandarin Yellow open-topped tourer, colours dappling the faces of the laughing foursome as they drive through a leafy tunnel and faint jazz music ebbs and flows down through the trees from the white ocean-liner of a house built on the cliff edge.
    I try to picture the face of the woman who held this pen before me, eighty years ago, and instead see your face, as you might imagine, for you knew I would be thus intrigued when you wrote that single phrase, that slender horizontal lightning-bolt, It’s been a long time . I see you as you were then, but also as you might be now. You were two years younger than me, so you’re fifty-five. I put lines in your brow, and guess what wrinkles might have accrued at the corners of eyes and mouth, and flesh out the neck a little, and add some pouches to the cheeks, streaks of grey to the black hair, and it is still you, what you have become. In any case I’d know you by the amber fleck in that left eye of yours, not so much flaw as beauty-spot. I’d know you anywhere.
    When York Minster was struck by lightning in 1984, and its South Transept razed by the subsequent fire, it was discovered that the four-hundred-year-old stained glass of the great Rose Window, made to commemorate the defeat of the House of York in the Wars of the Roses, had been riven into some forty thousand fragments, though the panels had miraculously stayed intact within their embrasures, having been releaded some years previously. Restoration began. Adhesive plastic film was applied to the crazed mosaic of the glass panels, which were then removed one by one, disassembled, and reassembled, tessera by tessera, using a specially developed fixative which had the same refractive index as the old glass, whereupon the completed work was sandwiched between two layers of clear glass for added security, and mounted back in place: which intervention means we will never again see what was seen before the fire, the dims and glows of stained glass unmitigated by an added medium, however clear. We two saw the glass as it was, as it had been.
    I write to try to see you as you were, or what you have become. You left no forwarding address: that was part of your