Read Online The Pen Friend by Ciaran Carson - Free Book Online

world, producers of Sunlight, Lifebuoy, Lux and Vim, among other brands. In 1930 Lever merged with the Dutch company Margarine Unie to form Unilever, which had links with the electronics firm of Philips, where your father worked. Unilever was one of the chief sponsors of Mass Observation. I note that today Unilever are the manufacturers of Dove deodorant, which makes me think of the intertwining doves of the L’Air du Temps bottle that sits on your dressing table; which is possibly neither here nor there, though it could be argued that any one thing in the universe implies the existence of every other thing.
    So I was tempted to have you tell me things you had not told me: you might have said, for example, that the poet Kathleen Raine, the partner of Charles Madge and author of such poems as ‘The Invisible Spectrum’, ‘Lenten Flowers’ and ‘The End of Love’, conducted a survey on the incidence of handkerchief use among Bolton women, from which we learn that on a particular day in 1937 a woman in a plum-coloured coat stopped outside the Regal Gown shop in Bolton and paused for two minutes and ten seconds before taking a handkerchief from her handbag and blowing her nose. You might have said that the poet and eminent literary critic William Empson was assigned to detail the contents of sweetshop windows in Bolton, and that the journalist Woodrow Wyatt was given the job of playing George Formby records on the gramophone in Harrisson’s rented house in Bolton, in order to give it an authentic Lancashire atmosphere. You might have told me that Harrisson’s first discipline had been that of ornithology, and that his experience of watching birds and then of listening to a people whose language he did not speak had convinced him that speech often hindered understanding. We cannot afford, said Harrisson – you might have said – to devote ourselves exclusively to people’s verbal reactions to questions asked them of a stranger in the street, without running a grave risk of reaching misleading conclusions. What people say is only one part – not a very important part – of the whole pattern of human thought and behaviour, said Harrisson.
    There was a soft crash as an archway of coal collapsed in the fire and for a second I got the smell of coal-smoke, and then it died and your perfume came back to me as it does now. I remember wondering if Mass Observation had surveyed the fragrance departments of the big stores in Bolton, and I thought of what it must have been like to come from the Bolton smog into their brightly lit foyers. Andy Warhol loved the names of those perfumes in the Thirties fashion magazines he liked to read, and used to say them over to himself, imagining what they smelled like, I go crazy because I want to smell them all so much, he said, Guerlain’s Sous le Vent , Worth’s Imprudence , Lenthéric’s Shanghai and Gardénia de Tahiti , D’Orsay’s Belle de Jour and Trophée , Kathleen Mary Quinlan’s Rhythm , Saravel’s White Christmas . What’s that? I asked. What’s what? you said, a bit piqued, I thought, that I had interrupted the flow of your story. Your perfume, I said, and then you offered me the blue vein in your wrist. Je Reviens , you said. It works on two levels. First you get a woody base with green ferns running through it, then a heady rush of flowers. Wild narcissus, jasmine, a dash of ylang-ylang.
    Let’s leave the job for now, you said.

In hoc signo vinces

    I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty. Andy Warhol said that. I found you beautiful, Nina, and sometimes I think it’s got to do with that photograph of your mother, Nell Birtwhistle, taken at the age you were when you showed it to me, taken before you were born, for you were a late child, her only child, though not your father’s. That affair came later. And, because she looks so like you that she could be you, I used to think of you as being as old as her, were she alive – for she had died before we