Blue Postcards

Blue Postcards

Douglas Bruton

FAIRLIGHT BOOKS

First published by Fairlight Books 2021

Fairlight Books

Summertown Pavilion, 18–24 Middle Way, Oxford, OX2 7LG

Copyright © Douglas Bruton 2021

The right of Douglas Bruton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Douglas Bruton in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, stored, distributed, transmitted, reproduced or otherwise made available in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-1-912054-83-1

www.fairlightbooks.com

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd.

Designed by Sara Wood

Illustrated by Sam Kalda

All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical characters – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Contents

About the Author

I

II

III

IV

V

Acknowledgements

The Fairlight Moderns series

About the Author

Douglas Bruton has been published in various publications including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, Aesthetica and The Irish Literary Review. His short stories have won competitions including Fish and the Neil Gunn Prize. He has had two novels published, The Chess Piece Magician and Mrs Winchester’s Gun Club.

I

Tekhelet Threads

At the foot of the steps of Le Passage de la Sorcière in Montmartre sits a man in a blue suit, the sleeves of his jacket pushed up to his elbows, his shirt collar unfastened and his blue tie loose around his neck. He sits playing with three chased silver egg cups and a wooden ball the size of a pea. He asks passers-by if they would like to bet on which egg cup the ball is under, after he does a dance of the cups, shifting the order and showing the wooden ball and then not showing it. It is a trick of course, but he does it so well it’s hard to see how. Once I saw him lift all three cups and there was no ball at all; it had disappeared.

He’s a showman and he makes everything look easy. He feigns surprise when the ball is not where it should be and he laughs, showing gaps in his yellow teeth when he does and one tooth has a blue stone fixed in it.

Maybe he doesn’t sit there now. Maybe he has disappeared for there are gendarmes in blue-black uniforms and pillbox hats, and they move people along if they are causing a disturbance.

Years ago in the blue mists of memory, there was a street in Paris called the Street of Tailors. Men sat outside their shops like kings on their thrones, and they nodded to each other or tipped their broad-brimmed hats and said, ‘Shalom,’ and smiled. There were also dressmakers on that street and gentlemen’s outfitters and cloth merchants. Then one day the whole street disappeared and all the people in it.

Now that street has a different name, though there is a tailor there and he wears a shawl some days, fringed with tassels. Four of the tassels each have, according to the law written in his book, a blue thread running through them. The man’s name is Henri and he works in the shop, taking down the measurements of men’s inside legs and the width of their shoulders and the thickness of their waists. He writes all these measurements down in a leather-bound ledger that is kept locked in a safe as though it is a book of secrets.

I remember standing at a stall beside the Eiffel Tower. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it. I stopped by the stall because it offered shade from an awning that stretched above three fold-down tables. On one table there were boxes of postcards in some sort of arrangement. They were old postcards – pictures of Paris over the years. I leafed through them, idly, in order to justify my sheltering. One card caught my eye.

It was a blue postcard. Completely blue on one side, a blank and eternal blue – though the paper was a little yellowed and cracked and the corners of the card rounded. On the reverse side, on the left, the postcard had a message in French, on the right a name and address. It carried a stamp in the top right-hand corner, a stamp that was completely blue; it had been franked and was dated 14 May 1957. I do not think the girl serving at the stall knew what she had. It was priced at one euro.

It is not easy to escape the drag and pull of time; its laws are pretty specific. And in the end a life lived is soon forgotten. My father, for example: all that’s left of him now are stories I tell to my children, and telling them over and over they shift, a little each time, so I am not sure how much they are true. And when I say, ‘Now the street has a different name and there is a tailor there,’ what does that ‘now’ signify, for he is not there as I write this but was there once, a long time ago, before I was born even. I was born on 14 May 1957. It is a small coincidence that the date of my birth is the date stamped on the reverse side of the blue postcard and it is not that fact that made me purchase the card.

There was a time when the colour blue was reserved for paintings of the Madonna, her shawl or her dress. The ultramarine pigment seemed to burn on the canvas. It was obtained from a mineral, derived from the crushing of lapis lazuli. At one point in history that came from one mine in the furthest reaches of Afghanistan. It travelled west along the Silk Road, wrapped in cloth and tucked under the clothes of dark-skinned merchants. It was worth more than gold then and so it could only be used for pictures of the most holy.

Lapis blue is a colour that seems to stand the test of time. The varnish that is layered over the top yellows with age, but conservators can strip that old varnish away and underneath the blue still burns with the intensity of flame.

The man shifting egg cups sitting at the bottom of the steps at Le Passage de la Sorcière in Montmartre – when he has not been moved on by the gendarmes and when we are in the right time, his time – has that blue stone in his tooth, a polished piece of lapis lazuli.

At some point in the nineteenth century a process was developed for the production of an artificial ultramarine blue and artists were no longer dependent on the expensive lapis lazuli.

Henri the tailor wears a suit when he is at work. He wears a tie also, with a pin, and he smiles more than he does when he is not working. The men who visit the shop where he works know him by name and they pass the time of day – his day – with him, remarking on the price of bread now the war is only a memory or making comment as to the colour of girls’ dresses that once were dull and grey and now are like rainbows. They shake cigarettes out of blue soft packs and they stand stiffly like shop mannequins, one arm outstretched so Henri can measure the length of the sleeve. And Henri is permitted to hold their fingers in his and to stroke their broad backs with the flat of his palm and to run his hand, soft and slow as a caress, up their inside legs.

The girl at the postcard stall beside the Eiffel Tower asks me if I want a bag for the blue postcard and she smiles. She says she has red postcards, too, and green and yellow, and the shape of her lips when she speaks is the shape of kisses. I accept her offer of a bag and she slips my blue postcard into a brown paper envelope.

It is a fact that colour perception deteriorates with age, particularly in the area of the spectrum that covers blue, blue-greens and yellows. I worry about that in a way that I never worried about the deterioration of hearing – there are high-pitched sounds that adolescents hear and that are beyond the reach of adults after around the age of twenty-five. Some security firms use this high pitch in alarms fitted to buildings where teenagers and anti-social behaviour are a problem. It never worried me that I could not hear the high mosquito-whine of those alarms; but I worry that one day blue might not be blue when I look at it. Maybe that is why I collect things that are blue and surround myself with them.

One of my favourite paintings is Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows. It is one of his last paintings. The yellow of the cornfield is aflame and the blue of the sky is a dark and brooding glory. I saw it hanging in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; it took my breath away and I wanted to step into the painting. It would be an unimaginable loss not to see that blue or that yellow in the way I see it now. It would be a loss comparable to the loss of words and thoughts.

Her name is Michelle, the girl at the postcard stall beside the Eiffel Tower. It says so on a handwritten badge pinned to her blouse. She holds the brown paper envelope out to me and it is one of those moments when an old man wishes he was young