Edward Docx - The Calligrapher

‘You are very lucky, I think. Everybody else in London talks only about the prices of houses and which of their colleagues they dislike.’

‘I know. Sometimes I think it would be better to be deaf.’

She smiled. ‘Yes, but you love London too?’

‘Yes, I do. Half the time.’

‘For me, it’s good to be here for a while but when I have finished my training, I am going to Martinique to teach real boys who want to know.’ Keeping her eyes on me, she twisted her hand so that she could lick between her fingers where some stray sugar had settled. ‘A lot of the boys here – I think they don’t want to learn. A lot of boys do not have the way to become real men.’

She sunk her teeth halfway into her last strawberry and left it clamped between her lips.

After Cécile had bathed, we stood together in my studio, and considered my week’s work. Although, admittedly, there were only a few lines (I was still going slowly back then, feeling my way) I could tell she was impressed. Perfectly defined, clear and elegant upon my board was the first verse of ‘The Sun Rising’.

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,

Go tell court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

This, as I had said to Cécile, was the first poem that I had tackled – my first hand to hand with Donne’s style, my introduction to the man. (It was also one of the five poems on Wesley’s must-include list; the other twenty-five I was at liberty to choose myself – one for each year of her life, I guessed.) And what a piece of work it is: rigorously intellectual and yet all the while artfully erotic; full of swagger but the speaker still the supplicant; simultaneously contemptuous and craven; relentlessly bent upon making that lover’s bed the centre of the universe, while irascibly conscious of the rest of the world; the verse swathes back and forth through its paradoxical business like a wrathful snake through dewy grass. Truly Donne is the great antagonist, the undisputed master of contrariety – his antitheses reversing into his theses, his syllables crammed with oppositions, and every clause sent out to vex the next.

Of course, back in March, I saw only a fraction of what I find in The Songs and Sonnets these days. In truth, at that time, standing with Cécile, both of us barefoot and tasting of coffee, I admit my response was rather linear. I was distracted by my professional eye, which had been drawn to the dimensions of the gap that I had left for the first letter of the first verse, the versal – my glorious, decorated ‘B’, which would only be added when I had finished the rest of the poems. Now that I had completed a stanza, I was beginning to feel that I hadn’t left quite enough space: the verse-to-versal proportion looked wrong. I would have to rethink and start over.

Cécile spoke up. ‘So it is a poem about a man waking up and thinking: fuck-off Mr Sun, I am not interested in today, I want to stay in my bed and make love with my woman – right?’

I nodded. ‘I think that’s pretty much exactly what it’s about, Cécile.’

Like all calligraphers, I hate mistakes with a vehemence I can hardly describe. And my abhorrence leads me to dwell with a vagrant’s fixity on the reasons for my downfall – but my primary mistake was not, I think, that I misjudged Cécile. Because she was so incontestably at home in the ‘Nude Action Body’ department (which was, after all, where we had met), I think I could have relied upon her not to behave inartistically had she known what devastation her actions were going to cause. But, alas, she did not. No – my primary mistake was to let her stay another night. We didn’t discuss it out loud. But come five, I found myself stepping out to the shops and begging Roy, my excellent local supplier and a man who looks as close as is possible to an obese version of Hitler, to let me have one of his brother’s fresh salmon. It cost me more than any other human being in the history of mankind has ever paid for a single fish, but life is short and inconvenient and there is no sense protesting.

Perhaps it was the light that day – bright, sharp, enthusiastic, a real rarity – or perhaps the spirit of the poem with its heavy insistence on the altar of the lovers’ bed as the only dwelling place of truth worth worshipping.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

Either way, I was scarcely conscious that the afternoon had given way to a wine-suffused evening. I had recruited two bottles of the crispest Sauvignon Blanc and a handful of haricots verts to go with the salmon and, at seven-thirty, we were still fooling around together in my kitchenette (already quite drunk) as I prepared the creature in lemon and tarragon before wrapping it in foil and placing it carefully in the oven.

There then followed nine truly Caligulan hours, during which several really good things happened including, I think, Cécile finding an old cigarette-holder that William had left and an attempt at a bilingual game of pornographic forfeit Scrabble which I very happily lost.

When, finally, I fell asleep, the sun was rising.

Love, any devil else but you,

Would for a given soul give something too.

And then my entryphone buzzed.

Jesus Christ.

I squeezed my eyes shut. But the racket persisted – on and off, on and off, on and off. Cécile shifted. I turned to look at my clock: five to seven on a Sunday morning. I could scarcely have been asleep for more than an hour and a half.

Semi-conscious, panicking, I thrashed my way out of the wound-round sails and rucked-up rigging of my bedclothes and stumbled towards the window. I hoist up the frame and stuck out my head.

‘YES! WHAT?’

There, four storeys below me, her hand raised like a peak cap to shield her eyes from the sun, Lucy stood waiting.

I confess: this was not an eventuality I had anticipated. Indeed, during the past twelve months of our relationship, I had devoted a tremendous amount of energy to preventing situations of exactly this kind.

Lucy’s voice rose from the pavement below: ‘Jasper? For God’s sake, open the door! I’ve been ringing for ages!’

With my head still stuck out of the window like some early-disturbed village idiot, gaping down from his hay loft, and conscious all the while that at my back, and doubtless speculating from the cool vantage of her many pillows, Cécile was also roused, I took a moment to consider.

Lucy was moving her stuff out of her flat today. The plan was that she would store it at her mother’s while she looked for somewhere to buy rather than sign down for another twelve months renting her current place. This much I knew and understood and even accepted. But my presence was not required until lunchtime, or so I had thought. And yet here she was – six hours early. What – for fuck’s sake – was going on?

‘Jasper? Come on. What are you doing?’

‘I’ll be down in a second, Luce,’ I said, as loudly and as quietly as I dared. ‘The electric lock is broken.’ I took a deeper breath of air. ‘The lock is broken … I can’t let you in from up here. Hang on. I’ll be right down.’ And with that I pulled in my head, shut the window and returned my attention to the room.

Time cleared its throat and tapped its brand-new watch. If Cécile had been listening, she gave no sign. She was lying with her face turned away from me, one lithe and sculpted leg brandished across the sheets. The room smelled sweetly of her warm body. I could tell she wasn’t asleep but there was a thin chance that she had heard only confusion in the conversation rather than deducing the full horror. Truth be told, I did not care what Cécile may or may not have been thinking. My main concern was to spare Lucy.