Edward Docx - The Calligrapher

My second best chance was this: as far as I could remember, I had cleared the table after dinner and neither Cécile nor I had gone into my sitting room again. It should have been – as the spymasters might say – ‘clean’. And, perhaps, with just a little luck and good management, I might be able to contain Lucy in there. Everything depended on me reaching my flat first, tactically blocking various views, and somehow casually shepherding her out of harm’s way. And that all depended on me being in advance as we mounted the first flight of stairs. Which is precisely what did not happen.

Somehow, as I pushed open the door, Lucy got ahead. And once she was in front there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t very well barge past. Neither was there any point in hustling up behind her. I could only behave as normally as possible and follow her in silent agony, praying all the while that Leon would venture out into the corridor as I had calculated that he might.

We climbed one flight, two, three, and so to the fourth floor. Ahead, my own front door was ajar. To the right, Leon’s. But I still couldn’t get past her.

Leon’s door opened. And suddenly there he was: curly brown hair, five foot ten, auburn beard and Franz Schubert spectacles. He was carrying his cello case. He looked like he was on his way out.

‘Hello Jasper,’ he said, furrowing his brow.

‘Er … Leon, this is Lucy. Lucy, this is Leon.’

Lucy stopped.

‘Leon plays the cello in a quartet,’ I went on, unnecessarily, ‘he’s very good.’

‘Hello,’ Lucy said, smiling.

‘Jasper very kindly puts up with my practising from time to time,’ Leon replied.

I edged past Lucy. ‘Thanks for opening the front door,’ I said, affecting a more playful manner and nodding in the direction of my flat, ‘I went down this morning and didn’t take my keys. Stupid. Are you off anywhere special?’

‘Just a rehearsal.’

I needed to make the conversation stick. ‘Hey Leon, by the way, I haven’t forgotten about going to see the comedy news review thing – you know, at the Lock Theatre.’ I turned to Lucy. ‘Leon and I have been trying to go out for a drink ever since I moved in – we thought we’d check out this local theatre round the corner. They do this news comedy show and it’s supposed to –’

‘When’s your next London concert?’ asked Lucy, primly disregarding my ramblings.

‘We’re playing at the Wigmore Hall in July.’ Leon nodded. ‘Beethoven mostly. And a Haydn.’

‘We’ll have to come along.’

‘You must.’

I attempted to drift gently away, feigning an incidental interest in my lock, an excuse which I intended only as a staging post before attempting a break-neck ascent of my own stairs beyond. But the conversational glue between them was not quite strong enough for me to get away with it and – having (rather ostentatiously I thought) checked for his own keys – Leon took his leave, making us promise again to come and see him play.

At least I was now in front.

I reached the top about four steps ahead of Lucy. Opposite, at the other end of the hall: my kitchenette. There were one or two bottles but nothing that I could not have drunk myself … over time.

She reached the top of the stairs. I moved slightly to obscure her view. (Oh, to be reduced to such knockabout farce …) She put down her bag on the side by the telephone immediately on her left. I stood between her and my bedroom door. She began untangling the headset wire of her mobile telephone where it had caught on something as she removed it from her bag. I glanced again towards the sink.

‘What a day!’ I sighed. ‘You must be tired out. Why don’t you sit down. Luce? I’ll just get some clothes and jump in the shower.’ I tried to keep the urgent tone out of my voice. I had to get into my bedroom and shut the door.

Lucy looked up and smiled. The wire dangled from her hand. ‘OK,’ she nodded, ‘see you in a second. Don’t be ages.’

Mercy! Mercy! She was preoccupied, flicking through the functions of her phone to check for missed calls or messages. And into the sitting room she went. Could it be that from the credulous jaws of defeat, I would somehow wrest a victorious deception?

I span around and into my room.

I took a shallow breath. Such a mess. No time. I cleared the covers of all the clothes with a single sweep of my arm and bundled them into the bottom of the wardrobe. Then, leaping across the bed, I quickly remade it. Next I bent to gather all the glasses, bottles, both empty and full, intending to pile them on top of the clothes. But just as I stood, bottles clasped in either hand, the door banged open behind me.

I had time only to half-turn as Lucy rushed towards me. I saw hot tears rising in the corners of her eyes. I felt the flat of her hand against my head. It wasn’t even a clean blow. It caught me awkwardly across the cheekbone. I staggered back, falling towards the bed, still holding the bottles as the sad dregs of French wine spilled on to Irish linen.

Before I could look up, Lucy had turned her back on me. She left the room without stopping even to slam the door. I listened to her running down my stairs, into the hall, past Leon’s, all the way down until I heard the heavy front door swing shut. There was silence for a moment before the sound of a car starting.

She was gone.

I lay still for a while.

Then I raised myself, curious, and walked across the hall into the sitting room. There were two unopened bottles of wine on the table by the window, just next to the Scrabble board, which was still covered in a sickening collage of the filthiest words imaginable. Propped up against the bottles was a note.

Jasper,

Your keys are under your pillow. I got you the wine since we drunk all yours. Aren’t I a good girl? Your girlfriend seems very boring to me – maybe you should tell her that Sundays are for lying in bed? I thought of an eight-letter word for you to put on that c in cock: how about ‘connerie’ as in ‘faire une’. You get bonus points for using all your letters.

Cécile.

Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.

Must I, who came to travel through you,

Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?

I wasn’t lying to Cécile when I said that I came to John Donne for the most part in ignorance – a few ill-informed suppositions and some half-remembered misapprehensions were all I had. I vaguely recognized the highlights: ‘Death be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful …’ (‘Holy Sonnet 6’); ‘… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee …’ (‘Meditation XVII’); ‘No man is an island …’ (‘Meditation XVII’). But I had never really taken the time to read his work properly. Nor did I know much about his life, other than that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare and that he wound up as Dean of St Paul’s.

However, one of the many plusses of being a calligrapher is that you get to hang around with some quality writers. And you do start to know their work quite well – more intuitively, perhaps, than the academics and certainly more intimately than the average reader. (It’s letter-by-letter stuff after all.) I suppose the bond is something like that between the musician and the composer: the audience loves to listen to the piece, the professors love to analyse and deconstruct the piece, but only the musician really lives within its dynamic energy.

Seeking to fuel what was fast becoming a genuine enthusiasm, I remember that it was during my work on ‘The Indifferent’ – the third poem I tackled after ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘The Broken Heart’ – that I decided I must know more. And so I duly braved the throng and journeyed down to the Charing Cross Road to purchase a good biography.