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‘Hello. Are you locked out? Your door’s been open all day and –’
I interrupted him. ‘Thanks,’ I said, stepping back.
The lock clicked.
‘Must be just mine that’s broken,’ I said, before Lucy could, ‘and it looks like I left my own front door open after all, so we don’t need the spares.’
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.
PART TWO (#ulink_6b676220-ca44-5564-934f-95ea66947093)
5. The Indifferent (#ulink_275976e4-5ff4-58b4-bf2a-76df2e9b599a)
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.
As far as I could glean, the two most important facts of Donne’s life were these. First, that in 1601, aged twenty-nine, he married in secret; and second, that he betrayed his birthright as a Catholic when he took holy orders in the Anglican Church.
Ann, his wife, was the daughter of a wealthy Surrey landowner, whom Donne met while serving as secretary to the Lord Keeper. Unfortunately, Donne was not of fit rank or estate to merit the match. Worse, he found he had disastrously miscalculated when he later confessed of the deed in a letter to his father-in-law: instead of the forgiveness and reprieve he was gambling on, he was summarily dismissed and disgraced. (He was even imprisoned for a short spell.) Thereafter, his career prospects were effectively ruined. He spent the next twelve years fretting a living on the fringes of the very society in which he had looked so certain to advance himself. When finally he was ordained into the Church of England, in 1615, it was not least because he could find no other way of regaining suitable employment. Almost immediately, James I appointed him a royal chaplain.
Which brings us to religion. Donne was brought up in a devout and well-known Catholic family at a time when being a Catholic could easily mean gruesome (and often public) death – disembowelling, stringing up, that sort of thing. On his mother’s side he was descended from the family of Sir Thomas More; his uncle became head of the secret Jesuit mission to England and was caught trying to flee the country during a storm and sent to the Tower; and his younger brother was arrested for sheltering a priest and subsequently died in prison when Donne himself was only twenty-one. The twin legacies of martyrdom and ultramontane loyalty therefore framed his existence; for most days of his life, he must have been acutely conscious of the implications of his Catholicism.
These linchpins notwithstanding, I should admit (if I am to be honest) that the biographical discovery which sealed my affinity for John Donne was a matter less intense. In the course of my reading, I also came across a first-hand account of the twenty-something man, left to us by Sir Richard Baker. This report relates how on ‘leaving Oxford, [Donne] lived at the Innes of Court, not dissolute, but very neat; a great visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited verses’. Naturally enough, this description appealed: the portrait of a serial philanderer, who was ‘not dissolute, but very neat’. Here was a man, I thought.
As well as marking the beginning of my pilgrimage of discovery, and aside from the intimate punch of the poem itself, ‘The Indifferent’ also presented some difficult technical challenges. With ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘The Broken Heart’, I had followed a similar textual scheme to that which I had employed for one of the earlier, single-sonnet Shakespeare commissions – a scheme derived, I happily admit, from the hand of my favourite calligrapher and personal hero, Jean Flamel, secretary to the Duc de Berry in the early fifteenth century. Now, however, with this poem, I had a problem.
Bâtarde, the hand that Saul, Wesley and I had agreed on for the Donne, is one of the most elastic scripts; and there are as many rules concerning the precise rotation and relative dimensions of the letters as there are examples of the form. These rules the good scribe will know, then disregard, then cleverly reinterpret. But even such ingenious reinterpretations are themselves to be cast aside when it comes to the lawless land of poetry. Let us ignore the vexed question of the versals; let us also forget the potential confusion of the lettering particulars (cursive or textura feet? cojoins? ligatures? serifs and hair-lines?); and let us look instead at the wider problem of layout. How, for example, does one legislate for margins, spacing or letter discretion when the lines of text are all different lengths? Good poets have good reason for fashioning their lines the way they do and it is not for the calligrapher to go barging in and breaking them up. And yet, so often the overall aesthetic effect of so much irregularity – even when written out well – is somehow to clutter and stifle, detracting from the words themselves. So rendering poetry per se is problem enough. However, with a manuscript collection, the whole thing is made infinitely more complicated because there will be such a diversity of lengths – two words a line here, thirteen there – all of which need to share the same script. Consider: in The Songs and Sonnets, Donne uses forty-six different stanza forms and only two of them more than once.
Put simply, my problem with ‘The Indifferent’ was this: some of the lines were too bloody long to fit on the fucking page.
The first verse goes as follows:
I can love both fair and brown,
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,
Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,
Her who believes, and her who tries,
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork, and never cries;
I can love her, and her, and you and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.
Executional troubles notwithstanding, you can well see why ‘The Indifferent’ became one of my early favourites. I like the exhaustive catalogue of that opening stanza and you can feel the speaker’s familiarity breeding its contempt even as he writes – ‘abundance melts’, ‘want betrays’, ‘spongy eyes’, ‘dry cork’: knowing phrases if ever I saw them.
Of course, the speaker of the poem is not entirely to be identified with Donne himself – this is partly an exercise in posturing and the work is based on one of Ovid’s Amores. But, between ourselves, I am not so sure that the pose is all. Although Donne is indeed playing the languid courtier, I believe his final trick is that he actually means it:
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?
This is not merely sport or showing off. There’s a freight of cruelty travelling with that ‘travel through you’ – all the more so because on the surface it seems so casually delivered, a nonchalant relative clause passing time on the way to the next big verb: ‘Grow’. (Calligraphers love their capital Gs.) Plus, by way of further compression, ‘travel’ can also be glossed as ‘travail’, and of course, whichever word actually appears on the page, the homophone’s meaning will be bound to sound in the reader’s (or listener’s) mind – exactly as Donne intended. Then there’s the mock (and mocking) indignation at the curse of women’s faithfulness. But it’s in the third verse that he delivers my favourite bit of the poem.
Venus heard me sigh this song,
And by love’s sweetest part, variety, she swore,
She heard not this till now; …
It is not enough for Donne that the goddess of love grants that variety is her most delectable aspect; he must have her swear upon it. Yet when you read, and indeed write, the verse as a whole, the crucial line gives the impression of being incidental to the guiding contour of the argument. However, nothing in Donne is ever en passant and those seemingly innocuous commas turn out to have been the means by which he has smuggled in the central credo of the entire poem: for Donne, ‘variety’ was what it was all about.
And so it was for me.
But how to explain this to Lucy?
The silent telephone calls began the day after the disaster and continued with increasing frequency in the week that followed. At random times of the day or night – just as I was poised to stroke the difficult stem of a ‘k’, or when I had at last cast myself into bed and was about to close my eyes – the spiteful persecutor would suddenly screech into life. The vicious ring would send me racing madly into the hall, where I would lunge for the receiver and quiet my tormentor until the next attack, two minutes or seven and a half hours later, at three thirty-six in the morning. Lucy never spoke but I knew it was she. She did not even bother to withhold her number.
For several days, I soldiered doggedly on, seeking to make light of the situation, blaming myself and quietly reflecting that if I was going to make such an unholy balls-up of my affairs then relentless telephonic harassment was no more punishment than I deserved. Most trying of all was the necessity of keeping up a breezy manner in case the call turned out to be somebody else.
By the middle of the second week I could take it no more. I pulled the phone from its socket and temporarily suspended all contact with the outside world. What else was I to do? I had tried talking into the receiver. I had tried ringing the poor girl back. I had even tried to out-silence her: the two of us just sitting there on either end of the line, listening to one another’s breathing, both parties bleakly determined not to hang up first as we clung on, hour after hour, into the wordless night. All to no avail.
I was aware that Lucy had not deserved my stupidity. And I knew well that only an idiot could have created such a banal mess. Indeed for a day or two, I considered going round to see her at her mother’s house, but I feared this would cause more damage than it might repair. No – Lucy was clearly no longer interested in discussion. Even abject apology would sound sickeningly glib to her. As for attempting to explain that I had recently discovered that I shared something of the outlook of a hopelessly contradictory, sybaritic metaphysical poet and that I was of the strong opinion that fidelity (let alone marriage) most often resulted in a state of physical torpor closely resembling death – forget about it.
Still, something had to be done. So that Saturday, the last in March, I sat down to pen her a short letter in the hope that its burning or shredding or chewing or flushing might have a worthwhile therapeutic effect.
Choosing for the occasion my finest italic, I constructed a devilish paragraph or two in which I painted as black a picture of myself as I thought she would believe, mixing truth and falsity so that they couldn’t be distinguished. And having thus fully ceded to her the moral high ground – that most unscenic of human viewpoints – I went on to point out, in as careful and delicate a manner as I could, that she was well advised to forget all about me and get on with the rest of her life.
Even so, my letter was, I confess, a little disingenuous. Maybe I exaggerated my behaviour just a fraction too far in order that she might sense a deliberate attempt to manipulate her into detesting me, and thereby identify a perverse strain of kindness on my part. Too convoluted? Possibly. But the truth was I knew from experience that few people had the heart to destroy my letters and I was confident that in all likelihood Lucy would read it through more than once, if not keep it for ever. And perhaps, in time she would perceive my hidden intention.
Fuck it all, I thought, after I had finished. Saturday night approaches. It was time to break my self-imposed exile and embrace the coquettish world once more: collect my linen from the launderette and pick up some provisions from Roy, the fat Hitler.
Around four that same Saturday afternoon, I tentatively plugged the phone back in. And before it could ring, I set off down the stairs with my bundles.
It is a truth at least mutually acknowledged that without Roy and his son, Roy Junior, I would die. I buy pretty much everything I eat from them. (Supermarkets are no longer bearable – too many people forcing you into the audience of their domestic lives – the mothers and the fathers and the couples and the single folk, all with their look-at-us brand decisions and mutely signalled checkout-queue superiorities … That the glory of human life should have fallen so low.) For the sake of convenience, Roy’s Convenience Store is closed only on Christmas Day and when it is impossible for Roy himself to stay awake any longer. Roy Junior, a seventeen-year-old, thinner and slightly less deranged version of Roy Senior, is the only person allowed to assist him. Of the two, although it is sometimes irksome to be forced to listen to what Roy Junior believes is involved in ‘having it large’, the son is less alarming to deal with as he does not have his father’s sinister talent for psychological attrition, nor does he possess the menacing note of the older man’s lingering Yorkshire accent. Indeed, it’s not that much of an exaggeration to say that I have become friends with Roy Junior in a neighbourly sort of a way; he delivers whatever I need, whenever I need it, and he also helps me out (at extortionate charge) when I require odd jobs done reliably, such as providing a private minicab service. Most important, the sheer range and quality of the produce that the Roys stock is staggering; and, if by some chance there’s something I need which they haven’t got in, then they pride themselves on their unrivalled ability to get hold of any ingredient large or small at less than two hours’ notice.
‘And a packet of your cashew nuts,’ I said.
Having offered up my basket, full of provisions, ready for the reckoning, I stood at the smooth wooden counter with my laundry folded over my arm.
‘Right you are, Mr Jackson,’ Roy Senior nodded, rotating to reach down a packet from the extensive nut display behind the counter.
‘How’s Roy?’ I asked.
‘He’s off in Keele this week. Organizing things.’
‘Right.’
There was a pause. Roy Senior smoothed his little moustache. Then he said: ‘You know they’ve gone up again, don’t you?’ He dangled the cashews before me for a moment. ‘I’m afraid they’ll be five … er … sixty-nine. Er, yes: five sixty-nine.’ He punched the numbers in quickly and dropped the nuts into one of his blue plastic bags.
‘Why’s that? Is there a shortage?’
‘No shortage. No.’ He began going through the other items one by one, slowly and carefully, entering the price of each item, using only the index finger of his right hand.
‘Global price-fixing agreement?’ I volunteered, not that interested, and wondering idly how much Brylcreem he must get through in a year.
Roy Senior stopped what he was doing. I looked up from his scrubbed-clean hands to his scrubbed-clean face. He seemed to struggle with private demons for a moment. Then he returned my glance with an expression that mingled concern with frustration: ‘Actually, Mr Jackson,’ he said, ‘I’ve been putting them up every seven days for the last fourteen weeks. Ten pence each week.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I was going to tell you before but I didn’t want to ruin my experiment.’
‘Experiment?’
‘Yes, my experiment, Mr Jackson,’ he said, smugly. Then, taking his time, he weighed my tomatoes on the electronic scales. He rang in the cost per pound. (The price came up as £1.435 and they were thus entered on the till at £1.43; Roy is scrupulous in all things and always rounds down to the nearest penny with fruit and up with vegetables, confirmation that the English eat more vegetables than fruit, I always think, and useful verification of the status of tomatoes if ever it is needed.) He turned his attention to my single green pepper and smiled in what he obviously believed to be a superior fashion before saying: ‘I have to own up, I have been using you as a guinea pig.’
