The Calligrapher

Unfortunately, several centuries in the highest ranks of government, church and army had left the men in his family quite unable to imagine women, let alone talk to them. Indeed, William suspected that he was the first male child in sixteen generations not to turn out gay. As I could imagine, this was a severe blow both to him and his lineage but he had tried it with other boys at school on several occasions and there was absolutely nothing doing. The truth of the matter was that he liked girls; and that was that. And as he was now nearing twenty, he rather felt that he should be getting on with it. Could I offer any pointers?

Naturally, things have moved on a good deal since then and these days Will is regularly trumpeted by various tedious publications as one of the most eligible men in London. He is an invaluable ally and well known on the doors of all good venues – early evening, private and exclusive as well as late night, public and squalid. I regret to say, however, that his approach remains erratic and hopelessly undisciplined. Though many women find him attractive, the execution of his actual seductions is not always the most appropriate. It is as if a strain of latent homosexuality bedevils his genes – like an over-attentive waiter at a business lunch.

All else aside, William is the most effortlessly charming man that anybody who meets him has ever met. He is also genuinely kind. And though he claims to feel terribly let down by the astonishing triviality of modern life, this is merely an intellectual arras behind which he chooses to conceal a rare species of idealism. He does not believe in God or mankind but he visits churches whenever he is abroad and runs a music charity for tramps.

On the subject of William’s relationship with Nathalie … Back in March, he claimed that it was purely platonic and I have to say that I think he was telling the truth. Under light questioning, he explained that it was only in this way that he could maintain the exclusivity of their intimacy since – of the few women who shared his bed from time to time – Nathalie was the only one with whom he was not having sex. They were therefore bound together by uncompromised affection and happily unable to cheat on one another. (She, too, I understood, was at complete liberty.) This approach, he confided, was an ingenious variation on the arrangement his forefathers had shared with their various wives since they had first come to prominence (under Edward II); dynastic obligations aside, they had kept sex resolutely outside of marriage, thereby removing all serious woes, threats and resentment from their lives.

A little before midnight, the birthday evening’s rightful enchaînement having been long re-established, Lucy and I were alone at last, intimately ensconced at the corner of the largest table in La Belle Epoque, my favourite French restaurant. We were considering the last of our dessert with a certain languid desire, and feeling about as happy as two young lovers can reasonably expect to feel in a London so beleaguered by medieval licensing laws. A little drunk perhaps, a little reckless with the cross-table kissing, a little laissez-faire with the last of the Latour; but undeniably at ease with one another and, well, having a good time. The bill was paid and my friends had all left – William and Nathalie among the last to go, along with Don, another university friend, over from New York, with his wife, Cal, and Pete, Don’s fashion-photographer brother, who had arrived with a beautiful Senegalese woman called Angel.

If pressed, the casual observer would probably have informed you that he was watching a boyfriend and girlfriend quietly canoodling while they awaited a final pair of espressos. If he was any good at description, this observer might have gone on to say that the woman was around twenty-eight, five-foot six or seven, slim, with dead straight, bobbed, light-brown hair, which – he might have further noticed – she had a habit of hooking behind her ears. Had he dashed over and stolen my chair while I visited the gents’, he would also have been able to tell you that her face was very slightly freckled, principally across the bridge of her nose, that she had thin lips (but a nice smile), that her eyes were a beseeching shade of green and that she liked to sit straight in her chair, cross her legs and loosen her right shoe so she could balance it, swinging a little, on her extended big toe. He might have rounded the whole thing off with some remarks about how – even now – England can still turn out these roses every once in a while. But at this stage we would surely have to dispute his claims to being casual and tell him to fuck off.

It is more or less true to say that back then, Lucy and I were more or less a year into it – our relationship, that is. I’m not sure why – these things happen …

Actually, I am sure why: because I liked Lucy very much. That is to say, I still like Lucy very much. Which is to say I have always liked Lucy very much. Lucy is the sort of woman who makes the human race worth the running. She’s not stupid or simpering, and she only laughs when something is funny. She’s intelligent and she knows her history. Yes, she can be cautious, but she’s quick-witted (a lawyer by profession) and she will smile when she sees she has won a point. Then she’ll pass on because she’s as sensitive to other people’s embarrassment as quicksilver to the temperature of a room. She keeps lists of things to do. She remembers what people have said, but doesn’t hold it against them. She seldom talks about her family. And she has no time for magazines or horoscopes. If you were sitting with us in some newly opened London eatery, privately wishing you had an ashtray for your cigarette, you might well find that she had discreetly nudged one to a place just by your elbow. Which is how we met.

Even so, it is with regret that I must add that Lucy is a nutcase. But I didn’t know that then. That all came later.

‘Close your eyes,’ she said, putting her finger to my lips for good measure.

I did as I was told and lowered my voice. ‘You haven’t organized a –’

‘Too late. It’s tough. I’ve got you a big cake with candles and all the waiters are going to join in with “Happy Birthday to You”, so you’ll just have to sit still and act appreciative.’

I heard the rustle of a bag and the stocky chink of espresso cups.

‘OK, open your eyes.’

A young waiter with a napkin over his shoulder hovered nearby – curious. A neatly wrapped present lay on the table.

Lucy smiled, infectiously. ‘Go ahead: guess.’

I leant across and kissed her.

‘Guess.’

‘Earrings?’

‘You wish.’

‘A gold locket with a picture of Princess Diana?’

‘Oh, go on, for God’s sake … open it.’

I undid her neat wrapping and unclasped the dark velvet case: a gentleman’s watch with a leather strap, three hands and Roman numerals. I held it carefully in my palm.

‘So now you have no excuses.’ Her eyes were full of delight. ‘You can never be late again.’

I felt that tug of gladness that you get when someone you care about is happy. ‘I won’t be late again, I promise,’ I said.

‘Not ever?’

‘Not for as long as the watch keeps time.’

‘It has a twenty-five-year guarantee.’

‘Well, that’s at least twenty-five years of me being on time then.’

On the face of it ‘Confined Love’ is one of John Donne’s more transparent poems: a man railing against the confinement of fidelity. Neither birds nor beasts are faithful, says his narrator, nor do they risk reprimand or sanctions when they lie abroad. Sun, moon and stars cast their light where they like, ships are not rigged to lie in harbours, nor houses built to be locked up … The metaphors are soon backed up nose to tail, honking their horns, like off-road vehicles in a downtown jam.

On the face of it, Donne, the young man about town, Master of the Revels at Lincoln’s Inn, seems to be striding robustly through his lines, booting the sanctimonious aside with a ribald rhythm and easy rhyme, on his way to wherever the next assignation happens to be. But actually, that’s not the point of the poem. That’s not what ‘Confined Love’ is about at all.

2. The Prohibition

Take heed of loving me,

At least remember, I forbade it thee;

Some introductions. My name, as you may have gathered, is Jasper Jackson. I am twenty-nine years old. And I am a calligrapher.

My birthday, 9th March, falls exactly midway between Valentine’s Day and April Fool’s – except when there’s a leap year, when it comes closer to the latter.

What else? I am an orphan. I have no recollection of the day itself but it would appear that my father, the young and dashing George Jackson, wrapped both himself and my mother, Elizabeth, around a Devon tree while trying to defeat his friends in their start-of-the-holiday motor race from Paddington to Penzance. My mother did not die straightaway but I was never taken to visit her in hospital.

From the age of four onwards (and very luckily for me), my upbringing and education was placed in the hands of Grace Jackson, my father’s mother, at whose Oxford home I was staying when news of the accident arrived. In a way, therefore, my entire life can be viewed as one long, extended holiday at my grandmother’s. And I am pleased to report that I can recall nothing but happiness from my early years. Even the reprimands I remember only with affection.

It is a hot summer afternoon. The whole town is wearing shorts or less. My grandmother and I stand contentedly in the grocer’s queue. We are buying black cherries – a special treat – as a prelude to our usual Saturday afternoon tea. (Grandmother has a fondness for scones on Saturdays.) I am holding the fruit in a brown paper bag, waiting to hand them up to be weighed. My movements go unnoticed because I am living at waist height (oh, happy days). I glance around. I see a red-haired girl about my age passing by the vegetable stands outside. One hand is holding her mother’s and the other is clutching the sticky stick of an orange iced-lollipop, which is cocked at a dangerous angle and visibly melting as she half-skips along.

I move without thinking. Still carrying the cherries, in a second I am out of the shop and on to the street. I turn one corner, then another. For the first time in my life – with exaggerated care – I cross a main road alone. There is a cry behind me – my grandmother. Then comes a shout – a man from the shop running along the pavement after me. The girl turns, wrist pivoting on her mother’s arm; the ice slides clean off and drops to the pavement. My sweetheart registers the disaster for a long moment, then her grey eyes come slowly up and look directly into mine. I too am visibly melting. I am five or maybe six.

But scolding was never my grandmother’s strong suit. Rather, she believed in punishment by improvement. (Perhaps this was because we had, between us, lost too many relatives to waste time being cross with each other: my grandfather had died suddenly, while in Cairo on business just after the Suez crisis.) So once we had returned the cherries, there were a few serious words – ‘Jasper, you cannot go anywhere by yourself until you are twelve, do you understand?’ – and then it was off to the library with me for a miserable afternoon indoors. Which was a blow because I had been planning to play on, my bike with Douglas Wilson from down the road.

I say miserable, but actually the library in question was beautiful, the most beautiful in Britain. Although, due to the war. Grandmother never finished her post-graduate work (something to do with medieval French), Somerville College felt that she was far too clever a scholar to lose. And when she returned from Egypt with my father still a boy and a pitiful widow’s pension, they quickly made her deputy librarian. By the time I arrived on the scene, two decades later, she had become an authority on late medieval manuscripts at the glorious Bodleian, a building in which, I maintain, it is impossible to be anything but enthralled – even when, ostensibly, one is being punished.

Between the ages of four and twelve years, I must have spent more time in the Bodleian than most academics manage in their entire lives. Often during the school holidays (although rarely on Saturdays) my grandmother would sit me down at the table near the reference section that was reserved for members of staff, and bring me a book to read. ‘It didn’t seem to do your father any good in the long run, Jasper,’ she once said, ‘but at least he knew a few things before he died, which is all we can any of us really hope for.’

Evidently, my grandmother was following exactly the same method of combining childcare with a career that she had when bringing up my father; and, like him, I think I became something of a mascot among the librarians, many of whom used to mind me on odd days when Grandmother had to go and give a lecture somewhere or there was a serious section count going on. Indeed, over the years, just about anybody who was anyone at the university came to know me. People would stop by to say hello on their way in or out, and ask me what I was reading, and sometimes (as in the case of Professor Williams, Grandmother’s friend) take me down to the canteen for lunch, and even bring me presents (which, at Christmas, I used to have to hide to avoid giving the impression that I was getting too many).

If, however, I was in need of ‘improving’, as was the case on the afternoon of the cherries, my grandmother would sit me down and, instead of giving me a book, place a large illuminated manuscript before me. She would then provide me with a range of sharpened pencils and some stiff paper and instruct me to copy out an entire page – ‘as exactly as you can, please, Jasper, I want your letters to look just like those. No noise. No trouble. Come and find me when you have finished.’

Secretly, I loved the task, but I had to pretend otherwise in case Grandmother realized and changed my punishment to something awful like washing cars, which is what Douglas had to do when he was in trouble.

The fateful cherry-day page was in Latin of course, but I remember asking one of the Saturday assistants what it was about and he told me it was a prayer written in 1206 by a monk, who was hiding in the Sierra Norte above old Seville, asking God to deliver him from the women in his dreams.

My grandmother and I decided we should stay in Oxford until I was twelve. Then we moved to Avignon, where she had been offered a job cataloguing some of the exquisite work left behind by the scribes who lived there during the hundred years of papal occupation until 1409. I attended a lycée while she worked in the Livree Ceccano, the municipal library, which was housed in what had originally been one of the many sumptuous palaces built by the cardinals who came to take up expedient residence near their pontiff.

In two years her task was complete and our next destination was the German university town of Heidelberg, where she led a restoration programme, which brought some of the earliest Reformation documents back to light.

‘Finally the boss, eh, Jasper – at sixty-three,’ she said. ‘Who says that women are held back in this clever old world of ours? And all because I bothered to learn German in the war.’

I never noticed how much money my grandmother had, which suggests she had enough, but we were by no means well off – a librarian’s salary is thin, even at the best of times. Nor is restoration exactly lucrative. I seem to remember that we spent a lot of time waiting for buses and persuading one another that second-hand clothes lent a person an air of bohemian charm unavailable to those lesser folk whose imaginations could not travel beyond the high street.

In Heidelberg, as in Avignon, our flat was small, designed for one not two. However, because the old universities always own the best property, the building we shared was both characterful and well situated. We lived at the top of an old house on Plock, an oddly named medieval street, that ran parallel to the Hauptstrasse and was overlooked by the castle. I should also mention that on the ground floor was the finest delicatessen in Germany – run by my two friends, Hans and Elke. They are still there now although Hans has grown a moustache to celebrate his fiftieth birthday and Elke is refusing to allow him into the shop until he relents. My first real job – Saturdays and late-night Wednesday – was behind their counter.

As a hollow-cheeked, fourteen-year-old English boy, now with a French accent and ever darker hair, I devoted the next four years, with increasing success, to the twin joys of reading and the pursuit of my pretty Rhineland classmates.

At school, I was never popular with the other boys in the usual kinds of ways: I was not a natural team captain, I did not draw an appreciative gang around me at the back of the class, and I never got around to beating the shit out of anyone. In fact, from about thirteen onwards, as far as I was concerned, male company was a complete waste of time. What can one boy teach another? Very little. Conkers perhaps.

No. The only thing that ever got me thinking, got me wondering, got my heart kicking with the sheer excitement of life, was the girls.

The girls were everything – their opinion, their glances, their moods; the way they walked or changed their hair; what they said, did, wanted to become; where they lived, how they had their bedrooms; which film stars they liked and why; who they read, who they imagined themselves with at night, which clothes they preferred at weekends; what they liked boys to say, why, and how often; what they wanted to buy; what they disliked about their brothers, fathers, uncles, each other; what amused them, what sickened them; how they put their socks on, how they took them off; when and how often they shaved their legs; what they thought about school, tangerines, Goethe, their mothers, holding hands, history, rivers, Portugal, and kissing strangers – all of it mattered. I had to know. To my mind, the girls were the point of being alive.

Two days after we arrived in Germany, I discovered that it was possible to walk along the narrow wooden balcony outside my bedroom window, climb over the end and swing across without too much peril on to the fire escape. Persuading my female classmates to accompany me up those skeletal steps at night was, I think, the first serious labour set for me by that merciless taskmaster whom Donne refers to as the ‘devil Love’. But I was always a good student and I studied hard.

I learned, for example, that a young lady who has just emerged, blinking, back into the forbidding glare of the real world from, say, a cinema would adamantly refuse to scale a precipitous iron stairway merely to clamber into the bedroom of an over-eager adolescent male.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Too dangerous,’ claimed Agnes, an even-tempered girl with dark corkscrew hair, who sat as close to me as possible in chemistry lessons.

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I do it all the time.’

‘Really?’

‘No. I mean I climb up there by myself all the time.’

‘I was joking. I know what you meant.’ She smiled.

‘Oh.’ I clicked my tongue. ‘Anyway, why not, Agnes?’

‘My clothes would get covered in rust.’ She ran her finger along the handrail as if to prove her point.

‘Not if you took them off.’

‘Jasper!’

I grinned. ‘Why not then?’

‘We might get found out. What if I got stuck?’

‘You won’t. It’s dead easy – I’ll help.’ I made as if to start up the first step. ‘Who’s going to find out?’

‘Your grandmother for one –’

‘She’s gone to bed early. Professor Williams is coming tomorrow. And her room is on the other side. Anyway she doesn’t mind.’

I stood, stalled on the lowest rung. Agnes looked suspicious again: ‘How do you know she doesn’t mind?’

‘She told me.’

Frank disbelief. ‘She told you?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Once. Anyway, Agnes, why not – just for a bit?’

She said nothing for a moment – vacillating perhaps – then she shook her head. ‘Because I have to be home by midnight or Dad comes out looking for me.’ She made a pretend-serious face: ‘We’re Catholics.’

‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘Plus he knows I am with you so he’ll probably set off at quarter to.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘He thinks that girls are in danger the minute it turns midnight.’ She widened her eyes histrionically.

I took the step back down. ‘OK then – it’s only eleven-thirty, so I could rush you home now, get myself in his good books and bank an extra half an hour so that we can stay out until twelve-thirty next time. That way if you do suddenly turn sex-mad next Friday, you’ll have someone to talk to about it.’

‘Who says I am free next Friday?’

Sure enough, the next Friday but one I learnt another lesson: that the most efficient way from the cinema to my bedroom was not necessarily the most direct. Take lovely Agnes first on a walk up the crooked steps to the old Schloss, and wander there among the battlements; look down upon the river, see how the moonlight casts the water in silver as if it were a necklace running through the town (I was only fourteen); imagine how the sons of the city merchants would leave their beds and scale the ramparts to meet secretly with the daughters of the court – and then bring her back into town, and presto, what was previously a grotty and precarious fire escape has miraculously become un escalier d’amour. Seduction, I realized, was all about setting an appropriate scene – a scene into which the subject can willingly walk and there abandon her former censorious sense of self to take on a new and flattering identity. As we all know, it becomes more complicated when everyone grows up but even the most recalcitrant old hag once dreamed herself a Juliet.

Nowadays Agnes teaches chemistry in Baden Baden and has two children. She writes me the occasional letter – and I write back; but we dare not meet up in case something happens. Catholics.

After Heidelberg, it was back home to England – to the icy Fens, there to wow all comers with my deft grasp of the German philosophers. This was not, in any sense, fun, but if I thought my chosen subject unyielding, it was as nothing compared to the arduousness of attempting to sleep with the women. Try as I may, I can scarcely exaggerate the skill and endurance that a young man is required to develop if he wishes to navigate the freezing sea of female sexuality that surrounds a Cambridge education.

Imagine the most socially awkward, sexually confused and neurotic people in the whole world and put them all in the same place for three uneasy years: that’s Cambridge University. And don’t let anyone tell you different. Talk about sex by all means – talk about it till you’re blue in the balls – but you’re sick if you even think about doing it. Worse than sick: you’re dangerous.

Nonetheless, I had my successes amid the crunching icebergs and the raging Arctic winds and fared better than most of my fellows, many of whom were lost for ever – buried like Captain Scott beneath the tundra or fallen, snow-blind and lust-numbed, into the ice-tombs of the Nuptial Crevasse. Having overcome such hazardous and bitter conditions, I arrived in London full of triumph and resource.

Then I really started work.

In fact, during the next seven years, I think I must have had some sort of a physical relationship with pretty much all the women in the city: young, old, dark, fair, married or lesbian; Asian, African, American, European, even Belgian; tall, short, thin or hefty; women so clever that they couldn’t stand the claustrophobia of their own consciousness; women so thick that each new sentence was a triumph of heartbreaking effort; fast and loose, slow and tight; sexual athletes, potato sacks; witches, angels, succubae and nymphs; women who could bore you to sleep even as you entered the bedroom; women who could keep you up all night disturbing the deepest pools of your psyche; aunts, daughters, mothers and nieces; crumpets, strumpets, chicks and tarts; damsels, dames, babes and dolls; all that I desired and quite a few I didn’t. And then, when I was well and truly satisfied that there was nothing more to want, I did it all again.