The Calligrapher

I slogged all the way back up to the Himalayan summit of number 33 and managed to crawl, breathless, teeth-gritted, sinew-strained, up the last few steps into my own hall. Instantly, the telephone began to ring – as though it had been sitting there like a pining dog, waiting for my return. I put my bags and my laundry down quite slowly by the hat-stand and then stood, eyes shut, breathing deeply, and counted to five.

I snatched up the receiver.

‘LUCY, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE STOP RINGING ME UNLESS YOU WANT TO TALK. PLEASE. I WILL TALK TO YOU IF THAT IS WHAT YOU WANT. OR WE CAN MEET UP OR I’LL COME OVER BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE STOP CALLING ME EVERY TWO SECONDS. I DON’T –’

‘Jasper?’

‘– KNOW WHAT I AM SUPPOSED TO –’

‘JASPER. JASPER!’

It was a man’s voice.

‘What? What? Sorry, who is it?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘William?’

‘What?’

‘Is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me. Will you stop being an arse and tell me what is going on? What are you doing with your phone? You’ve been out of order for a week and a half and when you do pick the fucking thing up you start calling me Lucy.’

‘Sorry, Will, sorry. Things have been a bit awkward lately. She’s gone insane. I am being harassed and silent-called. Almost stalked.’

‘Well, you’d better do something about it and quick or else the few friends you do have will give up on you for the worthless fucker you are.’ He took a sip of something. ‘So, has the sham come to an end and everything fallen apart?’

‘Yes. Totally.’

‘Do you care?’

‘Of course I care. I mean, I know it wasn’t going to last forever … But I wasn’t intending … Oh Christ, Lucy more or less found me in bed with that girl from the fucking Tate. Now she’s ringing me up all the time … I think she’s in quite a bad way. I care about that.’

‘Very nice of you.’ He sighed. ‘Jesus, Jasper.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Kill yourself on television. Wrap big apology signs around your head, explaining how you are sorry for being such a low-rent human being and behaving so disgracefully all your miserable life. That should do it. Give us the nod as to when you plan to go ahead and we can all tune in and watch. I think a burning tyre around your chest, that sort of thing, or maybe –’

‘And how can I help you today, William? Is there something you would like to share with the rest of the class?’

‘Yes, actually. I want you to get yourself to Le Fromage by eight sharp tonight, young man. I have a little treat for you.’ He hesitated. ‘But – well, we can do something else if you …’

‘I’m fine. Go ahead.’

‘Really, it’s OK if we need to leave it awhile. I’m only planning on a –’

‘There’s nothing I can do, Will. I’ve written a letter. It’s a motherfucker; that’s all.’

He clicked his tongue. ‘OK. So, do you remember those two girls that we ran into last time we were there?’

‘No.’

‘Well, they have finally had the decency to call me back and –’

‘You mean you called them.’

‘Precisely. They are prepared to meet up with us tonight. And for some reason unfathomable to humankind they want you to be there.’

‘Well, I’d better come along then. Refresh me as to their names?’

‘Tara and Babette.’

‘The Czech girls?’

‘Actually, I’ve found out their real names. When they aren’t on the catwalk in Paris or Milan or Rangoon – they’re called Sara and Annette. They have confided in me.’

‘Oh God.’

Le Fromage is William’s name for his club. (I have no idea what the real name is – ‘Settee’ perhaps?) Situated in a fashionably dismal Soho back-alley, it is silted up most days of the week with the detritus of humanity – fabulously talentless men and women, who ooze and slime through the half-light in a ceaseless search for the dwindling plankton of each other’s personalities. On Saturday, even the regulars avoid the place. Only William would ever sink so low as to organize a date there.

In the event, however, there were no celebrities around to degrade the dinner and things went surprisingly well. Well enough to occasion a group expedition back to William’s house for further drinks and what he insisted on billing as ‘an exciting midnight party’.

But thereafter we found ourselves becalmed. And had you happened to look into the wine cellar of an old house in Highgate at around one o’clock in the morning, you would have seen two figures crouching in the claustrophobic semi-darkness: one, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, the product of thirty generations of inbreeding, cradling a bottle of fino sherry; the other holding a bottle of Sancerre. Had you also stooped to listen, you would have heard the following hushed exchange.

‘You can’t make them take all their clothes off and pour sherry on their heads, Will. I don’t care if you’ve got to get rid of it –’

‘I am not going back into that room and … and just sitting there. It’s grotesque. I want something to happen. They must be lesbians.’

‘They’re not lesbians, they are Czech.’

‘Well, it rather turns out to be practically the same thing. What is wrong with women these days? Why can’t they just admit they want to and get on with it? Why the need for all this senseless prevarication? Those two up there are worse than bloody English girls.’

‘Get rid of them then. Tell them you’re sorry but it’s way past your bedtime and that you are a priest and that because it is Sunday tomorrow you have to go to work. Or you could thank them very much for their company, but say that now you are drunk you fancy going upstairs with me and so if they wouldn’t mind leaving –’

‘Will you stop being such a fuckpig and think of a plan? And I am not tight. I just refuse to let them leave after they have had so much of my wine. They are drinking their way through the fucking Loire Valley and what are you doing about it? Fuck all. Except cowering in this wine cellar like a penis.’

‘I am enjoying my evening.’

‘Jasper, you may laugh but I intend to sleep with one of those girls within the hour and I am holding you personally accountable if I don’t. Come on. Think of a plan. I’ll sit very still and let you concentrate.’

‘Perhaps you could try talking to them instead of going on about vintage cars like a tit. Or at least listening to them. Where do they live?’

‘How the bloody fuck should I know?’

‘If they live in separate places we could order two cabs – but stagger them on the quiet. I’ll pretend I’m near Annette – wherever that is – and share the first with her. Then you’ve got half an hour alone with Sara and well … you’ll just have to see how you get on. If things take a turn for the better you can always give the driver a tenner and tell him to fuck off.’

‘It’s an awful plan. And I hate it. And I don’t see why you should be heading into the night with the lissom Annette either.’

‘Because, Will, I have asked her, and she says that she hates you.’

Annette and I kissed all the way back to Bristol Gardens, breaking off only for the speed bumps. The driver, a truly revolting human being, insisted on four million pounds for the journey and the night would brook no argument so I handed over all my earthly possessions and reluctantly offered my limbs when it became clear he was refusing to leave without a tip.

Once inside, we sat up talking about nothing and drinking tea for an hour while some local radio station played soft. Annette was funny and told me about her home near Ostrava and her first boyfriend, who was called Max and designed submarines, even though Ostrava was about as landlocked as it is possible to be in Europe. Eventually, she asked if she could borrow a T-shirt and I found the shortest one that I had and (pretending innocence and the devout intention of decency) we went to bed, whereupon, aside from being generally attentive and instantly reciprocal, I left all the big decisions up to her. Such is the modern man’s lot.

Afterwards, she slept halfway down the bed with her red-brown hair spread crazily on the pillow and I remember that I lay as the light turned slowly blue, listening to her murmuring in her sleep. In Czech.

6. The Bait

Come live with me, and be my love,

And we will some new pleasures prove

Of golden sand, and crystal brooks,

With silken lines, and silver hooks.

I awoke to the acid jazz of a secular London Sunday: cars, buses, dogs barking, the air traffic, the street shouts, the stereos, the swearing, the sirens, the scaffolding clang, the Paddington clank … But Annette’s breathing was as regular as waves and so I set my pulse by that.

Of course I knew nothing of what the day was planning to unleash and though Lucy’s legacy still lingered, I am mildly ashamed to report that I was feeling quite happy to be back in my old routines. More fool I.

Though I sensed I was on safe ground with croissants, I decided against bringing breakfast into the bedroom as I guessed it wasn’t really Annette’s thing. Instead, when I knew she was awake, I got up and offered her a cup of tea. In a voice both businesslike and bashful, she said that yes, she’d love some tea – milk and one sugar – but that she liked it quite strong and to leave the bag in for quite a while please. I left her to get dressed in privacy and tarried in the kitchen the better to give her time and space.

In any case, making a cup of tea is not as quick or as straightforward a matter as it may at first seem. (Au sujet de: I must mention that my explorations in the magnificent garden world of tea came to an end two or three years ago when I at last beheld the regal splendour of Darjeeling. In my youth, I laboured on the pungent terraces of Assam – distracted, perhaps, by a certain brutal charm – until, in my middle twenties, I found myself quietly seduced by the more aromatic company offered by a passing Russian Caravan – still my favourite blend. Eventually, after further wanderings in both China and Ceylon, I pledged myself to lifelong service of the true Queen. Of course, in my Lady Darjeeling’s realm there are many mansions and it took me a few months of delicate experimentation to discover which of these was to be my chosen dwelling place. In the end, I settled on Jungpana, the tea garden of all tea gardens, and thereafter I have served only the first flush from the upper slopes thereof – uniquely supplied, I should add, by the excellent Tea Flowery on Neugasse in Heidelberg.) No no no – making a cup of tea is by no means quick or straightforward. As with so much in life, it has become principally a matter of protracted disguise. Annette, for example, having lived in London for three years, was quite understandably more familiar with the muddy sludge of a mashed-in-the-mug teabag – that nameless mixture of grit, sand and wood chip so beloved of the curmudgeonly Britisher – and did not expect her tea to contain any trace of actual tea leaves at all. Consequently, my task was to arrange matters covertly by abandoning my usual methods of infusion in favour of stewing the ill-fated Jungpana to buggery before straining it from my treasured pot and into a mug, whereupon (tears gently welling) I added the required milk and sugar. In this way, I hoped she would not notice anything suspect and the unflustered mood of the morning would be preserved. I even went so far as to take a little milk myself.

My efforts to try to make everyone feel more at ease must have worked reasonably well because, after we had both gone about our separate ablutions, we enjoyed a mock-formal breakfast during which she called me Mr Jackson and I had to call her Miss Krazcek. This lasted a pleasant hour or so but then she had to leave; she was due, she said, to meet someone (her boyfriend, I guessed) for lunch. We kissed at the top of my stairs – two friends – and then she was gone.

It was one of those mornings during which the light is forever changing – as though they are testing the switches in heaven. Absolutely fucking useless for calligraphers. Especially shagged out ones. So I returned to my bed.

Not until nearly two, after a scrupulous assault on both bathroom and kitchenette, as I was crossing the hall (eating a pear as it happens), did I realize that the telephone wasn’t ringing.

For a second or two, I simply stared at it. In all the excitement, I had completely forgotten about the Lucy situation. Could it be that I was saved?

Warily, I edged towards the little table.

First I checked that the receiver was properly down. (It was.)

Then I lifted it up to check that the line was connected. (It was.)

And finally, I dialled the test number to check that the ringer was sounding. (It was.)

Hallelujah!

And thank Christ for that.

I admit: I thought I was in the clear.

The city summer lay ahead: sunglasses, suntans, sexiness. Arms not sleeves. Legs not trousers. A better life. Or so I hoped.

But pucker-faced fate had other ideas. That very same afternoon events took an unexpected turn. The ratchet wound up by Lucy and sprung by Cécile now began to unravel its ropes in directions that no sane man could ever have predicted. That same afternoon everything changed and became blind and dazed and confounded and difficult to comprehend or process or even to believe. That same afternoon I fell apart.

By three, the light had steadied and it was reasonably hot – the first really warm day of the year. (Summer and winter are the world’s new superpowers, oppressing spring and autumn and running them as miniature puppet states.) I entered my studio and was soon relishing my labours. I had the window open a little and was grateful for a mild breeze. I remember that I was beginning my first draft of ‘Air and Angels’ and almost daring to think that I might be happy. I didn’t even mind the early wasp which came buzzing by, flying into the room for a brief turn before heading back out to the garden below.

I am not sure what the time was exactly when I decided to change the sketching paper for a proper skin of parchment in order to make a start on the opening lines – ‘Twice or thrice have I loved thee, / Before I knew thy face or name’ – but it was no later than four-thirty, and probably nearer to four.

Professional calligraphers are divided along ethical, artistic and financial lines as to the medium they prefer to work with. But as far as I am concerned, on a commission like this, there can be no alternative to parchment. Not only is it a joy to write upon, but it is also the nearest one can get to authenticity. Strictly speaking, vellum (made from calf skin) is what the likes of Flamel would have used, but aside from being hideously expensive (which is not to say that parchment is in any sense ‘cheap’), vellum is totally unacceptable to your average American media baron, seeking to impress his latest water-and-wilted-spinach-only woman. (And yet, though parchment is made from sheepskin, somehow, perversely, it seems problem-free; perhaps the word itself carries sufficient cultural resonance to disable scruples and exonerate all involved from guilt. {Inconsistency at every turn.} Or perhaps it’s just that Gus Wesley, like most people, simply doesn’t realize what parchment is made of.) In any case, modern preparations tend to leave the vellum sheets too stiff, too dry or too oily; and even parchment takes a good deal of extra private preparation to revive consistency after all the chemicals they treat it with. (Skins are washed in baths of lime and water, scraped and stretched; whiting is then added to them before they are scraped again and dried under tension. Tough going by anyone’s standards – dead or not.) If, as is most often the case, the skin is still a little greasy, the diligent calligrapher will first rub powdered pumice over the surface with the flat of his hand, then French chalk, then wet-and-dry paper to ‘raise the nap’. And after all of that, when he has finally set the sheet upon his board, he will apply silk to the surface in a last and loving effort to ensure that it is as free from residual grain and as receptive to his ink as possible.

It was sometime around four then that I got up from my stool to fetch some parchment from the stack by the door. I remember feeling its texture between my finger and thumb as I came back across the studio. I put the parchment down on the board, loosely, without fastening it. Then I reached up for the pumice, which I keep on a shelf, above and to the left of the window. I do not know why, but as I did so I happened to glance out, down, into the garden. And there she was. There she was.

It must have been her hair that first drew my eye – shoulder-length, tousled, amber-gold, light-attracting, light-catching, light-seducing.

For a minute, maybe longer, I did not move. I stood, with my arm raised to the shelf, craning my head. But the half-open frame was hindering my line of sight. So, very gently, I bent to undo the catch and push open the window as far as it would go. Then I knelt on my stool and leaned out over the ledge.

Lying on her front on the grass, just beyond the chestnut tree’s shade, was a sun-shot vision of a woman so divine as to call vowed men from their cloisters. Propped up on her elbows, her shoulder blades slightly raised, her head between her hands, she was wearing an aqua-blue cotton sundress. She was reading something – something too wide and spread out to be a newspaper or a magazine, a map perhaps – which she had weighted down with her sandals and a brown paper bag. Lazily, she kicked her legs behind her back. I could not see her face but her limbs were bare, sun-burnished and so perfectly in proportion to the rest of her body that even Michelangelo would have had to alter them for fear of his viewer’s disbelief. She raised her head, spat, and then waited a moment before reaching into the bag again and taking out another cherry. She appeared to be having some sort of a competition with herself to see how far she could shoot the stones.

Unreservedly, I confess, I was spellbound: pure unadulterated desire. Mainline. Cardiac.

I can’t tell you how long I was transfixed. But at last I became aware that my mind was slowly dissolving – not into lust, but into fear. Fear that this extraordinary woman might glance around and reveal her features to be in some way less exquisite than the picture I had involuntarily allowed myself to imagine. Or fear – far worse – that she might glance around and reveal herself to be every bit as beautiful as I had envisioned. Then how was I to cope? With Venus camped in my communal garden, what chance work, what chance sleep, what chance me doing any wonted thing at all?

A lunatic’s vigil ensued: I couldn’t leave the window; I was bound fast to my vantage point and to my fate. No escape and no reprieve. I just had to kneel there, knuckle-whitened, and wait. Each move she made was another moment of acute crisis; another moment at which reality and imagination might be rent asunder and sent howling and crippled into their separate wildernesses of despair. In anguish, I watched her fold her arms in front and rest her chin upon them, thinking that now must come the final reckoning. In agony, I watched her hand reach back over her opposite shoulder to pull up the strap of her dress where it had fallen down her arm, convinced that she would have to turn. In awe, I watched her raise her head to follow a passing butterfly, certain that the gesture would disturb the geometry of her relaxation and cause her whole body to stir and show to me my destiny. Until, at last, in no time and with no ceremony or thought for her attendant disciple, she simply turned over on to her back.

And I nearly fell from the window.

What can I say? That she was extraordinarily beautiful. It will hardly do. That she looked like the sort of woman whom men do not dare to dream of? That her brow was delectable, her nose delightful, her mouth delicious? That she had the features of an angel? That hers was a face to melt both Poles at once, to drag the dead from their tombs, to launch a thousand ships? None of this would quite capture it, I’m afraid. Then, as now, none of this would come close.

Ladies and gentlemen: she was a real hottie.

If thou, to be so seen, be’st loth,

By sun, or moon, thou darkenest both,

And if myself have leave to see,

I need not their light, having thee.

I saw her face for only a second or two before she lifted her sandals, took up the map and held it aloft so as to read while simultaneously shading herself from the sun. Then, like a taut rope sliced, I fell back into my studio and recoiled upon my stool. After a moment, I laid down my quill with care and due reverence and eased my way out from behind my board. And after that, as I say, I fell apart …

I shot out of the studio, stopping only to pick up the keys from my dining table (and not daring to look out of the window again), and set off at spectacular velocity down my (bastard, bastard) stairs before hurling myself along the pavement towards Roy’s. I tornadoed through his door and came twisting and harrying up to the counter.

‘Roy, I … I need the best oranges you have got. Right now. And a single lime – about a dozen – oranges, I mean – and I haven’t got time for you to weigh them so I’ll just take them on a guesstimate and pay you tomorrow, or later, or whenever, and you can do the usual five per cent compound interest rate payable anew at the stroke of midnight, every midnight, or whatever it was we agreed before.’

‘Whooaah. Steady Mr Jackson. Steady. Deep breaths. No need to panic. No need to get all carried away with compound interest.’

‘Roy – where are the bloody oranges?’

‘Same as always Mr Jackson – on the fruit stand outside. You passed them on the way in. Everybody does.’

I exited the shop and began feverishly to gather the better oranges.

Roy filled the doorway. ‘Having another one of our little lady-related emergencies, are we, Mr Jackson? Bit early in the week for that sort of thing isn’t it … Fond of oranges, is she?’

‘Roy, seriously: is it OK if I just take these? I really can’t hang around right now.’

‘Be my guest. A pleasure to see them going so fast.’ He chuckled.

‘Thanks. And I’ve got a couple of limes.’

‘I’ll make a note.’

Back up the road I hurtled, and across, and (fumbling for my keys at the big black front door) up, up, up I raced, back up the stairs and through my door, and up some more, and into the hall and straight to the kitchenette where I washed my hands and hastily, frantically, began slicing, squeezing, pouring until the job was done, lime and all, into a jug and into the freezer.

Off came my clothes, my work tunic over my head, my jeans shaken leg from leg as I tore into the bedroom. I threw myself into the shower. I scalded and froze and scalded and froze my shocked and flinching body. I leapt out. I towelled myself raw. I fetched out my trusty shorts, plunged into the arms of my freshly laundered, parchment-white, short-sleeved shirt and dashed back into the hall.

Freshly squeezed orange juice with just a little lime – the ideal refreshment and a pithy passport into my lady’s afternoon.

One more check. I sprinted back to the studio window.

She had gone!

Oh fuck!

No. Wait!

She had only moved. She had only moved! Now she was lying across the bench almost directly beneath me. My God. But for how much longer? I eyed the treacherous sky. A grey-hulled taskforce of destroyer clouds was moving in from the west.

This time I took the stairs like an Olympic pommel-horse specialist, vaulting around the banisters with a mighty swing at each turn, rucksack pressed against my shoulder. I banged out of the front door and – sandals slapping like demented seal flippers on the twelve stone stairs down to Bristol Gardens – set off, left, towards the entrance to the communal garden.

Which was locked.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Must the human condition be forever frustration and inarticulate wrath at the sheer injustice of it all?