The Calligrapher

by Edward Docx

  ‘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?

  For a long minute I stood, stalled on Formosa Street like a bewildered and long-travelled tourist blinking in the summer sun outside the Uffizi gallery – ‘Closed until next year for essential restoration work.’ Vast, white, twelve foot high, the unscalable double gate mocked me, the light glaring in the bright white gloss. There was nothing else for it. I would have to go all the way round to the other entrance at the opposite end of the garden. I turned the corner back the way I had come and rushed up the hill.