The Calligrapher

by Edward Docx

  She could tell I wasn’t lying. ‘Well, what’s the problem? I’m hardly asking for commitment.’ She jogged Ginger on her knee as if subconsciously to underline her point.

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And I presume it’s nothing religious.’ She smiled.

  I smiled in return. ‘If it were to do with my religion I’d be asking to see you more.’

  ‘But you want us … not to, Any more.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She took a deeper breath. ‘Fine. Your decision.’ A moment of wounded pride and then she changed tack, evincing concern – an older woman’s power ploy. ‘Are you OK? Has something happened?’

  Ginger opened wide, stuck out his tongue and let it drool.

  I hated myself for even thinking what I said next. ‘Yes. In a way. Something has happened. I am seeing someone … quite seriously … and I don’t want to be unfaithful … to her.’ Oh God, such premature and jinx-inviting lies. But they did the trick.

  ‘Oh, I see. You should have said. And has she stolen all of you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I didn’t think it would ever happen. I thought you of all people were a safe bet.’ She was still being flirtatious but only for the sake of the routine. The fight was gone. All that was left was for her to try to patronize the younger woman, whom, of course, neither of us had ever met. ‘I suppose she’s very clever and beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, she is.’

  I was depressed all the way home. Renunciation is a miserable business. Especially in the cities. Especially in London, where daily life is served out so cold and raw among so many strangers. It’s Hollywood’s eternally adolescent all-or-nothing men and women fables that do all the damage of course. Though most of us somehow remember that bullets and car crashes kill in real life, we take the romance myth to heart, we forget to suspend our disbelief. But the disappearing truth is that a man can like a woman in a certain kind of a way – on a certain afternoon perhaps, or in the evening over dinner every once in a while. And a woman can like a man the same: now and then, from time to time, in some specific setting, in some specific role. There don’t have to be promises about eternity or improbable undertakings of a responsibility beyond the moment – just the powerful then and there of a friendship, tacitly attended by desire. And it may not quite be love and it may not be for ever, but the two of them still like one another and it still counts.

  It was a son of a bitch about Selina.

  But it had to be done.

  When I got back to my flat, I checked the weather and then cheered myself up with Bach’s ridiculous Concerto for Four Harpsichords.

  The forecast was for a heatwave. Several days of uncommonly hot sun followed by biblical downpours. I went into my studio and looked out of the window. There was no sign of her. Carla had not called over the weekend. There was no word from Roy. I appraised the work on my board. ‘Love’s Diet’ was not quite finished. I read the first verse again and arrived once more at that word ‘discretion’.

  Very well, I thought, let me become the master’s pupil: a period of temperance and withdrawal and self-control, far away from the windows of temptation and desire. I changed into my calligraphy tunic and then began slowly to move my board, my inks and all my quills out of the studio and into my bedroom. Let Venus have the garden awhile.

  PART THREE

  9. The Damp

  Poor victories; but if you dare be brave,

  And pleasure in your conquest have,

  First kill th’enormous giant, your Disdain,

  And let th’enchantress Honour, next be slain,

  And like a Goth and Vandal rise,

  Deface records, and histories

  Of your own arts and triumphs over men,

  And without such advantage kill me then.

  The rain fell in the last of my dreams. When I awoke the air was cooler. I lay for a moment and listened to the heavy patter until, curious to see for myself, I rose and crossed to the window. Water was pouring from the sky, splashing thickly on the roofs of the houses opposite, coursing down their tiled valleys, welling up in the guttering. I hoisted up the frame and put out my head.

  My five days in the droughty wilderness were over. Having disconnected the phone again, I had done nothing but work since my lunch with Selina. And not once – through all the scorching sunny hours – had I approached the garden-facing windows.

  Now I made for the hall and tentatively entered my studio. The room seemed forlorn without my board or stool. Grateful for the rain, I released the blind and took a long look into the garden. Water was pooling in shallow muddy puddles around the empty bench.

  I do not wish to mislead you: beyond returning to my proper place of work, I had as yet no fixed plans. Venus would appear soon enough, I imagined, or Carla would call and I would find her at Danilo’s. Either way, I felt that my quarantine had done me much good. Some sorely needed cool had returned and I was prepared to bide my time. That scuffed old law: pursue a woman purposefully but never with impatience.

  I took tea in the bath with Donne. At that time, as I recall, I was just starting ‘The Apparition’: ‘When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead …’ But, rather naively and on account of the pissing rain, I decided to read ‘The Damp’ instead. I had noticed that both works – very oddly – used the narrator’s death as their point of departure. Which coincidence further confirmed me in what I had begun to suspect: that The Songs and Sonnets were best approached as a collection of cross-commentating poems – much as one might listen to a theme and variations in music. Donne’s theme is Love itself (the opening aria to which the piece must always return), while the variations range from purest union and equality between the sexes to undisguised contempt; from one of his poems entitled ‘Song’ (‘Sweetest love, I do not go, I For weariness of thee …’) to the other of the same name (‘And swear / No where / Lives a woman true, and fair …’). Each variation makes perfect sense alone, of course, but it is only as a collection that the tones achieve full resonance.

  At first sight, I thought that ‘The Damp’ looked particularly flippant. And in a way I was right: it is a work of amusement and play. These days, though, I consider it to be an exquisitely calibrated tour de force – not least because Donne somehow manages to move from a man’s cold corpse (laid upon a mortician’s slab and being cut open for forensic examination) to the intimation of a woman’s naked body (likewise laid out, but on her bed and very much alive) and all in twenty-four short lines.

  The title refers to something like poisonous mist or fog that arises in the first verse during one of Donne’s most memorable ‘scenes’. (Fuck all to do with rain, but I wasn’t to know.) The dead lover is to be dissected in order to satisfy the curiosity of his friends, who cannot understand what has killed him. The physicians go ahead and dismember the cadaver, considering each body part in turn until eventually they find a picture of the lover’s tormentress in his heart. This picture releases a ‘sudden damp of love’, which threatens to work its lethal charm on the senses of those gathered at the autopsy, so turning the single murder of the poet into a general massacre.

  Such macabre melodramatics are characteristic: Donne can be a real horror-merchant when he wants to be and (as so often with the genre) there is a sick, kitschy humour lurking around the mortuary. Certainly, the intellectual urge to push love from something intoxicating to something just plain toxic is – I have come to realize – typical of his idiosyncratic artistic intelligence. However, intellectual ingenuity aside, what struck me most of all was the tone of the second verse.

  Deface records, and histories

  Of your own arts and triumphs over men,

  And without such advantage kill me then.

  Not only is the poem one of those that deal explicitly with the notion of an ongoing battle between men and women, but also, on this occasion, Donne has granted himself a worthy opponent. Her presence is keenly felt throughout, partly because of the direct address with which he begins and partly
because of the manner of Donne’s writing, which assumes a fellow gamester, implacable but intelligent in her opposition. Women conquer too; and despite the erotically charged, nudge-nudge ending, there’s an unusual tang of parity in the air.

  Leon telephoned around three, just after I had finished moving my gear back into the studio.

  ‘Hello Jasper,’ he began, morosely. ‘It’s Leon – from downstairs.’ Despite my having lived above him for two years, Leon always introduced himself in this way. ‘How are you?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘and you?’

  ‘Oh, struggling on with it all.’ There was a pause while he swam the vast and slate-blue lakes of his inner melancholia to bring to me his request. ‘Listen Jasper – can I ask a serious favour?’

  With much apology and several semibreves’ worth of rests, he explained that he needed to practise for a couple of hours and that he hated to disturb me and realized that it was wholly unfair but could I not play any music on my stereo either – at least until this evening?

  As on previous occasions, I happily agreed and we were both about to hang up when the idea suddenly struck me.

  ‘Leon?’

  The phone came very slowly back up to his ear: ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you around this evening – later on, after you’ve finished? I mean, what are you doing?’

  ‘Yes. Nothing. Just finishing. That’s as far as I have thought ahead. The finish. And then …’

  ‘Well, Leon, this is our chance! Why don’t we go to The Review – at the Lock Theatre, above the pub? You never know, it might cheer you up. A change of scene, comedy, laughter, you might even enjoy yourself …’

  He cleared his throat. ‘OK. Why not? Tonight, I suppose, is as good a time as any. When is it on? Do they have a show on Sundays?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure they do. It’s at eight-thirty, I think. I’ll book tickets and knock on your door at – say eight?’

  Around four that afternoon, when I broke off from my work to call the Lock Theatre, I got a pre-recorded message, apologizing for itself and then giving the impression that the box office would be staffed to capacity if only I would telephone again anytime after five. This I duly did, but was then treated to ten long minutes of uninterrupted ringing. (Stranded in the hall – muffled Shostakovich in one ear and dring-dring in the other.) When I tried a third time, I got another pre-recorded message, saying sorry again but that the box office shut at six-thirty and thereafter tickets had to be ‘purchased and collected in person’. So at something like six-thirty-five and feeling somewhat at a loss, I was on the brink of calling Leon to convey the uninspiring news when I realized that I might as well do as they suggested. Bastards.

  Five minutes later, I stood leaning against the open front door and struggled to unwrap, unfasten, unlock, unleash my wretched umbrella. The rain was still coming down in great swollen drops, drumming lazily on the roofs of the parked cars. And the air smelled even more lush than it had earlier in the day. I set off, gingerly splashing down the stairs and on to the pavement.

  The road really was awash: there were little v-shaped eddies around all the lamp-posts and parking restriction poles; and several of the grids were backed up as though the sewers themselves were already full. A car sluiced by in four dirty fountains of spray.

  At the corner of Bristol Gardens and Clifton Villas the wind gusted, snatching at the umbrella and bending the rain underneath before I could tug it down again. If anything, conditions were worsening. For a stride or two I considered retreat but kept on, heartened by the sight of an old woman whipping along the opposite pavement in sou’wester and wellington boots. By the time I reached Blomfield Road, I was fighting my way through the beginnings of a monsoon. Hanging tight to the handle, I hurried along the road parallel to the canal until I came to the bridge. I turned sharp right and hastened over.

  I must have been looking down at the canal itself – pock-marked, brown and turbid – because when I raised the edge of the umbrella a fraction to check my way ahead she was already close upon me.

  Half-walking, half-running, staying on her toes and darting this way and that to avoid the worst of the puddles and with one hand holding a sodden newspaper above her head in a futile attempt to protect herself, she looked as though she had spent the last three days swimming in from some desperate shipwreck. I had no time to contrive anything, no time – thank God – to think. We were about to pass and I acted on instinct. She slowed to go around me. I lifted my umbrella high enough so that she could see my face. She looked at me in genuine surprise and hesitated for a second. I handed her the umbrella’s stem and said: ‘Take it, I’m only going over there’, gesturing towards The Lock. She clasped it in her hand and thumbed her wet hair off her cheek.

  I said, ‘Don’t worry, you can give it back to me whenever’, and turned to go. There was nothing more she could do except shout ‘Thanks’, which I only just heard over my shoulder because already I was dashing towards the theatre door and her voice was being drowned out by the rain.

  10. Negative Love

  If that be simply perfectest

  Which can by no way be expressed

  But negatives, my love is so.

  To all, which all love, I say no.

  If any who decipher best,

  What we know not, ourselves, can know,

  Let him teach me that nothing; this

  As yet my ease, and comfort is,

  Though I speed not, I cannot miss.

  The next day the downpour stopped, gradually giving place to a flotilla of clouds and, by Tuesday, a steady dispersing sun and a good afternoon light. I was at my board, still working away on ‘The Apparition’, when she appeared. She walked across the grass to her favourite spot, laid out a rug, removed her T-shirt and sat down. And I …

  Oh well I allowed myself a nonchalant minute or two to appreciate the scene and then returned directly to my work, pausing only to consider the pleasing shape of the word ‘solicitation’.

  With almost insulting insouciance I finished another entire line – ‘Then shall my ghost come to thy bed’ – before rising from my stool and checking to see if she was still there. After which I passed calmly into the hall where I picked up the phone and piped a call down to the Roach in his basement burrow, asking if six-fifteen was a convenient time to drop by and pick up the music that I had lent him. Then I took a leisurely shower and put on a linen shirt.

  Diaghilev himself could not have choreographed it better.

  ‘Hello.’ I began, as I sauntered by. ‘It’s going to be a beautiful evening, isn’t it?’

  She twisted round, caught by surprise. ‘Oh, hello again. Yes, it is – and it’s still quite warm too.’ She sat up. She was wearing her blue dress again.

  I kept my eyes fixed on hers.

  Now she smiled. ‘Hey, thanks for –’

  ‘No. Not at all.’ I interrupted with a reciprocal smile. ‘It was too late anyway. You were pretty soaked.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ She made a rueful face. ‘Complete disaster. I suddenly got it into my head that it would be really romantic to go jogging in the rain. God knows why. I thought it was stopping. But it started absolutely pissing down on the way back – just when I was totally knackered and I’d settled for the walking briskly thing. Serves me right. First run in three years.’

  ‘Bad timing.’ I nodded sagely. ‘Probably the wettest five days since records began; everything else these days seems to be the worst it has ever been since records began.’

  She laughed. ‘If you hang on a second I’ll just go get –’

  Again, I stopped her. ‘No – seriously – don’t get up now. You can drop it off anytime – I only live over there on Bristol Gardens – number thirty-three – top flat. Or I’ll see you here sometime, I’m sure. Anyway, enjoy the sun. I’m running late.’

  ‘OK. Right.’ She blinked – twice. ‘Thanks.’

  She turned back to her book and I carried casually on my way towards the little gate that separated t
he Roach’s overgrown patio from the garden.

  I peered in through the windows. He was standing behind his record decks with his back to the sheer cliff face of black speakers and seemed to be sort of shuffling on the spot while holding one of the headphones against his left ear. For no reason that I could divine, he also appeared to be wearing a bobble hat.

  OK, a two-minute exchange – nothing more than that, I admit. But enough, I felt, judging the texture of the encounter as a whole; enough for me to feel confident that our next meeting would be very soon and with considerably less embarrassment than our first. For though men may feel the need to march back and forth beneath the proverbial window – roses clenched in jaw, mandolins at the ready – women are slightly more subtle when it comes to signalling their interest. A woman can give herself away in the flickering of an eyelid. Or two.

  Oh, of course I realized that there were many questions unanswered, a thousand tedious impedimentia to be overcome. Perhaps she was on the brink of marriage to some snake-hipped Hollywood director, famous for his irresistible good looks and near-Periclean eloquence; or perhaps, after long reflection, she had decided to join the dwindling community of some island nunnery, cut off from the rest of humanity by that grim chastity belt otherwise known as the Irish Sea; or then again, perhaps she was locked into some epic fifteen-year affair with her childhood sweetheart, an adorable baby with whom she had shared a Bank Holiday paddling pool, now grown to be a great Achilles of a man, striding hither and thither among the aid workers of Africa; or maybe she was intent on a life of predatory afternoons in provincial dyke bars. But balls to it all, I thought. For a happy while elation ruled. And I was underway. There would come a time when she ditched the director, fled the convent, cast off her childhood crushes or grew bored of boots and battered biker-jacketed weekends in Brighton.