The Calligrapher

by Edward Docx

  ‘Soon enough – true to previous form and despite the fact that his wife looks like a latter-day Helen of Troy – Mr B. starts playing the field again. And guess who one of his very next conquests turns out to be? Lucy’s mother. Who is, unfortunately, I might add, already married to someone else – the nice man whom Lucy refers to as Dad.’

  ‘David.’

  ‘David. That’s what Lucy calls him too, isn’t it? David? Always suspicious when a child calls a parent by a Christian name actually –’

  A rabbit bolted across the road in front of us. William braked and my board and boxes all slid forward in the back. The frantic creature ran wildly along the verge – darting and bobbing, desperate to get out of the headlights. Then, just as quickly, it was gone.

  ‘Sorry. Is your stuff OK?’

  ‘Don’t worry – the important things are in the hard cases. Go on.’

  ‘So, anyway, Madeleine is conceived, Lucy is conceived: different mothers, same father. London is busy letting its hair down but all is obviously not well chez Belmont. Magdalena suspects her husband of doing the dirty and is drinking hard trying to prove it. Meanwhile, Lucy’s mum –’

  ‘Veronica.’

  ‘Lucy’s mum, Veronica, is going up the wall with her secret love for the dashing Mr B.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And so, one dark and baleful night, she – Veronica – comes looking for the man himself and is more than a little surprised when his darling wife answers the door.’

  ‘What a fucking mess.’

  ‘Quite so. Mr B. returns from a hard day shuffling paper to find not one but two unhappy pregnant women waiting for him. An unholy alliance. And the shit, as they say, has hit the fan.’

  I winced. But I was enjoying the vodka at last.

  William continued. ‘Again, this is according to Lucy: David and Veronica were – are – unable to have children, and so Veronica decides to confess to David what has been going on. This confession goes down badly. But anyway, having left her husband chucking glasses at the wall, Veronica’s first plan is actually to see how lover boy Julian feels about her leaving poor old David altogether and the two of them – Veronica and Julian – taking off into the sunset. However, as she now discovers, Julian is already married – and the main issue turns out to be not what Mr B. thinks about it all, but what his beautiful half-Italian alcoholic nutcase of a wife has to say.’

  ‘Half-Italian?’

  ‘Seemingly so. A Roman. In any case, the upshot is that Magdalena goes into permanent rage – refuses to talk to her husband or leave the house in his company – very bad news at Foreign Office bashes. And worse, she takes to drinking even more seriously – new-born baby or not – until eventually, ten months down the line, she decides to wash her evening case of grappa down with a box of pills chaser. Dead.’

  ‘Poor woman.’

  ‘Meanwhile, on the other side, Lucy’s mother, who has seen Julian for what he is and detests both him and the very earth he walks upon, has started to suffer from post-natal depression and almost goes off the deep end too. See how the sins of the mothers are visited upon the daughters,’ William shook his head. ‘In fact, the only person to come out of the whole sorry show with any credit is Mr David Giddings, who somehow finds it within himself to forgive his wife so that Lucy can be brought up as if she were his own daughter – albeit with a generous input of cash for school fees, birthdays and so on from the real culprit.

  ‘Age thirteen the girls – Lucy and Madeleine – are sent to the same boarding school – guilt-wracked Julian footing the bill from Paris. Lucy’s mother accepts the money but insists that Lucy is told the truth now that she’s growing up. Plus – so Lucy reckons – Veronica thought it would be a good idea for Lucy to know that she had a sister in the same school in case she became lonely or homesick or whatever – because she didn’t want Lucy to be trailing home back to London the minute she got upset. Anyway, it worked. Lucy and Madeleine become best friends for life. The two of them united by rock-bottom opinions of their mothers, a deep distrust of their father and, I suspect, grave but undiagnosed problems resulting in full-blown psychosis on the subject of young men. Enter J. Jackson Esq.’

  I switched to the brandy.

  At some murky place that looked indistinguishable from any other that we had passed, William clicked the indicator on. ‘People don’t realize that, in certain circumstances, it is still possible to indicate ironically,’ he said. ‘Now please – please let me finish that brandy, Jasper, I can’t stand it any more.’ He turned hard left. ‘The next twelve miles are private and if any fucker wants to stop me drinking, they can take it up with Edward II.’

  I handed him what was left.

  28. A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day

  Study me then, you who shall lovers be

  At the next world, that is, at the next spring:

  For I am every dead thing,

  In whom love wrought new alchemy,

  For his art did express

  A quintessence even from nothingness,

  From dull privations, and lean emptiness

  He ruined me, and I am re-begot

  Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

  For two weeks, I have been working with my crow quills – slowly, patiently, applying the fine filigree detail to the versals, moving through the whole sequence of poems for the second time. There can be no mistakes in this – the smallest slip will mean starting an entire poem again. But my concentration is unwavering and the care I take in every consideration exact.

  Outside, the tall poplar trees are bent and tugged about by an October wind and there is a morning mist that drifts and straggles across the lawns. The Norfolk sky is the colour of watered-down ink run thin to almost nothing; but when the morning clears and the autumn sun climbs, I will be able to see for miles – out past the rhododendron trees, across the river, over the fens and towards the sea.

  It is quite early still, and cold. When we arrived, William suggested I light the fire – set and ready in the grate – but I was worried about the smoke affecting the vellum. So he found me some old oil heaters and I have turned them all on. They are lethally hot to the touch and yet somehow I can’t help but feel they are making the room colder. Perhaps it is something to do with convection and high ceilings. Perhaps it is because I have foolishly set up my board in this draught-beset bay window. But the light is irresistible and I have found a pair of fingerless gloves.

  This morning, I am flourishing the last poem: ‘Woman’s Constancy’. Although my deadline is 25th October, I want to give myself a week with my magnifying glass back in London. Also, I would like to deliver them early to Gruber and Gruber, the framers, so as to allow as much time as possible in case the wood has to be ordered. Today is Saturday and I should be finished in an hour or two.

  The first few days here passed slowly. Insisting that I must stay, William returned to London on the Monday for his business. And I made friends with Ellie, the Laceys’ housekeeper, and her husband, Jim. When I wasn’t working, I ate Welsh rarebit on my lap by an open fire and went through William’s father’s record library. I read without concentration and turned films off whenever the romantic interest declared itself. I walked around the lake into the village and talked marine disasters with a barman who used to live in Tallahassee. Now and then I considered stealing the keys to one of the cars and driving all the way to Rome – sleeping with every woman that I met on the way.

  My thoughts gathered painfully, limping in from across the filthy battlefield, one by one, under cover of darkness – wounded, bedraggled, dismembered. But soon they had mustered in such numbers as to require ordering.

  I tried to be methodical, mainly to avoid sending myself mad as I lay awake watching the shadows of the trees, but also because I wanted to establish whether there was any chance that my mind might agree with my heart on the abysmal subject of what to do next – or whether I was just going to have to act regardless.

 
Initially, I’m not sure whether it was the coolness or the sheer scale of Madeleine’s deceit that appalled me – that frightened me – the most. Whether planned or spontaneous, her capacity for falsehood was breathtaking. Everything that had happened I now looked back on with suspicious eyes. She must have known, I thought, that it was Lucy who was calling me that night, when she stood listening as I pretended to talk to William – hence her yanking the phone from its socket to remove any further threat until such time as she could deal with her sister in person. (The bitch. And what a fool I must have seemed to her as I garbled inanities into the receiver.) Then, of course, there were the trips abroad, which, I now saw, she had probably fabricated: Amman was likely to be true but the Philadelphia fat wars? The crayfish festival? They were surely lies; on both occasions, she was probably with him. I recalled how she had directed the conversation away from details when Professor Williams had showed an interest in Sacramento. She was only ever visiting him.

  Did he come to London? He must have done. For one thing, I thought, he must have been to see her flat on the day that she left. That must have been when Roy caught them with his video camera. Nauseously, I recalled that the night before the bonfire Madeleine had gone ‘to stay at her father’s’. How many other times had this happened? How many other times had Madeleine gone to visit her ‘father’? I couldn’t be sure. (Did her father even have a place in London? Why should he? He lived in Paris.) I became convinced: whenever she was not with me – she was with him. How many nights were they together? How many nights did they spend just across the garden, sleeping in her assassin’s camp bed? I didn’t know. Surely it was too great a risk even for her. But such a possibility wasn’t beyond her audacity and I couldn’t quite see into her flat from mine.

  I realized, of course, how much contempt there was for me in her composure. During the months we were together, the only time she had looked even vaguely unsettled was soon after we first ‘met’, when I asked her what people called her – that time when we were coming back from Camden on the barge and I was trying to find out about her boyfriend. (The harsh hysterical laughter of hindsight: I knew … in my veins, I knew.)

  Worst of all was the psychological torture that she must have enjoyed – relished – administering. Her little flirtation in Rome seemed inconsequential by comparison with the schedule of cruelties she had dealt out. Then there was all that ‘so what did you do to her’ questioning at that bastard ball … The ball. Here my thoughts turned from anger and humiliation to something else … not hope exactly but something less sickening than the rest.

  My guess (so many guesses) was that Lucy and Madeleine had fought that night. Perhaps Madeleine’s crossness when she came into the room had not, after all, been directed at me. Perhaps their quarrel was caused as much by Lucy’s anger with her sister (when confronted with the evidence of how far Madeleine had let things drift) as it was by Madeleine’s anger at Lucy for wanting to be alone with me after I had been hit.

  Jesus Christ. Did they plan to have me hit? Or was that a bonus? They could not have known that Selina was going to be there. Could they? Could they actually have arranged it? Or did she just turn up and Lucy somehow knew. If so, how? Had Lucy seen me with Selina? How? Again there was no way of knowing. Unless she had followed me before … or seen me out with Selina somewhere or … what? The paranoia surged.

  The real question, I told myself, was this: was their intention really for Madeleine to sleep with me at all? No. I did not think so. Do half-sisters really accept (with a laugh and a joke) the physical actuality of sexual revenge? Does one sit happily back while (with a nudge and a wink) the other makes love to the same man (so recently the treacherous breaker of hearts) by way of getting even? Of course, vengeful conquests of men take place all the time – the I’ll-show-the-bastard-that-two-can-play-at-that-little-game one-night stand with a hapless stranger at a random party, the just-you-wait-to-hear-whether-I-am-over-it holiday romance … But, in most instances, there is only one woman and two men – the man she wants to hurt and the man she’ll do the hurting with. Rarely does it turn out the other way around. Rarely are there two women and one man. And rarely are they sisters.

  OK, so let’s grant them a special closeness, a real soul-matey whoop-de-doop sorority. Let’s grant inseparable siblings against the world. Let’s say two broken-home girls grow up nursing an evil pair of grievances. What, then, do these two do when they come across the epitome of all they most dislike, distrust and disdain? Inflict agony upon the cheating, lying bastard – yes. Cross, double-cross and triple-cross him; tie ribbons with his nerves – yes. Lead him on, put him off, lead him on, put him off, twist him around and around in circles – yes and yes again. But get into bed and make love to him over and over until he’s hardly able to walk? What kind of a punishment is that?

  No. Madeleine was never meant to sleep with me at all. She did so because – almost on the spur of the moment – she decided she wanted to. Then she told Lucy that it was only once or twice. But as our relationship deepened – or carried on at least – she found that she had to go on lying to her sister – about how often she was staying at my flat, about how she was feeling, about what was really going on, about more or less everything. She found herself stranded in London for longer than she had anticipated; and she quite enjoyed the company while she had to wait. (Did she really have to wait? Was her flat really being worked on the whole time?) And somewhere in the middle of it all and quite by accident, she forgot to carry on hating me until, finally, the hour grew so late for her leaving that she could not put it off a minute longer.

  And now, as well as everybody else, she was also lying to herself.

  Or maybe not. Maybe I was wrong. Hecate has a heart of frozen venom and even were there man alive to melt it, he would be sure to die from the poison vapours. And perhaps unflinching intimacy was merely Madeleine’s way of getting a good psychological run up for the final kick. In those parting moments, there was remorse in her eyes but not love. Or was there?

  And round went my thoughts again. In the darkness.

  Now, outside the window, the view is declaring itself. Most of the mist has returned to the river. And the oil heaters are at last doing their job; they gargle to themselves as if engaged in some weird alien conversation. In the stronger light, I return to ‘Woman’s Constancy’.

  I don’t like the letter ‘N’ as a rule – something to do with its austerity, I think, or its negative attitude: ‘M’s bony and resentful little brother. But I am proud of the work I have done to make this one sing:

  Now thou hast loved me one whole day,

  Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?

  I dread the thought that Madeleine has left belongings behind – in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the bedroom. I fear the studio view. And I pray that my flat is not going to join the renegade troops of my memory.

  If a woman says she doesn’t want to see you again, do you take her at her word? Or do you dare to presume to know her better than she knows herself? Do you dare to claim to know what’s best for both of you? And what, if anything, do you prove by crawling after her: that you love her, or that you’re too weak and helpless and abject to deserve her love? And for whose benefit and happiness are you on your knees? Hers? Surely not. Truly love is three parts selfishness to every one part superstition.

  But brave men and fools always go. Perhaps, we think, there is something sublime that we might say, some grand gesture that we might make, something that will cast everything in a new and clearer light, something that will change her mind …

  As with all the versals, the design for the ‘N’ is entirely my own. I have three more strokes to make but I will have to wait a moment. If there is one thing a calligrapher needs above all else, it is a steady hand.

  Then the work will be done.

  I will check with the magnifying glass next week but I think I have managed: thirty poems and not a single mistake. There’s something about ‘Woman’s Consta
ncy’, though.

  29. A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning

  Our two souls therefore, which are one,

  Though I must go, endure not yet

  A breach, but an expansion,

  Like gold to airy thinness beat

  If they be two, they are two so

  As stiff twin compasses are two,

  Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show

  To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

  And though it in the centre sit,

  Yet when the other far doth roam,

  It leans and hearkens after it

  And grows erect, as that comes home.

  Such wilt thou be to me, who must

  Like th’other foot, obliquely run;