Читать книгу The Calligrapher - Edward Docx - Страница 10

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

‘So, what is for my breakfast?’

‘What would you like?’

‘Something nice.’

‘OK. Something nice it is.’

I rose and stepped silently into my pyjamas. Always a good way to begin the day.

‘Strawberries. And coffee. Not tea.’ She lifted her head from the pillow to open one eye a challenging fraction.

It was the morning of Saturday, 16 March, seven days on from my birthday, and the sun was indeed insinuating its way through the gap in my carelessly drawn curtains. Give the old fool three hours, I thought, and the brazen slice of light now lying across the chest of drawers by the window would find its way across the room to where she lay in bed. But by then, she would probably be gone.

Between you and me, I find it almost impossible to guess breakfast requirements in advance for women like Cécile. As with so many children of the ecological revolution, you would presume that she prefers fruit – cleansing, nutritious, zestful. And yet no doubt she sometimes wakes to find herself craving the immoderate satisfaction of a chocolate croissant or even, on occasion, the wanton candour of bacon and eggs. In the end, I’m afraid, I don’t think there is any way round it: you just have to accept life as an uncertain business and make provision for all circumstances.

Even here there is danger. The talented amateur, for example, will stride merrily out to the shops on the eve of an assignation and buy everything his forthright imagination can conceive of – muesli, muffins, marmalade, a range of mushrooms, perhaps even some maple syrup. Thus laden, he will return to stuff his shelves, fill his fridge and generally clutter his kitchen with produce. But this will not do. Not only will his unwieldy efforts be noticed by even the most blasé of guests – as he offers her first one menu then another – but worse, the elegance and effect of seeming only to have exactly what she wants is utterly lost, drowned out in a deluge of les petits déjeuners.

No – the professional must take a very different approach. He will, of course, have all the same victuals as the amateur but – and here’s the rub – he will have hidden them. All eventualities will have been provided for, and yet it will appear as though he has made provision for none. Except – magically – the right one.

Anyway, thank fuck I got the strawberries.

‘It’s OK if I use your toothbrush?’ she called from my bathroom.

‘Yes, of course. You can have a bath or a shower if you like. There are clean towels in there.’

‘After, maybe.’

I listened to her moving about. She was light on her feet.

I live in this attic flat, at the top of what was once a smart stucco-fronted Georgian house on Bristol Gardens, near Warwick Avenue, London. What with all the eaves and so on, I’m afraid it’s not exactly roomy: OK-ish size lounge, small studio, bedroom, en suite bathroom, and a so-called hall with a kitchenette at one end and the stairs down to my internal front door at the other. But at least the relative cramp prohibits dinner parties – a real mercy in these blighted days of celebrity chefs and self-assembly furniture.

When I moved in, there were two bedrooms; as I only needed one, I was able to switch things around and have my studio at the back. This arrangement ensures that I get street noise when I am asleep and not when I am working; additionally, it has the great benefit of allowing me to have my draughtsman’s board by the north-facing window, which overlooks the beautiful garden below – a retreat surrounded on four sides by old buildings similar to my own and which is for the communal use of all the residents. North – because calligraphers prefer an even light.

My studio is not half as spacious as I would like but I have set it up to be as perfect a place to earn a living as possible. It contains everything I need – my reference books, magnifying glasses, knives for cutting and shaping my quills, and the quills themselves: swan for general writing, goose for colour work because it’s softer and, for the finest details, crow feather. The light is not perfect because my window actually faces slightly west of north. But the finest results are always achieved in natural conditions, so, unless I am on a serious deadline, I try to avoid working with the spotlights.

‘You’ve got a very clean place. I like it.’ Cécile was now standing in the doorway to my bedroom, naked except for my toothbrush, which she had now returned to her mouth and was rather lazily employing across her teeth.

‘You think?’

Out came the brush. ‘Tidy and clean for a man, I mean.’ She didn’t seem to be using very much toothpaste. Either that or she had swallowed it.

‘Thanks. Do you inspect a lot of men’s flats?’

‘Yes.’ A quick brush. ‘I have many brothers and they ask me to come over and see if their places are good for’ – she raised her eyebrows – ‘pulling the chicks.’

I brought down two bowls from the cupboard.

She frowned. ‘But my brothers – they never actually get any chicks back. They say: “Cécile, it is a terrible nightmare, there are no chicks in Dijon.”’ She came over and put her chin over my shoulder. ‘You really have strawberries!’

‘Yes.’

‘I was only making fun.’

‘Too late. We’re having them now. I haven’t got anything else. You want cream?’

‘Of course.’

‘OK.’

She stood back and watched me grind the coffee beans.

Ordinarily, I would have preferred to bring my trusty Brasilia to life, firing it up in all its shimmering glory and producing some coffee we could all have been proud of. (The true espresso, I submit, is modern Italy’s gift to the world – their great and most eloquent apologia. Meanwhile, here in England we seem to have traded our inheritance for a jamboree of high-street chains, peddling lukewarm coffee-flavoured milk shakes and lactescent silt.) However, not only is an espresso machine a little ostentatious, especially when still (in effect and despite the intervening night) on a first date, but also – crucially – its use results in single cups which, in turn, result in significantly shorter breakfasts-in-bed. So cafetière it had to be.

‘Shall I carry something?’

‘Sure.’

Cécile returned my brush to her teeth and turned on her heel with a bowl in each hand.

I have to say that I love the mornings almost as much as the nights. Best of all, you get to wake up and be the first person that day to see the true untroubled beauty of a woman’s face – brow clear, hair unfussed. (‘She is all states, and all princes, I,/Nothing else is …’) But almost as enjoyable, in different ways, is the awkward choreography of the bathroom sequence, the dressing, the where-are-my-earrings?, the what-do-we-say-now?’, the strangely stilted wait for the minicab, or my offer to come down to the Tube. In a slightly sick way, I also look forward to the mutual hangovers (we’re in this together) and most particularly that evanescent feeling of surprise that you sometimes experience after you’ve both been awake for a few minutes – surprise that despite all the static and interference and fundamental insecurity, which so often sabotages English heterosexual encounters, grown-up strangers still do this stuff on a whim.

Broadly speaking (and with all the usual disclaimers about generalizations duly assumed), there are three sorts of women in the morning: those who don’t want to be seen at any cost (as they dash from duvet to duffel coat); those who don’t care and stride around the place naked, daring you not to look (clothes forsaken where they fell); and those who would like to count themselves among the unabashed but can’t quite bring themselves to abandon cover, their modesty clinging like their childhood. Curiously, which type a given woman will turn out to be has nothing to do with class, age or even looks – and you can never tell beforehand – but, paradoxically, you can usually rely on the exhibitionists not to cause any trouble once they have gone. (I don’t know why this is: something to do with their ‘fuck you – you’ve got my number but I don’t give a shit whether you call’ attitude, I guess, whereas the shy ones … oh brother).

I set down the coffee on my side of the bed, passed Cécile her bowl, offered her a spoonful of demerara sugar and then climbed back in myself.

‘So what is it that you do, Jasper? You never said all the time we were at the dinner. I was listening. You are something bad? Like a tax person. Or you sell cigarettes in Africa?’

‘I am a calligrapher.’

‘Un calligraphe?’

‘Absolument.’

She sat up further, holding her bowl out of the way and pushing pillows awkwardly behind her back with her other hand. Her dark skin made her teeth look even whiter.

‘How is that?’

‘It’s good. I mean I enjoy it.’

‘You make your living?’

‘For now. Yes.’

‘You have some work here?’

‘Yes. I work at home.’

‘Can I see after?’

‘Yes, if you like.’ I twisted around to pour the coffee. ‘In fact, last week I started a new job for somebody – a collection of poems – and I just finished the first verse of the first one yesterday, but I’m not sure about it and –’

‘Which person?’

‘A big-shot American guy from Chicago. I’m not supposed to say his name. He owns loads of newspapers and television channels and I had to sign this confidentiality clause because – apparently – he’s so famous and important that if anybody ever found that he had commissioned some poems then Wall Street would collapse.’ Though facetiously spoken, this was true. My client was Gus Wesley – and although I couldn’t conceive of any way in which my disclosure could matter, I had been religiously following Saul’s advice and had told nobody who the work was for, not Will or Lucy or even Grandmother.

Cécile made a mountain under the bedclothes with her knees and set about her strawberries. ‘Money makes men forget they are full of shit. He sounds like a pain in the arse to me.’

‘To be fair …’ – I felt obscurely moved to defend my client – ‘… to be fair, I think the reason he doesn’t want me to tell anyone is because the poems are a present for his new girlfriend’s birthday. He’s already had two marriages and he gets torn apart every time his private life finds its way on to his rivals’ pages. So he’s keeping this hot new honey all to himself. Nobody knows about her. I guess he wants it to stay that way.’

Cécile shrugged and then scraped her spoon with her teeth. ‘I don’t know anything about it. I am not interested in media typhoons.’

It seemed inelegant to correct her. I ate my strawberries.

‘Actually,’ she turned her head, ‘I meant which person – which poet? Not who the poems are for.’

‘Oh sorry: the poet is John Donne.’

‘Now I have heard of him.’ She let her tongue travel across her front teeth. ‘He wrote a poem about death being too proud, I think. I had to write about it for an exam when I was a student. Not easy. But he’s a love poet, yes?’

‘Sort of.’ She had the French way of saying ‘love’ as though it were indeed a god. ‘He writes about men and women – or he does in the collection that I am doing anyway. A lot. But I think there is a whole bunch of other stuff too. Sermons and Holy Sonnets and so on. He seems like a serious guy. I’m going to find out more about him.’

‘You are very lucky, I think. Everybody else in London talks only about the prices of houses and which of their colleagues they dislike.’

‘I know. Sometimes I think it would be better to be deaf.’

She smiled. ‘Yes, but you love London too?’

‘Yes, I do. Half the time.’

‘For me, it’s good to be here for a while but when I have finished my training, I am going to Martinique to teach real boys who want to know.’ Keeping her eyes on me, she twisted her hand so that she could lick between her fingers where some stray sugar had settled. ‘A lot of the boys here – I think they don’t want to learn. A lot of boys do not have the way to become real men.’

She sunk her teeth halfway into her last strawberry and left it clamped between her lips.

After Cécile had bathed, we stood together in my studio, and considered my week’s work. Although, admittedly, there were only a few lines (I was still going slowly back then, feeling my way) I could tell she was impressed. Perfectly defined, clear and elegant upon my board was the first verse of ‘The Sun Rising’.

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,

Go tell court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

This, as I had said to Cécile, was the first poem that I had tackled – my first hand to hand with Donne’s style, my introduction to the man. (It was also one of the five poems on Wesley’s must-include list; the other twenty-five I was at liberty to choose myself – one for each year of her life, I guessed.) And what a piece of work it is: rigorously intellectual and yet all the while artfully erotic; full of swagger but the speaker still the supplicant; simultaneously contemptuous and craven; relentlessly bent upon making that lover’s bed the centre of the universe, while irascibly conscious of the rest of the world; the verse swathes back and forth through its paradoxical business like a wrathful snake through dewy grass. Truly Donne is the great antagonist, the undisputed master of contrariety – his antitheses reversing into his theses, his syllables crammed with oppositions, and every clause sent out to vex the next.

Of course, back in March, I saw only a fraction of what I find in The Songs and Sonnets these days. In truth, at that time, standing with Cécile, both of us barefoot and tasting of coffee, I admit my response was rather linear. I was distracted by my professional eye, which had been drawn to the dimensions of the gap that I had left for the first letter of the first verse, the versal – my glorious, decorated ‘B’, which would only be added when I had finished the rest of the poems. Now that I had completed a stanza, I was beginning to feel that I hadn’t left quite enough space: the verse-to-versal proportion looked wrong. I would have to rethink and start over.

Cécile spoke up. ‘So it is a poem about a man waking up and thinking: fuck-off Mr Sun, I am not interested in today, I want to stay in my bed and make love with my woman – right?’

I nodded. ‘I think that’s pretty much exactly what it’s about, Cécile.’

Like all calligraphers, I hate mistakes with a vehemence I can hardly describe. And my abhorrence leads me to dwell with a vagrant’s fixity on the reasons for my downfall – but my primary mistake was not, I think, that I misjudged Cécile. Because she was so incontestably at home in the ‘Nude Action Body’ department (which was, after all, where we had met), I think I could have relied upon her not to behave inartistically had she known what devastation her actions were going to cause. But, alas, she did not. No – my primary mistake was to let her stay another night. We didn’t discuss it out loud. But come five, I found myself stepping out to the shops and begging Roy, my excellent local supplier and a man who looks as close as is possible to an obese version of Hitler, to let me have one of his brother’s fresh salmon. It cost me more than any other human being in the history of mankind has ever paid for a single fish, but life is short and inconvenient and there is no sense protesting.

Perhaps it was the light that day – bright, sharp, enthusiastic, a real rarity – or perhaps the spirit of the poem with its heavy insistence on the altar of the lovers’ bed as the only dwelling place of truth worth worshipping.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

Either way, I was scarcely conscious that the afternoon had given way to a wine-suffused evening. I had recruited two bottles of the crispest Sauvignon Blanc and a handful of haricots verts to go with the salmon and, at seven-thirty, we were still fooling around together in my kitchenette (already quite drunk) as I prepared the creature in lemon and tarragon before wrapping it in foil and placing it carefully in the oven.

There then followed nine truly Caligulan hours, during which several really good things happened including, I think, Cécile finding an old cigarette-holder that William had left and an attempt at a bilingual game of pornographic forfeit Scrabble which I very happily lost.

When, finally, I fell asleep, the sun was rising.