THE
CALLIGRAPHER
EDWARD DOCX

Dedication

To Emma

Epigraph

‘Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:

Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot

A constant habit;’

John Donne

‘I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of

durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.’

Vladimir Nabokov

‘He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all –” ’

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Titivillus the Devil

PART ONE

1 Confined Love

2 The Prohibition

3 The Sun Rising

4 Love’s Exchange

PART TWO

5 The Indifferent

6 The Bait

7 The Triple Fool

8 Love’s Diet

PART THREE

9 The Damp

10 Negative Love

11 Air and Angels

12 The Dream (‘Image of her …’)

13 Song

14 Love’s Alchemy

15 The Message

16 The Apparition

17 The Good Morrow

PART FOUR

18 The Dream

19 Love’s Growth

20 The Legacy

21 Song

22 The Ecstasy

23 The Canonization

PART FIVE

24 Farewell to Love

25 The Curse

26 Twickenham Garden

27 The Broken Heart

28 A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day

29 A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning

30 Woman’s Constancy

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Titivillus the Devil

I might as well confess up front that I am in league with the Devil. It’s not a big deal – a stint of social nihilism here, a stretch of marital sabotage there – and I’m afraid it goes with the job. Seek for long enough and you will find that most human pursuits have a patron saint; but, of all the arts in the world, only calligraphy has a patron demon. His name is Titivillus. And he is a malicious little bastard.

Imagine a medieval monastery – somewhere in the high Pyrenees, say, with a great arched gate and tall white stone walls. In one corner of the cloistered courtyard there is a tower. Up the spiral staircase, nearer to the light and away from the damp, is usually to be found a large, round room. This is the scriptorium. And here, seated on stools, bent over their desks, arranged in a horseshoe around the senior supervisor, the armarius, are the monks.

In their right hands they have quills, and in their left they hold their knives. They work in silence and the only sound is their breathing and the continual rasp of their nibs across vellum. Despite their elevation, the light is dim and the older brothers are squinting. But there is no question of burning a fire or even a candle because the safety of the rare and sacred manuscripts is far more important than the monks’ mere earthly comfort.

Every so often, one of the brothers will raise his hand to signal the armarius to bring him additional quills, another pot of ink or some more skins. The knife, a treasured possession, will be used to pin down the undulating page at the point of writing as well as to sharpen the pen (hence pen-knife); but now and then, and with a bite of his lip, a monk will also have to use it to scratch out a mistake.

These mistakes are what Titivillus lives for.

He is a short, low-ranking demon, with a pot belly and a puckered, petulant face. Most of the day, he skulks about the corners of the scriptorium, sometimes sitting on his swag bag, other times scratching at his pointed ears or picking his nose with his stubby fingers, but he is always watching, always alert. Best of all he likes those errata that neither monks nor proof-readers notice and that survive in the new manuscript unchecked, to be reproduced by the next generation of scribes; but slips of the pen so big that the calligrapher must start the entire page again are also welcome – because these set back the Work of God.

Every night, after it has become too dark for the monks to continue and they have left the scriptorium for vespers, Titivillus carefully collects all the mistakes into his sack and drags them down to Hell, there to present them to the Devil so that each sin can be registered in a book – against the name of the monk responsible – to be read out on Judgement Day.

These unsatisfactory (some would say unfair) arrangements continued for more or less a thousand years – until the Renaissance flared across Europe and the calligrapher’s lot began to turn from bad to worse. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the monks found themselves being forced to work at a furious pace, on and on into the darkness in order to meet the ferocious demand for manuscript copies from the newly founded universities. Before long, sick of the blind rush, the brothers were desperately looking for ways to evade responsibility for the burgeoning number of flaws in their work and so save their ever-more imperilled souls.

Now Titivillus saw his chance.

He offered the holy scribes an eternal bargain: personal absolution from their sins in return for a secret guarantee that the number of mistakes would continue to increase dramatically. As the errors were already out of control, the monks gladly agreed.

Thus Titivillus became the patron demon of calligraphers: he kept their sins hidden and he rescued them from Hell.

Human endeavour, however, was having one of its periodic sprints, and by 1476 William Caxton (who learnt his filthy disgusting ways in Cologne) had set up his printing press in Westminster. All too soon, it looked as though Titivillus’s deal was worthless.

You might have thought that such a development was pretty much the end for the ugly little runt. You might have thought that one of Lucifer’s slicker lieutenants would have called Titivillus in for a personal assessment meeting and explained how, regrettably, some personnel were no longer required. But the Devil never fires his staff; he simply demotes them, drops their wages and forces them to carry on in ever-worsening conditions.

And so believe me, the pot-bellied little son of a bitch is still alive and well in twenty-first-century London, a maestro of distraction, kicking around my attic flat, sulkily intent on fucking things up just for the hell of it, whenever opportunity presents. Unfortunately for him, I don’t take on much biblical work. But what can he do? There aren’t that many calligraphers around these days and he has to take whatever he can get. Nevertheless, an eternal pact cannot be undone: he remains the Devil’s envoy and I remain confederate. Which suits me well. For should I make the occasional mistake, should I slip a little here and there, then absolution is surely only a formality.

Surely.

PART ONE

1. Confined Love

Some man unworthy to be possessor

Of old or new love, himself being false or weak,

Thought his pain and shame would be lesser,

If on womankind he might his anger wreak,

And thence a law did grow,

One should but one man know;

But are other creatures so?

Are sun, moon, or stars by law forbidden,

To smile where they list, or lend away their light?

Are birds divorced, or are they chidden

If they leave their mate, or lie abroad a-night?

Beasts do no jointures lose

Though they new lovers choose,

But we are made worse than those.

Who e’er rigged fair ship to lie in harbours,

And not to seek new lands, or not to deal withal?

Or built fair houses, set trees, and arbours,

Only to lock up, or else let them fall?

Good is not good, unless

A thousand it possess,

But doth waste with greediness.

Like so many people living through this great time in human history, I am not at all sure what is right and what is wrong. So if I appear a little slow to grasp the moral dimensions of what follows, I’m afraid I will have to ask you to bear with me. Apologies. It’s a difficult age.

Actually, I do not believe I was behaving all that badly when these withering atrocities first began. (And if it would now be helpful for me to admit that mine was a crime of sorts, then I feel I must also be allowed to maintain that I did not deserve the punishment.) Rather, I seem to recall that I was trying to be as careful and as sensitive and as discreet as possible; it was William who was acting like a fool.

We had finally come to a halt in the middle of ‘The Desire for Order’. Lucy and Nathalie were somewhere up ahead – progressing unabashed through the room designated ‘Modern Life’. I had been hoping to slip away without detection. But matters were not proceeding to plan. For the last two minutes, William had been following me through the gallery with the air of a pantomime detective: two steps behind, stopping only a slapstick fraction after me, and then raking his eyes accusingly up and down my person as if I were responsible for the summary immolation of an entire pension of pensioners or some such outrage.

He spoke in a vociferous whisper: ‘Jasper, what – in the name of arse – are you doing?’

‘Ssshh.’ The artificial lights hummed. ‘I am attempting to enjoy my birthday.’

‘Well, why do you keep running away from us?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Of course you are.’ His voice was becoming progressively louder. ‘You are deliberately refusing to enter “Modern Life” – over there.’ He pointed. ‘And you keep drifting back into “the Desire for Order” – in here.’ He pointed again, but this time at his feet and with a flourish. ‘Don’t think I haven’t been watching you.’

‘For Christ’s sake William, if you must know –’

‘I must.’

‘I am trying to get off this floor altogether and back upstairs into “Nude Action Body” without anybody noticing. So it would be very helpful if you would stop drawing attention to us and go and catch up with the girls. Why, exactly, are you following me?’

‘Because you’ve got the booze and I think you should open it. Immediately.’ He paused to draw a stiffening breath. ‘And because you always look oddly attractive when you are up to something.’

‘I’m not up to anything and I haven’t got the wine: I stowed it inside Lucy’s bag, which is now safely inside a cloakroom locker.’ I feigned interest in the mangled wire that we were facing.

‘You didn’t. My God. Well, we must mount a rescue. We must spring the noble prisoner from its vile cell straightaway! The Americans put their cream sodas in those lockers – I’ve seen them do it – and their … their bum bags. And God only knows what’s in Lucy’s bag: women’s products probably. And cheap Hungarian biros. You realize –’

‘Will you please keep your voice down?’ I frowned. An elderly couple wearing ‘I love Houston’ T-shirts seemed to be choking to death on the far side of the installation. ‘Anyway, Lucy uses an ink pen.’

But William was undeterred. ‘You realize that you may have ruined that great Burgundy’s life. One of the most elegant vintages of the last millennium traumatized beyond recovery within minutes of your having taken possession. It’s barbarous. I am holding you personally resp—’

‘William, for fuck’s sake. If you must talk so bloody loudly, then can you at least try to sound more like a human being from the present century? And less like a fucking ponce.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Besides, you’re not allowed to wander around Tate Modern swigging booze. It’s against the rules.’

‘Balls. What rules? That’s a 1990 Chambertin Clos de Bèze you’ve got locked up in there like a … like a common Chianti. Bought by me – especially for you, my dear Jasper, on this, the occasion of your twenty-ninth birthday. How could they stop us drinking it? They wouldn’t dare.’

I mimicked his ridiculous manner: ‘As well you know, my dear William, that bottle needs opening for at least two hours before we could even go near it. It’s my wine now and I forbid you to molest it before it’s had a chance to develop. Look at you, you’re slathering like a paedophile.’

‘Well, I think you’re being very unfair. You drag your friends out to look at all this – all this bric-à-brac and mutilated genitalia and then you deny us essential refreshment. Of course I am desperate. Of course I need a drink. This isn’t art, this is wreckage.’

I took a few steps away from him and turned to face a large canvas covered in heavy ridges of dun brown paint. William followed and did the same, tilting his head to one side in a parody of viewers of modern art the world over.

‘Actually,’ he said, a little less audibly, ‘I was meaning the small bottle of speciality vodka that Nathalie bought you. I thought you might have stashed it in your coat or something. I only need a painkiller to get me through the next room.’ Mock grievance now yielded to genuine curiosity: ‘Anyway, you haven’t answered my question.’

‘That’s because you are a complete penis, William.’

‘Why are you in such a hurry to leave us? What’s so special about “Nude Action Body”?’ He looked sideways at me but I kept my attention on the painting. ‘Is it that girl you were staring at?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, it is. It’s that girl from upstairs.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘The one you were pretending not to follow before we came down here.’ He paused. ‘I knew it. I knew it.’

‘OK. Yes. It is.’

He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘I thought you were supposed to be stopping all that. What was it you said?’ He composed his face as if to deliver Hamlet’s saddest soliloquy. ‘ “I can’t go on like this, Will, I am going mad. Oh Will, save me from the quagmire of womankind. No more of this relentless sex. Oh handsome Will, I have to stop. I must stop. I will be true.”’

I ignored him. ‘William, I need you to buy me some time and stop fucking around. Lucy and Nathalie will be back in here looking for us any second. Go and distract them. Be nice. Be selfless. Help me.’

He ignored me. ‘OK, maybe not the “handsome Will” bit – but those were more or less your words. And now look at you: you’re right back to where you were a year ago. You can’t leave your flat without trying to sleep with half of London. And never a moment’s cease to consider what the fuck you are doing or – heaven forbid – why.’

I walked towards the exit on the far side of the room and considered a collection of icons made to evoke the Russian Orthodox style. The figures were blurred and distorted and appeared to recede into their frames, so that it was impossible to tell whether they were indeed hallowed saints or grotesque contorted animals or merely half-smudged lines signifying nothing.

‘Look, Will, I need fifteen minutes. Will you keep an eye on the others for me – please? Don’t let them leave this floor. If they look like they’re moving, set off the fire alarm or something. I don’t want to fuck up and have to concoct some stupid bullshit. Not tonight. It would be awful. Lucy gets so uptight. I just want everyone to have as relaxed and pleasant a dinner as possible this evening.’

‘The fire alarm?’

‘Yes, it stops the escalators working.’

He shook his head, but there was amusement in his eyes.

‘I’m sorry. Will. But I swear to you: that girl winked at me and she is far too pretty for me to ignore. Admit it, she is. What am I supposed to do? I can’t just let it go. Come on. Millions of men would pay to be winked at by girls like her. I have a responsibility to act. Fifteen minutes max.’

He smiled. ‘Well, go on then: get on with it. But if the authorities arrest me for false alarms I shall instantly confess that you made me do it. I shall explain that you are dangerously persuasive and the worst sort of unscrupulous libertine –’

‘I’m exceptionally scrupulous.’

‘And I shall tell them that you are incapable of behaving in a decent manner towards friends – or even your own girlfriend – and that you deserve to be taught a serious lesson. See you in fifteen.’

‘Thank you, William.’

‘And don’t forget to check for sisters.’

Now, I don’t want to start blaming Cécile for the first wave of demoralizing set-backs that followed hard on the heels of this, the otherwise inauspicious evening of my twenty-ninth birthday, but as far as immediate causes of disaster go, then she has to shoulder full responsibility: J’accuse Cécile, la fille française. Had she not winked at me, I probably wouldn’t have risked it. But what could be the purpose of such fetching Mediterranean looks as hers, if not to fetch?

All the same, the fire alarm surprised everybody.

Chaos followed fast, rushing through ‘Nude Action Body’ like a messenger from the Front with news of approaching armies. From hidden antechambers and doors marked ‘private’ dozens of orange-clad ushers emerged and began urgently to usher; the lifts stopped; small blue lights flashed from odd places high on the walls; and (as if all this were not encouragement enough) an unnervingly measured female voice interrupted the revels every thirty seconds to spell the situation out in an exciting variety of languages. ‘This is a routine emergency. Please leave the building by the nearest fire exit and follow the advice of the officials. Thank you.’

I had only just returned to the fifth floor and had taken no more than three steps into the gallery proper. But now I doubled back and stood to one side by the wide emergency exit doors at the top of the escalators, waiting for Cécile. Along with everyone else, she was sure to leave this way. There was no longer any need to seek her. And I was rather enjoying all the panic.

Parents issued taut-voiced instructions to their charges. Scandinavians strode calmly towards the emergency stairs. Italian men put their arms around Italian women. A litter of art-college day-outers roused themselves reluctantly from their beanbags. Two children came careering out of ‘Staging Discord’ opposite. And an American woman began to scream ‘oh my God, oh my God’.

Given that Irony and Futility still seemed to be filling in for God and Beauty on the art circuit – the thought occurred to me that had I been filming the whole thing, I could perhaps have submitted the results for exhibition myself; perhaps a showing in ‘History Memory Society’: ‘People from All Over the World Leaving in Uncertainty’ (Jasper Jackson, calligrapher and video artist).

Of course I didn’t actually know that Cécile’s name was Cécile as I fell into place three or four people behind her. (Jostle, jockey, joke and jostle all the way down six flights of unapologetically functional fire stairs.) I didn’t know anything about her at all, except that she had short, choppy, boyish, black hair, a cute denim skirt cut above the knee, thin brown bare legs and unseasonable flip-flops, which flapped on every step as she went. And that she had (quite definitely) winked at me as we circled Rodin’s Kiss.

Outside, safely asquare the paving slabs of the South Bank, I looked hastily around. The light was thickening. St Paul’s across the Thames – a fat bishop boxed in and stranded flat on his back – and two bloated seagulls, making heavy weather of the homeward journey upstream. Crowds continued to eddy from the building but there was as yet no sign of William or Nathalie or Lucy’s adorable light-brown bob. Still, I had to act quickly.

Cécile was standing with her back to me, looking across the river.

‘Hi.’ I said.

She turned and then smiled, an elbow jutting out over the railings. ‘Oh, hello.’

‘That was quite exciting.’ I returned her smile.

‘You think there is a fire?’

I looked doubtful. ‘Probably terrorists or art protestors or rogue vegetarians.’

‘I wonder what they save from the flames?’ She bent an idle knee in my direction and swivelled her toe on the sole of her flip-flops. ‘The paintings or the objets?’

‘Good question.’

‘Maybe in an emergency they have an order for what to keep – and they begin at the top and then descend until everything is burning too much.’

‘Or maybe,’ I said, ‘they just let the bastard go until it’s finished so that they can open up afterwards as a new sort of gallery: Burnt Modern. A new kind of art.’

‘Perhaps that’s what the protesters want – a new kind of art.’ She was a born flirt.

I met her eye and moved us on. ‘They evacuated the building very quickly.’

‘Yes. But there are some people still coming out, I think.’ She gestured. ‘I like how in an emergency everybody starts to talk. As if because there is a disaster, now we can all be friends happy together.’ She looked past me for a second. ‘Will they let us back in, do you think?’

‘I’m not sure. But I am supposed to be going to a restaurant at eight so I don’t think I will be able to wait. This might take a couple of hours.’ I paused. ‘I should find my friends and see if they are OK.’

‘Me too. I have already lost them once today – when we were on the London Eye.’

‘How long are you in London for?’

‘I live here.’ She frowned slightly – amused disparagement.

I pretended to be embarrassed.

She relented. ‘I am teaching here.’

‘French?’

‘Yes.’ A pout masquerading as a smile.

‘You have an e-mail address?’

‘Yes.’

‘If I write to you, do you think that you’ll reply?’

‘Maybe. It depends what you say.’

I found William sitting on a bench with a diesel-coated pigeon and the man who had earlier been selling the Big Issue outside the main entrance.

‘Jasper – Ryan. Ryan – Jasper. We haven’t thought of a name for this little chap yet.’ He indicated the creature now pecking at a chocolate wrapper.

‘Where’s Lucy?’ I asked, acknowledging Ryan.

‘She’s fetching her bag with Nat. Did you meet anyone nice’ William winked exaggeratedly ‘– in the toilets?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

William did an American accent: ‘I hope you were real gentle with him.’

Ryan snorted and got up. ‘See you Thursday, Will mate,’ he said, ‘and let’s hope this new bloke knows how to deal with those fucking tambourine bastards.’

‘See you later.’ William raised an arm as Ryan left.

I sat down and was about to speak but William motioned me to be quiet.

‘Here they come,’ he said, ‘they’ve seen us.’

Lucy and Nathalie were making their way towards the bench. William addressed the pigeon: ‘You’ll have to piss off now, old chap, but we’ll catch up again soon, I hope. Let me know how the diet works out.’

Before we go much further, I should explain that William is one of my firmest friends from the freezing Fenland days of my tertiary education. (Philosophy, I’m afraid, man’s most defiant folly.) I can still remember the pale afternoon, a week or so after we had all arrived for our first year, when we were walking back from a betting shop together and he came out to me. It was going to be very awkward, he confided, and he was at a bit of a dead end with the whole idea because – apart from his sister, who didn’t count – he hadn’t really met any women before now, but – how could he put this?– he was rather worried that he might not be homosexual and – as I seemed to be rather, well, in the know on the subject, as it were – had I any suggestions as to next steps vis-à-vis the ladies?

Unfortunately, several centuries in the highest ranks of government, church and army had left the men in his family quite unable to imagine women, let alone talk to them. Indeed, William suspected that he was the first male child in sixteen generations not to turn out gay. As I could imagine, this was a severe blow both to him and his lineage but he had tried it with other boys at school on several occasions and there was absolutely nothing doing. The truth of the matter was that he liked girls; and that was that. And as he was now nearing twenty, he rather felt that he should be getting on with it. Could I offer any pointers?

Naturally, things have moved on a good deal since then and these days Will is regularly trumpeted by various tedious publications as one of the most eligible men in London. He is an invaluable ally and well known on the doors of all good venues – early evening, private and exclusive as well as late night, public and squalid. I regret to say, however, that his approach remains erratic and hopelessly undisciplined. Though many women find him attractive, the execution of his actual seductions is not always the most appropriate. It is as if a strain of latent homosexuality bedevils his genes – like an over-attentive waiter at a business lunch.

All else aside, William is the most effortlessly charming man that anybody who meets him has ever met. He is also genuinely kind. And though he claims to feel terribly let down by the astonishing triviality of modern life, this is merely an intellectual arras behind which he chooses to conceal a rare species of idealism. He does not believe in God or mankind but he visits churches whenever he is abroad and runs a music charity for tramps.

On the subject of William’s relationship with Nathalie … Back in March, he claimed that it was purely platonic and I have to say that I think he was telling the truth. Under light questioning, he explained that it was only in this way that he could maintain the exclusivity of their intimacy since – of the few women who shared his bed from time to time – Nathalie was the only one with whom he was not having sex. They were therefore bound together by uncompromised affection and happily unable to cheat on one another. (She, too, I understood, was at complete liberty.) This approach, he confided, was an ingenious variation on the arrangement his forefathers had shared with their various wives since they had first come to prominence (under Edward II); dynastic obligations aside, they had kept sex resolutely outside of marriage, thereby removing all serious woes, threats and resentment from their lives.

A little before midnight, the birthday evening’s rightful enchaînement having been long re-established, Lucy and I were alone at last, intimately ensconced at the corner of the largest table in La Belle Epoque, my favourite French restaurant. We were considering the last of our dessert with a certain languid desire, and feeling about as happy as two young lovers can reasonably expect to feel in a London so beleaguered by medieval licensing laws. A little drunk perhaps, a little reckless with the cross-table kissing, a little laissez-faire with the last of the Latour; but undeniably at ease with one another and, well, having a good time. The bill was paid and my friends had all left – William and Nathalie among the last to go, along with Don, another university friend, over from New York, with his wife, Cal, and Pete, Don’s fashion-photographer brother, who had arrived with a beautiful Senegalese woman called Angel.

If pressed, the casual observer would probably have informed you that he was watching a boyfriend and girlfriend quietly canoodling while they awaited a final pair of espressos. If he was any good at description, this observer might have gone on to say that the woman was around twenty-eight, five-foot six or seven, slim, with dead straight, bobbed, light-brown hair, which – he might have further noticed – she had a habit of hooking behind her ears. Had he dashed over and stolen my chair while I visited the gents’, he would also have been able to tell you that her face was very slightly freckled, principally across the bridge of her nose, that she had thin lips (but a nice smile), that her eyes were a beseeching shade of green and that she liked to sit straight in her chair, cross her legs and loosen her right shoe so she could balance it, swinging a little, on her extended big toe. He might have rounded the whole thing off with some remarks about how – even now – England can still turn out these roses every once in a while. But at this stage we would surely have to dispute his claims to being casual and tell him to fuck off.

It is more or less true to say that back then, Lucy and I were more or less a year into it – our relationship, that is. I’m not sure why – these things happen …

Actually, I am sure why: because I liked Lucy very much. That is to say, I still like Lucy very much. Which is to say I have always liked Lucy very much. Lucy is the sort of woman who makes the human race worth the running. She’s not stupid or simpering, and she only laughs when something is funny. She’s intelligent and she knows her history. Yes, she can be cautious, but she’s quick-witted (a lawyer by profession) and she will smile when she sees she has won a point. Then she’ll pass on because she’s as sensitive to other people’s embarrassment as quicksilver to the temperature of a room. She keeps lists of things to do. She remembers what people have said, but doesn’t hold it against them. She seldom talks about her family. And she has no time for magazines or horoscopes. If you were sitting with us in some newly opened London eatery, privately wishing you had an ashtray for your cigarette, you might well find that she had discreetly nudged one to a place just by your elbow. Which is how we met.

Even so, it is with regret that I must add that Lucy is a nutcase. But I didn’t know that then. That all came later.

‘Close your eyes,’ she said, putting her finger to my lips for good measure.

I did as I was told and lowered my voice. ‘You haven’t organized a –’

‘Too late. It’s tough. I’ve got you a big cake with candles and all the waiters are going to join in with “Happy Birthday to You”, so you’ll just have to sit still and act appreciative.’

I heard the rustle of a bag and the stocky chink of espresso cups.

‘OK, open your eyes.’

A young waiter with a napkin over his shoulder hovered nearby – curious. A neatly wrapped present lay on the table.

Lucy smiled, infectiously. ‘Go ahead: guess.’

I leant across and kissed her.

‘Guess.’

‘Earrings?’

‘You wish.’

‘A gold locket with a picture of Princess Diana?’

‘Oh, go on, for God’s sake … open it.’

I undid her neat wrapping and unclasped the dark velvet case: a gentleman’s watch with a leather strap, three hands and Roman numerals. I held it carefully in my palm.

‘So now you have no excuses.’ Her eyes were full of delight. ‘You can never be late again.’

I felt that tug of gladness that you get when someone you care about is happy. ‘I won’t be late again, I promise,’ I said.

‘Not ever?’

‘Not for as long as the watch keeps time.’

‘It has a twenty-five-year guarantee.’

‘Well, that’s at least twenty-five years of me being on time then.’

On the face of it ‘Confined Love’ is one of John Donne’s more transparent poems: a man railing against the confinement of fidelity. Neither birds nor beasts are faithful, says his narrator, nor do they risk reprimand or sanctions when they lie abroad. Sun, moon and stars cast their light where they like, ships are not rigged to lie in harbours, nor houses built to be locked up … The metaphors are soon backed up nose to tail, honking their horns, like off-road vehicles in a downtown jam.

On the face of it, Donne, the young man about town, Master of the Revels at Lincoln’s Inn, seems to be striding robustly through his lines, booting the sanctimonious aside with a ribald rhythm and easy rhyme, on his way to wherever the next assignation happens to be. But actually, that’s not the point of the poem. That’s not what ‘Confined Love’ is about at all.

2. The Prohibition

Take heed of loving me,

At least remember, I forbade it thee;

Some introductions. My name, as you may have gathered, is Jasper Jackson. I am twenty-nine years old. And I am a calligrapher.

My birthday, 9th March, falls exactly midway between Valentine’s Day and April Fool’s – except when there’s a leap year, when it comes closer to the latter.

What else? I am an orphan. I have no recollection of the day itself but it would appear that my father, the young and dashing George Jackson, wrapped both himself and my mother, Elizabeth, around a Devon tree while trying to defeat his friends in their start-of-the-holiday motor race from Paddington to Penzance. My mother did not die straightaway but I was never taken to visit her in hospital.

From the age of four onwards (and very luckily for me), my upbringing and education was placed in the hands of Grace Jackson, my father’s mother, at whose Oxford home I was staying when news of the accident arrived. In a way, therefore, my entire life can be viewed as one long, extended holiday at my grandmother’s. And I am pleased to report that I can recall nothing but happiness from my early years. Even the reprimands I remember only with affection.

It is a hot summer afternoon. The whole town is wearing shorts or less. My grandmother and I stand contentedly in the grocer’s queue. We are buying black cherries – a special treat – as a prelude to our usual Saturday afternoon tea. (Grandmother has a fondness for scones on Saturdays.) I am holding the fruit in a brown paper bag, waiting to hand them up to be weighed. My movements go unnoticed because I am living at waist height (oh, happy days). I glance around. I see a red-haired girl about my age passing by the vegetable stands outside. One hand is holding her mother’s and the other is clutching the sticky stick of an orange iced-lollipop, which is cocked at a dangerous angle and visibly melting as she half-skips along.

I move without thinking. Still carrying the cherries, in a second I am out of the shop and on to the street. I turn one corner, then another. For the first time in my life – with exaggerated care – I cross a main road alone. There is a cry behind me – my grandmother. Then comes a shout – a man from the shop running along the pavement after me. The girl turns, wrist pivoting on her mother’s arm; the ice slides clean off and drops to the pavement. My sweetheart registers the disaster for a long moment, then her grey eyes come slowly up and look directly into mine. I too am visibly melting. I am five or maybe six.

But scolding was never my grandmother’s strong suit. Rather, she believed in punishment by improvement. (Perhaps this was because we had, between us, lost too many relatives to waste time being cross with each other: my grandfather had died suddenly, while in Cairo on business just after the Suez crisis.) So once we had returned the cherries, there were a few serious words – ‘Jasper, you cannot go anywhere by yourself until you are twelve, do you understand?’ – and then it was off to the library with me for a miserable afternoon indoors. Which was a blow because I had been planning to play on, my bike with Douglas Wilson from down the road.

I say miserable, but actually the library in question was beautiful, the most beautiful in Britain. Although, due to the war. Grandmother never finished her post-graduate work (something to do with medieval French), Somerville College felt that she was far too clever a scholar to lose. And when she returned from Egypt with my father still a boy and a pitiful widow’s pension, they quickly made her deputy librarian. By the time I arrived on the scene, two decades later, she had become an authority on late medieval manuscripts at the glorious Bodleian, a building in which, I maintain, it is impossible to be anything but enthralled – even when, ostensibly, one is being punished.

Between the ages of four and twelve years, I must have spent more time in the Bodleian than most academics manage in their entire lives. Often during the school holidays (although rarely on Saturdays) my grandmother would sit me down at the table near the reference section that was reserved for members of staff, and bring me a book to read. ‘It didn’t seem to do your father any good in the long run, Jasper,’ she once said, ‘but at least he knew a few things before he died, which is all we can any of us really hope for.’

Evidently, my grandmother was following exactly the same method of combining childcare with a career that she had when bringing up my father; and, like him, I think I became something of a mascot among the librarians, many of whom used to mind me on odd days when Grandmother had to go and give a lecture somewhere or there was a serious section count going on. Indeed, over the years, just about anybody who was anyone at the university came to know me. People would stop by to say hello on their way in or out, and ask me what I was reading, and sometimes (as in the case of Professor Williams, Grandmother’s friend) take me down to the canteen for lunch, and even bring me presents (which, at Christmas, I used to have to hide to avoid giving the impression that I was getting too many).

If, however, I was in need of ‘improving’, as was the case on the afternoon of the cherries, my grandmother would sit me down and, instead of giving me a book, place a large illuminated manuscript before me. She would then provide me with a range of sharpened pencils and some stiff paper and instruct me to copy out an entire page – ‘as exactly as you can, please, Jasper, I want your letters to look just like those. No noise. No trouble. Come and find me when you have finished.’

Secretly, I loved the task, but I had to pretend otherwise in case Grandmother realized and changed my punishment to something awful like washing cars, which is what Douglas had to do when he was in trouble.

The fateful cherry-day page was in Latin of course, but I remember asking one of the Saturday assistants what it was about and he told me it was a prayer written in 1206 by a monk, who was hiding in the Sierra Norte above old Seville, asking God to deliver him from the women in his dreams.

My grandmother and I decided we should stay in Oxford until I was twelve. Then we moved to Avignon, where she had been offered a job cataloguing some of the exquisite work left behind by the scribes who lived there during the hundred years of papal occupation until 1409. I attended a lycée while she worked in the Livree Ceccano, the municipal library, which was housed in what had originally been one of the many sumptuous palaces built by the cardinals who came to take up expedient residence near their pontiff.

In two years her task was complete and our next destination was the German university town of Heidelberg, where she led a restoration programme, which brought some of the earliest Reformation documents back to light.

‘Finally the boss, eh, Jasper – at sixty-three,’ she said. ‘Who says that women are held back in this clever old world of ours? And all because I bothered to learn German in the war.’

I never noticed how much money my grandmother had, which suggests she had enough, but we were by no means well off – a librarian’s salary is thin, even at the best of times. Nor is restoration exactly lucrative. I seem to remember that we spent a lot of time waiting for buses and persuading one another that second-hand clothes lent a person an air of bohemian charm unavailable to those lesser folk whose imaginations could not travel beyond the high street.

In Heidelberg, as in Avignon, our flat was small, designed for one not two. However, because the old universities always own the best property, the building we shared was both characterful and well situated. We lived at the top of an old house on Plock, an oddly named medieval street, that ran parallel to the Hauptstrasse and was overlooked by the castle. I should also mention that on the ground floor was the finest delicatessen in Germany – run by my two friends, Hans and Elke. They are still there now although Hans has grown a moustache to celebrate his fiftieth birthday and Elke is refusing to allow him into the shop until he relents. My first real job – Saturdays and late-night Wednesday – was behind their counter.

As a hollow-cheeked, fourteen-year-old English boy, now with a French accent and ever darker hair, I devoted the next four years, with increasing success, to the twin joys of reading and the pursuit of my pretty Rhineland classmates.

At school, I was never popular with the other boys in the usual kinds of ways: I was not a natural team captain, I did not draw an appreciative gang around me at the back of the class, and I never got around to beating the shit out of anyone. In fact, from about thirteen onwards, as far as I was concerned, male company was a complete waste of time. What can one boy teach another? Very little. Conkers perhaps.

No. The only thing that ever got me thinking, got me wondering, got my heart kicking with the sheer excitement of life, was the girls.

The girls were everything – their opinion, their glances, their moods; the way they walked or changed their hair; what they said, did, wanted to become; where they lived, how they had their bedrooms; which film stars they liked and why; who they read, who they imagined themselves with at night, which clothes they preferred at weekends; what they liked boys to say, why, and how often; what they wanted to buy; what they disliked about their brothers, fathers, uncles, each other; what amused them, what sickened them; how they put their socks on, how they took them off; when and how often they shaved their legs; what they thought about school, tangerines, Goethe, their mothers, holding hands, history, rivers, Portugal, and kissing strangers – all of it mattered. I had to know. To my mind, the girls were the point of being alive.

Two days after we arrived in Germany, I discovered that it was possible to walk along the narrow wooden balcony outside my bedroom window, climb over the end and swing across without too much peril on to the fire escape. Persuading my female classmates to accompany me up those skeletal steps at night was, I think, the first serious labour set for me by that merciless taskmaster whom Donne refers to as the ‘devil Love’. But I was always a good student and I studied hard.

I learned, for example, that a young lady who has just emerged, blinking, back into the forbidding glare of the real world from, say, a cinema would adamantly refuse to scale a precipitous iron stairway merely to clamber into the bedroom of an over-eager adolescent male.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Too dangerous,’ claimed Agnes, an even-tempered girl with dark corkscrew hair, who sat as close to me as possible in chemistry lessons.

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I do it all the time.’

‘Really?’

‘No. I mean I climb up there by myself all the time.’

‘I was joking. I know what you meant.’ She smiled.

‘Oh.’ I clicked my tongue. ‘Anyway, why not, Agnes?’

‘My clothes would get covered in rust.’ She ran her finger along the handrail as if to prove her point.

‘Not if you took them off.’

‘Jasper!’

I grinned. ‘Why not then?’

‘We might get found out. What if I got stuck?’

‘You won’t. It’s dead easy – I’ll help.’ I made as if to start up the first step. ‘Who’s going to find out?’

‘Your grandmother for one –’

‘She’s gone to bed early. Professor Williams is coming tomorrow. And her room is on the other side. Anyway she doesn’t mind.’

I stood, stalled on the lowest rung. Agnes looked suspicious again: ‘How do you know she doesn’t mind?’

‘She told me.’

Frank disbelief. ‘She told you?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Once. Anyway, Agnes, why not – just for a bit?’

She said nothing for a moment – vacillating perhaps – then she shook her head. ‘Because I have to be home by midnight or Dad comes out looking for me.’ She made a pretend-serious face: ‘We’re Catholics.’

‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘Plus he knows I am with you so he’ll probably set off at quarter to.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘He thinks that girls are in danger the minute it turns midnight.’ She widened her eyes histrionically.

I took the step back down. ‘OK then – it’s only eleven-thirty, so I could rush you home now, get myself in his good books and bank an extra half an hour so that we can stay out until twelve-thirty next time. That way if you do suddenly turn sex-mad next Friday, you’ll have someone to talk to about it.’

‘Who says I am free next Friday?’

Sure enough, the next Friday but one I learnt another lesson: that the most efficient way from the cinema to my bedroom was not necessarily the most direct. Take lovely Agnes first on a walk up the crooked steps to the old Schloss, and wander there among the battlements; look down upon the river, see how the moonlight casts the water in silver as if it were a necklace running through the town (I was only fourteen); imagine how the sons of the city merchants would leave their beds and scale the ramparts to meet secretly with the daughters of the court – and then bring her back into town, and presto, what was previously a grotty and precarious fire escape has miraculously become un escalier d’amour. Seduction, I realized, was all about setting an appropriate scene – a scene into which the subject can willingly walk and there abandon her former censorious sense of self to take on a new and flattering identity. As we all know, it becomes more complicated when everyone grows up but even the most recalcitrant old hag once dreamed herself a Juliet.

Nowadays Agnes teaches chemistry in Baden Baden and has two children. She writes me the occasional letter – and I write back; but we dare not meet up in case something happens. Catholics.

After Heidelberg, it was back home to England – to the icy Fens, there to wow all comers with my deft grasp of the German philosophers. This was not, in any sense, fun, but if I thought my chosen subject unyielding, it was as nothing compared to the arduousness of attempting to sleep with the women. Try as I may, I can scarcely exaggerate the skill and endurance that a young man is required to develop if he wishes to navigate the freezing sea of female sexuality that surrounds a Cambridge education.

Imagine the most socially awkward, sexually confused and neurotic people in the whole world and put them all in the same place for three uneasy years: that’s Cambridge University. And don’t let anyone tell you different. Talk about sex by all means – talk about it till you’re blue in the balls – but you’re sick if you even think about doing it. Worse than sick: you’re dangerous.

Nonetheless, I had my successes amid the crunching icebergs and the raging Arctic winds and fared better than most of my fellows, many of whom were lost for ever – buried like Captain Scott beneath the tundra or fallen, snow-blind and lust-numbed, into the ice-tombs of the Nuptial Crevasse. Having overcome such hazardous and bitter conditions, I arrived in London full of triumph and resource.

Then I really started work.

In fact, during the next seven years, I think I must have had some sort of a physical relationship with pretty much all the women in the city: young, old, dark, fair, married or lesbian; Asian, African, American, European, even Belgian; tall, short, thin or hefty; women so clever that they couldn’t stand the claustrophobia of their own consciousness; women so thick that each new sentence was a triumph of heartbreaking effort; fast and loose, slow and tight; sexual athletes, potato sacks; witches, angels, succubae and nymphs; women who could bore you to sleep even as you entered the bedroom; women who could keep you up all night disturbing the deepest pools of your psyche; aunts, daughters, mothers and nieces; crumpets, strumpets, chicks and tarts; damsels, dames, babes and dolls; all that I desired and quite a few I didn’t. And then, when I was well and truly satisfied that there was nothing more to want, I did it all again.

It was a difficult time for everyone.

There were nights I could not go out for fear of fury or beatings, or grim-faced boyfriends bent on brutal reprisals; and yet neither could I stay in for fear of a deranged and raging flatmate. (I know, I know, but it was his girlfriend who started it). Once, things got so bad that I had to spend a couple of nights at one of William’s tramp hostels. But then I fucked the cook. (Largely because I caught sight of her using fresh coriander in the soup. It was pure lust, but sixteen stone, for Christ’s sake, and forty fucking three.)

When I met Lucy, she was my way out. My best hope.

But I am getting distracted. I should explain how I became a professional calligrapher.

After I arrived in London, I did quite a few jobs, all of them monumentally senseless and too depressing to go into here. From what I could discover, the corporate arena of employment is best compared to a stinking circus, full of grovelling clowns, fawning jugglers and boot-licking buskers, all running around in circles as they frantically try to outdo one another in feats of sycophancy and obsequiousness and irrelevance. There is no ring-master and not a single thing is ever accomplished to the wider benefit of mankind.

No wonder then, that on my twenty-sixth birthday, worn out and wretched, having resigned from yet another job, I journeyed to Rome to visit my grandmother, who had finally ‘retired’, taking a surprisingly lucrative consultancy role at the Vatican.

Professional calligraphy was her idea.

‘The truth of the matter, Jasper, is that all calligraphers are to some extent in league with the Devil,’ Grandmother explained, carefully slicing through a truly delicious vitello tonnato at II Vicolo, our favourite trattoria, on the Via del Moro, in the heart of beautiful Trastevere. ‘You might want to bear that in mind before you decide to pursue it. All other arts in the world have their patron saint, only calligraphy has a patron demon.’

‘Serious?’

‘Yes. Look it up: St Dunstan for musicians, St Luke for artists, St Boniface for tailors – I even found a patron saint for arms dealers once – St Adrian of Nicomedia. Don’t underestimate the capacity of the Roman Church for intervention. But you’ll never come across the patron saint of calligraphers: they have thrown their lot in with the opposition. It’s well known.’

‘Not that well known.’

‘Among people who read, it is well known.’

‘Who read Latin manuscripts from the Middle Ages.’

‘Among people who read.’ She looked at me directly for a moment – her eyes blue and always watery; then her face cracked into the familiar lines of her smile. ‘The patron devil’s name is Titivillus. He crops up all over from about 1285 onwards, especially in the margin doodles. I’ve mentioned him to you before, I’m sure I have.’

A typical grandmother trap. If I agreed that she had indeed mentioned him, then why had I forgotten? If I shook my head and claimed that she had not, then she would probably be able to cite time and place.

‘Yes, actually, now you bring it up, I do remember something you told me about the little calligraphy devil – or was it Professor Williams who explained him to me? How is Professor Williams, by the way?’

‘He’s very well, thank you.’ She took a sip of her Dolcetto and tried to frown, ‘Anyway, if you are going to make a living out of calligraphy, then you’ll have to make a deal with the Devil.’

I shrugged. A motorino buzzed by – the girl on the back still fiddling with her helmet strap as her tanned knees joggled slightly with the cobbles.

Grandmother finished what was left on her plate and arranged her cutlery neatly before carefully brushing some breadcrumbs into her palm. ‘Don’t worry, there are lots of advantages. Guaranteed absolution from sin for one. I imagine that could come in quite handy.’

I returned to the last of my rigatoni.

She picked up her glass and settled in her chair. ‘Seriously, Jasper, the main problem is that although you are very good, you have no experience of commercial art – of the art of art-for-money business. And you don’t know anything about the more technical side of things, like how to prepare vellum or which pigments to use for which col—’

‘How much do you get for a commission?’

‘Hang on a second. Slow down.’ Grandmother scowled. ‘Commissions do not just fall out of the bloody sky.’

‘Of course not, I mean –’

‘First, I think, you’ll have to go on the course at Roehampton.’ She raised her finger again to stop me interrupting. ‘I know you think you don’t need to but there’s a whole world of craft skills behind the art – which flight feathers are the best and why, how to cure the quills with hot sand, layout grids, organic pigments, not to mention gilding or mixing gesso …’ She shook her head. ‘You don’t know any of that. And then there’s the history too, and the theory behind the scripts. Also, I imagine the teachers will help you understand what’s going on right now – on the commercial side of things. You might make some good gallery contacts there. And, apart from anything else, there’s no harm in having a qualification that everybody can recognize.’

I nodded. ‘Right. I accept I will probably have to go on the course.’

‘Not probably. Definitely.’

‘But surely it can’t be all hand-to-mouth nightmares – trying to sell stuff at exhibitions? I thought your friends all worked on commissions. What about Susan or that man who’s doing the Bible thing? Surely there must be some way of getting a salary.’

‘I’m not saying that it is all hand to mouth. There are commissions to be had, and good ones. Of course there are. But you should look at the facts.’ She took another sip of wine, pausing to taste it. ‘There are two hundred or so professionals already working in England – all ahead of you in the queue. Not to mention all the locally celebrated amateurs.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Of that two hundred probably fewer than fifty actually earn a living with quill and ink. Most of them are doing wedding invitations or the menus of pseudo-Bavarian restaurant chains.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Of that fifty I would say fewer than twenty are regularly commissioned to produce formal manuscripts and even then, most do a bit of parliamentary or legal work whenever they have to. And of that last twenty, there are fewer than half a dozen artists who can afford to keep themselves in mozzarella di bufala.’

I broke some bread and dipped it in the olive oil. ‘OK. So how much do they get for a commission?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘Lots of things: on talent, of course, but also on reputation, contacts and – most of all – who their clients are.’ Grandmother raised her eyebrows. ‘Granted, you are considerably better than any other professional I have seen in the last few years, and certainly there cannot be many people in the world with your repertoire of hands, but that’s not enough on its own. You need to get a few good clients – and for that you need to get a reputation – and for that we need just a little more than me saying “my grandson is a genius with a quill”.’

‘Perhaps I should enter the church.’ I helped myself to more bread.

‘No, you’re too handsome for that. Besides, I didn’t say I couldn’t help you. Calligraphy is about the only thing in the world that I can help you with. You have the talent, Jasper, and I have the contacts. If you promise to go to Roehampton, then I will fix you up a meeting with my friend Saul – he works out of New York. America is –’ Grandmother broke off. A warm breeze, that seemed to come from the Gianicolo hill, had suddenly disturbed her white hair. She adjusted her ancient sunglasses on her head. ‘America is the only place to make any sort of money these days. If we are to get you to the front of that queue, you really need a big New York agent with a serious client list. Saul was a friend of your grandfather’s. In fact he was your father’s godfather. I think you’ve met him once.’

I must have looked blank.

‘He started off in rare books years ago and he has hung on to that side of things, even after he moved into paintings and traditional art. He’s become a bit of a dealer in his old age but he is respected and there is nothing that he cannot sell.’ She finished her wine. ‘He is definitely our man. In the meantime, you must begin by doing some speculative pieces – let’s say three or four of the famous Shakespeare sonnets in a few different hands – so that we have something to send him when the time comes.’

I pretended injury. ‘Why didn’t you suggest this when I was twenty-one? I’ve wasted five years labotomizing myself in offices.’

‘Because you wouldn’t have listened to me when you were twenty-one.’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. You only listen to me when you have already decided something for yourself.’ She picked up her battered clutch bag. ‘Shall we go to Babington’s for afternoon tea?’

‘I thought you had to go back to work.’

‘Oh bugger that. I am seventy-five – I can do what I like. And anyway this is work. I am a consultant. You are consulting me.’

I stayed in Rome all that summer courtesy of the Vatican and the remains of the money left to me by my mother. I practised and I learnt, studying more intently than ever before and seeking constant advice and criticism from Grandmother. I returned to London in September, rented a threadbare room and enrolled on the course. By December, she finally gave the all-clear (never was quality control so merciless) and we sent six Shakespeares to Saul, each done in a different hand.

Two weeks later I received notice that one of them had already been sold as a Christmas gift – for $200. While this was by no means a great deal of money, I felt that at least I was on my way.

My first real commission came the following spring (just as I was preparing for my exams): twelve ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ at $750 a shot. That was more like it. In all they took four months to complete. But I was reasonably certain that they were well done. And Saul – to whom I spoke more and more on the telephone – was confident that if I could stand doing ‘True Minds’ for the rest of my life, then I would be able to survive.

I walked the exams and was one of only three to sell my work at the end-of-term exhibition. I received a second commission on the back of the first, and then a third. I became a little faster and the money got better every time. Then, in the autumn of that year, I flew to New York and met up with Saul himself – a man of such significant girth that you might journey for several seasons to encircle his waist once.

And it is Saul who saves me still. Since then, my commissions have come from the heart of art-loving America, where he is thick as thieves with that little band of insightful millionaires, who consider that the best gift they can give their satiated friends is an original manuscript copy of something beautiful. For these people, I am truly grateful. But I owe Saul the most. He was responsible for securing me my current work – the most interesting and extended job to date: thirty poems taken from the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne.

3. The Sun Rising

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.

4. Love’s Exchange

Love, any devil else but you,

Would for a given soul give something too.

And then my entryphone buzzed.

Jesus Christ.

I squeezed my eyes shut. But the racket persisted – on and off, on and off, on and off. Cécile shifted. I turned to look at my clock: five to seven on a Sunday morning. I could scarcely have been asleep for more than an hour and a half.

Semi-conscious, panicking, I thrashed my way out of the wound-round sails and rucked-up rigging of my bedclothes and stumbled towards the window. I hoist up the frame and stuck out my head.

‘YES! WHAT?’

There, four storeys below me, her hand raised like a peak cap to shield her eyes from the sun, Lucy stood waiting.

I confess: this was not an eventuality I had anticipated. Indeed, during the past twelve months of our relationship, I had devoted a tremendous amount of energy to preventing situations of exactly this kind.

Lucy’s voice rose from the pavement below: ‘Jasper? For God’s sake, open the door! I’ve been ringing for ages!’

With my head still stuck out of the window like some early-disturbed village idiot, gaping down from his hay loft, and conscious all the while that at my back, and doubtless speculating from the cool vantage of her many pillows, Cécile was also roused, I took a moment to consider.

Lucy was moving her stuff out of her flat today. The plan was that she would store it at her mother’s while she looked for somewhere to buy rather than sign down for another twelve months renting her current place. This much I knew and understood and even accepted. But my presence was not required until lunchtime, or so I had thought. And yet here she was – six hours early. What – for fuck’s sake – was going on?

‘Jasper? Come on. What are you doing?’

‘I’ll be down in a second, Luce,’ I said, as loudly and as quietly as I dared. ‘The electric lock is broken.’ I took a deeper breath of air. ‘The lock is broken … I can’t let you in from up here. Hang on. I’ll be right down.’ And with that I pulled in my head, shut the window and returned my attention to the room.

Time cleared its throat and tapped its brand-new watch. If Cécile had been listening, she gave no sign. She was lying with her face turned away from me, one lithe and sculpted leg brandished across the sheets. The room smelled sweetly of her warm body. I could tell she wasn’t asleep but there was a thin chance that she had heard only confusion in the conversation rather than deducing the full horror. Truth be told, I did not care what Cécile may or may not have been thinking. My main concern was to spare Lucy.

Once in my little hall, I stood, hot-breathed, arid-eyed, parch-tongued, leaning on the banisters by the entryphone, trying to wrest my mind into clarity. (My hangover, like a drunken Glaswegian in the opposite seat at the beginning of a long train ride, sweating and swearing and wanting to be friends.) My thoughts were confused and came in crimson flashes. I did the only thing I could: I went into the bathroom to empty the bubbling cauldron of needles in my bladder. After this there really was no more time. I grabbed a pair of jeans that were loitering by the bath, squeezed a measure of toothpaste into my mouth, and set off down the stairs.

Now, in the normal run of things, I am an absolute master of the old Cartesian pack drill: if ‘a’ is the case, then ‘b’ must surely follow, et cetera, et cetera. But I would be deceiving you if I were to say that I had anything quite so formal in my head as I rushed headlong down the five flights of doom that morning. My lock ruse was as far as I had ever planned ahead. All I recall thinking was ‘I’ll think of something’ every seventh step, whereupon I would instantly forget that I had settled on this as my strategy and panic all over again on the eighth. Worse still was my anger, my rage, at having allowed such an oversight. I was furious. How could I have forgotten that she was coming in the morning? Beyond all question, this was the most shameful and disorderly fuck up in my entire career. I hated myself.

I thumbed the red master button that popped the lock and, grinning a grin calculated to convey a hopeful blend of benign insouciance and penitent disarray, I swung open the mighty front door to greet the waiting Lucy.

‘What kept you?’ She stepped up and hugged me tenderly.

It was enough to make you weep.

‘What’s wrong with your buzzer?’ she asked, changing tone, leaning back and looking up, meeting my eye.

‘Nothing,’ I replied, in a voice as blank as a pure white page. ‘It’s the lock that’s gone. The buzzer works fine and I can hear you through the intercom but I can’t unlock this door from my flat. I have to come down. I’m not sure what’s wrong. I was going to find out if it’s the same for the other flats later today – when they all get up.’

‘You don’t exactly look ready to go,’ she said, her head moving safely back towards my chest.

‘No. Yes, I am. What time?’

‘Now, idiot. The van has got to be back by one.’

‘Now. But Lucy …’ – exasperation to cover feverish brain-ransacking – ‘… it’s not even seven o’clock yet and it’s … it’s Sunday and –’

‘Oh Jasp, you are hopeless. I’m moving today, remember?’

I blinked.

‘You know – moving house – when a person takes all their things out of one place and drives them to another.’

‘I know. I know.’

‘Well, don’t act all surprised about it then.’ She rocked back on her heels. ‘Oh, come on stupid, let’s fix you some breakfast and then we can get on the road.’ She glanced over her shoulder down the street to where a white removals van waited menacingly. ‘The van will be OK over there for fifteen minutes, won’t it? I saw them towing someone away when I was coming over. Is parking still all right on Sundays around here?’

‘The van?’

Another change of tone, concern perhaps. ‘Are you OK, Jasper? What did you get up to last night?’ She broke away and put her hand up as if to take the temperature of my forehead.

I moved slightly to block the entrance and hoped that the black clouds of adversity that were scudding across my face were being interpreted as evidence of the earliness of the hour rather than the deepening crisis.

Businesslike now: ‘Jesus, Jasp, come on, let’s get you washed and dressed.’

‘We can’t,’ I said, a beat too quickly.

That was it. She was about to catch the insinuating scent of betrayal wafting down the stairs behind me. I could not hug her again. I had to act.

‘I’m not sure about the van,’ I said. ‘We had better check the parking restrictions. I think they’ve changed them because of the Heathrow link and the Paddington basin stuff … and I don’t think you can park here without a permit, even on Sundays. It’s because all the people coming in from the airport started leaving their cars and choking up the whole area. And now they’re just – you know – towing everybody away right, left and centre. Round the clock. We’d better check.’ I shook my head. ‘Did we really agree seven?’

Before she could get a word in, one arm around her waist and the other holding up my jeans, we were off to get a closer look at the nearby lamp-post with the parking notice on it. Three steps away from the door and it clicked shut behind us. Locked.

We stood together, bereft in the early morning street. How I berated myself. Shut out of my own home! How I cursed. And yet how adamant I was that I would not wake my neighbours to get in. Lucy, no! At this hour of the morning? No! Even if we are let into the hall, I’m not sure I left my own front door open! And the only person who has a spare set of keys is the Roach – but he’s a DJ and he doesn’t get up until mid-afternoon and there’s no way I am waking him up now: he’s probably not even home yet! I’ll sort it all out later. Then, how suddenly enthusiastic I became, how eager to be off. Hey, come on Lucy, what’s the problem? I’ll get a shower at your house, borrow some clothes … we might as well get on with it now you’re here. No sense hanging about. I’m up now! And, finally, how quietly apologetic: I’m sorry I forgot. Luce, I really am. I’m such an idiot sometimes …

So, five past seven on a Sunday morning: I had only been awake for less than ten minutes and already I was half-dressed, grinding through the rusty gears of destiny up the hill towards St John’s Wood.

It was a baneful day writhing with the horrors of which nightmares are made. And help, too, was thin on the ground. As usual, Lucy’s elusive sister, Bella, with whom Lucy shared her flat (and whom I had never had the pleasure of meeting in any of my scandalously few visits) was nowhere to be seen – away on holiday again. According to Lucy, Bella also wanted to ‘take the plunge’ and so hadn’t wished to sign another year’s contract either – although, clearly, she was some way behind Lucy in the property-hunting business. ‘Bloody Bella hasn’t even started looking so God only knows what she is going to do with all her stuff when she gets back tomorrow – probably ship it over to Mr Wonderful’s.’ (It may have been my over-zealous imagination but I couldn’t help but feel that the barb of this comment was intended as much for me as for Bella’s boyfriend.) Neither, I might add, were any other of Lucy’s many reported pals in evidence. In fact, the only other assistance was provided by Lucy’s nice-guy landlord and would-be best friend, Graham, a merchant banker with pretensions to photography, whose daily scratchings in that latter-day Golgotha that Londoners call the City had yet to reduce his towering smugness by so much as an inch. (Hey, watch out ladies, here comes Mr Right … and guess what? He’s single! And very nice manners. And so tall.)

Six foot two and boasting of some feeble drink-induced discomfort, Graham appeared shortly after eight, bringing with him – following a quick call on Lucy’s mobile phone – an old Oxford shirt, a pair of jogging trousers and running shoes. Though everything was too big (I am a lean five eleven), I was grateful all the same. Graham, I sensed, liked to inhabit a sartorial Hades all of his own and his charitable offerings could have been a lot worse. Not that this excused the poverty of his mercantile soul.

While Lucy wrote labels and Graham wrapped crockery, I dutifully showered and changed before rejoining the fray, manfully ignoring the toxic Armageddon taking place inside my head.

In what was left of the kitchen, Graham was now pouring lukewarm water on heavily brutalized bags of sawdust and po-facedly serving the results up as ‘cups of tea’. Lucy, meanwhile, was outlining the latest plan: as the van had to go back at one, we would have to make sure that all the remaining bits of furniture were moved first. After that, we were going to be limited to the use of Lucy’s Renault for odds and ends and Graham’s four-by-four LandWaster for the bigger boxes.

‘But I’ll have to be off to meet some of the lads around three, Lucy, I’m afraid,’ Graham said, loyalties already torn so early in the morning. ‘Although I can come back this p.m. if there’s any more needs shifting … and bring a couple of the lads with me – if you want us to tackle the dining room.’

Lucy smiled. ‘No, it’s all right, Graham. That’s very kind. But I really just want to move my desk and that big bookcase out there before you go. My dad did the bed and my sofa yesterday. And the table and all the chairs in the dining room are Bella’s.’

‘Well, tell her she can give me a ring tomorrow when she’s home if she requires –’

‘She’s not getting back till very late but I’ll let her know you’re up for helping when she needs it.’ She turned to me. ‘Are you OK, Jasp?’

‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks.’ I smiled weakly.

Lucy put a hand on my head. ‘Sorry – don’t you like the tea?’

‘No. Yes. It’s OK. I’ll be OK. Just a little …’ I cleared my throat.

She made a face at Graham and then lowered her voice. ‘Jasper is a bit of an arsehole about tea and things. Spends a lot of time on his own.’

Graham shrugged, charitably. ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with being an arsehole. Plenty of people are arseholes. Just got to make the best of it is all.’

‘You’re right,’ I nodded.

By nine, we had set to – hefting and heaving, staggering and swaying, pushing and pulling, levering in and out and round about, and pounding up and down and up and down and up and down the bastard stairs. Did ever a woman have so much stuff? And to what end? Rails and rails and rails of clothes and shoes innumerable; and then the mutinous fucker of a dressing table and more boxes of clothes (now neatly labelled ‘keep for two years’ or ‘winter’ or – most gallingly – ‘don’t keep’); and then the bookcase and another mirror, complete with a maddening brown blanket that seized every opportunity to embrace the floor. And then the desk. The bloody desk.

The only respite was during the few intermezzi of trundling back and forth across the city in the removal van, knee-deep in the cabin detritus of crisp packets, burger cartons and chocolate wrappers left behind by generous generations of amateur shit-shifters before us.

The van went back and we switched to the car. But it was nearly six by the time we were finished.

At six thirty-nine, I awoke for the second time that day. And for the second time was plunged head first, without apology or warning, into die Scheisse.

I suppose that I must have drifted off to the underpowered lull of the Renault as we pulled away from Lucy’s mother’s Fulham address for the last time; and I suppose that the sudden silence, as she turned off the ignition, must also have woken me up.

Naturally, I had long ago discarded all thought of risking a return to my own flat and had begun instead quietly to look forward to a night with Lucy at her father’s Bloomsbury pied à terre. (I should say that Pa and Ma Lucy – David and Veronica – had been separated many times but had recently started living together again in Fulham, though Pa Lucy warily continued to maintain his bolthold of old. Thankfully, they were both in Scotland that weekend – on some sort of reconciliatory whisky-tasting tour – and so were unable to witness their daughter’s boyfriend’s multi-layered distress as he hobbled devotedly in and out of their garage.) Bloomsbury was not an unreasonable expectation since Lucy has been using her father’s as her base these last few weeks, while various estate agents wasted her time and lied to her about the properties she saw or liked or thought she might buy. If pushed, I suppose I had anticipated that we might slip off to some resuscitative little brasserie by way of a prelude to an early night of muted caress beneath the guest-room duvet. But that was as far as I got. I was too tired to plan. I was exhausted.

Imagine, then, my horror when I opened my weary eyes, stretched, gathered my sluggish bearings and realized that Lucy had pulled up outside … my own flat. For yes, we were, it pains me to relate, right back at number 33 Bristol Gardens. Square one – in all its recalcitrant glory – belligerent and incontestable.

My single point of honour was that I did not flinch. Not a giveaway muscle did I move. In the leering face of disaster, I merely yawned: ‘Luce, I think I fell asleep.’ Then I let a pulse or two pass before adding, as though it were a matter of supreme indifference: ‘Oh, why’ve you brought us back here?’

‘Pick up your keys for tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Everyone will be at work otherwise and you won’t be able to get back in.’

I glimpsed the passing of a fleeting chance – a short solo sprint across the road, a ding on the Roach’s ding-dong bell, a beckoning voice from the basement, a hasty thumbs-up to Lucy from across the street, a swift ascent, a covert collection of my own keys, a rapid verification of the general health of the premises, an expeditious gathering of clothes and then an equally pacy descent back down to the Renault, whereupon Lucy would hit the gas and we’d be off … But too late! Lucy’s door was open and the cold air was coming in.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, trying to hold her with my voice. ‘I’ll only be a second.’

‘Might as well come with you,’ she replied, ‘you’re going to have to change if you want to have dinner with me.’

It wasn’t so much that I was worried that Cécile might still be hanging around smouldering. No – the sad and sour truth was that with or without the corporeal evidence of la fille française in person, I knew the bedroom would give the game away. Wine glasses, supper, bottles, everything on the floor, a hat, the cigarette-holder, make-up on pillows … oh God. Events were conspiring against me. No time to prepare or launder. No time to arrange or devise. A single uncharacteristic lapse of the memory and suddenly all etiquette had been breached and a squalid face-to-face with the loathsome banshees of moral outrage was pending.

Towards the big black front door of the old Georgian house we now trod. We stood on the steps. The Roach wasn’t answering. Good news. We might not be able to get into my flat after all. Hopefully Cécile had shut my internal front door and – without my keys – we would be stuck in the hall. If not, if Cécile had left my door open, my best chance was that one of my other neighbours (contrary to all previous form) might start such a riveting conversation that Lucy would be rendered quite immobile for a few crucial minutes while I slipped up the stairs and sorted things out. So next I chose Leon, the cellist who lived directly beneath me and the neighbour with whom I was most friendly. He kind of owed me for listening to him practise.

‘Hello, yes?’ came the lugubrious voice through the intercom.

‘Leon, it’s me, Jasper.’

‘Hello. Are you locked out? Your door’s been open all day and –’

I interrupted him. ‘Thanks,’ I said, stepping back.

The lock clicked.

‘Must be just mine that’s broken,’ I said, before Lucy could, ‘and it looks like I left my own front door open after all, so we don’t need the spares.’

My second best chance was this: as far as I could remember, I had cleared the table after dinner and neither Cécile nor I had gone into my sitting room again. It should have been – as the spymasters might say – ‘clean’. And, perhaps, with just a little luck and good management, I might be able to contain Lucy in there. Everything depended on me reaching my flat first, tactically blocking various views, and somehow casually shepherding her out of harm’s way. And that all depended on me being in advance as we mounted the first flight of stairs. Which is precisely what did not happen.

Somehow, as I pushed open the door, Lucy got ahead. And once she was in front there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t very well barge past. Neither was there any point in hustling up behind her. I could only behave as normally as possible and follow her in silent agony, praying all the while that Leon would venture out into the corridor as I had calculated that he might.

We climbed one flight, two, three, and so to the fourth floor. Ahead, my own front door was ajar. To the right, Leon’s. But I still couldn’t get past her.

Leon’s door opened. And suddenly there he was: curly brown hair, five foot ten, auburn beard and Franz Schubert spectacles. He was carrying his cello case. He looked like he was on his way out.

‘Hello Jasper,’ he said, furrowing his brow.

‘Er … Leon, this is Lucy. Lucy, this is Leon.’

Lucy stopped.

‘Leon plays the cello in a quartet,’ I went on, unnecessarily, ‘he’s very good.’

‘Hello,’ Lucy said, smiling.

‘Jasper very kindly puts up with my practising from time to time,’ Leon replied.

I edged past Lucy. ‘Thanks for opening the front door,’ I said, affecting a more playful manner and nodding in the direction of my flat, ‘I went down this morning and didn’t take my keys. Stupid. Are you off anywhere special?’

‘Just a rehearsal.’

I needed to make the conversation stick. ‘Hey Leon, by the way, I haven’t forgotten about going to see the comedy news review thing – you know, at the Lock Theatre.’ I turned to Lucy. ‘Leon and I have been trying to go out for a drink ever since I moved in – we thought we’d check out this local theatre round the corner. They do this news comedy show and it’s supposed to –’

‘When’s your next London concert?’ asked Lucy, primly disregarding my ramblings.

‘We’re playing at the Wigmore Hall in July.’ Leon nodded. ‘Beethoven mostly. And a Haydn.’

‘We’ll have to come along.’

‘You must.’

I attempted to drift gently away, feigning an incidental interest in my lock, an excuse which I intended only as a staging post before attempting a break-neck ascent of my own stairs beyond. But the conversational glue between them was not quite strong enough for me to get away with it and – having (rather ostentatiously I thought) checked for his own keys – Leon took his leave, making us promise again to come and see him play.

At least I was now in front.

I reached the top about four steps ahead of Lucy. Opposite, at the other end of the hall: my kitchenette. There were one or two bottles but nothing that I could not have drunk myself … over time.

She reached the top of the stairs. I moved slightly to obscure her view. (Oh, to be reduced to such knockabout farce …) She put down her bag on the side by the telephone immediately on her left. I stood between her and my bedroom door. She began untangling the headset wire of her mobile telephone where it had caught on something as she removed it from her bag. I glanced again towards the sink.

‘What a day!’ I sighed. ‘You must be tired out. Why don’t you sit down. Luce? I’ll just get some clothes and jump in the shower.’ I tried to keep the urgent tone out of my voice. I had to get into my bedroom and shut the door.

Lucy looked up and smiled. The wire dangled from her hand. ‘OK,’ she nodded, ‘see you in a second. Don’t be ages.’

Mercy! Mercy! She was preoccupied, flicking through the functions of her phone to check for missed calls or messages. And into the sitting room she went. Could it be that from the credulous jaws of defeat, I would somehow wrest a victorious deception?

I span around and into my room.

I took a shallow breath. Such a mess. No time. I cleared the covers of all the clothes with a single sweep of my arm and bundled them into the bottom of the wardrobe. Then, leaping across the bed, I quickly remade it. Next I bent to gather all the glasses, bottles, both empty and full, intending to pile them on top of the clothes. But just as I stood, bottles clasped in either hand, the door banged open behind me.

I had time only to half-turn as Lucy rushed towards me. I saw hot tears rising in the corners of her eyes. I felt the flat of her hand against my head. It wasn’t even a clean blow. It caught me awkwardly across the cheekbone. I staggered back, falling towards the bed, still holding the bottles as the sad dregs of French wine spilled on to Irish linen.

Before I could look up, Lucy had turned her back on me. She left the room without stopping even to slam the door. I listened to her running down my stairs, into the hall, past Leon’s, all the way down until I heard the heavy front door swing shut. There was silence for a moment before the sound of a car starting.

She was gone.

I lay still for a while.

Then I raised myself, curious, and walked across the hall into the sitting room. There were two unopened bottles of wine on the table by the window, just next to the Scrabble board, which was still covered in a sickening collage of the filthiest words imaginable. Propped up against the bottles was a note.

Jasper,

Your keys are under your pillow. I got you the wine since we drunk all yours. Aren’t I a good girl? Your girlfriend seems very boring to me – maybe you should tell her that Sundays are for lying in bed? I thought of an eight-letter word for you to put on that c in cock: how about ‘connerie’ as in ‘faire une’. You get bonus points for using all your letters.

Cécile.

PART TWO

5. The Indifferent

Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.

Must I, who came to travel through you,

Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?

I wasn’t lying to Cécile when I said that I came to John Donne for the most part in ignorance – a few ill-informed suppositions and some half-remembered misapprehensions were all I had. I vaguely recognized the highlights: ‘Death be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful …’ (‘Holy Sonnet 6’); ‘… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee …’ (‘Meditation XVII’); ‘No man is an island …’ (‘Meditation XVII’). But I had never really taken the time to read his work properly. Nor did I know much about his life, other than that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare and that he wound up as Dean of St Paul’s.

However, one of the many plusses of being a calligrapher is that you get to hang around with some quality writers. And you do start to know their work quite well – more intuitively, perhaps, than the academics and certainly more intimately than the average reader. (It’s letter-by-letter stuff after all.) I suppose the bond is something like that between the musician and the composer: the audience loves to listen to the piece, the professors love to analyse and deconstruct the piece, but only the musician really lives within its dynamic energy.

Seeking to fuel what was fast becoming a genuine enthusiasm, I remember that it was during my work on ‘The Indifferent’ – the third poem I tackled after ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘The Broken Heart’ – that I decided I must know more. And so I duly braved the throng and journeyed down to the Charing Cross Road to purchase a good biography.

As far as I could glean, the two most important facts of Donne’s life were these. First, that in 1601, aged twenty-nine, he married in secret; and second, that he betrayed his birthright as a Catholic when he took holy orders in the Anglican Church.

Ann, his wife, was the daughter of a wealthy Surrey landowner, whom Donne met while serving as secretary to the Lord Keeper. Unfortunately, Donne was not of fit rank or estate to merit the match. Worse, he found he had disastrously miscalculated when he later confessed of the deed in a letter to his father-in-law: instead of the forgiveness and reprieve he was gambling on, he was summarily dismissed and disgraced. (He was even imprisoned for a short spell.) Thereafter, his career prospects were effectively ruined. He spent the next twelve years fretting a living on the fringes of the very society in which he had looked so certain to advance himself. When finally he was ordained into the Church of England, in 1615, it was not least because he could find no other way of regaining suitable employment. Almost immediately, James I appointed him a royal chaplain.

Which brings us to religion. Donne was brought up in a devout and well-known Catholic family at a time when being a Catholic could easily mean gruesome (and often public) death – disembowelling, stringing up, that sort of thing. On his mother’s side he was descended from the family of Sir Thomas More; his uncle became head of the secret Jesuit mission to England and was caught trying to flee the country during a storm and sent to the Tower; and his younger brother was arrested for sheltering a priest and subsequently died in prison when Donne himself was only twenty-one. The twin legacies of martyrdom and ultramontane loyalty therefore framed his existence; for most days of his life, he must have been acutely conscious of the implications of his Catholicism.

These linchpins notwithstanding, I should admit (if I am to be honest) that the biographical discovery which sealed my affinity for John Donne was a matter less intense. In the course of my reading, I also came across a first-hand account of the twenty-something man, left to us by Sir Richard Baker. This report relates how on ‘leaving Oxford, [Donne] lived at the Innes of Court, not dissolute, but very neat; a great visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited verses’. Naturally enough, this description appealed: the portrait of a serial philanderer, who was ‘not dissolute, but very neat’. Here was a man, I thought.

As well as marking the beginning of my pilgrimage of discovery, and aside from the intimate punch of the poem itself, ‘The Indifferent’ also presented some difficult technical challenges. With ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘The Broken Heart’, I had followed a similar textual scheme to that which I had employed for one of the earlier, single-sonnet Shakespeare commissions – a scheme derived, I happily admit, from the hand of my favourite calligrapher and personal hero, Jean Flamel, secretary to the Duc de Berry in the early fifteenth century. Now, however, with this poem, I had a problem.

Bâtarde, the hand that Saul, Wesley and I had agreed on for the Donne, is one of the most elastic scripts; and there are as many rules concerning the precise rotation and relative dimensions of the letters as there are examples of the form. These rules the good scribe will know, then disregard, then cleverly reinterpret. But even such ingenious reinterpretations are themselves to be cast aside when it comes to the lawless land of poetry. Let us ignore the vexed question of the versals; let us also forget the potential confusion of the lettering particulars (cursive or textura feet? cojoins? ligatures? serifs and hair-lines?); and let us look instead at the wider problem of layout. How, for example, does one legislate for margins, spacing or letter discretion when the lines of text are all different lengths? Good poets have good reason for fashioning their lines the way they do and it is not for the calligrapher to go barging in and breaking them up. And yet, so often the overall aesthetic effect of so much irregularity – even when written out well – is somehow to clutter and stifle, detracting from the words themselves. So rendering poetry per se is problem enough. However, with a manuscript collection, the whole thing is made infinitely more complicated because there will be such a diversity of lengths – two words a line here, thirteen there – all of which need to share the same script. Consider: in The Songs and Sonnets, Donne uses forty-six different stanza forms and only two of them more than once.

Put simply, my problem with ‘The Indifferent’ was this: some of the lines were too bloody long to fit on the fucking page.

The first verse goes as follows:

I can love both fair and brown,

Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,

Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,

Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,

Her who believes, and her who tries,

Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,

And her who is dry cork, and never cries;

I can love her, and her, and you and you,

I can love any, so she be not true.

Executional troubles notwithstanding, you can well see why ‘The Indifferent’ became one of my early favourites. I like the exhaustive catalogue of that opening stanza and you can feel the speaker’s familiarity breeding its contempt even as he writes – ‘abundance melts’, ‘want betrays’, ‘spongy eyes’, ‘dry cork’: knowing phrases if ever I saw them.

Of course, the speaker of the poem is not entirely to be identified with Donne himself – this is partly an exercise in posturing and the work is based on one of Ovid’s Amores. But, between ourselves, I am not so sure that the pose is all. Although Donne is indeed playing the languid courtier, I believe his final trick is that he actually means it:

Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.

Must I, who came to travel through you,

Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?

This is not merely sport or showing off. There’s a freight of cruelty travelling with that ‘travel through you’ – all the more so because on the surface it seems so casually delivered, a nonchalant relative clause passing time on the way to the next big verb: ‘Grow’. (Calligraphers love their capital Gs.) Plus, by way of further compression, ‘travel’ can also be glossed as ‘travail’, and of course, whichever word actually appears on the page, the homophone’s meaning will be bound to sound in the reader’s (or listener’s) mind – exactly as Donne intended. Then there’s the mock (and mocking) indignation at the curse of women’s faithfulness. But it’s in the third verse that he delivers my favourite bit of the poem.

Venus heard me sigh this song,

And by love’s sweetest part, variety, she swore,

She heard not this till now; …

It is not enough for Donne that the goddess of love grants that variety is her most delectable aspect; he must have her swear upon it. Yet when you read, and indeed write, the verse as a whole, the crucial line gives the impression of being incidental to the guiding contour of the argument. However, nothing in Donne is ever en passant and those seemingly innocuous commas turn out to have been the means by which he has smuggled in the central credo of the entire poem: for Donne, ‘variety’ was what it was all about.

And so it was for me.

But how to explain this to Lucy?

The silent telephone calls began the day after the disaster and continued with increasing frequency in the week that followed. At random times of the day or night – just as I was poised to stroke the difficult stem of a ‘k’, or when I had at last cast myself into bed and was about to close my eyes – the spiteful persecutor would suddenly screech into life. The vicious ring would send me racing madly into the hall, where I would lunge for the receiver and quiet my tormentor until the next attack, two minutes or seven and a half hours later, at three thirty-six in the morning. Lucy never spoke but I knew it was she. She did not even bother to withhold her number.

For several days, I soldiered doggedly on, seeking to make light of the situation, blaming myself and quietly reflecting that if I was going to make such an unholy balls-up of my affairs then relentless telephonic harassment was no more punishment than I deserved. Most trying of all was the necessity of keeping up a breezy manner in case the call turned out to be somebody else.

By the middle of the second week I could take it no more. I pulled the phone from its socket and temporarily suspended all contact with the outside world. What else was I to do? I had tried talking into the receiver. I had tried ringing the poor girl back. I had even tried to out-silence her: the two of us just sitting there on either end of the line, listening to one another’s breathing, both parties bleakly determined not to hang up first as we clung on, hour after hour, into the wordless night. All to no avail.

I was aware that Lucy had not deserved my stupidity. And I knew well that only an idiot could have created such a banal mess. Indeed for a day or two, I considered going round to see her at her mother’s house, but I feared this would cause more damage than it might repair. No – Lucy was clearly no longer interested in discussion. Even abject apology would sound sickeningly glib to her. As for attempting to explain that I had recently discovered that I shared something of the outlook of a hopelessly contradictory, sybaritic metaphysical poet and that I was of the strong opinion that fidelity (let alone marriage) most often resulted in a state of physical torpor closely resembling death – forget about it.

Still, something had to be done. So that Saturday, the last in March, I sat down to pen her a short letter in the hope that its burning or shredding or chewing or flushing might have a worthwhile therapeutic effect.

Choosing for the occasion my finest italic, I constructed a devilish paragraph or two in which I painted as black a picture of myself as I thought she would believe, mixing truth and falsity so that they couldn’t be distinguished. And having thus fully ceded to her the moral high ground – that most unscenic of human viewpoints – I went on to point out, in as careful and delicate a manner as I could, that she was well advised to forget all about me and get on with the rest of her life.

Even so, my letter was, I confess, a little disingenuous. Maybe I exaggerated my behaviour just a fraction too far in order that she might sense a deliberate attempt to manipulate her into detesting me, and thereby identify a perverse strain of kindness on my part. Too convoluted? Possibly. But the truth was I knew from experience that few people had the heart to destroy my letters and I was confident that in all likelihood Lucy would read it through more than once, if not keep it for ever. And perhaps, in time she would perceive my hidden intention.

Fuck it all, I thought, after I had finished. Saturday night approaches. It was time to break my self-imposed exile and embrace the coquettish world once more: collect my linen from the launderette and pick up some provisions from Roy, the fat Hitler.

Around four that same Saturday afternoon, I tentatively plugged the phone back in. And before it could ring, I set off down the stairs with my bundles.

It is a truth at least mutually acknowledged that without Roy and his son, Roy Junior, I would die. I buy pretty much everything I eat from them. (Supermarkets are no longer bearable – too many people forcing you into the audience of their domestic lives – the mothers and the fathers and the couples and the single folk, all with their look-at-us brand decisions and mutely signalled checkout-queue superiorities … That the glory of human life should have fallen so low.) For the sake of convenience, Roy’s Convenience Store is closed only on Christmas Day and when it is impossible for Roy himself to stay awake any longer. Roy Junior, a seventeen-year-old, thinner and slightly less deranged version of Roy Senior, is the only person allowed to assist him. Of the two, although it is sometimes irksome to be forced to listen to what Roy Junior believes is involved in ‘having it large’, the son is less alarming to deal with as he does not have his father’s sinister talent for psychological attrition, nor does he possess the menacing note of the older man’s lingering Yorkshire accent. Indeed, it’s not that much of an exaggeration to say that I have become friends with Roy Junior in a neighbourly sort of a way; he delivers whatever I need, whenever I need it, and he also helps me out (at extortionate charge) when I require odd jobs done reliably, such as providing a private minicab service. Most important, the sheer range and quality of the produce that the Roys stock is staggering; and, if by some chance there’s something I need which they haven’t got in, then they pride themselves on their unrivalled ability to get hold of any ingredient large or small at less than two hours’ notice.

‘And a packet of your cashew nuts,’ I said.

Having offered up my basket, full of provisions, ready for the reckoning, I stood at the smooth wooden counter with my laundry folded over my arm.

‘Right you are, Mr Jackson,’ Roy Senior nodded, rotating to reach down a packet from the extensive nut display behind the counter.

‘How’s Roy?’ I asked.

‘He’s off in Keele this week. Organizing things.’

‘Right.’

There was a pause. Roy Senior smoothed his little moustache. Then he said: ‘You know they’ve gone up again, don’t you?’ He dangled the cashews before me for a moment. ‘I’m afraid they’ll be five … er … sixty-nine. Er, yes: five sixty-nine.’ He punched the numbers in quickly and dropped the nuts into one of his blue plastic bags.

‘Why’s that? Is there a shortage?’

‘No shortage. No.’ He began going through the other items one by one, slowly and carefully, entering the price of each item, using only the index finger of his right hand.

‘Global price-fixing agreement?’ I volunteered, not that interested, and wondering idly how much Brylcreem he must get through in a year.

Roy Senior stopped what he was doing. I looked up from his scrubbed-clean hands to his scrubbed-clean face. He seemed to struggle with private demons for a moment. Then he returned my glance with an expression that mingled concern with frustration: ‘Actually, Mr Jackson,’ he said, ‘I’ve been putting them up every seven days for the last fourteen weeks. Ten pence each week.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I was going to tell you before but I didn’t want to ruin my experiment.’

‘Experiment?’

‘Yes, my experiment, Mr Jackson,’ he said, smugly. Then, taking his time, he weighed my tomatoes on the electronic scales. He rang in the cost per pound. (The price came up as £1.435 and they were thus entered on the till at £1.43; Roy is scrupulous in all things and always rounds down to the nearest penny with fruit and up with vegetables, confirmation that the English eat more vegetables than fruit, I always think, and useful verification of the status of tomatoes if ever it is needed.) He turned his attention to my single green pepper and smiled in what he obviously believed to be a superior fashion before saying: ‘I have to own up, I have been using you as a guinea pig.’

‘Right.’

He drew breath. ‘As you know, I am a capitalist. And like the great woman herself, I am a grocer –’

I started to interrupt but he held up his hand.

‘I am a grocer. A while back, I thought to myself, why not try a little experiment? Why not? OK, I thought, so what are the facts?’

‘What are the facts?’

‘One: I know that Mr Jackson buys cashew nuts every week. Two: I know that he lives very locally. Three: I know that he doesn’t pay any attention to how much things cost. Witness this damson jam.’ He held it up and then entered £3.99 into the till. ‘So, I cogitated further and came up with an idea for an experiment in basic economics. Why don’t I put the price of his cashew nuts up by exactly ten pence every week, I thought, and that way find out what their true value is – their value, that is, to you as a customer?’

He rang up the grand total and I got the impression that he was becoming more agitated. ‘And I have been doing this, as I say, for fourteen weeks now and still nothing. Nothing, Mr Jackson. Not a thing. You haven’t noticed.’ His index finger came up from the till. ‘I have had to tell you about the cashews.’

‘You mean these cashews should really be two pounds whatever it is? And I’ve been –’

‘I can no longer stand by and watch you pay such a ridiculous price for them, Mr Jackson. The experiment is at an end. At an end. I can no longer stand by. This isn’t the way the system is supposed to work. You’re supposed to notice, go elsewhere, refuse to purchase. As a guinea pig, you are a failure. At five pounds and sixty-nine, you are being … you are being … you are being fleeced, Mr Jackson. It’s daylight robbery.’

‘I had no idea, I mean –’

‘Listen to me.’ He leant forward over the counter and lowered his voice threateningly. ‘For the next few weeks I want you to buy your cashew nuts elsewhere … I want you to take your cashew custom away … I want you to …’ He waved his arm, mortified, close to breaking down, lost for words.

‘Eschew your cashews?’ I said, helpfully.

‘Exactly. Exactly. That way I can build up an unacceptable surplus and that will force me to have a half-price sale to clear stock and that will bring the price back down to more or less what it should be and that will get us out of this … this mess.’

A single lick of thick black hair had come loose and now looped across his shiny forehead. He thrust the blue plastic bags across the counter. I left in chastened silence, the shop bell jingling behind me as I went out.

A Renault was parked at the end of the street. The female driver was talking into a mobile phone. For a heart-splintering moment, I thought it was Lucy.

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?

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.

And so into paradise at last I came, outwardly serene, but with a heart now beating itself blue against the cage of my ribs. Along the path, through the trees, into the open, across the grass, between the chestnut boughs, just a little further, and there she was. There she was: Venus on a bench with pillow.

At fifty paces, I deliberately scrunched on the gravel path. She glanced up in my direction. I stepped on to the grass and crossed towards the middle of the lawn between us. A black cat licked a white paw.

Fresh fucking orange juice!

What oh what oh what was I thinking? What kind of an idiot brought a woman he did not know – had not met, had only seen, had only seen from a distance – unsolicited orange juice? What in the name of arse was I doing? There she was: an innocent woman, minding her own business, quietly happy, undesiring of any man’s attention, trying to read, trying to enjoy the sunshine, trying to live her life. And here was I … What had got into me? For God’s sake man, turn it around for a single moment and ask yourself what you would think if your afternoon was hijacked by some terrible penis appearing (as if from the most casual of nowheres) with a picnic flask of freshly squeezed orange juice and two – two – glasses in his rucksack? Come on Jackson: only imagine her later relating the episode to her friends – their faces practically maimed with uncontrollable laughter – imagine her telling the story of this hapless, hapless scrotum of a man. Orange juice. Could anything be worse? Could anything be less natural?

Disgusted and horribly afraid, my faculties were fleeing the scene like so many deserting conscripts. But my stolid legs were carrying me ever on.

At thirty paces, the fiasco downshifted and became a disaster: unbelievably, unceremoniously, she started to get up. First she swung around so that she was sitting normally on the bench, her exquisite knees almost touching, then she picked up the pillow and … simply stood up.

Twenty paces and I could only look on aghast. Suddenly she had started walking towards me. It was appalling – desperate – ruinous. The light turned grisly pale, pregnant with doom. She cut the corner across the grass. The distance decreased at double speed.

Me: ‘Finished with the bench?’

Her: ‘It’s all yours.’

Me: ‘Thanks.’

And then she was past and there was only the faint almond scent of her sun lotion, followed by the sound of her footsteps as she reached the gravel path behind me. Six steps, seven, eight. I made the bench. I sat down. I looked up. She had already disappeared.

The wood was still warm.

7. The Triple Fool

I am two fools, I know,

For loving, and for saying so

In whining poetry;

‘Finished with the bench?’

Finished with the bench?

Finished with the fucking bench?

Of course she had finished with the bench, my dear Jasper, she had risen from it, removed her things and walked decisively away. Could there be any clearer evidence than this?

I told you it was bad. I told you I fell apart. I blame horoscopes. I blame faulty chakra. I blame my parents. I blame her. I blame the shock of her face up close. If she hadn’t looked … Oh Christ, I suppose I can no longer evade my descriptive duty. I’d better get it over with. Up close, she had the pure-skinned features of a perfume model but softer, more delicate and without the strident angles of someone employed to be striking in two dimensions. The day’s sun had left a faint redness across the bridge of her pretty nose and her fleeting smile, when it came, was all the more priceless for the slightest downturn at the corner of her mouth. Her lips – parted a fraction as we passed each other – were neither full nor thin but, I noticed, the lower had been lightly bitten. Her brow, like her hair, was fair. Her eyes were a captivating hazel – quick and self-possessed. Taken altogether, there was, I remember thinking, something in the lines of her face that mingled provocation with her ridiculous beauty.

And yes, I know: it depresses me too. But the point is that from that desperate moment – down there on the canvas with the head swim and the eye sting and the blood in my ears and the referee already at nine – I was always going to demand a come back fight.

First, I called William.

‘Well how many times have you seen her?’

‘Three,’ I replied. ‘The first time I was buggering about with oranges and so I sort of fucked up what I –’

‘You were what?’

‘I … It’s not important. Then I saw her again yesterday, walking towards the Tube when I was coming home. And now – just now – she’s been out in the garden behind my flat for the last forty minutes. She started sunbathing but it’s clouded over and she’s gone back inside. That’s three times. Anyway, listen, can you come over tomorrow?’

‘I’m not sure. I half promised to take Nathalie to Goodwood and –’ The void of a lost voice.

‘Will, you’re cutting out.’ Some crackle and snap. ‘Can you come over? She’s killing me. I can’t work in my bloody studio without looking out of the window every two seconds. I can’t go to my local shops in case I run into her. Or worse, in case I don’t run into her. It’s hopeless … I have to know who she is. And I can’t just go down into the bloody garden again, not yet, I … You’re cutting out again. Where are you? What’s all that racket in the background?’

‘I am in a gents’ toilet – in the Crowning Glory, actually, just off the Strand. I am on my way to a charity dinner. The sound you can hear is a spate of rather jubilant flushing emanating from some of the nearby cabins. Hang on. Let me get out of here.’

I waited. A moment of exertion and then the regular click-clack of William’s leather-soled shoes reasserted itself on the London pavement.

‘Right. Back on track again. I tell you, Jackson: ever since they started closing all the public conveniences, things have become very tricky. I have to carry this guidebook around in my head with details of all the pubs in London that don’t mind you taking an occasional tinkle and it’s changing by the-’

‘William.’

William cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, Jasper. Where were we? A certain mademoiselle has appeared in your garden and she is interfering with your pointless life? Is that it?’

‘Yes. It fucking well is it. I’m certain she’s moved into one of the flats opposite. There was a basement for sale that I had to talk Lucy out of making an offer on. Maybe she’s moved in there. Oh God, it’s a bloody nightmare.’ I paused. ‘Will, seriously, I’m under siege here. I’ve never had this happen on my own doorstep before. I don’t know if I can cope. If I don’t speak to her by the end of the week, I will have to move.’

‘It’s only been a few days – she might be staying with someone. She might be gone before you know it and then you can relax – get on with your work.’

‘She isn’t and she won’t.’

‘But you haven’t spoken to her?’

‘No. Not exactly.’

‘So you don’t know. And all this excitement is based purely on the physical, on how she l—’

‘No … Yes. No. Will, honestly, she eats cherries and spits out the stones. She reads maps. She … This is not like when I was twenty-one. Or last weekend with Annette or whatever. This is serious. She’s intelligent. I can tell. No joke. She came out here before with a bottle of wine and this battered red bucket, for Christ’s sake. And guess what she had in the bucket? Ice. Ice – to keep the wine cool. Can you believe it?’

‘Amazing.’

‘Oh fuck off. Of course it’s physical. That’s how the human race works. Stop being so pious. The whole planet is fucking physical. Look around you, man. She’s very physical.’

‘How come you need my help all of a sudden?’

‘Because I live here and I can’t go around the place asking questions. It might start to look odd.’

‘What questions? You don’t normally need to bother asking any questions.’

‘I know I know I know. But she’s … she’s a very different proposition to normal. Will. I know it’s bullshit but I have a … I have a feeling about her. And I don’t want to make any mistakes.’ A passing siren keened in the earpiece. Suddenly embarrassed, I collected myself. ‘I have to know more about her before I proceed. I have to know the right way to go about things before I can … go about things.’

William was finally beginning to comprehend the gravity of the situation. ‘You mean single or boyfriend or married or lezzer?’

‘Yes, that sort of thing. And her name and whatever else.’

‘Dear, oh dear. Whatever happened to romantic spontaneity?’

‘Balls to spontaneity. She’s far too attractive for that sort of crap. Spontaneity is a luxury available only to people who don’t care about what happens next.’

‘You have got it bad, young Jackson. She must be the answer that you’ve spent your whole life look—’ he prevented me interrupting. ‘OK, OK, I believe you.’

‘Can you make sure you’re here in the morning – before the estate agents shut? I have an idea.’

William exhaled noisily. ‘I suppose I can make myself available for a few hours. I’ll think of it as visiting the sick and –’

‘Good.’

‘– and Jasper?’

‘Yes? What?’

‘I’m by no means a shrink but – in case you are interested – I would say that you are once more in the unrestrained grip of Jackson’s Syndrome. Be aware that by any normal reckoning you are mentally ill.’

Second, I called on Roy. I paid him for the oranges and the limes and then asked, ‘Roy, will you do me a favour?’

‘Certainly, Mr Jackson – what would you like? More oranges?’ He became worryingly excited. ‘Oh yes, and my brother Trevor is bringing a delivery of fresh fish this afternoon for the new restaurant on Shirland Road. I am positive he can be persuaded to stop off – if you fancy a quick skate. Or how about a monkfish? Anything but cashews if you follow my drift, Mr –’

‘No, Roy, no thanks. No fish just now. In fact, it’s nothing to do with food. I just need you to keep a look out for me.’

‘Keep a look out?’ Up went two Schickelgruber brows.

‘Yep. And don’t worry, we can come to some sort of arrangement about fees or whatever.’

He looked alarmed. ‘I can’t leave the shop. You know that.’

‘No, no, no,’ I said, hastily. ‘I don’t want you to. I just need you to watch out for this woman who might –’

‘Let me stop you right there, Mr Jackson.’ He raised a palm and smirked. ‘The subject of women is one about which I can truly say – hand on heart – that I know nothing at all. Whatsoever. Nor, I might add, do I intend to waste any remaining God-given attempting to learn. There’s no sense to it, Mr Jackson. Nothing about women adds up. You always end up running the business at a loss – if you follow me. No, no,’ he waggled an index finger, ‘it doesn’t bother me to say that I have known only one woman in my entire life – and that was my wonderful wife, or I should say ex-wife, Roy’s mother. And ever since she decided that she was better suited to the Spanish … climate … well, I’ve not involved myself with the matter, beyond the exchange of seasonal niceties, of course. So I’m afraid if it’s advice you’re after, you have come to the wrong man, Mr Jackson. Now Roy Junior on the other hand, I have to say, he does appear to know a thing or two about the ladies and I’m sure that –’

‘Roy, let me stop you there. I appreciate what you’re saying, I really do, but you’ve jumped the gun a bit. All I am asking is that you keep an eye out for someone – and let me know if she’s with anyone when she comes in. With a bloke, I mean.’

The doorbell jingled. I swung round. Another customer passed behind me and set off towards the frozen goods at the back.

Roy lowered his voice. ‘Oh – I see. Right you are, Mr Jackson. No problem. You just want me to – shall we say – gauge the status – partner or otherwise – of a young lady whom you have reason to believe might be a customer of mine. Well, that’s easily done. I can always tell what stage a couple have reached by the level of attention they pay to their food purchases. They start off not really giving a monkey’s derrière about what they eat – excuse the Frog – but, gradually, their interest deepens as it begins to take over from you know what – until eventually, after a bit of time, they’re both obsessed by ingredients.’ He shook his head, sadly. ‘It’s when they start asking for fresh herbs you know that things have ground to a halt in the bedroom department, as it were.’

I stood back to allow the other customer access to the counter. Six hundred litres of Diet Coke, two bottles of rat-slayer wine, two litres of death-bastard vodka, four tubs of ice-cream, chocolate sauce, chocolate sauce, a box of chocolates, some chocolate slabs and four more tubs of chocolate ice-cream. She was around twenty-two and wearing her make-up to look as though she wasn’t wearing any make-up.

She shrugged ruefully. ‘We’re having a girls’ night in.’

I nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’m impressed.’

She mistook my tone for sarcasm and shook her head – men! – as she helped Roy wedge things into his too-flimsy blue plastic bags. I held open the door for her and returned to the counter.

Roy leant forward, conspiratorially. ‘So what does she look like, then, this young lady I’ve to keep an eye out for?’

‘She’s in her middle twenties, I think, Roy, five foot seven or eight, slim, blondeish hair – cut sort of expensively scruffy, just on the shoulder. You’ll know her: she’s extremely pretty and she’s –’

‘Got a great set of pins.’

It was my turn to look alarmed. ‘I was going to say she’s caught the sun. But yes. Yes, now you come to mention it, Roy, she has a great set of pins …’

Roy nodded sagely. ‘Oh, just because I don’t get involved doesn’t mean I’m not an armchair enthusiast, Mr Jackson. No – no. In fact, I know exactly the woman you mean. And what’s more, I wouldn’t be lying to you if I said I saw her yesterday. Didn’t come in here, mind, but she had her lunch over the road. Wears shorts and nice blue dresses and such – yes?’

‘Yes! That’s her! She was at Danilo’s? Yesterday?’

‘Yes. Seen her a few times now you mention it. But she was there yesterday sure enough for a couple of hours. I thought she was waiting for someone. Kept on looking around.’

Third, I went to see Carla.

For a short street, Formosa offers a number of dining options: an Italian café, an Italian delicatessen and an Italian bistro. Not exactly a dramatically contrasting range of world cuisine, you might argue, and hardly the cheek-by-jowl array of ethnic diversity that London is supposedly famous for. But nonetheless, over the last couple of years, believe me, I have come to savour their fine distinctions.

Danilo’s, the bistro, is a second home of sorts. I am very good friends with the owners: Danny himself, and his wife, Carla, the Madonna of Little Venice, whom I adore and for whom I would do anything. Dark-haired, late forties, high cheekbones, disdain about her mouth, but with boundless compassion in her eyes – the mother I never had.

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