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
