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.
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
