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.
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
