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
