The Calligrapher. Edward Docx

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