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2. The Prohibition

Take heed of loving me,

At least remember, I forbade it thee;

Some introductions. My name, as you may have gathered, is Jasper Jackson. I am twenty-nine years old. And I am a calligrapher.

My birthday, 9^th March, falls exactly midway between Valentine’s Day and April Fool’s – except when there’s a leap year, when it comes closer to the latter.

What else? I am an orphan. I have no recollection of the day itself but it would appear that my father, the young and dashing George Jackson, wrapped both himself and my mother, Elizabeth, around a Devon tree while trying to defeat his friends in their start-of-the-holiday motor race from Paddington to Penzance. My mother did not die straightaway but I was never taken to visit her in hospital.

From the age of four onwards (and very luckily for me), my upbringing and education was placed in the hands of Grace Jackson, my father’s mother, at whose Oxford home I was staying when news of the accident arrived. In a way, therefore, my entire life can be viewed as one long, extended holiday at my grandmother’s. And I am pleased to report that I can recall nothing but happiness from my early years. Even the reprimands I remember only with affection.

It is a hot summer afternoon. The whole town is wearing shorts or less. My grandmother and I stand contentedly in the grocer’s queue. We are buying black cherries – a special treat – as a prelude to our usual Saturday afternoon tea. (Grandmother has a fondness for scones on Saturdays.) I am holding the fruit in a brown paper bag, waiting to hand them up to be weighed. My movements go unnoticed because I am living at waist height (oh, happy days). I glance around. I see a red-haired girl about my age passing by the vegetable stands outside. One hand is holding her mother’s and the other is clutching the sticky stick of an orange iced-lollipop, which is cocked at a dangerous angle and visibly melting as she half-skips along.

I move without thinking. Still carrying the cherries, in a second I am out of the shop and on to the street. I turn one corner, then another. For the first time in my life – with exaggerated care – I cross a main road alone. There is a cry behind me – my grandmother. Then comes a shout – a man from the shop running along the pavement after me. The girl turns, wrist pivoting on her mother’s arm; the ice slides clean off and drops to the pavement. My sweetheart registers the disaster for a long moment, then her grey eyes come slowly up and look directly into mine. I too am visibly melting. I am five or maybe six.

But scolding was never my grandmother’s strong suit. Rather, she believed in punishment by improvement. (Perhaps this was because we had, between us, lost too many relatives to waste time being cross with each other: my grandfather had died suddenly, while in Cairo on business just after the Suez crisis.) So once we had returned the cherries, there were a few serious words – ‘Jasper, you cannot go anywhere by yourself until you are twelve, do you understand?’ – and then it was off to the library with me for a miserable afternoon indoors. Which was a blow because I had been planning to play on, my bike with Douglas Wilson from down the road.

I say miserable, but actually the library in question was beautiful, the most beautiful in Britain. Although, due to the war. Grandmother never finished her post-graduate work (something to do with medieval French), Somerville College felt that she was far too clever a scholar to lose. And when she returned from Egypt with my father still a boy and a pitiful widow’s pension, they quickly made her deputy librarian. By the time I arrived on the scene, two decades later, she had become an authority on late medieval manuscripts at the glorious Bodleian, a building in which, I maintain, it is impossible to be anything but enthralled – even when, ostensibly, one is being punished.

Between the ages of four and twelve years, I must have spent more time in the Bodleian than most academics manage in their entire lives. Often during the school holidays (although rarely on Saturdays) my grandmother would sit me down at the table near the reference section that was reserved for members of staff, and bring me a book to read. ‘It didn’t seem to do your father any good in the long run, Jasper,’ she once said, ‘but at least he knew a few things before he died, which is all we can any of us really hope for.’

Evidently, my grandmother was following exactly the same method of combining childcare with a career that she had when bringing up my father; and, like him, I think I became something of a mascot among the librarians, many of whom used to mind me on odd days when Grandmother had to go and give a lecture somewhere or there was a serious section count going on. Indeed, over the years, just about anybody who was anyone at the university came to know me. People would stop by to say hello on their way in or out, and ask me what I was reading, and sometimes (as in the case of Professor Williams, Grandmother’s friend) take me down to the canteen for lunch, and even bring me presents (which, at Christmas, I used to have to hide to avoid giving the impression that I was getting too many).

If, however, I was in need of ‘improving’, as was the case on the afternoon of the cherries, my grandmother would sit me down and, instead of giving me a book, place a large illuminated manuscript before me. She would then provide me with a range of sharpened pencils and some stiff paper and instruct me to copy out an entire page – ‘as exactly as you can, please, Jasper, I want your letters to look just like those. No noise. No trouble. Come and find me when you have finished.’

Secretly, I loved the task, but I had to pretend otherwise in case Grandmother realized and changed my punishment to something awful like washing cars, which is what Douglas had to do when he was in trouble.

The fateful cherry-day page was in Latin of course, but I remember asking one of the Saturday assistants what it was about and he told me it was a prayer written in 1206 by a monk, who was hiding in the Sierra Norte above old Seville, asking God to deliver him from the women in his dreams.

My grandmother and I decided we should stay in Oxford until I was twelve. Then we moved to Avignon, where she had been offered a job cataloguing some of the exquisite work left behind by the scribes who lived there during the hundred years of papal occupation until 1409. I attended a lycée while she worked in the Livree Ceccano, the municipal library, which was housed in what had originally been one of the many sumptuous palaces built by the cardinals who came to take up expedient residence near their pontiff.

In two years her task was complete and our next destination was the German university town of Heidelberg, where she led a restoration programme, which brought some of the earliest Reformation documents back to light.

‘Finally the boss, eh, Jasper – at sixty-three,’ she said. ‘Who says that women are held back in this clever old world of ours? And all because I bothered to learn German in the war.’

I never noticed how much money my grandmother had, which suggests she had enough, but we were by no means well off – a librarian’s salary is thin, even at the best of times. Nor is restoration exactly lucrative. I seem to remember that we spent a lot of time waiting for buses and persuading one another that second-hand clothes lent a person an air of bohemian charm unavailable to those lesser folk whose imaginations could not travel beyond the high street.

In Heidelberg, as in Avignon, our flat was small, designed for one not two. However, because the old universities always own the best property, the building we shared was both characterful and well situated. We lived at the top of an old house on Plock, an oddly named medieval street, that ran parallel to the Hauptstrasse and was overlooked by the castle. I should also mention that on the ground floor was the finest delicatessen in Germany – run by my two friends, Hans and Elke. They are still there now although Hans has grown a moustache to celebrate his fiftieth birthday and Elke is refusing to allow him into the shop until he relents. My first real job – Saturdays and late-night Wednesday – was behind their counter.

As a hollow-cheeked, fourteen-year-old English boy, now with a French accent and ever darker hair, I devoted the next four years, with increasing success, to the twin joys of reading and the pursuit of my pretty Rhineland classmates.

At school, I was never popular with the other boys in the usual kinds of ways: I was not a natural team captain, I did not draw an appreciative gang around me at the back of the class, and I never got around to beating the shit out of anyone. In fact, from about thirteen onwards, as far as I was concerned, male company was a complete waste of time. What can one boy teach another? Very little. Conkers perhaps.

No. The only thing that ever got me thinking, got me wondering, got my heart kicking with the sheer excitement of life, was the girls.

The girls were everything – their opinion, their glances, their moods; the way they walked or changed their hair; what they said, did, wanted to become; where they lived, how they had their bedrooms; which film stars they liked and why; who they read, who they imagined themselves with at night, which clothes they preferred at weekends; what they liked boys to say, why, and how often; what they wanted to buy; what they disliked about their brothers, fathers, uncles, each other; what amused them, what sickened them; how they put their socks on, how they took them off; when and how often they shaved their legs; what they thought about school, tangerines, Goethe, their mothers, holding hands, history, rivers, Portugal, and kissing strangers – all of it mattered. I had to know. To my mind, the girls were the point of being alive.

Two days after we arrived in Germany, I discovered that it was possible to walk along the narrow wooden balcony outside my bedroom window, climb over the end and swing across without too much peril on to the fire escape. Persuading my female classmates to accompany me up those skeletal steps at night was, I think, the first serious labour set for me by that merciless taskmaster whom Donne refers to as the ‘devil Love’. But I was always a good student and I studied hard.

I learned, for example, that a young lady who has just emerged, blinking, back into the forbidding glare of the real world from, say, a cinema would adamantly refuse to scale a precipitous iron stairway merely to clamber into the bedroom of an over-eager adolescent male.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Too dangerous,’ claimed Agnes, an even-tempered girl with dark corkscrew hair, who sat as close to me as possible in chemistry lessons.

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I do it all the time.’

‘Really?’

‘No. I mean I climb up there by myself all the time.’

‘I was joking. I know what you meant.’ She smiled.

‘Oh.’ I clicked my tongue. ‘Anyway, why not, Agnes?’

‘My clothes would get covered in rust.’ She ran her finger along the handrail as if to prove her point.

‘Not if you took them off.’

‘Jasper!’

I grinned. ‘Why not then?’

‘We might get found out. What if I got stuck?’

‘You won’t. It’s dead easy – I’ll help.’ I made as if to start up the first step. ‘Who’s going to find out?’

‘Your grandmother for one –’

‘She’s gone to bed early. Professor Williams is coming tomorrow. And her room is on the other side. Anyway she doesn’t mind.’

I stood, stalled on the lowest rung. Agnes looked suspicious again: ‘How do you know she doesn’t mind?’

‘She told me.’

Frank disbelief. ‘She told you?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Once. Anyway, Agnes, why not – just for a bit?’

She said nothing for a moment – vacillating perhaps – then she shook her head. ‘Because I have to be home by midnight or Dad comes out looking for me.’ She made a pretend-serious face: ‘We’re Catholics.’

‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘Plus he knows I am with you so he’ll probably set off at quarter to.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘He thinks that girls are in danger the minute it turns midnight.’ She widened her eyes histrionically.

I took the step back down. ‘OK then – it’s only eleven-thirty, so I could rush you home now, get myself in his good books and bank an extra half an hour so that we can stay out until twelve-thirty next time. That way if you do suddenly turn sex-mad next Friday, you’ll have someone to talk to about it.’

‘Who says I am free next Friday?’

Sure enough, the next Friday but one I learnt another lesson: that the most efficient way from the cinema to my bedroom was not necessarily the most direct. Take lovely Agnes first on a walk up the crooked steps to the old Schloss, and wander there among the battlements; look down upon the river, see how the moonlight casts the water in silver as if it were a necklace running through the town (I was only fourteen); imagine how the sons of the city merchants would leave their beds and scale the ramparts to meet secretly with the daughters of the court – and then bring her back into town, and presto, what was previously a grotty and precarious fire escape has miraculously become un escalier d’amour. Seduction, I realized, was all about setting an appropriate scene – a scene into which the subject can willingly walk and there abandon her former censorious sense of self to take on a new and flattering identity. As we all know, it becomes more complicated when everyone grows up but even the most recalcitrant old hag once dreamed herself a Juliet.

Nowadays Agnes teaches chemistry in Baden Baden and has two children. She writes me the occasional letter – and I write back; but we dare not meet up in case something happens. Catholics.

After Heidelberg, it was back home to England – to the icy Fens, there to wow all comers with my deft grasp of the German philosophers. This was not, in any sense, fun, but if I thought my chosen subject unyielding, it was as nothing compared to the arduousness of attempting to sleep with the women. Try as I may, I can scarcely exaggerate the skill and endurance that a young man is required to develop if he wishes to navigate the freezing sea of female sexuality that surrounds a Cambridge education.

Imagine the most socially awkward, sexually confused and neurotic people in the whole world and put them all in the same place for three uneasy years: that’s Cambridge University. And don’t let anyone tell you different. Talk about sex by all means – talk about it till you’re blue in the balls – but you’re sick if you even think about doing it. Worse than sick: you’re dangerous.

Nonetheless, I had my successes amid the crunching icebergs and the raging Arctic winds and fared better than most of my fellows, many of whom were lost for ever – buried like Captain Scott beneath the tundra or fallen, snow-blind and lust-numbed, into the ice-tombs of the Nuptial Crevasse. Having overcome such hazardous and bitter conditions, I arrived in London full of triumph and resource.

Then I really started work.

In fact, during the next seven years, I think I must have had some sort of a physical relationship with pretty much all the women in the city: young, old, dark, fair, married or lesbian; Asian, African, American, European, even Belgian; tall, short, thin or hefty; women so clever that they couldn’t stand the claustrophobia of their own consciousness; women so thick that each new sentence was a triumph of heartbreaking effort; fast and loose, slow and tight; sexual athletes, potato sacks; witches, angels, succubae and nymphs; women who could bore you to sleep even as you entered the bedroom; women who could keep you up all night disturbing the deepest pools of your psyche; aunts, daughters, mothers and nieces; crumpets, strumpets, chicks and tarts; damsels, dames, babes and dolls; all that I desired and quite a few I didn’t. And then, when I was well and truly satisfied that there was nothing more to want, I did it all again.

It was a difficult time for everyone.

There were nights I could not go out for fear of fury or beatings, or grim-faced boyfriends bent on brutal reprisals; and yet neither could I stay in for fear of a deranged and raging flatmate. (I know, I know, but it was his girlfriend who started it). Once, things got so bad that I had to spend a couple of nights at one of William’s tramp hostels. But then I fucked the cook. (Largely because I caught sight of her using fresh coriander in the soup. It was pure lust, but sixteen stone, for Christ’s sake, and forty fucking three.)

When I met Lucy, she was my way out. My best hope.

But I am getting distracted. I should explain how I became a professional calligrapher.

After I arrived in London, I did quite a few jobs, all of them monumentally senseless and too depressing to go into here. From what I could discover, the corporate arena of employment is best compared to a stinking circus, full of grovelling clowns, fawning jugglers and boot-licking buskers, all running around in circles as they frantically try to outdo one another in feats of sycophancy and obsequiousness and irrelevance. There is no ring-master and not a single thing is ever accomplished to the wider benefit of mankind.

No wonder then, that on my twenty-sixth birthday, worn out and wretched, having resigned from yet another job, I journeyed to Rome to visit my grandmother, who had finally ‘retired’, taking a surprisingly lucrative consultancy role at the Vatican.

Professional calligraphy was her idea.

‘The truth of the matter, Jasper, is that all calligraphers are to some extent in league with the Devil,’ Grandmother explained, carefully slicing through a truly delicious vitello tonnato at II Vicolo, our favourite trattoria, on the Via del Moro, in the heart of beautiful Trastevere. ‘You might want to bear that in mind before you decide to pursue it. All other arts in the world have their patron saint, only calligraphy has a patron demon.’

‘Serious?’

‘Yes. Look it up: St Dunstan for musicians, St Luke for artists, St Boniface for tailors – I even found a patron saint for arms dealers once – St Adrian of Nicomedia. Don’t underestimate the capacity of the Roman Church for intervention. But you’ll never come across the patron saint of calligraphers: they have thrown their lot in with the opposition. It’s well known.’

‘Not that well known.’

‘Among people who read, it is well known.’

‘Who read Latin manuscripts from the Middle Ages.’

‘Among people who read.’ She looked at me directly for a moment – her eyes blue and always watery; then her face cracked into the familiar lines of her smile. ‘The patron devil’s name is Titivillus. He crops up all over from about 1285 onwards, especially in the margin doodles. I’ve mentioned him to you before, I’m sure I have.’

A typical grandmother trap. If I agreed that she had indeed mentioned him, then why had I forgotten? If I shook my head and claimed that she had not, then she would probably be able to cite time and place.

‘Yes, actually, now you bring it up, I do remember something you told me about the little calligraphy devil – or was it Professor Williams who explained him to me? How is Professor Williams, by the way?’

‘He’s very well, thank you.’ She took a sip of her Dolcetto and tried to frown, ‘Anyway, if you are going to make a living out of calligraphy, then you’ll have to make a deal with the Devil.’

I shrugged. A motorino buzzed by – the girl on the back still fiddling with her helmet strap as her tanned knees joggled slightly with the cobbles.

Grandmother finished what was left on her plate and arranged her cutlery neatly before carefully brushing some breadcrumbs into her palm. ‘Don’t worry, there are lots of advantages. Guaranteed absolution from sin for one. I imagine that could come in quite handy.’

I returned to the last of my rigatoni.

She picked up her glass and settled in her chair. ‘Seriously, Jasper, the main problem is that although you are very good, you have no experience of commercial art – of the art of art-for-money business. And you don’t know anything about the more technical side of things, like how to prepare vellum or which pigments to use for which col—’

‘How much do you get for a commission?’

‘Hang on a second. Slow down.’ Grandmother scowled. ‘Commissions do not just fall out of the bloody sky.’

‘Of course not, I mean –’

‘First, I think, you’ll have to go on the course at Roehampton.’ She raised her finger again to stop me interrupting. ‘I know you think you don’t need to but there’s a whole world of craft skills behind the art – which flight feathers are the best and why, how to cure the quills with hot sand, layout grids, organic pigments, not to mention gilding or mixing gesso …’ She shook her head. ‘You don’t know any of that. And then there’s the history too, and the theory behind the scripts. Also, I imagine the teachers will help you understand what’s going on right now – on the commercial side of things. You might make some good gallery contacts there. And, apart from anything else, there’s no harm in having a qualification that everybody can recognize.’

I nodded. ‘Right. I accept I will probably have to go on the course.’

‘Not probably. Definitely.’

‘But surely it can’t be all hand-to-mouth nightmares – trying to sell stuff at exhibitions? I thought your friends all worked on commissions. What about Susan or that man who’s doing the Bible thing? Surely there must be some way of getting a salary.’

‘I’m not saying that it is all hand to mouth. There are commissions to be had, and good ones. Of course there are. But you should look at the facts.’ She took another sip of wine, pausing to taste it. ‘There are two hundred or so professionals already working in England – all ahead of you in the queue. Not to mention all the locally celebrated amateurs.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Of that two hundred probably fewer than fifty actually earn a living with quill and ink. Most of them are doing wedding invitations or the menus of pseudo-Bavarian restaurant chains.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Of that fifty I would say fewer than twenty are regularly commissioned to produce formal manuscripts and even then, most do a bit of parliamentary or legal work whenever they have to. And of that last twenty, there are fewer than half a dozen artists who can afford to keep themselves in mozzarella di bufala.’

I broke some bread and dipped it in the olive oil. ‘OK. So how much do they get for a commission?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘Lots of things: on talent, of course, but also on reputation, contacts and – most of all – who their clients are.’ Grandmother raised her eyebrows. ‘Granted, you are considerably better than any other professional I have seen in the last few years, and certainly there cannot be many people in the world with your repertoire of hands, but that’s not enough on its own. You need to get a few good clients – and for that you need to get a reputation – and for that we need just a little more than me saying “my grandson is a genius with a quill”.’

‘Perhaps I should enter the church.’ I helped myself to more bread.

‘No, you’re too handsome for that. Besides, I didn’t say I couldn’t help you. Calligraphy is about the only thing in the world that I can help you with. You have the talent, Jasper, and I have the contacts. If you promise to go to Roehampton, then I will fix you up a meeting with my friend Saul – he works out of New York. America is –’ Grandmother broke off. A warm breeze, that seemed to come from the Gianicolo hill, had suddenly disturbed her white hair. She adjusted her ancient sunglasses on her head. ‘America is the only place to make any sort of money these days. If we are to get you to the front of that queue, you really need a big New York agent with a serious client list. Saul was a friend of your grandfather’s. In fact he was your father’s godfather. I think you’ve met him once.’

I must have looked blank.

‘He started off in rare books years ago and he has hung on to that side of things, even after he moved into paintings and traditional art. He’s become a bit of a dealer in his old age but he is respected and there is nothing that he cannot sell.’ She finished her wine. ‘He is definitely our man. In the meantime, you must begin by doing some speculative pieces – let’s say three or four of the famous Shakespeare sonnets in a few different hands – so that we have something to send him when the time comes.’

I pretended injury. ‘Why didn’t you suggest this when I was twenty-one? I’ve wasted five years labotomizing myself in offices.’

‘Because you wouldn’t have listened to me when you were twenty-one.’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. You only listen to me when you have already decided something for yourself.’ She picked up her battered clutch bag. ‘Shall we go to Babington’s for afternoon tea?’

‘I thought you had to go back to work.’

‘Oh bugger that. I am seventy-five – I can do what I like. And anyway this is work. I am a consultant. You are consulting me.’

I stayed in Rome all that summer courtesy of the Vatican and the remains of the money left to me by my mother. I practised and I learnt, studying more intently than ever before and seeking constant advice and criticism from Grandmother. I returned to London in September, rented a threadbare room and enrolled on the course. By December, she finally gave the all-clear (never was quality control so merciless) and we sent six Shakespeares to Saul, each done in a different hand.

Two weeks later I received notice that one of them had already been sold as a Christmas gift – for $200. While this was by no means a great deal of money, I felt that at least I was on my way.

My first real commission came the following spring (just as I was preparing for my exams): twelve ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ at $750 a shot. That was more like it. In all they took four months to complete. But I was reasonably certain that they were well done. And Saul – to whom I spoke more and more on the telephone – was confident that if I could stand doing ‘True Minds’ for the rest of my life, then I would be able to survive.

I walked the exams and was one of only three to sell my work at the end-of-term exhibition. I received a second commission on the back of the first, and then a third. I became a little faster and the money got better every time. Then, in the autumn of that year, I flew to New York and met up with Saul himself – a man of such significant girth that you might journey for several seasons to encircle his waist once.

And it is Saul who saves me still. Since then, my commissions have come from the heart of art-loving America, where he is thick as thieves with that little band of insightful millionaires, who consider that the best gift they can give their satiated friends is an original manuscript copy of something beautiful. For these people, I am truly grateful. But I owe Saul the most. He was responsible for securing me my current work – the most interesting and extended job to date: thirty poems taken from the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne.