The Calligrapher - Edward Docx

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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,

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