Altogether, two years, three months, and twelve days had passed since Jasper Gwyn had communicated to the world that he was going to stop writing. Whatever effect it had had on his public image, he wasn’t aware of. The mail went, by a long-standing custom, to Tom, and sometime earlier Jasper Gwyn had asked him not even to send it on, since he had stopped opening it. He rarely read newspapers, he never went on the Internet. In fact, since he had published the list of the fifty-two things he would never do again, Jasper Gwyn had slipped into an isolation that others might have interpreted as a decline but that he tended to experience as a relief. He was convinced that after twelve years of unnatural public exposure, made inevitable by his profession as a writer, he was owed a form of convalescence. He imagined, probably, that when he started to work again, in his new job as a copyist, all the pieces of his life would reawaken and would be reassembled into a newly presentable picture. So when Jasper Gwyn left the house that Monday, it was with the certainty that he was entering not simply into the first day of a new job but into a new period of his existence. This explains why, coming out, he headed resolutely toward his regular barber, with the precise intention of having his head shaved.
He was lucky. It was closed for renovations.
So he wasted a little time and at ten appeared in the workshop of the old man in Camden Town, the one with the light bulbs. They had settled things on the phone. The old man took from a corner an old Italian pasta box that he had sealed with wide green tape and said that it was ready. In the taxi he didn’t want to stick it in the trunk, and he held it on his legs the whole way. Given that it was quite a large box but one whose contents were obviously light, there was something eerie about the agility with which he got out of the taxi and went up the few steps that led to Jasper Gwyn’s studio.
When he entered he stood still for a moment, without putting down the box.
“I was here once.”
“Do you like vintage motorcycles?”
“I don’t even know what they are.”
They opened the box cautiously and took out the eighteen Catherine de Médicis. They were wrapped individually in very soft tissue paper. Jasper Gwyn got the ladder he had bought from an Indian around the corner and then stepped out of the way. The old man took an unreasonably long time, by moving the ladder, and climbing up, and climbing down, but in the end he achieved the hoped-for effect of eighteen Catherine de Médicis installed in eighteen sockets hanging from the ceiling in a geometric arrangement. Even turned off they made a good show.
“Will you turn them on?” asked Jasper Gwyn, after closing the shutters on the windows.
“Yes, it would be better,” the old man said, as if an inexact pressure on the switch could possibly compromise everything. Probably, in his sick artisan’s mind, it did.
He approached the electrical panel, and with his gaze fixed on his bulbs pressed the switch.
They were silent for a moment.
“Did I tell you I wanted red?” asked Jasper Gwyn, bewildered.
“Quiet.”
For some reason that Jasper Gwyn was unable to understand, the light bulbs, which went on in a brilliant red color that transformed the studio into a bordello, slowly faded until they stabilized at a shade between amber and blue that could not be described as anything other than childlike.
The old man muttered something, satisfied.
“Incredible,” said Jasper Gwyn. He was genuinely moved.
Before leaving, he turned on the system that David Barber had prepared for him, and in the big room a current of sounds began to flow that apparently dragged along, at an astonishingly slow rate, piles of dry leaves and hazy harmonies of children’s wind instruments. Jasper Gwyn gave a last glance around. It was all ready.
“Not to pry into your business, but what do you do in here?” asked the old man.
“I work. I’m a copyist.”
The old man nodded. He was noticing that there was no desk in the room and, instead, a bed and two armchairs were visible. But he knew that every craftsman has his particular style.
“I once knew someone who was a copyist” was all he said.
They didn’t go into it further.
They ate together, in a pub across the street. When they said goodbye, with dignified warmth, it was two forty-five. Rebecca would arrive in just a little over an hour, and Jasper Gwyn prepared to do what he had been planning, in detail, for days.