Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

There’s nothing like breeding to make you quick at answering. His defence was that if anyone had heard him breathing heavily at Mass it was his asthma; and secondly he hadn’t never mentioned anyone’s posterior. He had talked about a bishop’s fox terrier! Isn’t it dazzling? It was the smartest thing he ever did, old Toby, though I’ve never known him at a loss for a clever answer. Well, the bishops were so staggered that they let him off with a caution and a thousand Ave Marias as a penance. This was pretty easy for Toby; in fact it was no trouble at all because he’d bought a little Chinese prayer-wheel which Budgie had fixed up to say Ave Marias for him. It was a simple little device, brilliantly adapted to the times as you might say. One revolution was an Ave Maria or fifty beads. It simplified prayer, he said; in fact one could go on praying without thinking. Later someone told on him and it was confiscated by the head bloke. Another caution for poor Toby. But nowadays he treated everything with a toss of the head and a scornful laugh. He was riding for a fall, you see. He had got a bit above himself. I couldn’t help noticing how much he’d changed because he touched here nearly every week with these blinking pilgrims. I think they were Italians visiting the Holy Places. Back and forth they went, and with them Toby. But he had changed. He was always in trouble now, and seemed to have thrown off all restraint. He had gone completely fanciful. Once he called on me dressed as a cardinal with a red beret and a sort of lampshade in his hand. ‘Cor!’ I gasped. ‘You aren’t half orchidaceous, Toby!’ Later he got very sharply told off for dressing above his rank, and I could see that it was only a matter of time before he fell out of the balloon, so to speak. I did what I could as an old friend to reason with him but somehow I couldn’t bring him to see the point. I even tried to get him back on to beer but it wasn’t any go at all. Nothing but fire water for Toby. Once I had to have him carried back aboard by the police. He was all figged up in a prelate’s costume. I think they call it a shibboleth.

And he tried to pronounce an anathema on the city from ‘A’ Boat Deck. He was waving an apse or something. The last thing I saw of him was a lot of real bishops restraining him. They were nearly as purple as his own borrowed robes. My, how those Italians carried on! Then came the crash. They nabbed him in fragrant delicto swigging the sacramental wine. You know it has the Pope’s Seal on it, don’t you? You buy it from Cornford’s, the Ecclesiastical Retailers in Bond Street, ready sealed and blessed. Toby had broken the seal. He was finished. I don’t know whether they excommunicate or what, but anyway he was struck off the register properly. The next time I saw him he was a shadow of his old self and dressed as an ordinary seaman. He was still drinking heavily but in a different way now, he said. ‘Scurvy’ he said. ‘Now I simply drink to expiate my sins. I’m drinking as a punishment now, not a pleasure. The whole tragedy had made him very moody and restless. He talked of going off to Japan and becoming a religious body there. The only thing that prevented him was that there you have to shave your head and he couldn’t bear to part with his hair which was long, and was justly admired by his friends. ‘No’ he said, after discussing the idea, ‘no, Scurvy old man, I couldn’t bring myself to go about as bald as an egg, after what I’ve been through. It would give me a strangely roofless appearance at my age. Besides once when I was a nipper I got ringworm and lost my crowning glory. It took ages to grow again. It was so slow that I feared it never would come into bloom again. Now I couldn’t bear to be parted from it. Not for anything.’ I saw his dilemma perfectly, but I didn’t see any way out for him. He would always be a square peg would old Toby, swimming against the stream.

Mind you, it was a mark of his originality. For a little while he managed to live by blackmailing all the bishops who’d been to confession while he was O.C. Early Mass, and twice he got a free holiday in Italy. But then other troubles came his way and he shipped to the Far East, working in Seamen’s Hostels when he was ashore, and telling everyone that he was going to make a fortune out of smuggled diamonds. I see him very rarely now, perhaps once every three years, and he never writes; but I’ll never forget old Toby. He was always such a gentleman in spite of his little mishaps, and when his father dies he expects to have a few hundred a year of his own. Then we’re going to join forces in Horsham with Budgie and put the earth-closet trade on a real economic basis. Old Budgie can’t keep books and files. That’s a job for me with my police training. At least so old Toby always said. I wonder where he is now?” ’ The recital ended, the laughter suddenly expired and a new expression appeared on Clea’s face which I did not remember ever having seen before. Something between a doubt and an apprehension which played about the mouth like a shadow. She added with a studied naturalness which was somehow strained:

‘Afterwards he told my fortune. I know you will laugh. He said he could only do it with certain people and at certain times. Will you believe me if I tell you that he described with perfect fidelity and in complete detail the whole Syrian episode?’ She turned her face to the wall with an abrupt movement and to my surprise I saw her lips were trembling. I put my hand up her warm shoulder and said ‘Clea’ very softly. ‘What is it?’ Suddenly she cried out:

‘Oh, leave me alone. Can’t you see I want to sleep?’

*******

III

MY CONVERSATIONS WITH BROTHER ASS ( being extracts from Pursewarden ’ s Notebook ) W ith what a fearful compulsion we return to it again and again — like a tongue to a hollow tooth — this question of writing! Can writers talk nothing but shop then?

No. But with old Darley I am seized with a sort of convulsive vertigo for, while we have everything in common, I find I cannot talk to him at all. But wait. I mean that I do talk: endlessly, passionately, hysterically without uttering a word aloud! There is no way to drive a wedge between his ideas which, ma foi , are thoughtful, orderly, the very essence of ‘soundness’. Two men propped on bar—stools thoughtfully gnawing at the universe as if at a stick of sugar-cane! The one speaks in a low, modulated voice, using language with tact and intuition; the other shifts from buttock to listless buttock shamefacedly shouting in his own mind, but only answering with an occasional affirmative or negative to these well-rounded propositions which are, for the most part, incontestably valuable and true! This would perhaps make the germ of a short story? (‘But Brother Ass, there is a whole dimension lacking to what you say. How is it possible for one to convey this in Oxford English?’) Still with sad penitential frowns the man on the high bar—stool proceeds with his exposition about the problem of the creative act — I ask you! From time to time he shoots a shyish sideways glance at his tormentor — for in a funny sort of way I do seem to torment him; otherwise he would not always be at me, aiming the button of his foil at the chinks in my self-esteem, or at the place where he believes I must keep my heart. No, we would be content with simpler conversational staples like the weather. In me he scents an enigma, something crying out for the probe. (‘But Brother Ass, I am as clear as a bell — a sancing bell! The problem is there, here, nowhere!’) At times while he is talking like this I have the sudden urge to jump on his back and ride him frantically up and down Rue Fuad, thrashing him with a Thesaurus and crying: ‘Awake, moon-calf! Let me take you by your long silken jackass’s ears and drive you at a gallop through the waxworks of our literature, among the clicking of Box Brownies each taking its monochrome snapshots of so-called reality! Together we will circumvent the furies and become celebrated for our depiction of the English scene, of English life which moves to the stately rhythm of an autopsy! Do you hear me, Brother Ass?’ He does not hear, he will not hear. His voice comes to me from a great way off, as if over a faulty land—line. ‘Hullo! Can you hear me?’ I cry, shaking the receiver. I hear his voice faintly against the roaring of Niagara Falls. ‘What is that? Did you say that you wished to contribute to English literature? What, to arrange a few sprigs of parsley over this dead turbot? To blow diligently into the nostrils of this corpse? Have you mobilized your means, Brother Ass? Have you managed to annul your early pot-training?