Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Why and how Gracie supplied this provender, it would take me an aeon to write. Her idiocy! Her uncomprehending urbanity! Above all, her stupidity! Yes, her stupidity made me feel safe, within my own depth. It was possible to give myself to her utterly. My desire was as unqualified by fear and mistrust as hers was by intelligence. Sometimes, sitting there on the bed with her, playing foolish kindergarten games with her, I used to imagine what would happen if suddenly she turned before my eyes into one of those precise female dormice of the upper classes with whom only my limitations express themselves. A weird feeling. I had, after all, utterly committed myself; and the idea of Grace turning into a she-judas before my eyes was frightening. Imagine a Croydon Juliet, secure in her knowledge of exactly what was sacred and profane love, rising up from my own sofa and scourging me! The cracking whips of outraged romance! (No. No. Preserve us from the ostrich.)

Must I confess, then, that the secret of our love was the vast stupidity of Grace and the huge egotism and terror of myself? These were the hinges on which our relationship turned. You see, I could not tell her I adored her. No. My love expressed itself in a devious, ambiguous way. My tongue became a scourge to torment not only myself but also the object of my adoration. Another woman jeered at, whipped by syllables, addressed as “you bitch”, “you slut”, or “you whore”, would have been clever enough to accept the terms for what they seemed worth. Who would have guessed that in using them I intended to convey only my own abject surrender? Only Gracie, of course, sitting in the corner of the sofa, very grande dame in my coloured dressing gown, deaf and sightless, cocking her finger over a cup of tea! Who would have accepted an apparent hate and known it to be love? No one but Grace, my cinematic princess.

Chamberlain, when he called, was shocked by the knife edge of cruelty that cut down into our social relations. He did not realize the depths of her insensitiveness. He saw only what seemed to him the wilful cruelty of myself. He did not realize that my viper’s tongue would have withered in my mouth if set to pronounce a single conventional endearment, “my darling”, or “my dear”. No. I am that I am. The senex fornicator if you will. The lutin. Nanus or pumilo. Tourneur’s “juiceless luxur”, if you prefer it, but never the conventionalized gramophone-record lover. But I realize that even these weird colours are denied me by my acquaintances whose method is simply to reverse the romantic medallion and declare that what they see is the face of cynicism. “Dear Mr. Gregory,” as someone said, “you’re such a cynic,” whatever she meant.

In a way this must be rather a pity, for Grace pines for romance, dimly in that numb soul of hers. Wistfully. Sometimes, on waking her from a trance, I have discovered that the object of her musing was only Gary Cooper. Soit. It has become imperative to present her with a substitute.

Much pondering on the subject had evolued for me an elixir, which seems to do the trick. Thrice-weekly visits to the cinema seem to hack away most of the romantic whale blubber which would poison our relationship; the rest is dissipated by an occasional visit from Clare. He is, as it were, the practical side of romance.

Saturday evenings she goes dancing at the Pally De Dance with him, glittering in a vulgar new evening frock which my charity has provided; baubled, painted, and with a swath of scent following her, a yard wide, like an invisible page. Radiant, one might almost say, were not her radiance the radiance of a rouged death mask.

With me she is still a little uncomfortable, but once outside the flat door she takes on any romantic colour she chooses. Out of the weekday chrysalis steps the princess Gracie, owner of a tall dark partner and a latchkey of her own. I would be a fool to grudge her this. Yet it rankles. I grudge it. And again, so unfortunate in my way of showing my feelings that I force her to go, goad her, simply in the hope that she will revolt, renounce the role, and stay at home. “But you must go,” I say, when she shows the slightest disinclination. “Clare will be sad. He says you dance lovely.” Hoping of course that she will laugh, put her hands on my shoulders, perhaps, and stay. But a more literal-minded little jezebel you could not hope to find. In all obedience, she goes. If I had the courage to say to her, for instance: “Tonight you must stay. I don’t want to be left alone,” she would as obediently stay; but try as I might I cannot bring myself to say the formula. Poor Gracie. The female thaumaturge. Where anyone else would try perhaps to deduce what I was feeling from the ambiguities of what I say, Gracie accepts the literal rendering of the text and acts on it. In this way I have no one to blame but myself.

Of course, there are solutions. But I am too much of the retiring violet ever to try them. I could, for instance, learn to dance. In fact I even bought a little manual of dance steps and trod a grave measure or two in front of my looking glass, wondering if it were possible to take clare’s place in the ballroom. Alas! I can see at once how fatal the attempt would be. The fallacy of the idea. Because what she wants is not a partner, but a romantic ally. Foxtrot I never so nimbly, I could not hope to oust Clare. For consider the disparity. Clare is tall, insolently cat-eyed, black-locked. The gigolo, in a word. His evening shoulders are padded to professional heavyweight size. Bigger than Grace, he hunches protectively over her, singing snatches of the tunes in her ears. He knows all the words to all the tunes, it seems. His movement is a lush, confident seal’s glide on the polished floor. Confronted by this picture of him for comparison with my own reflection in the mirror, I am at once disgusted by the fatuity of all this. No. Saturday evenings I sit virtuously alone, a-reading Gibbon, waiting for the clock to strike twelve.

Sometimes Tarquin comes down to see me, all nerves and nonchalance, and sits on the edge of a chair, talking wistfully, until they return. He resents her taking up clare’s time but dare not show it openly. He is scared that they will fall, as he puts it, in love with one another. “Aren’t you”, he says nervously, “in love with her enough to see the danger of all this?” Naturally, my viscera contract at this open statement of a fact which I haven’t ever wanted to examine closely. “Love?” I says to him I says, with my newly acquired Brixton aplomb. “Love, Tarquin?” This with all the chaste control I can muster. “Oh, it depends what you mean by the word.” I call up the Nelson touch and nail my pinafore to the mast. “What is love?” It is not myself I am asking, but Tarquin. I dissociate myself firmly from the question. Have I not already signalled my ignorance by a blank space where the word should have been? Nevertheless I am malicious now, because he should not try to smoke out the hornets’ nest in my brain. Shall we make him wriggle? “Do you love clare?” I say venomously. “Love,” he says, beginning to tremble. “ Love! ” The word is a sort of motor touched off inside him. His knees liquefy and dissolve inside the creased tubes of his trouser legs. “My dear fellow, what do you mean?”

This is the seventh occasion of Clare’s visit to the Pally with Grace. By this time we are nearly drunk on claret. Tarquin is almost hysterical and I am seeking about for the right phrase with which to disembowel him. It would wipe out my anger at Grace’s desertion to see him break down. But he will not. We sit like a couple of aged schoolmarms and discuss “life”. Tarquin’s confidences are a little embarrassing because they are so out of proportion. When he was five, he assures me, his little sister pulled down his trousers before five of her girl friends. This he assures me is the cause of his curious psychology. All of which is vaguely reminiscent of a literary outing with one of the Powys brothers. “You can understand the shame that polluted my life?” he demands angrily. He insists on reading me his diary, at any rate those significant excerpts which scald his bowels. Bad prose and worse sentiment. There are little flourishes and bravura pieces which are waiting eagerly for posterity. Tarquin banks his hopes of immortality on this tome: these hypochondriac dribblings!