Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Everything would have been perfect if it had not been for my pride. That half-second’s pause after I asked whether she really wanted to go was enough to outrage the professional husband in me. I knew of course that she hesitated simply because she did not know whether she wanted to go or not. She would never know. But to hang fire on a point like that … Obtusely I said, “Well you must go, of course, if that is the state of affairs.” This, you see, begins my perverse business of torturing myself. “Go on. Change your clothes and run along.” (Why did she not protest?) She sat there with her toes turned in and said nothing. I fiddled in a ladylike way with the fire to restore my nerve. Repeated, “Go on, Grace.” It was a delicious sensation, like standing on the edge of a cliff. Would she, after all, go? By God, she would pay for it if she did! “Get on with it,” I shouted angrily. “Hurry up and change.”

She got up slowly and sniffed her way into the bedroom, a little surprised, I imagine, that things were not turning out as she planned. She must have had a queer sensation of losing control over events. Here was Gregory, after all, acting right out of character. He was neither the jealous husband nor the understanding domestic pal. What was he?

She changed into my kimono with the parrots on it and returned to find me sitting in front of the fire, deep in Gibbon. I had taken the opportunity of putting on my skullcap. That, at any rate, gave me a superior monastic mien which always worried her a little; and whenever nervousness over a domestic or foreign crisis seized me, I immediately donned, as they say, my little skullcap. It gave me a sort of fancy-dress confidence in myself.

“Well,” I says to her I says with hearty monastic exuberance, “you’re ready, then?”

“Gregory,” she said suddenly, “it wouldn’t be fair of me. It wouldn’t be playing the gaime.”

I pooh-poohed this vigorously. “Fair, my dear Grace, what are you talking about?” Getting up I took her arm in order to call her bluff once and for all. I felt a little sick. We walked slowly to the front door of the flat together. She was puzzled by now — and a little afraid. Her arms were cold under the garish sleeves of my kimono. She hung back slightly, hoping I would prevent her from going at the last moment. Really, she began to realize that she didn’t want to go one little bit by now. At the door I released her arm and said: “Quietly, now. Don’t let Morgan or Charles see you, or we’ll have rumours. Good night.” I pushed her gently out, shut the door on her, and switched off the light. Outside the coloured panel of glass I could see her still standing, staring in at me, puzzled, unwilling to go. Then, hugging her cold hands in her armpits, she turned and vanished.

Gone! For a second I was so surprised that I could hardly believe it. She had actually gone. And in my kimono, too — the final cruel touch! Then I was in such a sudden panic and rage that I could have done anything. The names I called her! Enumerating all those sterling qualities in myself that she had spat upon by this outrageous act, I returned to the drawing room and poured myself out a stiff brandy. Someone must be made to pay for all this! Someone must pay! O.K. I sat down to the piano and begun to murder Beethoven.

That night Tarquin called. He had been sitting in the lounge reading the Criterion and waiting for Clare to get to bed safely. He wanted to know why they were so late. Had they got back yet? I told him bitterly, “No.” For a second I was profoundly shy; and then, rallying, I told him, “Yes,” with details. It was his turn to be profoundly shy. His distress accounted for a decanter of brandy. So abject he was, so miserable and hopeless, that I almost began to bless the event which was the cause of it all.

“It’s not that I’m jealous,” he said in one of his rambling attempts to excuse himself. “It isn’t that at all, as you know. Dammit, I’m not a greengrocer. I’ve read Petronius and I agree with every word. One must be free, don’t you think? Yes, I’ll take a small one. No — WOA! Don’t fill it up like that. Where was I? Yes, freedom. I don’t grudge him love, Gregory. I’m as modern as you are. I mean we’re not greengrocers, are we? We’ve read Petronius and we agree with every word. He must be free. It’s his spiritual love I want. Try and understand, Gregory, try and understand. You are so self-contained, you don’t feel these things. I’m more mystical. Try and imagine my loneliness. Since Mother’s death I’ve needed to be looked after. I’ve needed care. I want to be spiritually cherished, that’s it. Spiritually cherished. If only that bloody little gigolo would confide in me …”

(Think of Ion among the deep-water statuary, the hotels of the Greek waters, in the latitude of myth, dabbled by the delicate noses of fishes.) I say to myself, I do not care. I do not care. Let the liners go nosing southward, cutting her in slices. “O God, hear my prayer,” says Tarquin in private. “O Lord, hear my despair. O Lord …” He vomits green like a horse. The piano is playing. The books wink on the wall. Ion is a vase with many dancers. The myth precipitated in milky chalk at the bottom of a beaker. This is the isolation of hemlock. Ion! Ion! I am losing the thread.…

The rest you know.

Here Gregory ends.

Shadows in ink. The hotel with its blue shadows in snow. The convalescent blue of phthisis. Brother, I’ll be that strange composed fellow. In the darkness they hang out Japanese lanterns for the festivals. In the pandemonium of the ballroom the bunting sliding the floor in a long swoon of colour. Antiques gyrating forever, pictured by the mirrors in their gilt scrolls. The jazz band plugging away in the din; and in the barrage of drunkenness our hearts ticking over, squashed upon each other’s in pain. Darkness cut and blanched by the trembling spotlights, seeking the winners. You with the silver mouth and devil’s eyeteeth I could rive; press my arm into the arch of the backbone until the lean breastless body thawed and melted, pouring over me in a wave, like lighted oil on water. I locate this night dimly as the one where Lobo sat out in the rainy gardens, under a striped awning, making Miss Venable weep. Onward. Onward.

It is so silent here at night. This tomb of masonry hems us in, drives us in on ourselves. Ourselves! I am getting a little like Gregory, rolling the heavy chainshot of the ego about with him, prisoner. Here in these metal provinces, we are like dead cats bricked in the Wall of China. The winds turn aside from us in the dead land, the barren latitudes. I tell you the trams plough their furrows every day, but nothing springs from them. The blind men walk two by two at Catford.

Overhead in the darkness the noiseless rain is shining down over the counties. The pavements are thawing back to black asphalt. In this room the madness has set in, goading Lobo to finish the chart. Delicate, the dark gigolo clare treads the mushy street, cloaked and hatted, to a dancing engagement. The heavy signature of the mist glazes the dumb domes of the Crystal Palace: the final assured vulgar mark of Ruskin’s world on history. In Peru they hurry to early mass. The streets are baked. The peasants stand with their lice and sores and almonds in the church doorways. And his girl — ah! his hot little Latin world of little black men. If for a second he could reach her across the chart, across the bottle of ink, across the cockatoo on his pencil-box cigarettes, shopgirls, frost, wind, tram-lines, England — if he could only seize her and escape …

Black Latin Whore! We, sentimental, send our desires to you across the sea like many furling gulls. But after Dover imagination fails. The gulls waver, tremble, fall, are sponged out by the mists.…