Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

In the saloon bar, Connie, the brewer’s widow, awaits Clare. (One of her frilled garters hangs over Lobo’s bed — a gravely humorous present from one libertine to another.)

Connie possesses thighs like milk churns. Her mouth is an old comb full of many sawn-off teeth. Her laughter sets the froth dancing in her moustache. Dancing with Clare she sweats like a sentimental seal under the armpits, pants, moans, a little sentimental when the word love arrives in the tunes. Offer her a beer and she will sit up and bark like a sea lion. You could balance a glass on her nose as she sits there militarily, her behind overlapping the swivel stool. She sits down on her vulva. Watch her now. So. The circular head of the bar stool is applied to her bottom, penetrates the soft swathes of blubber, disappears. Infinite subterranean shuffling. One imagines the warm endless penetration of the padded stool in her viscera. “Jesus, she’s well sprung,” says Perez. Then the springs tighten. Giggling, she is sitting up there on her own neck. Her eyebrows perform gigantic arcs across the night. She is gay ha ha. The tank is full of ha ha. She loves the warm herded smell of males in the saloon, wet overcoats and whiskers, rich smell of steam and underclothes and armpits. She has been married twice. Bar-room gallantries. “Oh, do ’ave another glass of beer, miss.” And the shrill draughts of piss from the urinal which comes in at the swing doors. Men, men, men — how she loves the warm smell of herded males! She could take a man in each arm and slobber on him with that wet mouth of hers. She could slip a thick finger in their flies and tickle them. But Clare? He excites that superficial side of her which wants Romance. Oh! the sleek lateral waves in his hair. Oh! the delicate Levantine manners (how painfully acquired by post and study). Clare sucks little purple cachous that his breath, when he blows it on her, may be nothing less than royal honeydew. All the perfumes of Arabia cannot rinse the gin from it, however. He dances gravely with her, leaning on her whizzing exuberant tits with a sort of locomotive paralysis. Thumping, her great thighs propel them. Vast effort, as if they were dancing under water: spurning the floor, the walls, the band, the rotating glass dome which shivers splinters of prismatic light across the dancers. Gin brings out the pussy in her. Gin, and Clare’s hoarse crooning. He knows the words to all the tunes. His hand is palm outward on her spine, a genteel Edwardianism.

Connie’s eyes are glazed. For the last hour or so she has been diminishing, become steadily more diminutive and pussycat. In the interval, downing her beer, she has become a child of twelve again. “Hair down to here,” she yelps, striking her arse, “but me mother took it all off. The dirty old sow.” Dancing again, her intimacies are outrageous — even here. She has shrunk up on his breast like a wee girl now, like a bird nestling on his necktie. She peeks up at him with a panting smile, her little lascivious bud of lips pursed up. She can feel it stirring down there, like a live thing. The tight rod he has in his trousers now. She is diminishing, melting down, thawing. Ah! she is such a thumping, swollen, fourteen-stone, weeny little thing!

In the lobby she puts her hand on him. “You’ve got it,” she says nervously, as if he might be playing a trick on her. There might be nothing in there. “You’ve got it, haven’t you, ducky? Oo I can’t wait.”

Afterwards he will have to take her home and undress her, layer by layer. She will lie, like the Indian Ocean waiting for him — one vast anticipating grin, above and below!

Shadows in ink, and the strange composure of syllables. The quilt lies heavier on my bones than any six-foot earth. I am living out hours which no chronology allows for. Which no clock marks. If I say I love you I am using an idiom too soiled to express this cataclysm of nerves, this cataract of white flesh and gristle which opens new eyes inside me. I am opened suddenly like the valve of a flower, sticky, priapic: the snowdrop or the anemone brushing the warm flanks of Lesbos. A daemonic pansy opening to the sun, stifled in its own pollen. The delicate shoots are growing from my throat. From the exquisite pores of the membrane the soft vagina of the rose, with the torpedo hanging in it. The furred lisping torpedo of the bee. O God.

It is above all the silence which is remarkable. The last train to the world’s end has gone. The last bus skirts Croydon or Penge — what matter? In the tram terminus the deserted trams lie, their advertisements quenched in the smoky gloom. Corralled like horses they await the milk-can morning. Lochia. Rags of blown paper writhe among the snow. The dirty skeletons of the day’s news. There is not even a prostitute to brighten the cavernous roads. Hilda has gone. A real old-timer, the only one. Married a commercial traveller to give the foetus a name and status. Status! Extraordinary how sensitive she can be. Alas, poor Hilda. A raven of excellent jest, Horatio. The way she breathed beer and onions on one: the great cheesy whiffs of damp that blew among her clothes! As for the wretched foetus, if it could have spoken through its gills it would probably have dealt as curtly with its ancestry as Gregory. “My parentage is Scotch, if you must know. Well, northern. I am not sure, really. I am sure of so little. At any rate my soul wears tartan!”

Hilda, at any rate, swaggering up and down the bed in her pink cotton kilt — Hilda, with the great hanging sporran of red hair over her pelvis! A raven of excellent jest! Perez would take handsful of this rufous pelt up in one hand and blow on it playfully. “What have we here, Hilda? Feathers, my love?” Hilda with the great voice like a bass viol rasping out command and insinuation. Her gas-lit bed is a parade ground, a barrack square; her voice is all history rolled and boomed and rapped out in one’s ears.

Like a gaunt rat she lived between the pub and the tobacconist. In the snow she scuttled across the road splay-footed, ducking under the lights of snoring cars, to buy herself a packet of fags. Hilda, the fag end of the sentimental dreams I cherish! The memory of her is a sort of scarification, like wounds the aborigines keep open on their bodies, rubbing irritants into them, reopening them until the resulting ornament is something to make the whole tribe envious.

Hilda a-decorating Newcastle. I imagine vaguely docks. Hilda among the lights and tar-and-feather sailor boys: the whole fairyland of breathing steeples. Forsaken, a gaunt rat by the water. All night the lick and splash of inky silk. Pillowed on the flood’s broad back, the elastic steeples inhale and exhale their panorama. Morning. The child miscarried, and shortly after the legendary husband died. Perez, her only real friend, has got a letter from her, incoherent, blaring, tear-stained. A poem on violet paper with an anchor for a watermark. We still read it aloud when we want a good hysterical laugh. Hilda, and her rich pithecanthropoid contortions! Here, under white ceiling, planning an equipment of words to snare these hours which are so obviously secure from the dragnets of language: lying here, what sort of elegy can one compose for Hilda, for Connie, for the whole rabble of cinematic faces whose history is the black book? Shall we people a catacomb with their portraits? The last tram has gone. The epoch from which this chronicle is made flesh, when I think of it, is an explosion. My lovely people like so many fragments of an explosion already in flight — Hilda among them, flying like a heavy bomb, northward to Newcastle. Madame About died in 1929 of uterine cancer. I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. Tarquin died quietly while he was pouring himself a cup of tea; and showed up for dinner without a trace of his death on his face. Scrase, the golden-haired son of a cash register, himself hard and tight as a fistful of blond cash, was emptied out of the autumn sky to keep company with Icarus. In the snow there is a hail and farewell for Perez, for Lobo, for Chamberlain.…