Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Not even the phenomenon of Grace disturbed my life as much as that glimpse of the social mysteries. Horses sweat, but Grace perspires; very delicately on the smooth flesh, on the thin flanks, under the tiny undernourished breasts. The blue-veined phthisic fingers are moist and languorous. But why the present tense? For Grace is no more; no more the street girl who sat, hugging her knees, and staring at the empty wallpaper. Shall we write of her in the gnomic aorist? Shall we invest her with an epitaph? She would understand it. She understood nothing. She seemed not to hear. You could speak to her, sing to her, dance before her, and the distances she contemplated were not diminished by one inch.

“Come, Grace, you bitch,” one said. “Show a sign of life. Come now, give us a smile.”

Like an elaborate circus performer a smile wandered into the oval, disconsolate face. A great feat of concentration required to move the muscles of the face correctly in smiling. Her teeth were small and pure, with little gaps between them — an arrangement that suggested congenital syphilis. Her creator reserved red blood for fishes and journalists. In Grace’s veins flowed mercury, the purest distillation of icy metals.

Her skin was transparent almost, and pale. One felt that if one took a piece between finger and thumb, and ripped downward, say from knee to ankle, the whole epidermis would come away wetly, effortlessly, like sodden brown paper, cleaving the flesh and bone open. On her back as she sat on our inadequate bed, I have traced many a curious forefinger among the soft grooves and lucent vertebrae — colourless nuts — protruding under their transparent covering. The white blood never warms (tense again!), never filled her with delicious shudders and ticklings. She might have been dead flesh, dead meat to the world of the male. Passion only interested her in its most ardent conclusions, and then such an incandescence shone in her face, such veins moved in concentration on her temples, such a leaping tropic flame drove her fingernails to a billet in her accomplice’s flesh, that one was reassured. She was alive, after all, deep down: at the temperature which melts metals; the boiling point at the earth’s centre where the beds of ore clang together, and the hot magma liquefies iron and rock. She was alive behind this elaborate mien of detachment.

Gracie was bought, without any bargaining, for the promise of a cup of coffee. I remember it was a night when the snow was driving up past the big Catholic church so thickly that it blinded one. The road was buried. She was shivering inside the thin clothes, the inadequate covering of baubles and lipstick which decorated her small person. The snow hung in a glittering collar to the astrakhan lining of her coat. Wisps of black hair froze to her cheek. From her nose hung a drop of snot which she sniffed back whenever she could remember to do so. She had no handkerchief.

Inside the hall door she stood passive, like an animal, while I wiped her face, her coat collar, her grubby clothes. Then I drove her, passive and dull, downstairs to my room, guiding her with taps from my cane. In the harsh electric light she stood again, graven, and stared feebly at this row of books, this littered desk. Then, speaking of her own accord for the first time, she said, “In ’ere, mister?” A small, hard voice, running along the outer edges of sanity. I switched on the fire and commanded her to approach it. Slowly she did so.

Regarding her in silence, I was alarmed by the colour her face had taken. It was that of a three-day corpse. Under the skin a faint bluish tinge which reminded me of the shadows in snow.

“What’s your name?”

She had a habit of regarding one for an age before answering, as if determining whether the truth would or would not be a suitable weapon for the occasion. Her eyes dilated and she gave a sigh, remote, concerning nothing but her private problems.

“Gracie.”

Snow dripped from the brim of her shabby coat. The tentacle of hair on her cheek had thawed and hung down beside her nose. She was wet through and dirty.

“You’d better take off those wet things at once. There’s a dressing gown in there. I’ll get you some coffee.”

When I returned she was sitting naked before the electric fire, with her knees drawn up to her chin. Her flesh was puckered with cold. “Some brandy first,” one said with heartiness, becoming the medical man all at once, handing her a goblet. Pondering, she drank the draught at a gulp, and then turned, her eyes dilating warmly, a sudden blush covering her forehead. For a second she seemed about to speak, and then some interior preoccupation drew a single line of worry across her forehead. With little unemotional starts she began to cough up patches of her lung, quite dumbly, like some sort of animal. One got her a clean handkerchief from the drawer and stood looking down at the averted head, a little astonished and disgusted by the perfect repose of the face even in sickness.

“Well, this is a business. You’ve t.b.”

She played the trick of staring up with the expressionless black circles in her eyes, like a blind cat. Then she looked away, numb and patient.

“And Grace, you’re filthy. You must have a bath.”

Her feet were dirty, her fingernails, her ears. Passively she allowed herself to be scraped and scrubbed with the loofah; dried, curried, chafed, and sprinkled with nice astringent eau de Cologne. She took no notice, but practised this peculiar evasion, which one found so exciting. Afterward in my parrot dressing gown she cocked her little finger at me over the coffee cup. In that tinny voice she gave me a few particulars about herself. She was eighteen and lived at home. Out of work. She was interested in Gary Cooper. But all this was a kind of elaboration of her inner evasion. By giving her a dressing gown and a cup of coffee one had merely brought upon oneself the few social tricks she knew how to perform. She was not interested, merely polite. For services rendered she returned the payment of this lifted little finger and a vague awakening over a cup of suburban coffee. One was afraid that at any moment she would become urbanely ladylike, and revive the Nelson touch which one finds so painful in the ladies of Anerley and Penge. (Preserve us from the ostrich.)

“Tell me”, one said, by a fluke, “about your family. Where they live and how and everything.”

This interested her. It almost made her face wake up; her gestures became alive and instinctive. Only her eyes could not wholly achieve the change — narrowing, widening, the rim of the blackness. Really, to look at her was as senseless as looking into the shutter of a camera.

Her family, she said, lived in a villa in Croydon. Father had a job at the gasworks. He was a card. Her four brothers were all working. They were cards, too. Her two sisters were on the telephone exchange. They were real cards. Mother was a little queer in the head, and she, Gracie, was the youngest. Mother was a treat, the things she said! Laugh? They fairly killed themselves at her in the parlour. You see, she didn’t know what she was saying, like. A bit soppy in the top story. Made them yell, the things she came out with, specially when she was a little squiffy. Laugh? They howled. If you could only write them in a book, it would be wonderful.

One tried to imagine her in the bosom of this roaring family — this animal waif with the voice running along the thin edge of sanity — but failed. There was nothing Elizabethan about her, to suggest that she would fit in with this pack of yelling cards — Pa with his watch chain and clay pipe, Mother with her bottle of Wincarnis. The parlour overflowing with brothers and sisters, and the port overflowing in mother’s brain cells.

Her father was a bad man when he was in drink, she said at last. Always having tiffs with Albert. Always mucking about with her and Edith the eldest one. Only on Saturday nights when he wasn’t himself, however, and Ted the eldest brother was the same. They knew it wasn’t right but what could you do if it was your own father? She coughed a little.