Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

“Do you live at home?”

“When I’m there I’m there,” she said patiently. “When I don’t go back they don’t worry. Glad to be free of me. Not earning me keep any more, see?” I saw.

She finished her drink and put the cup down. Then she strolled over to the bookcase and quizzed the titles. Sniffed, turned to me, and said, “Fine lot o’ books you got here.” But with a gesture so foreign, so out of character that I was forced to laugh. She was actually being seductive; and above all, not seductive by the ordinary formulae, but by the dashing hectic formulae of the cinema. It was astonishing. Posed like that, her hip stuck out under the palm of one hand, her slender, rather frail legs Venus’d — one knee over the other — she had become that cinema parrot, a dangerous woman. Even her small face was strained to an imaginary expression before an imaginary camera. Only the awful sightlessness of her eyes betrayed her. One became embarrassed; as at a theatre where the famous comedian fails to raise the most fleeting of sniggers from his audience.

“Come off it, Grace,” one said uncomfortably. “Come off it. You’re not an actress.”

She was suddenly chastened and dumb, like a reprimanded pet. The pose was shattered. Slipping off the dressing gown she lit a cigarette and sat herself down on my knee; began to kiss me in a businesslike way, pausing from time to time to exhale clouds of smoke from her small dry mouth. Her eyes might have been covered in cataracts for all the meaning they held in them. Her kisses were tasteless, like straw. “Do you like me?” she inquired at last with stunning fervour — the great screen star taking possession of her face for a second. “Do you reely like me, mister?”

From that moment there is the flash of a sword, dividing the world. A bright cleavage with the past, cutting down through the nerves and cells and arteries of feeling. The past was amputated, and the future became simply Gracie. That peculiar infatuation which absorbed one, sapped one by the fascination of its explorations. Gracie stayed on, and days lost count of themselves: so remote was that world in which I wandered with her, so all-absorbing her least mannerism, the least word, the least breath she drew.

After the first ardours were tasted and realized, she became even more wonderful as a sort of pet. Her vocabulary, her great thoughts lit up the days like comets. And that miserable tranquillity she retired into when she was ill made one realize that she was inexhaustible. What a curious adventure another person is!

I phoned Tarquin: “My dear fellow, you must come down to my rooms on Tuesday and meet Gracie. I’m giving a little party for her. You must come. I’m sure you will be great friends. She spits blood.”

They all came. Perez, the gorilla with his uncouth male stride and raving tie; Lobo agitatedly showing his most flattering half profile; Clare, Tarquin, Chamberlain with his bundle of light music and jazz. They sat about uncomfortably, rather ghoulishly, while I, revelling in the situation, made them drink, and helped Grace to perform her tricks. It was a cruel tableau, but she was far too obtuse to realize it. She played the social hostess with a zeal and clumsiness which would have made one weep if one were less granite-livered. I congratulated myself on my skill in gathering together such a collection of butterflies for their mutual embarrassment. Yes, I chuckled inwardly as I caught their eyes over their glasses. The comedy of wheels within wheels. It was a society of pen-club members who, after being invited to meet a celebrity, had been presented with a mere reviewer. Scandalized they were by the performance Grace put up, cocking her little finger over the teacups, and talking with the hygienic purity of an Anerley matron. (Preserve us from the ostrich.) How their eyes accused me!

Poor Grace was obviously an embarrassing bore. They relaxed a little when the gramophone was started and Chamberlain was compelled by punctiliousness to gyrate with his hostess. He was the least affected by Gracie, I suppose because he was the most natural person there. But Perez and Lobo conferred in a corner and decided that they had an important engagement elsewhere. Lobo said good day with the frigidity of a Castilian gentleman dismissinga boring chambermaid. No manners like those of the really well bred.

Later, however, Clare danced with her and she seemed to like it. He alone of all of them seemed to speak a quiet language which was really familiar to her, which thrilled her from the start. In fact they danced so well together, and so intimate were their tones of conversation, that Tarquin began to fidget about and behave clumsily with his glass.

Chamberlain, who didn’t live in the hotel himself, followed me to the lavatory, and kept me talking, his eyes shining with excitement.

“What do you think of Gracie?”

“Good enough fun. Not much of you, though.”

“What do you mean?”

He laughed in my face, wrinkling up his nose. Not quite certain whether to be frank or not. As always he took the chance, however.

“This party of yours. An elaborate piece of self-gratification. You must always take it out on somebody, mustn’t you? Life is one long revenge for your own shortcomings.”

“You’ve been reading the Russians,” I said. Nothing else. It was furiously annoying. I bowed and led him back to the circus. Tarquin was waterlogged by this time, and ready to leave. Clare danced on in a kind of remote control, a social communion with Gracie. They hardly spoke at all, but there was an awareness, an ease between them I envied. A contact.

“Well, Grace, I’m going,” said Chamberlain with good humour, shaking hands with her. To me, as he passed, he offered one word, in my private ear. “Sentimentalist.” I confess it rankled.

That evening I took it out on Grace, appeased the rage that Chamberlain’s little observation had bred in me. For a day or two everything about her seemed odious, odious.

But all this, one realizes, is simply writing down to one’s subject from the heights of an intellectual superiority, à la Huxley. It is a trick to be played on anyone, but not on yourself. The intellectual superiority of the emotionally sterile. Because I am grateful to Grace, more grateful than inky words can express, whatever agony you inject into them. Yet the idea of an audience! The idea of anyone knowing that I felt such sentiments turned them at once crystal-cold. Changed them into a rage against my own emotional weakness. And thence into a rage against the object of that indulgence, yclept she. In retrospect the party explains itself simply enough. Was it possible that I felt anything for this little cockney child with her tedious humours, her spurious gentility? Quick, quick then, let me insult myself and her for such a lapse from the heights of intellectual purity of feeling. How we cherish the festering intelligence! But then again, feeling, if it is to be interpreted by emotion, is not my province: at any rate if I am ever to write about it. For bad emotion can only produce the terrible squealing of the slaughtered pig— De Profundis is the sterling example. Let us thank God, therefore, that I do not try to squeeze out such pus on to handmade paper. I shirk the epitaph for Grace, not because she wouldn’t understand it, but because I dare not write it.

The carapace of the rational intelligence! I think the reason I loved Grace so much was that I could escape from myself with her. The cage I inhabited was broken wide open by our experience. She was not audience enough for me to hate her. Yet, writing nicely, “love” is not the correct word. For a man like me does not need love in the accepted sense. There should be another word to express this very real state. One hardly knows how to do it without the key word to the situation. Let me leave a blank space and proceed.