Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

The little pile of white saucers rapidly grew on the table before him. Should he attempt a gesture of some sort — drink himself to death or ring up Chloe?

Drinks only gave him indigestion or made him sleepy. Besides, his love for Alice was so deeply and comfortably based in habit and interest, that he found it hard to bring to the surface for such boring and idiotic interrogations. He would sulk, and probably grow a moustache. Up to now Alice had always refused to let him grow one because it made his chin look so weak and undershot. He would stop at nothing now.

He looked forward to a mutual retreat and regrouping; something like a month’s holiday. But an unrepenting and violent Alice appeared suddenly at the hotel, thirsting for drama.

It took all his forbearance to avoid a serious engagement during the first quarter of an hour. Alice piled reproaches upon him for being a bad husband, for taking all the travellers’ cheques with him, and for being too cowardly even to reproach her for what she had done.

To her distracted mind it seemed unbelievable that John should be standing there in front of her exhibiting the merest pique and disapproval; in her own eyes the crime had been enlarging itself until it seemed now to be worth a more distinct response. But no. There he stood, in the middle of this drama, refusing to be drawn in beyond the gentlemanly limits laid down in Kipling’s “If”. That he should be able to sit in front of a pile of saucers, dressed in his pork pie hat, blue diceboard tie, canary-coloured cardigan and grey slacks, seemed to be almost irreverent. She noticed that he even fingered an incipient moustache once or twice in a furtive manner.

They continued to sleep in the same bed, though here again John’s caution prevented her from enjoying the scenes of which she fell so much need. He did not even try to make love to her. She had planned a dramatic scene about that. “Don’t touch me,” she had decided to say in a strangled voice, “can’t you see what i’ve been through?’’

Worse, however, was in store for them. Alice discovered that she was going to have a baby after all. There was every indication that it would be Coréze’s. The thought gave them both a fright. Even John sat up a bit. As for her, she was filled with violent self-loathing for the trick which her body had played upon her. Meanwhile, John conquered his aristocratic disgust sufficiently to carry his inexperience into the consulting-rooms of shabby gynaecologists in the Boulevard Raspail. An operation was arranged and a very cowed Alice thought desperately that poison was really better than dishonour — but submitted herself to science in the person of Dr. Magnoun, a jolly little twig of a Frenchman with an Academy rosette in his button-hole and moustache-ends waxed into a guardee stiffness. “Vous connaissez, Madame,” he said with a certain roguishness, placing her ankles in the canvas hooks hanging from the ceiling and pulling until she was practically standing on her head. “Vous connaissez lépigramme du grand génie Pascal qui dit: ‘Le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connait pas’?”

Alice returned to a little studio overlooking Parc Montsouris which John had taken. She felt old and worn, and full of a sense of dismal insufficiency. Her anger was changed to gratitude for John’s patience and kindness. He looked after her with complete devotion and did not utter a single reproach. If he had she might have rallied more quickly. As it was she spent over a month in bed. This incident effectively disrupted their lives. Their circle of Paris friends seemed to be no longer as “amusing” and as “vital” as heretofore. Alice gave up painting entirely and could not raise enough interest to visit picture galleries to criticize the work of her contemporaries. As for John, the very concerts at the Salle Pleyel became something between a mockery and a bore — so deep a gulf, it seemed, stretched between life and art.

It was at this time, when the frustrating sense of unresolved conflict was making him unhappy, that he ran into Campion again. The latter was making a name for himself. He lived in a little studio behind Alésia and was painting with his customary facility.

Campion at this time was already an expatriate of several years’ standing who had found that the life of Paris, which in those days seemed miraculously to exist only for and through the artist, was more congenial to his temper than the fogs and rigours of London. Baird was having a cognac at the Dome when he saw the small self-possessed figure approach from among the tables with the curious swiftness and stealth that always reminded him of a cat. He had seen Campion about quite often in Paris, had visited his exhibitions, and had even bought one of his nudes for Alice. They had never spoken to one another and he was surprised now to see that Campion was smiling in recognition. Baird wondered whether he was perhaps out to cadge a meal as he watched the small figure in the soiled blue shirt and grey trousers. He half-rose to greet him.

Campion was a little drunk and his eyes sparkled. As it was he had just come from a party and was looking for a victim upon whom to fasten and pour out all the dammed-up feelings of persecution and envy which the society of English people seemed to foster in him. “Baird,” he said, with a smile, “a very long time since we met.”

They sat down and ordered drinks, and Baird found not only that Campion remembered him perfectly, but he had even read two small articles he had written in which his work was mentioned favourably. It was not this, however, that was his business, for Campion almost immediately plunged into a description of his party to ease those pent-up feelings within him. Baird at once recognized behind the acid and brilliant sketches he drew of other people the familiar motive: the sense of social inferiority which had made so many artists difficult companions for him. He remembered one horrible occasion when D. H. Lawrence, upset by some imagined slight, refused to talk to him except in an outlandish Derbyshire dialect — which was intended to emphasize his peasant upbringing. Something of the same discomfort possessed him now as he heard Campion talk, and reflected that he had been born probably in Camberwell, and had left a Secondary school at sixteen. His accent sounded suspiciously correct. It was probably the result of studying the B.B.C. announcers.

Campion had been patronized by a gentleman and he was reacting to it now. His description of Lady Sholter barking like a shotgun and dropping her monocle to shake hands with him, was a masterpiece of ferocious miming. “The English, my God, the English,” he said, pleased to have found an audience that did not contest his opinions. “The granite-bound idiocy and moral superiority. The planetary atmosphere of self-satisfaction each of them carries around, to look at himself through. It is staggering.” He moved his toes in his sandals as he talked with exquisite pleasure. He was enjoying himself. “The sense of ritual they had evolved to cover their disastrous negation — their impotence.”

Baird listened carefully and politely, observing his man with interest. Campion’s small round face gleamed golden in the light of the street-lamps. His white, well-kept hands moved as he talked in a series of small graphic gestures as if they were drawing very lightly in the air the scenes he was describing.

Campion was doubly annoyed, because, in going to this party, he had broken a self-imposed rule. He had thought perhaps that this time it might be different — but no. Ferocious, and full of a suffocating sense of self-limitation, he had left it after a quarter of an hour. “To be patronized, to be permitted entry because of my talent rather than because of myself — that’s what angers me.”