Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Baird asked why he had gone. Campion gave a mirthless bark of a laugh. “I was told by old Mrs. Dubois that Lady Sholter was anxious to meet me, not only because she thought I was a significant artist, but because she wanted to commission someone to design her a studio for her castle. Idiot that I am, I went partly out of flattery and partly because I cannot afford to turn down two hundred pounds at my time of life.” He drank deeply and ordered another drink. “Not a bit of it,” he said. “She took one look at my clothes and said: ‘Oh, but there’s some mistake. You can’t be Archie Worm’s friend can you? Were you at Eton with Archie?’ Madame Dubois whispered ‘Lord Worms’ in my ear in an ecstatic voice. Was I at Eton with him? Well, my dear Baird, it turned out that I had been mistaken for Campion the couturier. ”

Baird protested that this might have happened to anyone, but Campion would not hear of it. Only the English, it seemed, could be boorish or ignorant. “It’s because they despise art in England,” said Campion. “The artist is expected to be a sort of potboy or bagman.” He laughed again. “Architectural drawings for Lady Sholter! English architecture, like the English character, is founded on the Draught. You should have seen them. What a fool I am!”

Baird was getting a little tired. “Schwabe says that the Englishman deserves neither his literature nor his penis — caring so little for either,” he said in a half-hearted attempt to be jocular. Campion was staring at him with his peculiar wide-eyed stare which seemed to combine impudence and candour in equal parts. “As a victim of an English upbringing I suppose I ought to defend myself,” said Baird. Campion was no longer listening. He scratched his foot through the web of his sandal. “A world of druids and bores,” he said softly. The greater part of his rage had evaporated and he was once more becoming the pleasant and equable companion he normally was.

The two men talked in a desultory fashion, and Baird confessed that he wanted to get away for a complete rest. “And how are your wife’s paintings?” asked Campion, who had once seen Alice and thought her beautiful. Baird made some evasive remark and they parted.

He wound his way home slowly to find that Alice was already in bed, reading. “I’ve decided to go away for a bit,” he said, surprising himself, for he did not know that he had come to any decision. “I need a rest.”

She did not even look up from her book.

She had been cultivating a stoical and speechless reserve of late. “Very well,” she said in a tone which was tinged ever so slightly with anxiety. It was the first time in their lives that he had shown any initiative.

That was how Baird began his travels, drifting south into Italy and Greece, gradually emptying his ambitions one by one into the slow wake of a life which, curiously enough, seemed only now to be beginning. A year in Athens, a winter in Syria, confirmed the first fugitive feelings of happiness at being alone. When he got a letter from Alice asking for a divorce it was with a curious indifference that he read it, sitting in an olive-grove in Poros. A casual friend from Paris whom he encountered in Beirut told him that Alice was going to marry Campion — or said she was. Old Madame Dubois, whose trail he crossed as she was on her way to winter in Egypt, told him that Campion would never marry anyone and asked politely whether he was happy. Sitting on the terrace of the Café Moka, he admitted that he was very happy. “You have become a Mediterranean man, eh?” said the old lady, with her distinguished face concentrated upon his like a burning-glass in the shadow of that absurd straw hat. “It happens to people sometimes, you know.” Baird tried to tell her something of his recent journeys, but found them completely lacking in the kind of detail which could make small-talk. No, he had not looked up the Adlers in Jerusalem, nor the Habib family in Beirut. He had, in fact, done none of the things he had been advised to do. He had presented not a single letter of introduction. He had been drifting vaguely about, he told her, becoming a sub-tropical man by degrees. The old lady sucked her iced coffee through a straw, watching his face closely all the time. There was just a tinge of mockery in her eyes. “You’ve got broader and older-looking,” she said at last, removing the small creamy moustache she had allowed to form upon her upper lip with a lace handkerchief. “No doubt you are beginning to enjoy love-making too, without all your silly Anglo-Saxon sentiment?” He had indeed become broader and older-looking; it was partly due to the moustache. But he searched for some way to make the change more concrete so that it could be expressed in words. What could one say? The fundamental factor could, it seemed, only be expressed in negatives, like the first principle of the Hindu religions. “Nothing means very much any more,” he said, and added anxiously, lest the phrase should bear a false interpretation. “I mean by that I am quite happy and full of life; but I don’t try to feel through books any more. I can’t.” She smiled with her beautiful young-girl face, and laid a small tender hand on his wrist. “The world is so large,” she said, “and a lifetime so short, and people so lovable and cruel and exciting.”

It was indeed large, he thought, letting his mind slip back across the kaleidoscope of the last few years, from the courtyard of the fortune-teller in Fez to the day spent under the fig-tree in Poros: from a face reflected in a Damascus water-jar to a cafe in Horns.

“I think that it is only in the south that they warm themselves at life instead of transforming it into bad literature,” said the old lady. Baird lit a cigarette.

He said: “I’ve begun a novel inside. It should take five years to experience and a year to write. It will be my only justification for taking such a long holiday from myself.” He was surprised to see from this that he did consider himself (his English self) as someone quite separate, and his present life not simply an extension of the past — that peach-fed existence of parties and pretensions.

Madame Dubois settled her hands more deeply in her gloves.

“Let me tell you why I come to Egypt every year,” she said, with the faintest suspicion of archness. “Fifteen years ago, in spring (she said the word with that little upcast inflexion of pleasure, as Parisians do) I fell in love. I was already married. I was in the temple at Baalbec and I met a young Greek officer. He was also married. We determined that though experience was to be respected — and ours was that spontaneous unfolding inevitable sequence of meetings which one covers with the inadequate word I have just used for the experience of love; while that had to be respected, the common forms of life too had their due. He had two children. I had a husband so gracious and human that I could not bear to hurt him. I come to Egypt every year, leaving George to his banking, and relive the experience which a year’s domestic propinquity would kill but which had not died throughout these years. He has a little studio in the Arab quarter. We meet in secret. Each year it gets better. Oh my friend, all this was fifteen years ago, and here I am, an old lady. But this secret friendship, so superficial that a week of marriage would kill it, is one of the lovely things of my life.”

She excused herself for a moment and crossed the café to the counter to buy some cakes. She had left her book and handbag on the table. Somewhere a radio played the piercing quarter-tones of some Arabic dance. Baird picked up the book and idly turned the pages. It was a little anthology of aphorisms. He noticed that she had placed an exclamation mark beside one of the aphorisms. “ L’ amour maternel est le seul bonbeur qui dépasse ce qu’ on en espérait ,” he read. Madame Dubois, of course, had only that adopted daughter who was always away in Montreux at a Convent. The pencil-mark had scored into the soft white paper. “ L’amour maternel! ” Well, there remained mountain-ranges to be crossed for all of us; paradoxically enough, travel was only a sort of metaphorical journey — an outward symbol of an inward march upon reality.