Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

That night Campion went to bed early, after taking three aspirins. It was always the same. He was upset at leaving Francesca behind. And yet he made a point of breaking off his relations with the woman of the moment with wounding suddenness. Hardly had the telegram arrived from London when he felt as if a cloud which had been obscuring his vision for weeks was removed. He must leave at once. Marseilles had become stale. He must walk out of the old life once again into the new. There were problems to be resolved. Crete would make an admirable theatre of operations. This decision was so easily, so suddenly made that he wondered why it was necessary for the telegram to come at all. Could he not have thought of it himself? No, life itself was binding: to have a woman or a studio was binding: it needed a jolt from outside sometimes. How should he tell Francesca, who had been his mistress for a year now? In order to assist his own decision to become determination, he walked across the cobbles and tramlines of the Rue Pigalle to where the shipping agent had his offices. The Europa would be in that night. It was really a holiday-cruise liner, but it was half empty; for a small consideration he could have a cabin.…

Francesca was busy in the kitchen among a litter of pans. He caught sight of her long coltish figure and beautiful legs as he shut the door and threw his beret on the table. She had, he guessed, spent the morning mending his clothes, about which he had made a row yesterday, and in trying to make him the little sesame cakes he had demanded. He sat down, a small and grim figure, at the table and studied the newspaper, reading with great deliberation the account of a murder. It was as if he had no other object in life than to sit there, his lips moving, as he spelt out the unfamiliar French words and let their meaning soak into his brain. “C’est toi, Campyon?” she called musically from the kitchen. He grunted. No one was ever allowed to call him anything but Campion. He laid down the paper and stared with a grave deliberate abstraction at the painting on the wall. It was one of the Aries paintings that Francesca had liked and had insisted on keeping. A peasant seated at the door of a cabin. A tree. It was a complete statement made with the utmost economy, the utmost concentration. What could Francesca like in it? He half-closed his eyes, the better to test the blue of the wall against the shell-pink, almost nacreous tone of the woman’s dress. Still sitting thus, he cleared his throat, and said in a definite clear voice. “Francesca, je pars ce soir pour l‘Angleterre.” She came in to him, all concern, with a dish in her hands. He continued to look at the painting, focusing all his interest on it. She put down the dish and said: “Mais, Campyon.” He felt the faintest stirrings of compassion, mixed with an overwhelming disgust. Why the devil did one need women; or needing them, why the devil did one create dependencies that one could not satisfy? “I have to go,” he heard himself saying stonily. “Help me pack.” She moved across and taking his face between her hands she turned it towards her, fixing her great troubled eyes upon his two stony blue eyes. “Is it true?” she asked. You could never be sure. Campion was always pretending to leave her for ever whenever the evening meal was late. “My mother is dead,” said Campion — a remark which he felt was almost irresistibly funny; yet his voice preserved its leaden calmness. “I must leave tonight.” For a long moment they stared at one another. Then she bent down and kissed him on the mouth, carefully wiping away the lipstick mark with the corner of her apron. “It is not true,” she said slowly and sadly. “It is not true. You are leaving me.”

It seemed to him that all his life he had been enacting and re-enacting this scene, in dozens of different languages. Francesca was a charming and a beautiful creature, but she was no easier to shake off than had been the girl in Syria, or the girl in Paris. Or was she? Francesca sat down opposite him and put her chin on her elbows. He turned his gaze back to the painting and began to study it with complete absorption. They sat for a long time thus. Then she burst into tears, which she quickly stifled in the folds of her apron. Campion winced. Now it was coming.

“Why?” she said.

“My mother is dead,” he said, suppressing a temptation to giggle.

“Your mother died years ago. You said so.”

“I lied.”

“Is it because the food was late?”

“No.”

“Because I did not mend your sandals?”

“No.”

“Is it because you are tired of me?”

“It is because my mother died,” said Campion with a freezing dignity. He took out the War Office telegram and laid it on the table. The pose of her head with its long throat was beautiful as she bent down to study it. Francesca was incapable of reading English, so there was no fear that she would realize what was in the telegram. He fell to studying her pose with the same concentration as he had studied the picture on the wall. His eye indulged itself with the sweet firm line of the chin and the broad mouth. She had been a wonderful bedfellow. And an excellent girl to have about the house. Why did he not take her with him? It was not because he was tired of Francesca as a person. It was because he was tired of all women — fed up with the whole race of women he told himself. As for Francesca, if he had met her as he was getting off the boat the other end he would in all probability start all over again with her. She was a fine creature. But he just could not be bothered. As he sat on the uncomfortable wicker chair he felt his freedom oozing away second by second. Why could not women realize that all he wanted of them was their friendship — and their cooking? It was reasonable enough. They considered that by making love with you they had the right to tie you down to a small orbit of domestic life. Campion longed suddenly to become a domestic man — a husband, a father, a churchwarden. Anything to break the monotony of this life of change. But not here; not now; not with Francesca.

He got up suddenly and began to pack while she sat with her face red from the heat of the kitchen stove, crying very softly and repeating to herself in a small voice, “J’comprends pas pourquoi, J’comprends pas pourquoi.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Campion in his own mind, as he packed his few belongings. His mind was already busy with the thought of escape, escape across the sea to Crete. He had never been to Crete. He stifled a temptation to whistle. Francesca was not making as much of a scene as he had imagined she would; if his attention wandered she might get really angry. Hence it was wiser not to whistle or sing until he was in the street. And yet, how lovely she was; what a beautiful animal with her tawny skin and brown eyes.

When everything was ready, his easel folded, his rucksack full to bursting point, he went in and stood facing her across the table.

“Francesca,” he said. “Darling.”

She continued her little muffled sobbing. She sat there with a look of preoccupied pain on her features, turned towards the wall. It was as if the hurt that found expression in this muffled whimpering belonged to her alone — had no reference to the Campion that faced her. Pain created its own privacy in her mind, so that she was like a person with a deep toothache, focused on it with such concentration that she could hardly raise her head to answer questions. He laid his small cold hands upon the back of her neck, and softly rubbed the nape, where her dark hair ran down into a little V-shaped peak. This is what one got, he was thinking, for indulging the lust of hand and eye — not to mention the lusts of the mind and body. He wound up his wrist-watch, making little soothing sounds as he did so. “Don’t cry, then,” he said over and over again. “I shall come back next month. You know I shall come back.”