Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

“Wait,” said Mrs. Truman. “I ought to do my ‘air.”

“Do your ’air nothing,” said Campion. “Come and sit down here.” At the stern of the ship was a great locker brimming with coils of rope. It was comfortable enough, and dazzling light was broken by the awning into patches of lemon-yellow, green, mauve. Campion looked at her as she moved about with a detached, yet rather greedy eye. It was a magnificent head. He could have broken it off and walked away with it under his arm. He took her chin and tilted it until the firm line of flesh from the high cheekbones was thrown in shadow. “Now,” he said with stern compressed lips. “Stay like that.”

“Mind you make it like me,” said Mrs. Truman. “You’re not one of them modern painters are you?” Campion grunted. He was squeezing paint on to his palette and setting up his stretched canvas.

“And make me young,” said Mrs. Truman.

“You’re young enough,” he said, still busy, his mind working on ways and means. It was like watching a dentist sterilize his equipment. “A Hecuba,” he said, and at last stood up. He was looking at her now as if she were a lump of inanimate matter; it was a glance in which was mixed some of his mind’s delight in the smooth lines of the chin and mouth.

“So you want a likeness?” he said grimly, in a faraway voice. “I wonder if you’ve ever seen yourself?”

Mrs. Truman was startled out of her self-possession. She blushed. “The face of a great courtesan,” said Campion, more to himself than to anyone else. He had put a brush between his teeth now and was drawing in soft pencil on the canvas.

“I suppose you know all about them,” said Mrs. Truman, uncomfortably aware that under the badinage there might lie observations of some interest. Campion seemed to be breaking up her face into small fragments. It was no longer a synthesis — an entity called Mrs. Truman — which faced him, but a series of plastic forms and planes. It was a disturbing scrutiny. She became aware that her nose was unpowdered (“Stop squinting,” said Campion peremptorily), and that the spot on her lip looked awful.

“A courtesan,” repeated Campion. “Now if you’d lived in the south there might have been scope for your talents.”

Mrs. Truman moistened her lips and said nothing. Campion mixed smears of paint on to his palette, lit a cigarette, leaving it balanced upon a stanchion and said: “I had a girl who looked like you when I was an undergraduate. She was jolly and rough — like a blast of hot air from a tube-station. But she couldn’t make love.”

“Must have come from Scotland,” she said.

“She came from Leeds.”

“It’s a libel,” said Mrs. Truman, scratching one ankle with the sole of her shoe.

“It wasn’t till I met a Rumanian girl in Paris that I discovered the fact,” admitted Campion. He was talking in order to see the fugitive expressions of interest and amusement flit across his sitter’s face. “Her name was Lola.”

“Exotic,” suggested Mrs. Truman.

“She was an awful slut really. She lay in bed all day eating chocolates with soft centres and reading novels; but she hummed like a top in the evening.”

“So Leeds girls don’t hum, eh?” said Mrs. Truman, with good-natured amusement. “Better ask my husband. He knows Leeds.”

“You’re moving,” said Campion with a sigh, waking up from his trance and staring at her bad-temperedly. She apologized and made an attempt to freeze back into her original pose. Campion moved her head back, holding it by the nose. “There,” he said.

“I hope”, said Mrs. Truman, “that you don’t make me look like Lola. My husband is old-fashioned, you know.”

“Don’t you want a likeness?” said Campion ironically. But now he had sunk back into his concentration. He had begun to build up the portrait in a series of blocks of colour. His small ringers gripped the tall brushes tightly, with a nervous energy, as if he were afraid of dropping them. They reminded Mrs. Truman of the claws of a bird. From time to time he whistled to himself softly, or paused to drag at his cigarette.

After half an hour he allowed her a rest, and they sat together smoking and looking at the vague series of blobs on the canvas. “It looks like a street scene in Barcelona,” she said. “Here’s the fire brigade, and there’s the main street.”

“That, my good woman, is your nose emerging.”

“Bright brown?”

“A scorbutic tendency which is due to being unable to sit still without fidgeting for a second.”

“Well, I never,” said Mrs. Truman. She retired for a minute to powder it.

When she emerged on deck again Campion had started in on the painting without her. She threw away her cigarette and sat down again in the required pose. “Tell me,” she said, “how do artists happen?” It was a question that had occurred to her as she examined her face in the smoky little mirror of the cabin.

Campion was as far away as ever now. “Do you really want to know? Or are you wasting my time?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. Campion painted on in silence for a moment. “It’s easy,” he said at last. “When they’re babies you drop them on their heads or neglect them, so they are driven to try and recapture something; so they learn a skill; then those as are bad artists are content to go on copying Nature, while those as are good — something funny happens to them.”

“What?” she said. Under his lightness she felt as if there were something else, something profound perhaps.

“They begin to make love to the object.”

“How?”

“In paint. This face of yours is so lovely. I am in a sort of inner sense making love to it with every brush-stroke. You can’t have a purer love than that can you? Which probably explains why I am so unprincipled in my private life. But this is far deeper than just sleeping with you.”

Mrs. Truman blushed crimson. Campion went on painting, apparently unaware that he had said anything to disturb her. His hands moved quickly, mixing the paint, and applying light dabs of it to the rough hollow canvas. Indeed, she suddenly had a suffocating feeling of self-consciousness, as if indeed each brush-stroke were a soft kiss, an endearment. After the session was over she went down to her cabin once more and stared at her own features in the glass. She could dimly locate its familiar qualities — good-humour, honesty, ingenuity. Was beauty among those qualities, and, if so, in what did it lie?

Her husband, who was lying in his bunk with a newspaper, turned a quizzical eye upon her. “I see,” he said, “getting vain, eh? You’ll be heading for Hollywood next.”

Mrs. Truman sat down beside him and asked in her most serious tone: “Would you say I was beautiful? I mean beautiful —the word.”

Her husband went on with his reading, absently patting her shoulder. “Yes,” he said vaguely. “Of course.” Mrs. Truman got up with dignity. “You don’t have to tell me lies, you don’t,” she said, and went on deck. Campion and Graecen were smoking over the painting. “Of course,” Campion was saying, “if you get the massive butt of the nose, the sort of way the root thickens into the frontal bone, the whole face falls into shape.”

She turned away disappointedly and strolled forward to her favourite place on A deck. They spoke as if her face were something quite separate from herself, something that was completely detached; not as if it were a personal instrument on which she registered her moods and graces. Elsie Truman looked out over the calm sea, to where the snow-capped mountains of the Peloponnesus glowed in the azure sky. Flying fish exploded in flashing beads of light at the passage of the Europa through the still sea; farther away a dolphin jumped into the air and disappeared again, leaving a black blot like an ink-stain. Tonight they would make the Piraeus. Tomorrow Crete.