Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

She tossed her hair back out of her eyes, and sniffed. “Yes,” she said stonily. She had been thinking of the tender, the considerate Graecen lying down there smothered in earth and boulders. Who knows what declarations he might not have made if they had had the time; or even if he had been here with her instead of Campion. She dabbed her eyes and moved back until her shoulders were pressed to the wall of the natural stone balcony upon which they found themselves. “We’ll have a spot to eat,” Campion was saying, his voice still squeaky with fatigue, “and then work our way down the cliff to Cefalû, to tell them what has happened.” He did not mention his sudden half-second vision of the Truman couple crossing a rickety gallery of stone; what would have been the point? He could not rescue them. Besides he was relieved to see that the girl had stopped crying at last. “Unpack the food,” he said, anxious to give her something practical with which to occupy her mind, while he himself reconnoitred.

Walking to the edge he found himself looking down upon the broad upturned face of the sea, several hundred feet below. The balcony upon which they stood was simply a narrow cockpit thrust out from the cliff-face over the water. His face grew anxious, and then all of a sudden very pale. The rock stretched away in a clear cleavage of limestone, sheer to the sea; not a foothold or cranny could his eyes pick out as they travelled frantically backwards and forwards over the surface of stone. Campion hoisted himself upon the ridge and tried to climb upwards; he found one foothold and hoisted himself a few feet, only to see that it was hopeless. Smooth and unbroken except by major cleavages the cliff swept up into the sky.

He returned once more and gazed out at the sea, moving from side to side, his whole mind furiously engaged by this new problem. Behind him the girl had removed the battered sandwiches from their wrappings and was calling him to eat. Without speaking, he motioned her to join him and, drawing her down by the shoulders, lay beside her for a long time staring down into the insolent blue of the waters below. She gave a little cry as she understood.

It was perhaps three hundred feet down, he told himself. Could they jump? A kestrel whistled and dived from a ledge just below them, flattening out into a glide before touching the surface of the sea. He could feel the dry island wind playing upon his forehead. Faintly, very faintly from the outer world he could hear the music of trees and the singing of birds. A small ragged strip of coastline was their only prospect. The sea looked deep. Nearer inland it became shallower; he could see the yellow freckles of light moving across the sand bar. If they jumped they would have to clear the fringe of rocks beneath. How far was it? Campion knew he was hopeless at factual calculations of any sort. He closed his eyes and tried to recall the height of the eight-metre board at Villars. An airman had once told him that the resistance of water made it as solid as concrete for anyone attempting to jump into it from above a certain height. What was the height? He could not for the life of him remember. They lay there side by side for a long time, hardly moving. The sea rocked below them, its savage noise coming up in the little lulls of wind from the land. Campion opened his eyes very wide and carefully, elaborately lit another cigarette. His fingers were shaking again. The girl said nothing. They turned back to where she had unwrapped the sandwiches. Campion was thirsty, but they had brought no water with them. Lunch would, in the normal course of events, have been eaten near some fresh-water spring under an olive tree.… He made a grimace and said, “I suppose you’re thirsty too.” Virginia sat down, drawing her legs up under her. Her face was flushed as if she had been running. Campion guessed that tears were not far off. “We will have to jump for it,” he said, and undid the little box of crayons, while he held his sandwich in the other hand. It soothed him to scribble on the smooth rock. They sat for a while in silence, he drawing and she watching him as she ate, slowly and tidily, like a cat. After he had done a series of small men in bowler hats, an eagle, a train, and the Europa , he dusted his fingers and said, with something of the old mordant truculence: “It’s just as well, really. I’m not sure I want to go back.”

The girl put her head on one side and examined the statement of his with an expression of gentle impartiality. “I mean, if one could live how one wanted,” pursued Campion, “and not be at the mercy of a silly world that cares for what is ephemeral and neglects everything that is essential.” His silence was only a grace note. He had begun to sketch a little landscape, a house, some olive trees. “At twenty”, he said softly, “I thought I knew what was wrong. I was a Marxist. A redistribution of property was all that stood between us and heaven. The last few years have been an eye-opener.” At twenty a fumiste , at twenty-one a pointilliste , and twenty-five a Thomiste; at thirty a potential Trappist. Campion scribbled away as he talked partly to himself and partly to Virginia Dale. As he did so much of his life came back to him — without form and order, but with a new marked coherence. The girl he met on the Strada Balbi in Genoa; the broken-down room over the wineshop with its cracked and peeling cherubs on the ceiling, and the red-curtained four-poster bed; a broken mirror and a soap-dish with a lottery ticket lying on it. Is it possible that but for the accident he, campion, might have spent the rest of his life with her between those dirty sheets — entangled in long rich-smelling dark hair? Or Nanteaux, where he had suddenly woken one morning to see the blue Mediterranean gleaming like a stained-glass window, and realized that there was nothing more he wanted to do, nowhere he wanted to go? What had ejected him from these situations if it had not been this restless voracious self with its groundless fears and fantasies about happiness and order? Now perhaps if he should find his way out of this impasse, what could he devise for himself as a way of life that would fulfil the potentiality that he felt about to realize — now experienced only as a gaping hole in his moral outlook. “Stay like that,” he called out. The sun was striking sideways on her face. He began with his nervous deft fingers to draw her.

“I suppose”, said Virginia, “you are a Jew?”

This surprised Campion. It was a charge he had never been able to bring himself to admit. “Why should you say that?” he replied in as off-hand a tone as he could muster.

“No reason,” she said. “I was talking to Richard about you only yesterday. He says you are a great painter.”

“Did he say I was a Jew?” said Campion sharply.

“No. I did. He didn’t think you were.”

Campion put down his pastel and rubbed his fingers on the stone. “And what makes you think I am?” he said.

“I met a lot of Jews in the city,” said the girl. “They all had the same sort of attitude to the world.”

“What attitude?” Campion was getting out of temper with her monotonous delivery.

“That the world is not good enough for them.”

He smiled grimly and picked up his small stub of crayon again. He began to shade in those anaemic but rather gracefully equine features. She sat obediently with her face turned away from him so that the afternoon sun threw into relief her throat and the high cheek-bone.

“Yes,” said Campion, “I am a Jew.” He stubbed out his cigarette and added: “If you really think that Jews have a common psychology.”

Virginia Dale stifled a yawn. “When are we going to jump?” she asked. She seemed to have recovered a great deal of her composure. Campion said rudely: “You can jump whenever you like. I was trying to find out whether I wanted to jump back into the world or not.”