The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [160]
‘ “Ecoute…. ”
‘ “Rien — silence. ”
‘ “Mais chéri, nous sommes seuls. ” She was still sleepy. Cast an eye to a bolted door. She felt a momentary disgust at this bour-geois fear of his; afraid of intruders, spies, a husband?
‘ “Qu’ est-ce que c’ est?”
‘ “Je m’é coute moi-même. ” Yellow eyes without a trace of dis-cernible divinity in them; he was like a slender rock-god, with ruffled moustache. Past lives? “Le coeur qui bat. ” Derisively he quoted a popular song.
‘ “Tu n’ es pas une femme pour moi — pas dans mon genre. ”
‘This made her feel like a whipped dog specially as a moment ago he had been kissing her, breaking her down into successive images of pain and pleasure with an importunity which belonged, she now knew, only to his passion and not to himself.
‘ “What do you want?” she said, and struck him across the face to feel at once the stinging retort on her own cheek — like spray dashing over her. And now he began to fool again until she could not prevent herself from laughing.
‘This weird translation of feelings into gestures which belied words and words which belied gestures, confused and disoriented her. She needed someone to tell her whether to laugh or to cry.
‘As for Pursewarden, he believed with Rilke that no woman adds anything to the sum of Woman, and from satiety he had now taken refuge in the plenty of the imagination — the true field of merit for the artist. This is perhaps what made him seem to her somehow cold and unfeeling. “Somewhere inside you there is a nasty little Anglican clergyman” she told him and he considered the remark gravely on its merits. “Perhaps” he said, and added after a pause
“But your humourlessness has made you an enemy of pleasure. The enemy. You have a premeditated approach to experience. I am a truer pagan.” And he began to laugh. Great honesty can be crueller than anything else.
‘He was sick, I think too, of all the “mud thrown up by the wheels of life” — so he writes. He had done his best to scrape off as much as he could, to tidy himself up. Was he now to be saddled with the inquisitions and ardours of a Justine — the marshy end of a personality which in a funny sort of way he had himself transcended? “By God, no!” he told himself. Can you see what a fool he was?
‘His life had been a various and full one, and he had held a number of contract posts for some political branch of the Foreign Office, largely, I gather, connected with cultural relations. This work had taken him to several countries and he spoke at least three languages well. He was married and had two children although he
was separated from his wife — and indeed never spoke about her without stammering — though I gather they corresponded affec-tionately and he was always most scrupulous in sending her money. What else? Yes, his real name was Percy and he was somewhat sensitive about it because of the alliteration, I suppose; hence his choice of Ludwig as a signature to his books. He was always de-lighted when his reviewers took him to be of German extraction.
‘I think what frightened and delighted Justine about him most, however, was his somewhat contemptuous repudiation of Arnauti and his book Moeurs. Mind you, this too was overdone — he actually admired the book very much. But he used it as a stick to belabour Justine, describing her ex-husband as a “tiresome psychoanalytical turnkey with a belt full of rusty complexes”. I must say, this delighted her. You see, here was someone who set no store by jargon and refused to regard her as a Case. Of course Pursewarden, the silly fool, was simply trying to get rid of her and this was not a very good way. Yet as a doctor I can testify to the therapeutic effects of insults in cases where medicine is at a loss to make any headway! Indeed, had Justine succeeded in making herself really interesting to him, she might have learned a lot of valuable lessons. Odd, isn’t it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you must know, it is a law of love that the so-called “right” person always comes too soon or too