The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [172]
There was a long silence. “Well, stap me! The old Porn himself!”
(He had coined this nickname from the word “pornographer”.) And then very quietly and tentatively, Pursewarden went on: “I suddenly had the idea on re-reading all that stuff, you know, that if I had been in your shoes and the whole damn thing wasn’t just a lie to make yourself more interesting to the psychopomps —
I’d … well, I’d bloody well try and sleep with him again and try to lay the image that way. The idea suddenly came to me.”
‘This betrays, of course, his total ignorance of psychology. In-deed, it was a fatal step to suggest. But here, to his own surprise, she began to laugh — the first effortless, musical laugh he had ever heard her give. “I did” she said, now laughing almost too much for speech, “I did. You’ll never guess what an effort it cost me, hanging about in the dark road outside his house, trying to pluck up courage to ring the bell. Yes, it occurred to me too. I was des-perate. What would he say? We had been friends for years — with never of course a reference to this event. He had never referred to Moeurs and, you know, I don’t believe he has read it ever. Perhaps he preferred, I always thought, to disregard the whole thing — to bury it tactfully.”
‘Laughter again overtook her, shaking her body so much that Pursewarden took her arm anxiously, not to let her interrupt the recital. She borrowed his handkerchief to mop her eyes and con-tinued: “I went in at last. He was there in his famous library! I was shaking like a leaf. You see, I didn’t know what note to strike, something dramatic, something pathetic? It was like going to the dentist. Really, it was funny, Pursewarden. I said at last ‘Dear Da Capo, old friend, you have been my demon for so long that I have come to ask you to exorcise me once and for all. To take away the memory of a horrible childhood event. You must sleep with me!’
You should have seen Da Capo’s face. He was terribly thrown off guard and stammered: ‘ Mais voyons, Justine, je suis un ami de Nessim! ’ and so on. He gave me a whisky and offered me an aspirin
— sure that I had gone out of my mind. ‘Sit down’ he said, putting out a chair for me with shaking hands and sitting nervously down opposite me with a comical air of alarm — like a small boy accused of stealing apples.” Her side was hurting and she pressed her hand to it, laughing with such merriment that it infected him and in-voluntarily he began to laugh too. “Poor Da Capo” she said, “he was so terribly shocked and alarmed to be told he had raped me when I was a street arab, a child. I have never seen a man more taken aback. He had completely forgotten, it is clear, and com-pletely denied the whole thing from start to finish. In fact, he was outraged and began to protest. I wish you could have seen his face! Do you know what slipped out in the course of his self-
justifications? A marvellous phrase ‘ Il y a quinze ans que je n’ ai pas fait ça! ’ ” She threw herself now face downward on to Purse-warden’s lap and stayed a moment, still shaking with laughter; and then she raised her head once more to wipe her eyes. She said “I finished my whisky at last and left, much to his relief; as I was at the door he called after me ‘Remember you are both dining with me on Wednesday. Eight for eight-fifteen, white tie’, as he had done these past few years. I went back home in a daze and drank half a bottle of gin. And you know, I had a strange thought that night in bed — perhaps you will find it shockingly out of place; a thought about Da Capo forgetting so completely an act which had cost me so many years of anxiety and indeed mental illness and had made me harm so many people. I said to myself ‘This is perhaps the very way God himself forgets the wrongs he does to us