The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [295]
Dear Mr. Pursewarden,
I am writing to ask you to perform an unusual service for me. A favourite uncle of mine has just died. He was a great lover of England and the English language which he knew almost better than his own; in his will he left instructions that an epitaph in English should be placed upon his tomb, in prose or verse, and if possible original. I am anxious to honour his memory in this most suitable way and to carry out his last wishes, and this is why I write: to ask you if you would consider such an undertaking, a common one for poets to perform in ancient China, but un-common today. I would be happy to commission you in the sum of £500 for such a work.
The epitaph had been duly delivered and the money deposited in his bank, but to his surprise he found himself unable to touch it. Some queer superstition clung to him. He had never written poetry to order before, and never an epitaph. He smelt something unlucky almost about so large a sum. It had stayed there in his bank, untouched. Now he was suddenly visited by the conviction that he must give it away to Darley! It would, among other things, atone for his habitual neglect of his qualities, his clumsy awkwardness.
She walked back to the hotel with him, pressed as close as a scabbard to his thigh — the professional walk of a woman of the streets. They hardly spoke. The streets were empty.
The old dirty lift, its seats trimmed with dusty brown braid and its mirrors with rotting lace curtains, jerked them slowly upwards into the cobwebbed gloom. Soon, he thought to himself, he would drop through the trap-door feet first, arms pinioned by arms, lips by lips, until he felt the noose tighten about his throat and the stars explode behind his eyeballs. Surcease, forgetfulness, what else should one seek from an unknown woman’s body?
Outside the door he kissed her slowly and deliberately, pressing into the soft cone of her pursed lips until their teeth met with a slight click and a jar. She neither responded to him nor withdrew, presenting her small expressionless face to him (sightless in the gloom) like a pane of frosted glass. There was no excitement in her, only a profound and consuming world-weariness. Her hands were
cold. He took them in his own, and a tremendous melancholy beset him. Was he to be left once more alone with himself? At once he took refuge in a comic drunkenness which he well knew how to simulate, and which would erect a scaffolding of words about reality, to disorder and distemper it. ‘ Viens, viens! ’ he cried sharply, reverting almost to the false jocularity he assumed with Darley, and now beginning to feel really rather drunk again. ‘ Le maître vous invite. ’ Unsmiling, trustful as a lamb, she crossed the threshold into the room, looking about her. He groped for the bed-lamp. It did not work. He lit a candle which stood in a saucer on the night-table and turned to her with the dark shadows dancing in his nostrils and in the orbits of his eyes. They looked at one another while he conducted a furious mercenary patter to disguise his own unease. Then he stopped, for she was too tired to smile. Then, still unspeaking and unsmiling, she began to un-dress, item by item, dropping her clothes about her on the ragged carpet.
For a long moment he lay, simply exploring her slender body with its slant ing ribs (structure of ferns) and the small, immature but firm breasts. Troubled by his silence, she sighed and said something inaud ible. ‘ Laissez. Laissez parler les doigts … comme ça’ he whispered to silence her. He would have liked to say some simple and concrete word. In the silence he felt her beginning to struggle against the luxurious darkness and the growing powers of his lust, straggling to compartment her feelings, to keep them away from her proper life among the bare transactions of existence.
‘A separate compartment’ he thought; and ‘Is it marked Death?’
He was determined to exploit her weakness, the tenderness he