The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [414]
I: ‘Only if you wish.’
She: ‘I found myself suddenly and hopelessly entangled with someone I had admired some years before but never quite ima-gined in the context of a lover. Chance brought us together for a few short months. I think that neither of us had foreseen this sudden coup de foudre. We both caught fire, as if somewhere an invisible burning glass had been playing on us without our being aware. It is curious that an experience so wounding can also be recognized as good, as positively nourishing. I suppose I was even a bit eager to be wounded — or I would not have made the mistakes I did. He was somebody already committed to some-one else, so there was never, from the beginning, any pretence of permanence in our liaison. Yet (and here comes my famous stupidity again) I very much wanted to have a child by him. A moment’s thought would have shown me that it would have been impossible; but the moment’s thought only supervened when I was already pregnant. I did not, I thought, care that he must go away, marry someone else. I would at least have his child! But when I confessed it — at the very moment the words left my lips
— I suddenly woke up and realized that this would be to per-petuate a link with him to which I had no right. To put it plainly I should be taking advantage of him, creating a responsibility which would shackle him throughout his marriage. It came to me in a flash, and I swallowed my tongue. By the greatest luck he had not heard my words. He was lying like you are now, half asleep, and had not caught my whisper. “What did you say?” he said. I substituted another remark, made up on the spur of the moment. A month later he left Syria. It was a sunny day full of the sound of bees. I knew I should have to destroy the child. I bitterly regretted it, but there seemed no other honourable course to take in the matter. You will probably think I was wrong, but even now I am glad I took the course I did, for it would have perpetuated some-thing which had no right to exist outside the span of these few
golden months. Apart from that I had nothing to regret. I had been immeasurably grown-up by the experience. I was full of gratitude and still am. If I am generous now in my love-making it is perhaps because I am paying back the debt, refunding an old love in a new. I entered a clinic and went through with it. Afterwards the kindly old anaesthetist called me to the dirty sink to show me the little pale homunculus with its tiny members. I wept bitterly. It looked like a smashed yolk of an egg. The old man turned it over curiously with a sort of spatula — as one might turn over a rasher of bacon in a frying-pan. I could not match his cold scientific curiosity and felt rather sick. He smiled and said: “It is all over. How relieved you must feel!” It was true, with my sadness there was a very real relief at having done what I recognized as the right thing. Also a sense of loss; my heart felt like a burgled swallow’s nest. And so back to the mountains, to the same easel and white canvas. It is funny but I realized that precisely what wounded me most as a woman nourished me most as an artist. But of course I missed him for a long time: just a physical being whose presence attaches itself without one’s knowing, like a piece of cigarette paper to the lip. It hurts to pull it away. Bits of the skin come off! But hurt or not, I learned to bear it and even to cherish it, for it allowed me to come to terms with another illusion. Or rather to see the link between body and spirit in a new way — for the physique is only the outer periphery, the contours of the spirit, its solid part. Through smell, taste, touch we apprehend each other, ignite each other’s minds; information