The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [448]
At the Petit Coin we secured a corner table after an amiable altercation with a naval lieutenant, and he at once took hold of Menotti and commanded champagne to be brought. Where the devil had he got this new laughing authoritative manner which instantly commanded sympathetic respect without giving offence?
‘The desert!’ he said, as if in answer to my unspoken question.
‘The desert, Darley, old boy. That is something to be seen.’
From a capacious pocket he produced a copy of the Pickwick Papers. ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘I mustn’t forget to get this copy replaced. Or the crew will bloody well fry me.’ It was a sodden, dog-eared little book with a bullet hole in the cover, smeared with oil. ‘It’s our only library, and some bastard must have wiped himself on the middle third. I’ve sworn to replace it. Actually there’s a copy at the flat. I don’t suppose Pombal would mind my pinching it. It’s absurd. When there isn’t any action we he about reading it aloud to one another, under the stars! Absurd, my dear chap, but then everything is more absurd. More and more absurd every day.’
‘You sound so happy’ I said, not without a certain envy.
‘Yes’ he said in a smaller voice, and suddenly, for the first time, became relatively serious. ‘I am. Darley, let me make you a con-fidence. Promise not to groan.’
‘I promise.’
He leaned forward and said in a whisper, his eyes twinkling,
‘I’ve become a writer at last!’ Then suddenly he gave his ringing laugh. ‘You promised not to groan’ he said.
‘I didn’t groan.’
‘Well, you looked groany and supercilious. The proper response would have been to shout “Hurrah!” ’
‘Don’t shout so loud or they’ll ask us to leave.’
‘Sorry. It came over me.’
He drank a large bumper of champagne with the air of some-one toasting himself and leaned back in his chair, gazing at me quizzically with the same mischievous sparkle in his blue eyes.
‘What have you written?’ I asked.
‘Nothing’ he said, smiling. ‘Not a word as yet. It’s all up here.’
He pointed a brown finger at his temple. ‘But now at least I know it is. Somehow whether I do or don’t actually write isn’t im-portant — it isn’t, if you like, the whole point about becoming a writer at all, as I used to think.’
In the street outside a barrel organ began playing with its sad hollow iteration. It was a very ancient English barrel organ which old blind Arif had found on a scrap heap and had fixed up in a somewhat approximate manner. Whole notes misfired and several chords were hopelessly out of tune.
‘Listen’ said Keats, with deep emotion, ‘just listen to old Arif.’
He was in that delicious state of inspiration which only comes when champagne supervenes upon a state of fatigue — a melan-choly tipsiness which is wholly inspiriting. ‘Gosh!’ he went on in rapture, and began to sing in a very soft husky whisper, marking time with his finger, ‘ Taisez-vous, petit babouin’ . Then he gave a great sigh of repletion, and chose himself a cigar from Menotti’s great case of specimens, sauntering back to the table where he once more sat before me, smiling rapturously. ‘This war’ he said at last, ‘I really must tell you…. It is quite different to what I imagined it must be like.’
Under his champagne-bedizened tipsiness he had become relatively grave all at once. He said: ‘Nobody seeing it for the first time could help crying out with the whole of his rational mind in protest at it: crying out “It must stop!” My dear chap, to see the ethics of man at his norm you must see a battlefield. The
general idea may be summed up in the expressive phrase: “If you can’t eat it or **** it, then **** on it.” Two thousand years of civilization! It peels off in a flash. Scratch with your little finger and you reach the woad or the ritual war paint under the varnish!
Just like that!’ He scratched the air between us languidly with his expensive cigar. ‘And yet — you know what? The most un-accountable and baffling thing. It has made a man of me, as the saying goes. More, a writer! My soul is quite clear, I suppose you could regard