The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [57]
She lives without lovers or family ties, without malices or pets, concentrating with single-mindedness upon her painting which
she takes seriously, but not too seriously. In her work, too, she is lucky; for these bold yet elegant canvases radiate clemency and humour. They are full of a sense of play — like children much-beloved. But I see that I have foolishly spoken of her as ‘denying herself marriage’. How this would anger her: for I remember her once saying: ‘If we are to be friends you must not think or speak about me as someone who is denying herself something in life. My soli-tude does not deprive me of anything, nor am I fitted to be other than I am. I want you to see how successful I am and not imagine me full of inner failings. As for love itself — cher ami — I told you already that love interested me only very briefly — and men more briefly still; the few, indeed the one, experience which marked me was an experience with a woman. I am still living in the happiness of that perfectly achieved relationship: any physical substitute would seem today horribly vulgar and hollow. But do not imagine me as suffering from any fashionable form of broken heart. No. In a funny sort of way I feel that our love has really gained by the passing of the love-object; it is as if the physical body somehow stood in the way of love’s true growth, its self-realization. Does that sound calamitous?’ She laughed.
We were walking, I remember, along the rainswept Corniche in autumn, under a darkening crescent of clouded sky; and as she spoke she put her arm affectionately through mine and smiled at me with such tenderness that a passer-by might have been forgiven for imagining that we ourselves were lovers.
‘And then’ she went on ‘there is another thing which perhaps you will discover for yourself. There is something about love — I will not say defective for the defect lies in ourselves: but some-thing we have mistaken about its nature. For example, the love you now feel for Justine is not a different love for a different object but the same love you feel for Melissa trying to work itself out through the medium of Justine. Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appear-ing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people. But it is limited in quantity, can be used up, become shop-worn and faded before it reaches its true object. For its destination lies somewhere in the deepest regions of the psyche where it will come to recognize itself as self-love, the ground upon which we
build the sort of health of the psyche. I do not mean egoism or narcissism.’
It was conversations like these: conversations lasting sometimes far into the night, which first brought me close to Clea, taught me that I could rely upon the strength which she had quarried out of self-knowledge and reflection. In our friendship we were able to share our private thoughts and ideas, to test them upon one an-other, in a way that would have been impossible had we been linked more closely by ties which, paradoxically enough, separate more profoundly than they join, though human illusion forbids us to believe this. ‘It is true’ I remember her saying once, when I had mentioned this strange fact, ‘that in some sense I am closer to you than either Melissa or Justine. You see, Melissa’s love is too con-fiding : it blinds her. While Justine’s cowardly monomania sees one through an invented picture of one, and this forbids you to do any-thing except to be a demoniac like her. Do not look hurt. There is no malice in what I say.’
But apart from Clea’s own painting, I should not forget to men-tion the work she does for Balthazar. She is the clinic painter. For some reason