The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [283]
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 felt ebbing and flowing in her veins, but his own moral strength ebbed now and guttered. He turned pale and lay with his bright feverish eyes turned to the shabby ceiling, seeing backwards into time. A clock struck coarsely somewhere, and the sound of the hours woke Melissa, driving away her lassitude , replacing it once more with anxiety, with a desire to be done, to be poured back into the sleep with which she struggled.
They played with each other, counterfeiting a desultory passion which mocked its own origins, could neither ignite nor extinguish itself. (You can lie with lips apart, legs apart, for numberless eternities, telling yourself it is something you have forgotten, it is
on the tip of your tongue, the edge of your mind. For the life of you you cannot remember what it is, the name, the town, the day, the hour … the biological memory fails.) She gave a small sniff, as if she were crying, holding him in those pale, reflective fingers, tenderly as one might hold a fledgling fallen from the nest. Ex-pressions of doubt and anxiety flitted across her face — as if she were herself guilty for the failure of the current, the broken communication. Then she groaned — and he knew that she was thinking of the money. Such a large sum! His improvidence could never be repeated by other men! And now her crude solicitude, her roughness began to make him angry.
‘ Chéri. ’ Their embraces were like the dry conjunction of wax-works, of figures modelled in gesso for some classical tomb. Her hands moved now charmlessly upon the barrel-vaulting of his ribs, his loins, his throat, his cheek; her fingers pressing here and there in darkness, linger of the blind seeking a secret panel in a wall, a forgotten switch which would slide back, illuminate another world, out of time. It was useless, it seemed. She gazed wildly around her. They lay under a nightmarish window full of sealight, against which a single curtain moved softly like a sail, reminding her of Darley