The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [394]
“right” person in vain, even when your heart knows it has found him after so much seeking? No, an eyelash, a perfume, a haunting walk, a strawberry on the neck, the smell of almonds on the breath
— these are the accomplices the spirit seeks out to plan your overthrow.’
Thinking of such passages of savage insight — and they are many in that strange book — I would turn to the sleeping Clea and study her quiet profile in order to … to ingest her, drink the whole of her up without spilling a drop, mingle my very heart-beats with hers. ‘However near we would wish to be, so far exactly do we remain from each other’ wrote Arnauti. It seemed to be no longer true of our condition. Or was I simply deluding myself once more, refracting truth by the disorders inherent in my own vision? Strangely enough I neither knew nor cared now; I had stopped rummaging through my own mind, had learned to take her like a clear draught of spring water.
‘Have you been watching me asleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘Unfair! But what thinking?’
‘Many things.’
‘Unfair to watch a sleeping woman, off her guard.’
‘Your eyes have changed colour again. Smoke.”
(A mouth whose paint blurred slightly under’ kisses. The two small commas, which were almost cusps, almost ready to turn into dimples when the lazy smiles broke surface. She stretches and places her arms behind her head, pushing back the helmet of fair hair which captures the sheen of the candle-light. In the past she had not possessed this authority over her own beauty. New gestures, new tendrils had grown, languorous yet adept to express this new maturity. A limpid sensuality which was now undivided by hesitations, self-questionings. A transformation of the old ‘silly goose’ into this fine, indeed impressive, personage,
quite at one with her own body and mind. How had this come about?)
I: ‘That commonplace book of Pursewarden’s. How the devil did you come by it? I took it to the office today.’
She: ‘Liza. I asked her for something to remember him by. Absurd. As if one could forget the brute! He’s everywhere. Did the notes startle you?’
I: ‘Yes. It was as if he had appeared at my elbow. The first thing I fell upon was a description of my new chief, Maskelyne by name. It seems Pursewarden worked with him once. Shall I read it to you?’
She: ‘I know it.’
(‘Like most of my compatriots he had a large hand-illuminated sign hanging up on the front of his mind reading ON NO
ACCOUNT DISTURB. At some time in the distant past he had been set going like a quartz clock. He will run his course un-faltering as a metronome. Do not let the pipe alarm you. It is intended to give a judicial air. White man smoke puff puff, white man ponder puff puff. In fact white man is deeply deeply asleep under the badges of office, the pipe, the nose, the freshly starched handkerchief sticking out of his sleeve.’)
She: ‘Did you read it to Maskelyne?’
I: ‘Naturally not.’
She: ‘There are wounding things about all of us in it; perhaps that is why I took a fancy to it! I could hear the brute’s voice as he uttered them. You know, my dear, I think I am the only person to have loved old Pursewarden for himself while he was alive. I got his wavelength. I loved him for himself, I say, because strictly he had no self. Of course he could be tiresome, difficult, cruel — like everyone else. But he exemplified something — a grasp on something. That is why his work will live and go on giving off light, so to speak. Light me a cigarette. He had cut a foothold in the cliff a bit higher than I could dare to go — the point where one looks at the top because one is afraid to look down! You tell me that Justine also says something like this. I suppose she got the same thing in a way — but I suspect her of being merely grateful to him, like an animal whose master pulls a thorn from its paw. His intuition was very feminine and much sharper than hers —
and you know that women instinctively like a man with plenty of