The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [453]
— that these were periods when for a long time she had not heard the weeping which she once long ago described as belonging to a she-camel in distress or some horrible mechanical toy. But what could such nonsense really mean to anyone — and how could it elucidate those other periods when she fell into silence and moroseness, became a nervous and woebegone version of her old self? I do not know. I only know that this new personage was
subject to long distracted silences now, and to unusual fatigues. She might, for example, fall asleep on a sofa in the middle of a party and begin to snore: as if overcome with weariness after an immensely long vigil. Insomnia too began to play its part, and she resorted to relatively massive doses of barbiturates in order to seek release from it. She was smoking very heavily indeed.
‘Who is this new nervy person I do not recognize?’ asked Balthazar in perplexity one evening when she had snapped his head off after some trivial pleasantry and left the room, banging the door in my face.
‘There’s something wrong’ I said. He looked at me keenly for a moment over a lighted match. ‘She isn’t pregnant?’ he asked, and I shook my head. ‘I think she’s beginning to wear me out really.’ It cost me an effort to bring out the words. But they had the merit of offering something like a plausible explanation to these moods — unless one preferred to believe that she were being gnawed by secret fears.
‘Patience’ he said. ‘There is never enough of it.’
‘I’m seriously thinking of absenting myself for a while.’
‘That might be a good idea. But not for too long.’
‘I shall see.’
Sometimes in my clumsy way I would try by some teasing remark to probe to the sources of this disruptive anxiety. ‘Clea, why are you always looking over your shoulder — for what?’ But this was a fatal error of tactics. Her response was always one of ill-temper or pique, as if in every reference to her distemper, however oblique, I was in some way mocking her. It was intimi-dating to see how rapidly her face darkened, her lips compressed themselves. It was as if I had tried to put my hand on a secret treasure which she was guarding with her life.
At times she was particularly nervous. Once as we were coming out of a cinema I felt her stiffen on my arm. I turned my eyes in the direction of her gaze. She was staring with horror at an old man with a badly gashed face. He was a Greek cobbler who had been caught in a bombardment and mutilated. We all knew him quite well by sight, indeed Amaril had repaired the damage as well as he was able. I shook her arm softly, reassuringly and she suddenly seemed to come awake. She straightened up abruptly
and said ‘Come. Let us go.’ She gave a little shudder and hurried me away.
At other such times when I had unguardedly made some allusion to her inner preoccupations — this maddening air of always listening for something — the storms and accusations which followed seriously suggested the truth of my own hypo-thesis — namely that she was trying to drive me away: ‘I am no good for you, Darley. Since we have been together you haven’t written a single line. You have no plans. You hardly read any more.’ So stern those splendid eyes had become, and so troubled!
I was forced to laugh, however. In truth I now knew, or thought I did, that I would never become a writer. The whole impulse to confide in the world in this way had foundered, had guttered out. The thought of the nagging little world of print and paper had become unbearably tedious to contemplate. Yet I was not un-happy to feel that the urge had abandoned me. On the contrary I was full of relief — a relief from the bondage of these forms which seemed so inadequate an instrument to convey the truth of feelings. ‘Clea, my dear’ I said, still smiling ineffectually, and yet desiring in a way to confront this accusation and placate her.
‘I have been actually meditating a book of criticism.’
‘Criticism!’ she echoed sharply, as if the word were an insult. And she smacked me full across the mouth — a stinging blow which brought tears to my eyes and cut the inside of my lip against my teeth. I retired to the bathroom to mop my mouth for I could feel the salty taste of the blood. It was interesting to see my teeth outlined in blood. I looked like an ogre who had just taken a mouthful of bleeding flesh from his victims. I washed my mouth, furiously enraged. She came in and sat down on the bidet, full of remorse.