The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [454]
‘One more performance like this’ I said grimly, ‘and I’ll give you a blow between those beautiful eyes which you’ll remember.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She put her arms round my shoulders from behind and kissed my neck. The blood had stopped. ‘What the devil is wrong?’ I said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘What has come over you these days? We’re drifting apart, Clea.’
‘I know.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ But her face had once more become hard and obstinate. She sat down on the bidet and stroked her chin thoughtfully, suddenly sunk in reflection once more. Then she lit a cigarette and walked back into her living-room. When I returned she was sitting silently before a painting gazing at it with an inattentive malevolent fixity.
‘I think we should separate for a while’ I said.
‘If you wish’ she rapped out mechanically.
‘Do you wish it?’
Suddenly she started crying and said ‘Oh, stop questioning me. If only you would stop asking me question after question. It’s like being in court these days.’
‘Very well’ I said.
This was only one of several such scenes. It seemed clear to me that to absent myself from the city was the only way to free her — to give her the time and space necessary to … what? I did not know. Later that winter I thought that she had begun running a small temperature in the evenings and incurred another furious scene by asking Balthazar to examine her. Yet despite her anger she submitted to the stethoscope with comparative quiet-ness. Balthazar could find nothing physically wrong, except that her pulse rate was advanced and her blood pressure higher than normal. His prescription of stimulants she ignored, however. She had become much thinner at this time.
By patient lobbying I at last unearthed a small post for which I was not unsuitable and which somehow fitted into the general rhythm of things — for I did not envisage my separation from Clea as something final, something in the nature of a break. It was simply a planned withdrawal for a few months to make room for any longer-sighted resolutions which she might make. New factors were there, too, for with the ending of the war Europe was slowly becoming accessible once more — a new horizon opening beyond the battle-lines. One had almost stopped dreaming of it, the recondite shape of a Europe hammered flat by bombers, raked by famine and discontents. Nevertheless it was still there. So it was that when I came to tell her of my departure it was not with despondency or sorrow — but as a matter-of-fact decision which she must welcome for her own part. Only the manner in
which she pronounced the word ‘Away’ with an indrawn breath suggested for a brief second that perhaps, after all, she might be afraid to be left alone. ‘You are going away, after all?’
‘For a few months. They are building a relay station on the island, and there is need for someone who knows the place and can speak the language.’
‘Back to the island?’ she said softly — and here I could not read the meaning of her voice or the design of her thought.
‘For a few short months only.’
‘Very well.’
She walked up and down the carpet with an air of perplexity, staring downwards at it, deep in thought. Suddenly she looked up at me with a soft expression that I recognized with a pang —
the mixture of remorse and tenderness at inflicting unw itting sorrow upon others. It was the face of the old Clea. But I knew that it would not last, that once more the peculiar shadow of her discontent would cast itself over our relationship. There was no point in trusting myself once more to what could only prove a short respite. ‘Oh, Darley’ she said, ‘when do you go, my dear?’
taking my hands.
‘In a fortnight. Until then I propose not to see you at all. There is no point in our upsetting each other by these wrangles.’
‘As you wish.’
‘I’ll write to you.’
‘Yes of course.’
It was a strange listless way of parting after such a momentous relationship. A sort of ghostly anaesthesia had afflicted our emotions. There was a kind of deep ache inside me but it wasn