The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [53]
Then, of course, there is the ancient cake-stand which serves as his commode, bookcase and escritoire in one. Clea has accorded it the ungrudging treatment it deserves, painting it with a micro-scopic fidelity. It has four tiers, each fringed with a narrow but elegant level. It cost him ninepence farthing in the Euston Road in 1911, and it has travelled twice round the world with him. He will help you admire it without a trace of humour or self-consciousness.
‘Fetching little thing, what?’ he will say jauntily, as he takes a cloth and dusts it. The top tier, he will explain carefully, was designed for buttered toast: the middle for shortbreads: the bottom tier is for ‘two kinds of cake’. At the moment, however, it is fulfilling another purpose. On the top shelf he his telescope, compass and Bible; on the middle tier lies his correspondence which consists only of his pension envelope; on the bottom tier, with tremendous gravity, lies a chamber-pot which is always referred to as ‘the heir-loom’, and to which is attached a mysterious story which he will one day confide to me.
The room is lit by one weak electric-light bulb and a cluster of rush lights stand ing in a niche which also houses an earthenware jar full of cool drinking water. The one uncurtained window looks blindly out upon a sad peeling wall of mud. Lying in bed with the smoky feeble glare of the night-lights glinting in the glass of his
compass — lying in bed after midnight with the brandy throbbing in his skull he reminds me of some ancient wedding-cake, waiting only for someone to lean forward and blow out the candles!
His last remark at night, when one has seen him safely to bed and tucked him in — apart from the vulgar ‘Kiss Me Hardy’ which is always accompanied by a leer and a popped cheek — is more serious. ‘Tell me honestly’ he says. ‘Do I look my age?’
Frankly Scobie looks anybody’s age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder. On his prehensile toes the glossiest pair of elastic-sided boots. In his hand a ravaged family Bible whose fly-leaf bore the words ‘Joshua Samuel Scobie 1870. Honour thy father and thy mother’. To these possessions were added eyes like dead moons, a distinct curvature of the pirate’s spinal column, and a taste for quinqueremes. It was not blood which flowed in Scobie’s veins but green salt water, deep-sea stuff. His walk is the slow rolling grinding trudge of a saint walking on Galilee. His talk is a green-water jargon swept up in five oceans — an antique shop of polite fable bristling with sex-tants, astrolabes, porpentines and isobars. When he sings, which he so often does, it is in the very accents of the Old Man of the Sea. Like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world, in Zanzibar, Colombo, Togoland, Wu Fu: the little deciduous morsels which he has been shedding for so long now, old antlers, cuff-links, teeth, hair