The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell

Author:Lawrence Durrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

The death damp is creeping in again. In the autumn we escape occasionally, like moles, into the upper air, and brood on the extinction settling down over England. This is chiefly to enable Tarquin to write his musical poem: To England. He is participating bravely, he tells me, in the death under the shield: the death which he swears is fattening itself on Our very bones. Go to the country, he tells me, and describe it all for me when you get back. He does not want to see it for himself; is happier in town. That is why you are beside me again, alive to the sweet particularities of the island’s doom, warm of wrist and knee, ankle and elbow.…

Cornfields falling away from the thread of the road in dusty garrisons, leaning, gravid, heavy in the ear. Sunk in them almost submarine, among the gardens, the beautiful farmhouses with the beetle in the wood, churches with pointed windows, mellow stables. Tudor half-timbering, scribbled with creeper; ploughland and arable in jaundiced yellows, mould-browns and purples, spinning away under your fingers in gentle undulations. No, I am quiet and serious. It is all laid out like a page in Gregory’s diary. See, from one end the pen begins to bite, you turn up a long furrow on the paper—a green furrow. The fingers tug slowly like a team of oxen. Behind the steel tooth green figures are coming alive, stretching their arms, and looking around. In this way everything was created.

I am recalling again the terms of our separation: the calendar lying there with the broken back, offering an infinity of smoky evenings. The oblique wishes and hopes of a lifetime gathered together and spent in the space of a few weeks. And now, it seems, I have no more hopes—only acceptance. I keep my mouth shut because my jaw would fall off if I tried to speak.

I am out walking again with Chamberlain in the long evenings: corridor upon stone corridor opening up before us until, for a breath of air and a personal glimpse of trees, we are forced to turn into the park gates. Or else peering at the faded portraits of the Elizabethans in the gallery, while my companion talked vehemently about Lawrence, and his prediluvial madhouse. (“Tut tut, Lawrence? Too vehemently eoan, my dear. Tarquin.”)

Rowing on the lake in the mist; or in the hot nights watching the shadows pass and repass on the walls of Hilda’s bedroom, lighting the washstand, the shelves of belfries, the hanged man in the mirror. The glare of headlights withering her naked body. Reaching you at last over a café table, touching fingers, one’s heart bruised and swollen with despair. The long stabbing waves of parting under the airplane light. The green mouth climbing away upward through my World like a torch, burning away the tissue, the bone and cartilage, nosing among the twittering nerves, annihilating me. Hilda’s big toe, left over from the evening’s entertainment, posted above the bedrail to rot away through eternity, like a traitor’s head on London Bridge.

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