Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Autumn, I give you late Autumn, like a once bright playing-card, now softened and blurred with the damp: its painted significance now indistinct. The bright inks running wet, with all the hard outlines gone. Late Autumn like a bedraggled parrot, moist in the declining season. The popjaye royalle. Smoke from the cottage chimneys, from the farms, lifting and merging across the hill-slopes where the sodden grass lay crisp all summer. Now we have a sopping scalp of green to the earth, easily peeled, easily torn by heavy boots or the brute feet of the cattle that crowd the gateways. Southward, if you look from one of those hills among the farms where all night long the dogs tug at their chains and bark at nothing, you will see the long grey form of the sea stirring through the mist. Uneasy grey patrol of waters round the coast, eternally vigilant.

  And then Ruth. Dozens of pictures of her: dozens of shapes and lights which were her. Ruth, particularly, under sentence, like the lupins and those lissom early flowers that flagged the April hedges. Ruth smiling, elbows propped on the wood window-sill of the cottage, staring down across the slopes, seaward. Ruth angry. Ruth in quiet nakedness beside him in the heavy bed upstairs. Ruth shaking the hair out of her eyes, smiling again—the red oval in her face, fringed with teeth, and the bright soft rim of lips about it. The eyelash, particularly, fluttering in soft terror against his skin. The terrific interchange of gestures, the great flux of lightning that swept them, drinking them up, while the eyelash beat and beat. The tides, the recession, the final music of nakedness. Yes, but he had seen her face turn back, folded in painful crying, half laughter, half tears, and her mouth actually moaning. Surely the lupins had voices for the final fire that consumed them, surely the last spasm of life shivering in them made them moan like this, upwards?

  There were so many images that it was no use to apply method to them, to go back step by step, stratum by stratum and reconstruct them: memory was a sudden gift out of nowhere, as if a child should turn and hand one a bright playing-card of himself and Ruth, static and fixed in the eternity that was two years by the calendar reckoning. Two years in which he could watch the progression of a million springs, summers, winters, for time itself, all continuity, had utterly vanished. The one big division in the pattern was Ruth dying: her lapsing like that into quietness, like a gift of faithlessness. There was only time before that and after it. An infinity in which her going was the one clean partition.

  Before the events it was nothing but bright colours to remember, crowding in on him, without method or progression. Ruth, for instance, in summer, her hair wet and salt from swimming, shaking down the apple blossom from the tree, standing in the shower of petals shouting with laughter. Apple blossom. And then himself—how unreal that dead self—breaking through the wet fringe of hair at the nape of her neck with his mouth. Or himself again, as they lay on the clean hard sand of the cove, naked, filling her sleeping nostrils with fine sand. How unreal themselves, laughing and tangled in each other s arms on the warm sand! But we are talking of Autumn, and the last fruit.

  They walked in the rain together, among a torrent of wet dead leaves, wind tugging their hair back on their scalps, rain in their mouths and the smell of dead earth. Little splashes of mud coming up on to the rim of his corduroy trousers, and congealing hard. Rain falling from the elms. The vicarage with its damp red stone sweating water and the limp trees smoking round it. Her icy hand stuck inside his coat for warmth, burrowing like a mole through his red pullover, his shirt, his vest. Icy contact with skin!

  They walked together in the rain, across the long meadow, in heavy grass, their footsteps cutting a long trail of fallen rain-drops, until they reached the long last lichgate on Trimmer’s Hill. Crouched on the wet gate, hooking their heels in the bars to keep them balanced in the wind. He spread his mackintosh over them both, and under its shelter they smoked cheap fags and sat silent. Below them, half a county curved away to the sea, laced with lines of road and hedge, toned here and there with long tracts of woodland. Cars spinning along the shining black lines in a flutter of water, like wild geese dragging their toes along the surface of a lake. Small cars like uncouth baby bears, and coloured monsters as well, but all in a flutter of rain-water.

  Then the long race back to the cottage. The gate with the latch that stuck. Ruth dancing about impatiently while he wrestled with it. Indoors, Dolly, the rosy farm-girl, had built up the big log fire and laid tea. Fresh bread from town, butter from Dail’s farm, icy milk with three fingers of cream on the top. Honey, muffins, toast. Stampede in the great flagged kitchen, slipping out of their sodden clothes and shoes into dressing-gowns and slippers while Dolly poured the tea.

  Rain again, lashing the windows, scuttling in the gutters. The fire smoking blue and crackly. Sparks, gold-starred, flashing along the tough forest wood. Drops of resin, burning blood bright, falling from the wood in a pother of smoke, hissing among the embers. Butter and resin, warm slippers, toast, the rain falling outside, and Ruth. Oh quick, draw up the long couch to the fireplace, and put the tea-table beside it. Pull the curtains across the big bay-window to blot out the rain and the closing darkness. Ruth gobbling the muffins with the melted butter running at the corners of her mouth. Kiss the warm buttery mouth and slip your fingers inside the warm blue dressing-gown at her breasts. The slow even bumping of her heart at your fingers. Capricious metronome. The delicate mechanism faulty; quiet heart ticking itself away into the silence, consuming itself, consuming him, consuming this rapt world of toast, wood-resin, warmth in slippers, butter mouths, breasts, loveliness, stars at night, and the wake of liquid nightingales which sang in the elm all summer. Everything being poured out and consumed by just this inexorable movement. Systole, diastole. The dance of life in the imperfect body. And her rich mouth and breath, fit to blow in the nostrils of an aeon of lovers. O God, O God, I know that my Redeemer liveth. Kiss the yielding mouth again in silent panic. Squeeze the small breasts again until they hurt.

  O to forget this gnawing memory

  That where I have invested love is only

  Perilous and woundable frail flesh.…

  And Ruth, for the moment not thinking, not noticing his fear, not allowing her own perpetual fear, saying: “Tell the girl to light the candles, will you? The bitch always forgets.” And the wrinkles that ran along her nose, drawing up the fine mockery of her smile.

  Soft lamplight on them both now. Candles in a long iron stick, and one softly radiant oil-lamp. Feet spread in luxury before the fire. The infinite quiet, the infinite rest. Mouth to mouth it was no good in the silence; they would be masks moving each to each. The torsion of subcutaneous muscles, the shape of the eyes set back against the brown forehead. The mouth as senseless to his want as the rubber lip-mask of a dentist’s gas-apparatus. Only that chill, half-second’s pause before orgasm, when the skins trembled and tangled like a pouch of snakes together, when the voice broke haunting in among the summer nightingales and the dogs, rattling their chains and barking at nothing, only that moment, above all others, held the mystery. Then she was lost in himself. Not the daily and imperfect osmosis of ordinary life. Feeling percolating through a membrane. In that moment the walls were broken down, and the fluid rushed together, like the meeting of seas.

  But what did she know of these fascinating abstractions as she sat, trying to pretend that she did not know that he was staring at her: with her stockinged toes curled under her, reading herself into a doze? For himself, in an amputated world, there was only the slow crumble of toast in his mouth. The warmth crawling over his feet on the coloured carpet and up his legs. Little draughts and eddies of air in the room behind him. Dust on the shelf of books. A cheque for thirty pounds on the mantelpiece and a letter from Garland saying: “Do you mind selling your soul? You do it well. This last tune of yours is good. As I see it you’ll be rich before long. Ecstasy to be in Love is still selling mildly. But I anticipate bigger things from this one, Never come Back.” Does one mind selling one’s soul? Does one mind anything when she is trying to pretend that she
does not see me looking at her with grave eyes? Why can’t I weep? And his diary.

  So many abstractions in that one brown face, and the eyes moving like synchronized insects along the lines of black type. So many faces in one face. If I sit down and try to write of her the thoughts fly into splinters, and my brain numbs, while the images of her fall across my body like burning rockets. These very white, senseless, bloodless typewriter keys refuse to chatter of her. They become so many dissimilar white faces of her. Let me count them. Thirty-two keys to her, and all lost, all sterile and lost by words. Yet one goes on, for no discoverable reason except this insane desire to make oneself real, to understand the splintered mirrors in oneself, and through oneself to reach out for that twin world, whose discovery is lost in a single second of two bodies in friction, heeling over like toy balloons whose strings have snapped, heading for the spaces among the planets.

  “Forget these dreary milestones, the commas, the hyphens, the exclamation marks, the colons, the full stop which lies at every sentence, whether it has the flux and ecstasy in it, or whether it is some drab and meaningless cliché, down-at-heel, sucked dry like old orange skin, and tossed into the mind’s limbo as soon as comprehended. Open and close the inverted commas, though the words of her mouth can never reach another mind except through perhaps some turn, some artifice, which another’s words place over them. Reality of her, I sup pose, must run like a thread in a worn carpet, here and there bright, visible and new. The carpet slippers of old men, the dust of ancient ankles have blotted out most of it, will blot out the rest. Even these banal lines can only blow across the mind like a casual scent of March flowers, soon lost, soon disseminated, and the breath of a lover’s mouth in darkness on your tongue, becomes for an instant her breath, significant. Otherwise we meet across acres of ink, of paper, of corrections, ink blue, red, green, violet, vermilion, ink running in the veins of the head, the mouth gushing ink in poetry, the hearts of our lovers filling, pausing, gushing ink again into the body to complete the endless circuit. I think if I took a bright knife to you, my darling, and split the artery which bulges above your elbow, your arm would spout ink like a tiny fountain, running across my wretched papers, across the wretched type-heads of this machine which tries and tries to hammer out an image of you; one hard medallion of you on to the senseless paper. Perhaps when I kiss you, your mouth is only wet with ink, where I have pressed shapes in you, printed my own longing indelibly across your body, hammered these dancing type-heads into your very pith.…”

  But the playing-card of their last Autumn had more than one face on it; or rather, the faces changed, merged, swapped. Dolly, with the red cheeks and the hefty loins, Dolly the dour potential baby-maker who could not marry until old Vole skipped into his coffin. What a four-foot tyrant the old man was, hovering on the edge of the grave! And the big stout harness-maker’s son, with his blue eyes fixed longingly on the old man’s second daughter. They courted now. One could see them on Sunday, holding raw red hands, dressed in their best (he in a black suit, she in a red dress), standing like rooted stumps by the cornfield gate, immobile, gazing with a queer gentle puzzlement on the earth bursting into life. The atmosphere would go thin some time, and cut them like knives, and goad them to action. So gentle they were, so puzzled, with the mud sticking to the soles of their heavy shoes. Their desire, one felt, if it ever got hold of them, would submerge the whole household, would sweep away all the furniture of old Vole’s life; all the gimcrack paraphernalia which helped him to maintain his autocracy over the female.

  The kitchen range, with its stirring pots and pans over the bright fire, the mantelshelf with its two sere photos of an ice-age Mr. Vole and his big-fingered, now-dead wife. The little tea-caddy, with green and gold patterns on it, in which he kept his shag. The guns hanging up on the wall. The cherrywood stick behind the door. The sink where the thick cheap plates were washed up. His innumerable soiled waistcoats in the bedroom. Whitaker’s Almanac. A shovel. Boots like iron, whose toes had curled upward with damp, and to whose soles hung the dry mud of a hundred winters. His little insect hands, finger and thumb dredging his waistcoat pocket for loose matches. His feet on the fender. Dolly herself, standing for an aeon over the sink, staring numbly out of the window across the farmlands, with a plate in one hand. The warm cattle, whose breath stirred one with its sweetness and volume: the loose black mouth of a foal she could take in her rough hand and kiss with great winsome smacks. All of this, one felt, would be swept away giddily, loosely on the torrent that waited to break forth from their stony bodies. Yet the flood never came. Old Vole, oblivious, could think of nothing but his crops and his bitter beer. Ruth would have liked to see him playing Noah, sailing away on the wrathful flood of his daughter’s life. But the flood never came. Tomorrow, I think, if it is spring or summer when you read this, you could go down and see them still there, Dolly and the red-faced youth, rooted by the edge of the cornfield, quite dumb, quite still, puzzled by the silence and calling of cattle. They will stay there until the first midges begin to bite her red arms. Then they will say good-night like wood-carvings by the edge of the corn.

  So much for Dolly. But a half turn of the card in the light will give you the Rev. Richard Pixie, the parson. Here was a six-foot pixy, bowed down by the cares of religion, who called and was drearily friendly, in the name of our sweet Saviour, etc. He insisted on calling Ruth “your wife”; though he knew they were living in sin, he still had some vague idea of helping them to avoid sinning in life. He would come so dreary, so weary, so lax, debile, anile, frustrate, gnawed, and unwind himself into a chair by the fire, stretching out his wretched black boots, and accepting cigarettes with both bony hands. He stank faintly of all the mouldering relics of his caste and occupation, much as the brick church smelt—of damp vegetables and flowers—after the harvest festival. He was a confirmed reader of the sporting page, supporter of the party policy, subscriber to conventions, coloured bath-mats made of cork, mother’s meetings, lads of the village brigade, football on the green. He did not even preach his own sermons and give one the chance to have some fun at his expense. He read them out of a book. He had never heard of Donne, piles, the Reformation, Duke Ellington, the cosmic ray, Remy de Gourmont, Henry Miller. The top of his head was flat, matted with light red hair, the shape of a snake, or some reptile. Sometimes he brought his wife, sometimes he came alone. He seemed happier when he was with her, perhaps because the endless rushing of her conversation completely obliterated him, allowed him to take refuge in a corner by the fireplace. She was a thin woman, with a body like a pencil. Her mouth was a purse of solecisms, which was continually tearing and allowing the clattering, bouncing stream of old pennies to run out among the company. Such a stream of coins, and every one old, with the face rubbed off it by long handling. Not one bright bronze newly-minted coin in the collection. Nevertheless out they all flowed, in the drab stream, rolling across the floor, hitting the legs of chairs, the wall. Stunned, one bent down and groped about for them, collected them. Handed them back to her and hoped for the best. Alas! Within a moment, bang went the mouth of the purse, and out rolled the stream again, intolerably tedious.

  She had big rough hands and slack breasts, long since laid up against her, useless: stacked like late autumn windfalls. Their only child, which had been named Maud Alexandria Helen Pixie, died when it was four. Since then they had had five dogs, Rufus, Whisky, Bill, Rufus, and Whisky; two cats, Betty and Annie; and an Austin seven, which she had called Victor III, after her now deceased father, and on whose faulty tin bowels she spent her most cherished maternal treasures. She decarbonized it herself, cleaned it herself, mended punctures, recharged the batteries, fitted new rings when necessary, boasted about it, added up its insignificant mileages, painted the wings, corrected a slipping clutch, knitted it a radiator cover, and only used it when she had to. In spite of this, however, the bloody thing only went about once in every five times.

  Besides this occupation of hers, there was nothing else wor
th noticing. She showed a clear inch of petticoat under her dress when she walked, and left cigarettes in her mouth until they fizzled right away up under her nose, without touching them. But she once said to Ruth, looking significantly at her, as she got into the car: “You’ll regret all this one day, dear. Believe me, I KNOW.”

  Now what in the name of heaven (as Ruth said) could that mannish tubular parson’s wife know about “all this”? Walsh was sure that the answer was one of the largest zeros ever drawn. Nix. Nothing. He had a good eye for the symbols of private tragedy, and once, when the vicar was showing him the excellence of the interior architecture of his home, he had penetrated the fastness of the bedroom, and let his eye wander across all those signposts to domestic decay.

  Pixie obviously gargled in permanganate before going to bed. On the shelf above the wash-basin were two identical tooth-mugs, each holding a spare set of witty false teeth. An atomizer for Pixie’s tonsils. A corn-cure. Embrocation for the lady’s rheumatism (probably the result of lying out all winter on the damp garage floor under the Austin). A prayer-book; a cheque-book; a bank-book; a Daily Mail Tear Book; a Bible, and a collection of unpleasant male neck-refuse—collar studs. A photograph of a Herculean maiden aunt suggestively flanked by a print of the Colosseum. Two pairs of worn slippers. In the corner, with the dust thick on them, a pair of fantastic skates. Obviously the domestic ice had never been firm enough for him to skate on. Perhaps the way was effectively barred by the shelf full of preliminaries—permanganate, Milton, Sloane’s, and the atmosphere of Swift’s lady’s dressing-room. Over the bed-head, on the wall, was a text, such as one sees in hikers’ hostels: The Lord is my Shepherd.