The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  BOOK TWO

  If the spring ever breaks in this district it is with an air of surprised green. A momentous few weeks of fruition in which the little unwary things come out in their defenceless, naïve way. The soot and the metal paralysis soon eat them. The canker of steel rusting slowly in the virginity of the rose.

  The cold weather drives us breast to breast in these chilly form rooms by the iron stoves. A raw fug of anthracite and unwashed bodies. The children fart incessantly; and in the form room upstairs Marney, the hunchback, sits down before the fire and spreads out the sodden folds of his handkerchief, sniffing. As the rank menstruous steam goes up he will throw over his shoulder some such profundity as: ¿ Es este obrero quien fuma? or ¿ Somos nosotros quienes hemos hablado al banquero? All winter he has a roaring cold, and every day his sopping handkerchief is dried at the boiler thus. The children squeak and fart and hold their eternal palavers behind his back. The air tastes faintly of steamed snot.

  This is Honeywoods. The two suburban houses telescoped into one, gathered, as it were, under the armorial banner of Eustace Adams Honeywood, Esq. Inside these rotting brick walls, in the bare, unwashed rooms, the children parade themselves daily, in a vain attempt to master the principles and practice of big business. Outside, the trams pass, rocking and hooting, cannonading the windows in their loose frames. The big green board is chipped and faded, and whitened with pigeon shit. The gutters sag and the lightning conductor twangs on the wind like a harp string.

  All this is custom now. Familiarity has bred, not so much contempt, as a sort of unreasonable love of the place. In the crooked little vestry, which is the holy of holies, Eustace himself lies all day in a sleepy coma. On the door is the decomposing postcard on which he has written, at some time before the flood, the glyph: E. A. Honeymood, Director. That means you must tap before entering in order to wake him up. Prediluvial, paleolithic, geologic—there is no chronological qualification which expresses accurately the age of this community. It is outside chronologies.

  This is a reflection from the little desk behind the door at which I maunder through the day’s work. Next door, from the typing room, the symphonic racket of typewriters leaks across the ocean of papers, of files, bills, acknowledgements. The so-called English mistress, with no roof to her mouth, is dictating a few anthology pieces and classics for the typewriters to reduce to Morse.

  Tomowwow and tomowwow and tomowwow

  Cweeps in this petty pace fwom day to day.

  The desks are humming and the inkpots dancing. A mild solo of nose blowing from the Commerce room where Marney is drying his handkerchief and teaching commercial Spanish. Dust along the floors, and a poisoned sunlight along the windows. This is the time when the blackbird opens up her drumfire, streams of softnosed dum-dums on the stunned fields. The captive canary in the corner completes its millionth exploration of the world, and falls asleep. It is bored. Spring has broken like a bucketful of pounded ice and we are still working our feet in our shoes for warmth. There is some irrational problem about Keats, and the nightingales spinning silk in my mind, battling with the sleep. The crepuscular morning opening like a vegetable, and this soft decay in which we either work or sleep. At a precise point in the meditation, when I have reached Greece, or Carthage, or the Syrian lions spitting gold dust, Eustace will open one lidless blond eye and say: “Cam on, me lad. Get on with that letter.”

  “It’s done.”

  “Oh.” And he will fall asleep again, wringing his ear peevishly with his finger; or else walk up and down importantly, one finger and thumb searching in his waistcoat for something he never finds, fussing and moping, taking off his glasses and replacing them, whistling through his teeth, or sucking the sore spot on his thumb. Eustace is a queer cuffin. If he farts by mistake he pretends nothing has happened. If I fart he is indignant. “Remember you’re in a college with young ladies, me lad,” he says stiffly. If I reply, “Hoity-toity,” he will pretend to give me the sack. This is interesting because he cannot do so. I am his secretary, true, but our agreement is not monetary. In return for my services he allows me to spend three days a week learning typing. A gentleman’s agreement. Hence Keats, hence the lions spitting gold dust, hence to long comfortable dozes in which the whole world is gathered up in a grain of birdseed and handed to the canary. From a private secretary to a mascot is a short step. From a mascot to a housekeeper …

  “There’s that smell again!” he says. I take no notice. Keats must come first. The subject of faulty drainage is as old as Noah. “Do you notice it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the girls’ bogs again.”

  Faint drafts of cheese or cosmetics or soap and sweat, and then a long curling whiff of this vegetable odour. Someone will have to go into that fetid little tabernacle and prize open the cistern. (“Plunger won’t work, eh? Yes. Yes. I’ll have a plumber up to look at it.”) It is not the first time. Keats’s poetry, I say firmly to myself, rattling my knuckles on the desk like the bones of Judas, was the product of his disease. Five more years, three more years even … “Miss Ethelred complained this morning that the pan won’t flush,” Eustace says suddenly. “I can’t make out what that girl eats, like. It’s always her blocking up the bogs. Once more and I’ll sue her ma and pa.” The faint whiff like a boiled pudding, engulfing Keats, Venice among its floating furniture, Severn, and that little cock teaser Shelley, like a blob of pus scribbling, scribbling. Or Hamlet with the incandescent father? “Listen,” he says, “do it just this once. I won’t never ask you again. Just this once.”

  I am glad, for the sake of this mythology, that Marney takes it into his head to come seesawing down the stairs at this precise moment, to contribute his gothic charade to the morning. Here, his hunchback figure, foreshortened, wagging down the stairs. First the legs and body, all splayed, then the little knot of the head; like one of those carnival figures they carry on poles in Italy. His nose hangs down like Notre Dame in gloom. As always when he sees the hunchback, Eustace finds a vein of broad jocular humour spring up in him. One has to be like this with him because he is so vain, so terrifying in his vanity. Quick, pretend that he is not deformed, that he is a great brisk normal man. We experience a panic of embarrassment; we become servile in the face of the gigantic egotism of this little East End Jew. “Ah ha!” yells Eustace, “so it’s you is it, Mister Marney?”

  Marney’s head sits back on his hump, perpetually cocked up at the ceiling. In order to look at Eustace he makes some compensating mechanism hold him forward, stiffly, as if thrust out on an invisible stick. He is smiling his glittering self-satisfied smile, opening and shutting those little pale mushrooms under his nose. He is snicking amiably now, pulling down his waistcoat hard. “D’you notice the smell, then?” roars Eustace with incredible joviality; and Marney, scenting a joke, demands vot smell he means. “A smell I’m talking of, sir. A smell what’s been bothering us today.” Marney is acting for all he is worth, sniffing and pouting, his vanity throwing up images of himself, now in this pose, now in that. “It’s not me,” he admits at last, “it’s not me vot’s made it.” And from this piece of wit grows Eustace’s deep false bassooning laughter, and the queer snickering of Marney—like someone swishing a cane. My cue. I contribute a modish snicker to the party, politely, as befits a secretary who can’t help overhearing. We are both nervous of Marney.

  The hunchback’s dry knot of hair rides his scalp as if in the grip of a hurricane. His face becomes so taut with laughter that one fears it will suddenly fly into a dozen rough fragments, like a canvas mask. He is breathing right in the mouth of Eustace, leaning on the desk, offering his amusement to the blond man, who sits in utter disgust, laughing back at him. Once every twelve snicks or so Marney’s body suffers a sort of tiny compensating convulsion. It is like watching a shirt pass through a wringer. His arms are tossed wide, his head comes down. Then the magazine of laughter is emptied snick snick snick. Shall he tell us what it is? he says at last, archly. Shall he? It’s the gi
rls’ lavatory. They follow each other out into the hall; Eustace is driving him back deliberately now, laughing him back to his room. And Marney retreats with self-satisfied unction, snickering and louting. Projects himself uncouthly upstairs again like a crab, while Eustace keeps him on his way with little squirts of laughter. Then back to his desk, swearing under his breath, disgusted, outraged, humiliated. Marney! Eustace sitting there furious with Marney, in his little polished black hoofs, with his blond hair falling away on each side of his head.

  The human comedy! The divine drama of a blocked shithouse all entangled with Marney, the little brown hoofs, the bucket of green ice and the canary setting out like Columbus every ten minutes and ending like Sir Walter Raleigh. The adventure of the ship, like a wooden body, and the spiritual adventure in the tower. I am not trying to muddle you. It is only that I myself am muddled by these phenomena—the snow, and Marney’s raw Spanish tulip, Eustace and the impotence of being earnest. If I look at him now he will be a little ashamed, remembering his laughter. In order not to let me see this, he will turn aside to the little mirror on the wall and examine the cavities in his teeth. From the lavatory a boiled pudding; from the hall where the coats hang like the girls’ playground selves, waiting for the clock, a whiff, human, sweaty, polluted with cheap scent and rice powder; from Eustace a pert fart—just to show that the equilibrium of his sunny temperament is restored.

  It is not what one thinks, I have discovered from the books I read, that is important; it is not even what one does. It is what one is, essentially. That is why there is such confusion when I set out in an attempt to begin this spiritual adventure, because the fine logical borders of my reality completely disappear when a word comes to seize them; I attempt to put myself in jail, as it were, in the padded cell of language, only to discover that the whole external façade is implicated in this process. There is the ego, plus a number of fantastic appendages, with personal pronouns attached to them. My desk, for example, behind the door; my spring, filling by bowels with mushy ice; my Eustace too, my Marney … It is a rapacious mechanism which attempts to swallow the world. In it there is no paradigm of irrelevances. Everything is included in this dragnet—as one might set a lobster pot one night and find a continent in it when the sun rises. The hotel breathing quietly in a snowstorm of electric light; the existence here in which there is neither faith, hope, nor charity; Lobo sitting like a disconsolate robin (a Peruvian robin) by the locked door, waiting for Miss Venable to open to him; or Eustace sifting his voiceless farts through his underclothes and hastily opening the window. (And then, to annihilate this confusion of realities, today there is a wind blowing up from the Levant. The morning came like a fog along a roll of developed film.… It is a little unreasonable.)

  I am sitting at the desk when Ohm appears, agitated, sweating. He teaches economics. His slack black coat-tails mourn agitatedly behind his thin back. His moustache lies down wearily on his lip. His corncrake voice is deeper by two tones than normal. Imagine a small soiled penguin with a weak backbone and broken flippers. That is Ohm. For Godsake, he is saying, Eustace must do something. There is one of the girls howling her heart out and he cannot find out what is wrong with her. His violet eyes are full of tears. She does not seem in pain but she is.… Eustace puts on his glasses and asks, where is she? Outside the door? Have her sent in at once.

  She is there all of a sudden, a rather fine-looking girl of about fourteen. Thick bronze pigtails, and her face trampled with weeping. All of a sudden she says, “I’m bleedin’, sir.” A strange mixture of fear, shame, and puzzlement. Bleeding? The tears are running down her face again; she is giving out enormous male sniffs. Then, with her throat full of fog, she points at herself queerly and says, “I’m bleedin’ down there, between my legs, sir.” And before we can say or do anything, she falls down as softly and expertly as an adagio in front of the desk, in a faint. The confusion is immediately precipitated like a Morris dance. Ohm beats his own coat-tails in a wild dash to the telephone and starts ringing up a doctor. Eustace and I pick her up and put her on a couch. Perhaps the poor girl stabbed herself with a pen nib or something. For a while we chafe her hands and Eustace calls the English mistress in, who lights trails of brown paper and holds them shakily under the girl’s nose. There is whispering in the commerce room, and peeping at doors. The whole school is shaken to the roots. Then someone suggests examining her. “Yes, yes,” flutters Ohm like a ballet dancer. “She might be bleeding to death.” The English mistress declines the privilege out of modesty. She has no roof to her mouth, and also she is scared. Besides, she could never be able to explain coherently to anyone afterwards, supposing she did find out. Well, one of the older girls is called in, and we males retire. In ten minutes the English mistress comes out with a scarlet face, and runs to the lavatory to have a good weep. In the commerce room they are whispering: “What? Her period? What was all the row?” etc. etc. The doctor, when he arrives, gives us the news in stilted throaty medical terms. He is proud of knowing the terminology, it seems. The English mistress asks for the day off to get over her blushes. She will be bleeding next if she’s not careful. “It wasn’t that I was scared of,” says Eustace, contemptuously. “Silly little Winnie. Them girls get up to queer tricks sometimes. Ah well.” He is smiling now. Expelling his noiseless laughter out between his teeth with gusts of cigarette smoke. The temperature chart has fallen to subnormal following the anticlimax. Ohm stands there in his soiled penguins and gives a giggle of relief, then catches his boss’s eye and becomes flint again—passive, soiled, immobile, and very shy. Suddenly remembering, Eustace sits up and says, “Mr. Ohm, sir.” The violet eyes sink to the ground as he stands there, waiting. “Do you notice a queer smell, sir, in here, sir?” The eyes flash up to Eustace, to me, flutter and wander out into the garden. He does not sniff or move a muscle. It is as if he were sniffing with his mind. “No,” he says harshly at last. “No, sir.”

  This question of the boiled pudding steaming in its rags! Or Severn drifting down among the floating furniture in a birdcage across Venice. If it were in my choice I would reject a petrarchal coronation—on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. (This is a spiritual adventure, not the memoirs of a plumber.) “Do it please,” says Eustace, “do it for me this once and I’ll promise it’s the last time.” Ohm has trotted away through the yard door, to his desk in the economics room. Inevitably someone must go into that little hole and prize open the cistern lid to make the plunger plunge. Eustace is sitting there leaning forward, with an anxious, preoccupied look—as if he can hear the shit slowly piling up. “Go on,” he wheedles softly, miserably.

  In the end I take an improving book and retire to this little tank-like lavatory under the dusty staircase. The walls breathe a beautiful moisture. It is as cool as a butter dish. From the high window I am in direct communication with Madame About, with her irregular verbs. “Cela passe toute croyance” she announces suddenly in my ear, graciously. A question is asked. The sounds are all hollow and resonant. The gracious old woman with the ringed hands, and the aristocratic preoccupation in her eyes; the secrecy of things aromatic, leaves, ferns, under the snow-like silences. I imagine the candid profile upon the window, drenched in its own privacy. Everything is peace when the children enter her room. No rebellions, no hates, no hysterias. In the summer afternoons it is like a dream, time slowly flowing across the classroom, the blinds swinging and freckling the girls’ arms and throats. Dust on the windows and the trams smothering by, shadows across the window, passing in cinematic briefness. On the dais she has cupped one hand in the other and is talking quietly to herself, tired to the point of sleep. She does not like helping me to read French verse; it disturbs her thoughts, disturbs this oil-on-water afternoon, and the coming and going of breath in her mouth. At four she will sigh and dismiss us with the benediction of relief; screw down her old black hat with long pins, slide her books into the leather satchel, and go, gathering up her skirts like a ballet dress. Down the dark
staircase into the sunshine, along the hot pavement by the playing field where the trees crisp together.

  In the lavatory I close my book, disturbed as I always am by the reflection of Madame About’s inner privacy: the qualitative superiority of aristocracy, which brings out the tradesman in Eustace and quenches the children without a word. I am a little sentimental about her, thinking of the tall black queen treading the new grass of the playing fields, passing down Green Lane like a breath of tranquillity in her bulging patched shoes; the cherries dripping from her hat, saluting the hips and haws, and the new things which bud and stiffen along Ruskin Manor. Passing along the logical cricketers like a premonition of absolute death, shadowing their angel white with her black rustling clothes and silence. It is too real, the drama which she offers to this common, rather mean and shabby reality. Sometimes, sitting at the wooden desk, watching her face set stiffly in thought, I have the sensation of intruding on her, penetrating the façade of preoccupation which separates us. But this process is always taken up short. She is aware of the potential trespasser in me. When she catches me her face breaks into that perfect lazy smile, and I am ashamed of the obviousness of my interest. I am confused by the smile, the flower that opens upward from her throat.… Madame About like a black summer hypnosis dominating a form! What I am trying to get at is the almost dimensional quality of her difference from the others, as we might be a formula—the same class passing from room to room, teacher to teacher. The teacher a catalyst which changes us. I am thinking of Marney, and the subterranean hate which connects him with the pupils. Marney is a relic of the Middle Ages; there is the feeling that one day a chord will strike, a cable snap, a wheel turn—that the whole class will rise to its feet and stone him. Marney’s face is always visible, eroded, weathered, lined with vanity, staring at us from a hundred cathedral gutters, from gothic buttresses, corbels; or running on hands and feet before the avenging stones of the mob. Often, sitting among the form, one can feel the temperature of emotion take a sudden deep curve up, at some small gesture of his, some vain remark; I can feel the hair tighten on the scalps of these thirty girls as they stare at him. At such times, if he dares to make a joke, the laughter is so harsh and bored that one winces instinctively. But he seems not to notice, turning on the gridiron of his own vanity. When they get him properly on the run the rage sets his face small and hard; his nose thins, eyes sink back into his forehead. He is like a bird. And this rouses the girls. They want to goad him to the end of emotion; they are flushed with rage and a kind of sexual happiness. They want him to burst into tears or foam. But the same class will pass into the French room, and sit as passive as cattle, faced with the complete stoical passivity of the old lady. Madame About, celebrating an eternal inner spring, though the heavens are falling; have fallen, I suppose one should write. I was not there on that August afternoon in which one of the many chronologies claimed her; yet I am there, watching the death mask smiling, with the flower in its throat. (“If this is imprecise it is because I myself am muddled.”) By the same method she is here, if I brood on it among the islands, the flutes, and berries: among the lambs leaping to the ceiling, little flossy bombs of spring. Among these hesitating pages, scribbled with emendations and images. If you must write there is no forgetfulness, and no memory. The only periodicity is in the time of poem. Very well, Madame About to waltz time, in a new scansion, with a cadenza of death in it. Or Marney as a dactylic elegy, punctuated by the brassy spondees of nose blowing. It is not difficult to explain. On the mantelpiece is a clock. The hands stand to a quarter past six, and it is striking twelve. By these tokens I know that it is exactly ten past ten.