The Black Book

The Black Book Read Free Page B

Book: The Black Book Read Free
Author: Lawrence Durrell
Ads: Link
arms of the newest chambermaid, who looks healthy, raw, and adequate. He presents his half profile to her until she leaves. One of these mornings she will be spread-eagled on his bed while the coffee gets cold. This, one recognizes fatally, is one of the conditions of life. The wireless will be on the whole time. Fiat voluntas, with the family looking owlish and the little shoes in their static ballet.
    He takes the tray on his knee and begins to eat fastidiously, like a cat, pushing the spoon between his broad ripe lips.
    â€œI think”, he says at last, “I will go into a monastery. Will you come with me? Eh? We forget all these bitches, dear boy, and be holy holy holy. In black.”
    (Draw back the blind and let the soft translucent light into the room. She is lying there in bed among the apple trees and the frozen lakes, long and cool as a dormitory. The immense gothic monastery between her legs, etc.)
    Snow like a great chain from pole to pole. The enumeration of our sins, the forgiving of our sins, the postmen, the buses, the letter with the halfpenny stamp in the rack. The gutters are clotted with filth. The buses scatter. Monologue of the white road stretching down past the Catholic church, the Municipal School, the Lock Hospital, the exchange, the postbox. Tarquin lying like Gulliver in Lilliput while the buses roam up and down him, over his hips and thighs. Tarquin like the island of England in its winter chains, and the hills like many blanched nipples.
    â€œI am a Catholic,” says Lobo cleverly, with the air of having done a trick.
    His watch strikes the hour in his waistcoat pocket, and he springs to attention. He will miss the lecture on ferroconcrete, and that would be evil, in the moral sense. His dear father is paying his fees. Moral: honour thy father and thy mother in their frames, and learn to build more Catholic churches in ferroconcrete.
    He gathers up his manuscript, his instruments, his textbooks, and switches off the wireless. “Well,” he says with finality, locking the door carefully behind him.
    Half past ten of a Yuletide season. Lobo has vanished in a sweeping draught through the stone pillars into the main road. His scarf dangles over his shoulders. The streets are sharp with frost, the shops with decorations. The lamb is born, or will soon be born. I present the telephone at my temple gingerly, like a suicide. Marney pipes and blows down the other end. I can feel the hairs stiffening on his hump. No work today. I have a bad cold. He is angry, to be left in charge of the school like this, and deserted by all but a few good-natured oafs. The miserable children are crowding into the form rooms, piping and farting to keep warm, huddling round the tin stoves. The hunchback usher resents my illness. The sounds are all mangled with cold, indeterminate anger, pique, dignity, despair. “I thought we could count on you at least,” he says. I am tempted to reply, “Sorry, but I am a Catholic.” Instead I ring off and consult the lounge clock. It is too late to go to Communion: the only gesture in this life that contains the full quota of irony. It is early to go to bed. It is always too late or too early to do anything at all. However, when in doubt, consult the lounge clock. I consult it. New paragraph.
    In his little underground Hades overlooking the garden Peters will be lying, pondering on his own genius—or masturbating. The great problem for him is whom to be like, if he is going to be a genius. Leonardo liked port and crab apples, for example, whereas Dowson preferred a cigar. It is difficult. Swinburne took it straight from the bottle, and Wagner wore nothing but silk next to the skin. Beethoven’s syphilis, was she contracted or hereditary? If the latter, then it is too much to ask. Frankly, all this is a little boring.
    Let us take a novelist-in-the-cupboard peep at Tarquin. He has already managed to crawl out of his tepid bed and lift the window

Similar Books

Bone Deep

Gina McMurchy-Barber

In Vino Veritas

J. M. Gregson

Wolf Bride

Elizabeth Moss

Just Your Average Princess

Kristina Springer

Mr. Wonderful

Carol Grace

Captain Nobody

Dean Pitchford

Paradise Alley

Kevin Baker

Kleber's Convoy

Antony Trew