Read Online The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell - Free Book Online Page B

not bear to hurt him. I come to Egypt every year, leaving George to his banking, and relive the experience which a year’s domestic propinquity would kill but which had not died throughout these years. He has a little studio in the Arab quarter. We meet in secret. Each year it gets better. Oh my friend, all this was fifteen years ago, and here I am, an old lady. But this secret friendship, so superficial that a week of marriage would kill it, is one of the lovely things of my life.”
    She excused herself for a moment and crossed the café to the counter to buy some cakes. She had left her book and handbag on the table. Somewhere a radio played the piercing quarter-tones of some Arabic dance. Baird picked up the book and idly turned the pages. It was a little anthology of aphorisms. He noticed that she had placed an exclamation mark beside one of the aphorisms. “ L’ amour maternel est le seul bonbeur qui dépasse ce qu’ on en espérait ,” he read. Madame Dubois, of course, had only that adopted daughter who was always away in Montreux at a Convent. The pencil-mark had scored into the soft white paper. “ L’amour maternel! ” Well, there remained mountain-ranges to be crossed for all of us; paradoxically enough, travel was only a sort of metaphorical journey—an outward symbol of an inward march upon reality.
    Madame Dubois returned with a packet of crystallized fruit and some cream cakes of deleterious hue. “We have feasts,” she said. “ Orgies of iced cakes and Russian tea in the little studio. And I tell him once more the plot of the novel which I shall never write; and he brings me the presents he has had six months to choose.” Blessed are the happy.
    The war was approaching, he reflected, as he rode eastward across the deadly green Egyptian delta to Alexandria. There was perhaps only a year of this life to spend before the barriers came down. He stood up and examined his face in the pocket mirror of the carriage, steadying himself against the swaying of the train by placing his braced legs far apart. The face that stared back at him was certainly the face of a person. It was good, very good, to feel at last a responsibility for his own mind and body: to be rich with increase.
    Madame Dubois had said, on that last evening: “I think, you know, that you have discovered the south, and you know that the only life for you is one of curiosity—sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation.”
    In Haifa he was pounced upon, as he was having his shoes cleaned, by Miss Dombey, of all people. Rufous-red, burnt to brickdust by the sun and her perpetual pent-up rage against people for having dark skins, Miss Dombey was travelling for a missionary society. “Fancy seeing you here,” she said. “I heard you were drifting round the Mediterranean.”
    â€œDrifting,” thought Baird. It could not have been better put; in Miss Dombey’s mouth the word carried a suppressed pejorative inflexion. Drifting was something that “remittance men” did. It was, however, impossible to escape from her. They had a cup of tea, and between them reconstructed the fragments of that old overcast life when Miss Dombey cycled to Thorsham every Saturday to change her books at the library and take Bible class for the vicar. The rain, the steaming fields. He heard fairly regularly from his father. Outside in the dusky street a thin rain began to fall, as if to heighten the verisimilitude of the atmosphere created by the tea-cups and the scrannel-harsh voice of Miss Dombey. She was fuller of freckles than a peacock’s tail, he found himself thinking. Each freckle an eye, and every eye an inquisition. Now she wanted to talk about Alice. He changed the subject abruptly and told her about his little Moorish house in Fez, omitting any mention of the kohl-painted pair of dark eyes that watched the dusty road by the cypresses so anxiously for him. Miss