Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  At any rate, then, the Pixies were honest enough to admit each night, as they went to bed, that they were sheep. The good shepherd protect them, and keep his fingers out of the mincer, and his wife out of the mangle, for I have done with them.

  Trigger, I suppose, was much the same—but in a different way. He was the village doctor; very large, heavy, with a face full of pores the size of pin-heads, and a fan-shaped ginger moustache which seemed an absurd Edwardian relic fixed on a face that was medieval in its obesity. The face was the face of a Renaissance prelate, the voice was the voice of Gargantua. One could imagine him eating pilgrims with the salad and not noticing them. His laugh was infectious, rousing, under the fan of whisker. His great paws were always full of chilblains, and smelt, (a) of absolute alcohol, or (b) of embrocation. The folds of his tweed shooting-coat swung wide as he walked, spreading a faint damp whiff of tobacco, lint, spring onions, and damp dead pigeons.

  His life was built on two passions: killing and curing. When he was not indulging either of these he was bored with a terrible annihilating boredom. When there was a long spell of saving life ahead of him, he would go out with his gun, and shoot the stuffing out of every man, woman, or child in sight, by way of compensation.

  Trigger was majestic. In the simplicity of his tastes; in the crudeness of his ideas; in the sparseness of his opinions; in the profound singleness of his purpose. While the philosopher was meditating; while the fakir was sitting on a trolley-full of pins; while the poet was fulminating, the painter daubing, the pedant, like an elderly hen, scratching around the barren mud of his natural backyard, the letter page of The Times Literary Supplement—Trigger had quietly and with system arrived at simplification of life which defeated them all.

  They used to go out a lot together, he and Walsh (the latter with an old twelve-bore he hired from Vole), and rough-shoot across the park-lands. The squire had given Trigger permission to shoot where and when he liked. Explaining this, Trigger said significantly: “I once treated him successfully for constipation, y’know.” Quite seriously, with his discoloured blue eyes fixed fiercely on a hedge from which something might be put up by the sound of their boots in the mud, or his own loud voice.

  Walking across country, stopping for a rest and an occasional cigarette, one could find out a lot about Trigger’s passion for medicine; in the consulting-room, at the sick-bed, in the surgery, one could not get him to talk of anything but shooting. His mind hinged into two watertight compartments, which functioned, as it were, inversely.

  “And look’ee, my lad,” he said one day, as they skirted the long meadow by Dail’s Farm to get some rabbits, “don’t go expectin’ any bills from me, ‘cause I won’t be sendin’ you any, see?” He cleared his throat loudly and hawked. “Young Ruth is worth mints to me in a dead practice like this. Mints. Nothing but greenstick fractures and scarlet fever to keep me busy. And old Verey’s piles. I ought to be paying you.”

  For all his adoration of Ruth he could never quite see her as a person or, for that matter, imagine anyone else doing so. She was a “dooced interestin’ case.” One felt that he could see her only through the transparent walls of a test-tube. But it would have been intolerable had he been one of those grave, sententious, mourning cockroaches, which batten on death.

  No, Trigger was some sort of gent, in a peculiar way of his own. A mixture of rube and gent which it would not be difficult to find anywhere in England. Tact, as far as he was concerned, was non-existent.

  “Know anything about surgery of the heart?”

  “No. Nothing at all.”

  This, while they were sitting under an elm on the further slopes of Trimmer’s Hill, in the grass of a long meadow, with a dead pigeon beside them. Walsh squinted along the black barrel of his gun, turning it now on this target, now on that. He held a cartridge to his nose and inhaled the fine smell of a past explosion. The pigeon had a strange green membrane over its eyes. Its beak dripped eloquent bright blood.

  “Dooced fascinating game. I read of a case the other day of a fifteen-year-old. Mitral stenosis and regurgitation. Bloke laid open the heart by a flap job. Clamped the bottom of the appendix. Couple of sutures shoved in, appendix incised and pulled over his finger like a glove. He found he could poke around inside the auricle as much as he liked. Amazing, what? He found that stenosis wasn’t too bad, valve wasn’t as thick as he thought, so he just stretched the damn thing with his finger. Ligature, and there you are. Chest-flap closed. There you are. What do you make of that, eh? Amazing, what?”

  “Amazing.”

  “But, I mean, really amazing what they can do to one these days, what? I mean, it’s amazing when you think of it?”

  “Amazing.”

  Trigger contemplated infinity with his cigarette burning away under the tabby fan of moustache. His paunch rested comfortably against the inner wall of his plus-fours, his hands were plumply spread-eagled to support the weight of his body thrown back. The grass was very damp. Sideways, Walsh could see the slight prognathous starting of his underjaw, fixed in an attitude of concentration. The whites of his eyes were discoloured by fine veins such as one sees in those rich Blood Royal children’s marbles.

  Several times he called with his car to take Ruth into town to the laboratory of a friend of his. His gallantry was profound and a little embarrassing. His laughter set up pin-point answering vibrations in the elms, in the dead leaves along the ditches, in the trembling nerves of the girl herself, in his own hanging suit of clothes, heavy with damp tobacco and pigeon smells. His big teeth shone their yellow film of cigarette-stain, and the veins twinkled around the circular blue vent of meaning, the iris in each eye. Trigger was being tactful. In the cold his laughter clouded into jets of uproarious steam as it left his lips, ringing like a spade on the frosty earth. His hands were blue meat, heavily chilblained.

  The girl in her rough tweeds and black beret, perched beside him on the front seat like a substantial bird, could feel the cold thrill of leather run along her thighs; could smell the warm engine smell; and could smile among red cold lips as the car gathered way down the lane, among the plundered trees—cold algebraic patterns on the dark sky—across the shivering countryside into winter; into the winter which closed on her like the cold black wooden lid of a coffin. Sometimes, as he turned his head and looked at her, hunched and queerly male in the seat beside him, he was flushed with a queer bright emotion that was half fear and half pity. There she was, after all, beside him, with her brown socked legs stretched out under the dashboard, smoking his cigarettes. How strange the eyes of the girl when she turned to him! The light fell slowly, deeply into them; they showed strange moods, half-flickers, dyings of colour. The moist lips shaping themselves about a cigarette. The broad thinning curve of eyebrow, hooding the secret nose, evasively wrinkling its laughter upward.

  Ah well! It was a different Trigger who could stand, in white X-ray guards, watching the ray turn her bloodless; a spindle of bones in a white jelly. He was admiration itself for her afterwards. I think, if he had been able, he would have put her into a little test-tube, labelled it, and contemplated her with reverence and adoration for the rest of his days. Men have strange goddesses. Ruth as Ruth only existed in pieces: minute spaces of feeling in acres of objective vision. She was only real to him thus, as a marrowless framework of transparent bones, swimming in jelly, a machine which symbolized the only mystery which was real to Trigger. To his own way of thinking this was Love.

  Walsh would never go on these expeditions, though the girl pleaded with him once or twice to go with them. He knew that his own lack of composure would startle them both, would annihilate that reticence between himself and Trigger on which their relationship was based. Trigger might come awake with emotions too barely uncomfortable, sentiments too threadbare to stand his vocabulary. He would go instead for a walk, dropping in on his way home at Tarquin’s cottage. Tarquin was the schoolmaster.

  Sitting in the threadbare armchair, puffing his pipe, with his feet c
rossed at the wide fireplace, he would be again amazed at the huge, bald, gentle cranium of his host; the twists of silver at his ears. The mild eyes, almost olive-purple, with their fine lashes. The ease with which one could escape, as it were, through Tarquin, to ages long past, to traditions, pomps, splendours, colours, pageants, against which his own age appeared shabby, bigoted, and mean. Tarquin was interesting because he was a splendid medium: through him one could reach history. No, it was more than that, for Tarquin was history. The perfect refugee to whom any age was more immediately accessible than his own, he lived between the fireside and the long shelves of dusty books, which fed his insatiable taste for the living death. The ghosts of Greek boys, more real to him than ever Walsh could have been, haunted the low windows of the cottage; sandalled strangers from the dusty Ionian waited in the porch, respectfully alive in the precious music of his voice. Tarquin had drifted for centuries down the vivid Nile, among a pageant of barges, with his attendant Nubians, black shining midnights, while the long spokes of moonlight cartwheeled the still waters and sunk in the smoky flare of torches. Women more delicate than Cleopatra had been his abstractions, with the shift of light along unguents, resins, salves; the fume of balsams hung in his nostrils. His feet had been laved in lotions more purely astringent than grape-juice or the rank liquid pith of olives. He had been disembowelled by Ptolemaic embalmers, cured and mummified, and had risen again on the third day. The colonnades of white Mediterranean villas had heard his slow footsteps, pausing in peripatetic meditation; Lucretius had bathed with him; Epicurus kissed him as a brother. The long blue Ionian nightfall, splintered by lights among stone columns, had given him the vision of Greek women, ripe as marble, natural as fruit to be plucked, lingering among the shadow of the waters, laughing upon the mouths of the young men. The high-riding disc of full moon showed the leaning, falling torsos of young men, swerving down into the spray, with the laughter drifting up on the spice-ladened air: mimosa sweetening the still air across the bays and islands, and the girls with pomegranate flowers in their mouths. Tarquin kept these images of his life stored in that deep, shining cranium of his. As he talked, his long hands released the stem of his briar, and built up the cool breathing statues for you—bodies of the young men now dead, and Greek girls.

  Quiet and precise he was, while his language was as sure and cold as the technique of a lapidary, as he snipped away at the cold pebbles of thought. But the light shone in and through him, in a shaft of clear thought illuminating lost ages. His talk had the quality of some ancient and unhappy epigram, written by an anonymous lover to a lover as anonymous, holding all the bright and eloquent pain—eloquent as the bright blood dripping from the nose of the dead pigeon—of an age dead, but still strong enough to wound us. His Love was different from Trigger’s, but as poignant.

  December came in that last year like a long breath of cold from one of the poles, settling frost along the farm-ways, the pumps, icing the bare trees, leaving a white finger under the dripping taps. The fruit was all laid up in the lofts at Dail’s, snug with straw, and a log fire blazed all day in the little hall. Dolly s arms had become red and raw with cold as she walked among the steamy breath of cattle. At night, lying with Ruth beside him in the bed upstairs, watching the cold distant flicker of headlights on the arterial road tinting the raftered walls, he could feel the season closing down on them like a suit of ice; could hear the ringing stamp of hooves on the rimy track, which ran behind the cottage. The strawberries were laid under straw. At night the candles beside their bed winked and smoked in the cold draughts of air from the tiny window. The season was gathering its forces to sweep them both away in a whirl of snowflakes, into an eternity. The blood was slow in their veins, black arterial rivers congealed along the body’s canals, now viscid and almost still: like the desire. Laid up under straw like the scented apples in the loft, whose fragrance drifted down from time to time to them as they lay in the stupor of half sleep. Why had they need to make provision for next year’s cider? All this was a remote world, in which the real poignancy was numbed; a world of ice, spiked crowns of thorns, dead rotten leaves, shadows of bare trees now innocent of birds, fires guttering below the chimney-pieces, candles in raftered rooms, cold breaths on their cheeks. In the darkness, in the pale shadows of winter along the walls, in the light of lanterns, among the scented steam of animals’ breaths in byres, sheep moaning beside fiery thorns, what room, what feeling was there left for the sharp spikes of death or desire or loss? In darkness their breathing mouth to mouth (so far between bodies, so distant the space between planets of flesh!) was the breathing of white cadavers already, laid in the velvet-lined caskets of a remote charnel-house. No longer they had electric lips, eyes, knees, loins: but only the cold mesh of veins, running cold and heavy with the dark blood. At night she would read to him in that clear voice, ringing like a shadow of truth among the truths and falsehoods of other ages; while he, with his hands folded across his still body, his eyes closed, saw too deeply into the mysteries of her personality ever to weep, or grudge her the natural deceptions she held before him. The candles burned away on the pages of their books. The voice of winter was vague with warning. For his own part, beyond deception, evasion, beyond the talk and trembling, the lies and happiness, with a hard serene conviction he knew the end: with a conviction as cold, stern, as the rim of ice which had formed across the lake, he knew it all. He could hear her reading without emotion now, while the candles beat down their tracks of gold across her throat and her moving lips, and the small breasts in her dressing-gown.

  “Every revolution which the sun makes about the world divides between life and death; and death possesses both those portions by the next morrow; and we are dead to all those months we have already lived, and we shall never live them over again: and still God makes little periods of our age. First we change our world, when we come from the womb to feel the warmth of the sun. Then we sleep and enter into the image of death, in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world: and if our Mothers or our Nurses die, or a wild boar destroy our vineyards, or our King be sick, we regard it not, but during that state, are as disinterested as if our eyes were closed with the clay that weeps in the bowels of the earth.”

  The heavy blankets, which covered them so warmly, might have been the layers of sod, cut finely and shaped by the patient spade of the old sexton. In the dark the walls of the great upper room shrank down to the dimensions of a six-foot coffin. Yes, raising the pads of his fist he could beat and beat on the polished walls of the blackness that was obliterating them both, until there was no reason or sense left in his breathless, stifled mind: only the doom hung over him like a curtain and he was inarticulate.

  For a time the frost scouted for the season. A St. John the Baptist time, with bright berries on the hedges, robin vermilions fluffed on every paling, like financiers puffed with wrath at an economic winter. A St. John the Baptist time, minus scrip, locust, and wild honey, but vivid with berries and hungry sparrows crowding for food. They walked together down among the crisp spikes of grass, by the lakes, and watched the ice crust over. A blue membraneous scum first over the eye of the water: then green, muddy black, like a gangrened wound. And then the steel surface upon which the feet of the wild duck found no purchase. All night long the wind ruffled the woods. The noise of stones flung on the ice by passing farm-boys squeaked away, diminishing, into the further woods, across the iron-bound fences, northward. The winter had been announced.

  One night when Dolly went into the yard for wood it was snowing in large velvety tufts. Ruth and Walsh watched from the upper window when they went to bed. All distance had vanished, had been broken down by this manna. Columns of turning, tossing, leaning whiteness drifted out of heaven like feathers out of a sack, settling easily upon the cowed world. There were no stars, no planets, no signs, no wonders, no orange comets, not even shapes material evolving laboriously through this soft pile. They were quite alone now, in a sunk world of snow, penned in a little
house among woods and hills which existed only in their memories. Four hands over a dead fire, and all the candles low.

  Episodes of decay. Numb feet in boots on the snowy road. Sunlight so watery that when Ruth breathed across the window a rainbow sprang from her mouth across the light, a slanting prismatic portent in a deep curve. Perhaps a pot of treasure at the end of it. Largesse as gold as urine. Hands, bright hands and flushed cheeks nestling in wool. Hands kneading snowballs. A parcel of dribble-nosed schoolboys on the way up to Tarquin. One orange-haired imp with bloody knees, pressing bruised hands in his armpits, blowing on his nails to warm them, after a fall on the frosty road. The snow put deep shadows on the world, in the corner of the bedroom, across the walls like webs. Looking out across the garden, like seeing a negative of a known photograph. Christmas card December. Signals of ice hanging in delicate fingers from a tree. The voice of birds quipping, a little shrill with cold, a little anxious with fear. The racket of milk-churns being loaded on to a six o’clock lorry. Episodes of decay. The old thumbed notebook of Ruth’s which held all her poems.

  I am so plunged in you, God knows,

  There’s no redemption but the falling,

  Spirals of terrible water, my princeling,

  Snatching the life of me, cold,

  Colours of water about me, calling.…

  Wretched stuff, with here a line, there a line, skip a page, skim a page. Then suddenly,

  You are my only logic in the cold world.

  I, a graft to your tree, following, merging,

  Fruiting as you, flowering as you.

  The thorns of winter spike us both.

  Poor bright pages with their tributes fluttering past under his thumbs like successive kisses. Out of one’s mouth came the words. The frost made a witty steam of them.