The noise of the music rolled over his words and he felt snatches of sleep invading his whole consciousness in little paroxysms of pleasure. The collision of different languages superposed and mingled gave a wonderful barbaric note to the fair. One could imagine whole conversations when one did not understand what was being said.
Who is your friend over there? The cannibal one?
Death!
He looks rather nice.
He improves on acquaintance. The man with a pocketful of deaths.
I thought he looked familiar.
The Prince’s car was full of small gipsies – they had asked for a ride and were being driven over the bridge and around, the leafy roads with their dapples of frenzied light. The great engine purred, soft as elephant fur, emissary from the world of Pelf and Vox Pop and processed citizen. “Everyone is here save the lovers and Smirgel,” said the Préfet on a note of deep anxiety, as he wished to begin his alembicated discourse well before the advance into the caves.
“They will come,” said Felix soothingly. And truth to tell they were not far off. As for the lovers, they had elected to ride up from the sea and with the falling of darkness had reached Remoulins when the meandering roads led them steadily towards the bridge; from time to time through the forest they caught glimpses of insinuating light against the distant sky. Soon the distant clamour of mandolins would greet them. They advanced like riders in a dream, his arm through hers. They had decided to separate for a while, perhaps for several months, in order to give themselves the possibility of concentrating all their forces upon the book which he had decided to begin at long last. But this could not be done without a finalising meeting with Sutcliffe for whom now the enormous sense of utter despondency had once more gained the forefront of his mind – the despair over the inaccessibility of Sabine. As they wound slowly through the dark glades he told her his plan and asked for her permission to execute it.
She was vehemently in favour of it; she felt, in fact, that the whole oeuvre for which he was going to try was as much her work, her responsibility, as his – which was indeed the case. To celebrate the mystical marriage of four dimensions with five skandas so to speak. To exemplify in the flesh the royal cobra couple, the king and queen of the affect, of the spiritual world. “My spinal I with her final she.” Some of this they tried to express to Sutcliffe who remained somewhat unconvinced. “Very well,” he said at last, “on condition that you don’t write like a hundred garbage cans. But first we should clap eyes on the treasure, no? To console ourselves against the cold and damp of our native island – that barbaric place with its two tribes.” The Prince explained the allusion. “At first you have difficulty liking the inhabitants. Then you realise that they come in two sorts, the British and the English. The first are descendants of Calvin, the second descendants of Rupert Brooke! Poets and Idealists against Protestant shop-keepers. Hence the divided voice which so often fills us with dismay. After all, in this hideous war we have just passed through never forget that Halifax would have treated with Hitler: it took Churchill to refuse. England over Britain!” It was one of his favourite themes, and one very congenial to a typically Egyptian temperament. As who should know!
The remaining two persons – Smirgel and Quatrefages – arrived in an old fashioned gig with a somewhat superannuated horse drawing them. They looked somehow dazed in a vaguely triumphant way, and the German, true to his promise, had brought the Austrian sapper’s map of the workings without which all access to the treasure would have proved impossible. But first the warnings, and here the Préfet could afford to wax somewhat rhetorical as he pleaded for care and circumspection and civic respect for the saint – if they managed to locate her. His voice was from time to time drowned by the moan of mandolins. But at long last the great moment announced itself; Cade manifested in a puff of smoke and a flash – an optical illusion which the light created as it flashed among the leaves. He had with him a whole bundle of lottery tickets which he wore over his shoulder like a bandolier. This had been Smirgel’s idea. “It would be wise to keep a check on those who go in. The gipsies are such a rabble I am scared to let them in. But if you give them a ticket each we can do a count later on if something goes wrong.” There were also torches to be distributed and fairy-lights … All these elements had to be coaxed into some sort of order. Slowly the mellifluous periods of the official French wound to a halt.
“And so, my children,” – for he could not resist the avuncular note – “let us go in all humility in search of our Saint who alone will secure the well-being of all who live here. Viva Sara!” The cry went off like a pistol shot and for a long moment the music swept upwards towards the sky in a glorious arpeggio while individual voices barked the savage message to the shade of the Saint. “Viva Sara! Viva Sara!” And now the fireworks ranged upon the aqueduct started to splutter and whizz – crowns and globes of spinning light in a deep blue sky. The volume of the music turned itself down and a single plangent woman’s voice started to sing a lovesong, an Andalusian folk-tune with its curious peristaltic rhythm and alternative breaths suggestive of the human orgasm. Sutcliffe said grimly, “Sex – the human animal’s larder.” And his double said, “Yes. Or the fatal power-house. We could do so much with it if we learned the code!” But the Prince who had learned of the mortal illness of the Princess and was planning to leave for Cairo at dawn, was thinking of other things – of mortal sin, parodied by illnesses of the physical envelope! He could see so clearly into the future of her death, clearer than any gipsy. On the anniversary of it the telephone smothered in tea-roses – white roses and red. In this way to conspire against console, and hope in their love. Aubrey said, “When we separate shall we correspond, do you think?” Sutcliffe said, “Of course. We mustn’t neglect to think of the collected correspondence – an exchange of hieroglyphs between two cuneiform personages, what? A correspondence in Mandarin?”
The procession was forming; at its head would ride the Prince and the Préfet in the royal Daimler; then the official limousine; then the other cars and the ribbon of caravans. At the head of the procession walked the magnificent singing woman-gipsy in all her finery while the cars followed, slowed down to her pace. In this way they covered the quarter of a mile to the cave entry with its ominous hoardings with the inscription DANGER everywhere written large. Here Cade had taken up his position in order to give everyone a ticket before letting them through the barrier. The first cave was vast, like a cathedral, and was rapidly filled. Now it was time to advance down the inner corridors guided by Smirgel and Quatrefages. The lovers gave a shiver of premonition and Blanford thought that if ever he wrote the scene he would say: “It was at this precise moment that reality prime rushed to the aid of fiction and the totally unpredictable began to take place!”
A Biography of Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell’s work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet’s completion, Life called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”
Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.
Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year
, Durrell published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. He also read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller’s advice and work heavily influenced Durrell’s provocative second novel, The Black Book (1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell’s first book of note, The Black Book was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn’t appear in print in Britain until 1973.
In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family fled Corfu for Alexandria, Egypt. His relationship with Nancy was strained by the time they reached Egypt, and they separated in 1942. During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassy. He also wrote Prospero’s Cell, a novel set on his beloved Corfu, while living in Egypt in 1945.
Durrell met Yvette Cohen in Alexandria, and the couple married in 1947. They had a daughter, Sappho Jane, in 1951, and separated in 1955. Durrell published White Eagles Over Serbia in 1957, alongside the celebrated memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and Justine (1957), the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet Capitalizing on the overwhelming success of Justine, Durrell went on to publish the next three novels in the series—Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960)—in quick succession. Upon the series’ completion, poet Kenneth Rexroth hailed it as “a tour de force of multiple-aspect narrative.”
Durrell married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon, who died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, which ended in divorce in 1979.
After a life spent in varied locales, Durrell settled in Sommières, France, where he wrote the Revolt of Aphrodite series as well as the Avignon Quintet. The first book in the Quintet, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize while Constance (1982), the third novel, was nominated for the Booker Prize.
Durrell died in 1990 at his home in Sommières.
This photograph of Lawrence Durrell aboard his boat, the Van Norden, is taken from a negative discovered among his papers. The vessel is named after a character in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (Photograph held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)
One of Nancy Durrell’s photographs from the 1930s. Pictured here is the Caique, which they used to travel around the waters of Corfu. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin, property of the Gerald Durrell Estate.)
This photograph of Nancy and Lawrence Durrell was likely taken in Delphi, Greece, in late 1939. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin and the Gerald Durrell Estate.)
A 1942 photograph of Lawrence Durrell with his wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Penelope, taken in Cairo. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)
This manuscript notebook contains one of two drafts of Justine acquired by the British Library as part of Lawrence Durrell’s large archive in 1995. (Notebook held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)
A page from Durrell’s notebooks, or, as he called them, the “quarry.” This page introduced his notes on the “colour and narrative” of scenes in Justine. (Photo courtesy of the Lawrence Durrell Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)
“As well as serving delicious food in an idyllic setting, the Taverna Nikolas at Agni has strong links with the Durrell story in Corfu,” says Joanna Hodgkin of this 2012 photo. Durrell lived in the neighboring town of Kalami, where his famous White House sits right above the shoreline. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Monsieur © 1974 by Lawrence Durrell
Livia © 1978 by Lawrence Durrell
Constance © 1982 by Lawrence Durrell
Sebastian © 1983 by Lawrence Durrell
Quinx © 1985 by Lawrence Durrell
cover design by Jason Gabbert
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Lawrence Durrell, The Avignon Quintet
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