The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell

was rather exciting and not a little touching. “I have been so hurt by love,” murmured Coréze, getting his hand under her skirt, “it can’t happen again, it mustn’t.” His passion was very convincing. “Say you won’t make me,” he almost shouted and covered her mouth with his own before she could promise that she wouldn’t.
    She wrote a note to John and asked for a final interview. Rather alarmed by this he hurried back to the villa from the terrace of the hotel. He was received in a dramatic and steely fashion. She had, she said, a confession to make. She was going to leave him for Coréze. He could not help finding her touching and pathetic as she made this confession; people (an irrational part of his mind kept interjecting) are products of their experience. Alice was now behaving rather like Lilian Gish in—what was the name of the film? For a moment John was tempted to say something extremely forcible to Coréze, but the latter had removed himself to Barcelona for a few days to be out of reach. He had a long experience of Latin husbands and did not propose to find himself once more scuffling in the fireplace over a girl he did not really want. He had excused his departure in a short heartbroken note on the grounds that he could no longer stand Alice’s presence unless she crowned his flame.
    John Baird was really too lazy to get angry. He took a plane for Paris and left Alice fuming. Characteristically, the only reproach he had offered her had been of a social rather than a personal nature—for he was more outraged in his social vanity than in his feelings. “People”, he said, “simply do not behave like this. We are not Bohemians, after all.” It was this that made Alice wonder whether she really could love him or not. If only he had shown violent jealousy and determination—who knows? She might out of pity have renounced Coréze. But no, he treated her with the haughty disapproval of guardian for the erring ward. His worst reproach was, after all, to be a case of English sulks. S’blood!
    John left and Coréze returned. As a matter of fact he had only retired to the house of a friend in the suburbs to pass a Jewish feast in self-examination and purification, leaving this little affair, so to speak, on the hob. Alice’s letter took a week to be forwarded on from the address in Barcelona. It gave them both time to review the situation.
    Alice found in the meantime that she was not going to have a baby after all; but things had progressed so far with Coréze that she did not feel able to draw back at this stage. Besides, Coréze was always teasing her about her youth and inexperience, and this would only give him more ammunition. He would consider her naive and irresponsible. She felt more than ever that she should show herself fully emancipated, and yet.… But John had carried off all their travellers’ cheques by mistake, and there was no way of evading a decision. After all, there was the faintest hope in the world that she was going to enjoy it all.
    She did not. Coréze made love to her with an art and industry which would have to be described to be fully appreciated. Her pride, her self-respect went out of the window in the short space of forty-eight hours. In the same length of time she succeeded in borrowing the price of a plane-ticket to Paris from the Consul. How bitterly she regretted the whole business. So that was what Lawrence meant with his filthy old gamekeeper with his shirt-ends tied round his neck. She would never, she felt, be much of a success as a wife again, and as the aircraft nosed over the Pyrenees she clasped her cold hands together, thinking darkly of broken faith and nunneries.
    To John, sitting innocently on the terrasse of the Rotonde it seemed that some pronounced attitude of mind was called for on his part—but precisely what? How did one react to the debauching of one’s