Songs of Blue and Gold (42 page)

A sigh and he pulled her in, his hands warm and solid on her back. His mouth brushed hers like the touch of a feather, then was confident and serious. In the dark and secret interior land of a kiss, its surprising new contours and rhythms, the intimate exchanges and growing understanding, they were holding fast together, part of the metronomic rock of the boat.

All was brought alive in the intimate universe of their mouths and hands. The boat at anchor was an independent island, unearthly sky above and the busy sea below.

Reluctantly they pulled apart.

Wordlessly, she opened her eyes.

All around, the sea was patched with low green and gold lights.

He clasped her hand and took it with his as he pointed. ‘Look!'

Dipping over the side, he lifted jewelled strings of emeralds.

‘Phosphorescence.'

He was laughing as he dripped the magical skeins of gems over their bodies. The water and the ribbons seemed to marble the deck.

‘Imagine you are in a sea of green,' she murmured. ‘Beneath you the boat is rocking gently . . .'

This was the ancient tale, which we always want to hear again. At last she understood, that she had been searching for this place – the only fixed element in the story – not to relive the story but to find her own version of it.

‘It's our time now,' she said, reaching out for him.

The inspiration for this book came one gloomy winter afternoon when I rediscovered
Prospero's Cell
on the bookshelves of a bedroom at the top of the house. Opening it and starting to read was like injecting the grey with vivid blues and emeralds. A richly evocative account of Lawrence Durrell's life in Corfu in the 1930s, it was first published in 1945 and purports to be a diary in which he is a serious young writer living blissfully in the sun, deeply in love both with his new wife and with the idea of Greece. Durrell states that
Prospero's Cell
is a ‘guide to the landscape and manners' of Corfu but it never quite becomes this. It is a lyrical personal notebook, and what he leaves out is as poignant as what he includes.

Its content is almost unrecognisable as the same ground his younger brother, the zoologist Gerald, covers in his famous Corfu book
My Family and Other Animals
, in which ‘Larry' lives with the family (which he never did) and is the ‘diminutive blond firework' by turns pompously literary and hilarious. And by the time he wrote
Prospero's Cell
Lawrence
and his first wife Nancy had separated. He was already sadder and wiser, and living in wartime Egypt with Eve Cohen who would become his second wife.

I was intrigued. Further researches and a reading of several biographies soon revealed a complex and contradictory character. His work, over a period of nearly sixty years – most famously in
The Alexandria Quartet
– was concerned with duality: love and hate; truth and fiction; memory and misinterpretation. And running through it all, the transfiguring effect of time.

Lawrence Durrell wrote beguilingly, drawing constantly on his own experience and his many subsequent moves across the shores of the Mediterranean: to Rhodes (
Reflections on a Marine Venus
), Cyprus (
Bitter Lemons
), the former Yugoslavia, and finally to the South of France (
Caesar's Vast Ghost
) where he settled for thirty years. Interwoven with this background were his many loves and four marriages. He seemed to pack so many different lives into one! And while he was a comet blazing, what of the women he collided with along the way, I wondered? How did their stories end? And what of those he met, whose lives he changed but who did not rate even a footnote in his biography? Soon, I was busy inventing Julian Adie and Elizabeth.

Prospero's Cell

Reflections on a Marine Venus

Bitter Lemons

The Greek Islands

Caesar's Vast Ghost

The Alexandria Quartet

Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

The Avignon Quintet

Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, Quinx

Collected Poems
, ed. James A. Brigham

Selected Poems
, ed. Peter Porter

Ian MacNiven,
Lawrence Durrell
,
A Biography
.

This is the official biography, exhaustively researched with Durrell's full cooperation in the years before he died.

Gordon Bowker,
Through the Dark Labyrinth
,
A Biography of Lawrence Durrell
.

The unofficial version and no less admiring of Durrell as
a writer, but with a less restrained investigation of the darker episodes in his life.

Edmund Keeley,
Inventing Paradise
,
The Greek Journey 1937-47
.

This and the following are more academic volumes examining Durrell's literary influences and setting his work in context.

Anna Lillios, (ed.),
Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World.

Michael Haag,
Alexandria, City of Memory
.

A fabulous book, wonderfully written, which reveals the Alexandria of E M Forster and C P Cavafy as well as Durrell. Haag's own photographs such as that of the now-derelict Ambron Villa (where Durrell lodged), as well as unusual ones missed by other biographical works, make this special.

Hilary Whitton Paipeti,
In the Footsteps of Lawrence Durrell and Gerald Durrell in Corfu (1935-39)
,
A Modern Guidebook.

This slim volume, packed with photographs and quirky facts, is as enjoyable for the armchair traveller as for the visitor to Corfu.

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Epub ISBN: 9781407007304

Version 1.0

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Published in Great Britain in 2008 by Arrow Books

Copyright © Deborah Lawrenson, 2008

Deborah Lawrenson has asserted her right, in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. Please refer to the author's acknowledgements
here
for details of any resemblance to actual persons.

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Arrow Books

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ISBN 9780099505198