(
Malcolm Lowry
PRESENT ESTATE OF POMPEII
In thunder, at noon,
in
a leaden twilight, ju"st outside the
Pompeii station, a man said to them:
"Come to my Restaurant Vesuvius. The other restaurant is
broken. . .
in
the bombardment," he added.
Inside the restaurant during the thunderstorm, there was one
moment of pure happiness within the dark inner room when it started
to rain. "Now thank God I don't have to see the ruins," Roderick
thought. And he watched, through the window, the dove in its little
rainbeaten house, with just its feet peeping out, and then, the next
moment, not a finger's breadth away, the same dove on the window
sill.
This happiness was spoilt for him by the proprietor's con–
tinued insistence on what he was going to eat-when he was per–
fectly content, after an antipasto, with bread and wine: moreover
now the rain had stopped he knew he damned well had to see the
ruins.
Still he could have sat with his wife forever in that dark
deserted inner room of the Restaurant Vesuvius.
Yes, it was wonderful in the restaurant here at Pompeii, with
the train whistling by on one side, and the thunder crashing around
Vesuvius on the other: with the rain-liquid syllables of its epilogue-–
the pigeon, the girl standing under the garden
trellis
singing, and
washing dishes in the rainwater, and Tansy happy, if impatient,
he wanted never to go out, to leave this scene. But when the full
bottle of vino rosso was depleted by as much as one glass his spirits
correspondingly sank, and almost for a moment he did not care
whether he stayed or left. He cared
all
right though: he wanted to
stay.
