Everything about her person is honey-gold and warm in tone; the fair, crisply-trimmed hair which she wears rather long at the back, knotting it simply at the downy nape of her neck. This focuses the candid face of a minor muse with its smiling grey-green eyes. The calmly disposed hands have a deftness and shapeliness which one only notices when one sees them at work, holding a paint-brush perhaps or setting the broken leg of a sparrow in splints made from match-ends.
I should say something like this: that she had been poured, while still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires.
To have great beauty; to have enough money to construct an independent life; to have a skill — these are the factors which persuade the envious, the dispirited to regard her as undeservedly lucky. But why, ask her critics and observers, has she denied herself marriage?
She lives in modest though not miserly style, inhabiting a comfortable attic-studio furnished with little beyond an iron bed and a few ragged beach chairs which in the summer are transferred bodily to her little bathing cabin at Sidi Bishr. Her only luxury is a glittering tiled bathroom in the corner of which she has installed a minute stove to cope with whatever cooking she feels inclined to do for herself; and a bookcase whose crowded shelves indicate that she denies it nothing.
She lives without lovers or family ties, without malices or pets, concentrating with single-mindedness upon her painting which she takes seriously, but not too seriously. In her work, too, she is lucky; for these bold yet elegant canvases radiate clemency and humour. They are full of a sense of play — like children much-beloved.
But I see that I have foolishly spoken of her as ‘denying herself marriage’. How this would anger her: for I remember her once saying: ‘If we are to be friends you must not think or speak about me as someone who is denying herself something in life. My solitude does not deprive me of anything, nor am I fitted to be other than I am. I want you to see how successful I am and not imagine me full of inner failings. As for love itself — cher ami — I told you already that love interested me only very briefly — and men more briefly still; the few, indeed the one, experience which marked me was an experience with a woman. I am still living in the happiness of that perfectly achieved relationship: any physical substitute would seem today horribly vulgar and hollow. But do not imagine me as suffering from any fashionable form of broken heart. No. In a funny sort of way I feel that our love has really gained by the passing of the love-object; it is as if the physical body somehow stood in the way of love’s true growth, its self-realization. Does that sound calamitous?’ She laughed.
We were walking, I remember, along the rainswept Corniche in autumn, under a darkening crescent of clouded sky; and as she spoke she put her arm affectionately through mine and smiled at me with such tenderness that a passer-by might have been forgiven for imagining that we ourselves were lovers.
‘And then’ she went on ‘there is another thing which perhaps you will discover for yourself. There is something about love — I will not say defective for the defect lies in ourselves: but something we have mistaken about its nature. For example, the love you now feel for Justine is not a different love for a different object but the same love you feel for Melissa trying to work itself out through the medium of Justine. Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people. But it is limited in quantity, can be used up, become shopworn and faded before it reaches its true object. For its destination lies somewhere in the deepest regions of the psyche where it will come to recognize itself as self-love, the ground upon which we build the sort of health of the psyche. I do not mean egoism or narcissism.’
It was conversations like these: conversations lasting sometimes far into the night, which first brought me close to Clea, taught me that I could rely upon the strength which she had quarried out of self-knowledge and reflection. In our friendship we were able to share our private thoughts and ideas, to test them upon one another, in a way that would have been impossible had we been linked more closely by ties which, paradoxically enough, separate more profoundly than they join, though human illusion forbids us to believe this. ‘It is true’ I remember her saying once, when I had mentioned this strange fact, ‘that in some sense I am closer to you than either Melissa or Justine. You see, Melissa’s love is too confiding: it blinds her. While Justine’s cowardly monomania sees one through an invented picture of one, and this forbids you to do anything except to be a demoniac like her. Do not look hurt. There is no malice in what I say.’
But apart from Clea’s own painting, I should not forget to mention the work she does for Balthazar. She is the clinic painter. For some reason or other my friend is not content with the normal slipshod method of recording medical anomalies by photographs. He is pursuing some private theory which makes him attach importance to the pigmentation of the skin in certain stages of his pet diseases. The ravages of syphilis, for example, in every degree of anomaly, Clea has recorded for him in large coloured drawings of terrifying lucidity and tenderness. In a sense these are truly works of art; the purely utilitarian object has freed the painter from any compulsion towards self-expression; she has set herself to record; and these tortured and benighted human members which Balthazar picks out daily from the long sad queue in the outpatients’ ward (like a man picking rotten apples from a barrel) have all the values of depicted human faces — abdomens blown like fuses, skin surfaces shrunken and peeling like plaster, carcinomata bursting through the rubber membranes which retain them.… I remember the first time I saw her at work; I had called on Balthazar at the clinic to collect a certificate for some routine matter in connection with the school at which I worked. Through the glass doors of the surgery I caught a glimpse of Clea, whom I did not then know, sitting under the withered pear-tree in the shabby garden. She was dressed in a white medical smock, and her colours were laid out methodically beside her on a slab of fallen marble. Before her, seated half-crouching upon a wicker chair, was a big-breasted sphinx-faced fellah girl, with her skirt drawn up above her waist to expose some choice object of my friend’s study. It was a brilliant spring day, and in the distance one could hear the scampering of the sea. Clea’s capable and innocent fingers moved back and forth upon the white surface of the paper, surely, deftly, with wise premeditation. Her face showed the rapt and concentrated pleasure of a specialist touching in the colours of some rare tulip.
When Melissa was dying it was for Clea that she asked; and it was Clea who spent whole nights at her bedside telling her stories and tending her. As for Scobie — I do not dare to say that their inversion constituted a hidden bond — sunk like a submarine cable linking two continents — for that might do an injustice to both. Certainly the old man is unaware of any such matter; and she for her part is restrained by her perfect tact from showing him how hollow are his boasts of love-making. They are perfectly matched, and perfectly happy in their relationship, like a father and daughter. On the only occasion when I heard him rally her upon not being married Clea’s lovely face became round and smooth as that of a schoolgirl, and from the depths of an assumed seriousness which completely disguised the twinkle of the imp in her grey eyes, she replied that she was waiting for the right man to come along: at which Scobie nodded profoundly, and agreed that this was the right line of conduct.
It was from a litter of dusty canvases in one corner of her studio that I unearthed a head of Justine one day — a half profile, touched in impressionistically and obviously not finished. Clea caught her breath and gazed at it with all the compassion a mother might show for a child which she recognized as ugly, but which was none the less beautiful for her. ‘It is ages old’ she said; and after much reflection gave it to me for my birthday. It stands now on the old arched mantelshelf to remind me of the breathless, incisive beauty of that dark and beloved head. She has just taken a cigarette from between her
lips, and she is about to say something which her mind has already formulated but which has so far only reached the eyes. The lips are parted, ready to utter it in words.
A mania for self-justification is common both to those whose consciences are uneasy and to those who seek a philosophic rationale for their actions: but in either case it leads to strange forms of thinking. The idea is not spontaneous, but voulue. In the case of Justine this mania led to a perpetual flow of ideas, speculations on past and present actions, which pressed upon her mind with the weight of a massive current pressing upon the walls of a dam. And for all the wretched expenditure of energy in this direction, for all the passionate contrivance in her self-examination, one could not help distrusting her conclusions, since they were always changing, were never at rest. She shed theories about herself like so many petals. ‘Do you not believe that love consists wholly of paradoxes?’ she once asked Arnauti. I remember her asking me much the same question in that turbid voice of hers which somehow gave the question tenderness as well as a sort of menace. ‘Supposing I were to tell you that I only allowed myself to approach you to save myself from the danger and ignominy of falling deeply in love with you? I felt I was saving Nessim with every kiss I gave you.’ How could this, for example, have constituted the true motive for that extraordinary scene on the beach? No rest from doubt, no rest from doubt. On another occasion she dealt with the problem from another angle, not perhaps less truthfully: ‘The moral is — what is the moral? We were not simply gluttons, were we? And how completely this love-affair has repaid all the promises it held out for us — at least for me. We met and the worst befell us, but the best part of us, our lovers. Oh! please do not laugh at me.’
For my part I remained always stupefied and mumchance at all the avenues opened up by these thoughts; and afraid, so strange did it seem to talk about what we were actually experiencing in such obituary terms. At times I was almost provoked like Arnauti, on a similar occasion, to shout: ‘For the love of God, stop this mania for unhappiness or it will bring us to disaster. You are exhausting our lives before we have a chance to live them.’ I knew of course the uselessness of such an exhortation. There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. For my part Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist discovered treading the perilous leads of a high tower; any attempt to wake her with a shout might lead to disaster. One could only follow her silently in the hope of guiding her gradually away from the great shadowy drops which loomed up on every side.
But by some curious paradox it was these very defects of character — these vulgarities of the psyche — which constituted for me the greatest attraction of this weird kinetic personage. I suppose in some way they corresponded to weaknesses in my own character which I was lucky to be able to master more thoroughly than she could. I know that for us love-making was only a small part of the total picture projected by a mental intimacy which proliferated and ramified daily around us. How we talked! Night after night in shabby sea-front cafés (trying ineffectually to conceal from Nessim and other common friends an attachment for which we felt guilty). As we talked we insensibly drew nearer and nearer to each other until we were holding hands, or all but in each other’s arms: not from the customary sensuality which afflicts lovers but as if the physical contact could ease the pain of self-exploration.
Of course this is the unhappiest love-relationship of which a human being is capable — weighed down by something as heartbreaking as the post-coital sadness which clings to every endearment, which lingers like a sediment in the clear waters of a kiss. ‘It is easy to write of kisses’ says Arnauti, ‘but where passion should have been full of clues and keys it served only to slake our thoughts. It did not convey information as it usually does. There was so much else going on.’ And indeed in making love to her I too began to understand fully what he meant in describing the Check as ‘the parching sense of lying with some lovely statue which was unable to return the kisses of the common flesh which it touches. There was something exhausting and perverting about loving so well and yet loving so little.’
The bedroom for example with its bronze phosphorous light, the pastels burning in the green Tibetan urn diffusing a smell of roses to the whole room. By the bed the rich poignant scent of her powder hanging heavy in the bed-curtains. A dressing-table with its stoppered cream and salves. Over the bed the Universe of Ptolemy! She has had it drawn upon parchment and handsomely framed. It will hang forever over her bed, over the ikons in their leather cases, over the martial array of philosophers. Kant in his nightcap feeling his way upstairs. Jupiter Tonans. There is somehow a heavy futility in this array of great ones — among whom she has permitted Pursewarden an appearance. Four of his novels are to be seen though whether she has put them there specially for the occasion (we are all dining together) I cannot say. Justine surrounded by her philosophers is like an invalid surrounded by medicines — empty capsules, bottles and syringes. ‘Kiss her’ says Arnauti ‘and you are aware that her eyes do not close but open more widely, with an increasing doubt and madness. The mind is so awake that it makes any gift of the body partial — a panic which will respond to nothing less than a curette. At night you can hear her brain ticking like a cheap alarm-clock.’
On the far wall there is an idol the eyes of which are lit from within by electricity, and it is to this graven mentor that Justine acts her private role. Imagine a torch thrust through the throat of a skeleton to light up the vault of the skull from which the eyeless sockets ponder. Shadows thrown on the arch of the cranium flap there in imprisonment. When the electricity is out of order a stump of candle is soldered to the bracket: Justine then, standing naked on tip-toes to push a lighted match into the eyeball of the God. Immediately the furrows of the jaw spring into relief, the shaven frontal bone, the straight rod of the nose. She has never been tranquil unless this visitant from distant mythology is watching over her nightmares. Under it lie a few small inexpensive toys, a celluloid doll, a sailor, about which I have never had the courage to question her. It is to this idol that her most marvellous dialogues are composed. It is possible, she says, to talk in her sleep and be overheard by the wise and sympathetic mask which has come to represent what she calls her Noble Self — adding sadly, with a smile of misgiving, ‘It does exist you know.’
The pages of Arnauti run through my mind as I watch her and talk to her. ‘A face famished by the inward light of her terrors. In the darkness long after I am asleep she wakes to ponder on something I have said about our relationship. I am always waking to find her busy with something, preoccupied; sitting before the mirror naked, smoking a cigarette, and tapping with her bare foot on the expensive carpet.’ It is strange that I should always see Justine in the context of this bedroom which she could never have known before Nessim gave it to her. It is always here that I see her undergoing those dreadful intimacies of which he writes. ‘There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self — because she does not know where to find it.’ How often, lying beside her, I have debated these observations which, to the ordinary reader, might pass unnoticed in the general flux and reflux of ideas in Moeurs.
She does not slide from kisses into sleep — a door into a private garden — as Melissa does. In the warm bronze light her pale skin looks paler — the red eatable flowers growing in the cheeks where the light sinks and is held fast. She will throw back her dress to unroll her stocking and show you the dark cicatrice above the knee, lodged between the twin dimples of the suspender. It is indescribable the feeling I have when I see this wound — like a character out of the book — and recall its singular origin. In the mirror the dark head, younger and more graceful now than the original it has outlived, gives back a vestigial image of a young Justine — like the calcimined imprint of a fern in chalk: the youth she believes she has lost.
I cannot believe that she existed so t
horoughly in some other room; that the idol hung elsewhere, in another setting. Somehow I always see her walking up the long staircase, crossing the gallery with its putti and ferns, and then entering the low doorway into this most private of rooms. Fatma, the black Ethiopian maid, follows her. Invariably Justine sinks on to the bed and holds out her ringed fingers as with an air of mild hallucination the negress draws them off the long fingers and places them in a small casket on the dressing-table. The night on which Pursewarden and I dined alone with her we were invited back to the great house, and after examining the great cold reception rooms Justine suddenly turned and led the way upstairs, in search of an ambience which might persuade my friend whom she greatly admired and feared, to relax.
Pursewarden had been surly all evening, as he often was, and had busied himself with the drinks to the exclusion of anything else. The little ritual with Fatma seemed to free Justine from constraint; she was free to be natural, to move about with ‘that insolent unbalanced air, cursing her frock for catching in the cupboard door’, or pausing to apostrophize herself in the great spade-shaped mirror. She told us of the mask, adding sadly: ‘It sounds cheap and rather theatrical, I know. I turn my face to the wall and talk to it. I forgive myself my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me. Sometimes I rave a little and beat on the wall when I remember the follies which must seem insignificant to others or to God — if there is a God. I speak to the person I always imagine inhabiting a green and quiet place like the 23rd Psalm.’ Then coming to rest her head upon my shoulder and put her arms round me, ‘That is why so often I ask you to be a little tender with me. The edifice feels as if it had cracked up here. I need little strokes and endearments like you give Melissa; I know it is she you love. Who could love me?’
The Alexandria Quartet Page 13