At times, too, he was sufficiently alarmed to seek, if not the help, at least the surcease of contact with other human beings: a doctor who left him with a phosphorous tonic and a regimen he did not follow. The sight of a column of marching Carmelites, tonsured like mandrils, crossing Nebi Daniel drove him to renew his lapsed friendship with Father Paul who in the past had seemed so profoundly happy a man, folded into his religion like a razor into its case. But now the kind of verbal consolations offered him by this lucky, happy, unimaginative brute only filled him with nausea.
One night he knelt down beside his bed — a thing he had not done since his twelfth year — and deliberately set himself to pray. He stayed there a long time, mentally spellbound, tongue-tied, with no words or thoughts shaping themselves in his mind. He was filled by some ghastly inhibition like a mental stroke. He stayed like this until he could stand it no longer — until he felt that he was on the point of suffocating. Then he jumped into bed and drew the sheets over his head murmuring broken fragments of oaths and involuntary pleadings which he did not recognize as emanating from any part of himself.
Outwardly however there were no signs of these struggles to be seen; his speech remained dry and measured despite the fever of the thoughts behind it. His doctor complimented him on his excellent reflexes and assured him that his urine was free from excess albumen. An occasional headache only proved him to be a victim of petit mal — or some other such customary disease of the rich and idle.
For his own part he was prepared to suffer thus as long as the suffering remained within the control of his consciousness. What terrified him only was the sensation of utter loneliness — a reality which he would never, he realized, be able to communicate either to his friends or to the doctors who might be called in to pronounce upon anomalies of behaviour which they would regard only as symptoms of disorder.
He tried feverishly to take up his painting again, but without result. Self-consciousness like a poison seemed to eat into the very paint, making it sluggish and dead. It was hard even to manipulate the brush with an invisible hand pulling at one’s sleeve the whole time, hindering, whispering, displacing all freedom and fluidity of movement.
Surrounded as he was by this menacing twilight of the feelings he turned once more, in a vain effort to restore his balance and composure, to the completion of the Summer Palace — as it was jokingly called; the little group of Arab huts and stables at Abousir. Long ago, in the course of a ride to Benghazi along the lonely shoreline, he had come upon a fold in the desert, less than a mile from the sea, where a fresh spring suddenly burst through the thick sand pelt and hobbled a little way down towards the desolate beaches before it was overtaken and smothered by the dunes. Here the Bedouin, overtaken by the involuntary hunger for greenness which lies at the heart of all desert-lovers, had planted a palm and a fig whose roots had taken a firm subterranean grip upon the sandstone from which the pure water ran. Resting with the horses in the shade of these young trees, Nessim’s eye had dwelt with wonder upon the distant view of the old Arab fort, and the long-drawn white scar of the empty beach where the waves pounded night and day. The dunes had folded themselves hereabouts into a long shapely valley which his imagination had already begun to people with clicking palm-trees and the green figs which, as always near running water, offer a shade so deep as to be like a wet cloth pressed to the skull. For a year he had allowed the spot to mature in his imagination, riding out frequently to study it in every kind of weather, until he had mastered its properties. He had not spoken of it to anyone, but in the back of his mind had lurked the idea of building a summer pleasure house for Justine — a miniature oasis where she could stable her three Arab thoroughbreds and pass the hottest season of the year in her favourite amusements, bathing and riding.
The spring had been dug out, channelled and gathered into the marble cistern which formed the centre-piece to the little courtyard, paved with rough sandstone, around which the house and stables were to stand. As the water grew so the green grew with it; shade created the prongy abstract shapes of cactus and the bushy exuberance of Indian corn. In time even a melon-bed was achieved — like some rare exile from Persia. A single severe stable in the Arab style turned its back upon the winter sea-wind, while in the form of an L grew up a cluster of storerooms and small living-rooms with grilled windows and shutters of black iron.
Two or three small bedrooms, no larger than the cells of medieval monks, gave directly into a pleasant oblong central room with a low ceiling, which was both living and dining-room; at one end a fireplace grew up massive and white, and with decorated lintels suggested by the designs of Arab ceramics. At the other end stood a stone table and stone benches reminiscent of some priory refectory used by desert fathers perhaps. The severity of the room was discountenanced by rich Persian rugs and some tremendous carved chests with gilt ornamentation writhing over their hooked clasps and leather-polished sides. It was all of a controlled simplicity which is the best sort of magnificence. On the severe white-washed walls, whose few grilled windows offered sudden magnificent slotted views of beach and desert, hung a few old trophies of hunting or meditation, like: an Arab lance-pennon, a Buddhist mandala, a few assegais in exile, a longbow still used for hunting of hares, a yacht-burgee. There were no books save an old Koran with ivory covers and tarnished metal clasps, but several packs of cards lay about on the sills, including the Grand Tarot for amateur divination and a set of Happy Families. In one corner, too, there stood an old samovar to do justice to the one addiction from which they both suffered — tea-drinking.
The work went forward slowly and hesitantly, but when at last, unable to contain his secret any longer, he had taken Justine out to see it, she had been unable to contain her tears as she walked about it, from window to window of the graceful rooms, to snatch now a picture of the emerald sea rolling on the sand, now a sudden whorled picture of the dunes sliding eastward into the sky. Then she sat down abruptly before the thorn fire in her habit and listened to the soft clear drumming of the sea upon the long beaches mingled with the cough and stamp of the horses in their new stalls beyond the courtyard. It was late autumn, then, and in the moist gathering darkness the fireflies had begun to snatch fitfully, filling them both with pleasure to think that already their oasis had begun to support other life than their own.
What Nessim had begun was now Justine’s to complete. The small terrace under the palm-tree was extended towards the east and walled in to hold back the steady sand-drift which, after a winter of wind, would move forward and cover the stones of the courtyard in six inches of sand. A windbreak of junipers contributed a dull copper humus of leaf-mould which in time would become firm soil nourishing first bushes and later other and taller trees.
She was careful, too, to repay her husband’s thoughtfulness by paying a tribute to what was then his ruling passion — astronomy. At one corner of the L-shaped block of buildings she laid down a small observatory which housed a telescope of thirty magnifications. Here Nessim would sit night after night in the winter, dressed in his old rust-coloured abba, staring gravely at Betelgeuse, or hovering over books of calculations for all the world like some medieval soothsayer. Here too their friends could look at the moon or by altering the angle of the barrel catch sudden smoky glimpses of the clouds of pearl which the city always seemed to exhale from afar.
All this, of course began to stand in need of a guardian, and it came as no surprise to them when Panayotis arrived and took up his residence in a tiny room near the stables. This old man with his spade beard and gimlet-eyes had been for twenty years a secondary school teacher at Damanhur. He had taken orders and spent nine years at the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai. What brought him to the oasis it was impossible to tell for at some stage in his apparently unadventurous life he had had his tongue cut out of his head. From the signs he made in response to questions it might seem that he had been making a pilgrimage on foot to the little shrine of St Menas situated to the west when he had stumbled upon t
he oasis. At any rate there seemed nothing fortuitous about his decision to adopt it. He fitted it to perfection, and for a small salary stayed there all the year round as watchman and gardener. He was an able-bodied little old man, active as a spider, and fearfully jealous of the green things which owed their life to his industry and care. It was he who coaxed the melon-bed into life and at last persuaded a vine to start climbing beside the lintel of the central doorway. His laughter was an inarticulate clucking, and he had a shy habit of hiding his face in the tattered sleeve of his old beadle’s soutane. His Greek loquacity, dammed up behind his disability, had overflowed into his eyes where it sparkled and danced at the slightest remark or question. What more could anyone ask of life, he seemed to say, than this oasis by the sea?
What more indeed? It was the question that Nessim asked himself repeatedly as the car whimpered towards the desert with hawk-featured Selim motionless at the wheel. Some miles before the Arab fort the road fetches away inland from the coast and to reach the oasis one must swerve aside off the tarmac along an outcrop of stiff flaky dune — like beaten white of egg, glittering and mica-shafted. Here and there where the swaying car threatens to sink its driving-wheels in the dune they always find purchase again on the bed of friable sandstone which forms the backbone to the whole promontory. It was exhilarating to feather this sea of white crispness like a cutter travelling before a following wind.
It had been in Nessim’s mind for some time past — the suggestion had originally been Pursewarden’s — to repay the devotion of old Panayotis with the only kind of gift the old man would understand and find acceptable: and he carried now in his polished briefcase a dispensation from the Patriarch of Alexandria permitting him to build and endow a small chapel to St Arsenius in his house. The choice of saint had been, as it always should be, fortuitous. Clea had found an eighteenth-century ikon of him, in pleasing taste, lying among the lumber of a Muski stall in Cairo. She had given it to Justine as a birthday present.
These then were the treasures they unpacked before the restless bargaining eye of the old man. It took them some time to make him understand for he followed Arabic indifferently and Nessim knew no Greek. But looking up at last from the written dispensation he clasped both hands and threw up his chin with a smile; he seemed about to founder under the emotions which beset him. Everything was understood. Now he knew why Nessim had spent such hours considering the empty end-stable and sketching on paper. He shook his hands warmly and made inarticulate clucking-noises. Nessim’s heart went out to him with a kind of malicious envy to see how wholehearted his pleasure was at this act of thoughtfulness. From deep inside the camera obscura of the thoughts which filled his mind he studied the old beadle carefully, as if by intense scrutiny to surprise the single-heartedness which brought the old man happiness, peace of mind.
Here at least, thought Nessim, building something with my own hands will keep me stable and unreflective — and he studied the horny old hands of the Greek with admiring envy as he thought of the time they had killed for him, of the thinking they had saved him. He read into them years of healthy bodily activity which imprisoned thought, neutralized reflection. And yet… who could say? Those long years of school-teaching: the years in the monastery: and now the long winter solitude which closed in around the oasis, when only the boom and slither of the sea and the whacking of palm-fronds were there to accompany one’s thoughts.… There is always time for spiritual crises, he thought, as he doggedly mixed cement and dry sand in a wooden mortar.
But even here he was not to be left alone for Justine, with that maddening guilty solicitude which she had come to feel for the man whom she loved, and yet was trying to destroy, appeared with her trio of Arabs and took up her summer quarters at the oasis. A restless, moody, alert familiar. And then I, impelled by the fearful pangs her absence created in me, smuggled a note to her telling her either that she must return to the city or persuade Nessim to invite me out to the Summer Palace. Selim duly arrived with the car and motored me out in a sympathetic silence into which he did not dare to inject the slightest trace of contempt.
For his part Nessim received me with a studied tenderness; in fact, he was glad to see us again at close quarters, to detach us from the fictitious framework of his agents’ reports and to judge for himself if we were… what am I to say? ‘In love?’ The word implies a totality which was missing in my mistress, who resembled one of those ancient goddesses in that her attributes proliferated through her life and were not condensed about a single quality of heart which one could love or unlove. ‘Possession’ is on the other hand too strong: we were human beings not Brontë cartoons. But English lacks the distinctions which might give us (as Modern Greek does) a word for passion-love.
Apart from all this, not knowing the content and direction of Nessim’s thoughts I could in no way set his inmost fears at rest: by telling him that Justine was merely working out with me the same obsessive pattern she had followed out in the pages of Arnauti. She was creating a desire of the will which, since it fed secretly on itself, must be exhausted like a lamp — or blown out. I knew this with only a part of my mind: but there I detected the true lack in this union. It was not based on any repose of the will. And yet how magically she seemed to live — a mistress so full of wit and incantation that one wondered how one had ever managed to love before and be content in the quality of the loving.
At the same time I was astonished to realize that the side of me which clave to Melissa was living its own autonomous existence, quietly and surely belonging to her yet not wishing her back. The letters she wrote me were gay and full and unmarred by any shadow of reproof or self-pity; I found in all she wrote an enlargement of her self-confidence. She described the little sanatorium where she was lodged with humour and a nimble eye, describing the doctors and the other patients as a holidaymaker might. On paper she seemed to have grown, to have become another woman. I answered her as well as I was able but it was hard to disguise the shiftless confusion which reigned in my life; it was equally impossible to allude to my obsession with Justine — we were moving through a different world of flowers and books and ideas, a world quite foreign to Melissa. Environment had closed the gates to her, not lack of sensibility. ‘Poverty is a great cutter-off’ said Justine once, ‘and riches a great shutter-off.’ But she had gained admittance to both worlds, the world of want and the world of plenty, and was consequently free to live naturally.
But here at least in the oasis one had the illusion of a beatitude which eluded one in town life. We rose early and worked on the chapel until the heat of the day began, when Nessim retired to his business papers in the little observatory and Justine and I rode down the feathery dunes to the sea to spend our time in swimming and talking. About a mile from the oasis the sea had pushed up a great coarse roundel of sand which formed a shallow-water lagoon beside which, tucked into the pectoral curve of a dune, stood a reed hut roofed with leaves, which offered the bather shade and a changing-place. Here we spent most of the day together. The news of Pursewarden’s death was still fresh, I remember, and we discussed him with a warmth and awe, as if for the first time we were seriously trying to evaluate a character whose qualities had masked its real nature. It was as if in dying he had cast off from his earthly character, and taken on some of the grandiose proportions of his own writings, which swam more and more into view as the memory of the man itself faded. Death provided a new critical referent, and a new mental stature to the tiresome, brilliant, ineffectual and often tedious man with whom we had had to cope. He was only to be seen now through the distorting mirror of anecdote or the dusty spectrum of memory. Later I was to hear people ask whether Pursewarden had been tall or short, whether he had worn a moustache or not: and these simple memories were the hardest to recover and to be sure of. Some who had known him well said his eyes had been green, others that they had been brown.… It was amazing how quickly the human image was dissolving into the mythical image he had created of himself in his trilogy God is a
Humorist.
Here, in these days of blinding sunlight, we talked of him like people anxious to capture and fix the human memory before it quite shaded into the growing myth; we talked of him, confirming and denying and comparing, like secret agents rehearsing a cover story, for after all the fallible human being had belonged to us, the myth belonged to the world. It was now too that I learned of him saying, one night to Justine, as they watched Melissa dance: ‘If I thought there were any hope of success I would propose marriage to her tomorrow. But she is so ignorant and her mind is so deformed by poverty and bad luck that she would refuse out of incredulity.’
But step by step behind us Nessim followed with his fears. One day I found the word ‘Beware’ written in the sand with a stick at the bathing-place. The Greek word suggested the hand of Panayotis but Selim also knew Greek well.
This further warning was given point for me by an incident which occurred very shortly afterwards when, in search of a sheet of notepaper on which to write to Melissa, I strayed into Nessim’s little observatory and rummaged about on his desk for what I needed. I happened to notice that the telescope barrel had been canted downwards so that it no longer pointed at the sky but across the dunes towards where the city slumbered in its misty reaches of pearl cloud. This was not unusual, for trying to catch glimpses of the highest minarets as the airs condensed and shifted was a favourite pastime. I sat on the three-legged stool and placed my eye to the eye-piece, to allow the faintly trembling and vibrating image of the landscape to assemble for me. Despite the firm stone base on which the tripod stood the high magnification of the lens and the heat haze between them contributed a feathery vibration to the image which gave the landscape the appearance of breathing softly and irregularly. I was astonished to see — quivering and jumping, yet pin-point clear — the little reed hut where not an hour since Justine and I had been lying in each other’s arms, talking of Pursewarden. A brilliant yellow patch on the dune showed up the cover of a pocket King Lear which I had taken out with me and forgotten to bring back; had the image not trembled so I do not doubt but that I should have been able to read the title on the cover. I stared at this image breathlessly for a long moment and became afraid. It was as if, all of a sudden, in a dark but familiar room one believed was empty a hand had suddenly reached out and placed itself on one’s shoulder. I tip-toed from the observatory with the writing pad and pencil and sat in the arm-chair looking out at the sea, wondering what I could say to Melissa.
The Alexandria Quartet Page 16