The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  They played with each other, counterfeiting a desultory passion which mocked its own origins, could neither ignite nor extinguish itself. (You can lie with lips apart, legs apart, for numberless eternities, telling yourself it is something you have forgotten, it is on the tip of your tongue, the edge of your mind. For the life of you you cannot remember what it is, the name, the town, the day, the hour … the biological memory fails.) She gave a small sniff, as if she were crying, holding him in those pale, reflective ringers, tenderly as one might hold a fledgling fallen from the nest. Expressions of doubt and anxiety flitted across her face — as if she were herself guilty for the failure of the current, the broken communication. Then she groaned — and he knew that she was thinking of the money. Such a large sum! His improvidence could never be repeated by other men! And now her crude solicitude, her roughness began to make him angry.

  ‘Chéri.’ Their embraces were like the dry conjunction of wax-works, of figures modelled in gesso for some classical tomb. Her hands moved now charmlessly upon the barrel-vaulting of his ribs, his loins, his throat, his cheek; her fingers pressing here and there in darkness, finger of the blind seeking a secret panel in a wall, a forgotten switch which would slide back, illuminate another world, out of time. It was useless, it seemed. She gazed wildly around her. They lay under a nightmarish window full of sealight, against which a single curtain moved softly like a sail, reminding her of Darley’s bed. The room was full of the smell of stale joss, decomposing manuscripts, and the apples he ate while he worked. The sheets were dirty.

  As usual, at a level far below the probings of self-disgust or humiliation, he was writing, swiftly and smoothly in his clear mind. He was covering sheet upon sheet of paper. For so many years now he had taken to writing out his life in his own mind — the living and the writing were simultaneous. He transferred the moment bodily to paper as it was lived, warm from the oven, naked and exposed.…

  ‘Now’ she said angrily, determined not to lose the piastres which in her imagination she had already spent, already owed, ‘now I will make you La Veuve’ and he drew his breath in an exultant literary thrill to hear once more this wonderful slang expression stolen from the old nicknames of the French guillotine, with its fearful suggestion of teeth reflected in the concealed metaphor for the castration complex. La Veuve! The shark-infested seas of love which closed over the doomed sailor’s head in a voiceless paralysis of the dream, the deep-sea dream which dragged one slowly downwards, dismembered and dismembering … until with a vulgar snick the steel fell, the clumsy thinking head (use your loaf’) smacked dully into the basket to spurt and wriggle like a fish.… ‘Mon coeur’ he said hoarsely, ‘mon ange’; simply to taste the commonest of metaphors, hunting through them a tenderness lost, torn up, cast aside among the snows. ‘Mon ange.’ A sea-widow into something rich and strange!

  Suddenly she cried out in exasperation: ‘Ah God! But what is it? You do not want to?’ her voice ending almost in a wail. She took his soft rather womanish hand upon her knee and spread it out like a book, bending over it a despairing curious face. She moved the candle the better to study the lines, drawing up her thin legs. Her hair fell about her face. He touched the rosy light on her shoulder and said mockingly ‘You tell fortunes.’ But she did not look up. She answered shortly ‘Everyone in the city tells fortunes.’ They stayed like this, like a tableau, for a long moment. ‘The caput mortuum of a love-scene’ he thought to himself. Then Melissa sighed, as if with relief, and raised her head. ‘I see now’ she said quietly. ‘You are all closed in, your heart is closed in, completely so.’ She joined index finger to index finger, thumb to thumb in a gesture such as one might use to throttle a rabbit. Her eyes flashed with sympathy. ‘Your life is dead, closed up. Not like Darley’s. His is wide… very wide… open.’ She spread her arms out for a moment before dropping them to her knee once more. She added with the tremendous unconscious force of veracity: ‘He can still love.’ He felt as if he had been hit across the mouth. The candle flickered. ‘Look again’ he said angrily. ‘Tell me some more.’ But she completely missed the anger and the chagrin in his voice and bent once more to that enigmatic white hand. ‘Shall I tell you everything?’ she whispered, and for a minute his breath stopped. ‘Yes’ he said curtly. Melissa smiled a stranger, private smile.

  ‘I am not very good’ she said softly, ‘I’ll tell you only what I see.’ Then she turned her candid eyes to him and added: ‘I see. death very close.’ Pursewarden smiled grimly. ‘Good’ he said. Melissa drew her hair back to her ear with a finger and bent to his hand once more. ‘Yes, very close. You will hear about it in a matter of hours. What rubbish!’ She gave a little laugh. And then, to his complete surprise she went on to describe his sister. ‘The blind one — not your wife.’ She closed her eyes and spread her repellent arms out before her like a sleep-walker. ‘Yes’ said Pursewarden, ‘that is her. That is my sister.’ ‘Your sister?’ Melissa was astounded. She dropped his hand. She had never in playing this game made an accurate prediction before. Pursewarden told her gravely: ‘She and I were lovers. We shall never be able to love other people.’ And now, with the recital begun he suddenly found it easy to tell the rest, to tell her everything. He was completely master of himself and she gazed at him with pity and tenderness. Was it easy because they spoke French? In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he had always qualified it as ‘an unsniggerable language’. Or was it simply that the fugitive sympathy of Melissa made these events easy to speak of? She herself did not judge, • everything was known, had been experienced. She nodded gravely as he spoke of his love and his deliberate abandoning of it, of his attempt at marriage, of its failure.

  Between pity and admiration they kissed, but passionately now, united by the ties of recorded human experience, by the sensation of having shared something. ‘I saw it in the hand’ she said, ‘in your hand.’ She was somewhat frightened by the unwonted accuracy of her own powers. And he? He had always wanted someone to whom he could speak freely — but it must be someone who could not fully understand! The candle flickered. On the mirror with shaving soap he had written the mocking verses for Justine which began:

  Oh Dreadful is the check!

  Intense the agony.

  When the ear begins to hear

  And the eye begins to see!

  He repeated them softly to himself, in the privacy of his own mind, as he thought of the dark composed features which he had seen here, by candle-light — the dark body seated in precisely the pose which Melissa now adopted, watching him with her chin on her knee, holding his hand with sympathy. And as he went on in his quiet voice to speak of his sister, of his perpetual quest for satisfactions which might be better than those he could remember, and which he had deliberately abandoned, other verses floated through his mind; the chaotic commentaries thrown up by his reading no less than by his experiences. Even as he saw once again the white marble face with its curling black hair thrown back about the nape of a slender neck, the ear-points, chin cleft by a dimple — a face which led him back always to those huge empty eye-sockets — he heard his inner mind repeating:

  Amors par force vos demeine!

  Combien durra vostre folie?

  Trop avez mene ceste vie.

  He heard himself saying things which belonged elsewhere. With a bitter laugh, for example: ‘The Anglo-Saxons invented the word “fornication” because they could not believe in the variety of love.’ And Melissa, nodding so gravely and sympathetically, began to look more important — for here was a man at last confiding in her things she could not understand, treasures of that mysterious male world which oscillated always between sottish sentimentality and brutish violence! ‘In my country almost all the really delicious things you can do to a woman are criminal offences, grounds for divorce.’ She was frightened by his sharp, cracked laugh. Of a sudden he looked so ugly. Then he dropped his voice again and continued pressing her hand to hi
s cheek softly, as one presses upon a bruise; and inside the inaudible commentary continued:

  ‘What meaneth Heaven by these diverse laws?

  Eros, Agape — self-division’s cause?

  Locked up there in the enchanted castle, between the terrified kisses and intimacies which would never now be recovered, they had studied La Lioba! What madness! Would they ever dare to enter the lists against other lovers? Jurata fornicatio — those verses dribbling away in the mind; and her body, after Rudel, ‘gras, delgat et gen’. He sighed, brushing away the memories like a cobweb and saying to himself: ‘Later, in search of an askesis he followed the desert fathers to Alexandria, to a place between two deserts, between the two breasts of Melissa. O morosa delectatio. And he buried his face there among the dunes, covered by her quick hair.’

  Then he was silent, staring at her with his clear eyes, his trembling lips closing for the first time about endearments which were now alight, now truly passionate. She shivered suddenly, aware that she would not escape him now, that she would have to submit to him fully.

  ‘Melissa’ he said triumphantly.

  They enjoyed each other now, wisely and tenderly, like friends long sought for and found among the commonplace crowds which thronged the echoing city. And here was a Melissa he had planned to find — eyes closed, warm open breathing mouth, torn from sleep with a kiss by the rosy candle-light. ‘It is time to go.’ But she pressed nearer and nearer to his body, whimpering with weariness. He gazed down fondly at her as she lay in the crook of his arm. ‘And the rest of your prophecy?’ he said gaily. ‘Rubbish, all rubbish’ she answered sleepily. ‘I can sometimes learn a character from a hand — but the future! I am not so clever.’

  The dawn was breaking behind the window. On a sudden impulse he went to the bathroom and turned on the bathwater. It flowed boiling hot, gushing into the bath with a swish of steam! How typical of the Mount Vulture Hotel, to have hot bathwater at such an hour and at no other. Excited as a schoolboy he called her. ‘Melissa, come and soak the weariness out of your bones or I’ll never get you back to your home.’ He thought of ways and means of delivering the five hundred pounds to Darley in such a way as to disguise the source of the gift. He must never know that it came from a rival’s epitaph on a dead Copt! ‘Melissa’ he called again, but she was asleep.

  He picked her up bodily and carried her into the bathroom. Lying snugly in the warm bath, she woke up, uncurled from sleep like one of those marvellous Japanese paper-flowers which open in water. She paddled the warmth luxuriously over her shallow pectorals and glowed, her thighs beginning to turn pink. Pursewarden sat upon the bidet with one hand in the warm water and talked to her as she woke from sleep. ‘You mustn’t take too long’ he said, ‘or Darley will be angry.’

  ‘Darley! Bah! He was out with Justine again last night.’ She sat up and began to soap her breasts, breathing in the luxury of soap and water like someone tasting a rare wine. She pronounced her rival’s name with small cringing loathing that seemed out of character. Pursewarden was surprised. ‘Such people — the Hosnanis’ she said with contempt. ‘And poor Darley believes in them, in her. She is only using him. He is too good, too simple.’

  ‘Using him?’

  She turned on the shower and revelling in the clouds of steam nodded a small pinched-up face at him. ‘I know all about them.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  He felt inside himself the sudden stirring of a discomfort so pronounced that it had no name. She was about to overturn his world as one inadvertendy knocks over an inkpot or a goldfish-bowl. Smiling a loving smile all the time. Standing there in the clouds of steam like an angel emerging from heaven in some seventeenth-century engraving.

  ‘What do you know?’ he repeated.

  Melissa examined the cavities in her teeth with a handmirror, her body still wet and glistening. ‘I’ll tell you. I used to be the mistress of a” very important man, Cohen, very important and very rich.’ There was something pathetic about such boasting. ‘He was working with Nessim Hosnani and told me things. He also talked in his sleep. He is dead now. I think he was poisoned because he knew so much. He was helping to take arms into the Middle East, into Palestine, for Nessim Hosnani. Great quantities. He used to say “Pour faire sauter les Anglais!”’ She ripped out the words vindictively, and all of a sudden, after a moment’s thought added: ‘He used to do this.’ It was grotesque, her imitation of Cohen bunching up his fingers to kiss them and then waving them in a gesture as he said ‘Tout a toi, John Bull!’ Her face crumpled and screwed up into an imitation of the dead man’s malice.

  ‘Dress now’ said Pursewarden in a small voice. He went into the other room and stood for a moment gazing distraaedly at the wall above the bookshelf. It was as if the whole city had crashed down about his ears.

  ‘That is why I don’t like the Hosnanis’ cried Melissa from the bathroom in a new, brassy fishwife’s voice. ‘They secretly hate the British.’

  ‘Dress’ he called sharply, as if he were speaking to a horse. ‘And get a move on.’

  Suddenly chastened she dried herself and tiptoed out of the bathroom saying ‘I am ready immediately.’ Pursewarden stood quite still staring at the wall with a fixed, dazed expression. He might have fallen there from some other planet. He was so still that his body might have been a statue cast in some heavy metal. Melissa shot small glances at him as she dressed. ‘What is it?’ she said. He did not answer. He was thinking furiously.

  When she was dressed he took her arm and together they walked in silence down the staircase and into the street. The dawn was beginning to break. There were still street-lamps alight and they soil cast shadows. She looked at his face from time to time, but it was expressionless. Punctually as they approached each light their shadows lengthened, grew narrower and more contorted, only to disappear into the half-light before renewing their shape. Pursewarden walked slowly, with a tired, deliberate trudge, still holding her arm. In each of these elongated capering shadows he saw now quite clearly the silhouette of the defeated Maskelyne.

  At the corner by the square he stopped and with the same abstracted expression on his face said: ‘Tiens! I forgot. Here is the thousand I promised you.’

  He kissed her upon the cheek and turned back towards the hotel without a word.

  IX

  Mountolive was away on an official tour of the cotton-ginning plants in the Delta when the news was phoned through to him by Telford. Between incredulity and shock, he could hardly believe his ears. Telford spoke self-importantly in the curious slushy voice which his ill-fitting dentures conferred upon him; death was a matter of some importance in his trade. But the death of an enemy! He had to work hard to keep his tone sombre, grave, sympathetic, to keep the self-congratulation out of it. He spoke like a county coroner. ‘I thought you’d like to know, sir, so I took the liberty of interrupting your visit. Nimrod Pasha phoned me in the middle of the night and I went along. The police had already sealed up the place for the Parquet inquiry; Dr Balthazar was there. I had a look around while he issued the certificate of death. I was allowed to bring away a lot of personal papers belonging to the … the deceased. Nothing of much interest. Manuscript of a novel. The whole business came as a complete surprise. He had been drinking very heavily — as usual, I’m afraid. Yes.’

  ‘But…’ said Mountolive feebly, the rage and incredulity mixing in his mind like oil and water. ‘What on earth.…’ His legs felt weak. He drew up a chair and sat down at the telephone crying peevishly: ‘Yes, yes, Telford — go on. Tell me what you can.’

  Telford cleared his throat, aware of the interest his news was creating, and tried to marshal the facts in his fuddled brain. ‘Well, sir, we have traced his movements. He came up here, very unshaven and haggard (Enrol tells me) and asked for you. But you had just left. Your secretary says that he sat down at your desk and wrote something — it took him some time — which he said was to be delivered to you personally. He insisted on her franking it “Secret” an
d sealing it up with wax. It is in your safe now. Then he appears to have gone off on a … well, a binge. He spent all day at a tavern on the seashore near Montaza which he often visited. It’s just a shack down by the sea — a few timbers with a palm-leaf roof, run by a Greek. He spent the whole day there writing and drinking. He drank quite a lot of zibib according to the proprietor. He had a table set right down by the sea-shore in the sand. It was windy and the man suggested he would be better off in the shelter. But no. He sat there by the sea. In the late afternoon he ate a sandwich and took a tram back to town. He called on me.’

  ‘Good: well.’

  Telford hesitated and gasped. ‘He came to the office. I must say that although unshaven he seemed in very good spirits. He made a few jokes. But he asked me for a cyanide tablet — you know the kind. I won’t say any more. This line isn’t really secure. You will understand, sir.’

  ‘Yes, yes’ cried Mountolive. ‘Go on, man.’

  Reassured Telford continued breathlessly: ‘He said he wanted to poison a sick dog. It seemed reasonable enough, so I gave him one. That is probably what he used according to Dr Balthazar. I hope you don’t feel, sir, that I was in any way.…’

  Mountolive felt nothing except a mounting indignation that anyone in his mission should confer such annoyance by a public act so flagrant! No, this was silly. ‘It is stupid’ he whispered to himself. But he could not help feeling that Pursewarden had been guilty of something. Damn it, it was inconsiderate and underbred — as well as being mysterious. Kenilworth’s face floated before him for a moment. He joggled the receiver to get a clear contact, and shouted: ‘But what does it all mean?’