The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  But his own relief was mixed with terror. How had he managed at last to turn the key in the lock? By sacrificing to the truth, by putting himself at her mercy. His unwisdom had been the only course left open. He had been forced to take it. Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions — however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. In this response to a common field of action, Justine was truer to herself than she had ever been, responding as a flower responds to light. And it was now, while they talked quietly and coldly, their heads bent towards each other like flowers, that she could at last say, magnificently: ‘Ah, Nessim, I never suspected that I should agree. How did you know that I only exist for those who believe in me?’

  He stared at her, thrilled and a little terrified, recognizing in her the perfect submissiveness of the oriental spirit — the absolute feminine submissiveness which is one of the strongest forces in the world.

  They went out to the car together and Justine suddenly felt very weak, as if she had been carried far out of her depth and abandoned in mid-ocean. ‘I don’t know what more to say.’

  ‘Nothing. You must start living.’ The paradoxes of true love are endless. She felt as if she had received a smack across the face. She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate. She drank it with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain.

  It was some hours later, when he was sitting at his desk, that Nessim, after a long moment of thought, picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria’s number. ‘Da Capo’ he said quietly, ‘you remember my plans for marrying Justine? All is well. We have a new ally. I want you to be the first to announce it to the committee. I think now they will show no more reservation about my not being a Jew — since I am to be married to one. What do you say?’ He listened with impatience to the ironical congratulations of his friend. ‘It is impertinent’ he said at last, coldly ‘to imagine that I am not motivated by feelings as well as by designs. As an old friend I must warn you not to take that tone with me. My private life, my private feelings, are my own. If they happen to square with other considerations, so much the better. But do not do me the injustice of thinking me without honour. I love her.’ He felt quite sick as he said the words: sick with a sudden self-loathing, Yet the word was utterly exact — love.

  Now he replaced the receiver slowly, as if it weighed a ton, and sat staring at his own reflection in the polished desk. He was telling himself: ‘It is all that I am not as a man which she thinks she can love. Had I no such plans to offer her, I might have pleaded with her for a century. What is the meaning of this little four-letter word we shake out of our minds like poker-dice — love?’ His self-contempt almost choked him.

  That night she arrived unexpectedly at the great house just as the clocks were chiming eleven. He was still up and dressed and sitting by the fire, sorting his papers. ‘You did not telephone?’ he cried with delight, with surprise. ‘How wonderful!’ She stood in grave silence at the door until the servant who had showed her in retired. Then she took a step forward letting her fur cape slide from her shoulders. They embraced passionately, silently. Then, turning her regard upon him in the firelight, that look at once terrified and exultant, she said: ‘Now at last I know you, Nessim Hosnani.’ Love is every sort of conspiracy. The power of riches and intrigue stirred within her now, the deputies of passion. Her face wore the brilliant look of innocence which comes only with conversion to a religious way of life! ‘I have come for your directions, for further instructions’ she said. Nessim was transfigured. He ran upstairs to his little safe and brought down the great folders of correspondence — as if to show that he was honest, that his words could be verified there and then, on the spot. He was now revealing to her something which neither his mother nor his brother knew — the extent of his complicity in the Palestine conspiracy. They crouched down before the fire talking until nearly dawn.

  ‘You will see from all this my immediate worries. You can deal with them. First the doubts and hesitations of the Jewish Committee. I want you to talk to them. They think that there is something questionable about a Copt supporting them while the local Jews are staying clear, afraid of losing their good name with the Egyptians. We must convince them, Justine. It will take a little while at least to complete the arms build-up. Then, all this must be kept from our well-wishers here, the British and the French. I know they are busy trying to find out about me, my underground activities. As yet, I think they don’t suspect. But among them all there are two people who particularly concern us. Darley’s liaison with the little Melissa is one point néuralgique; as I told you she was the mistress of old Cohen who died this year. He was our chief agent for arms shipments, and knew all about us. Did he tell her anything? I don’t know. Another person even more equivocal is Pursewarden; he clearly belongs to the political agency of the Embassy. We are great friends and all that but… I am not sure what he suspects. We must if necessary reassure him, try and sell him an innocent community movement among the Copts! What else does he, might he, know or fear? You can help me here. Oh, Justine, I knew you would understand!’ Her dark intent features, so composed in the firelight, were full of a new clarity, a new power. She nodded. In her hoarse voice she said ‘Thank you, Nessim Hosnani. I see now what I have to do.’

  Afterwards they locked the tall doors, put away the papers, and in the dead of night lay down before the fire in each other’s arms, to make love with the passionate detachment of succubi. Savage and exultant as their kisses were, they were but the lucid illustrations of their human case. They had discovered each other’s inmost weakness, the true site of love. And now at last there were no reserves and no inhibitions in Justine’s mind, and what may seem wantonness in other terms was really the powerful coefficient of a fully realized abandonment to love itself — a form of true identity she had never shared with anyone else! The secret they shared made her free to act. And Nessim foundering in her arms with his curiously soft — almost virginal — femininity, felt shaken and banged by her embrace like a rag doll. The nibbling of her lips reminded him of the white Arab mare he had owned as a child; confused memories flew up like flocks of coloured birds. He felt exhausted, on the point of tears, and yet irradiated by a tremendous gratitude and tenderness. In these magnificent kisses all his loneliness was expurgated. He had found someone to share his secret — a woman after his own special heart. Paradox within paradox!

  As for her, it was as if she had rifled the treasury of his spiritual power symbolized so queerly in the terms of his possessions; the cold steel of rifles, the cold nipples of bombs and grenades which had been born from tungsten, gum arabic, jute, shipping, opals, herbs, silks and trees.

  He felt her on top of him, and in the plunge of her loins he felt the desire to add to him — to fecundate his actions; and to fructify him through these fatality-bearing instruments of his power, to give life to those death-burdening struggles of a truly barren woman. Her face was expressionless as a mask of Siva. It was neither ugly nor beautiful, but naked as power itself. It seemed coeval (this love) with the Faustian love of saints who had mastered the chilly art of seminal stoppage in order the more clearly to recognize themselves — for its blue fires conveyed not heat but cold to the body. But will and mind burned up as if they had been dipped in quicklime. It was a true sensuality with nothing of the civilized poisons about it to make it anodyne, palatable to a human society constructed upon a romantic idea of truth. Was it the less love for that? Paracelsus had described such relationships among the Caballi. In all this one may see the austere mindless primeval face of Aphrodite.

  And all the time he was thinking to himself: ‘When all this is over, when I have found her lost child — by that time we shall be so
close that there will never be any question of leaving me.’ The passion of their embraces came from complicity, from something deeper, more wicked, than the wayward temptings of the flesh or the mind. He had conquered her in offering her a married life which was both a pretence and yet at the same time informed by a purpose which might lead them both to death! This was all that sex could mean to her now! How thrilling, sexually thrilling, was the expectation of their death!

  He drove her home in the first faint trembling light of dawn; waited to hear the lift climb slowly, painfully, to the third floor and return again. It stopped with a slight bounce before him and the light went out with a click. The personage had gone, but her perfume remained.

  It was a perfume called ‘Jamais de la vie’.

  XI

  Throughout that summer and autumn the conspirators had worked together to mount entertainments on a scale seldom seen in the city. The big house was seldom quiet now for hours together. It was perpetually alive to the cool fern-like patterns of a quartet, or to the foundering plunge of saxophones crying to the night like cuckolds. The once cavernous and deserted kitchens were now full of the echoing bustle of servants preparing for a new feast or clearing up after one which had ended. In the city it was said that Nessim had deliberately set himself to launch Justine in society — as if the provincial splendours of Alexandria held any promise or charm to one who had become at heart a European, as he had. No, these planned assaults upon the society of the second capital were both exploratory and diversionary. They offered a backcloth against which the conspirators could move with a freedom necessary to their work. They worked indefatigably — and only when the pressure of things became too great stole short holidays in the little summer lodge which Nessim had christened ‘Justine’s Summer Palace’; here they could read and write and bathe, and enjoy those friends who were closest to them — Clea and Amaril and Balthazar.

  But always after these long evenings spent in a wilderness of conversation, a forest of plates and wine-bottles, they locked the doors, shot the great bolts themselves and turned sighing back to the staircase, leaving the sleepy domestics to begin the task of clearing up the débris; for the house must be completely set to rights by morning; they walked slowly arm in arm, pausing to kick off their shoes on the first landing and to smile at each other in the great mirror. Then, to quieten their minds, they would take a slow turn up and down the picture-gallery, with its splendid collection of Impressionists, talking upon neutral topics while Nessim’s greedy eyes explored the great canvases slowly, mute testimony to the validity of private worlds and secret wishes.

  So at last they came to those warm and beautifully furnished private bedrooms, adjoining one another, on the cool north side of the house. It was always the same; while Nessim lay down on the bed fully dressed, Justine lit the spirit-lamp to prepare the infusion of valerian which he always took to soothe his nerves before he slept. Here too she would set out the small card-table by the bed, and together they played a hand or two of cribbage or picquet as they talked, obsessively talked about the affairs which occupied their waking minds. At such times their dark, passionate faces glowed in the soft light with a sort of holiness conferred by secrecy, by the appetities of a shared will, by desires joined at the waist. Tonight it was the same. As she dealt the first hand, the telephone by the bed rang. Nessim picked up the receiver, listened for a second, and then passed it to her without a word. Smiling, she raised her eyebrows in interrogation and her husband nodded. ‘Hullo’ the hoarse voice counterfeited sleepiness, as if she had been woken from her bed. ‘Yes, my darling. Of course. No, I was awake. Yes, I am alone.’ Nessim quietly and methodically fanned out his hand and studied the cards without visible expression. The conversation ran stutteringly on and then the caller said goodnight and rang off. Sighing, Justine replaced the receiver, and then made a slow gesture, as of someone removing soiled gloves, or of someone disembarrassing herself of a skein of wool. ‘It was poor Darley’ she said, picking up her cards. Nessim raised his eyes for a moment, put down a card, and uttered a bid. As the game began, she started to talk again softly, as if to herself. ‘He is absolutely fascinated by the diaries. Remember? I used to copy out all Arnauti’s notes for Moeurs in my own handwriting when he broke his wrist. We had them bound up. All the parts which he did not use in the end. I have given them to Darley as my diary.’ She depressed her cheeks in a sad smile. ‘He accepts them as mine, and says, not unnaturally, that I have a masculine mind! He also says my French is not very good — that would please Arnauti, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I am sorry for him’ said Nessim quietly, tenderly. ‘He is so good. One day I will be quite honest, explain everything to him.’

  ‘But I don’t see your concern for the little Melissa’ said Justine, again as if engaged in a private debate rather than a conversation. ‘I have tried to sound him in every way. He knows nothing. I am convinced that she knows nothing. Just because she was Cohen’s mistress … I don’t know.’

  Nessim laid down his cards and said: ‘I cannot get rid of a feeling she knows something. Cohen was a boastful and silly man and he certainly knew all that there was to know.’

  ‘But why should he tell her?’

  ‘It is simply that after his death, whenever I ran across her, she would look at me in a new way — as if in the light of something she had heard about me, a piece of new knowledge. It’s hard to describe.’

  They played in silence until the kettle began to whine. Then Justine put down her cards, went across to prepare the valerian. As he sipped it she went into the other room to divest herself of her jewellery. Sipping the cup, and staring reflectively at the wall, Nessim heard the small snap of her ear-rings as she plucked them off, and the small noise of the sleeping-tablets falling into a glass. She came back and sat down at the card-table.

  ‘Then if you feared her, why did you not get her removed somehow?’ He looked startled and she added: ‘I don’t mean to harm her, but to get her sent away.’

  Nessim smiled. ‘I thought I would, but then when Darley fell in love with her, I… had a sympathy for him.’

  ‘There is no room for such ideas’ she said curtly, and he nodded, almost humbly. ‘I know’ he said. Justine dealt the cards once more, and once more they consulted their hands in silence.

  ‘I am working now to get her sent away — by Darley himself. Amaril says that she is really seriously ill and has already recommended that she go to Jerusalem for special treatment. I have offered Darley the money. He is in a pitiable state of confusion. Very English. He is a good person, Nessim, though now he is very much afraid of you and invents all sorts of bogies with which to frighten himself. He makes me feel sad, he is so helpless.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But Melissa must go. I have told him so.’

  ‘Good.’ Then, in a totally different voice, raising his dark eyes to hers, he said: ‘What about Pursewarden?’

  The question hung between them in the still air of the room, quivering like a compass needle. Then he slung his eyes once more to the cards in his hand. Justine’s face took on a new expression, both bitter and haggard. She lit a cigarette carefully and said: ‘As I told you, he is someone quite out of the ordinary — c’est un personnage. It would be quite impossible to get a secret out of him. It’s hard to describe.’

  She stared at him for a long time, studying those dark averted features with an expression of abstraction. ‘What I am trying to say is this: about the difference between them. Darley is so sentimental and so loyal to me that he constitutes no danger at all. Even if he came into the possession of information which might harm us, he would not use it, he would bury it. Not Pursewarden!’ Now her eyes glittered. ‘He is somehow cold and clever and self-centred. Completely amoral — like an Egyptian! He would not deeply care if we died tomorrow. I simply cannot reach him. But potentially he is an enemy worth reckoning with.’

  He raised his eyes to her and they sat for a long moment staring sightlessly into each ot
her’s minds. His eyes were now full of a burning passionate sweetness like the eyes of some strange noble bird of prey. He moistened his lips with his tongue but did not speak. He had been on the point of blurting out the words: ‘I am terrified that you may be falling in love with him.’ But a queer feeling of pudicity restrained him.

  ‘Nessim.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette now and, deep in thought, rose to walk up and down the room, her hands hugged in her armpits. As always when she was thinking deeply, she moved in a strange, almost awkward way — a prowling walk which reminded him of some predatory animal. His eye had become vague now, and lustreless. He picked up the cards mechanically and shuffled them once, twice. Then he put them down and raised his palms to his burning cheeks.

  At once she was at his side with her warm hand upon his brow. ‘You have a temperature again.’

  ‘I don’t think so’ he said rapidly, mechanically.