Yet if he himself were powerless, now, how much more so the others? Like the etiolated projections of a sick imagination, they seemed, drained of meaning, empty as suits of clothes; taking up emplacements in this colourless drama of contending wills. Nessim, Justine, Leila — they had an unsubstantial air now — as of dream projections acting in a world populated by expressionless waxworks. It was difficult to feel that he owed them even love any longer. Leila’s silence above all suggested, even more clearly, the guilt of her complicity.
Autumn drew to an end and still Nur could produce no proof of action. The life-lines which tied Mountolive’s Mission to London became clogged with longer and longer telegrams full of the shrewish iterations of minds trying to influence the operation of what Mountolive now knew to be not merely chance, but in fact destiny. It was interesting, too, in a paradoxical sort of way, this first great lesson which his profession had to teach him; for outside the circumscribed area of his personal fears and hesitations, he watched the whole affair with a kind of absorbed attention, with almost a sense of dreadful admiration. But it was like some fretful mummy that he now presented himself to the gaze of Nur, almost ashamed of the splendours of that second-hand uniform, so clearly was it intended to admonish or threaten the Minister. The old man was full of a feverish desire to accommodate him; he was like a monkey jumping enthusiastically on the end of a chain. But what could he do? He made faces to match his transparent excuses. The investigations undertaken by Memlik were not as yet complete. It was essential to verify the truth. The threads were still being followed up. And so forth.
Mountolive did what he had never done before in his official life, colouring up and banging the dusty table between them with friendly exasperation. He adopted the countenance of a thundercloud and predicted a rupture of diplomatic relations. He went so far as to recommend Nur for a decoration … realizing that this was his last resort. But in vain.
The broad contemplative figure of Memlik squatted athwart the daylight, promising everything, performing nothing; immovable, imperturbable, and only faintly malign. Each was now pressing the other beyond the point of polite conciliation: Maskelyne and the High Commissioner were pressing London for action; London, full of moralizing grandeurs, pressed Mountolive; Mountolive pressed Nur, overwhelming the old man with a sense of his own ineffectuality, for he too was powerless to grapple with Memlik without the help of the King: and the King was ill, very ill. At the bottom of this pyramid sat the small figure of the Minister for Interior, with his priceless collection of Korans locked away in dusty cupboards.
Constrained nevertheless to keep up the diplomatic pressure, Mountolive was now irradiated by an appalling sense of futility as he sat (like some ageing jeune premier) and listened to the torrent of Nur’s excuses, drinking the ceremonial coffee and prying into those ancient and imploring eyes. ‘But what more evidence do you need, Pasha, than the papers I brought you?’ The Minister’s hands spread wide, smoothing the air between them as if he were rubbing cold-cream into it; he exuded a conciliatory and apologetic affection, like an unguent. ‘He is going into the matter’ he croaked helplessly. ‘There is more than one Hosnani, to begin with’ he added in desperation. Backwards and forwards moved the tortoise’s wrinkled head, regular as a pendulum. Mountolive groaned inside himself as he thought of those long telegrams following one another, endless as a tapeworm. Nessim had now, so to speak, wedged himself neatly in between his various adversaries, in a position where neither could reach him — for the time being. The game was in baulk.
Donkin alone derived a quizzical amusement from these exchanges — so characteristic of Egypt. His own affection for the Moslem had taught him to see clearly into his motives, to discern the play of childish cupidities underneath the histrionic silence of a Minister, under his facile promises. Even Mountolive’s gathering hysteria in the face of these checks was amusing for a junior secretary. His Chief had become a puffy and petulant dignitary, under all this stress. Who could have believed such a change possible?
The observation that there was more than one Hosnani was a strange one, and it was a fruit of the prescient Rafael’s thought as he quietly shaved his master one morning, according to custom; Memlik paid great attention to what the barber said — was he not a European? While the little barber shaved him in the morning they discussed the transactions of the day. Rafael was full of ideas and opinions, but he uttered them obliquely, simplifying them so that they presented themselves in readily understandable form. He knew that Memlik had been troubled by Nur’s insistence, though he had not shown it; he knew, moreover, that Memlik would act only if the King recovered enough to grant Nur an audience. It was a matter of luck and time; meanwhile, why not pluck Hosnani as far as possible? It was only one of a dozen such matters which lay gathering dust (and perhaps bribes) while the King was ill.
One fine day His Majesty would feel much better under his new German doctors and would grant audience once again. He would send for Nur. That is the manner in which the matter would fall out. The next thing: the old goose-necked telephone by the yellow divan would tingle and the old man’s voice (disguising its triumphant tone) would say, ‘I am Nur, speaking from the very Divan of the Very King, having received audience. That matter of which we spoke concerning the British Government. It must now be advanced and go forward. Give praise to God!’
‘Give praise to God!’ and from this point forward Memlik’s hands would be tied. But for the moment he was still a free agent, free to express his contempt for the elder Minister by inaction.
‘There are two brothers, Excellence,’ Rafael had said, putting on a story-book voice and casting an expression of gloomy maturity upon his little doll’s face. ‘Two brothers Hosnani, not one, Excellence.’ He sighed as his white fingers took up small purses of Memlik’s dark skin for the razor to work upon. He proceded slowly, for to register an idea in a Moslem mind is like trying to paint a wall: one must wait for the first coat to dry (the first idea) before applying a second. ‘Of the two brothers, one is rich in land, and the other rich in money — he of the Koran. Of what good are lands to my Excellence? But one whose purse is fathomless.…’ His tone suggested all the landless man’s contempt for good ground.
‘Well, well, but.…’ said Memlik with a slow, unemphatic impatience, yet without moving his lips under the kiss of the crisp razor. He was impatient for the theme to be developed. Rafael smiled and was silent for a moment. ‘Indeed’ he said thoughtfully, ‘the papers you received from his Excellence were signed Hosnani — in the family name. Who is to say which brother signed them, which is guilty and which innocent? If you were wise in deed would you sacrifice a moneyed man to a landed one? I not, Excellence, I not.’
‘What would you do, my Rafael?’
‘For people like the British it could be made to seem that the poor one was guilty, not the rich. I am only thinking aloud, Excellence, a small man among great affairs.’
Memlik breathed quietly through his mouth, keeping his eyes shut. He was skilled in never showing surprise. Yet the thought, suspended idly in his mind, filled him with a reflective astonishment. In the last month he had received three additions to his library which had left in little doubt the comparative affluence of his client, the elder Hosnani. It was getting on for the Christian Christmastide. He pondered heavily. To satisfy both the British and his own cupidity.… That would be very clever!
Not eight hundred yards away from the chair in which Memlik sprawled, across the brown Nile water, sat Mountolive at his papers. On the polished desk before him lay the great florid invitation card which enjoined his participation in one of the great social events of the year — Nessim’s annual duckshoot on Lake Mareotis. He propped it against his inkwell in order to read it again with an expression of fugitive reproach.
But there was another communication of even greater importance; even after this long silence he recognized Leila’s nervous handwriting on the lined envelope smelling of chypre. But inside it he found a page to
rn from an exercise book scrawled over with words and phrases set down anyhow, as if in great haste.
‘David, I am going abroad, perhaps long perhaps short, I cannot tell; against my will. Nessim insists. But I must see you before I leave. I must take courage and meet you the evening before. Don’t fail. I have something to ask, something to tell. “This business”! I knew nothing about it till carnival I swear; now only you can save.…’
So the letter ran on pell-mell; Mountolive felt a queer mixture of feelings — an incoherent relief which somehow trembled on the edge of indignation. After all this time she would be waiting for him after dark near the Auberge Bleue in an old horse-drawn cab pulled back off the road among the palms! That plan was at least touched with something of her old fantasy. For some reason Nessim was not to know of this meeting — why should he disapprove? But the information that she at least had had no part in the conspiracies fostered by her son — that flooded him with relief and tenderness. And all this time he had been seeing Leila as a hostile extension of Nessim, had been training himself to hate her! ‘My poor Leila’ he said aloud, holding the envelope to his nose to inhale the fragrance of chypre. He picked up the phone and spoke softly to Errol: ‘I suppose the whole Chancery has been invited to the Hosnani shoot? Yes? I agree, he has got rather a nerve at such a time.… I shall, of course, have to decline, but I would like you chaps to accept and apologize for me. To keep up a public appearance of normality merely. Will you then? Thank you very much. Now one more thing. I shall go up the evening before the shoot for private business and return the next day — we shall probably pass each other on the desert road. No, I’m glad you fellows have the chance. By all means, and good hunting.’
The next ten days passed in a sort of dream, punctuated only by the intermittent stabbings of a reality which was no longer a drug, a dissipation which gagged his nerves; his duties were a torment of boredom. He felt immeasurably expended, used-up, as he confronted his face in the bathroom mirror, presenting it to the razor’s edge with undisguised distaste. He had become quite noticeably grey now at the temples. From somewhere in the servants’ quarters a radio burred and scratched out the melody of an old song which had haunted a whole Alexandrian summer: ‘Jamais de la vie’. He had come to loathe it now. This new epoch — a limbo filled with the dispersing fragments of habit, duty and circumstance — filled him with a gnawing impatience; underneath it all he was aware that he was gathering himself together for this long-awaited meeting with Leila. Somehow it would determine, not the physical tangible meaning of his return to Egypt so much as the psychic meaning of it in relation to his inner life. God! that was a clumsy way to put it — but how else could one express these things? It was a sort of barrier in himself which had to be crossed, a puberty of the feelings which had to be outgrown.
He drove up across the crackling desert in his pennoned car, rejoicing in the sweet whistle of its cooled engine, and the whickering of wind at the side-screens. It had been some time since he had been able to travel across the desert alone like this — it reminded him of older and happier journeys. Flying across the still white air with the speedometer hovering in the sixties, he hummed softly to himself, despite his distaste, the refrain:
Jamais de la vie,
Jamais dans la nuit
Quand ton coeur se démange de chagrin.…
How long was it since he had caught himself singing like this? An age. It was not really happiness, but an overmastering relief of mind. Even the hateful song helped him to recover the lost image of an Alexandria he had once found charming. Would it, could it be so again?
It was already late afternoon by the time he reached the desert fringe and began the slow in-curving impulse which would lead him to the city’s bristling outer slums. The sky was covered with clouds. A thunderstorm was breaking over Alexandria. To the east upon the icy green waters of the lake poured a rainstorm — flights of glittering needles pocking the waters; he could dimly hear the hush of rain above the whisper of the car. He glimpsed the pearly city through the dark cloud-mat, its minarets poked up against the cloud bars of an early sunset; linen soaked in blood. A sea-wind chaffered and tugged at the sea-limits of the estuary. Higher still roamed packages of smoking, blood-stained cloud throwing down a strange radiance into the streets and squares of the white city. Rain was a rare and brief winter phenomenon in Alexandria. Presently the sea-wind would rise, alter inclination, and peel the sky clear in a matter of minutes, rolling up the heavy cumulus like a carpet. The glassy freshness of the winter sky would resume its light, polishing the city once more till it glittered against the desert like quartz, like some beautiful artifact. He was no longer impatient. Dusk was beginning to swallow the sunset. As he neared the ugly ribbons of cabins and warehouses by the outer harbour, his tyres began to smoke and seethe upon the wet tarmac, its heat now slaked by a light rain. Time to throttle down.…
He entered the penumbra of the storm slowly, marvelling at the light, at the horizon drawn back like a bow. Odd gleams of sunshine scattered rubies upon the battleships in the basin (squatting under their guns like horned toads). It was the ancient city again; he felt its pervading melancholy under the rain as he crossed it on his way to the Summer Residence. The brilliant unfamiliar lighting of the thunderstorm re-created it, giving it a spectral, story-book air — broken pavements made of tinfoil, snail-shells, cracked horn, mica; earth-brick buildings turned to the colour of ox-blood; the lovers wandering in Mohammed Ali Square, disoriented by the unfamiliar rain, disconsolate as untuned instruments; the clicking of violet trams along the sea-front among the tatting of palm-fronds. The desuetude of an ancient city whose streets were plastered with the wet blown dust of the surrounding desert. He felt it all anew, letting it extend panoramically in his consciousness — the moan of a liner edging out towards the sunset bar, or the trains which flowed like a torrent of diamonds towards the interior, their wheels chattering among the shingle ravines and the powder of temples long since abandoned and silted up.…
Mountolive saw it all now with a world-weariness which he at last recognized as the stripe which maturity lays upon the shoulders of an adult — the stigma of the experiences which age one. The wind spouted in the harbour. The corridors of wet rigging swayed and shook like the foliage of some great tree. Now the tears were trickling down the windscreen under the diligent and noiseless wipers.… A little period in this strange contused darkness, fitfully lit by lightning, and then the wind would come — the magistral north wind, punching and squeezing the sea into its own characteristic plumage of white crests, knocking open the firmament until the faces of men and women once more reflected the open winter sky. He was in plenty of time.
He drove to the Summer Residence to make sure that the staff had been warned of his arrival; he intended to stay the night and return to Cairo on the morrow. He let himself into the front door with his own key, having pressed the bell, and stood listening for the shuffle of Ali. And as he heard the old man’s step approaching, the north wind arrived with a roar, stiffening the windows in their frames, and the rain stopped abruptly as if it had been turned off.
He had still an hour or so before the rendezvous: comfortable time in which to have a bath and change his clothes. To his own surprise, he felt perfectly at ease now, no longer tormented by doubts or elated by a sense of relief. He had put himself unreservedly in the hands of chance.
He ate a sandwich and drank two strong whiskies before setting out and letting the great car slide softly down the Grande Corniche towards the Auberge Bleue which lay towards the outskirts of the town, fringed by patches of dune and odd clusters of palm. The sky was clear again now and the whitecaps were racing ashore to bang themselves in showers of spray upon the metal piers of Chatby. At the horizon’s edge flickered the intermittent lightning still, but dimly. These faint gleams suggested perhaps the gun flashes of distant warships in a naval engagement.
He edged the car softly off the road and into the deserted car park of the Auberge, swi
tching off the side-lamps as he did so. He sat for a moment, accustoming himself to the bluish dusk. The Auberge was empty — it was still too early for dancers and diners to throng its elegant floor and bars. Then he saw it. Just off the road, on the opposite side of the park, there was a bare patch of sand-dune with a few leaning palms. A gharry stood there. Its old-fashioned oil-lamps were alight and wallowed feebly like fireflies in the light sea-airs. There was a dim figure on the jarvey’s box in a tarbush — apparently asleep.
He crossed the gravel with a light and joyous step, hearing it squeak under his shoes, and as he neared the gharry called, in a soft voice: ‘Leila!’ He saw the silhouette of the driver turn against the sky and register attention; from inside the cab he heard a voice — Leila’s voice — say something like: ‘Ah! David, so at last we meet. I have come all this way to tell you.…’
He leaned forward with a puzzled air, straining his eyes, but could not see more than the vague shape of someone in the far corner of the cab. ‘Get in’ she cried imperiously. ‘Get in and we shall talk.’
And it was here that a sense of unreality overtook Mountolive; he could not exactly fathom why. But he felt as one does in dreams when one walks without touching the ground, or else appears to rise deliberately through the air like a cork through water. His feelings, like antennae, were reaching out towards the dark figure, trying to gather and assess the meaning of these tumbling phrases and to analyse the queer sense of disorientation which they carried, buried in them, like a foreign intonation creeping into familiar voices; somewhere the whole context of his impressions foundered.
The Alexandria Quartet Page 74