‘It is strange to what extent small inanimate objects can sometimes be responsible for the complete breakdown of an affective field; a love based on an eye-tooth, a disgust fathered by short-sight, a passion founded on hairy wrists. It was the green fingerstall that disgusted him finally. He could not bear to feel a hand moving on his body whose index finger was sheathed in a fingerstall. Yet I had to wear it, for my finger had begun to suppurate again; you know I have a little patch of eczema which plays me up from time to time, usually when I am run down or over-excited. It even manages to burst through the thick scab of methylene blue. I tried everything, but without avail. Perhaps unconsciously I was courting his disgust as an adolescent might with an acne? Who can say?
‘Then of course it came to an end, as everything does, even presumably life! There is no merit in suffering as I did, dumbly like a pack animal, galled by intolerable sores it cannot reach with its tongue. It was then that I remembered a remark in your manuscript about the ugliness of my hands. Why did I not cut them off and throw them in the sea as you had so thoughtfully recommended? This was the question that arose in my mind. At the time I was so numb with drugs and drink that I did not imagine I would feel anything. However I made an attempt, but it is harder than you imagine, all that gristle! I was like those fools who cut their throats and come bang up against the oesophagus. They always live. But when I desisted with pain I thought of another writer, Petronius. (The part that literature plays in our lives!) I lay down in a hot bath. But the blood wouldn’t run, or perhaps I had no more. The colour of bitumen it seemed, the few coarse drops I persuaded to trickle. I was about to try other ways of alleviating the pain when Amaril appeared at his most abusive and brought me to my senses by giving me a deep sedation of some twenty hours during which he tidied up my corpse as well as my room. Then I was very ill, with shame I believe. Yes, it was chiefly shame, though of course I was much weakened by the absurd excess to which I had been pushed. I submitted to Pierre Balbz who removed the teeth and provided me with this set of glittering snappers — art nouveau! Amaril tried in his clumsy way to analyse me — but what is one to say of this very approximate science which has carelessly overflowed into anthropology on one side, theology on the other? There is much they do not know as yet: for instance that one kneels in church because one kneels to enter a woman, or that circumcision is derived from the clipping of the vine, without which it will run to leaf and produce no fruit! I had no philosophic system on which to lean as even Da Capo did. Do you remember Capodistria’s exposition of the nature of the universe? “The world is a biological phenomenon which will only come to an end when every single man has had all the women, every woman all the men. Clearly this will take some time. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but to help forward the forces of nature by treading the grapes as hard as we can. As for an afterlife — what will it consist of but satiety? The play of shadows in Paradise — pretty hanoums flitting across the screens of memory, no longer desired, no longer desiring to be desired. Both at rest at last. But clearly it cannot be done all at once. Patience! Avanti!” Yes, I did a lot of slow and careful thinking as I lay here, listening to the creak of the cane chair and the noises from the street. My friends were very good and often visited me with gifts and conversations that left me headaches. So I gradually began to swim up to the surface again, with infinite slowness. I said to myself “Life is the master. We have been living against the grain of our intellects. The real teacher is endurance.” I had learned something, but at what a cost!
‘If only I had had the courage to tackle my love wholeheartedly I would have served the ideas of the Cabal better. A paradox, you think? Perhaps. Instead of letting my love poison my intellect and my intellectual reservations my love. Yet though I am rehabilitated and ready once more to enter the world, everything in nature seems to have disappeared! I still awake crying out: “He has gone away forever. True lovers exist for the sake of love.”’
He gave a croaky sob and crawled out from between the sheets, looking ridiculous in his long woollen combinations, to hunt for a handkerchief in the chest of drawers. To the mirror he said: ‘The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.’ Then he shook his head gloomily and returned to his bed, settling the pillows at his back and adding: ‘And that fat brute Father Paul talks of acceptance! Acceptance of the world can only come from a full recognition of its measureless extents of good and evil; and to really inhabit it, explore it to the full uninhibited extent of this finite human understanding — that is all that is necessary in order to accept it. But what a task! One lies here with time passing and wonders about it. Every sort of time trickling through the hour-glass, “time immemorial” and “for the time being” and “time out of mind”; the time of the poet, the philosopher, the pregnant woman, the calendar.… Even “time is money” comes into the picture; and then, if you think that money is excrement for the Freudian, you understand that time must be also! Darley you have come at the right moment, for I am to be rehabilitated tomorrow by my friends. It was a touching thought which Clea first had. The shame of having to put in a public appearance again after all my misdeeds has been weighing on me very heavily. How to face the city again — that is the problem. It is only in moments like this that you realize who your friends are. Tomorrow a little group is coming here to find me dressed, my hands less conspicuously bandaged, my new teeth in place. I shall of course wear dark glasses. Mountolive, Amaril, Pombal and Clea, two on each arm. We will walk the whole length of Rue Fuad thus and take a lengthy public coffee on the pavement outside Pastroudi. Mountolive has booked the largest lunch table at the Mohammed Ali and proposes to offer me a lunch of twenty people to celebrate my resurrection from the dead. It is a wonderful gesture of solidarity, and will certainly quell spiteful tongues and sneers. In the evening the Cervonis have asked me to dinner. With such lucky help I feel I may be able in the long run to repair my damaged confidence and that of my old patients. Is it not fine of them — and in the traditions of the city? I may live to smile again, if not to love — a fixed and glittering smile which only Pierre will gaze at with affection — the affection of the artificer for his handiwork.’ He raised his white boxing-gloves like a champion entering the ring and grimly saluted an imaginary crowd. Then he flopped back on his pillows once more and gazed at me with an air of benign sorrow.
‘Where has Clea gone?’ I asked.
‘Nowhere. She was here yesterday afternoon asking for you.’
‘Nessim said she had gone somewhere.’
‘Perhaps to Cairo for the afternoon; where have you been?’
‘Out to Karm for the night.’
There was a long silence during which we eyed each other. There were clearly questions in his mind which he tactfully did not wish to inflict on me; and for my part there was little that I felt I could explain. I picked up an apple and took a bite from it.
‘And the writing?’ he said after a long silence.
‘It has stopped. I don’t seem to be able to carry it any further for the moment. I somehow can’t match the truth to the illusions which are necessary to art without the gap showing — you know, like an unbasted seam. I was thinking of it at Karm, confronted again by Justine. Thinking how despite the factual falsities of the manuscript which I sent you the portrait was somehow poetically true — psychographically if you like. But an artist who can’t solder the elements together falls short somewhere. I’m on the wrong track.’
‘I don’t see why. In fact this very discovery should encourage rather than hamper you. I mean about the mutability of all truth. Each fact can have a thousand motivations, all equally valid, and each fact a thousand faces. So many truths which have little to do with fact! Your duty is to hunt them down. At each moment of time all multiplicity waits at your elbow. Why, Darley, this should thrill you and give your writing the curves of a pregnant woman.’
‘On the contrary,
it has faulted me. For the moment anyway. And now that I am back here in the real Alexandria from which I drew so many of my illustrations I don’t feel the need for more writing — or at any rate writing which doesn’t fulfil the difficult criteria I see lurking behind art. You remember Pursewarden writing: “A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!”’
‘Yes.’
‘And so indeed it should: But now I am confronted once more with my models I am ashamed to have botched them up. If I start again it will be from another angle. But there is still so much I don’t know, and presumably never will, about all of you. Capodistria, for example, where does he fit in?’
‘You sound as if you knew he was alive!’
‘Mnemjian told me so.’
‘Yes. The mystery isn’t a very complicated one. He was working for Nessim and compromised himself by a serious slip. It was necessary to clear out. Conveniently it happened at a time when he was all but bankrupt financially. The insurance money was most necessary! Nessim provided the setting and I provided the corpse. You know we get quite a lot of corpses of one sort or another. Paupers. People who donate their bodies, or actually sell them in advance for a fixed sum. The medical schools need them. It wasn’t hard to obtain a private one, relatively fresh. I tried to hint at the truth to you once but you did not take my meaning. Anyway the thing’s worked smoothly. Da Capo now lives in a handsomely converted Martello tower, dividing his time between studying black magic and working on certain schemes of Nessim’s about which I know nothing. Indeed I see Nessim only rarely, and Justine not at all. Though guests are permitted by special police order they never invite anyone out to Karm. Justine telephones people from time to time for a chat, that is all. You have been privileged, Darley. They must have got you a permit. But I am relieved to see you cheerful and undesponding. You have made a step forward somewhere, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know. I worry less.’
‘But you will be happy this time, I feel it; much has changed but much has remained the same. Mountolive tells me he has recommended you for a censorship post, and that you will probably live with Pombal, until you have had a chance to look round a bit.’
‘Another mystery! I hardly know Mountolive. Why has he suddenly constituted himself my benefactor?’
‘I don’t know, possibly because of Liza.’
‘Pursewarden’s sister?’
‘They are up at the summer legation for a few weeks. I gather you will be hearing from him, from them both.’
There was a tap at the door and a servant entered to tidy the flat; Balthazar propped himself up and issued his orders. I stood up to take my leave.
‘There is only one problem’ he said ‘which occupies me. Shall I leave my hair as it is? I look about two hundred and seventy when it isn’t dyed. But I think on the whole it would be better to leave it to symbolize my return from the dead with a vanity chastened by experience, eh? Yes, I shall leave it. I think I shall definitely leave it.’
‘Toss a coin.’
‘Perhaps I will. This evening I must get up for a couple of hours and practise walking about; extraordinary how weak one feels simply from lack of practice. After a fortnight in bed one loses the power of one’s legs. And I mustn’t fall down tomorrow or the people will think I am drunk again and that would never do. As for you, you must find Clea.’
‘I’ll go round to the studio and see if she is working.’
‘I’m glad you are back.’
‘In a strange way so am I.’
And in the desultory brilliant life of the open street it was hard not to feel like an ancient inhabitant of the city, returning from the other side of the grave to visit it. Where would I find Clea?
V
She was not at the flat, though her letter-box was empty, which suggested that she had already collected her mail and gone out to read it over a café crème, as had been her wont in the past. There was nobody at the studio either. It fitted in with my mood to try and track her down in one of the familiar cafés and so I dutifully walked down Rue Fuad at a leisurely pace towards Baudrot, the Café Zoltan and the Coquin. But there was no sign of her. There was one elderly waiter at the Coquin who remembered me however, and he had seen her walking down Rue Fuad earlier in the morning with a portfolio. I continued my circuit, peering into the shop-windows, examining the stalls of second-hand books, until I reached the Select on the seafront. But she was not there. I turned back to the flat and found a note from her saying that she would not be able to make contact before the later afternoon, but that she would call there for me; it was annoying, for it meant that I should have to pass the greater part of the day alone, yet it was also useful, for it enabled me to visit Mnemjian’s redecorated emporium and indulge in a post-Pharaonic haircut and shave. (‘The natron-bath’ Pursewarden used to call it.) It also gave me time to unpack my belongings.
But we met by chance, not design. I had gone out to buy some stationery, and had taken a short cut through the little square called Bab El Fedan. My heart heeled half-seas over for a moment, for she was sitting where once (that first day) Melissa had been sitting, gazing at a coffee cup with a wry reflective air of amusement, with her hands supporting her chin. The exact station in place and time where I had once found Melissa, and with such difficulty mustered enough courage at last to enter the place and speak to her. It gave me a strange sense of unreality to repeat this forgotten action at such a great remove of time, like unlocking a door which had remained closed and bolted for a generation. Yet it was in truth Clea and not Melissa, and her blonde head was bent with an air of childish concentration over her coffee cup. She was in the act of shaking the dregs three times and emptying them into the saucer to study them as they dried into the contours from which fortune-tellers ‘scry’ — a familiar gesture.
‘So you haven’t changed. Still telling fortunes.’
‘Darley.’ She sprang up with a cry of pleasure and we embraced warmly. It was with a queer interior shock, almost like a new recognition, that I felt her warm laughing mouth on mine, her hands upon my shoulders. As though somewhere a window had been smashed, and the fresh air allowed to pour into a long-sealed room. We stood thus embracing and smiling for a moment. ‘You startled me! I was just coming on to the flat to find you.’
‘You’ve had me chasing my tail all day.’
‘I had work to do. But Darley, how you’ve changed! You don’t stoop any more. And your spectacles.…’
‘I broke them by accident ages ago, and then found I didn’t really need them.’
‘I’m delighted for you. Bravo! Tell me, do you notice my wrinkles? I’m getting some, I fear. Have I changed very much, would you say?’
She was more beautiful than I could remember her to have been, slimmer, and with a subtle range of new gestures and expressions suggesting a new and troubling maturity.
‘You’ve grown a new laugh.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes. It’s deeper and more melodious. But I must not flatter you! A nightingale’s laugh — if they do laugh.’
The Alexandria Quartet Page 85