The Alexandria Quartet (118 page)

‘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

S
he 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.'

‘Don't make me self-conscious because I so much want to laugh with you. You'll turn it into a croak.'

‘Clea, why didn't you come and meet me?'

She wrinkled up her nose for a moment, and putting her hand on my arm, bent her head once more to the coffee grounds which were drying fast into little whorls and curves like sand-dunes. ‘Light me a cigarette' she said pleadingly.

‘Nessim said you turned tail at the last moment.'

‘Yes, I did, my dear.'

‘Why?'

‘I suddenly felt it might be inopportune. It might have been a complication somehow. You had old accounts to render, old scores to settle, new relationships to explore. I really felt powerless to do anything about you until … well, until you had seen Justine. I don't know why. Yes I do, though. I wasn't sure that the cycle would really change, I didn't know how much you had or hadn't changed yourself. You are such a bloody correspondent I hadn't any way of judging about your inside state of mind. Such a long time since you wrote, isn't it? And then the child and all that. After all, people sometimes get stuck like an old disc and can't move out of a groove. That might have been your fate with Justine. So it wasn't for me to intrude, since my side of you.… Do you see? I had to give you air.'

‘And supposing I have stuck like some old disc?'

‘No it hasn't turned out like that.'

‘How can you tell?'

‘From your face, Darley. I could tell in a flash!'

‘I don't know quite how to explain.…'

‘You don't
need
to' her voice curved upwards with elation and her bright eyes smiled. ‘We have such totally different claims upon each other. We are free to
forget!
You men are the strangest creatures. Listen, I have arranged this first day together like a tableau, like a charade. Come first and see the queer immortality one of us has gained. Will you put yourself in my hands? I have been so looking forward to acting as dragoman on … but no, I won't tell you. Just let me pay for this coffee.'

‘What does your fortune say in the grounds?'

‘Chance meetings!'

‘I think you invent.'

The afternoon had been overcast and dusk fell early. Already the sunset violets had begun to tamper with the perspectives of the streets along the seafront. We took an old horse-drawn gharry which was standing forlornly in a taxi rank by Ramleh Station. The ancient jarvey with his badly cicatriced face asked hopefully if we wished for a ‘carriage of love' or an ‘ordinary carriage', and Clea, giggling, selected the latter variety of the same carriage as being cheaper. ‘O son of truth!' she said. ‘What woman would take a lusty husband in such a thing when she has a good bed at home which costs nothing.'

‘Merciful is God' said the old man with sublime resignation.

So we set off down the white curving Esplanade with its fluttering awnings, the quiet sea spreading away to the right of us to a blank horizon. In the past we had so often come this way to visit the old pirate in his shabby rooms in Tatwig Street.

‘Clea, where the devil are we going?'

‘Wait and see.'

I could see him so clearly, the old man. I wondered for a moment if his shabby ghost still wandered about those dismal rooms, whisding to the green parrot and reciting:
‘Taisez-vous, petit babouin.'
I felt Clea's arm squeeze mine as we sheered off left and entered the smoking ant-heap of the Arab town, the streets choked with smoke from the burning refuse-heaps, or richly spiced with cooking meat and whiffs of baking bread from the bakeries.

‘Why on earth are you taking me to Scobie's rooms?' I said again as we started to clip-clop down the length of the familiar street. Her eyes shone with a mischievous delight as putting her lips to my ear she whispered: ‘Patience. You shall see.'

It was the same house all right. We entered the tall gloomy archway as we had so often in the past. In the deepening dusk it looked like some old faded daguerreotype, the little courtyard, and I could see that it had been much enlarged. Several supporting walls of neighbouring tenements had been razed or had fallen down and increased its mean size by about two hundred square feet. It was just a shattered and pock-marked no-man's-land of red earth littered with refuse. In one corner stood a small shrine which I did not remember having remarked before. It was surrounded by a huge ugly modern grille of steel. It boasted a small white dome and a withered tree, both very much the worse for wear. I recognized in it one of the many
maquams
with which Egypt is studded, spots made sacred by the death of a hermit or holy man and where the faithful repair to pray or solicit his help by leaving ex-votos. This little shrine looked as so many do, utterly shabby and forlorn, as if its existence had been overlooked and forgotten for centuries. I stood looking around me, and heard Clea's clear voice call: ‘Ya Abdul!' There was a note in it which suggested suppressed amusement but I could not for the life of me tell why. A man advanced towards us through the shadows peering. ‘He is almost blind. I doubt if he'll recognize you.'