The Alexandria Quartet (29 page)

They talked now as a doomed brother and sister might, renewing in each other the sense of relief which comes to those who find someone to share the burden of unconfessed preoccupations. In all this sympathy an unexpected shadow of desire stirred within them, a wraith merely, the stepchild of confession and release. It foreshadowed, in a way, their own love-making, which was to come, and which was so much less ugly than ours — mine and Justine's. Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds. It was already dawn when they rose from their conversation, stiff and cramped, the fire long since out, and marched across the damp sand to the car, scouting the pale lavender light of dawn. Melissa had found a friend and patron; as for Nessim, he was transfigured. The sensation of a new sympathy had enabled him, magically, to become his own man again — that is to say, a man who could act (could murder his wife's lover if he so wished)!

Driving along that pure and natal coastline they watched the first tendrils of sunlight uncoil from horizon to horizon across the dark self-sufficient Mediterranean sea whose edges were at one and the same moment touching lost hallowed Carthage and Salamis in Cyprus.

Presently, where the road dips down among the dunes to the seashore Nessim once more slowed down and involuntarily suggested a swim. Changed as he was he felt a sudden desire that Melissa should see him naked, should approve the beauty which for so long had lain, like a suit of well-cut clothes in an attic cupboard, forgotten.

Naked and laughing, they waded out hand in hand, into the icy water feeling the tame sunlight glowing on their backs as they did so. It was like the first morning since the creation of the world. Melissa, too, had shed with her clothes the last residual encumbrance of the flesh, and had become the dancer she truly was; for nakedness always gave her fulness and balance: the craft she lacked in the cabaret.

They lay together for a long time in perfect silence, seeking through the darkness of their feelings for the way forward. He realized that he had won an instant compliance from her — that she was now his mistress in everything.

They set off together for the city, feeling at the same time happy and ill-at-ease — for both felt a kind of hollowness at the heart of their happiness. Yet since they were reluctant to surrender each other to the life which awaited them they lagged, the car lagged, their silence lagged between endearments.

At last Nessim remembered a tumbledown café in Mex where one could find a boiled egg and coffee. Early though it was the sleepy Greek proprietor was awake and set chairs for them under a barren fig-tree in a backyard full of hens and their meagre droppings. All around them towered corrugated iron wharves and factories. The sea was present only as a dank and resonant smell of hot iron and tar.

He set her down at last on the street-corner she named and said good-bye in a ‘wooden perfunctory' sort of way — afraid perhaps that some of his own office employees might oversee him. (This last is my own conjecture as the words ‘wooden' and ‘perfunctory', which smell of literature, seem somehow out of place.) The inhuman bustle of the city intervened once more, committing them to past feelings and preoccupations. For her part, yawning, sleepy and utterly natural as she was, she left him only to turn into the little Greek church and set a candle to the saint. She crossed herself from left to right as the orthodox custom is and brushed back a lock of hair with one hand as she stooped to the ikon, tasting in its brassy kiss all the consolation of a forgotten childhood habit. Then wearily she turned to find Nessim standing before her. He was deathly white and staring at her with a sweet burning curiosity. She at once understood everything. They embraced with a sort of anguish, not kissing, but simply pressing their bodies together, and he all at once began to tremble with fatigue. His teeth began to chatter. She drew him to a choir stall where he sat for some abstracted moments, struggling to speak, and drawing his hand across his forehead like someone who is recovering from drowning. It was not that he had anything to say to her, but this speechlessness made him fear that he was experiencing a stroke. He croaked: ‘It is terribly late, nearly half past six.' Pressing her hand to his stubbled cheek he rose and like a very old man groped his way back through the great doors into the sunlight, leaving her sitting there gazing after him.

Never had the early dawn-light seemed so good to Nessim. The city looked to him as brilliant as a precious stone. The shrill telephones whose voices filled the great stone buildings in which the financiers really lived, sounded to him like the voices of great fruitful mechanical birds. They glittered with a pharaonic youthfulness. The trees in the park had been rinsed down by an unaccustomed dawn rain. They were covered in brilliants and looked like great contented cats at their toilet.

Sailing upwards to the fifth floor in the lift, making awkward attempts to appear presentable (feeling the dark stubble on his chin, retying his tie) Nessim questioned his reflection in the cheap mirror, puzzled by the whole new range of feelings and beliefs these brief scenes had given him. Under everything, however, aching like a poisoned tooth or finger, lay the quivering meaning of those eight words which Melissa had lodged in him. In a dazed sort of way he recognized that Justine was dead to him — from a mental picture she had become an engraving, a locket which one might wear over one's heart for ever. It is always bitter to leave the old life for the new — and every woman is a new life, compact and self-contained and
sui generis
. As a person she had suddenly faded. He did not wish to possess her any longer but to free himself from her. From a woman she had become a situation.

He rang for Selim and when the secretary appeared he dictated to him a few of the duller business letters with a calm so surprising that the boy's hand trembled as he took them down in his meticulous crowsfoot shorthand. Perhaps Nessim had never been more terrifying to Selim than he appeared at this moment, sitting at his great polished desk with the gleaming battery of telephones ranged before him.

Nessim did not meet Melissa for some time after this episode but he wrote her long letters, all of which he destroyed in the lavatory. It seemed necessary to him, for some fantastic reason, to explain and justify Justine to her and each of these letters began with a long painful exegesis of Justine's past and his own. Without this preamble, he felt, it would be impossible ever to speak of the way in which Melissa had moved and captivated him. He was defending his wife, of course, not against Melissa, who had uttered no criticism of her (apart from the one phrase) but against all the new doubts about her which emerged precisely from his experience with Melissa. Just as my own experience of Justine had illuminated and re-evaluated Melissa for me so he looking into Melissa's grey eyes saw a new and unsuspected Justine born therein. You see, he was now alarmed at the extent to which it might become possible to hate her. He recognized now that hate is only unachieved love. He felt envious when he remembered the single-mindedness of Pursewarden who on the flyleaf of the last book he gave Balthazar had scribbled the mocking words:

Pursewarden on Life

N.B. Food is for eating

Art is for arting

Women for ———

Finish

RIP

And when next they met, under very different circumstances … But I have not the courage to continue. I have explored Melissa deeply enough through my own mind and heart and cannot bear to recall what Nessim found in her — pages covered with erasures and emendations. Pages which I have torn from my diaries and destroyed. Sexual jealousy is the most curious of animals and can take up a lodgement anywhere, even in memory. I avert my face from the thought of Nessim's shy kisses, of Melissa's kisses which selected in Nessim only the nearest mouth to mine.…

From a crisp packet I selected a strip of pasteboard on which, after so many shame-faced importunities, I had persuaded a local jobbing printer to place my name and address, and taking up my pen wrote:

mr ——— accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of mr ——— to a duck shoot on Lake Mareotis.

It seemed to me that now one might learn some important truths about human behaviour.

Autumn has settled at last into the clear winterset. High seas flogging the blank panels of stone along the Corniche. The migrants multiplying on the shallow reaches of Mareotis. Waters moving from gold to grey, the pigmentation of winter.

The parties assemble at Nessim's house towards twilight — a prodigious collection of cars and shooting-brakes. Here begins the long packing and unpacking of wicker baskets and gun-bags, conducted to the accompaniment of cocktails and sandwiches. Costumes burgeon. Comparison of guns and cartridges, conversation inseparable from a shooter's life, begin now, rambling, inconsequent, wise. The yellowish moonless dusk settles: the angle of the sunlight turns slowly upwards into the vitreous lilac of the evening sky. It is brisk weather, clear as waterglass.

Justine and I are moving through the spiderweb of our preoccupations like people already parted. She wears the familiar velveteen costume — the coat with its deeply cut and slanted pockets: and the soft velours hat pulled down over her brows — a schoolgirl's hat: leather jack-boots. We do not look directly at each other any more, but talk with a hollow impersonality. I have a splitting headache. She has urged upon me her own spare gun — a beautiful stout twelve by Purdey, ideal for such an unpractised hand and eye as mine.

There is laughter and clapping as lots are drawn for the makeup of the various parties. We will have to take up widely dispersed positions around the lake, and those who draw the western butts will have to make a long detour by road through Mex and the desert fringes. The leaders of each party draw paper strips in turn from a hat, each with a guest's name written upon it. Nessim has already drawn Capodistria who is clad in a natty leather jerkin with velvet cuffs, khaki gaberdine plus-fours and check socks. He wears an old tweed hat with a cock-pheasant's feather in it, and is festooned with bandoliers full of cartridges. Next comes Ralli the old Greek general, with ash-coloured bags under his eyes and darned riding-breeches; Pallis the French Chargé d'Affaires in a sheepskin coat; lastly myself.

Justine and Pombal are joining Lord Errol's party. It is clear now that we are to be separated. All of a sudden, for the first time, I feel real fear as I watch the expressionless glitter of Nessim's eyes. We take our various places in the shooting-brakes. Selim is doing up the straps of a heavy pigskin gun-case. His hands tremble. With all the dispositions made the cars start up with a roar of engines, and at this signal a flock of servants scamper out of the great house with glasses of champagne to offer us a stirrup-cup. This diversion enables Justine to come across to our car and under the pretext of handing me a packet of smokeless cartridges to press my arm once, warmly, and to fix me for a half-second with those expressive black eyes shining now with an expression I might almost mistake for relief. I try to form a smile with my lips.

We move off steadily with Nessim at the wheel and catch the last rays of the sunset as we clear the town to run along the shallow dunelands towards Aboukir. Everyone is in excellent spirits, Ralli talking nineteen to the dozen and Capodistria keeping us entertained with anecdotes of his fabulous mad father. (‘His first act on going mad was to file a suit against his two sons accusing them of wilful and persistent illegitimacy.') From time to time he raises a finger to touch the cotton compress which is held in position over his left eye by the black patch. Pallis has produced an old deerstalker with large ear-flaps which make him look like a speculative Gallic rabbit. From time to time in the driving mirror I catch Nessim's eye and he smiles.

The dusk has settled as we come to the shores of the lake. The old hydroplane whimpers and roars as it waits for us. It is piled high with decoys. Nessim assembles a couple of tall duck-guns and tripods before joining us in the shallow punt to set off across the reed-fringed wilderness of the lake to the desolate lodge where we are to spend the night. All horizons have been abruptly cut off now as we skirt the darkening channels in our noisy craft, disturbing the visitants of the lake with the roar of our engines; the reeds tower over us, and everywhere the sedge hassocks of islands rise out of the water with their promise of cover. Once or twice a long vista of water opens before us and we catch sight of the flurry of birds rising — mallard trailing their webs across the still surface. Nearer at hand the hither-and-thithering cormorants keep a curiosity-shop with their long slave-to-appetite beaks choked with sedge. All round us now, out of sight the teeming colonies of the lake are settling down for the night. When the engines of the hydroplane are turned off the silence is suddenly filled with groaning and gnatting of duck.