The Alexandria Quartet (54 page)

‘He never failed to speak most slightingly of my own interests in the occult, and indeed in the work of the Cabal whose meetings you attended yourself. He said of this “Truth is a matter of direct apprehension — you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.”

‘I can't get away from the feeling that he was at his most serious when he was most impudent. I heard him maintaining to Keats that the best lines of English poetry ever written were by Coventry Patmore. They were:

The truth is great and will prevail

When none care whether it prevail or not
.

‘And then, having said this, he added: “And their true beauty resides in the fact that Patmore when he wrote them did not know what he meant.
Sich lassen!”
You can imagine how this would annoy Keats. He also quoted with approval a mysterious phrase of Stendhal, namely: “The smile appears on the skin outside.”

‘Are we to assume from all this the existence of a serious person underneath the banter? I leave the question to you — your concern is a direct one.

‘At the time when we knew him he was reading hardly anything but science. This for some reason annoyed Justine who took him to task for wasting his time in these studies. He defended himself by saying that the Relativity proposition was directly responsible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless (or at any rate cyclic forms in) literature. Once it was grasped they were understood, too. He added: “In the Space and Time marriage we have the greatest Boy meets Girl story of the age. To our great-grandchildren this will be as poetical a union as the ancient Greek marriage of Cupid and Psyche seems to us. You see, Cupid and Psyche were facts to the Greeks, not concepts. Analogical as against analytical thinking! But the true poetry of the age and its most fruitful poem is the mystery which begins and ends with an
n
.”

‘“Are you serious about all this?”

‘“Not a bit.”

‘Justine protested: “The beast is up to all sorts of tricks, even in his books.” She was thinking of the famous page with the asterisk in the first volume which refers one to a page in the text which is mysteriously blank. Many people take this for a printer's error. But Pursewarden himself assured me that it was deliberate. “I refer the reader to a blank page in order to throw him back upon his own resources — which is where every reader ultimately belongs.”

‘You speak about the plausibility of our actions — and this does us an injustice, for we are all living people and have the right as such to take refuge in the suspended judgement of God if not the reader. So, while I think of it, let me tell you the story of Justine's laughter! You will admit that you yourself never heard it, not once, I mean in a way that was not mordant, not wounded. But Pursewarden did — at the tombs in Saqarra! By moonlight, two days after Sham el Nessim. They were there among a large party of sightseers, a crowd under cover of which they had managed to talk a little, like the conspirators they were: already at this time Pursewarden had put an end to her private visitations to his hotel-room. So it gave them a forbidden pleasure, this exchange of a few hoarded secret words; and at last this evening they came by chance to be alone, standing together in one of those overbearing and overwhelming mementoes to a specialized sense of death: the tombs.

‘Justine had laddered her stockings and filled her shoes with sand. She was emptying them, he was lighting matches and gazing about him, and sniffing. She whispered she had been terribly worried of late by a new suspicion that Nessim had discovered something about her lost child which he would not tell her. Pursewarden was absently listening when suddenly he snapped his fingers which he had burnt on a match and said: “Listen, Justine — you know what? I re-read
Moeurs
again last week for fun and I had an idea; I mean if all the song and dance about Freud and your so-called childhood rape and so on are true — are they? I don't know. You could easily make it all up. But since you knew who the man in the wretched eyepiece was and refused to reveal his name to the wretched army of amateur psychologists headed by Arnauti, you must have had a good reason for it. What was it? It puzzles me. I won't tell anyone, I promise. Or is it all a lie?” She shook her head, “No.”

‘They walked out in a clear milk-white moonlight while Justine thought quietly. Then she said slowly: “It wasn't just shyness or an unwillingness to be cured as they called it — as he called it in the book. The thing was, he was a friend of ours, of yours, of all of us.” Pursewarden looked at her curiously. “The man in the black patch?” he said. She nodded. They lit cigarettes and sat down on the sand to wait for the others. Feeling that everything she confided in him was absolutely secure she said quietly: “Da Capo.” There was a long silence. “Well, stap me! The old Porn himself!” (He had coined this nickname from the word “pornographer”.) And then very quietly and tentatively, Pursewarden went on: “I suddenly had the idea on re-reading all that stuff, you know, that if I had been in your shoes and the whole damn thing wasn't just a lie to make yourself more interesting to the psychopomps — I'd … well, I'd bloody well try and sleep with him again and try to lay the image that way. The idea suddenly came to me.”

‘This betrays, of course, his total ignorance of psychology. Indeed, it was a fatal step to suggest. But here, to his own surprise, she began to laugh — the first effortless, musical laugh he had ever heard her give. “I did” she said, now laughing almost too much for speech, “I did. You'll never guess what an effort it cost me, hanging about in the dark road outside his house, trying to pluck up courage to ring the bell. Yes, it occurred to me too. I was desperate. What would he say? We had been friends for years — with never of course a reference to this event. He had never referred to
Moeurs
and, you know, I don't believe he has read it ever. Perhaps he preferred, I always thought, to disregard the whole thing — to bury it tactfully.”

‘Laughter again overtook her, shaking her body so much that Pursewarden took her arm anxiously, not to let her interrupt the recital. She borrowed his handkerchief to mop her eyes and continued: “I went in at last. He was there in his famous library! I was shaking like a leaf. You see, I didn't know what note to strike, something dramatic, something pathetic? It was like going to the dentist. Really, it was funny, Pursewarden. I said at last ‘Dear Da Capo, old friend, you have been my demon for so long that I have come to ask you to exorcise me once and for all. To take away the memory of a horrible childhood event. You must sleep with me!' You should have seen Da Capo's face. He was terribly thrown off guard and stammered:
‘Mais voyons, Justine, je suis un ami de Nessim!'
and so on. He gave me a whisky and offered me an aspirin — sure that I had gone out of my mind. ‘Sit down' he said, putting out a chair for me with shaking hands and sitting nervously down opposite me with a comical air of alarm — like a small boy accused of stealing apples.” Her side was hurting and she pressed her hand to it, laughing with such merriment that it infected him and involuntarily he began to laugh too. “Poor Da Capo” she said, “he was so terribly shocked and alarmed to be told he had raped me when I was a street arab, a child. I have never seen a man more taken aback. He had completely forgotten, it is clear, and completely denied the whole thing from start to finish. In fact, he was outraged and began to protest. I wish you could have seen his face! Do you know what slipped out in the course of his self-justifications? A marvellous phrase ‘Il
y a quinze ans que je n'ai pas fait ça!
'” She threw herself now face downward on to Pursewarden's lap and stayed a moment, still shaking with laughter; and then she raised her head once more to wipe her eyes. She said “I finished my whisky at last and left, much to his relief; as I was at the door he called after me ‘Remember you are both dining with me on Wednesday. Eight for eight-fifteen, white tie', as he had done these past few years. I went back home in a daze and drank half a bottle of gin. And you know, I had a strange thought that night in bed — perhaps you will find it shockingly out of place; a thought about Da Capo forgetting so completely an act which had cost me so many years of anxiety and indeed mental illness and had made me harm so many people. I said to myself ‘This is perhaps the very way God himself forgets the wrongs he does to us in abandoning us to the mercies of the world.' “ She threw back her smiling head and stood up.

‘She saw now that Pursewarden was looking at her with tears of admiration in his eyes. Suddenly he embraced her warmly, kissing her more passionately perhaps than he had ever done. When she was telling me all this, with a pride unusual in her, she added: “And you know, Balthazar, that was better than any lover's kiss, it was a real reward, an accolade. I saw then that if things had been different I had it in me to make him love me — perhaps for the very defects in my character which are so obvious to everyone.”

‘Then the rest of the party came chattering up among the tombs and … I don't know what. I suppose they all drove back to the Nile and ended up at a night-club. What the devil am I doing scribbling all these facts down for you? Lunacy! You will only hate me for telling you things you would prefer not to know as a man and prefer perhaps to ignore as an artist.… These obstinate little dispossessed facts, the changelings of our human existence which one can insert like a key into a lock — or a knife into an oyster: will there be a pearl inside? Who can say? But somewhere they must exist in their own right, these grains of a truth which
“just slipped out”
. Truth is not what is uttered in full consciousness. It is always what “just slips out” — the typing error which gives the whole show away. Do you understand me, wise one? But I have not done. I shall never have the courage to give you these papers, I can see. I shall finish the story for myself alone.

‘So from all this you will be able to measure the despair of Justine when that wretched fellow Pursewarden went and killed himself. In the act of being annoyed with him I find myself smiling, so little do I believe in his death as yet. She found this act as completely mysterious, as completely unforeseen as I myself did; but she poor creature had organized her whole careful deception around the idea of his living on! There was nobody except myself in whom to confide now; and you whom, if she did not love, God knows she did not hate, were in great danger. It was too late to do anything except make plans to go away. She was left with the “decoy”! Does one learn anything from these bitter truths? Throw all this paper into the sea, my dear boy, and read no more of the Interlinear. But I forget. I am not going to let you see it, am I? I shall leave you content with the fabrications of an art which “reworks reality to show its significant side.” What significant side could she turn, for example, to Nessim, who at that time had become a prey to those very preoccupations which made him appear to everyone — himself included — mentally unstable? Of his more serious preoccupations at this time I could write a fair amount, for I have in the interval learned a good deal about his affairs and his political concerns. They will explain his sudden changeover into a great entertainer — the crowded house which you describe so well, the banquets and balls. But here … the question of censorship troubles me, for if I were to send you this and if you were, as you might, to throw this whole disreputable jumble of paper into the water, the sea might float it back to Alexandria perhaps directly into the arms of the Police. Better not. I will tell you only what seems politic. Perhaps later on I shall tell you the rest.

‘Pursewarden's face in death reminded me very much of Melissa's; they both had the air of just having enjoyed a satisfying private joke and of having fallen off to sleep before the smile had fully faded from the corners of the mouth. Some time before he had said to Justine: “I am ashamed of one thing only: because I have disregarded the first imperative of the artist, namely, create and starve. I have never starved, you know. Kept afloat doing little jobs of one sort or another: caused as much harm as you and more.”

‘That night, Nessim was already there in the hotel-room sitting with the body when I arrived, looking extraordinarily composed and calm but as if deafened by an explosion. Perhaps the impact of reality had dazed him? He was at this time going through that period of horrible dreams of which he had a transcript made, some of which you reproduce in your MS. They are strangely like echoes of Leila's dreams of fifteen years ago — she had a bad period after her husband died and I attended her at Nessim's request. Here again in judging him you trust too much to what your subjects say about themselves — the accounts they give of their own actions and their meaning. You would never make a good doctor. Patients have to be found out — for they
always
lie. Not that they can help it, it is part of the defence-mechanism of the illness — just as your MS. betrays the defence-mechanism of the dream which does not wish to be invaded by reality! Perhaps I am wrong? I do not wish to judge anyone unjustly or intrude upon your private territory. Will all these notes of mine cost me your friendship? I hope not, but I fear it.

‘What was I saying? Yes, Pursewarden's face in death! It had the same old air of impudent contrivance. One felt he was playacting — indeed, I still do, so alive does he seem to me.

‘It was Justine first who alerted me. Nessim sent her to me with the car and a note which I did not let her read. It was clear that Nessim had either learned of the intention or the fact before any of us — I suspect a telephone call by Pursewarden himself. At any rate, my familiarity with suicide cases — I have handled any number for Nimrod's night-patrol — made me cautious. Suspecting perhaps barbiturates or some other slow compound, I took the precaution of carrying my little stomach-pump with me among my antidotes. I confess that I thought with pleasure of my friend's expression when he woke up in hospital. But it seems I misjudged both his pride and his thoroughness for he was thoroughly and conclusively dead when we arrived.