The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

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 make-up 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.

A faint green wind springs up and ruffles the water round the little wooden hut on the balcony of which sit the loaders waiting for us. Darkness has suddenly fallen, and the voices of the boatmen sound hard, sparkling, gay. The loaders are a wild crew; they scamper from island to island with shrill cries, their galabeahs tucked up round their waists, impervious to the cold. They seem black and huge, as if carved from the darkness. They pull us up to the balcony one by one and then set off in shallow punts to lay their armfuls of decoys while we turn to the inner room where paraffin lamps have already been lit. From the little kitchen comes the encouraging smell of food which we sniff appreciatively as we divest ourselves of our guns and bandoliers, and kick off our boots. Now the sportsmen fall to backgammon or tric-trac and bag-and-shot talk, the most delightful and absorbing masculine conversation in the world. Ralli is rubbing pigsfat into his old much-darned boots. The stew is excellent and the red wine has put everyone in a good humour.

By nine however most of us are ready to turn in; Nessim is busy in the darkness outside giving his last instructions to the loaders and setting the rusty old alarm clock for three. Capodistria alone shows no disposition to sleep. He sits, as if plunged in reflection, sipping his wine and smoking a cheroot. We speak for a while about trivialities; and then all of a sudden he launches into a critique of Pursewarden’s third volume which has just appeared in the bookshops. ‘What is astonishing’ he says ‘is that he presents a series of spiritual problems as if they were commonplaces and illustrates them with his characters. I have been thinking over the character of Parr the sensualist. He resembles me so closely. His apology for a voluptuary’s life is fantastically good — as in the passage where he says that people only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it. To be so struck by a face sometimes that one wants to devour it feature by feature. Even making love to the body beneath it gives no surcease, no rest. What is to be done with people like us?’ He sighs and abruptly begins to talk about Alexandria in the old days. He speaks with a new resignation and gentleness about those far-off days across which he sees himself moving so serenely, so effortlessly as a youth and a young man. ‘I have never got to the bottom of my father. His view of things was mordant, and yet it is possible this his ironies concealed a wounded spirit. One is not an ordinary man if one can say things so pointed that they engage the attention and memory of others. As once in speaking of marriage he said “In marriage they legitimized despair,” and “Every kiss is the conquest of a repulsion.” He struck me as having a coherent view of life but madness intervened and all I have to go on is the memory of a few incidents and sayings. I wish I could leave behind as much.’

I lie awake in the narrow wooden bunk for a while thinking over what he has been saying: all is darkness now and silence save for the low rapid voice of Nessim on the balcony outside talking to the loaders. I cannot catch the words. Capodistria sits for a while in the darkness to finish his cheroot before climbing heavily into the bunk under the window. The others are already asleep to judge by the heavy snoring of Ralli. My fear has given place to resignation once more; now at the borders of sleep I think of Justine again for a moment before letting the memory of her slide into the limbo which is peopled now only with far-away sleepy voices and the rushing sighing waters of the great lake.

It is pitch-dark when I awake at the touch of Nessim’s gentle hand shaking my shoulder. The alarm clock has failed us. But the room is full of stretching yawning figures climbing from their bunks. The loaders have been curled up asleep like sheep-dogs on the balcony outside. They busy themselves in lighting the paraffin lamps whose unearthly glare is to light our desultory breakfast of coffee and sandwiches. I go down the landing stage and wash my face in the icy lake water. Utter blackness all around. Everyone speaks in low voices, as if weighed down by the weight of the darkness. Snatches of wind make the little lodge tremble, built as it is on frail wooden stilts over the water.

We are each allotted a punt and a gun-bearer. ‘You’ll take Faraj’ says Nessim. ‘He’s the most experienced and reliable of them.’ I thank him. A black barbaric face under a soiled white turban, unsmiling, spiritless. He takes my equipment and turns silently to the dark punt. With a whispered farewell I climb in and seat myself. With a lithe swing of the pole Faraj drives us out into the channel and suddenly we are scoring across the heart of a black diamond. The water is full of stars, Orion down, Capella tossing out its brilliant sparks. For a long while now we crawl upon this diamond-pointed star-floor in silence save for the suck and lisp of the pole in the mud. Then we turn abruptly into a wider channel to hear a string of wavelets pattering against our prow while draughts of wind fetch up from the invisible sea-line tasting of salt.

Premonitions of the dawn are already in the air as we cross the darkness of this lost world. Now the approaches to the empty water ahead are shivered by the faintest etching of islands, sprouts of beard, reeds and sedge. And on all sides now comes the rich plural chuckle of duck and the shrill pinched note of the gulls to the seaboard. Faraj grunts and turns the punt towards a nearby island. Reaching out upon the darkness my hands grasp the icy rim of the nearest barrel into which I laboriously climb. The butts consist merely of a couple of dry wood-slatted barrels tied together and festooned with tall reeds to make them invisible. The loader holds the punt steady while I disembarrass him of my gear. There is nothing to do now but to sit and wait for the dawn which is rising slowly somewhere, to be born from this black expressionless darkness.

It is bitterly cold now and even my heavy greatcoat seems to offer inadequate protection. I have told Faraj that I will do my own loading as I do not want him handling my spare gun and cartridges in the next barrel. I must confess to a feeling of shame as I do so, but it sets my nerves at rest. He nods with an expressionless face and stands off with the punt in the next cluster of reeds, camouflaged like a scarecrow. We wait now with our faces turned towards the distant reaches of the lake — it seems for centuries.

Suddenly at the end of the great couloir my vision is sharpened by a pale disjunctive shudder as a bar of buttercup-yellow thickening gradually to a ray falls slowly through the dark masses of cloud to the east. The ripple and flurry of the invisible colonies of birds around us increases. Slowly, painfully, like a half-open door the dawn is upon us, forcing back the darkness. A minute more and a stairway of soft kingcups slides smoothly down out of heaven to touch in our horizons, to give eye and mind an orientation in space which it has been lacking. Faraj yawns heavily and scratches himself. Now rose-madder and warm burnt gold. Clouds move to green and yellow. The lake has begun to shake off its sleep. I see the black silhouette of teal cross my vision eastward. ‘It is time’ murmurs Faraj; but the minute hand of my wrist watch shows that we still have five minutes to go. My bones feel as if they have been soaked in the darkness. I feel suspense and inertia struggling for possession of my sleepy mind. By agreement there is to be no shooting before four-thirty. I load slowly and dispose my bandolier across the butt next me within easy reach. ‘It is time’ says Faraj more urgently. Nearby there is a plop and a scamper of some hidden birds. Out of sight a couple of coot squat in the middle of the lake pondering. I am about to say something when the first chapter of guns opens from the south — like the distant click of cricket-balls.

Now solitaries begin to pass, one, two, three. The light grows and waxes, turning now from red to green. The clouds themselves are moving to reveal enormous cavities of sky. They peel the morning like a fruit. Four separate arrowheads of duck rise and form two hundred yards away. They cross me trimly at an angle and I open up with a tentative right barrel for distance. As usual they are faster and higher than they seem. The minutes are ticking away in the heart. Guns open up nearer to hand, and by now the lake is in a general state of alert. The duck are coming fairly frequently now in groups, three, five, nine: very low and fast. Their wings purr, as they feather the sky, their necks reach. Higher again in mid-heaven there travel the clear formations of mallard, grouped like aircraft against the light, ploughing a soft slow flight. The guns squash the air and harry them as they pass, moving with a slow curling bias towards the open sea. Even higher and quite out of reach come chains of wild geese, their plaintive honking sounding clearly across the now sunny waters of Mareotis.

There is hardly time to think now: for teal and wigeon like flung darts whistle over me and I begin to shoot slowly and methodically. Targets are so plentiful that it is often difficult to choose one in the split second during which it presents itself to the gun. Once or twice I catch myself taking a snap shot into a formation. If hit squarely a bird staggers and spins, pauses for a moment, and then sinks gracefully like a handkerchief from a lady’s hand. Reeds close over the brown bodies, but now the tireless Faraj is out poling about like mad to retrieve the birds. At times he leaps into the water with his galabeah tucked up to his midriff. His features blaze with excitement. From time to time he gives a shrill whoop.

They are coming in from everywhere now, at every conceivable angle and every speed. The guns bark and jumble in one’s ears as they drive the birds backwards and forwards across the lake. Some of the flights though nimble are obviously war-weary after heavy losses; other solitaries seem quite out of their minds with panic. One young and silly duck settles for a moment by the punt, almost within reach of Faraj’s hands, before it suddenly sees danger and spurts off in a slither of foam. In a modest way I am not doing too badly though in all the excitement it is hard to control oneself and to shoot deliberately. The sun is fairly up now and the damps of the night have been dispersed. In an hour I shall be sweating again in these heavy clothes. The sun shines on the ruffled waters of Mareotis where the birds still fly. The punts by now will be full of the sodden bodies of the victims, red blood running from the shattered beaks on to the floor-boards, marvellous feathers dulled by death.

I eke out my remaining ammunition as best I can but already by quarter past eight I have fired the last cartridge; Faraj is still at work painstakingly tracking down stragglers among the reeds with the single-mindedness of a retriever. I light a cigarette, and for the first time feel free from the shadow of omens and premonitions — free to breathe, to compose my mind once more. It is extraordinary how the prospect of death closes down upon the free play of the mind, like a steel shutter, cutting off the future which alone is nourished by hopes and wishes. I feel the stubble on my unshaven chin and think longingly of a hot bath and a warm breakfast. Faraj is still tirelessly scouting the islands of sedge. The guns have slackened, and in some quarters of the lake are already silent. I think with a dull ache of Justine, somewhere out there across the sunny water. I have no great fear for her safety for she has taken as her own gun-bearer my faithful servant Hamid.

I feel all at once gay and light-hearted as I shout to Faraj to cease his explorations and bring back the punt. He does so reluctantly and at last we set off across the lake, back through the channels and corridors of reed towards the lodge.

‘Eight brace no good’ says Faraj, thinking of the large professional bags we will have to face when Ralli and Capodistria return. ‘For me it is very good’ I say. ‘I am a rotten shot. Never done as well.’ We enter the thickly sown channels of water which border the lake like miniature canals.

At the end, against the light, I catch sight of another punt moving towards us which gradually defines itself into the familiar figure of Nessim. He is wearing his old moleskin cap with the ear-flaps up and tied over the top. I wave but he does not respond. He sits abstractedly in the prow of the punt with his hands clasped about his knees. ‘Nessim’ I shout. ‘How did you do? I got eight brace and one lost.’ The boats are nearly abreast now, for we are heading towards the mouth of the last canal which leads to the lodge. Nessim waits until we are within a few yards of each other before he says with a curious serenity, ‘Did you hear? There’s been an accident. Capodistria …’ and all of a sudden my heart contracts in my body. ‘Capodistria?’ I stammer. Nessim still has the curious impish serenity of someone resting after a great expenditure of energy. ‘He’s dead’ he says, and I hear the sudden roar of the hydroplane engines starting up behind the wall of reeds. He nods towards the sound and adds in the same still voice: ‘They are taking him back to Alexandria.’

A thousand conventional commonplaces, a thousand conventional questions spring to my mind, but for a long time I can say nothing.

On the balcony the others have assembled uneasily, almost shamefacedly; they are like a group of thoughtless schoolboys for whom some silly prank has ended in the death of one of their fellows. The furry cone of noise from the hydroplane still coats the air. In the middle distance one can hear shouts and the noise of car-engines starting up. The piled bodies of the duck, which would normally be subject matter for gloating commentaries, lie about the lodge with anachronistic absurdity. It appears that death is a relative question. We had only been prepared to accept a certain share of it when we entered the dark lake with our weapons. The death of Capodistria hangs in the still air like a bad smell, like a bad joke.

Ralli had been sent to get him and had found the body lying face down in the shallow waters of the lake with the black eye-patch floating near him. It was clearly an accident. Capodistria’s loader was an elderly man, thin as a cormorant, who sits now hunched over a mess of beans on the balcony. He cannot give a coherent account of the business. He is from Upper Egypt and has the weary half-crazed expression of a desert father.

Ralli is extremely nervous and is drinking copious draughts of brandy. He retells his story for the seventh time, simply because he must talk in order to quieten his nerves. The body could not have been long in the water, yet the skin was like the skin of a washerwoman’s hands. When they lifted it to get it into the hydroplane the false teeth slipped out of the mouth and crashed on to the floor-boards frightening them all. This incident seems to have made a great impression on him. I suddenly feel overcome with fatigue and my knees start to tremble. I take a mug of hot coffee and, kicking off my boots, crawl into the nearest bunk with it. Ralli is still talking with deafening persistence, his free hand coaxing the air into expressive shapes. The others watch him with a vague and dispirited curiosity, each plunged in his own reflections. Capodistria’s loader is still eating noisily like a famished animal, blinking in the sunlight. Presently a punt comes into view with three policemen perched precariously in it. Nessim watches their antics with an imperturbability flavoured ever so slightly with satisfaction; it is as if he were smiling to himself. The clatter of boots and musket-butts on the wooden steps, and up they come to take down our depositions in their note-books. They bring with them a grave air of suspicion which hovers over us all. One of them carefully manacles Capodistria’s loader before helping him into the punt. The servant puts out his wrists for the iron cuffs with a bland uncomprehending air such as one sees on the faces of old apes when called upon to perform a human action which they have learned but not understood.

It is nearly one o’clock before the police have finished their business. The parties will all have ebbed back from the lake by now to the city where the news of Capodistria’s death will be waiting for them. But this is not to be all.

One by one we straggle ashore with our gear. The cars are waiting for us, and now begins a long chaffering session with the loaders and boatmen who must be paid off; guns are broken up and the bag distributed; in all this incoherence I see my servant Hamid advancing timidly through the crowd with his good eye screwed up against the sunlight. I think he must be looking for me but no: he goes up to Nessim and hands him a small blue envelope. I want to describe this exactly. Nessim takes it absently with his left hand while his right is reaching into the car to place a box of cartridges in the glove-box. He examines the superscription once thoughtlessly and then once more with marked attention. Then keeping his eyes on Hamid’s face he takes a deep breath and opens the envelope to read whatever is written on the half sheet of note-paper. For a minute he studies it and then replaces the letter in the envelope. He looks about him with a sudden change of expression, as if he suddenly felt sick and was looking about for a place where he might be so. He makes his way through the crowd and putting his head against a corner of mud wall utters a short panting sob, as of a runner out of breath. Then he turns back to the car, completely controlled and dry-eyed, to complete his packing. This brief incident goes completely unremarked by the rest of his guests.

Clouds of dust rise now as the cars begin to draw away towards the city; the wild gang of boatmen shout and wave and treat us to carved water-melon smiles studded with gold and ivory. Hamid opens the car door and climbs in like a monkey. ‘What is it?’ I say, and folding his small hands apologetically towards me in an attitude of supplication which means ‘Blame not the bearer of ill tidings’ he says in a small conciliatory voice: ‘Master, the lady has gone. There is a letter for you in the house.’

It is as if the whole city had crashed about my ears: I walk slowly to the flat, aimlessly as survivors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, surprised to find how much that had been familiar has changed, Rue Piroua, Rue de France, the Terbana Mosque (cupboard smelling of apples), Rue Sidi Abou El Abbas (water-ices and coffee), Anfouchi, Ras El Tin (Cape of Figs), Ikingi Mariut (gathering wild flowers together, convinced she cannot love me), equestrian statue of Mohammed Ali in the square…. General Earle’s comical little bust, killed Sudan 1885…. An evening multitudinous with swallows … the tombs at Kom El Shugafa, darkness and damp soil, both terrified by the darkness…. Rue Fuad as the old Canopic Way, once Rue Rosette…. Hutchinson disturbed the whole water-disposition of the city by cutting the dykes…. The scene in Moeurs where he tries to read her the book he is writing about her. ‘She sits in the wicker chair with her hands in her lap, as if posing for a portrait, but with a look of ever-growing horror on her face. At last I can stand it no longer, and I throw down the manuscript in the fireplace, crying out: “What are they worth, since you understand nothing, these pages written from a heart pierced to the quick?”’ In my mind’s eye I can see Nessim racing up the great staircase to her room to find a distraught Selim contemplating the empty cupboards and a dressing table swept clean as if by a blow from a leopard’s paw.

In the harbour of Alexandria the sirens whoop and wail. The screws of ships crush and crunch the green oil-coated waters of the inner bar. Idly bending and inclining, effortlessly breathing as if in the rhythm of the earth’s own systole and diastole, the yachts turn their spars against the sky. Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?

PART IV

The disappearance of Justine was something new to be borne. It changed the whole pattern of our relationship. It was as if she had removed the keystone to an arch: Nessim and I left among the ruins, so to speak were faced with the task of repairing a relationship which she herself had invented and which her absence now rendered hollow, echoing with a guilt which would, I thought, henceforward always overshadow affection.

His suffering was apparent to everyone. That expressive face took on a flayed unhealthy look — the pallor of a church martyr. In seeing him thus I was vividly reminded of my own feelings during the last meeting with Melissa before she left for the clinic in Jerusalem. The candour and gentleness with which she said: ‘The whole thing is gone…. It may never come back…. At least this separation.’ Her voice grew furry and moist, blurring the edges of the words. At this time she was quite ill. The lesions had opened again. ‘Time to reconsider ourselves…. If only I were Justine…. I know you thought of her when you made love to me…. Don’t deny it…. I know my darling…. I’m even jealous of your imagination…. Horrible to have self-reproach heaped on top of the other miseries…. Never mind.’ She blew her nose shakily and managed a smile. ‘I need rest so badly…. And now Nessim has fallen in love with me.’ I put my hand over her sad mouth. The taxi throbbed on remorselessly, like someone living on his nerves. All round us walked the wives of the Alexandrians, smartly turned out, with the air of well-lubricated phantoms. The driver watched us in the mirror like a spy. The emotions of white people, he perhaps was thinking, are odd and excite prurience. He watched as one might watch cats making love.

‘I shall never forget you.’

‘Nor I. Write to me.’

‘I shall always come back if you want.’

‘Never doubt it. Get well, Melissa, you must get well. I’ll wait for you. A new cycle will begin. It is all there inside me, intact. I feel it.’

The words that lovers use at such times are charged with distorting emotions. Only their silences have the cruel precision which aligns them to truth. We were silent, holding hands. She embraced me and signalled to the driver to set off.

‘With her going the city took on an unnerving strangeness for him’ writes Arnauti. ‘Wherever his memory of her turned a familiar corner she recreated herself swiftly, vividly, and superimposed those haunted eyes and hands on the streets and squares. Old conversations leaped up and hit him among the polished table-tops of cafés where once they had sat, gazing like drunkards into each other’s eyes. Sometimes she appeared walking a few paces ahead of him in the dark street. She would stop to adjust the strap of a sandal and he would overtake her with beating heart — only to find it was someone else. Particular doors seemed just about to admit her. He would sit and watch them doggedly. At other times he was suddenly seized by the irresistible conviction that she was about to arrive on a particular train, and he hurried to the station and breasted the crowd of passengers like a man fording a river. Or he might sit in the stuffy waiting-room of the airport after midnight watching the departures and arrivals, in case she were coming back to surprise him. In this way she controlled his imagination and taught him how feeble reason was; and he carried the consciousness of her going heavily about with him — like a dead baby from which one could not bring oneself to part.’

The night after Justine went away there was a freak thunder-storm of tremendous intensity. I had been wandering about in the rain for hours, a prey not only to feelings which I could not control but also to remorse for what I imagined Nessim must be feeling. Frankly, I hardly dared to go back to the empty flat, lest I should be tempted along the path Pursewarden had already taken so easily, with so little premeditation. Passing Rue Fuad for the seventh time, coatless and hatless in that blinding downpour, I happened to catch sight of the light in Clea’s high window and on an impulse rang the bell. The front door opened with a whine and I stepped into the silence of the building from the dark street with its booming of rain in gutters and the splash of overflowing manholes.

She opened the door to me and at a glance took in my condition. I was made to enter, peel off my sodden clothes and put on the blue dressing-gown. The little electric fire was a blessing, and Clea set about making me hot coffee.

She was already in pyjamas, her gold hair combed out for the night. A copy of A Rebours lay face down on the floor beside the ash-tray with the smouldering cigarette in it. Lightning kept flashing fitfully at the window, lighting up her grave face with its magnesium flashes. Thunder rolled and writhed in the dark heavens outside the window. In this calm it was possible partly to exorcise my terrors by speaking of Justine. It appeared she knew all — nothing can be hidden from the curiosity of the Alexandrians. She knew all about Justine, that is to say.

‘You will have guessed’ said Clea in the middle of all this ‘that Justine was the woman I told you once I loved so much.’

This cost her a good deal to say. She was standing with a coffee cup in one hand, clad in her blue-striped pyjamas by the door. She closed her eyes as she spoke, as if she were expecting a blow to fall upon the crown of her head. Out of the closed eyes came two tears which ran slowly down on each side of her nose. She looked like a young stag with a broken ankle. ‘Ah! let us not speak of her any more’ she said at last in a whisper. ‘She will never come back.’

Later I made some attempt to leave but the storm was still at its height and my clothes still impossibly sodden. ‘You can stay here’ said Clea ‘with me’; and she added with a gentleness which brought a lump into my throat, ‘But please — I don’t know how to say this — please don’t make love to me.’

We lay together in that narrow bed talking of Justine while the storm blew itself out, scourging the window-panes of the flat with driven rain from the seafront. She was calm now with a sort of resignation which had a moving eloquence about it. She told me many things about Justine’s past which only she knew; and she spoke of her with a wonder and tenderness such as people might use in talking of a beloved yet infuriating queen. Speaking of Arnauti’s ventures into psycho-analysis she said with amusement: ‘She was not really clever, you know, but she had the cunning of a wild animal at bay. I’m not sure she really understood the object of these investigations. Yet though she was evasive with the doctors she was perfectly frank with her friends. All that correspondence about the words “Washington D.C.”, for example, which they worked so hard on — remember? One night while we were lying here together I asked her to give me her free associations from the phrase. Of course she trusted my discretion absolutely. She replied unerringly (it was clear she had already worked it out though she would not tell Arnauti): ‘There is a town near Washington called Alexandria. My father always talked of going to visit some distant relations there. They had a daughter called Justine who was exactly my age. She went mad and was put away. She had been raped by a man.’ I then asked her about D.C. and she said, “Da Capo. Capodistria”.’

I do not know how long this conversation lasted or how soon it melted into sleep, but we awoke next morning in each other’s arms to find that the storm had ceased. The city had been sponged clean. We took a hasty breakfast and I made my way towards Mnemjian’s shop for a shave through streets whose native colours had been washed clean by the rain so that they glowed with warmth and beauty in that soft air. I still had Justine’s letter in my pocket but I did not dare to read it again lest I destroy the peace of mind which Clea had given me. Only the opening phrase continued to echo in my mind with an obstinate throbbing persistence: ‘If you should come back alive from the lake you will find this letter waiting for you.’

On the mantelpiece in the drawing-room of the flat there is another letter offering me a two-year contract as a teacher in a Catholic school in Upper Egypt. I sit down at once without thinking and draft my acceptance. This will change everything once more and free me from the streets of the city which have begun to haunt me of late so that I dream that I am walking endlessly up and down, hunting for Melissa among the dying flares of the Arab quarter.

With the posting of this letter of acceptance a new period will be initiated, for it marks my separation from the city in which so much has happened to me, so much of momentous importance: so much that has aged me. For a little while, however, life will carry its momentum forward by hours and days. The same streets and squares will burn in my imagination as the Pharos burns in history. Particular rooms in which I have made love, particular café tables where the pressure of fingers upon a wrist held me spellbound, feeling through the hot pavements the rhythms of Alexandria transmitted upwards into bodies which could only interpret them as famished kisses, or endearments uttered in voices hoarse with wonder. To the student of love these separations are a school, bitter yet necessary to one’s growth. They help one to strip oneself mentally of everything save the hunger for more life.

Now, too, the actual framework of things is undergoing a subtle transformation, for other partings are also beginning. Nessim is going to Kenya for a holiday. Pombal has achieved crucifixion and a posting to the Chancery in Rome where I have no doubt he will be happier. A series of leisurely farewell parties have begun to serve the purposes of all of us; but they are heavy with the absence of the one person whom nobody ever mentions any more — Justine. It is clear too that a world war is slowly creeping upon us across the couloirs of history — doubling our claims upon each other and upon life. The sweet sickly smell of blood hangs in the darkening air and contributes a sense of excitement, of fondness and frivolity. This note has been absent until now.

The chandeliers in the great house whose ugliness I have come to hate, blaze over the gatherings which have been convened to say farewell to my friend. They are all there, the faces and histories I have come to know so well, Sveva in black, Clea in gold, Gaston, Claire, Gaby. Nessim’s hair I notice has during the last few weeks begun to be faintly touched with grey. Ptolemeo and Fuad are quarrelling with all the animation of old lovers. All round me the typical Alexandrian animation swells and subsides in conversations as brittle and frivolous as spun glass. The women of Alexandria in all their stylish wickedness are here to say good-bye to someone who has captivated them by allowing them to befriend him. As for Pombal himself, he has grown fatter, more assured since his elevation in rank. His profile now has a certain Neronian cast. He is professing himself worried about me in sotto voce; for some weeks we have not met properly, and he has only heard about my school-mastering project tonight. ‘You should get out’ he repeats, ‘back to Europe. This city will undermine your will. And what has Upper Egypt to offer? Blazing heat, dust, flies, a menial occupation…. After all, you are not Rimbaud.’

The faces surging round us sipping toasts prevent my answering him, and I am glad of it for I have nothing to say. I gaze at him with a portentous numbness, nodding my head. Clea catches my wrist and draws me aside to whisper: ‘A card from Justine. She is working in a Jewish kibbutz in Palestine. Shall I tell Nessim?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

‘She asks me not to.’

‘Then don’t.’

I am too proud to ask if there is any message for me. The company has started to sing the old song ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ in a variety of times and accents. Pombal has turned pink with pleasure. I gently shake off Clea’s hand in order to join in the singing. The little consul-general is fawning and gesticulating over Pombal; his relief at my friend’s departure is so great that he has worked himself up into a paroxysm of friendship and regret. The English consular group has the disconsolate air of a family of moulting turkeys. Madame de Venuta is beating time with an elegant gloved hand. The black servants in their long white gloves move swiftly from group to group of the guests like eclipses of the moon. If one were to go away, I catch myself thinking, to Italy perhaps or to France: to start a new sort of life: not a city life this time, perhaps an island in the Bay of Naples…. But I realise that what remains unresolved in my life is not the problem of Justine but the problem of Melissa. In some curious way the future, if there is one, has always been vested in her. Yet I feel powerless to influence it by decisions or even hopes. I feel that I must wait patiently until the shallow sequences of our history match again, until we can fall into step once more. This may take years — perhaps we will both be grey when the tide suddenly turns. Or perhaps the hope will die stillborn, broken up like wreckage by the tides of events. I have so little faith in myself. The money Pursewarden left is still in the bank — I have not touched a penny of it. For such a sum we might live for several years in some cheap spot in the sun.

Melissa still writes the spirited nonchalant letters which I have such difficulty in answering save by whining retorts about my circumstances or my improvidence. Once I leave the city it will be easier. A new road will open. I will write to her with absolute frankness, telling her all I feel — even those things which I believe her forever incapable of understanding properly. ‘I shall return in the spring’ Nessim is saying to the Baron Thibault ‘and take up my summer quarters at Abousir. I am determined to slack off for about two years. I’ve been working too hard at business and it isn’t worth it.’ Despite the haunted pallor of his face one cannot help seeing in him a new repose, a relaxation of the will; the heart may be distracted, but the nerves are at last at rest. He is weak, as a convalescent is weak; but he is no longer ill. We talk and joke quietly for a while; it is clear that our friendship will repair itself sooner or later — for we now have a common fund of unhappiness upon which to draw. ‘Justine’ I say, and he draws in his breath slightly, as if one had run a small thorn under his fingernail, ‘writes from Palestine.’ He nods quickly and motions me with a small gesture. ‘I know. We have traced her. There is no need to … I’m writing to her. She can stay away as long as she wishes. Come back in her own good time.’ It would be foolish to deprive him of the hope and the consolation it must give him, but I know now that she will never return on the old terms. Every phrase of her letter to me made this clear. It is not us she had abandoned so much but a way of life which threatened her reason — the city, love, the sum of all that we had shared. What had she written to him, I wondered, as I recalled the short sobbing breath he had drawn as he leaned against the whitewashed wall?

* * * * *

On these spring mornings while the island slowly uncurls from the sea in the light of an early sun I walk about on the deserted beaches, trying to recover my memories of the time spent in Upper Egypt. It is strange when everything about Alexandria is so vivid that I can recover so little of that lost period. Or perhaps it is not so strange — for compared to the city life I had lived my new life was dull and uneventful. I remember the back-breaking sweat of school work: walks in the flat rich fields with their bumper crops feeding upon dead men’s bones: the black silt-fed Nile moving corpulently through the Delta to the sea: the bilharzia-ridden peasantry whose patience and nobility shone through their rags like patents of dispossessed royalty: village patriarchs intoning: the blind cattle turning the slow globe of their waterwheels, blind-folded against monotony — how small can a world become? Throughout this period I read nothing, thought nothing, was nothing. The fathers of the school were kindly and left me alone in my spare time, sensing perhaps my distaste for the cloth, for the apparatus of the Holy Office. The children of course were a torment — but then what teacher of sensibility does not echo in his heart the terrible words of Tolstoy: ‘Whenever I enter a school and see a multitude of children, ragged thin and dirty but with their clear eyes and sometimes angelic expressions, I am seized with restlessness and terror, as though I saw people drowning’?

Unreal as all correspondence seemed, I kept up a desultory contact with Melissa whose letters arrived punctually. Clea wrote once or twice, and surprisingly enough old Scobie who appeared to be rather annoyed that he should miss me as much as he obviously did. His letters were full of fantastic animadversion against Jews (who were always referred to jeeringly as ‘snipcocks’) and, surprisingly enough, to passive pederasts (whom he labelled ‘Herms’, i.e. Hermaphrodites). I was not surprised to learn that the Secret Service had gravelled him, and he was now able to spend most of the day in bed with what he called a ‘bottle of wallop’ at his elbow. But he was lonely, hence his correspondence.

These letters were useful to me. My feeling of unreality had grown to such a pitch that at times I distrusted my own memory, finding it hard to believe that there had ever been such a town as Alexandria. Letters were a lifeline attaching me to an existence in which the greater part of myself was no longer engaged.

As soon as my work was finished I locked myself in my room and crawled into bed; beside it lay the green jade box full of hashish-loaded cigarettes. If my way of life was noticed or commented upon at least I left no loophole for criticism in my work. It would be hard to grudge me simply an inordinate taste for solitude. Father Racine, it is true, made one or two attempts to rouse me. He was the most sensitive and intelligent of them all and perhaps felt that my friendship might temper his own intellectual loneliness. I was sorry for him and regretted in a way not being able to respond to these overtures. But I was afflicted by a gradually increasing numbness, a mental apathy which made me shrink from contact. Once or twice I accompanied him for a walk along the river (he was a botanist) and heard him talk lightly and brilliantly on his own subject. But my taste for the landscape, its flatness, its unresponsiveness to the seasons had gone stale. The sun seemed to have scorched up my appetite for everything — food, company and even speech. I preferred to lie in bed staring at the ceiling and listening to the noises around me in the teachers’ block: Father Gaudier sneezing, opening and shutting drawers; Father Racine playing a few phrases over and over again on his flute; the ruminations of the organ mouldering away among its harmonies in the dark chapel. The heavy cigarettes soothed the mind, emptying it of every preoccupation.

One day Gaudier called to me as I was crossing the close and said that someone wished to speak to me on the telephone. I could hardly comprehend, hardly believe my ears. After so long a silence who would telephone? Nessim perhaps?

The telephone was in the Head’s study, a forbidding room full of elephantine furniture and fine bindings. The receiver, crepitating slightly, lay on the blotter before him. He squinted slightly and said with distaste ‘It is a woman from Alexandria.’ I thought it must be Melissa but to my surprise Clea’s voice suddenly swam up out of the incoherence of memory: ‘I am speaking from the Greek hospital. Melissa is here, very ill indeed. Perhaps even dying.’

Undeniably my surprise and confusion emerged as anger. ‘But she would not let me tell you before. She didn’t want you to see her ill — so thin. But I simply must now. Can you come quickly? She will see you now.’

In my mind’s eye I could see the jogging night train with its interminable stoppings and startings in dust-blown towns and villages — the dirt and the heat. It would take all night. I turned to Gaudier and asked his permission to absent myself for the whole week-end. ‘In exceptional cases we do grant permission’ he said thoughtfully. ‘If you were going to be married, for example, or if someone was seriously ill.’ I swear that the idea of marrying Melissa had not entered my head until he spoke the words.

There was another memory, too, which visited me now as I packed my cheap suitcase. The rings, Cohen’s rings, were still in my stud-box wrapped in brown paper. I stood for a while looking at them and wondering if inanimate objects also had a destiny as human beings have. These wretched rings, I thought — why, it was as if they had been anxiously waiting here all the time like human beings; waiting for some shabby fulfilment on the finger of someone trapped into a mariage de convenance. I put the poor things in my pocket.

Far off events, transformed by memory, acquire a burnished brilliance because they are seen in isolation, divorced from the details of before and after, the fibres and wrappings of time. The actors, too, suffer a transformation; they sink slowly deeper and deeper into the ocean of memory like weighted bodies, finding at every level a new assessment, a new evaluation in the human heart.

It was not anguish I felt so much at Melissa’s defection, it was rage, a purposeless fury based, I imagine, in contrition. The enormous vistas of the future which in all my vagueness I had nevertheless peopled with images of her had gone by default now; and it was only now that I realized to what an extent I had been nourishing myself on them. It had all been there like a huge trust fund, an account upon which I would one day draw. Now I was suddenly bankrupt.

Balthazar was waiting for me at the station in his little car. He pressed my hand with rough and ready sympathy as he said, in a matter-of-fact voice: ‘She died last night poor girl. I gave her morphia to help her away. Well.’ He sighed and glanced sideways at me. ‘A pity you are not in the habit of shedding tears. Ça aurait été un soulagement.’

‘Soulagement grotesque.’

‘Approfondir les émotions … les purger.’

‘Tais-toi, Balthazar, shut up.’

‘She loved you, I suppose.’

‘Je le sais.’

‘Elle parlait de vous sans cesse. Cléa a été avec elle toute la semaine.’

‘Assez.’

Never had the city looked so entrancing in that soft morning air. I took the light wind from the harbour on my stubbled cheek like the kiss of an old friend. Mareotis glinted here and there between the palm-tops, between the mud huts and the factories. The shops along Rue Fuad seemed to have all the glitter and novelty of Paris. I had, I realized, become a complete provincial in Upper Egypt. Alexandria seemed a capital city. In the trim garden nurses were rolling their prams and children their hoops. The trams squashed and clicked and rattled. ‘There is something else’ Balthazar was saying as we raced along. ‘Melissa’s child, Nessim’s child. But I suppose you know all about it. It is out at the summer villa. A little girl.’

I could not take all this in, so drunk was I on the beauty of the city which I had almost forgotten. Outside the Municipality the professional scribes sat at their stools, inkhorns, pens and stamped paper beside them. They scratched themselves, chattering amiably. We climbed the low bluff on which the hospital stood after threading the long bony spine of the Canopic Way. Balthazar was still talking as we left the lift and started to negotiate the long white corridors of the second floor.

‘A coolness has sprung up between Nessim and myself. When Melissa came back he refused to see her out of a sort of disgust which I found inhuman, hard to comprehend. I don’t know…. As for the child he is trying to get it adopted. He has come almost to hate it, I suppose. He thinks Justine will never come back to him so long as he has Melissa’s child. For my part’ he added more slowly ‘I look at it this way: by one of those fearful displacements of which only love seems capable the child Justine lost was given back by Nessim not to her but to Melissa. Do you see?’

The sense of ghostly familiarity which was growing upon me now was due to the fact that we were approaching the little room in which I had visited Cohen when he was dying. Of course Melissa must be lying in the same narrow iron bed in the corner by the wall. It would be just like real life to imitate art at this point.

There were some nurses in the room busy whispering round the bed, arranging screens; but at a word from Balthazar they scattered and disappeared. We stood arm in arm in the doorway for a moment looking in. Melissa looked pale and somehow wizened. They had bound up her jaw with tape and closed the eyes so that she looked as if she had fallen asleep during a beauty treatment. I was glad her eyes were closed; I had been dreading their glance.

I was left alone with her for a while in the huge silence of that whitewashed ward and all of a sudden I found myself suffering from acute embarrassment. It is hard to know how to behave with the dead; their enormous deafness and rigidity is so studied. One becomes awkward as if in the presence of royalty. I coughed behind my hand and walked up and down the ward stealing little glances at her out of the corner of my eye, remembering the confusion which had once beset me when she called upon me with a gift of flowers. I would have liked to slip Cohen’s rings on her fingers but they had already swathed her body in bandages and her arms were bound stiffly to her sides. In this climate bodies decompose so quickly that they have to be almost unceremoniously rushed to the grave. I said ‘Melissa’ twice in an uncertain whisper bending my lips to her ear. Then I lit a cigarette and sat down beside her on a chair to make a long study of her face, comparing it to all the other faces of Melissa which thronged my memory and had established their identity there. She bore no resemblance to any of them — and yet she set them off, concluded them. This white little face was the last term of a series. Beyond this point there was a locked door.

At such times one gropes about for a gesture which will match the terrible marble repose of the will which one reads on the faces of the dead. There is nothing in the whole ragbag of human emotions. ‘Terrible are the four faces of love,’ wrote Arnauti in another context. I mentally told the figure on the bed that I would take the child if Nessim would part with her, and this silent agreement made I kissed the high pale forehead once and left her to the ministrations of those who would parcel her up for the grave. I was glad to leave the room, to leave a silence so elaborate and forbidding. I suppose we writers are cruel people. The dead do not care. It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience.

(‘In the old days the sailing ships in need of ballast would collect tortoises from the mainland and fill great barrels with them, alive. Those that survived the terrible journey might be sold as pets for children. The putrefying bodies of the rest were emptied into the East India Docks. There were plenty more where they came from.’)

I walked lightly effortlessly about the town like an escaped prisoner. Mnemjian had violet tears in his violet eyes as he embraced me warmly. He settled down to shave me himself, his every gesture expressing an emollient sympathy and tenderness. Outside on the pavements drenched with sunlight walked the citizens of Alexandria each locked into a world of personal relationships and fears, yet each seeming to my eyes infinitely remote from those upon which my own thoughts and feelings were busy. The city was smiling with a heartbreaking indifference, a cocotte refreshed by the darkness.

There remained only one thing to do now, to see Nessim. I was relieved to learn that he was due to come into town that evening. Here again time had another surprise in store for me for the Nessim who lived in my memories had changed.

He had aged like a woman — his lips and face had both broadened. He walked now with his weight distributed comfortably on the flat of his feet as if his body had already submitted to a dozen pregnancies. The queer litheness of his step had gone. Moreover he radiated now a flabby charm mixed with concern which made him at first all but unrecognizable. A foolish authoritativeness had replaced the delightful old diffidence. He was just back from Kenya.

I had hardly time to capture and examine these new impressions when he suggested that we should visit the Etoile together — the night-club where Melissa used to dance. It had changed hands, he added, as if this somehow excused our visiting it on the very day of her funeral. Shocked and surprised as I was I agreed without hesitation, prompted both by curiosity as to his own feelings and a desire to discuss the transaction which concerned the child — this mythical child.

When we walked down the narrow airless stairway into the white light of the place a cry went up and the girls came running to him from every corner like cockroaches. It appeared that he was well known now as an habitué. He opened his arms to them with a shout of laughter, turning to me for approval as he did so. Then taking their hands one after another he pressed them voluptuously to the breast pocket of his coat so that they might feel the outlines of the thick wallet he now carried, stuffed with banknotes. This gesture at once reminded me of how, when I was accosted one night in the dark streets of the city by a pregnant woman and trying to make my escape, she took my hand, as if to give me an idea of the pleasure she was offering (or perhaps to emphasize her need) and pressed it upon her swollen abdomen. Now, watching Nessim, I suddenly recalled the tremulous beat of the foetal heart in the eighth month.

It is difficult to describe how unspeakably strange I found it to sit beside this vulgar double of the Nessim I had once known. I studied him keenly but he avoided my eye and confined his conversation to laboured commonplaces which he punctuated by yawns that were one by one tapped away behind ringed fingers. Here and there, however, behind this new façade stirred a hint of the old diffidence, but buried — as a fine physique may be buried in a mountain of fat. In the washroom Zoltan the waiter confided in me: ‘He has become truly himself since his wife went away. All Alexandria says so.’ The truth was that he had become like all Alexandria.

Late that night the whim seized him to drive me to Montaza in the late moonlight; we sat in the car for a long time in silence, smoking, gazing out at the moonlit waves hobbling across the sand bar. It was during this silence that I apprehended the truth about him. He had not really changed inside. He had merely adopted a new mask.

* * * * *

In the early summer I received a long letter from Clea with which this brief introductory memorial to Alexandria may well be brought to a close.

‘You may perhaps be interested in my account of a brief meeting with Justine a few weeks ago. We had, as you know, been exchanging occasional cards from our respective countries for some time past, and hearing that I was due to pass through Palestine into Syria she herself suggested a brief meeting. She would come, she said, to the border station where the Haifa train waits for half an hour. The settlement in which she works is somewhere near at hand, she could get a lift. We might talk for a while on the platform. To this I agreed.

‘At first I had some difficulty in recognizing her. She has gone a good deal fatter in the face and has chopped off her hair carelessly at the back so that it sticks out in rats’ tails. I gather that for the most part she wears it done up in a cloth. No trace remains of the old elegance or chic. Her features seem to have broadened, become more classically Jewish, lip and nose inclining more towards each other. I was shocked at first by the glittering eyes and the quick incisive way of breathing and talking — as if she were feverish. As you can imagine we were both mortally shy of each other.

‘We walked out of the station along the road and sat down on the edge of a dry ravine, a wadi, with a few terrified-looking spring flowers about our feet. She gave the impression of already having chosen this place for our interview: perhaps as suitably austere. I don’t know. She did not mention Nessim or you at first but spoke only about her new life. She had achieved, she claimed, a new and perfect happiness through “community-service”; the air with which she said this suggested some sort of religious conversion. Do not smile. It is hard, I know, to be patient with the weak. In all the back-breaking sweat of the Communist settlement she claimed to have achieved a “new humility”. (Humility! The last trap that awaits the ego in search of absolute truth. I felt disgusted but said nothing.) She described the work of the settlement coarsely, unimaginatively, as a peasant might. I noticed that those once finely-tended hands were calloused and rough. I suppose people have a right to dispose of their bodies as they think fit, I said to myself, feeling ashamed because I must be radiating cleanliness and leisure, good food and baths. By the way, she is not a Marxist as yet — simply a work-mystic after the manner of Panayotis at Abousir. Watching her now and remembering the touching and tormenting person she had once been for us all I found it hard to comprehend the change into this tubby little peasant with the hard paws.

‘I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings — the one might be deduced from the other. Time carries us (boldly imagining that we are discrete egos modelling our own personal futures) — time carries us forward by the momentum of those feelings inside us of which we ourselves are least conscious. Too abstract for you? Then I have expressed the idea badly. I mean, in Justine’s case, having become cured of the mental aberrations brought about by her dreams, her fears, she has been deflated like a bag. For so long the fantasy occupied the foreground of her life that now she is dispossessed of her entire stock-in-trade. It is not only that the death of Capodistria has removed the chief actor in this shadow-play, her chief gaoler. The illness itself had kept her on the move, and when it died it left in its place total exhaustion. She has, so to speak, extinguished with her sexuality her very claims on life, almost her reason. People driven like this to the very boundaries of freewill are forced to turn somewhere for help, to make absolute decisions. If she had not been an Alexandrian (i.e. sceptic) this would have taken the form of religious conversion. How is one to say these things? It is not a question of growing to be happy or unhappy. A whole block of one’s life suddenly falls into the sea, as perhaps yours did with Melissa. But (this is how it works in life, the retributive law which brings good for evil and evil for good) her own release also released Nessim from the inhibitions governing his passional life. I think he always felt that so long as Justine lived he would never be able to endure the slightest human relationship with anyone else. Melissa proved him wrong, or at least so he thought; but with Justine’s departure the old heartsickness cropped up and he was filled with overwhelming disgust for what he had done to her — to Melissa.

‘Lovers are never equally matched — do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?

‘So that if from another point of view Nessim did plan Capodistria’s death (as has been widely rumoured and believed) he could not have chosen a more calamitous path. It would indeed have been wiser to kill you. Perhaps he hoped in releasing Justine from the succubus (as Arnauti before him) he would free her for himself. (He said so once — you told me.) But quite the opposite has happened. He has granted her a sort of absolution, or poor Capodistria unwittingly did — with the result that she thinks of him now not as a lover but as a sort of arch-priest. She speaks of him with a reverence which would horrify him to hear. She will never go back, how could she? And if she did he would know at once that he had lost her forever — for those who stand in a confessional relationship to ourselves can never love us, never truly love us.

‘(Of you Justine said simply, with a slight shrug: “I had to put him out of my mind”.)

‘Well, these are some of the thoughts that passed through my mind as the train carried me down through the orange groves to the coast; they were thrown into sharp relief by the book I had chosen to read on the journey, the penultimate volume of God is a Humorist. How greatly Pursewarden has gained in stature since his death! It was before as if he stood between his own books and our understanding of them. I see now that what we found enigmatic about the man was due to a fault in ourselves. An artist does not live a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings. Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a man tortured beyond endurance by the lackof tendernessin the world.

‘And all this brings me back to myself, for I too have been changing in some curious way. The old self-sufficient life has transformed itself into something a little hollow, a little empty. It no longer answers my deepest needs. Somewhere deep inside a tide seems to have turned in my nature. I do not know why but it is towards you, my dear friend, that my thoughts have turned more and more of late. Can one be frank? Is there a friendship possible this side of love which could be sought and found? I speak no more of love — the word and its conventions have become odious to me. But is there a friendship possible to attain which is deeper, even limitlessly deep, and yet wordless, idealess? It seems somehow necessary to find a human being to whom one can be faithful, not in the body (I leave that to the priests) but in the culprit mind? But perhaps this is not the sort of problem which will interest you much these days. Once or twice I have felt the absurd desire to come to you and offer my services in looking after the child perhaps. But it seems clear now that you do not really need anybody any more, and that you value your solitude above all things….’

There are a few more lines and then the affectionate superscription.

* * * * *

The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines — so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings; or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them — I mean a black patch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings….

Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky will be dusted thickly with summer stars. I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water. I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything* depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? So that….

WORKPOINTS

Landscape-tones: steep skylines, low cloud, pearl ground with shadows in oyster and violet. Accidie. On the lake gunmetal and lemon. Summer: sand lilac sky. Autumn: swollen bruise greys. Winter: freezing white sand, clear skies, magnificent starscapes.

* * *

CHARACTER-SQUEEZES

Sveva Magnani: pertness, malcontent.

Gaston Pombal: honey-bear, fleshly opiates.

Teresa di Petromonti: farded Berenice.

Ptolomeo Dandolo: astronomer, astrologer, Zen.

Fuad El Said: black moon-pearl.

Josh Scobie: piracy.

Justine Hosnani: arrow in darkness.

Clea Montis: still waters of pain.

Gaston Phipps: nose like a sock, black hat.

Ahmed Zananiri: pole-star criminal.

Nessim Hosnani: smooth gloves, face frosted glass.

Melissa Artemis: patron of sorrow.

S. Balthazar: fables, work, unknowing.

* * *

Pombal asleep in full evening dress. Beside him on the bed a chamberpot full of banknotes he had won at the Casino.

* * *

Da Capo: ‘To bake in sensuality like an apple in its jacket.’

* * *

Spoken impromptu by Gaston Phipps:

‘The lover like a cat with fish

Longs to be off and will not share his dish.’

* * *

Accident or attempted murder? Justine racing along the desert road to Cairo in the Rolls when suddenly the lights give out. Sightless, the great car swarms off the road and whistling like an arrow buries itself in a sand-dune. It looked as if the wires had been filed down to a thread. Nessim reached her within half an hour. They embrace in tears.

* * *

Balthazar on Justine: ‘You will find that her formidable manner is constructed on a shaky edifice of childish timidities.’

* * *

Clea always has a horoscope cast before any decision reached.

* * *

Clea’s account of the horrible party; driving with Justine they had seen a brown cardboard box by the road. They were late so they put it in the back and did not open it until they reached the garage. Inside was dead baby wrapped in newspaper. What to do with this wizened homunculus? Perfectly formed organs. Guests were due to arrive, they had to rush. Justine slipped it into drawer of the hall desk. Party a great success.

* * *

Pursewarden on the ‘n-dimensional novel’ trilogy: ‘The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of the future racing towards one. Anyway, that was my idea.’ …

* * *

‘Then how long will it last, this love?’ (in jest).

‘I don’t know.’

‘Three weeks, three years, three decades…?’

‘You are like all the others … trying to shorten eternity with numbers,’ spoken quietly, but with intense feeling.

* * *

Conundrum: a peacock’s eye. Kisses so amateurish they resembled an early form of printing.

* * *

Of poems: ‘I like the soft thudding of Alexandrines’ (Nessim).

* * *

Clea and her old father whom she worships. White haired, erect, with a sort of haunted pity in his eyes for the young unmarried goddess he has fathered. Once a year on New Year’s Eve they dance at the Cecil, stately, urbanely. He waltzes like a clockwork man.

* * *

Pombal’s love for Sveva: based on one gay message which took his fancy. When he awoke she’d gone, but she had neatly tied his dress tie to his John Thomas, a perfect bow. This message so captivated him that he at once dressed and went round to propose marriage to her because of her sense of humour.

* * *

Pombal was at his most touching with his little car which he loved devotedly. I remember him washing it by moonlight very patiently.

* * *

Justine: ‘Always astonished by the force of my own emotions — tearing the heart out of a book with my fingers like a fresh loaf.’

* * *

Places: street with arcade: awnings: silverware and doves for sale. Pursewarden fell over a basket and filled the street with apples.

* * *

Message on the corner of a newspaper. Afterwards the closed cab, warm bodies, night, volume of jasmine.

* * *

A basket of quail burst open in the bazaar. They did not try to escape but spread out slowly like spilt honey. Easily recaptured.

* * *

Postcard from Balthazar: ‘Scobie’s death was the greatest fun. How he must have enjoyed it. His pockets were full of love-letters to his aide Hassan, and the whole vice squad turned out to sob at his grave. All these black gorillas crying like babies. A very Alexandrian demonstration of affection. Of course the grave was too small for the coffin. The grave-diggers had knocked off for lunch, so a scratch team of policemen was brought into action. Usual muddle. The coffin fell over on its side and the old man nearly rolled out. Shrieks. The padre was furious. The British Consul nearly died of shame. But all Alexandria was there and a good time was had by all.’

* * *

Pombal walking in stately fashion down Rue Fuad, dead drunk at ten in the morning, clad in full evening dress, cloak and opera hat — but bearing on his shirt-front, written in lipstick, the words ‘Torche-cul des républicains.’

* * *

(Museum)

Alexander wearing the horns of Ammon (Nessim’s madness). He identified himself with A because of the horns?

* * *

Justine reflecting sadly on the statue of Berenice mourning her little daughter whom the Priests deified: ‘Did that assuage her grief I wonder? Or did it make it more permanent?’

* * *

Tombstone of Apollodorus giving his child a toy. ‘Could bring tears to one’s eyes.’ (Pursewarden) ‘They are all dead. Nothing to show for it.’

* * *

Aurelia beseeching Petesouchos the crocodile god … Narouz.

* * *

Lioness Holding a Golden flower…

* * *

Ushabti … little serving figures which are supposed to work for the mummy in the underworld.

* * *

Somehow even Scobie’s death did not disturb our picture of him. I had already seen him long before in Paradise — the soft conklin-coloured yams like the haunches of newly cooked babies: the night falling with its deep-breathing blue slur over Tobago, softer than parrot-plumage. Paper flamingoes touched with gold-leaf, rising and falling on the sky, touched by the keening of the bruise-dark water-bamboos. His little hut of reeds with the cane bed, beside which still stands the honoured cake-stand of his earthly life. Clea once asked him: ‘Do you not miss the sea, Scobie?’ and the old man replied simply, without hesitation, ‘Every night I put to sea in my dreams.’

* * * * *

I copied out and gave her the two translations from Cavafy which had pleased her though they were by no means literal. By now the Cavafy canon has been established by the fine thoughtful translations of Mavrogordato and in a sense the poet has been freed for other poets to experiment with; I have tried to transplant rather than translate — with what success I cannot say.

THE CITY

You tell yourself: I’ll be gone

To some other land, some other sea,

To a city lovelier far than this

Could ever have been or hoped to be —

Where every step now tightens the noose:

A heart in a body buried and out of use:

How long, how long must I be here

Confined among these dreary purlieus

Of the common mind? Wherever now I look

Black ruins of my life rise into view.

So many years have I been here

Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.

There’s no new land, my friend, no

New sea; for the city will follow you,

In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly,

The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,

In the same house go white at last —

The city is a cage.

No other places, always this

Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists

To take you from yourself. Ah! don’t you see

Just as you’ve ruined your life in this

One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth

Everywhere now — over the whole earth?

THE GOD ABANDONS ANTONY

When suddenly at darkest midnight heard,

The invisible company passing, the clear voices,

Ravishing music of invisible choirs —

Your fortunes having failed you now,

Hopes gone aground, a lifetime of desires

Turned into smoke. Ah! do not agonize

At what is past deceiving

But like a man long since prepared

With courage say your last good-byes

To Alexandria as she is leaving.

Do not be tricked and never say

It was a dream or that your ears misled,

Leave cowards their entreaties and complaints,

Let all such useless hopes as these be shed,

And like a man long since prepared,

Deliberately, with pride, with resignation

Befitting you and worthy of such a city

Turn to the open window and look down

To drink past all deceiving

Your last dark rapture from the mystical throng

And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria leaving.

NOTES IN THE TEXT

Page 18. ‘The Poet of the city.’ C. P. Cavafy.

Page 18. ‘The old man.’ C. P. Cavafy.

Page 39. Caballi. The astral bodies of men who died a premature death ‘They imagine to perform bodily actions while in fact they have no physical bodies but act in their thoughts.’ Paracelsus.

Page 39. ‘Held the Gnostic doctrine that creation is a mistake…. He imagines a primal God, the centre of a divine harmony, who sent out manifestations of himself in pairs of male and female. Each pair was inferior to its predecessor and Sophia (“wisdom”) the female of the thirtieth pair, least perfect of all. She showed her imperfection not, like Lucifer, by rebelling from God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him. She fell through love.’ E. M. Forster, Alexandria.

Page 40. Quotation from Paracelsus.

Page 51. Taphia, Egyptian ‘Red Biddy.’

Page 53. Greek text.

Page 77. Amr, Conqueror of Alexandria, was a poet and soldier. Of the Arab invasion E. M. Forster writes: ‘Though they had no intention of destroying her, they destroyed her, as a child might a watch. She never functioned again properly for over 1,000 years.’

Page 147. A translation of ‘The City’ is among the ‘Workpoints.’

Page 195. See page 196.

BALTHAZAR

To

MY MOTHER

these memorials of an unforgotten city

The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.

D. A. F. DE SADE: Justine

Yes, we insist upon those details, you veil them with a decency which removes all their edge of horror; there remains only what is useful to whoever wishes to become familiar with man; you have no conceptionhow helpful these tableaux are to the developmentof the human spirit; perhaps we are still so benighted with respect to this branch of learning only because of the stupid restraint of those who wish to write upon such matters. Inhabited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is familiar and dare not, by turning a bold hand to the human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view.

D. A. F. DE SADE: Justine

PART I

I

Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph. Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the Harpoon Men … Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac.

summer: buff sand, hot marble sky.

autumn: swollen bruise-greys.

winter: freezing snow, cool sand.

clear sky panels, glittering with mica.

washed delta greens.

magnificent starscapes.

And spring? Ah! there is no spring in the Delta, no sense of refreshment and renewal in things. One is plunged out of winter into: wax effigy of a summer too hot to breathe. But here, at least, in Alexandria, the sea-breaths save us from the tideless weight of summer nothingness, creeping over the bar among the warships, to flutter the striped awnings of the cafés upon the Grande Corniche. I would never have …

* * * * *

The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory. Why must I return to it night after night, writing here by the fire of carob-wood while the Aegean wind clutches at this island house, clutching and releasing it, bending back the cypresses like bows? Have I not said enough about Alexandria? Am I to be reinfected once more by the dream of it and the memory of its inhabitants? Dreams I had thought safely locked up on paper, confided to the strong-rooms of memory! You will think I am indulging myself. It is not so. A single chance factor has altered everything, has turned me back upon my tracks. A memory which catches sight of itself in a mirror.

Justine, Melissa, Clea…. There were so few of us really — you would have thought them easily disposed of in a single book, would you not? So would I, so did I. Dispersed now by time and circumstance, the circuit broken forever….

I had set myself the task of trying to recover them in words, reinstate them in memory, allot to each his and her position in my time. Selfishly. And with that writing complete, I felt that I had turned a key upon the doll’s house of our actions. Indeed, I saw my lovers and friends no longer as living people but as coloured transfers of the mind; inhabiting my papers now, no longer the city, like tapestry figures. It was difficult to concede to them any more common reality than to the words I had used about them. What has recalled me to myself?

But in order to go on, it is necessary to go back: not that anything I wrote about them is untrue, far from it. Yet when I wrote, the full facts were not at my disposal. The picture I drew was a provisional one — like the picture of a lost civilization deduced from a few fragmented vases, an inscribed tablet, an amulet, some human bones, a gold smiling death-mask.

* * * * *

‘We live’ writes Pursewarden somewhere ‘lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.’ Something of this order….

And as for human characters, whether real or invented, there are no such animals. Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing predispositions. Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion — but a necessary illusion if we are to love!

As for the something that remains constant … the shy kiss of Melissa is predictable, for example (amateurish as an early form of printing), or the frowns of Justine, which cast a shadow over those blazing dark eyes — orbits of the Sphinx at noon. ‘In the end’ says Pursewarden ‘everything will be found to be true of everybody. Saint and Villain are co-sharers.’ He is right.

I am making every attempt to be matter-of-fact….

* * * * *

In the last letter which reached me from Balthazar he wrote: ‘I think of you often and not without a certain grim humour. You have retired to your island, with, as you think, all the data about us and our lives. No doubt you are bringing us to judgement on paper in the manner of writers. I wish I could see the result. It must fall very far short of truth: I mean such truths as I could tell you about us all — even perhaps about yourself. Or the truths Clea could tell you (she is in Paris on a visit and has stopped writing to me recently). I picture you, wise one, poring over Moeurs, the diaries of Justine, Nessim, etc., imagining that the truth is to be found in them. Wrong! Wrong! A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love. Do you know whom Justine really loved? You believed it was yourself, did you not? Confess!’

My only answer was to send him the huge bundle of paper which had grown up so stiffly under my slow pen and to which I had loosely given her name as a title — though Cahiers would have done just as well. Months passed after this — a blessed silence indeed, for it suggested that my critic had been satisfied, silenced.

I cannot say that I forgot the city, but I let the memory of it sleep. Yet of course, it was always there, as it always will be, hanging in the mind like the mirage which travellers so often see. Pursewarden has described the phenomenon in the following words:

‘We were still almost a couple of hours’ steaming distance before land could possibly come into sight when suddenly my companion shouted and pointed at the horizon. We saw, inverted in the sky, a full-scale mirage of the city, luminous and trembling, as if painted on dusty silk: yet in the nicest detail. From memory I could clearly make out its features, Ras El Tin Palace, the Nebi Daniel Mosque and so forth. The whole representation was as breath-taking as a masterpiece painted in fresh dew. It hung there in the sky for a considerable time, perhaps twenty-five minutes, before melting slowly into the horizon mist. An hour later, the real city appeared, swelling from a smudge to the size of its mirage.’

* * * * *

The two or three winters we have spent in this island have been lonely ones — dour and windswept winters and hot summers. Luckily, the child is too young to feel as I do the need for books, for conversation. She is happy and active.

Now in the spring come the long calms, the tideless, scentless days of premonition. The sea tames itself and becomes attentive. Soon the cicadas will bring in their crackling music, background to the shepherd’s dry flute among the rocks. The scrambling tortoise and the lizard are our only companions.

I should explain that our only regular visitant from the outside world is the Smyrna packet which once a week crosses the headland to the south, always at the same hour, at the same speed, just after dusk. In winter, the high seas and winds make it invisible, but now — I sit and wait for it. You hear at first only the faint drumming of engines. Then the creature slides round the cape, cutting its line of silk froth in the sea, brightly lit up in the moth-soft darkness of the Aegean night — condensed, but without outlines, like a cloud of fireflies moving. It travels fast, and disappears all too soon round the next headland, leaving behind it perhaps only the half-uttered fragment of a popular song, or the skin of a tangerine which I will find next day, washed up on the long pebbled beach where I bathe with the child.

The little arbour of oleanders under the planes — this is my writing-room. After the child has gone to bed, I sit here at the old sea-stained table, waiting for the visitant, unwilling to light the paraffin lamp before it has passed. It is the only day of the week I know by name here — Thursday. It sounds silly, but in an island so empty of variety, I look forward to the weekly visit like a child to a school treat. I know the boat brings letters for which I shall have to wait perhaps twenty-four hours. But I never see the little ship vanish without regret. And when it has passed, I light the lamp with a sigh and return to my papers. I write so slowly, with such pain. Pursewarden once, speaking about writing, told me that the pain that accompanied composition was entirely due, in artists, to the fear of madness; ‘force it a bit and tell yourself that you don’t give a damn if you do go mad, and you’ll find it comes quicker, you’ll break the barrier.’ (I don’t know how true this all is. But the money he left me in his will has served me well, and I still have a few pounds between me and the devils of debt and work.)

I describe this weekly diversion in some detail because it was into this picture that Balthazar intruded one June evening with a suddenness that surprised me — I was going to write ‘deafened’ — there is no one to talk to here — but ‘surprised me’. This evening something like a miracle happened. The little steamer, instead of disappearing as usual, turned abruptly through an arc of 150 degrees and entered the lagoon, there to lie in a furry cocoon of its own light: and to drop into the centre of the golden puddle it had created the long slow anchor-chain whose symbol itself is like a search for truth. It was a moving sight to one who, like myself, had been landlocked in spirit as all writers are — indeed, become like a ship in a bottle, sailing nowhere — and I watched as an Indian must perhaps have watched the first white man’s craft touch the shores of the New World.

The darkness, the silence, were broken now by the uneven lap-lap of oars; and then, after an age, by the chink of city-shod feet upon shingle. A hoarse voice gave a direction. Then silence. As I lit the lamp to set the wick in trim and so deliver myself from the spell of this departure from the norm, the grave dark face of my friend, like some goat-like apparition from the Underworld, materialized among the thick branches of myrtle. We drew a breath and stood smiling at each other in the yellow light: the dark Assyrian ringlets, the beard of Pan. ‘No — I am real!’ said Balthazar with a laugh and we embraced furiously. Balthazar!

The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is. Alexandria indeed — the true no less than the imagined — lay only some hundreds of sea-miles to the south.

‘I am on my way to Smyrna’ said Balthazar, ‘from where I was going to post you this.’ He laid upon the scarred old table the immense bundle of manuscript I had sent him — papers now seared and starred by a massive interlinear of sentences, paragraphs and question-marks. Seating himself opposite with his Mephistophelean air, he said in a lower, more hesitant tone:

‘I have debated in myself very long about telling you some of the things I have put down here. At times it seemed a folly and an impertinence. After all, your concern — was it with us as real people or as “characters”? I didn’t know. I still don’t. These pages may lose me your friendship without adding anything to the sum of your knowledge. You have been painting the city, touch by touch, upon a curved surface — was your object poetry or fact? If the latter, then there are things which you have a right to know.’

He still had not explained his amazing appearance before me, so anxious was he about the central meaning of the visitation. He did so now, noticing my bewilderment at the cloud of fire-flies in the normally deserted bay. He smiled.

‘The ship is delayed for a few hours with engine trouble. It is one of Nessim’s. The captain is Hasim Kohly, an old friend: perhaps you remember him? No. Well, I guessed from your description roughly where you must be living; but to be landed on your doorstep like this, I confess!’ His laughter was wonderful to hear once more.

But I hardly listened, for his words had plunged me into a ferment, a desire to study his interlinear, to revise — not my book (that has never been of the slightest importance to me for it will never even be published), but my view of the city and its inhabitants. For my own personal Alexandria had become, in all this loneliness, as dear as a philosophy of introspection, almost a monomania. I was so filled with emotion I did not know what to say to him. ‘Stay with us, Balthazar —’ I said, ‘stay awhile….’

‘We leave in two hours’ he said, and patting the papers before him: ‘This may give you visions and fevers’ he added doubtfully.

‘Good’ I said — ‘I ask for nothing better.’

‘We are all still real people’ he said, ‘whatever you try and do to us — those of us who are still alive. Melissa, Pursewarden — they can’t answer back because they are dead. At least, so one thinks.’

‘So one thinks. The best retorts always come from beyond the grave.’

We sat and began to talk about the past, rather stiffly to be sure. He had already dined on board and there was nothing I could offer him beyond a glass of the good island wine which he sipped slowly. Later he asked to see Melissa’s child, and I led him back through the clustering oleanders to a place from which we could both look into the great firelit room where she lay looking beautiful and grave, asleep there with her thumb in her mouth. Balthazar’s dark cruel eye softened as he watched her, lightly breathing. ‘One day’ he said in a low voice ‘Nessim will want to see her. Quite soon, mark. He has begun to talk about her, be curious. With old age coming on, he will feel he needs her support, mark my words.’ And he quoted in Greek: ‘First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.’ I said nothing. It was the room itself which was breathing now — not our bodies.

‘You have been lonely here’ said Balthazar.

‘But splendidly, desirably lonely.’

‘Yes, I envy you. But truthfully.’

And then his eye caught the unfinished portrait of Justine which Clea in another life had given me.

‘That portrait’ he said ‘which was interrupted by a kiss. How good to see that again — how good!’ He smiled. ‘It is like hearing a loved and familiar statement in music which leads one towards an emotion always recapturable, never-failing.’ I did not say anything. I did not dare.

He turned to me. ‘And Clea?’ he said at last, in the voice of someone interrogating an echo. I said: ‘I have heard nothing from her for ages. Time doesn’t count here. I expect she has married, has gone away to another country, has children, a reputation as a painter … everything one would wish her.’

He looked at me curiously and shook his head. ‘No’ he said; but that was all.

It was long after midnight when the seamen called him from the dark olive groves. I walked to the beach with him, sad to see him leave so soon. A rowboat waited at the water’s edge with a sailor standing to his oars in it. He said something in Arabic.

The spring sea was enticingly warm after a day’s sunshine and as Balthazar entered the boat the whim seized me to swim out with him to the vessel which lay not two hundred yards away from the shore. This I did and hovered to watch him climb the rail, and to watch the boat drawn up. ‘Don’t get caught in the screw’ he called, and ‘Go back before the engines start’ — ‘I will’ — ‘But wait — before you go —’ He ducked back into a stateroom to reappear and drop something into the water beside me. It fell with a soft splash. ‘A rose from Alexandria’ he said, ‘from the city which has everything but happiness to offer its lovers.’ He chuckled. ‘Give it to the child.’

‘Balthazar, good-bye!’

‘Write to me — if you dare!’

Caught like a spider between the cross mesh of lights, and turning towards those yellow pools which still lay between the dark shore and myself, I waved and he waved back.

I put the precious rose between my teeth and dog-paddled back to my clothes on the pebble beach, talking to myself.

And there, lying upon the table in the yellow lamplight, lay the great interlinear to Justine — as I had called it. It was crosshatched, crabbed, starred with questions and answers in different-coloured inks, in typescript. It seemed to me then to be somehow symbolic of the very reality we had shared — a palimpsest upon which each of us had left his or her individual traces, layer by layer.

Must I now learn to see it all with new eyes, to accustom myself to the truths which Balthazar has added? It is impossible to describe with what emotion I read his words — sometimes so detailed and sometimes so briefly curt — as for example in the list he had headed ‘Some Fallacies and Misapprehensions’ where he said coldly: ‘Number 4. That Justine “loved” you. She “loved”, if anyone, Pursewarden. “What does that mean”? She was forced to use you as a decoy in order to protect him from the jealousy of Nessim whom she had married. Pursewarden himself did not care for her at all — supreme logic of love!’

In my mind’s eye the city rose once more against the flat mirror of the green lake and the broken loins of sandstone which marked the desert’s edge. The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria’s streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms — moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot.

It was almost dawn before I surrendered the fascinating mound of paper with its comments upon my own real (inner) life and like a drunkard stumbled to my bed, my head aching, echoing with the city, the only city left where every extreme of race and habit can meet and marry, where inner destinies intersect. I could hear the dry voice of my friend repeating as I fell asleep: ‘How much do you care to know… how much more do you care to know?’ — ‘I must know everything in order to be at last delivered from tne city’ I replied in my dream.

* * * * *

‘When you pluck a flower, the branch springs back into place. This is not true of the heart’s affections’ is what Clea once said to Balthazar.

* * * * *

And so, slowly, reluctantly, I have been driven back to my starting-point, like a man who at the end of a tremendous journey is told that he has been sleepwalking. ‘Truth’ said Balthazar to me once, blowing his nose in an old tennis sock, ‘Truth is what most contradicts itself in time.’

And Pursewarden on another occasion, but not less memorably: ‘If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!’

How will I ever deliver myself from this whore among cities — sea, desert, minaret, sand, sea?

No. I must set it all down in cold black and white, until such time as the memory and impulse of it is spent. I know that the key I am trying to turn is in myself.

II

Le cénacle Capodistria used to call us in those days when we gathered for an early morning shave in the Ptolemaic parlour of Mnemjian, with its mirrors and palms, its bead curtains and the delicious mimicry of clear warm water and white linen: a laying out and anointing of corpses. The violet-eyed hunchback himself officiated, for we were valued customers all (dead Pharaohs at the natron baths, guts and brains to be removed, renovated and replaced). He himself, the barber, was often unshaven having just hurried down from the hospital after shaving a corpse. Briefly we met here in the padded chairs, in the mirrors, before separating to go about our various tasks — Da Capo to see his brokers, Pombal to totter to the French consulate (mouth full of charred moths, hangover, sensation of having walked about all night on his eyeballs), I to teach, Scobie to the Police Bureau, and so on….

I have somewhere a faded flashlight photograph of this morning ritual, taken by poor John Keats, the Global Agency correspondent. It is strange to look at it now. The smell of the gravecloth is on it. It is a speaking likeness of an Alexandrian spring morning: quiet rubbing of coffee pestles, curdling crying of fat pigeons. I recognize my friends by the very sounds they make: Capodistria’s characteristic ‘Quatsch’ and ‘Pouagh’ at some political remark, followed by that dry cachinnation — the retching of a metal stomach; Scobie’s tobacco cough ‘Tench, Teuch’: Pombal’s soft ‘Tiens’, like someone striking a triangle. ‘Tiens’.

And in one corner there I am, in my shabby raincoat — the perfected image of a schoolteacher. In the other corner sits poor little Toto de Brunel. Keats’s photograph traps him as he is raising a ringed finger to his temple — the fatal temple.

Toto! He is an original, a numéro. His withered witch’s features and small boy’s brown eyes, widow’s peak, queer art nouveau smile. He was the darling of old society women too proud to pay for gigolos. ‘Toto, mon chou, c’est toi!’ (Madame Umbada), ‘Comme il estcharmant, ceToto!’(Athena Trasha). He lives on these dry crusts of approbation, an old woman’s man, with the dimples sinking daily deeper into the wrinkled skin of an ageless face, quite happy, I suppose. Yes.

‘Toto — comment vas-tu?’ — ‘Si heureux de vous voir, Madame Martinengo!’

He was what Pombal scornfully called ‘a Gentleman of the Second Declension.’ His smile dug one’s grave, his kindness was anaesthetic. Though his fortune was small, his excesses trivial, yet he was right in the social swim. There was, I suppose, nothing to be done with him for he was a woman: yet had he been born one he would long since have cried himself into a decline. Lacking charm, his pederasty gave him a kind of illicit importance. ‘Homme serviable, homme gracieux’(Count Banubula, General Cervoni — what more does one want?).

Though without humour, he found one day that he could split sides. He spoke indifferent English and French, but whenever at loss for a word he would put in one whose meaning he did not know and the grotesque substitution was often delightful. This became his standard mannerism. In it, he almost reached poetry — as when he said ‘Some flies have come off my typewriter’ or ‘The car is trepanned today’ or ‘I ran so fast I got dandruff.’ He could do this in three languages. It excused him from learning them. He spoke a Toto-tongue of his own.

Invisible behind the lens itself that morning stood Keats — the world’s sort of Good Fellow, empty of ill intentions. He smelt lightly of perspiration. C’est le métier qui exige. Once he had wanted to be a writer but took the wrong turning, and now his profession had so trained him to stay on the superficies of real life (acts and facts about acts) that he had developed the typical journalist’s neurosis (they drink to still it): namely that Something has happened, or is about to happen, in the next street, and that they will not know about it until it is too late to ‘send’. This haunting fear of missing a fragment of reality which one knows in advance will be trivial, even meaningless, had given our friend the conventional tic one sees in children who want to go to the lavatory — shifting about in a chair, crossing and uncrossing of legs. After a few moments of conversation he would nervously rise and say ‘I’ve just forgotten something — I won’t be a minute.’ In the street he would expel his breath in a swish of relief. He never went far but simply walked around the block to still the unease. Everything always seemed normal enough, to be sure. He would wonder whether to phone Mahmoud Pasha about the defence estimates or wait till tomorrow…. He had a pocketful of peanuts which he cracked in his teeth and spat out, feeling restless, unnerved, he did not know why. After a walk he would come trotting back into the café, or barber’s shop, beaming shyly, apologetically: an ‘Agency Man’ — our best-integrated modern type. There was nothing wrong with John except the level on which he had chosen to live his life — but you could say the same about his famous namesake, could you not?

I owe this faded photograph to him. The mania to perpetuate, to record, to photograph everything! I suppose this must come from the feeling that you don’t enjoy anything fully, indeed are taking the bloom off it with every breath you draw. His ‘files’ were enormous, bulging with signed menus, bands off memorial cigars, postage stamps, picture postcards…. Later this proved useful, for somehow he had captured some of Pursewarden’s obiter dicta.

Farther to the east sits good old big-bellied Pombal, under each eye a veritable diplomatic bag. Now here is someone on whom one can really lavish a bit of affection. His only preoccupation is with losing his job or being impuissant: the national worry of every Frenchman since Jean-Jacques. We quarrel a good deal, though amicably, for we share his little flat which is always full of unconsidered trifles and trifles more considered: les femmes. But he is a good friend, a tender-hearted man, and really loves women. When I have insomnia or am ill: ‘Dis donc, tu vas bien?’ Roughly, in the manner of a bon copain. ‘Ecoute — tu veux une aspirine?’ or else ‘Ou bien — j’ai une jaune amie dans ma chambre si tu veux….’ (Not a misprint: Pombal called all poules ‘jaunes femmes’.) ‘Hein? Elle n’est pas mal — et c’est tout payé, mon cher. Mais ce matin, moi jeme sens untout petitpeuantiféministe — j’en ai marre, hein!’Satiety fell upon him at such times. ‘Je deviens de plus en plus anthropophage’ he would say, rolling that comical eye. Also, his job worried him; his reputation was pretty bad, people were beginning to talk, especially after what he calls ‘l’affaire Sveva’;and yesterday the Consul-General walked in on him while he was cleaning his shoes on the Chancery curtains…. ‘Monsieur Pombal! Jesuisobligé de vous faire quelques observations sur votre comportement officiel!’ Ouf! A reproof of the first grade….

It explains why Pombal now sits heavily in the photograph, debating all this with a downcast expression. Lately we have become rather estranged because of Melissa. He is angry that I have fallen in love with her, for she is only a dancer in a night-club, and as such unworthy of serious attention. There is also a question of snobbery, for she is virtually living at the flat now and he feels this to be demeaning: perhaps even diplomatically unwise.

‘Love’ says Toto ‘is a liquid fossil’ — a felicitous epigram in all conscience. Now to fall in love with a banker’s wife, that would be forgivable, though ridiculous…. Or would it? In Alexandria, it is only intrigue per se which is wholeheartedly admired; but to fall in love renders one ridiculous in society. (Pombal is a provincial at heart.) I think of the tremendous repose and dignity of Melissa in death, the slender body bandaged and swaddled as if after some consuming and irreparable accident. Well.

And Justine? On the day this picture was taken, Clea’s painting was interrupted by a kiss, as Balthazar says. How am I to make this comprehensible when I can only visualize these scenes with such difficulty? I must, it seems, try to see a new Justine, a new Pursewarden, a new Clea…. I mean that I must try and strip the opaque membrane which stands between me and the reality of their actions — and which I suppose is composed of my own limitations of vision and temperament. My envy of Pursewarden, my passion for Justine, my pity for Melissa. Distorting mirrors, all of them…. The way is through fact. I must record what more I know and attempt to render it comprehensible or plausible to myself, if necessary, by an act of the imagination. Or can facts be left to themselves? Can you say ‘he fell in love’ or ‘she fell in love’ without trying to divine its meaning, to set it in a context of plausibilities? ‘That bitch’ Pombal said once of Justine. ‘Elle a l’ air d’être bien chambrée!’ And of Melissa ‘Unepauvrepetite poulequelconque …’ He was right, perhaps, yet the true meaning of them resides elsewhere. Here, I hope, on this scribbled paper which I have woven, spider-like, from my inner life.

And Scobie? Well, he at least has the comprehensibility of a diagram — plain as a national anthem. He looks particularly pleased this morning for he has recently achieved apotheosis. After years as a Bimbashi in the Egyptian Police, in what he calls ‘the evening of his life’ he has just been appointed to … I hardly dare to write the words for I can see his shudder of secrecy, can see his glass eye rolling portentously round in its socket … the Secret Service. He is not alive any more, thank God, to read the words and tremble. Yes, the Ancient Mariner, the secret pirate of Tatwig Street, the man himself. How much the city misses him. (His use of the word ‘uncanny’!)….

Elsewhere I have recounted how I answered a mysterious summons to find myself in a room of splendid proportions with my erstwhile pirate friend facing me across a desk, whistling through his ill-fitting dentures. I think his new assignment was as much a puzzle to him as it was to me, his only confidant. It is true of course that he had been long in Egypt and knew Arabic well; but his career had been comparatively obscure. What could an intelligence agency hope to get out of him? More than this — what did he hope to get out of me? I had already explained in detail that the little circle which met every month to hear Balthazar expound the principles of the Cabbala had no connection with espionage; it was simply a group of hermetic students drawn by their interest in the matter of the lectures. Alexandria is a city of sects — and the shallowest inquiry would have revealed to him the existence of other groups akin to the one concerned with the hermetic philosophy which Balthazar addressed: Steinerites, Christian Scientists, Ouspenskyists, Adventists…. What was it that riveted attention particularly on Nessim, Justine, Balthazar, Capodistria, etc.? I could not tell, nor could he tell me.

‘They’re up to something’ he repeated weakly. ‘Cairo says so.’ Apparently, he did not even know who his own masters were. His work was invisibly dictated by a scrambler telephone, as far as I could understand. But whatever ‘Cairo’ was it paid him well: and if he had money to throw about on nonsensical investigations who was I to prevent him throwing it to me? I thought that my first few reports on Balthazar’s Cabal would successfully damp all interest in it — but no. They wanted more and again more.

And this very morning, the old sailor in the photograph was celebrating his new post and the increase of salary it carried by having a haircut in the upper town, at the most expensive of shops — Mnemjian’s.

I must not forget that this photograph also records a ‘Secret Rendezvous’; no wonder Scobie looks distraught. For he is surrounded by the very spies into whose activities it is necessary to inquire — not to mention a French diplomat who is widely rumoured to be head of the French Deuxième….

Normally Scobie would have found this too expensive an establishment to patronize, living as he did upon a tiny nautical pension and his exiguous Police salary. But now he is a great man.

He did not dare even to wink at me in the mirror as the hunchback, tactful as a diplomat, elaborated a full-scale haircut out of mere air — for Scobie’s glittering dome was very lightly fringed by the kind of fluff one sees on a duckling’s bottom, and he had of late years sacrificed the torpedo beard of a wintry sparseness.

‘I must say’ he is about to say throatily (in the presence of so many suspicious people we ‘spies’ must speak ‘normally’), ‘I must say, old man, you get a spiffing treatment here, Mnemjian really does understand.’ Clearing his throat, ‘The whole art.’ His voice became portentous in the presence of technical terms. ‘It’s all a question of Graduation — I had a close friend who told me, a barber in Bond Street. You simply got to graduate.’ Mnemjian thanked him in his pinched ventriloquist’s voice. ‘Not at all’ said the old man largely. ‘I know the wrinkles.’ Now he could wink at me. I winked back. We both looked away.

Released, he stood up, his bones creaking, and set his piratical jaw in a look of full-blooded health. He examined his reflection in the mirror with complacence. ‘Yes’ he said, giving a short authoritative nod, ‘it’ll do.’

‘Electric friction for scalp, sir?’

Scobie shook his head masterfully as he placed his red flower-pot tarbush on his skull. ‘It brings me out in goose pimples’ he said, and then, with a smirk, ‘I’ll nourish what’s left with arak.’ Mnemjian saluted this stroke of wit with a little gesture. We were free.

But he was really not elated at all. He drooped as we walked slowly down Chérif Pacha together towards the Grande Corniche. He struck moodily at his knee with the horsehair fly-swatter, puffing moodily at his much-mended briar. Thought. All he said with sudden petulance was ‘I can’t stand that Toto fellow. He’s an open nancy-boy. In my time we would have….’ He grumbled away into his skin for a long time and then petered into silence again.

‘What is it, Scobie?’ I said.

‘I’m troubled’ he admitted. ‘Really troubled.’

When he was in the upper town his walk and general bearing had an artificial swagger — it suggested a White Man at large, brooding upon problems peculiar to White Men — their Burden as they call it. To judge by Scobie, it hung heavy. His least gesture had a resounding artificiality, tapping his knees, sucking his lip, falling into brooding attitudes before shop windows. He gazed at the people around him as if from stilts. These gestures reminded me in a feeble way of the heroes of domestic English fiction who stand before a Tudor fireplace, impressively whacking their riding-boots with a bull’s pizzle.

By the time we had reached the outskirts of the Arab quarter, however, he had all but shed these mannerisms. He relaxed, tipped his tarbush up to mop his brow, and gazed around him with the affection of long familiarity. Here he belonged by adoption, here he was truly at home. He would defiantly take a drink from the leaden spout sticking out of a wall near the Goharri mosque (a public drinking fountain) though the White Man in him must have been aware that the water was far from safe to drink. He would pick a stick of sugar-cane off a stall as he passed, to gnaw it in the open street: or a sweet locust-bean. Here, everywhere, the cries of the open street greeted him and he responded radiantly.

‘Y’alla, effendi, Skob’

‘Naharak said, ya Skob’

‘Allah salimak.’

He would sigh and say ‘Dear people’; and ‘How I love the place you have no idea!’ dodging a liquid-eyed camel as it humped down the narrow street threatening to knock us down with its bulging sumpters of bercim, the wild clover which is used as fodder.

‘May your prosperity increase’

‘By your leave, my mother’

‘May your day be blessed’

‘Favour me, O sheik.’

Scobie walked here with the ease of a man who has come into his own estate, slowly, sumptuously, like an Arab.

Today we sat together for a while in the shade of the ancient mosque listening to the clicking of the palms and the hooting of sea-going liners in the invisible basin below.

‘I’ve just seen a directive’ said Scobie at last, in a sad withered little voice ‘about what they call a Peddyrast. It’s rather shaken me, old man. I don’t mind admitting it — I didn’t know the word. I had to look it up. At all costs, it says, we must exclude them. They are dangerous to the security of the net.’ I gave a laugh and for a moment the old man showed signs of wanting to respond with a weak giggle, but his depression overtook the impulse, to leave it buried, a small hollowness in those cherry-red cheeks. He puffed furiously at his pipe. ‘Peddyrast’ he repeated with scorn, and groped for his matchbox.

‘I don’t think they quite understand at Home’ he said sadly. ‘Now the Egyptians, they don’t give a damn about a man if he has Tendencies — provided he’s the Soul of Honour, like me.’ He meant it. ‘But now, old man, if I am to work for the … You Know What … I ought to tell them — what do you say?’

‘Don’t be a fool, Scobie.’

‘Well, I don’t know’ he said sadly. ‘I want to be honest with them. It isn’t that I cause any harm. I suppose one shouldn’t have Tendencies — any more than warts or a big nose. But what can I do?’

‘Surely at your age very little?’

‘Below the belt’ said the pirate with a flash of his old form. ‘Dirty. Cruel. Narky.’ He looked archly at me round his pipe and suddenly cheered up. He began one of those delightful rambling monologues — another chapter in the saga he had composed around his oldest friend, the by now mythical Toby Mannering. ‘Toby was once Driven Medical by his excesses — I think I told you. No? Well, he was. Driven Medical.’ He was obviously quoting and with relish. ‘Lord how he used to go it as a young man. Stretched the limit in beating the bounds. Finally he found himself under the Doctor, had to wear an Appliance.’ His voice rose by nearly an octave. ‘He went about in a leopard-skin muff when he had shore leave until the Merchant Navy rose in a body. He was put away for six months. Into a Home. They said “You’ll have to have Traction” — whatever that is. You could hear him scream all over Tewkesbury, so Toby says. They say they cure you but they don’t. They didn’t him at any rate. After a bit, they sent him back. Couldn’t do anything with him. He was afflicted with Dumb Insolence, they said. Poor Toby!’

He had fallen effortlessly asleep now, leaning back against the wall of the Mosque. (‘A cat-nap’ he used to say, ‘but always woken by the ninth wave.’ For how much longer, I wondered?) After a moment the ninth wave brought him back through the surf of his dreams to the beach. He gave a start and sat up. ‘What was I saying? Yes, about Toby. His father was an M.P. Very High Placed. Rich man’s son. Toby tried to go into the Church first. Said he felt The Call. I think it was just the costume, myself— he was a great amateur theatrical, was Toby. Then he lost his faith and slipped up and had a tragedy. Got run in. He said the Devil prompted him. “See he doesn’t do it again” says the Beak. “Not on Tooting Common, anyway.” They wanted to put him in chokey — they said he had a rare disease — cornucopia I think they called it. But luckily his father went to the Prime Minister and had the whole thing hushed up. It was lucky, old man, that at that time the whole Cabinet had Tendencies too. It was uncanny. The Prime Minister, even the Archbishop of Canterbury. They sympathized with poor Toby. It was lucky for him. After that, he got his master’s ticket and put to sea.’

Scobie was asleep once more; only to wake again after a few seconds with a histrionic start. ‘It was old Toby’ he went on, without a pause, though now crossing himself devoutly and gulping ‘who put me on to the Faith. One night when we were on watch together on the Meredith (fine old ship) he says to me: “Scurvy, there’s something you should know. Ever heard of the Virgin Mary?” I had of course, vaguely. I didn’t know what her duties were, so to speak….’

Once more he fell asleep and this time there issued from between his lips a small croaking snore. I carefully took his pipe from between his fingers and lit myself a cigarette. This appearance and disappearance into the simulacrum of death was somehow touching. These little visits paid to an eternity which he would soon be inhabiting, complete with the comfortable forms of Toby and Budgie, and a Virgin Mary with specified duties…. And to be obsessed by such problems at an age when, as far as I could judge, there was little beyond verbal boasting to make him a nuisance. (I was wrong — Scobie was indomitable.)

After a while he woke again from this deeper sleep, shook himself and rose, knuckling his eyes. We made our way together to the sordid purlieus of the town where he lived, in Tatwig Street, in a couple of tumbledown rooms. ‘And yet’ he said once more, carrying his chain of thought perfectly, ‘it’s all very well for you to say I shouldn’t tell them. But I wonder.’ (Here he paused to inhale the draught of cooking Arab bread from the doorway of a shop and the old man exclaimed ‘It smells like mother’s lap!’) His ambling walk kept pace with his deliberations. ‘You see the Egyptians are marvellous, old man. Kindly. They know me well. From some points of view, they might look like felons, old man, but felons in a state of grace, that’s what I always say. They make allowances for each other. Why, Nimrod Pasha himself said to me the other day “Peddyrasty is one thing — hashish quite another.” He’s serious, you see. Now I never smoke hashish when I’m on duty — that would be bad. Of course, from another point of view, the British couldn’t do anything to a man with an official position like me. But if the Gyppos once thought they were — well, critical about me — old man, I might lose both jobs, and both salaries. That’s what troubles me.’

We mounted the fly-blown staircase with its ragged rat-holes. ‘It smells a bit’ he agreed, ‘but you get quite used to it. It’s the mice. No, I’m not going to move. I’ve lived in this quarter for years now — years! Everybody knows me and likes me. And besides, old Abdul is only round the corner.’

He chuckled and stopped for breath on the first landing, taking off his flowerpot the better to mop his brow. Then he hung downwards, sagging as he always did when he was thinking seriously as if the very weight of the thought itself bore down upon him. He sighed. ‘The thing’ he said slowly, and with the air of a man who wishes at all costs to be explicit, to formulate an idea as clearly as lies within his power, ‘the thing is about Tendencies — you only realize it when you’re not a hot-blooded young sprig any more.’ He sighed again. ‘It’s the lack of tenderness, old man. It all depends on cunning somehow, you get lonely. Now Abdul is a true friend.’ He chuckled and cheered up once more. ‘I call him the Bul Bul Emir. I set him up in his business, just out of friendly affection. Bought him everything: his shop, his little wife. Never laid a finger on him nor ever could, because I love the man. I’m glad I did now, because though I’m getting on, I still have a true friend. I pop in every day to see them. It’s uncanny how happy it makes me. I really do enjoy their happiness, old man. They are like son and daughter to me, the poor perishing coons. I can’t hardly bear to hear them quarrel. It makes me anxious about their kids. I think Abdul is jealous of her, and not without cause, mark you. She looks flirty to me. But then, sex is so powerful in this heat — a spoonful goes a long way as we used to say about rum in the Merchant Navy. You lie and dream about it like ice-cream, sex, not rum. And these Moslem girls — old boy — they circumcise them. It’s cruel. Really cruel. It only makes them harp on the subject. I tried to get her to learn knitting or crewel-work, but she’s so stupid she didn’t understand. They made a joke of it. Not that I mind. I was only trying to help. Two hundred pounds it took me to set Abdul up — all my savings. But he’s doing well now — yes, very well.’

The monologue had had the effect of allowing him to muster his energies for the final assault. We addressed the last ten stairs at a comfortable pace and Scobie unlocked the door of his rooms. Originally he had only been able to rent one — but with his new salary he had rented the whole shabby floor.

The largest was the old Arab room which served as a bedroom and reception-room in one. It was furnished by an uncomfortable looking truckle bed and an old-fashioned cake-stand. A few joss-sticks, a police calendar, and Clea’s as yet unfinished portrait of the pirate stood upon the crumbling mantelpiece. Scobie switched on a single dusty electric light bulb — a recent innovation of which he was extremely proud (‘Paraffin gets in the food’) — and looked round him with unaffected pleasure. Then he tiptoed to the far corner. In the gloom I had at first overlooked die room’s other occupant: a brilliant green Amazonian parrot in a brass cage. It was at present shrouded in a dark cloth, and this the old man now removed with a faintly defensive air.

‘I was telling you about Toby’ he said ‘because last week he came through Alex on the Yokohama run. I got this from him — he had to sell — the damn bird caused such a riot. It’s a brilliant conversationalist, aren’t you Ron, eh? Crisp as a fart, aren’t you?’ The parrot gave a low whistle and ducked. ‘That’s the boy’ said Scobie with approval and turning to me added ‘I got Ron for a very keen price, yes, a very keen price. Shall I tell you why?’

Suddenly, inexplicably, he doubled up with laughter, nearly joining nose to knee and whizzing soundlessly like a small human top, to emerge at last with an equally soundless slap on his own thigh — a sudden paroxysm. ‘You’d never imagine the row Ron caused’ he said. ‘Toby brought the bird ashore. He knew it could talk, but not Arabic. By God. We were sitting at a café yarning (I haven’t seen Toby for five whole years) when Ron suddenly started. In Arabic. You know, he recited the Kalima, a very sacred, not to mention holy, text from the Koran. The Kalima. And at every other word, he gives a fart, didn’t you Ron?’ The parrot agreed with another whistle. ‘It’s so sacred, the Kalima’ explained Scobie gravely, ‘that the next thing was a raging crowd round us. It was lucky I knew what was going on. I knew that if a non-Moslem was caught reciting this particular text he was liable to Instant Circumcision!’ His eye flashed. ‘It was a pretty poor outlook for Toby to be circumcised like that while one was taking shore leave and I was worried. (I’m circumcised already.) However, my presence of mind didn’t desert me. He wanted to punch a few heads, but I restrained him. I was in police uniform you see, and that made it easier. I made a little speech to the crowd saying that I was going to take the infidel and this perishing bird into chokey to hand them over to the Parquet. That satisfied them. But there was no way of silencing Ron, even under his little veil, was there Ron? The little bastard recited the Kalima all the way back here. We had to run for it. My word, what an experience!’

He was changing out of his police rig as he talked, placing his tarbush on the rusty iron nail above his bed, above the crucifix in the little alcove where a stone jar of drinking-water also stood. He put on a frayed old blazer with tin buttons, and still mopping his head went on: ‘I must say — it was wonderful to see old Toby again after so long. He had to sell the bird, of course, after such a riot. Didn’t dare go through the dock area again with it. But now I’m doubtful, for I daren’t take it out of the room hardly for fear of what more it knows.’ He sighed. ‘Another good thing’ he went on ‘was the recipe Toby brought for Mock Whisky — ever heard of it? Nor had I. Better than Scotch and dirt cheap, old man. From now on I’m going to brew all my own drinks, thanks to Toby. Here. Look at this.’ He indicated a grubby bottle full of some fiery-looking liquid. ‘It’s home-made beer’ he said, ‘and jolly good too. I made three, but the other two exploded. I’m going to call it Plaza beer.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Are you going to sell it?’

‘Good Lord, no!’ said Scobie. ‘Just for home use.’ He rubbed his stomach reflectively and licked his lips. ‘Try a glass’ he said.

‘No thanks.’

The old man now consulted a huge watch and pursed his lips. ‘In a little while I must say an Ave Maria. I’ll have to push you out, old man. But just let’s have a look and see how the Mock Whisky is getting on for a moment, shall we?’

I was most curious to see how he was conducting these new experiments and willingly followed him out on to the landing again and into the shabby alcove which now housed a gaunt galvanized iron bath which he must have bought specially for these illicit purposes. It stood under a grimy closet window, and the shelves around it were crowded with the impedimenta of the new trade — a dozen empty beer bottles, two broken, and the huge chamberpot which Scobie always called ‘the Heirloom’; not to mention a tattered beach umbrella and a pair of goloshes. ‘What part do these play?’ I could not help asking, indicating the latter. ‘Do you tread the grapes or potatoes in them?’

Scobie took on an old-maidish, squinting-down-the-nose expression which always meant that levity on the topic under discussion was out of place. He listened keenly for a moment, as if to sounds of fermentation. Then he got down on one shaky knee and regarded the contents of the bath with a doubtful but intense eye. His glass eye gave him a more than mechanical expression as it stared into the rather tired-looking mixture with which the bath was brimming. He sniffed dispassionately and tutted once before rising again with creaking joints. ‘It doesn’t look as good as I hoped’ he admitted. ‘But give it time, it has to be given time.’ He tried some on his finger and rolled his glass eye. ‘It seems to have gone a bit turpid’ he admitted. ‘As if someone had peed in it.’ As Abdul and himself shared the only key to this illicit still I was able to look innocent.

‘Do you want to try it?’ he asked doubtfully.

‘Thank you, Scobie — no.’

‘Ah well’ he said philosophically, ‘maybe the copper sulphate wasn’t fresh. I had to order the rhubarb from Blighty. Forty pounds. That looked pretty tired when it got here, I don’t mind telling you. But I know the proportions are right because I went into it all thoroughly with young Toby before he left. It needs time, that’s what it needs.’

And made buoyant once more by the hope, he led the way back into the bedroom, whistling under his breath a few staves of the famous song which he only sang aloud when he was drunk on brandy. It went something like this:

‘I want

Someone to match my fancy

I want

Someone to match my style

I’ve been good for an awful long while

Now I’ll take her in my arms

Tum ti Tum Tum ti charms….’

Somewhere here the melody fell down a cliff and was lost to sight, though Scobie hummed out the stave and beat time with his finger.

He was sitting down on the bed now and staring at his shabby shoes.

Abruptly, without apparent premeditation (though he closed his eyes fast as if to shut the subject away out of sight forever) Scobie lay back on the bed, hands behind his head, and said:

‘Before you go, there’s a small confession I’d like to make to you, old man. Right?’

I sat down on the uncomfortable chair and nodded. ‘Right’ he said emphatically and drew a breath. ‘Well then: sometimes at the full moon, I’m Took. I come under An Influence.’

This was on the face of it a somewhat puzzling departure from accepted form, for the old man looked quite disturbed by his own revelation. He gobbled for a moment and then went on in a small humbled voice devoid of his customary swagger. ‘I don’t know what comes over me.’ I did not quite understand all this. ‘Do you mean you walk in your sleep, or what?’ He shook his head and gulped again. ‘Do you turn into a werewolf, Scobie?’ Once more he shook his head like a child upon the point of tears. ‘I slip on female duds and my Dolly Varden’ he said, and opened his eyes fully to stare pathetically at me.

‘You what?’ I said.

To my intense surprise he rose now and walked stiffly to a cupboard which he unlocked. Inside, hanging up, moth-eaten and unbrushed, was a suit of female clothes of ancient cut, and on a nail beside it a greasy old cloche hat which I took to be the so-called ‘Dolly Varden’. A pair of antediluvian court shoes with very high heels and long pointed toes completed this staggering outfit. He did not know how quite to respond to the laugh which I was now compelled to utter. He gave a weak giggle. ‘It’s silly, isn’t it?’ he said, still hovering somewhere on the edge of tears despite his smiling face, and still by his tone inviting sympathy in misfortune. ‘I don’t know what comes over me. And yet, you know, it’s always the old thrill….’

A sudden and characteristic change of mood came over him at the words: his disharmony, his discomfiture gave place to a new jauntiness. His look became arch now, not wistful, and crossing to the mirror before my astonished eyes, he placed the hat upon his bald head. In a second he replaced his own image with that of a little old tart, button-eyed and razor-nosed — a tart of the Waterloo Bridge epoch, a veritable Tuppeny Upright. Laughter and astonishment packed themselves into a huge parcel inside me, neither finding expression. ‘For God’s sake!’ I said at last. ‘You don’t go around like that, do you, Scobie?’

‘Only’ said Scobie, sitting helplessly down on the bed again and relapsing into a gloom which gave his funny little face an even more comical expression (he still wore the Dolly Varden), ‘only when the Influence comes over me. When I’m not fully Answerable, old man.’

He sat there looking crushed. I gave a low whistle of surprise which the parrot immediately copied. This was indeed serious. I understood now why the deliberations which had consumed him all morning had been so full of heart-searching. Obviously if one went around in a rig like that in the Arab quarter…. He must have been following my train of thought, for he said ‘It’s only sometimes when the Fleet’s in.’ Then he went on with a touch of self-righteousness: ‘Of course, if there was ever any trouble, I’d say I was in disguise. I am a policeman when you come to think of it. After all, even Lawrence of Arabia wore a nightshirt, didn’t he?’ I nodded. ‘But not a Dolly Varden’ I said. ‘You must admit, Scobie, it’s most original …’ and here the laughter overtook me.

Scobie watched me laugh, still sitting on the bed in that fantastic headpiece. ‘Take if off!’ I implored. He looked serious and preoccupied now, but made no motion. ‘Now you know all’ he said. ‘The best and the worst in the old skipper. Now what I was going to ——’

At this moment there came a knock at the landing door. With surprising presence of mind Scobie leaped spryly into the cupboard, locking himself noisily in. I went to the door. On the landing stood a servant with a pitcher full of some liquid which he said was for the Effendi Skob. I took it from him and got rid of him, before returning to the room and shouting to the old man who emerged once more — now completely himself, bareheaded and blazered.

‘That was a near shave’ he breathed. ‘What was it?’ I indicated the pitcher. ‘Oh, that — it’s for the Mock Whisky. Every three hours.’

‘Well,’ I said at last, still struggling with these new and indigestible revelations of temperament, ‘I must be going.’ I was still hovering explosively between amazement and laughter at the thought of Scobie’s second life at full moon — how had he managed to avoid a scandal all these years? — when he said: ‘Just a minute, old man. I only told you all this because I want you to do me a favour.’ His false eye rolled around earnestly now under the pressure of thought. He sagged again. ‘A thing like that could do me Untold Harm’ he said. ‘Untold Harm, old man.’

‘I should think it could.’

‘Old man,’ said Scobie, ‘I want you to confiscate my duds. It’s the only way of controlling the Influence.’

‘Confiscate them?’

‘Take them away. Lock them up. It’ll save me, old man. I know it will. The whim is too strong for me otherwise, when it comes.’

‘All right’ I said.

‘God bless you, son.’

Together we wrapped his full-moon regalia in some newspapers and tied the bundle up with string. His relief was tempered with doubt. ‘You won’t lose them?’ he said anxiously.

‘Give them to me’ I said firmly and he handed me the parcel meekly. As I went down the stairs he called after me to express relief and gratitude, adding the words: ‘I’ll say a little prayer for you, son.’ I walked back slowly through the dock-area with the parcel under my arm, wondering whether I would ever dare to confide this wonderful story to someone worth sharing it with.

The warships turned in their inky reflections — the forest of masts and rigging in the Commercial Port swayed softly among the mirror-images of the water: somewhere a ship’s radio was blaring out the latest jazz-hit to reach Alexandria:

Old Tiresias

No-one half so breezy as,

Half so free and easy as

Old Tiresias.

* * * * *

III

Somehow, then, the problem is just how to introject this new and disturbing material into (under?) the skin of the old without changing or irremediably damaging the contours of my subjects or the solution in which I see them move. The golden fish circling so languidly in their great bowl of light — they are hardly aware that their world, the field of their journeys, is a curved one….

The sinking sun which had emptied the harbour roads of all but the black silhouettes of the foreign warships had nevertheless left a flickering greyness — the play of light without colour or resonance upon the surface of a sea still dappled with sails. Dinghies racing for home moved about the floor of the inner harbour, scuttling in and out among the ships like mice among the great boots of primitive cottagers. The sprouting tier of guns on the Jean Bart moved slowly — tilted — and then settled back into brooding stillness, aimed at the rosy heart of the city whose highest minarets still gleamed gold in the last rays of the sunset. The flocks of spring pigeons glittered like confetti as they turned their wings to the light. (Fine writing!)

But the great panels of the brass-framed windows in the Yacht Club blazed like diamonds, throwing a brilliant light upon the snowy tables with their food, setting fire to the glasses and jewellery and eyes in a last uneasy conflagration before the heavy curtains would be drawn and the faces which had gathered to greet Mountolive took on the warm pallors of candle-light.

The triumphs of polity, the resources of tact, the warmth, the patience…. Profligacy and sentimentality … killing love by taking things easy … sleeping out a chagrin…. This was Alexandria, the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up her history. Listen.

Tony Umbada, Baldassaro Trivizani, Claude Amaril, Paul Capodistria, Dmitri Randidi, Onouphrios Papas, Count Banubula, Jacques de Guéry, Athena Trasha, Djamboulat Bey, Delphine de Francueil, General Cervoni, Ahmed Hassan Pacha, Pozzo di Borgo, Pierre Balbz, Gaston Phipps, Haddad Fahmy Amin, Mehmet Adm, Wilmot Pierrefeu, Toto de Brunel, Colonel Neguib, Dante Borromeo, Benedict Dangeau, Pia dei Tolomei, Gilda Ambron…. The poetry and history of commerce, the rhyme-schemes of the Levant which had swallowed Venice and Genoa. (Names which the passer-by may one day read upon the tombs in the cemetery.)

The conversation rose in a steamy cloud to envelop Mountolive whose personal triumph it was and who stood talking to Nessim, his host, with the gentle-mannered expression on his face which, like a lens, betrayed all the stylized diffidence of his perfect breeding. The two men indeed were much alike; only Nessim’s darkness was smooth, cleanly surfaced, and his eyes and hands restless. Despite a difference of age they were well matched — even to the tastes they shared, which the years had done nothing to diminish though they had hardly corresponded directly all the time Mount-olive had been away from Egypt. It had always been to Leila that he wrote, not to her sons. Nevertheless, once he had returned, they were much together and found they had as much to discuss as ever in the past. You would hear the sharp pang of their tennis racquets every spring afternoon on the Legation court at an hour when everyone normally slept. They rode in the desert together or sat for hours side by side, studying the stars, at the telescope which Justine had had installed in the Summer Palace. They painted and shot in company. Indeed, since Mountolive’s return they had become once more almost inseparables. Tonight the soft light touched them both with an equal distinction, yet softly enough to disguise the white hairs at Mountolive’s temples and the crow’s-feet around those thoughtful arbitrator’s eyes. By candle-light the two men seemed exactly of an age if indeed not of the same family.

A thousand faces whose reverberating expressions I do not understand (‘We are all racing under sealed handicaps’ says a character in Pursewarden’s book), and out of them all there is one only I am burning to see, the black stern face of Justine. I must learn to see even myself in a new context, after reading those cold cruel words of Balthazar. How does a man look when he is ‘in love’? (The words in English should be uttered in a low bleating tone.) Peccavi! Imbecile! There I stand in my only decent suit, whose kneecaps are bagged and shiny with age, gazing fondly and short-sightedly around me for a glimpse of the woman who…. What does it matter? I do not need a Keats to photograph me. I do not suppose I am uglier than anyone else or less pleasant; and certainly my vanity is of a very general order — for how have I never stopped to ask myself for a second why Justine should turn aside to bestow her favours on me?

What could I give her that she could not get elsewhere? Does she want my bookish talk and amateurish love-making — she with the whole bargain-basement of male Alexandria in her grasp? ‘A decoy!’ I find this very wounding to understand, to swallow, yet it has all the authority of curt fact. Moreover, it explains several things which have been for me up to now inexplicable — such as the legacy Pursewarden left me. It was his guilt, I think, for what he knew Justine was doing to Melissa: in ‘loving’ me. While she, for her part, was simply protecting him against the possible power of Nessim (how gentle and calm he looks in the candle-light). He once said with a small sigh ‘Nothing is easier to arrange in our city than a death or a disappearance.’

A thousand conversations, seeking out for each other like the tap-roots of trees for moisture — the hidden meaning of lives disguised in brilliant smiles, in hands pressed upon the eyes, in malice, in fevers and contents. (Justine now breakfasted silently surrounded by tall black footmen, and dined by candle-light in brilliant company. She had started from nothing — from the open street — and was now married to the city’s handsomest banker. How had all this come about? You would never be able to tell by watching that dark, graceful form with its untamed glances, the smile of the magnificent white teeth….). Yet one trite conversation can contain the germ of a whole life. Balthazar, for example, meeting Clea against a red brocade curtain, holding a glass of Pernod, could say: ‘Clea, I have something to tell you’; taking in as he spoke the warm gold of her hair and a skin honeyed almost to the tone of burnt sugar by sea-bathing in the warm spring sunshine. ‘What?’ Her candid eyes were as blue as corn-flowers and set in her head like precision-made objects of beauty — the life-work of a jeweller. ‘Speak, my dear.’ Black head of hair (he dyed it), lowered voice set in its customary sardonic croak, Balthazar said: ‘Your father came to see me. He is worried about an illicit relationship you are supposed to have formed with another woman. Wait — don’t speak, and don’t look hurt.’ For Clea looked now as if he were pressing upon a bruise, the sad grave mouth set in a childish expression, imploring no further penetration. ‘He says you are an innocent, a goose, and that Alexandria does not permit innocent people to….’

‘Please, Balthazar.’

‘I would not have spoken had I not been impressed by his genuine anguish — not about scandal: who cares for gossip? But he was worried lest you should be hurt.’

In a small compressed voice, like some packaged thought squeezed to a hundredth of its size by machinery, Clea said:

‘I have not been alone with Justine for months now. Do you understand? It ended when the painting ended. If you wish us to be friends you will never refer to this subject again’ smiling a little tremulously, for in the same breath Justine came sailing down upon them, smiling warmly, radiantly. (It is quite possible to love those whom you most wound.) She passed, turning in the candlelight of the room like some great sea-bird, and came at last to where I was standing. ‘I cannot come tonight’ she whispered. ‘Nessim wants me to stay at home.’ I can feel still the uncomprehending weight of my disappointment at the words. ‘You must’ I muttered. Should I have known that not ten minutes before she had said to Nessim, knowing he hated bridge: ‘Darling, can I go and play bridge with the Cervonis — do you need the car?’ It must have been one of those rare evenings when Pursewarden consented to meet her out in the desert — meetings to which she went unerringly, like a sleep-walker. Why? Why?

Balthazar at this moment is saying: ‘Your father said: “I cannot bear to watch it, and I do not know what to do. It is like watching a small child skipping near a powerful piece of unprotected machinery.”’ Tears came into Clea’s eyes and slowly vanished again as she sipped her drink. ‘It is over’ she said, turning her back upon the subject and upon Balthazar in one and the same motion. She turned her sullen mouth now to the discussion of meaningless matters with Count Banubula, who bowed and swung as gallantly as Scobie’s green parrot ducking on its perch. She was pleased to see that her beauty had a direct, clearly discernible effect upon him, like a shower of golden arrows. Presently, Justine herself passed again, and in passing caught Clea’s wrist. ‘How is it?’ said Clea, in the manner of one who asks after a sick child. Justine gave the shadow of a grimace and whispered dramatically: ‘Oh, Clea — it is very bad. What a terrible mistake. Nessim is wonderful — I should never have done it. I amfollowed everywhere.’They stared at each other sympathetically for a long moment. It was their first encounter for some time. (That afternoon, Pursewarden had written: ‘A few hasty and not entirely unloving words from my sickbed about this evening.’ He was not in bed but sitting at a café on the sea-front, smiling as he wrote.) Messages spoken and unspoken, crossing and interlacing, carrying the currents of our lives, the fears, dissimulations, the griefs. Justine was speaking now about her marriage which still exhibited to the outer world a clearness of shape and context — the plaster cast of a perfection which I myself had envied when first I met them both. ‘The marriage of true minds’ I thought; but where is the ‘magnificent two-headed animal’ to be found? When she first became aware of the terrible jealousy of Nessim, the jealousy of the spiritually impotent man, she had been appalled and terrified. She had fallen by mistake into a trap. (All this, like the fever-chart of a striken patient, Clea watched, purely out of friendship, with no desire to renew the love she felt for this dispersed unself-comprehending Jewess.)

Justine put the matter to herself another way, a much more primitive way, by thinking: up to now she had always judged her men by their smell. This was the first time ever that she had neglected to consult the sense. And Nessim had the odourless purity of the desert airs, the desert in summer, unconfiding and dry. Pure. How she hated purity! Afterwards? Yes, she was revolted by the little gold cross which nestled in the hair on his chest. He was a Copt — a Christian. This is the way women work in the privacy of their own minds. Yet out of shame at such thoughts she became doubly passionate and attentive to her husband, though even between kisses, in the depths of her mind, she longed only for the calm and peace of widowhood! Am I imagining this? I do not think so.

How had all this come about? To understand it is necessary to work backwards, through the great Interlinear which Balthazar has constructed around my manuscript, towards that point in time where the portrait which Clea was painting was interrupted by a kiss. It is strange to look at it now, the portrait, standing unfinished on the old-fashioned mantelpiece of the island house. ‘An idea had just come into her mind, but had not yet reached the lips.’ And then, softly, her lips fell where the painter’s wet brush should have fallen. Kisses and brush-strokes — I should be writing of poor Melissa!

How distasteful all this subject-matter is — what Pursewarden has called ‘the insipid kiss of familiars’; and how innocent! The black gloves she wore in the portrait left a small open space when they were buttoned up — the shape of a heart. And that innocent, ridiculous kiss only spoke admiration and pity for the things Justine was telling her about the loss of her child — the daughter which had been stolen from her while it was playing on the river-bank. ‘Her wrists, her small wrists. If you could have seen how beautiful and tame she was, a squirrel.’ In the hoarseness of the tone, in the sad eyes and the down-pointed mouth with a comma in each cheek. And holding out a hand with finger and thumb joined to describe the circuit of those small wrists. Clea took and kissed the heart in the black glove. She was really kissing the child, the mother. Out of this terrible sympathy her innocence projected the consuming shape of a sterile love. But I am going too fast. Moreover, how am I to make comprehensible scenes which I myself see only with such difficulty — these two women, the blonde and the bronze in a darkening studio at Saint Saba, among the rags and the paintpots and the warm gallery of portraits which lined the walls, Balthazar, Da Capo, even Nessim himself, Clea’s dearest friend? It is hard to compose them in a stable colour so that the outlines are not blurred.

Justine at this time … coming from nowhere, she had performed one trick regarded as clever by the provincials of Alexandria. She had married Arnauti, a foreigner, only to earn the contempt of society by letting him in the end divorce and abandon her. Of the fate of the child, few people knew or cared. She was not ‘in society’ as the saying goes…. For a time poverty forced her to do a little modelling at so many piastres an hour for the art-students of the Atelier. Clea, who knew her only by hearsay, passed through the long gallery one day when she was posing and, struck by the dark Alexandrian beauty of her face, engaged her for a portrait. That was how those long conversations grew up in the silences of the painter; for Clea liked her subjects to talk freely, provided they stayed still. It gave a submarine life to their features, and filled their looks with unconscious interpretations of thought — the true beauty in otherwise dead flesh.

Clea’s generous innocence — it needed something like that to see the emptiness in which Justine lived with her particular sorrows — factual illustrations merely of a mind at odds with itself: for we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own fingerprints. The gesture itself was simply a clumsy attempt to appropriate the mystery of true experience, true suffering — as by touching a holy man the supplicant hopes for a transference of the grace he lacks. The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another — to copy itself like the reflections of a moth in a looking-glass. That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been premeditated. So it proved! Clea’s own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forceps of its author. Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth, Justine’s ageless; her innocence was as defenceless as memory itself. Seeking and admiring only the composure of Justine’s sorrow she found herself left with all the bitter lye of an uninvited love.

She was ‘white of heart’, in the expressive Arabic phrase, and painting the darkness of Justine’s head and shoulders she suddenly felt as if, stroke by stroke, the brush itself had begun to imitate caresses she had neither foreseen nor even thought to permit. As she listened to that strong deep voice recounting these misfortunes, so desirable in that they belonged to the active living world of experience, she caught her breath between her teeth, trying now to think only of the unconscious signs of good breeding in her subject: hands still in the lap, voice low, the reserve which delineates true power. Yet even she, from her inexperience, could do little but pity Justine when she said things like ‘I am not much good, you know. I can only inflict sadness, Arnauti used to say. He brought me to my senses and taught me that nothing matters except pleasure — which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.’ Clea was touched by this because it seemed clear to her that Justine had never really experienced pleasure — one has to be generous for that. Egotism is a fortress in which the conscience desoi-même,like a corrosive, eats away everything. True pleasure is in giving, surely.

‘As for Arnauti, he nearly drove me mad with his inquisitions. What I lost as a wife I gained as a patient — his interest in what he called “my case” outweighed any love he might have had for me. And then losing the child made me hate him where before I had only seen a rather sensitive and kindly man. You have probably read his book Moeurs. Much of it is invented — mostly to satisfy his own vanity and get his own back on me for the way I wounded his pride in refusing to be “cured” — so-called. You can’t put a soul into splints. If you say to a Frenchman “I can’t make love to you unless I imagine a palm-tree,” he will go out and cut down the nearest palm-tree.’

Clea was too noble to love otherwise than passionately; and yet at the same time quite capable of loving someone to whom she spoke only once a year. The deep still river of her heart hoarded its images, ever reflecting them in the racing current, letting them sink deeper into memory than most of us can. Real innocence can do nothing that is trivial, and when it is allied to generosity of heart, the combination makes it the most vulnerable of qualities under heaven.

In this sudden self-consuming experience, comparable in its tension and ardour to those ridiculous passions which schoolgirls have so often for their mistresses — yet touched in by the fierce mature lines of nature (the demonic line-drawings of an expert love which Justine could always oppose as a response to those who faced her) — she felt really the growing-pains of old age: her flesh and spirit quailing before demands which it knows it cannot meet, which will tear it to rags. Inside herself she had the first stirrings of a sensation new to her: the sensation of a yolk inside her separating from the egg. These are the strange ways in which people grow up.

Poor dear, she was to go through the same ridiculous contortions as the rest of us — feeling her body like a bed of quick-lime clumsily slaked to burn away the corpse of the criminal it covered. The world of secret meetings, of impulses that brand one like an iron, of doubts — this suddenly descended upon her. So great was her confusion of mind that she would sit and stare at the metamorphosed Justine and try to remember what she really looked like on the other side of the transforming membrane, the cataract with which Aphrodite seals up the sick eyes of lovers, the thick, opaque form of a sacred sightlessness.

She would be in a fever all day until the appointed moment when her model met her. At four she stood before the closed door of the studio, seeing clearly through it to the corner where Justine already sat, turning over the pages of a Vogue and smoking as she waited, legs crossed. The idea crossed her mind. ‘I pray to God she has not come, is ill, has gone away. How eagerly I would welcome indifference!’ Surprised too, for these disgusts came from precisely the same quarters as the desire to hear once more that hoarse noble voice — they too arose only from the expectation of seeing her beloved once more. These polarities of feeling bewildered and frightened her by their suddenness.

Then sometimes she wished to go away simply in order to belong more fully to her familiar! Poor fool, she was not spared anything in the long catalogue of self-deceptions which constitute a love affair. She tried to fall back on other pleasures, to find that none existed. She knew that the heart wearies of monotony, that habit and despair are the bedfellows of love, and she waited patiently, as a very old woman might, for the flesh to outgrow its promptings, to deliver itself from an attachment which she now recognized was not of her seeking. Waited in vain. Each day she plunged deeper. Yet all this, at any rate, performed one valuable service for her, proving that relationships like these did not answer the needs of her nature. Just as a man knows inside himself from the first hour that he has married the wrong woman but that there is nothing to be done about it. She knew she was a woman at last and belonged to men — and this gave her misery a fugitive relief.

But the distortions of reality were deeply interesting to someone who recognized that for the artist in herself some confusions of sensibility were valuable. ‘Walking towards the studio she would suddenly feel herself becoming breathlessly insubstantial, as if she were a figure painted on canvas. Her breathing became painful. Then after a moment she was overtaken by a feeling of happiness and well-being so intense that she seemed to have become weightless. Only the weight of her shoes, it seemed, held her to the ground. At any moment she might fly off the earth’s surface, breaking through the membrane of gravity, unable to stop. This feeling was so piercing that she had to stop and hold on to the nearest wall and then to walk along it bent double like someone on the deck of a liner in a hurricane. This was itself succeeded by other disagreeable sensations — as of a hot clamp round her skull, pressing it, of the beating of wings in her ears. Half-dreaming in bed, suddenly horns rammed downwards into her brain, impaling her mind; in a brazen red glare she saw the bloodshot eyes of the mithraic animal. It was a cool night with soft pockets of chemical light in the Arab town. The Ginks were abroad with their long oiled plaits and tinselled clothes; the faces of black angels; the men-women of the suburbs.’ (I copy these words from the case history of a female mental patient who came under Balthazar’s professional care — a nervous breakdown due to ‘love’ — requited or unrequited who can say? Does it matter? The aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree, and this passage could serve not only for Clea but indeed for all of us.)

But it was not only of the past that Justine spoke but of a present which was weighing upon her full of decisions which must be taken. In a sense, everything that Clea felt was at this time meaningless to her. As a prostitute may be unaware that her client is a poet who will immortalize her in a sonnet she will never read, so Justine in pursuing these deeper sexual pleasures was unaware that they would mark Clea: enfeeble her in her power of giving undivided love — what she was most designed to give by temperament. Her youth, you see. And yet the wretched creature meant no harm. She was simply a victim of that Oriental desire to please, to make this golden friend of hers free of treasures which her own experience had gathered and which, in sum, were as yet meaningless to her. She gave everything, knowing the value of nothing, a true parvenue of the soul. To love (from any quarter) she could respond, but only with the worn felicities of friendship. Her body really meant nothing to her. It was a dupe. Her modesty was supreme. This sort of giving is really shocking because it is as simple as an Arab, without precociousness, unrefined as a drinking habit among peasants. It was born long before the idea of love was formed in the fragmented psyche of European man — the knowledge (or invention) of which was to make him the most vulnerable of creatures in the scale of being, subject to hungers which could only be killed by satiety, but never satisfied; which nourished a literature of affectation whose subject-matter would otherwise have belonged to religion — its true sphere of operation. How does one say these things?

Nor, in another scale of reference, is it of the slightest importance — that a woman disoriented by the vagaries of her feelings, tormented, inundated by frightening aspects of her own unrecognized selves, should like a soldier afraid of death, throw herself into the heart of the mêlée to wound those whom truly she most loved and most admired — Clea, myself, lastly Nessim. Some people are born to bring good and evil in greater measure than the rest of us — the unconscious carriers of diseases they cannot cure. I think perhaps we must study them, for it is possible that they promote creation in the very degree of the apparent corruption and confusion they spread or seek. I dare not say even now that she was stupid or unfeeling; only that she could not recognize what passed within herself (‘the camera obscura of the heart’), could not put a precise frame around the frightening image of her own meaninglessness in the world of ordinary action. The sort of abyss which seemed to lie around her was composed of one quality — a failure of value, a failure to attach meaning which kills joy — which is itself only the internal morality of a soul which has discovered the royal road to happiness, whose nakedness does not shame itself. It is easy for me to criticize now that I see a little further into the truth of her predicament and my own. She must, I know, have been bitterly ashamed of the trick she was playing on me and the danger into which she put me. Once at the Café El Bab where we were sitting over an arak, talking, she burst into tears and kissed my hands, saying: ‘You are a good man, really a good man. And I am so sorry.’ For what? For her tears? I had been speaking about Goethe. Fool! Imbecile! I thought I had perhaps moved her by the sensibility with which I expressed myself. I gave her presents. So had Clea, so did Clea now: and the strange thing was that for the first time her taste in choosing objects of vertu deserted this most gifted and sensitive of painters. Ear-rings and brooches of a commonness which was truly Alexandrian! I am at a loss to understand this phenomenon, unless to love is to become besotted…. Yes.

But then I don’t know; I am reminded of Balthazar’s dry marginal comment on the matter. ‘One is apt’ he writes ‘to take a high moral tone about these things — but in fact, who will criticize himself for reaching up to pluck an apple lying ripe upon a sun-warmed wall? Most women of Justine’s temperament and background would not have the courage to imitate her even if they were free to do so. Is it more or less expensive to the spirit to endure dreams and petit mal so that the physician will always find a hot forehead and a guilty air? I don’t know. It is hard to isolate a moral quality in the free act. And then again, all love-making to one less instructed than oneself has the added delicious thrill which comes from the consciousness of perverting, of pulling them down into the mud from which passions rise — together with poems and theories of God. It is wiser perhaps not to make a judgement.’

But outside all this, in the sphere of daily life, there were problems about which Justine herself needed reassurance. ‘I am astonished and a little horrified that Nessim whom I hardly know, has asked to marry me. Am I to laugh, dearest Clea, or be ashamed, or both?’ Clea in her innocence was delighted at the news for Nessim was her dearest friend and the thought of him bringing his dignity and gentleness to bear on the very real unhappiness of Justine’s life seemed suddenly illuminating — a solution to everything. When one invites rescue by the mess one creates around oneself, what better than that a knight should be riding by? Justine put her hands over her eyes and said with difficulty ‘For a moment my heart leapt up and I was about to shout “yes”; ah, Clea my dear, you will guess why. I need his riches to trace the child — really, somewhere in the length and breadth of Egypt it must be, suffering terribly, alone, perhaps ill-treated.’ She began to cry and then stopped abruptly, angrily. ‘In order to safeguard us both from what would be a disaster I said to Nessim “I could never love a man like you: I could never give you an instant’s happiness. Thank you and good-bye.”’

‘But are you sure?’

‘To use a man for his fortune, by God I’ll never.’

‘Justine, what do you want?’

‘First the child. Then to escape from the eyes of the world into some quiet corner where I can possess myself. There are whole parts of my character I do not understand. I need time. Today again Nessim has written to me. What can he want? He knows all about me.’

The thought crossed Clea’s mind: ‘The most dangerous thing in the world is a love founded on pity.’ But she dismissed it and allowed herself to see once more the image of this gentle, wise, undissimulating man breasting the torrent of Justine’s misfortunes and damming them up. Am I unjust in crediting her with another desire which such a solution would satisfy? (Namely, to be rid of Justine, free from the demands she made upon her heart and mind. She had stopped painting altogether.) The kindness of Nessim — the tall dark figure which drifted unresponsively around the corridors of society — needed some such task; how could a knight of the order born acquit himself if there were no castles and no desponding maidens weaving in them? Their preoccupations matched in everything — save the demand for love.

‘But the money is nothing’ she said; and here indeed she was speaking of what she knew to be precisely true of Nessim. He himself did not really care about the immense fortune which was his. But here one should add that he had already made a gesture which had touched and overwhelmed Justine. They met more than once, formally, like business partners, in the lounge of the Cecil Hotel to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger. This is the way of the city. We are mental people, and wordly, and have always made a clear distinction between the passional life and the life of the family. These distinctions are part of the whole complex of Mediterranean life, ancient and touchingly prosaic.

‘And lest an inequality of fortune should make your decision difficult’ said Nessim, flushing and lowering his head, ‘I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person — simply as a woman, Justine. This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone’s thoughts in the city, poisoning everything! Let us be free of it before deciding anything.’ He passed across the table a slim green cheque with the words ‘Three Thousand Pounds’ written on it. She stared at it for a long time with surprise but did not touch it. ‘It has not offended you’ he said hastily at last, stammering in his anxiety. ‘No’ she said. ‘It is like everything you do. Only what can I do about not loving you?’

‘You must, of course, never try to.’

‘Then what sort of life could we make?’

Nessim looked at her with hot shy eyes and then lowered his glance to the table, as if under a cruel rebuke. ‘Tell me’ she said after a silence. ‘Please tell me. I cannot use your fortune and your position and give you nothing in exchange, Nessim.’

‘If you would care to try’ he said gently, ‘we need not delude each other. Life isn’t very long. One owes it to oneself to try and find a means to happiness.’

‘Is it that you want to sleep with me?’ asked Justine suddenly: disgusted yet touched beyond measure by his tone. ‘You may. Yes. Oh! I would do anything for you, Nessim — anything.’

But he flinched and said: ‘I am speaking about an understanding in which friendship and knowledge can take the place of love until and if it comes as I hope. Of course I shall sleep with you — myself a lover, and you a friend. Who knows? In a year perhaps. All Alexandrian marriages are business ventures after all. My God, Justine, what a fool you are. Can’t you see that we might possibly need each other without ever fully realizing it? It’s worth trying. Everything may stand in the way. But I can’t get over the thought that in the whole city the woman I most need is you. There are any number a man may want, but to want is not to need. I may want others — you I need! I do not dare to say the same for you. How cruel life is, and how absurd.’ Nobody had said anything like that to her before — had offered her a partnership as coolly designed, as wholly pure in intention. It must be admired from this point of view. ‘You are not the sort of man to stake everything on a single throw at rouge et noir’ she said slowly. ‘Our bankers who are so brilliant with money are notoriously weak in the head when it comes to women.’ She put her hand upon his wrist.

‘You should have your doctor examine you, my dear. To take on a woman who has said that she can never love you — what sort of temerity is that? Ah, no!’

He did not say anything at all, recognizing that her words were really not addressed to him: they were part of a long internal argument with herself. How beautiful her disaffected face looked — chloroformed by its own simplicity: she simply could not believe that someone might value her for herself— if she had a self. He was indeed, he thought, like a gambler putting everything on the turn of a wheel. She was standing now upon the very edge of a decision, like a sleepwalker on a cliff: should she awake before she jumped, or let the dream continue? Being a woman, she still felt it necessary to pose conditions; to withdraw herself further into secrecy as this man encroached upon it with his steady beguiling gentleness. ‘Nessim’ she said, ‘wake up.’ And she shook him gently.

‘I am awake’ he said quietly.

Outside in the square with its palms nibbled by the sea-wind, a light rain was falling. It was the tenth Zu-el-Higga, the first day of Courban Bairam, and fragments of the great procession were assembling in their coloured robes, holding the great silk banners and censers, insignia of the religion they honoured, and chanting passages from the litany: litany of the forgotten Nubian race which every year makes its great resurrection at the Mosque of Nebi Daniel. The crowd was brilliant, spotted with primary colours. The air rippled with tambourines, while here and there in the lags of silence which fell over the shouts and chanting, there came the sudden jabbering of the long drums as their hide was slowly stiffened at the hissing braziers. Horses moaned and the gonfalons bellied like sails in the rain-starred afternoon. A cart filled with the prostitutes of the Arab town in coloured robes went by with shrill screams and shouts, and the singing of painted young men to the gnash of cymbals and scribbling of mandolines: the whole as gorgeous as a tropical animal.

‘Nessim’ she said foolishly. ‘On one sole condition — that we sleep together absolutely tonight.’ His features drew tight against his skull and he set his teeth tightly as he said angrily: ‘You should have some intelligence to go with your lack of breeding — where is it?’

‘I’m sorry’ seeing how deeply and suddenly she had annoyed him. ‘I felt in need of reassurance.’ He had become quite pale.

‘I proposed something so different’ he said, replacing the cheque in his wallet. ‘I am rather staggered by your lack of understanding. Of course we can sleep together if you wish to make it a condition. Let us take a room at the hotel here, now, this minute.’ He looked really splendid when he was wounded like this, and suddenly there stirred inside her the realization that his quietness was not weakness, and than an uncommon sort of sensibility underlay these confusing thoughts and deliberate words, perhaps not altogether good, either. ‘What could we prove to each other’ he went on more gently ‘by it or by its opposite: never making love?’ She saw now how hopelessly out of context her words had been. ‘I’m bitterly ashamed of my vulgarity.’ She said this without really meaning the words, as a concession to his world as much as to himself — a world which dealt in the refinements of manners she was as yet too coarse to enjoy, which could afford to cultivate emotions posées by taste. A world which could only be knocked off its feet when you were skin to skin with it, so to speak! No, she did not mean the words, for vulgar as the idea sounded, she knew that she was right by the terms of her intuition since the thing she proposed is really, for women, the vital touchstone to a man’s being; the knowledge, not of his qualities which can be analysed or inferred, but of the very flavour of his personality. Nothing except the act of physical love tells us this truth about one another. She bitterly regretted his unwisdom in denying her a concrete chance to see for herself what underlay his beauty and persuasion. Yet how could one insist?

‘Good’ he said, ‘for our marriage will be a delicate affair, and very much a question of manners, until——’

‘I’m sorry’ she said. ‘I really did not know how to treat honourably with you and avoid disappointing you.’

He kissed her lightly on the mouth as he stood up. ‘I must go first and get the permission of my mother, and tell my brother. I am terribly happy, even though now I am furious with you.’

They went out to the car together and Justine suddenly felt very weak, as if she had been carried far out of her depth and abandoned in mid-ocean. ‘I don’t know what more to say.’

‘Nothing. You must start living’ he said as the car began to draw away, and she felt as if she had received a smack across the mouth. She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate which she drank with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain. No, somewhere she was truly a woman.

Nessim took the lift up to his office, and sitting down at his desk wrote upon a card the following words: ‘My dearest Clea, Justine has agreed to marry me. I could never do this if I thought it would qualify or interfere in any way with either her love for you or mine….’

Then, appalled by the thought that whatever he might write to Clea might sound mawkish, he tore the note up and folded his arms. After a long moment of thought he picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria’s number. ‘Da Capo’ he said quietly. ‘You remember my plans for marrying Justine? All is well.’ He replaced the receiver slowly, as if it weighed a ton, and sat staring at his own reflection in the polished desk.

* * * * *

IV

It was now, having achieved the major task of persuasion, that his self-assurance fled and left him face to face with a sensation entirely new to him, namely an acute shyness, an acute unwillingness to face his mother directly, to confront her with his intentions. He himself was puzzled by it, for they had always been close together, their confidences linked by an affection too deep to need the interpretation of words. If he had ever been shy or awkward it was with his awkward brother, never with her. And now? It was not as if he even feared her disfavour — he knew she would fall in with his wishes as soon as they were spoken. What then inhibited him? He could not tell. Yet he flushed as he thought of her now, and passed the whole of that morning in restless automatic acts, picking up a novel only to lay it down, mixing a drink only to abandon it, starting to sketch and then abruptly dropping the charcoal to walk out into the garden of the great house, ill at ease. He had telephoned his office to say that he was indisposed and then, as always when he had told a lie, began to suffer in truth with an attack of indigestion.

Then he started to ask for the number of the old country house where Leila and Narouz lived, but changed his mind and asked the operator instead for the number of his garage. The car would be back, they told him, cleaned and greased by noon. He lay down and covered his face with his hands. Then he rang up Selim, his secretary, and told him to telephone to his brother and say that he was coming to Karm Abu Girg for the week-end. Heavens! what could be more normal? ‘You go on like a chambermaid who has got engaged’ he told himself hotly. Then for a moment he thought of taking someone with him to ease the strain of the meeting — Justine? Impossible. He picked up a novel of Pursewarden’s and came upon the phrase: ‘Love is like trench warfare — you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.’

The doorbell rang. Selim brought him some letters to sign and then went silently upstairs to pack his bag and briefcase. There were papers he must take for Narouz to see — papers about the lift machinery needed to drain and reclaim the desert which fringed the plantations. Business matters were a welcome drug.

The Hosnani fortunes were deployed in two directions, separated into two spheres of responsibility, and each brother had his own. Nessim controlled the banking house and its ancillaries all over the Mediterranean, while Narouz lived the life of a Coptic squire, never stirring from Karm Abu Girg where the Hosnani lands marched with the fringe of the desert, gradually eating into it, expropriating it year by year, spreading their squares of cultivation — carob and melon and corn — and pumping out the salt which poisoned it.

‘The car is here’ said the hawk-faced secretary as he returned. ‘Am I to drive you, sir?’ Nessim shook his head and dismissed him quietly, before crossing the garden once more, chin in hand. He paused by the lily pond to study the fish — those expensive toys of the ancient Japanese Emperors, survivals from an age of luxury, which he had imported at such cost, only to find them gradually dying off of some unknown illness — homesickness, perhaps? Pursewarden spent hours watching them. He said that they helped him to think about art!

The great silver car stood at the door with the ignition key in the dashboard. He got in thoughtfully and drove slowly across the town, examining its parks and squares and buildings with a serene eye, but deliberately dawdling, irresolutely, emptying his mind by an act of will every time the thought of his destination came upon him. When he reached the sea he turned at last down the shining Corniche in the sunlight to watch the smooth sea and cloudless air for a moment, the car almost at a standstill. Then suddenly he changed gear and began to travel along the sea-shore at a more resolute pace. He was going home.

Soon he turned inland, leaving the town with its palms crackling in the spring wind and turning towards the barren network of faults and dried-out lake-beds where the metalled road gave place to the brown earth tracks along embankments lined with black swamps and fringed by barbed reeds and a cross-hatching of sweet-corn plantations. The dust came up between his wheels and filled the air of the saloon, coating everything in a fine-grained pollen. The windscreen became gradually snowed-up and he switched on the wipers to keep it clear.

Following little winding lanes which he knew by heart he came, after more than an hour, to the edge of a spit flanked by bluer water and left the car in the shadow of a tumbledown house, the remains perhaps of some ancient customs-shed built in the days when river traffic plied between Damietta and the Gulf: now drying up day by day, withering and cracking under the brazen Egyptian sky, forgotten by its keepers.

He locked the car carefully and followed a narrow path across a holding of poverty-stricken beanrows and dusty melons, fringed with ragged and noisy Indian corn, to come out upon a landing-stage where an aged ferryman awaited him in a ramshackle boat. At once he saw the horses waiting upon the other side, and the foreshortened figure of Narouz beside them. He threw up an excited arm in an awkward gesture of pleasure as he saw Nessim. Nessim stepped into the boat with beating heart.

‘Narouz!’ The two brothers, so unlike in physique and looks, embraced with feeling which was qualified in Nessim by the silent agony of a shyness new to him.

The younger brother, shorter and more squarely built than Nessim, wore a blue French peasant’s blouse open at the throat and with the sleeves rolled back, exposing arms and hands of great power covered by curly dark hair. An old Italian cartridge bandolier hung down upon his haunches. The ends of his baggy Turkish trousers with an old-fashioned drawstring, were stuffed into crumpled old jackboots of soft leather. He ducked, excitedly, awkwardly, into his brother’s arms and out again, like a boxer from a clinch. But when he raised his head to look at him, you saw at once what it was that had ruled Narouz’ life like a dark star. His upper lip was split literally from the spur of the nose — as if by some terrific punch: it was a hare-lip which had not been caught up and basted in time. It exposed the ends of a white tooth and ended in two little pink tongues of flesh in the centre of his upper lip which were always wet. His dark hair grew down low and curly, like a heifer’s, on to his brow. His eyes were splendid: of a blueness and innocence that made them almost like Clea’s: indeed his whole ugliness took splendour from them. He had grown a ragged and uneven moustache over his upper lip, as someone will train ivy over an ugly wall — but the scar showed through wherever the hair was thin: and his short, unsatisfactory beard too was a poor disguise: looked simply as if he had remained unshaven for a week. It had no shape of its own and confused the outlines of his taurine neck and high cheekbones. He had a curious hissing shy laugh which he always pointed downward into the ground to hide his lip. The whole sum of his movements was ungainly — arms and legs somewhat curved and hairy as a spider — but they gave off a sensation of overwhelming strength held rigidly under control. His voice was deep and thrilling and held something of the magic of a woman’s contralto.

Whenever possible they tried to have servants or friends with them when they met — to temper their shyness; and so today Narouz had brought Ali, his factor, with the horses to meet the ferry. The old servant with the cropped ears took a pinch of dust from the ground before Nessim’s feet and pressed it to his forehead before extending his hand for a handshake, and then diffidently partook of the embrace Nessim offered him — as someone he had loved from his childhood onwards. Narouz was charmed by his brother’s easy, comradely but feeling gesture — and he laughed downwards into the ground with pleasure.

‘And Leila?’ said Nessim, in a low voice, raising his fingers to his temple for a moment as he did so.

‘Is well’ said Narouz in the tone that springs from a freshly rosined bow. ‘This past two months. Praise God.’

Their mother sometimes went through periods of mental instability lasting for weeks, always to recover again. It was a quiet surrender of the real world that surprised no one any longer, for she herself now knew when such an attack was coming on and would make preparations for it. At such times, she spent all day in the little hut at the end of the rose-garden, reading and writing, mostly the long letters which Mountolive read with such tenderness in Japan or Finland or Peru. With only the cobra for company, she waited until the influence of the afreet or spirit was spent. This habit had lasted for many years now, since the death of their father and her illness, and neither son took any account of these departures from the normal life of the great house. ‘Leila is well in her mind!’ said Narouz again in that thrilling voice. ‘So happy too that Mountolive is posted back. She looks years younger.’

‘I understand.’

The two brothers now mounted their horses and started slowly along the network of embankments and causeways which led them over the lake with its panels of cultivation. Nessim always loved this ride for it evoked his real childhood — so much richer in variety than those few years spent in the house at Aboukir where Leila had moved for a while after their father’s death. ‘All your new lift pumps should be here next month’ he shouted, and Narouz chuckled with pleasure; but with another part of his mind he allowed the soft black earthworks of the river with its precarious tracks separating the squares of cultivated soil to lead him steadily back to the remembered treasures of his childhood here. For this was really Egypt — a Copt’s Egypt — while the white city, as if in some dusty spectrum, was filled with the troubling and alien images of lands foreign to it — the intimations of Greece, Syria, Tunis.

It was a fine day and shallow draught boats were coursing among the beanfields towards the river tributaries, with their long curved spines of mast, lateen rigs bent like bows in the freshets. Somewhere a boatman sang and kept time on a finger-drum, his voice mixing with the sighing of sakkias and the distant village hangings of wheelwrights and carpenters manufacturing disc-wheels for wagons or the shallow-bladed ploughs which worked the alluvial riverside holdings.

Brilliant kingfishers hunted the shallows like thunderbolts, their wings slurring, while here and there the small brown owls, having forgotten the night habits of their kind, flew between the banks, or nestled together in songless couples among the trees.

The fields had begun to spread away on either side of the little cavalcade now, green and scented with their rich crops of bercim and beanrows, though the road still obstinately followed along the banks of the river so that their reflections rode with them. Here and there were hamlets whose houses of unbaked mud wore flat roofs made brilliant now by stacks of Indian corn which yellowed them. They passed an occasional line of camels moving down towards a ferry, or a herd of great black gamoose — Egyptian buffalo — dipping their shiny noses in the rich ooze and filth of some backwater, flicking the flies from their papery skins with lead tails. Their great curved horns belonged to forgotten frescoes.

It was strange now how slowly life moved here, he reflected with pleasure as he moved towards the Hosnani property — women churning butter in goatskins suspended from bamboo tripods or walking in single file down to the river with their pots. Men in robes of blue cotton at the waterwheels, singing, matrons swathed from crown to ankle in the light dusty black robes which custom demanded, blue-beaded against the evil eye. And then all the primeval courtesies of the road exchanged between passers-by to which Narouz responded in his plangent voice, sounding as if it belonged to the language as much as to the place. ‘Naharak Said!’ he cried cheerfully, or ‘Said Embarak!’ as the wayfarers smiled and greeted them. ‘May your day be blessed’ thought Nessim in remembered translation as he smiled and nodded, overcome at the splendour of these old-fashioned greetings one never heard except in the Arab quarter of the city; ‘may today be as blessed as yesterday.’

He turned and said ‘Narouz’ and his brother rode up beside him tenderly, saying ‘Have you seen my whip?’ Laughing downwards again, his tooth showing through the rent in his lip. He carried a splendid hippopotamus-hide whip, loosely coiled at his saddle-bow. ‘I found the perfect one — after three years. Sheik Bedawi sent it down from Assuan. Do you know?’ He turned those brilliant blue eyes upwards for a moment to stare into the dark eyes of his brother with intense joy. ‘It is better than a pistol, at any rate a .99’ he said, thrilled as a child. ‘I’ve been practising hard with it — do you want to see?’

Without waiting for an answer he tucked his head down and rode forward at a trot to where some dozen chickens were scratching at the bare ground near a herdsman’s cot. A frightened rooster running faster than the others took off under his horse’s hooves: Nessim reined back to watch. Narouz’ arm shot up, the long lash uncurled slowly on the air and then went rigid with a sudden dull welt of sound, a sullen thwack, and laughing, the rider dismounted to pick up the mutilated creature, still warm and palpitating, its wings half-severed from its body, its head smashed. He brought it back to Nessim in triumph, wiping his hand casually on his baggy trousers. ‘What do you think?’ Nessim gripped and admired the great whip while his brother threw the dead fowl to his factor, still laughing himself, and so slowly remounted. They rode side by side now, as if the spell upon their communication were broken, and Nessim talked of the new machinery which had been ordered and heard of Narouz’ battle against drought and sand-drift. In such neutral subjects they could lose themselves and become natural. United most closely by such topics, they were like two blind people in love who can only express themselves through touch: the subject of their hands.

The holdings became richer now, planted out with tamarisk and carob, though here and there they passed the remains of properties abandoned by owners too poor or too lazy to contend with the deserts, which encircled the fertile strip on three sides. Old houses, fallen now into desuetude, abandoned and overgrown, stared out across the water with unframed windows and shattered doors. Their gates, half-smothered in bougainvillaea, opened rustily into gardens of wild and unkempt beauty where marble fountains and rotted statuary still testified to a glory since departed. On either side of them one could glimpse the well-wooded lands which formed the edge, the outer perimeter of the family estates — palm, acacia and sycamore which still offered the precarious purchase to life which without shade and water perished, reverted to the desert. Indeed, one was conscious of the desert here although one could not see it — melodramatically tasteless as a communion wafer.

Here an old island with a ruined palace; there tortuous paths and channels of running water where the slim bird-forms of river-craft moved about their task of loading tibbin (corn); they were nearing the village now. A bridge rose high upon mudbanks, crowned by a magnificent grove of palms, with a row of coloured boats waiting for the boom to lift. Here on the rise one glimpsed for a moment the blue magnetic haze of a desert horizon lying beyond this hoarded strip of plenty, of green plantations and water.

Round a corner they came upon a knot of villagers waiting for them who set up cries of ‘What honour to the village!’ and ‘You bring blessings!’ walking beside them as they rode smiling onwards. Some advanced on them, the notables, catching a hand to kiss, and some even kissing Nessim’s stirrup-irons. So they passed through the village against its patch of emerald water and dominated by the graceful fig-shaped minaret, and the cluster of dazzling beehive domes which distinguished the Coptic church of their forefathers. From here, the road turned back again across the fields to the great house within its weather-stained outer walls, ruined and crumbling with damp in many places, and in others covered by such graffiti as the superstitious leave to charm the afreet — black talismanic handprints, or the legend ‘B’ism’illah ma’sha’llah’ (may God avert evil). It was for these pious villagers that its tenants had raised on the corners of the wall tiny wooden windmills in the shape of men with revolving arms, to scare the afreet away. This was the manor-house of Karm Abu Girg which belonged to them.

Emin, the chief steward, was waiting at the outer gate with the usual gruff greetings which custom demanded, surrounded by a group of shy boys to hold the horses and help their riders dismount.

The great folding doors of the courtyard with their pistol bolts and inscribed panels were set back so that they could walk directly into the courtyard against which the house itself was built, tilted upon two levels — the ceremonial first floor looking down sideways along the vaulted arches below — a courtyard with its granaries and reception-rooms, storehouses and stables. Nessim did not cross the threshold before examining once more the faded but still visible cartoons which decorated the wall at the right-hand side of it — and which depicted in a series of almost hieroglyphic signs the sacred journey he had made to bathe in the Jordan: a horse, a motorcar, a ship, an aeroplane, all crudely represented. He muttered a pious text, and the little group of servants smiled with satisfaction, understanding by this that his long residence in the city had not made him forget country ways. He never forgot to do this. It was like a man showing his passport. And Narouz too was grateful for the tact such a gesture showed — which not only endeared his brother to the dependants of the house, but also strengthened his own position with them as the ruling master of it.