The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

On the other side of the lintel, a similar set of pictures showed that he also, the younger brother, had made the pious pilgrimage which is incumbent upon every Copt of religious principles.

The main gateway was flanked on each side by a pigeon-tower — those clumsy columns built of earthen pitchers pasted together anyhow with mud-cement: which are characteristic of country houses in Egypt and which supplied the choicest dish for the country squire’s table. A cloud of its inhabitants fluttered and crooned all day over the barrel-vaulted court. Here all was activity: the negro night-watchman, the ghaffirs, factors, stewards came forth one by one to salute the eldest brother, the heir. He was given a bowl of wine and a nosegay of flowers while Narouz stood by proudly smiling.

Then they went at ceremonial pace through the gallery with its windows of many-coloured glass which for a brief moment transformed them into harlequins, and then out into the rose garden with its ragged and unkempt arbour and winding paths towards the little summer-house where Leila sat reading, unveiled. Narouz called her name once to warn her as they neared the house, adding ‘Guess who has come!’ The woman quickly replaced her veil and turned her wise dark eyes towards the sunlit door saying: ‘The boy did not bring the milk again. I wish you would tell him, Narouz. His mind is salt. The snake must be fed regularly or it becomes ill-tempered.’ And then the voice, swerving like a bird in mid-air, foundered and fell to a rich melodious near-sob on the name ‘Nessim’. And this she repeated twice as they embraced with such trembling tenderness that Narouz laughed, swallowing, and tasted both the joy of his brother’s love for Leila and his own bitterness in realizing that he, Nessim, was her favourite — the beautiful son. He was not jealous of Nessim; only heartsick at the melody in his mother’s voice — the tone she had never used in speaking to him. It had always been so.

‘I will speak to the boy’ he said, and looked about him for signs of the snake. Egyptians regard the snake as too lucky a visitant to a house to kill and so tempt ill-luck, and Leila’s long self-communing in the little summer-house would not have been complete without this indolent cobra which had learned to drink milk from a saucer like a cat.

Still holding hands they sat down together and Nessim started to speak of political matters with those dark, clever, youthful eyes looking steadily into his. From time to time, Leila nodded vigorously, with a determined air, while the younger son watched them both hungrily, with a heavy admiration at the concise way Nessim abbreviated and expressed his ideas — the fruit of a long public life. Narouz felt these abstract words fall dully upon his ear, fraught with meanings he only half-guessed, and though he knew that they concerned him as much as anyone, they seemed to him to belong to some rarer world inhabited by sophists or mathematicians — creatures who would forge and give utterance to the vague longings and incoherent desires he felt forming inside him whenever Egypt was mentioned or the family estates. He sucked the knuckle of his forefinger, and sat beside them, listening, looking first at his mother and then back to Nessim.

‘And now Mountolive is coming back’ concluded Nessim, ‘and for the first time what we are trying to do will be understood. Surely he will help us, if it is possible? He understands.’

The name of Mountolive struck two ways. The woman lowered her eyes to her own white hands which lay before her upon a half-finished letter — eyes so brilliantly made up with kohl and antimony that to discern tears in them would have been difficult. Yet there were none. They sparkled only with affection. Was she thinking of those long letters which she had so faithfully written during the whole period of their separation? But Narouz felt a sudden stirring of jealousy in his brain at the mention of the name, under which, interred as if under a tombstone, he had hidden memories of a different epoch — of the young secretary of the High Commission whom his mother had — (mentally he never used the word ‘loved’ but left a blank space in his thoughts where it should stand); moreover of the sick husband in the wheelchair who had watched so uncomplainingly. Narouz’ soul vibrated with his father’s passion when Mountolive’s name, like a note of music, was struck. He swallowed and stirred uneasily now as he watched his mother tremblingly fold a letter and slide it into an envelope. ‘Can we trust him?’ she asked Nessim. She would have struck him over the mouth if he had answered ‘No.’ She simply wanted to hear him pronounce the name again. Her question was a prompting, nothing more. He kissed her hand, and Narouz greedily admired his courtier’s smiling air as he replied ‘If we cannot, who can we trust?’

As a girl, Leila had been both beautiful and rich. The daughter of a blue-stocking, convent-bred and very much in society, she had been among the first Coptic women to abandon the veil and to start to take up the study of medicine against her parents’ will. But an early marriage to a man very much older than herself had put an end to these excursions into the world of scope where her abilities might have given her a foot-hold. The temper of Egyptian life too was hostile to the freedom of women, and she had resigned a career in favour of a husband she very much admired and the uneventful round of country life. Yet somehow, under it all, the fire had burned on. She had kept friends and interests, had visited Europe every few years, had subscribed to periodicals in four languages. Her mind had been formed by solitude, enriched by books which she could only discuss in letters to friends in remote places, could only read in the privacy of the harim. Then came the advent of Mountolive and the death of her husband. She stood free and breathing upon the brink of a new world with no charge upon her but two growing sons. For a year she had hesitated between Paris and London as a capital of residence, and while she hesitated, all was lost. Her beauty, of which until then she had taken no particular account, as is the way with the beautiful, had been suddenly ravaged by a confluent smallpox which melted down those lovely features and left her only the magnificent eyes of an Egyptian sibyl. The black hideous veil which so long had seemed to her a symbol of servitude became now a refuge in which she could hide the ruins of a beauty which had been considered so outstanding in her youth. She had not the heart now to parade this new melted face through the capitals of Europe, to brave the silent condolences of friends who might remember her as she had once been. Turned back upon her tracks so summarily, she had decided to stay on and end her life in the family estates in such seclusion as might be permitted to her. Her only outlet now would be in letter-writing and in reading — her only care her sons. All the unsteadiness of her passions was canalized into this narrow field. A whole world of relations had to be mastered and she turned her resolution to it like a man. Ill-health, loneliness, boredom — she faced them one by one and overcame them — living here in retirement like a dethroned Empress, feeding her snake and writing her interminable letters which were full of the liveliness and sparkle of a life which now the veil masked and which could escape only through those still youthful dark eyes.

She was now never seen in society and had become something of a legend amongst those who remembered her in the past, and who indeed had once nicknamed her the ‘dark swallow’. Now she sat all day at a rough deal table, writing in that tall thoughtful handwriting, dipping her quill into a golden inkpot. Her letters had become her very life, and in the writing of them she had begun to suffer fromt hat curious sense of distorted reality which writers have when they are dealing with real people; in the years of writing to Mountolive, for example, she had so to speak re-invented him so successfully that he existed for her now not so much as a real human being but as a character out of her own imagination. She had even almost forgotten what he looked like, what to expect of his physical presence, and when his telegram came to say that he expected to be in Egypt again within a few months, she felt at first nothing but irritation that he should intrude, bodily as it were, upon the picture projected by her imagination. ‘I shall not see him’ she muttered at first, angrily; and only then did she start to tremble and cover her ravaged face with her hands.

‘Mountolive will want to see you’ said Nessim, at last, as the conversation veered round in his direction again. ‘When may I bring him? The Legation is moving up to summer quarters soon, so he will be in Alexandria all the time.’

‘He must wait until I am ready’ she said, once more feeling the anger stir in her at the intrusion of this beloved figment. ‘After all these years.’ And then she asked with a pathetic lustful eagerness, ‘Is he old now — is he grey? Is his leg all right? Can he walk? That ski-ing fall in Austria….’

To all this Narouz listened with cocked head and sullen heavy heart: he could follow the feeling in her voice as one follows a line of music.

‘He is younger than ever’ said Nessim, ‘hasn’t aged by a day’: and to his surprise she took his hand, and putting it to her cheek she said brokenly ‘Oh — you are horrible, both of you. Go. Leave me alone now. I have letters to write.’

She permitted no mirrors in the harim since the illness which had deprived her of her self-esteem; but privately in a gold-backed pocket-mirror, she touched and pencilled her eyes in secret — her remaining treasure — practising different make-ups on them, practising different glances and matching them to different remarks — trying to give what was left of her looks a vocabulary as large as her lively mind. She was like a man struck suddenly blind learning to spell, with the only member left him, his hands.

Now the two men walked back into the old house, with its cool but dusty rooms whose walls were hung with ancient carpets and embroidered mats, and crowded with gigantic carcasses of furniture long since outmoded — a sort of Ottoman Buhl such as one sees in the old houses of Egypt. Nessim’s heartstrings were tugged by the memory of its ugliness, its old-fashioned Second Empire pieces and its jealously guarded routines. The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said ‘Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether.’ These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion. Even the primitive sanitary arrangements — there were no bathrooms — seemed to him somehow in keeping with the character of things, though he loved hot water. Narouz himself slept naked winter and summer. He washed in the courtyard — a servant threw water over him from a pitcher. Indoors, he usually wore an old blue cloak and Turkish slippers. He smoked tobacco too in a narguileh the length of a musket.

While the elder brother unpacked his clothes, Narouz sat on the end of the bed studying the papers which filled the briefcase, musing with a quiet intentness, for they related to the machinery with the help of which he proposed to keep up and extend his attack on the dead sand. In the back of his mind he could see an army of trees and shrubs marching steadily forward into the emptiness — carob and olive, vine and jujube, pistachio, peach and apricot, spreading around them the green colours of quickness in those tenantless areas of dust choked with sea-salt. He looked almost lustfully upon the pictures of equipment in the shiny brochures Nessim had brought him, lovingly touching them with his finger, hearing in his imagination the suck and swell of sweet water through pumps gradually expressing the dead salts from the ground and quickening it to nourish the sipping roots of his trees. Gebel Maryut, Abusir — his mind winged away like a swallow across the dunes into the Nitrian desert itself — mentally conquering it.

‘The desert’ said Narouz. ‘By the way, will you ride out with me to the tents of Abu Kar tomorrow? I have been promised an Arab and I want to break it myself. It would make a pleasant excursion.’ Nessim was at once delighted at the prospect. ‘Yes’ he said. ‘But early’ said Narouz, ‘and we can pass the olive plantation for you to see what progress we’re making. Will you? Please do!’ He squeezed his arm. ‘Since we started with the Tunisian chimlali we haven’t had a single casualty. Oh, Nessim! I wish you stayed here. Your place is here.’

Nessim as always was beginning to wish the same. That night they dined in the old-fashioned way — so different from the impertinent luxury of Alexandrian forms — each taking his napkin from the table and proceeding to the yard for the elaborate hand-washing ceremony which preceded a meal in the country. Two servants poured for them as they stood side by side, washing their fingers with yellow soap, and rinsed them off with orange-water. Then to the table where their only cutlery was a wooden spoon each for dealing with soup — otherwise they broke the flat thin cakes of the country to dip into the dishes of cooked meats. Leila had always dined alone in the women’s quarters, and retired to bed early so that the two brothers were left alone to their repast. They ate in leisurely fashion, with long pauses between the courses, and Narouz acted host, placing choice morsels upon Nessim’s plate and breaking up the fowl and the turkey with his strong fingers the better to serve his guest. At last, when sweetmeats and fruit had been served, they returned once more to where the waiting servants stood and washed their hands again.

In the interval, the table had been cleared of dishes and set back to make room for the old-fashioned divans to pass through the room and out on to the balcony. Smoking materials had been set out — the long-barrelled narguilehs with Narouz’ favourite tobacco and a silver dish of sweets. Here they sat together for a while in silence to drink their coffee. Nessim had kicked off his slippers and drawn his legs up under him: he sat with his chin in his hand wondering how he could impart his news, the marriage which nibbled at the edge of his mind: and whether he should be frank about his motives in choosing for a wife a woman who was of a different faith from his own. The night was hot and still, and the scent of magnolia blossom came up to the balcony in little drifts and eddies of air which made the candles flutter and dance; he was gnawed by irresolution.

In such a mood every promise of distraction offered relief, and he was pleased when Narouz suggested that the village singer should be called to play for them, a custom which they had so often enjoyed as youths. There is nothing more appropriate to the heavy silence of the Egyptian night than the childish poignance of the kemengeh’s note. Narouz clapped his hands and despatched a message and presently the old man came from the servant’s quarters where he dined each night on the charity of the house, walking with the slow and submissive step of extreme old age and approaching blindness. The sounding-board of his small viol was made from half a coconut. Narouz sprang up and settled him upon a cushion at the end of the balcony. There came footsteps in the courtyard and a familiar voice, that of the old schoolmaster Mohammed Shebab, who climbed the stairs, smiling and wrinkled, to clasp Narouz’ hand. He had the bright hairy face of a monkey and wore, as usual, an immaculate dark suit with a rose in his button-hole. He was something of a dandy and an epicure and these visits to the great house were his only distraction, living as he did for the greater part of the year buried in the depths of the delta; he had brought the old treasured narguileh mouthpiece which he had owned for a quarter of a century. He was delighted to hear some music and listened with emotion to the wild quasidas that the old man sang — songs of the Arab canon full of the wild heart-sickness of the desert. The old voice, crumpled here and there like a fragile leaf, rose and fell upon the night; tracing the quavering melodic line of the songs as if it were following the ancient highways of half-obliterated thoughts and feelings. The little viol scribbled its complaints upon the text reaching back into their childhood. And now suddenly the singer burst into the passionate pilgrim song which expresses so marvellously the Moslem’s longing for Mecca and his adoration of the Prophet — and the melody fluttered inside the brothers’ hearts, imprisoned like a bird with beating wings. Narouz, though a Copt, was repeating ‘All-ah, All-ah!’ in a rapture of praise.

‘Enough, enough’ cried Nessim at last. ‘If we are to be up early, we should sleep early, don’t you think?’

Narouz sprang up too, and still acting the host, called for lights and water and walked before him to the guest-room. Here he waited until Nessim had washed and undressed and climbed into the creaking old-fashioned bed before bidding him good night. As he stood in the doorway, Nessim said impulsively: ‘Narouz — I’ve something to tell you.’ And then, overcome once more with shyness, added: ‘But it will keep until tomorrow. We shall be alone, shan’t we?’ Narouz nodded and smiled. ‘The desert is such torture for them that I always send them back at the fringe, the servants.’

‘Yes.’ Nessim well knew that Egyptians believe the desert to be an emptiness populated entirely by the spirits of demons and other grotesque visitants from Eblis, the Moslem Satan.

Nessim slept and awoke to find his brother, fully dressed, standing beside his bed with coffee and cigarettes. ‘It’s time’ he said. ‘I suppose in Alexandria you sleep late….’

‘No’ said Nessim, ‘strangely enough I am usually at my office by eight.’

‘Eight! Oh! my poor brother’ said Narouz mockingly, and helped him to dress. The horses were waiting and together they rode out upon a dawn with a thick bluish mist rising from the lake. Crisp air, inclining to frost — but already the sun was beginning to soak into the upper air and dry up the dew upon the minaret of the mosque.

Narouz led now, down winding ways, along the tortuous bridle paths, and across embankments, quite unerringly, for the whole land existed in his mind like the most detailed map by a master cartographer. He carried it always in his head like a battle-plan, knowing the age of every tree, the poundage of every well’s water, the drift of sand to an inch. He was possessed by it.

Slowly they made a circuit of the great plantation, soberly assessing progress and discussing plans for the next offensive when the new machinery should be installed. And then, presently when they had come to a lonely spot by the river, screened on all sides by reeds, Narouz said ‘Wait a second….’ and dismounted, taking as he did so the old leather game-bag from his shoulders. ‘Something to hide’ he said, smiling downwards shyly. Nessim watched him idly as he turned the bag over to tip its contents into the dank waters of the river. But he was not prepared to see a shrunken human head, lips drawn back over yellow teeth, eyes squinting inwards upon each other, roll out of the bag and sink slowly out of sight into the green depths beneath. ‘What the devil’s that?’ he asked, and Narouz gave his little hissing titter at the ground and replied ‘Abdel-Kader — head of.’ He knelt down and started washing the bag out in the water, moving it vigorously to and fro, and then with a gesture turned it inside out as one might turn a sleeve and returned to his horse. Nessim was thinking deeply. ‘So you had to do it at last’ he said. ‘I was afraid you might.’

Narouz turned his brilliant eyes upon his brother for a moment and said seriously: ‘More troubles with Bedouin labour could have cost us a thousand trees next year. It was too much of a risk to take. Besides, he was going to poison me.’

He said no more and they rode on in silence until they reached the thinning edges of cultivation — the front line so to speak where the battle was actually being joined at present — a long ragged territory like the edges of a wound. Along the whole length of it infiltration from the arable land on the one side and the desert drainage on the other, both charged with the rotten salts, had poisoned the ground and made it the image of desolation.

Here only giant reeds and bulrushes grew or an occasional thorn bush. No fish could live in the brackish water. Birds shunned it. It lay in the stagnant belt of its own foul air, weird, obsessive and utterly silent — the point at which the desert and the sown met in a death-embrace. They rode now among towering rushes whose stems were bleached and salt-encrusted, glittering in the sun. The horses gasped and scrambled through the dead water which splashed upon them, crystallizing into spots of salt wherever it fell; pools of slime were covered with a crust of salt through which their plunging hooves broke, releasing horrible odours from the black mud beneath and sudden swarms of small stinging flies and mosquitoes. But Narouz looked about him with interest even here, his eyes alight, for he had already mentally planted this waste with carobs and green shrubs — conquered it. But they both held their breath and did not speak as they traversed this last mephitic barrier and the long patches of wrinkled mummy-like soil to which it gave place. Then at last they were on the edge of the desert and they paused in shadow while Narouz fished in his clothes for the little stick of blue billiard-marker’s chalk. They rubbed a little chalk under each of their eyelids with a finger against the glare — as they had always done, even as children; and each tied a cloth around his head in Bedouin fashion.

And then: the first pure draughts of desert air, and the nakedness of space, pure as a theorem, stretching away into the sky drenched in all its own silence and majesty, untenanted except by such figures as the imagination of man has invented to people landscapes which are inimical to his passions and whose purity flays the mind.

Narouz gave a shout and the horses, suddenly awoken and filled with a sense of new freedom and space around them, started their peculiar tearing plunging gallop across the dunes, manes and tassels tossing, saddles creaking. They raced like this for many minutes, Nessim giggling with excitement and joy. It was so long since he had ridden at this wild gallop.

But they held it, completing a slow arc eastwards across scrubby land where wild flowers bloomed and butterflies tippled amongst the waste of dunes and the dingy tenacious specimens of plant-life. Their hooves rattled across shingle floors, through stone valleys with great sandstone needles and chines of rosy shale filling in the known horizons. Nessim was busy with his memories of those youthful nights camped out here under a sky hoary with stars, in a booming tent (whose frosted guy-ropes glittered like brilliants) pitched under Vega, the whole desert spread around them like an empty room. How did one come to forget the greatest of one’s experiences? It was all lying there like a piano that one could play but which one had somehow forgotten to touch for years. He was irradiated by the visions of his inner eye and followed Narouz blindly. He saw them in all that immensity — two spots like pigeons flying in an empty sky.

They halted for a short rest in the shadow of a great rock — a purple oasis of darkness — panting and happy. ‘If we put up a desert wolf’ said Narouz ‘I’ll run it down with my kurbash,’ and he caressed the great whip lovingly, running it through his fingers.

When they set off again, Narouz started a slow tacking path, questing about for the ancient caravan route — the masrab which would take them to the Quasur el Atash (Castles of the Thirsty) where the Sheik’s men were due to meet them before noon. Once Nessim too had known these highways by heart — the smugglers’ roads which had been used for centuries by the caravans which plied between Algiers and Mecca — the ‘bountiful highways’ which steered the fortunes of men through the wilderness of the desert, taking spices and stuffs from one part of Africa to another or affording to the pious their only means of reaching the Holy City. He was suddenly jealous of his brother’s familiarity with the desert they had once equally owned. He copied him eagerly.

Presently Narouz gave a hoarse shout and pointed and in a little while they came upon the masrab — a highway of camel-tracks, deeply worn in some places into solid rock, but running in a wavy series, parallel from horizon to horizon. And here once more the younger brother set the pace. His blue shirt was now stained violet at the armpits. ‘Nearly there’ he cried, and out of the trembling pearly edges of the sky there swam slowly a high cluster of reddish basalt blocks, carved into the vague semblance (like a face in the fire) of a sphinx tortured by thirst; and there, gibbering in the dark shade of a rock, the little party waited to conduct them to the Sheik’s tents — four tall lean men, made of brown paper, whose voices cracked at the edges of meaning with thirst, and whose laughter was like fury unleashed. To them they rode — into the embrace of arms like dry sticks and the thorny clicking of an unfamiliar Arabic in which Narouz did all the talking and explaining.

Nessim waited, feeling suddenly like a European, city-bred, a visitor: for the little party carried with them all the feeling of the tight inbred Arab world — its formal courtesies and feuds — its primitiveness. He surprised himself by seeking in his own mind the memory of a painting by Bonnard or a poem by Blake — as a thirsty man might grope at a spring for water. In such a way might a traveller present himself to some rude mountain clan, admiring their bunioned feet and coarse hairy legs, but grateful too that the sum of European culture was not expressed by their life-hating, unpleasure-loving strength. Here he suddenly lost his brother, parted company with him, for Narouz had plunged into the life of these Arabian herdsmen with the same intensity as he plunged into the life of his land, his trees. The great corded muscles in his hairy body were tense with pride, for he, a city-bred Alexandrian — almost a despised Nasrany — could out-shoot, out-talk and out-gallop any of them. On him whose mettle they knew they kept a speculative aboriginal eye; the gentle Nessim they had seen in many guises before, his well-kept hands betrayed a city gentleman. But they were polite.

A knowledge of forms only was necessary now, not insight, for these delightful desert folk were automata; thinking of Mountolive Nessim smiled suddenly and wondered where the British had found the substance of their myths about the desert Arab. The fierce banality of their lives was so narrow, so regulated. If they stirred one at all it was as the bagpipe can, without expressing anything above the level of the primitive. He watched his brother handle them, simply from a knowledge of their forms of behaviour, as a showman handles dancing fleas. Poor souls! He felt the power and resource of his city-bred intelligence stir in him.

They all rode now in a compact group to the Sheik’s tents, down long ribbed inclines of sand, through mirages of pastures which only the rain clouds imagined, until they came there, to the little circle of tents, manhood’s skies of hide, invented by men whose childish memories were so fearful they had had perforce to invent a narrower heaven in which to contain the germ of the race; in this little cone of hide the first child was born, the first privacy of the human kiss invented…. Nessim wished bitterly that he could paint as well as Clea. Absurd thoughts, and out of place.

But the Sheik’s tents were extensive, covering nearly two thousand square feet with a tent-cloth woven of goat-hair in broad stitches of black, green, maroon and white. Long tassels hung down from the seams, playing in the wind.

The Sheik and his sons, like a gallery of playing cards, awaited them with the conventional greetings to which Narouz at least knew every response. The Sheik himself conducted them to a tent saying ‘This house is your house; do as you please. We are your servants.’ And behind him pressed the water-carriers to bathe their hands and feet and faces — the latter now somewhat dry and blistered by the journey. They rested for at least an hour, for the heat of the day was at full, in that brown darkness. Narouz lay snoring upon the cushions with arms and legs outspread while Nessim dozed fitfully, awakening from time to time to watch him — the effortless progress of sleep which physical surrender to action always brings. He brooded upon his brother’s ugliness — the magnificent set of white teeth showing through the pink rent in his upper lip. From time to time, too, as they rested, the headmen of the tribe called noiselessly, taking off their shoes at the entrance of the tent, to enter and kiss Nessim’s hand. Each uttered the single word of welcome ‘Mahubbah’ in a whisper.

It was late in the afternoon when Narouz woke and calling for water doused his body down, asking at the same time for a change of clothes which were at once brought to him by the Sheik’s eldest son. He strode out into the heat of the sand saying: ‘Now for the colt. It may take a couple of hours? You won’t mind? We’ll be back a bit late, eh?’ Cushions had been set for them in the shade and here Nessim was glad to recline and watch his brother moving quickly across the dazzle of sand towards a group of colts which had been driven up for him to examine.

They played gracefully and innocently, the tossing of their heads and manes seeming to him ‘like the surf of the June sea’ as the proverb has it. Narouz stopped keenly as he neared them, watching. Then he shouted something and a man raced out to him with a bridle and bit. ‘The white one’ he cried hoarsely and the Sheik’s sons shouted a response which Nessim did not catch. Narouz turned again, and softly with a queer ducking discretion, slipped in among the young creatures and almost before one could think was astride a white colt after having bridled it with a single almost invisible gesture.

The mythical creature stood quite still, its eyes wide and lustrous as if fully to comprehend this tremendous new intelligence of a rider upon its back, then a slow shudder rippled through its flesh — the tides of the panic which always greets such a collision of human and animal worlds. Horse and rider stood as if posing for a statue, buried in thought.

Now the animal suddenly gave a low whistling cry of fear, shook itself and completed a dozen curious arching jumps, stiffly as a mechanical toy, coming down savagely on its forelegs each time with the downthrust. This did not dislodge Narouz who only leaned forward and growled something in its ear that drove it frantic for it now set off at a ragged plunging tossing canter, turning and curvetting and ducking. They made a slow irregular circle round the tents until at last they came back to where the crowd of Arabs stood at the doorway of the main tent, watching silently. And now the poor creature, as if aware that some great portion of its real life — its childhood perhaps — was irrevocably over, gave another low whistling groan and broke suddenly into the long tireless flying gallop of its breed, aimed like a shooting-star to pierce the very sky, and whirled away across the dunes with its rider secured to it by the powerful scissors of his legs — firm as a figure held by ringbolts — diminishing rapidly in size until both were lost to sight. A great cry of approval went up from the tents and Nessim accepted, besides the curd cheese and coffee, the compliments which were his brother’s due.

Two hours later Narouz brought her back, glistening with sweat, dejected, staggering, with only enough fight in her to blow dejectedly and stamp, conquered. But he himself was deliriously exhausted, dazed as if he had ridden through an oven, while his bloodshot eyes and drawn twitching face testified to the severity of the fight. The endearments he uttered to the horse came from between parched and cracked lips. But he was happy underneath it all — indeed radiant — as he croaked for water and begged leave of half an hour’s rest before they should set out once more on the homeward journey. Nothing could finally tire that powerful body — not even the orgasm he had experienced in long savage battle. But closing his eyes now as he felt the water pouring over his head, he saw again the dark bleeding sun which shimmered behind their lids, image of fatigue, and felt the desert glare parching and cracking the water on his very skin. His mind was a jumble of sharp stabbing colours and apprehensions — as if the whole sensory apparatus had melted in the heat like a colour-box, fusing thought and wish and desire. He was light-headed with joy and felt as unsubstantial as a rainbow. Yet in less than half an hour he was ready for the journey back.

They set off with a different escort this time across the inclining rays of sunlight which threw their rose and purple shadows into the sockets of the dunes. They made good time to the Quasur el Atash. Narouz had made arrangements for the white colt to be delivered him later in the week by the Chief’s sons, and he rode at ease now, occasionally singing a stave or two of a song. Darkness fell as they reached the Castles of the Thirsty and having said good-bye to their hosts set off once more across the desert.

They rode slowly at ease, watching the brindled waning moon come up on a silence broken only by the sudden stammer of their horses’ hooves on a shingle bed, or the far-away ululations of jackals, and now, quite suddenly, Nessim found the barrier lifted and was able to say: ‘Narouz, I am going to be married. I want you to tell Leila for me. I don’t know why but I feel shy about it.’

For a minute Narouz felt himself turned to ice — a figure in a coat of mail; he seemed to sway in his saddle as with a delight so forced and hollow that it made his voice snap off short he crabbed out the words: ‘To Clea, Nessim? To Clea?’ feeling the blood come rushing back to his ticking nerves when his brother shook his head and stared curiously at him. ‘No. Why? To Arnauti’s ex-wife’ replied Nessim with a controlled, a classical precision of utterance. They rode on with creaking saddles and Narouz, who was now grinning to himself with relief, cried ‘I am so happy, Nessim! At last! You will be happy and have children.’

But here Nessim’s mortal shyness overcame him again and he told Narouz all that he had learned about Justine and about the loss of her child, adding: ‘She does not love me now, and does not pretend to: but who knows? If I can get her child back and give her some peace of mind and security, anything is possible.’ He added after a moment ‘Don’t you think?’ not because he wished for an opinion on the matter but simply to bridge the silence which poured in between them like a drifting dune. ‘As for the child, it is difficult. The Parquet have investigated as best they could — and what little evidence they have points to Magzub (the Inspired One); there was a festival in the town that evening and he was there. He has been several times accused of kidnapping children but the case has always been dropped for lack of evidence.’ Narouz pricked up his ears and bristled like a wolf. ‘You mean the hypnotist?’ Nessim said thoughtfully: ‘I have sent to offer him a large sum of money — very large indeed — for what I want to know. Do you see?’ Narouz shook his head doubtfully and picked at his short beard. ‘He is the one who is mad’ he said. ‘He used to come to St Damiana every year. But strange-mad. Zein-el-Abdin. He is holy too.’

‘That is the one’ said Nessim; and as if struck by an afterthought Narouz reined both horses and embraced him, uttering the conventional congratulations in the family tongue. Nessim smiled and said: ‘You will tell Leila? Please, my brother.’

‘Of course.’

‘After I have gone?’

‘Of course.’

With the release of this tension and Narouz’ ready compliance Nessim suddenly felt a load lifted from his mind. And correspondingly he suddenly felt very tired and on the point of sleep. They travelled briskly but without haste and it was towards midnight when they came once more within sight of the desert’s edge. Here the horses put up a startled hare and Narouz made an attempt to ride it down with his whip but he missed it in the half-darkness.

‘It is very good news’ he cried on returning to Nessim’s side, as if the little gallop across the moonlit dunes had given him all the time and detachment he needed to come to a considered opinion. ‘Will you bring her to us next week — to Leila? I think I must have met her but cannot remember. Very dark? “A firefly’s light in darkness for such eyes” as the song goes?’ He laughed his downward laugh.

Nessim yawned sleepily. ‘Ach! my bones ache. That is what I get for living in Alexandria. Narouz, before I fall asleep there was one other thing I meant to ask you. I have not seen Pursewarden. The meetings?’

Narouz drew a hissing inward breath and turned his bright eyes to his brother, saying ‘Yes. Very well. The next one is to be at the mulid of St Damiana, in the desert.’ He flexed the great muscles of his shoulders. ‘The whole ten families are coming — can you believe it?’

‘You will be careful’ said his brother ‘to see that everything is done privately and there are no leaks.’

‘Of course!’ he cried.

‘I mean’ said Nessim ‘that in the early stages this should not have a political character. It must grow slowly with the understanding of the matter. Eh? I do not think, for example, it is necessary for you to actually speak to them, but rather to discuss. We can’t risk. You see, it is not only the British.’

Narouz jaunted a leg impatiently and picked his teeth. He thought of Mountolive and sighed.

‘It is also the French — and they are at cross-purposes. If we are to use them both….’

‘I know, I know’ said Narouz impatiently. Nessim looked at him keenly. ‘Attend’ he said sharply, ‘for much depends on your understanding just how far we can go at this stage.’

His reproof crushed Narouz. He flushed and joined his hands together as he looked at his brother. ‘I do’ he said in a low hoarse voice. Nessim at once felt ashamed of himself and took his arm. He went on in his low confiding tone.

‘You see, there are mysterious leaks from time to time. Old Cohen, for example, the furrier who died last month. He was working for the French in Syria. On his return, the Egyptians knew all about his mission. How? Nobody knows. Among our friends we certainly have enemies — in Alexandria itself. Do you see?’

‘I see.’

The next morning it was time for Nessim to return and the two brothers rode out across the fields at a leisurely pace to the point of rendezvous at the ferry. ‘Why do you never come into the town?’ said Nessim. ‘Come with me today. There’s a ball at the Randidis’. You’d enjoy it as a change.’ Narouz as always wore a hang-dog expression when anyone suggested an excursion into the city. ‘I shall come at Carnival’ he said slowly, looking at the ground, and his brother laughed and touched his arm. ‘I knew you’d say that! Always, once a year at Carnival. I wonder why!’

But he knew; Narouz’ mortal shyness about his hare-lip had driven him into a seclusion almost as unbroken as that of his mother. Only the black domino of the carnival balls permitted him to disguise the face he had come to loathe so much that he could no longer bear to see it even in a shaving-mirror. At the carnival ball he felt free. And yet there was another and indeed unexpected reason — a passion for Clea which had lasted for years now; for a Clea to whom he had never spoken, and indeed only twice seen when she came down with Nessim to ride on the estate. This was a secret which could not have been dragged out of him under torture, but to every carnival dance he came and drifted about in the crowd hoping vaguely that he might by accident meet this young woman whose name he had never uttered aloud to anyone until that day.

(He did not know that Clea loathed the carnival season and spent the time quietly drawing and reading in her studio.)

They parted now with a warm embrace and Nessim’s car scribbled its pennants of dust across the warm air of the fields, eager to regain the coast road once more. A battleship in the basin was firing a twenty-one gun salute, in honour perhaps of some Egyptian dignitary, and the explosions appeared to make the clouds of pearl which always overhung the harbour in spring, tremble and change colour. The sea was high today, and four fishing-boats tacked furiously towards the town harbour with their catch. Nessim stopped only once, to buy himself a carnation for his buttonhole from the flower-vendor on the corner of Saad Zagloul. Then he went to his office, pausing to have his shoe-shine on the way up. The city had never seemed more beautiful to him. Sitting at his desk he thought of Leila and then of Justine. What would his mother have to say about his decision?

Narouz walked out to the summer-house that morning to discharge his mission; but first he picked a mass of blooms from the red and yellow roses with which to refill the two great vases which stood on either side of his father’s portrait. His mother was asleep at her desk but the noise he made lifting the latch woke her at once. The snake hissed drowsily and then lowered its head to the ground once more.

‘Bless you, Narouz’ she said as she saw the flowers and rose at once to empty her vases. As they started to trim and arrange the new blooms, Narouz broke the news of his brother’s marriage. His mother stood quite still for a long time, undisturbed but serious as if she were consulting her own inmost thoughts and emotions. At last she said, more to herself than anyone, ‘Why not?’ repeating the phrase once or twice as if testing its pitch.

Then she bit her thumb and turning to her younger son said ‘But if she is an adventuress, after his money, I won’t have it. I shall take steps to have her done away with. He needs my permission anyhow.’

Narouz found this overwhelmingly funny and gave an appreciative laugh. She took his hairy arm between her fingers. ‘I will’ she said.

‘Please.’

‘I swear it.’

He laughed now until he showed the pink roof of his mouth. But she remained abstracted, still listening to an inner monologue. Absently she patted his arm as he laughed and whispered ‘Hush’; and then after a long pause she said, as if surprised by her own thoughts. ‘The strange thing is, I mean it.’

‘And you can’t count on me, eh?’ he said, still laughing but with the germ of seriousness in his words. ‘You can’t trust me to watch over my own brother’s honour.’ He was still swollen up toad-like by the laughter, though his expression had now become serious. ‘My God’ she thought, ‘how ugly he is.’ And her fingers went to the black veil, pressing through it to the rough cicatrices in her own complexion, touching them fiercely as if to smooth them out.

‘My good Narouz’ she said, almost tearfully, and ran her fingers through his hair; the wonderful poetry of the Arabic stirred and soothed him in one. ‘My honeycomb, my dove, my good Narouz. Tell him yes, with my embrace. Tell him yes.’

He stood still, trembling like a colt, and drinking in the music of her voice and the rare caresses of that warm and capable hand.

‘But tell him he must bring her here to us.’

‘I will.’

‘Tell him today.’

And he walked with his queer jerky sawing stride to the telephone in the old house. His mother sat at her dusty table and repeated twice in a low puzzled tone: ‘Why should Nessim choose a Jewess?’

V

So much have I reconstructed from the labyrinth of notes which Balthazar has left me. ‘To imagine is not necessarily to invent’ he says elsewhere, ‘nor dares one make a claim for omniscience in interpreting people’s actions. One assumes that they have grown out of their feelings as leaves grow out of a branch. But can one work backwards, deducing the one form from the other? Perhaps a writer could if he were sufficiently brave to cement these apparent gaps in our actions with interpretations of his own to bind them together? What was going on in Nessim’s mind? This is really a question for you to put to yourself.

‘Or in Justine’s for that matter? One really doesn’t know; all I can say is that their esteem for each other grew in inverse ratio to their regard — for there never by common consent was any love between them as I have shown you. Perhaps it is as well. But in all the long discussions I had with them separately, I could not find the key to a relationship which failed signally — one could see it daily sinking as land sinks, as the level of a lake might sink, and not know why. The surface colouring was brilliantly executed and so perfect as to deceive most observers like yourself, for example. Nor do I share Leila’s view — who never liked Justine. I sat beside her at the presentation which Narouz organized at the great mulid of Abu Girg which falls towards Easter every year. Justine had by then renounced Judaism to become a Copt in obedience to Nessim’s wish, and as he could only marry her privately since she had already once been married, Narouz had to be content with a party which would present her to the great house and its dependants whose lives he was always anxious to cement into the family pattern.

‘For four days then a huge encampment of tents and marquees grew up around the house — carpets and chandeliers and brilliant decorations. Alexandria was stripped bare of hothouse flowers and not less of its great social figures who made the somewhat mocking journey down to Abu Girg (nothing excites so much mocking amusement in the city as a fashionable wedding) to pay their respects and congratulate Leila. Local mudirs and sheiks, peasants innumerable, dignitaries from near and far had flocked in to be entertained — while the Bedouin, whose tribal grounds fringed the estate, gave magnificent displays of horsemanship, galloping round and round the house firing their guns — for all the world as if Justine were a young bride — a virgin. Imagine the smiles of Athena Trasha, of the Cervonis! And old Abu Kar himself rode up the steps of the house on his white Arab and into the very reception-rooms with a bowl of flowers.

‘As for Leila, she never for one moment took those clever eyes off Justine. She followed her with care like someone studying a historical figure. “Is she not lovely?” I asked as I followed her glance and she turned a quick bird-like glance in my direction before turning back to the subject of her absorbed study. “We are old friends, Balthazar, and I can talk to you. I was telling myself that she looked something like I did once, and that she is an adventuress; like a small dark snake coiled up at the centre of Nessim’s life.” I protested in a formal manner at this; she stared into my eyes for a long moment and then gave a slow chuckle. I was surprised by what she said next. “Yes, she is just like me — merciless in the pursuit of pleasure and yet arid — all her milk has turned into power-love. Yet she is also like me in that she is tender and kindly and a real man’s woman. I hate her because she is like me, do you understand? And I fear her because she can read my mind.” She began to laugh. “My darling” she called out to Justine, “come over here and sit by me.” And she thrust upon her the one sort of confectionery she herself most loathed — crystallized violets — which I saw Justine accept with reserve — for she loathed them too. And so the two of them sat there, the veiled sphinx and the unveiled, eating sugar violets which neither could bear. I was delighted to be able to see women at their most primitive like this. Nor can I tell you very much about the validity of such judgements. We all make them about each other.

‘The curious thing was, that despite this antipathy between the two women — the antipathy of affinity, you might say — there sprang up side by side with it a strange sympathy, a sense of identification with each other. For example when Leila at last dared to meet Mountolive it was done secretly and arranged by Justine. It was Justine who brought them together, both masked, during the carnival ball. Or so I heard.

‘As for Nessim, I would, at the risk of over-simplification, say something like this: he was so innocent that he had not realized that you cannot live with a woman without in some degree falling in love with her — that possession is nine points of the jealousy? He was dismayed and terrified by the extent of his own jealousy for Justine and was honestly trying to practise something new for him — indifference. True or false? I don’t know.

‘And then, turning the coin round, I would say that what irked Justine herself unexpectedly was to find that the contract of wife undertaken so rationally, and at the level of a financial bargain, was somehow more binding than a wedding ring. One does not, as a woman (if passion seems to sanction it) think twice about being unfaithful to a husband; but to be unfaithful to Nessim seemed like stealing money from the till. What would you say?’

My own feeling (pace Balthazar) is that Justine became slowly aware of something hidden in the character of this solitary endearing long-suffering man; namely a jealousy all the more terrible and indeed dangerous for never allowing itself any outlet. Sometimes … but here I am in danger of revealing confidences which Justine made to me during the period of the so-called love affair which so much wounded me and in which, as I learn now, she was only using me as a cover for other activities. I have described the progress of it all elsewhere; but if I were now to reveal all she told me of Nessim in her own words I should be in danger, primo, of setting down material perhaps distasteful to the reader and indeed unfair to Nessim himself. Secundo: I am not sure any more of its relative truth since it might have been part of the whole grand design of deception! In my own mind even those feelings (‘important lessons learned’ etc.) are all coloured by the central doubt which the Interlinear has raised in my mind. ‘Truth is what most contradicts itself …’! What a farce it all is!

But what he says of the jealousy of Nessim must be true, however, for I lived for a while in its shadow, and there is no doubt about the effect it had on Justine. Almost from the beginning she had found herself followed, kept under surveillance, and very naturally this gave her a feeling of uncertainty: uncertainty made terrible by the fact that Nessim never openly spoke of it. It rested, an invisible weight of suspicion dogging and discolouring her commonest remarks, the most innocent of after-dinner walks. He would sit between the tall candles gently smiling at her while a whole silent inquisition unrolled reverberating in his mind. So at least she said.

The simplest and most sincere actions — a visit to a public library, a shopping list, a message on a place-card—became baffling to the eye of a jealousy founded in emotional impotence. Nessim was torn to rags by her demands; she was torn to rags by the doubts she saw reflected in his eyes — by the very tenderness with which he put a wrap around her shoulders. It felt as if he were slipping a noose over her neck. In a queer sort of way this relationship echoed the psycho-analytic relationship described in Moeurs by her first husband — where Justine became for them all a Case rather than a person, chased almost out of her right mind by the tiresome inquisitions of those who never know when to leave ill alone. Yes, she had fallen into a trap, there is no doubt. The thought echoed in her mind like mad laughter. I hear it echo still.

So they went on side by side, like runners perfectly matched, offering to Alexandria what seemed the perfect pattern of a relationship all envied and none could copy. Nessim the indulgent, the uxorious, Justine the lovely and contented wife.

‘In his own way’ notes Balthazar ‘I suppose he was only hunting for the truth. Isn’t this becoming rather a ridiculous remark? We should drop it by common consent! It is after all such an odd business. Shall I give you yet another example from another quarter? Your account of Capodistria’s death on the lake is the version which we all of us accepted at the time as likely to be true: in our minds, of course.

‘But in the Police depositions, everyone concerned mentioned one particular thing — namely that when they raised his body from the lake in which it was floating, with the black patch beside it in the water, his false teeth fell into the boat with a clatter, and startled them all. Now listen to this: three months later I was having dinner with Pierre Balbz who was his dentist. He assured me that Da Capo had an almost perfect set of teeth and certainly no false teeth which could possibly have fallen out. Who then was it? I don’t know. And if Da Capo simply disappeared and arranged for some decoy to take his place, he had every reason: leaving behind him debts of over two million. Do you see what I mean?

‘Fact is unstable by its very nature. Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there “the wind blew out one’s footsteps like candle-flames”. So it seems to me does reality. How then can we hunt for the truth?’

* * * * *

Pombal was hovering between diplomatic tact and the low cunning of a provincial public prosecutor; the conflicting emotions played upon his fat face as he sat in his gout-chair with his fingers joined. He had the air of a man in complete agreement with himself. ‘They say’ he said, watching me keenly ‘that you are now in the British Deuxième. Eh? Don’t tell me, I know you can’t speak. Nor can I if you ask me about myself. You think you know that I am in the French — but I deny the whole thing most strenuously. What I am asking is whether I should have you living in the flat. It seems somehow … how do you say? … Box and Cox. No? I mean, why don’t we sell each other ideas, eh? I know you won’t. Neither will I. Our sense of honour … I mean only if we are in the … ahem. But of course, you deny it and I deny it. So we are not. But you are not too proud to share my women, eh? Autre chose. Have a drink eh? The gin bottle is over there. I hid it from Hamid. Of course. I know that something is going on. I don’t despair of finding out. Something … I wish I knew … Nessim, Capodistria … Well!’

‘What have you done to your face?’ I say to change the subject. He has recently started to grow a moustache. He holds on to it defensively as if my question constituted a threat to shave it off forcibly. ‘My moustache, ah that! Well, recently I have had so many reproofs about work, not attending to it, that I analysed myself deeply, au fond. Do you know how many man-hours I am losing through women? You will never guess. I thought a moustache (isn’t it hideous?) would put them off a bit, but no. It is just the same. It is a tribute, dear boy, not to my charm but to the low standards here. They seem to love me because there is nothing better. They love a well-hung diplomat — how do you say, faisandé? Why do you laugh? You are losing a lot of woman-hours too. But then you have the British Government behind you — the pound, eh? That girl was here again today. Mon Dieu, so thin and so uncared for! I offered her some lunch but she would not stay. And the mess in your room! She takes hashish, doesn’t she? Well, when I go to Syria on leave you can have the whole place. Provided you respect my firescreen — isn’t it good as for art, hein?’

He has had an immense and vivid firescreen made for the flat which bears the legend ‘LEGERETE, FATALITE, MATERNITE’ in poker-work.

‘Ah well’ he continues, ‘so much for art in Alexandria. But as for that Justine, that is a better barbarian for you, no? I bet she — eh? Don’t tell. Why are you not happier about it? You Englishmen, always gloomy and full of politics. Pas de remords, mon cher. Two women in tandem — who would want better? And one Left-Handed — as Da Capo calls Lesbians. You know Justine’s reputation? Well, for my part, I am renouncing the whole——’

So Pombal flows in great good humour over the shallow river bed of his experience and standing on the balcony I watch the sky darkening over the harbour and hear the sullen hooting of ships’ sirens, emphasizing our loneliness here, our isolation from the warm Gulf Stream of European feelings and ideas. All the currents slide away towards Mecca or to the incomprehensible desert and the only foothold in this side of the Mediterranean is the city we have come to inhabit and hate, to infect with our own self-contempts.

And then I see Melissa walk down the street and my heart contracts with pity and joy as I turn to open the flat door.

* * * * *

These quiet bemused island days are a fitting commentary to the thoughts and feelings of one walking alone on deserted beaches, or doing the simple duties of a household which lacks a mother. But I carry now the great Interlinear in my hand wherever I go, whether cooking or teaching the child to swim, or cutting wood for the fireplace. But these fictions all live on as a projection of the white city itself whose pearly skies are broken in spring only by the white stalks of the minarets and the flocks of pigeons turning in clouds of silver and amethyst; whose veridian and black marble harbour-water reflects the snouts of foreign men-of-war turning through their slow arcs, depicting the prevailing wind; or swallowing their own inky reflections, touching and overlapping like the very tongues and sects and races over which they keep their uneasy patrol: symbolizing the western consciousness whose power is exemplified in steel — those sullen preaching guns against the yellow metal of the lake and the town which breaks open at sunset like a rose.

* * * * *

PART II

VI

‘Pursewarden!’ writes Balthazar.

‘I won’t say that you have been less than just to him — only that he does not seem to resurrect on paper into a recognizable image of the man I knew. He seems to be a sort of enigma to you. (It is not enough, perhaps, to respect a man’s genius — one must love him a little, no?) It may have been the envy you speak of which blinded you to his qualities, but somehow I doubt it; it seems to me to be very hard to envy someone who was so single-minded and moreover such a simpleton in so many ways, as to make him a real original (for example: money terrified him). I admit that I regarded him as a great man, a real original, and I knew him well — even though I have never, to this day, read a single book of his, not even the last trilogy which made such a noise in the world, though I pretend to have done so in company. I have dipped here and there. I feel I don’t need to read more.

‘I put down a few notes upon him here then, not to contradict you, wise one, but simply to let you compare two dissimilar images. But if you are wrong about him, you are not less wrong than Pombal who always credited him with an humour noir so dear to the French heart. But there was no spleen in the man and his apparent world-weariness was not feigned; while his cruelties of tongue were due to his complete simplicity and a not always delightful sense of mischief. Pombal never recovered I think from being nicknamed “Le Prépuce Barbu”; and if you will forgive me neither did you from Pursewarden’s criticism of your own novels. Remember? “These books have a curious and rather forbidding streak of cruelty — a lack of humanity which puzzled me at first. But it is simply the way a sentimentalist would disguise his weakness. Cruelty here is the obverse of sentimentality. He wounds because he is afraid of going all squashy.” Of course, you are right in saying that he was contemptous of your love of Melissa — and the nickname he gave you must have wounded also, suiting as it did your initials (Lineaments of Gratified Desire). “There goes old Lineaments in his dirty mackintosh.” A poor joke, I know. But all this is not very real.

‘I am turning out a drawer full of old mementoes and notes today in order to think about him a bit on paper; it is a holiday and the clinic is closed. It is risky work, I know, but perhaps I can answer a question which you must have put to yourself when you read the opening pages of the Interlinear: “How could Pursewarden and Justine …?” I know.

‘He had been in Alexandria before twice, before he met us all, and had once spent a winter at Mazarita working on a book: but this time he came back to do a short course of lectures at the Atelier, and as Nessim and I and Clea were on the committee, he could not avoid the side of Alexandrian life which most delighted and depressed him.

‘Physical features, as best I remember them. He was fair, a good average height and strongly built though not stout. Brown hair and moustache — very small this. Extremely well-kept hands. A good smile though when not smiling his face wore a somewhat quizzical almost impertinent air. His eyes were hazel and the best feature of him — they looked into other eyes, into other ideas, with a real candour, rather a terrifying sort of lucidity. He was somewhat untidy in dress but always spotlessly clean of person and abhorred dirty nails and collars. Yes, but his clothes were sometimes stained with spots of the red ink in which he wrote. There!

‘Really, I think his sense of humour had separated him from the world, into a privacy of his own, or else he had discovered for himself the uselessness of having opinions and in consequence made a habit of usually saying the opposite of what he thought in a joking way. He was an ironist, hence he appeared often to violate good sense: hence too his equivocal air, the apparent frivolity with which he addressed himself to large subjects. This sort of serious clowning leaves footmarks in conversation of a peculiar kind. His little sayings stayed like the pawmarks of a cat in a pat of butter. To stupidities he would respond only with the word “kwatz”.

‘He believed, I think, that success was inherent in greatness. His own lack of financial success (he made very little money from his work, contrary to what you thought, and it all went to his wife and two children who lived in England) was inclined to make him doubt his powers. Perhaps he should have been born an American? I don’t know.

‘I remember going down to the dock to meet his boat with the panting Keats — who proposed to interview him. We were late and only caught up with him as he was filling in an immigration form. Against the column marked “religion” he had written “Protestant — purely in the sense that I protest.”

‘We took him for a drink so that Keats could interview him at leisure. The poor boy was absolutely nonplussed. Pursewarden had a particular smile for the Press. I still have the picture Keats took that morning. The sort of smile which might have hardened on the face of a dead baby. Later I got to know this smile and learned that it meant he was about to commit an outrage on accepted good sense with an irony. He was trying to amuse no-one but himself, mind you. Keats panted and puffed, looked “sincere” and probed, but all in vain. Later I asked him for a carbon copy of his interview which he typed out and gave me with his puzzled air, explaining that there was no “news” in the man. Pursewarden had said things like “It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively” and “England cries out for brothels”; this last somewhat shocked poor Keats who asked him if he felt that “unbridled licence” would be a good thing in England. Did Pursewarden want to undermine religion?

‘I can see as I write the wicked air with which my friend replied in shocked tones: “Good Lord, no! I would simply like to put an end to the cruelty to children which is such a distressing feature of English life — as well as the slavish devotion to pets which borders on the obscene.” Keats must have gulped his way through all this, dotting and dashing in his shorthand book with rolling eye, while Pursewarden studied the further horizon. But if the journalist found this sort of exchange enigmatic, he was doubly puzzled by some of the answers to his political questions. For example, when he asked Pursewarden what he thought of the Conference of the Arab Committee which was due to start in Cairo that day, he replied: “When the English feel they are in the wrong, their only recourse is to cant.” “Am I to understand that you are criticizing British policy?” “Of course not. Our statesmanship is impeccable.” Keats fanned himself all the harder and abandoned politics forthwith. In answer to the question “Are you planning to write a novel while you are here?” Pursewarden said: “If I am denied every other means of self-gratification.”

‘Later Keats, poor fellow, still fanning that pink brow, said “He’s a thorny bastard, isn’t he?” But the odd thing was that he wasn’t at all. Where can a man who really thinks take refuge in the so-called real world without defending himself against stupidity by the constant exercise of equivocation? Tell me that. Particularly a poet. He once said: “Poets are not really serious about ideas or people. They regard them much as a Pasha regards the members of an extensive harim. They are pretty, yes. They are for use. But there is no question of them being true or false, or having souls. In this way the poet preserves his freshness of vision, and finds everything miraculous. And this is what Napoleon meant when he described poetry as a science creuse. He was quite right from his own point of view.”

‘This robust mind was far from splenetic though its judgements were harsh. I have seen him so moved in describing Joyce’s encroaching blindness and D. H. Lawrence’s illness that his hand shook and he turned pale. He showed me once a letter from the latter in which Lawrence had written: “In you I feel a sort of profanity — almost a hate for the tender growing quick in things, the darkGods….” He chuckled. He deeply loved Lawrence but had no hesitation in replying on a post-card: “My dear DHL. This side idolatry — I am simply trying not to copy your habit of building a Taj Mahalaround anything as simple as a good f———k.”

‘He said to Pombal once: “On fait l’amour pour mieux refouler et pour décourager les autres.” And added: “I worry a great deal about my golf handicap.” It always took Pombal a few moments to work out these non-sequiturs. “Quel malin, cetype-là!” he would mutter under his breath. Then and only then would Pursewarden permit himself a chuckle — having scored his personal victory. They were a splendid pair and used to drink together a great deal.

‘Pombal was terribly affected by his death — really overcome, he retired to bed for a fortnight. Could not speak of him without tears coming into his eyes; this used to infuriate Pombal himself. “I never knew how much I loved the blasted man” he would say…. I hear Pursewarden’s wicked chuckle in all this. No, you are wrong about him. His favourite adjective was “uffish!” or so he told me.

‘His public lectures were disappointing, as you may remember. Afterwards, I discovered why. He read them out of a book. They were someone else’s lectures! But once when I took him up to the Jewish school and asked him to talk to the children of the literary group, he was delightful. He began by showing them some card tricks and then congratulated the winner of the Literary Prize, making him read the prize essay aloud. Then he asked the children to write down three things in their notebooks which might help them some day if they didn’t forget them. Here they are:

1. Each of our five senses contains an art.

2. In questions of art great secrecy must be observed.

3. The artist must catch every scrap of wind.

‘Then he produced from his mackintosh pocket a huge packet of sweets upon which they all fell, he no less, and completed the most successful literary hour ever held at the school.

‘He had some babyish habits, picked his nose, and enjoyed taking his shoes off under the table in a restaurant. I remember hundreds of meetings which were made easy and fruitful by his naturalness and humour but he spared no-one and made enemies. He wrote once to his beloved DHL: “Maître, Maître, watch your step. No-one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.”

‘When he wished to discuss a bad work of art he would say in tones of warm approbation “Most effective.” This was a feint. He was not interested enough in art to want to argue about it with others (“dogs snuffing over a bitch too small to mount”) so he said “Most effective.” Once when he was drunk he added: “The effective in art is what rapes the emotion of your audience without nourishing its values.”

‘Do you see? Do you see?

‘All this was brought to bear on Justine like a great charge of swan-shot, scattering her senses and bringing her for the first time something she had despaired of ever encountering: namely laughter. Imagine what one touch of ridicule can do to a Higher Emotion! “As for Justine” said Pursewarden to me when he was drunk once, “I regard her as a tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we must all pass — a somewhat vulpine Alexandrian Venus. By God, what a woman she would be if she were really natural and felt no guilt! Her behaviour would commend her to the Pantheon — but one cannot send her up there with a mere recommendation from the Rabbinate — a bundle of Old Testament ravings. What would old Zeus say?” He saw my reproachful glance at these cruelties and said, somewhat shamefacedly. “I’m sorry, Balthazar. I simply dare not take her seriously. One day I will tell you why.”

‘Justine herself wished very much to take him seriously but he absolutely refused to command sympathy or share the solitude from which he drew so much of his composure and self-possession.

‘Justine herself, you know, could not bear to be alone.

‘He was due, I remember, to lecture in Cairo to several societies affiliated to our own Arts Society, and Nessim, who was busy, asked Justine to take him down by car. That was how they came to find themselves together on a journey which threw up a sort of ludicrous shadow-image of a love-relationship, like a clever magic-lantern picture of a landscape, created by, strangely — not Justine at all — but a worse mischief-maker — the novelist himself. “It was Punch and Judy, all right!” said Pursewarden ruefully afterwards.

‘He was at that time deeply immersed in the novel he was writing, and as always he found that his ordinary life, in a distorted sort of way, was beginning to follow the curvature of his book. He explained this by saying that any concentration of the will displaces life (Archimedes’ bath-water) and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived. You will see from this that he was a serious fellow underneath much of his clowning and had quite comprehensive beliefs and ideas. But also, he had been drinking rather heavily that day as he always did when he was working. Between books he never touched a drop. Riding beside her in the great car, someone beautiful, dark and painted with great eyes like the prow of some Aegean ship, he had the sensation that his book was being rapidly passed underneath his life, as if under a sheet of paper containing the iron filings of temporal events, as a magnet is in that commonplace experiment one does at school: and somehow setting up a copying magnetic field.

‘He never flirted, mind you; and if he started to approach Justine it was simply to try out a few speeches and attitudes, to verify certain conclusions he had reached in the book before actually sending it to the printer, so to speak! Afterwards, of course, he bitterly repented of this piece of self-indulgence. He was at that moment trying to escape from the absurd dictates of narrative form in prose: “He said” “She said” “He cocked an eye, shot a cuff, lifted a lazy head, etc.” Was it possible, had he succeeded in “realizing” character without the help of such props? He was asking himself this as he sat there in the sand. (“Her eyelashes brushed his cheek.” Merde alors! Had he written that?) Justine’s thick black eyelashes were like … what? So it was that his kisses were really warm and wholehearted in an absent-minded way because they were in no way meant for her. (One of the great paradoxes of love. Concentration on the love-object and possession are the poisons.) And he discovered to her the fact that she was ridiculous, with a series of disarming and touching pleasantries at which she found herself laughing with a relief that seemed almost sinful. As for her: it was not only that his skin and hair were fresh and that his love-making was full of a lazy, unblushing enterprise; he was wholly himself in a curious way. It aroused in her an unfamiliar passionate curiosity. And then, the things he said! “Of course I’ve read Moeurs and had you pointed out a hundred times as the tragic central character. It’s all right, written by a born lettré, of course, and smells fashionably of armpits and eau de javel. But surely you are making yourself a little self-important about it all? You have the impertinence to foist yourself on us as a problem — perhaps because you have nothing else to offer? It is foolish. Or perhaps it is that the Jew loves punishment and always comes back for more?” And suddenly, but completely, to take her firmly by the nape of the neck and force her down into the hot sand before she could find time to measure the extent of the insult or form a response in her mind. And then, while he was still kissing, to say something so ludicrous that the laughter and tears in her mind became one and the same sort of things, a mixture of qualities hard to endure.

‘“For God’s sake!” she said, having decided to behave as if outraged. He had been too quick for her. He had surprised her while she was half-asleep in her mind, so to speak.

‘“Didn’t you want to make love? My mistake!”

‘She looked at him, a little disarmed by the mock-repentance of his expression. “No, of course not. Yes.” Something inside her repeated “Yes, yes.” An attachment without fingerprints — something as easy as sailing a boat or driving into deep water: “Fool!” she cried, and to her own surprise started laughing. A conquest by impudence? I don’t know. I am only putting down my own views.

‘She explained this to herself later by saying that for him sex was the nearest thing to laughter — quite free of particularity, neither sacred nor profane. Pursewarden himself has written that he thought it comic and sinister and divine in one. But she could not grasp and define the thing as she wished, for when she said to him “You are hopelessly promiscuous, like I am” he was really angry, really outraged. “Imbecile” he replied, “you have the soul of a clerk. For those who love poetry there is no such thing as vers libre.” She did not understand this.

‘“Oh, stop behaving like a pious old sin-cushion into which we all have to stick rusty pins of our admiration” he snapped. In his diary he added drily: “Moths are attracted by the flame of personality. So are vampires. Artists should take note and beware.” And in the mirror he cursed himself roundly for this lapse, a self-indulgence which had brought him what most bored him — an intimate relationship. But in the sleeping face he too saw the childish inhabitant of Justine, the “calcimined imprint of a fern in chalk”. He saw how she must have looked on the first night of love — hair torn and trailing over the pillow like a ruffled black dove, fingers like tendrils, warm mouth inhaling the airs of sleep; warm as a figure of pastry fresh from the oven. “Oh damn!” he cried aloud.

‘Then in bed with her in a hotel crowded with Alexandrian acquaintances who might easily observe their rashness and carry their gossip back to the city they had left together that morning, he swore again. Pursewarden had much to hide, you know. He was not all he seemed. And at this time he did not dare to prejudice his relations with Nessim. The Bloody woman! I hear his voice.

‘“Ecoute….”

‘“Rien — silence.”

‘“Mais chéri, nous sommes seuls.” She was still sleepy. Cast an eye to a bolted door. She felt a momentary disgust at this bourgeois fear of his; afraid of intruders, spies, a husband?

‘“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

‘“Je m’écoute moi-même.” Yellow eyes without a trace of discernible divinity in them; he was like a slender rock-god, with ruffled moustache. Past lives? “Le coeur qui bat.” Derisively he quoted a popular song.

‘“Tu n’es pas une femme pour moi — pas dans mon genre.”

‘This made her feel like a whipped dog specially as a moment ago he had been kissing her, breaking her down into successive images of pain and pleasure with an importunity which belonged, she now knew, only to his passion and not to himself.

‘“What do you want?” she said, and struck him across the face to feel at once the stinging retort on her own cheek — like spray dashing over her. And now he began to fool again until she could not prevent herself from laughing.

‘This weird translation of feelings into gestures which belied words and words which belied gestures, confused and disoriented her. She needed someone to tell her whether to laugh or to cry.

‘As for Pursewarden, he believed with Rilke that no woman adds anything to the sum of Woman, and from satiety he had now taken refuge in the plenty of the imagination — the true field of merit for the artist. This is perhaps what made him seem to her somehow cold and unfeeling. “Somewhere inside you there is a nasty little Anglican clergyman” she told him and he considered the remark gravely on its merits. “Perhaps” he said, and added after a pause “But your humourlessness has made you an enemy of pleasure. The enemy. You have a premeditated approach to experience. I am a truer pagan.” And he began to laugh. Great honesty can be crueller than anything else.

‘He was sick, I think too, of all the “mud thrown up by the wheels of life” — so he writes. He had done his best to scrape off as much as he could, to tidy himself up. Was he now to be saddled with the inquisitions and ardours of a Justine — the marshy end of a personality which in a funny sort of way he had himself transcended? “By God, no!” he told himself. Can you see what a fool he was?

‘His life had been a various and full one, and he had held a number of contract posts for some political branch of the Foreign Office, largely, I gather, connected with cultural relations. This work had taken him to several countries and he spoke at least three languages well. He was married and had two children although he was separated from his wife — and indeed never spoke about her without stammering — though I gather they corresponded affectionately and he was always most scrupulous in sending her money. What else? Yes, his real name was Percy and he was somewhat sensitive about it because of the alliteration, I suppose; hence his choice of Ludwig as a signature to his books. He was always delighted when his reviewers took him to be of German extraction.

‘I think what frightened and delighted Justine about him most, however, was his somewhat contemptuous repudiation of Arnauti and his book Moeurs, Mind you, this too was overdone — he actually admired the book very much. But he used it as a stick to belabour Justine, describing her ex-husband as a “tiresome psychoanalytical turnkey with a belt full of rusty complexes”. I must say, this delighted her. You see, here was someone who set no store by jargon and refused to regard her as a Case. Of course Pursewarden, the silly fool, was simply trying to get rid of her and this was not a very good way. Yet as a doctor I can testify to the therapeutic effects of insults in cases where medicine is at a loss to make any headway! Indeed, had Justine succeeded in making herself really interesting to him, she might have learned a lot of valuable lessons. Odd, isn’t it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you must know, it is a law of love that the so-called “right” person always comes too soon or too late. As for Pursewarden, he withdrew his favours so abruptly that there was hardly time for her to measure the full force of his personality.

‘But at the time of which I am writing he was busy insulting her in his somewhat precise idiosyncratic English or French (he had a few pet neologisms which he used with pleasure — one was the noun “bogue” which he had coined from “bogus”; c’est de la grande bogue ça or “what bloody bogue”) — he insulted her, if one can use the expression, simply to discourage her. I must say I can hardly repress a laugh when I think of it: you could as easily discourage Justine as an equinox, and she was not disposed to abandon this experiment before she had learned as much as possible about herself from it. Predatory Judaic characteristic! Pursewarden was like Doctor Foster in the nursery rhyme.

‘For her, his easy detachment gave him freshness of heart. Justine had never had anyone who didn’t want or who could do without her before! All kinds of new resonances sprang out of making love to such a person. (Am I inventing this? No. I knew them both well and discussed each with the other.) Then, he could make her laugh — quite the most dangerous thing to do to a woman for they prize laughter most after passion. Fatal! No, he was not wrong when he told himself in the mirror: “Ludwig, thou art an imbecile.”

‘Worse, the mockery of his cruelty hurt her, and after making love, say, made her think something like this: “What he does is simple as a domestic impulse become habit — cleaning his shoes on a mat.” Then unexpectedly would come some terrible mocking phrase like “We are all looking for someone lovely to be unfaithful to — did you think you were original?” Or else “The human race! If you can’t do the trick with the one you’ve got, why — shut your eyes and imagine the one you can’t get. Who knows? It’s perfectly legal and secret. It’s the marriage of true minds!” He was standing at the washbasin cleaning his teeth in white wine. She could have murdered him for looking so gay and self-possessed.

‘Coming back from Cairo they had several rows. “As for your so-called illness — have you ever thought it might be just due to an inflamed self-pity?” She became so furious that she nearly drove the car off the road into a tree. “Miserable Anglo-Saxon!” she cried, on the point of tears — “Bully!”

‘And he thought to himself: “Great Heavens! Here we are quarrelling like a couple of newly-weds. Soon we shall marry and live in filthy compatibility, feasting on each other’s blackheads. Ugh! Dreadful isogamy of the Perfect Match. Perce, you gone and done it again.” I can reconstruct this because he always spoke to himself in cockney when he was drunk as well as when he was alone.

‘“If you try to hit me” he said happily “we shall have a crash.” And the thought of a bitter little short story into which he might insert her. “What we need to establish for sex in art” he muttered “is a revulsion coefficient.” She was still angry. “What are you muttering about?” — “Praying.”

‘For her, the moiety which remained after love-making then was not disgust or despair as it usually was, but laughter; and though furious with him she nevertheless found herself smiling at some absurdity of his even as she realized with a pang that he could never be achieved, attained as a man, nor would he even become a friend, except on his own terms. He offered an uncompanionate compassionless ardour which in a funny sort of way made his kisses thrilling. They were as healthy as the bite of a hungry child into a cooking-apple. And regretting this, with another part of her mind (there was an honest woman somewhere deep down) she found herself hoping he would never abandon this entrenched position, or retreat from it. Like all women, Justine hated anyone she could be certain of; and you must remember she had never had anyone as yet whom she could wholly admire — though that may sound strange to you. Here at last was someone she could not punish by her infidelities — an intolerable but delightful novelty. Women are very stupid as well as very profound.

‘As for Justine, she was surprised by the new emotions he seemed capable of provoking. Quite simple things — for example she found her love extending itself to inanimate objects concerned with him, like his old meerschaum pipe with the much basted stem. Or his old hat, so battered and weather-stained — it hung behind the door like a water-colour of the man himself. She found herself cherishing objects he had touched or thrown aside. It seemed to her an infuriating sort of mental captivity to find herself stroking one of his old notebooks as if she were caressing his body, or tracing with her ringer the words he had written on the shaving-mirror with his brush (from Stendhal): “You must boldly face a little anatomy if you want to discover an unknown principle” and “Great souls require nourishment.”

‘Once, when she discovered an Arab prostitute in his bed (while he himself was shaving in the other room and whistling an air from Donizetti) she was surprised to find that she was not jealous but curious. She sat on the bed and pinning the arms of the unfortunate girl to the pillow set about questioning her closely about what she had felt while making love to him. Of course, this scared the prostitute very much. “I am not angry” Justine repeated to the wailing creature, “I am puzzled. Tell me what I ask of you.”

‘Pursewarden had to come in and release his visitant and they all three sat on the bed together, Justine feeding her with crystallized fruit to calm her fears.

‘Shall I go on? This analysis may give you pain — but if you are a real writer you will want to follow things to their conclusion, no? All this shows you how hard it was for Melissa….

‘If he succeeded in infuriating her it was because he could feel concern about her without any real affection. He did not always clown, or stay beyond her reach; that is what I mean by his honesty. He gave intellectual value for money — in fact he told her the real secret which lay hidden under the enigma of his behaviour. You will find it in one of his books. I know this because Clea quoted it to me as his most profound statement on human relationships. He said to her one night: “You see, Justine, I believe that Gods are men and men Gods; they intrude on each other’s lives, trying to express themselves through each other — hence such apparent confusion in our human states of mind, our intimations of powers within or beyond us…. And then (listen) I think that very few people realize that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth — a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach. That is why all your dull repetitions of the same mistake are simply like a boring great multiplication table, and will remain so until you get your head out of the paper bag and start to think responsibly.”

‘It is impossible to describe the effect these words had on her: they threw her life and actions into relief in an entirely new way. She saw him all of a sudden in a new light, as a man whom one could “really love”. Alas, he had already withdrawn his favours…

‘When he next went to Cairo he elected to go alone and, made restless by his absence, she made the mistake of writing him a long passionate letter in which she clumsily tried to thank him for a friendship of whose real value to her he was completely unaware — that is true of all love again. He regarded this simply as another attempt to intrude upon him and sent her a telegram. (They corresponded through me. I have it still.)

“First nobody can own an artist so be warned. Second what good is a faithful body when the mind is by its very nature unfaithful? Third stop whining like an Arab, you know better. Fourth neurosis is no excuse. Health must be won and earned by a battle. Lastly it is honourable if you can’twin to hangyourself.”

‘Once she happened upon him when he was very drunk at the Café Al Aktar; I gather that you and I had just left. You remember the evening? He had been rather insulting. It was the evening when I tried to show you how the nine-point proposition of the Cabal worked. I did not know then that you would type it all out and send it to the Secret Service! What a marvellous jest! But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket. No sooner had we left than Justine entered. It was she who helped him back to his hotel and pushed him safely on to his bed. “Oh, you are the most despairing man!” she cried at that recumbent figure, at which he raised his arms and responded “I know it, I know it! I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!” And he began to laugh — a laughter which was overtaken by nausea. She left him being sick in the washbasin.

‘The next morning she went round early with some French reviews in one of which there was an article about his work. He was wearing nothing but a pyjama jacket and a pair of spectacles. On his mirror he had written with a wet shaving-stick, some words from Tolstoy: “I do not cease to reflect upon art and upon every form of temptation which obscures the spirit.”

‘He took the books from her without a word and made as if to shut the door in her face. “No” she said, “I’m coming in.” He cleared his throat and said: “This is for the last time. I’m sick of being visited as one might visit the grave of a dead kitten.” But she took him by the arms and he said, more gently, “A definite and complete stop, see?”

‘She sat down on the end of the bed and lit a cigarette, considering him, as one might a specimen. “I am curious, after all your talk about self-possession and responsibility, to see just how Anglo-Saxon you are — unable to finish anything you start. Why do you look furtive?” This was a splendid line of attack. He smiled. “I’m going to work today.”

‘“Then I’ll come tomorrow.”

‘“I shall have ’flu.”

‘“The day after.”

‘“I shall be going to the Zoo.”

‘“I shall come too.”

‘Pursewarden was now extremely rude; she knew she had scored a victory and was delighted. She listened to his honeyed insults as she tapped the carpet with her foot. “Very well” she said at last, “we shall see.” (I am afraid you will have to make room in this for the essential comedy of human relations. You give it so little place.) The next day he put her out of his hotel-room by the neck, like a pet cat. The following day he woke and found the great car parked once more outside the hotel. “Merde” he cried and just to spite her dressed and went to the Zoo. She followed him. He spent the morning looking at the monkeys with the greatest attention. She was not blind to the insult. She followed him to a bench where he sat, eating the peanuts which he had originally bought to feed the monkeys. She always looked splendid when she was angry, with her nostrils quivering, and clad in that spotless shark-skin suit with a flower at her lapel.

‘“Pursewarden” she said, sitting down.

‘“You won’t believe me” he said, “you bloody tiresome obsessive society figure. From now on you are going to leave me alone. Your money won’t help you.”

‘It is a measure of his stupidity that he could use such language. She was delighted at making him so alarmed. You, of course, know how determined she is. But there was a reason — and underneath the insults she detected a genuine concern — something that did not bear at all on their relationship such as it was. Something else. What?

‘You have already noted that she was an unerring mind-reader; and sitting beside him, watching his face, she said like someone reading a badly-written manuscript — “Nessim. Something to do with Nessim. You are afraid … not of him.” And then in a flash the intuitive contact was made and she blurted out: “There is something regarding Nessim which you cannot afford to compromise: I understand.” And she heaved a great sigh. “O Fool, why did you not tell me? Am I to forfeit your friendship because of this? Of course not. I don’t care whether you want to sleep with me or not. But you — that is different. Thank God I’ve discovered what it was.”

‘He was too astonished to say anything. This mind-reading performance surprised him more than anything about her. He simply stared at her and said nothing, for a long time. “Oh, I am glad” she went on, “for that is so easily arranged. And it will not prevent us from meeting. We need never sleep together again if you don’t wish it. But at least I shall be able to see you.” Another category of the “love-beast”, one which I am unable to define. She would have gone through fire for him by now.

‘The silences of Nessim had already assumed huge proportions in her mind. They stretched away on every side like the desert itself — unnerving her. And since her own conscience was by its nature and even without reason, a guilty one, she had already begun to build up a defensive circle of friends whose harmless presences might obviate suspicion of her — the little court of homosexuals like Toto and Amar, whose activities and predispositions were sufficiently well-known to everybody to offer no cause for heart-burnings. She moved now like some sulky planet in the social life of the town, accepting the attentions of these neuters purely as a defence. In this way a general will utilize the features of a town he wishes to defend by building up ring within ring of earthworks. She did not know, for example, that the silences of Nessim betokened only despair and not suspense — for he never broke them.

‘In your manuscripts, you hardly mention the question of the child — I told you once before that I thought Arnauti neglected that aspect of affairs in Moeurs because it seemed to him melodramatic. “To the childless all things are without resonance” says Pursewarden somewhere. But now the question of the child had become as important to Nessim as to Justine herself — it was his sole means of enlisting the love he desired from her — or so he thought. He fell upon the central problem like a fury, thinking that this would be the one means of penetrating the affective armour of his beautiful tacit wife; the wife he had married and hung up in a cobwebbed corner of his life, by the wrists, like a marionette on strings! Thank God I have never “loved”, wise one, and never will! Thank God!

‘Pursewarden writes somewhere (again from Clea): “English has two great forgotten words, namely “helpmeet” which is much greater than “lover” and “loving-kindness” which is so much greater than “love” or even “passion”.’

‘Now Justine one day overheard part of a telephone conversation which led her to believe that Nessim had either located the missing child or knew something about it which he did not wish to reveal to her. As she passed through the hall he was putting down the telephone after having said: “Well then, I count on your discretion. She must never know.” Never know what? Who was the “she”? One can be forgiven for jumping to conclusions. As he did not speak of the conversation for several days she taxed him with it. He now made the fatal mistake of saying that it had never taken place, that she had misheard a conversation with his secretary. Had he said that it related to something quite different, he would have been all right, but to accuse her of not hearing the words which had been ringing in her ears for several days like an alarm bell, this was fatal.

‘At one blow she lost confidence in him and began to imagine all sorts of things. Why should he wish to keep from her any knowledge he might have gained about her child? After all, his original promise had been to do what he could to discover its fate. Was it then too horrible to speak of? Surely Nessim would tell her anything if indeed he knew anything? Why should he hold back a hypothetical knowledge of its fate? She simply could not guess but inside herself she felt that in some way the information was being held as a hostage is held — against something — what? Good behaviour?

‘But Nessim, who had destroyed by this last clumsiness the last vestiges of regard she had for him, was grappling with a new set of factors. He himself had set great store by the recovery of the child as a means to the recovery of Justine herself; he simply did not dare to tell her — or indeed himself, so painful was it — that one day, after he had exhausted all his resources in an attempt to find out the truth, Narouz telephoned to say: “I saw the Magzub by chance last night and forced the truth out of him. The child is dead.”

‘This now rose between them like a great wall of China, shutting them off from any further contact, and making her afraid that he might even intend her harm. And this is where you come in.’

* * * * *

Yes, this alas is where I come in again, for it must have been approximately now that Justine came to my lecture on Cavafy and thence carried me off to meet the gentle Nessim; simple ‘as an axe falling’ — cleaving my life in two! It is inexpressibly bitter today to realize that she was putting me to a considered purpose of her own, the monster, trailing me before Nessim as a bullfighter trails a cloak, and simply to screen her meetings with a man with whom she herself did not even wish to sleep! But I have already desscribed it all, so painfully, and in such great detail — trying to omit no flavour or crumb which would give the picture the coherence I felt it should possess. And yet, even now I can hardly bring myself to feel regret for the strange ennobling relationship into which she plunged me — presumably herself feeling nothing of its power — and from which I myself was to learn so much. Yes, truly it enriched me, but only to destroy Melissa. We must look these things in the face. I wonder why only now I have been told all this? My friends must all have known all along. Yet nobody breathed a word. But of course, the truth is that nobody ever does breathe a word, nobody interferes, nobody whispers while the acrobat is on the tight-rope; they just sit and watch the spectacle, waiting only to be wise after the event. But then, from another point of view, how would I, blindly and passionately in love with Justine, have received such unwelcome truths at the time? Would they have deflected me from my purpose? I doubt it.

I suppose that in all this Justine had surrendered to me only one of the many selves she possessed and inhabited — to this timid and scholarly lover with chalk on his sleeve!

Where must one look for justifications? Only I think to the facts themselves; for they might enable me to see now a little further into the central truth of this enigma called ‘love’. I see the image of it receding and curling away from me in an infinite series like the waves of the sea; or, colder than a dead moon, rising up over the dreams and illusions I fabricated from it — but like the real moon, always keeping one side of the truth hidden from me, the nether side of a beautiful dead star. My ‘love’ for her, Melissa’s ‘love’ for me, Nessim’s ‘love’ for her, her ‘love’ for Pursewarden — there should be a whole vocabulary of adjectives with which to qualify the noun — for no two contained the same properties; yet all contained the one indefinable quality, one common unknown in treachery. Each of us, like the moon, had a dark side — could turn the lying face of ‘unlove’ towards the person who most loved and needed us. And just as Justine used my love, so Nessim used Melissa’s…. One upon the back of the other, crawling about ‘like crabs in a basket’.

It is strange that there is not a biology of this monster which lives always among the odd numbers, though by all the romances we have built around it it should inhabit the evens: the perfect numbers the hermetics use to describe marriage!

‘What protects animals, enables them to continue living? A certain attribute of organic matter. As soon as one finds life one finds it, it is inherent in life. Like most natural phenomena it is polarized — there is always a negative and a positive pole. The negative pole is pain, the positive pole sex…. In the ape and man we find the first animals, excluding tame animals, in which sex can be roused without an external stimulus…. The result is that the greatest of all natural laws, periodicity, is lost in the human race. The periodic organic condition which should rouse the sexual sense has become an absolutely useless, degenerate, pathological manifestation.’* (Pursewarden brooding over the monkey-house at the Zoo! Capodistria in his tremendous library of pornographic books, superbly bound! Balthazar at his occultism! Nessim facing rows and rows of figures and percentages!)

And Melissa? Of course, she was ill, indeed seriously ill, so that in a sense it is melodramatic in me to say that I killed her, or that Justine killed her. Nevertheless, nobody can measure the weight of the pain and neglect which I directly caused her. I remember now one day that Amaril came to see me, sentimental as a great dog. Balthazar had sent Melissa to him for X-rays and treatment.

Amaril was an original man in his way and a bit of a dandy withal. The silver duelling-pistols, the engraved visiting-cards in their superb case, clothes cut in all the elegance of the latest fashions. His house was full of candles and he wrote for preference on black paper with white ink. For him the most splendid thing in the world was to possess a fashionable woman, a prize greyhound, or a pair of invincible fighting-cocks. But he was an agreeable man and not without sensibility as a doctor, despite these romantic foibles.

His devotion to women was the most obvious thing about him; he dressed for them. Yet it was accompanied by a delicacy, almost a pudicity, in his dealings with them — at least in a city where a woman was, as provender, regarded as something like a plateful of mutton; a city where women cry out to be abused.

But he idealized them, built up romances in his mind about them, dreamed always of a complete love, a perfect understanding with one of the tribe. Yet all this was in vain. Ruefully he would explain to Pombal or to myself: ‘I cannot understand it. Before my love has a chance to crystallize, it turns into a deep, a devouring friendship. These devotions are not for you womanizers, you wouldn’t understand. But once this happens, passion flies out of the window. Friendship consumes us, paralyses us. Another sort of love begins. What is it? I don’t know. A tenderness, a tendresse, something melting. Fondante.’ Tears come into his eyes. ‘I am really a woman’s man and women love me. But —’ shaking his handsome head and blowing the smoke from his cigarette upwards to the ceiling he adds smiling, but without self-pity, ‘I alone among men can say that while all women love me no one woman ever has. Not properly. I am as innocent of love (not sexual love, of course) as a virgin. Poor Amaril!’

It is all true. It was his very devotion to women which dictated his choice in medicine — gynaecology. And women gravitate to him as flowers do to the sunlight. He teaches them what to wear and how to walk; chooses their scents for them, dictates the colour of their lipsticks. Moreover, there is not a woman in Alexandria who is not proud to be seen out on his arm; there is not one who if asked (but he never asks) would not be glad to betray her husband or her lover for him. And yet … and yet…. A connecting thread has been broken somewhere, a link snapped. Such desires as he knows, the stifling summer desires of the body in the city of sensuality, are stifled among shop-girls, among his inferiors. Clea used to say ‘One feels a special sort of fate in store for Amaril. Dear Amaril!’

Yes. Yes. But what? What sort of fate lies in store for such a romantic — such a devoted, loving, patient student of women? These are the questions I ask myself as I see him, elegantly gloved and hatted, driving with Balthazar to the hospital for an operation….

He described to me Melissa’s condition adding only: ‘It would help her very much if she could be loved a bit.’ A remark which filled me with shame. It was that very night that I had borrowed the money from Justine to send her to a clinic in Palestine much against her own will.

We walked together to the flat after having spent a few minutes in the public gardens discussing her case. The palms looked brilliant in the moonlight and the sea glittered under the spring winds. It seemed so out of place — serious illness — in this scheme of things. Amaril took my arms as we climbed the stairs and squeezed them gently. ‘Life is hard’ he said. And when we entered the bedroom once more to find her lying there in a trance with her pallid little face turned to the ceiling and the hashish pipe beside her on the table, he added, taking up his hat: ‘It is always … don’t think I blame you … no, I envy you Justine … yet it is always in extremis that we doctors make the last desperate prescription for a woman patient — when all the resources of science have failed. Then we say “If only she could be loved!” He sighed and shook his handsome head.

There are always a hundred ways of justifying oneself but the sophistries of paper logic cannot alter the fact that after this kind of information in the Interlinear, the memory of those days haunts me afresh, torments me with guilts which I might never have been aware of before! I walk now beside the child which Melissa had by Nessim during that brief love-affair (was it ‘love’ again, or was he trying to use her to find out all he could about his wife? Perhaps one day I shall discover): I walk beside the child I say on these deserted beaches like a criminal, going over and over these fragments of the white city’s life with regrets too deep to alter the tone of voice in which I talk to her. Where does one hunt for the key to such a pattern?

But it is clear that I was not alone in feeling such guilt: Pursewarden himself must have been feeling guilty — how else can I explain the money he left me in his will with the express request that it should be spent with Melissa? That at least is one problem solved.

Clea too, I know, felt the guilt of the wound we were all of us causing Melissa — though she felt it, so to speak, on behalf of Justine. She took it, so to speak, upon herself—appalled at the mischief which her lover was causing to us both for so little cause. It was she who now became Melissa’s friend, champion and counsellor and who remained her closest confidante until she died. The selfless and innocent Clea, another fool! It does not pay to be honest in love! She said of Melissa: ‘It is terrible to depend so utterly on powers that do not wish you well. To see someone always in your thoughts, like a stain upon reality….’ I think she was also thinking, perhaps, of Justine, up there in the big house among the tall candles and the oil-paintings by forgotten masters.

Melissa also said to her of me: ‘With his departure everything in nature disappeared.’ This was when she was dying. But nobody has the right to occupy such a place in another’s life, nobody! You can see now upon what raw material I work in these long and passionate self-communings over a winter sea. ‘She loved you’ said Clea again ‘because of your weakness — this is what she found endearing in you. Had you been strong you would have frightened away so timid a love.’ And then lastly, before I bang the pages of my manuscript shut with anger and resentment, one last remark of Clea’s which burns like a hot iron: ‘Melissa said: “You have been my friend, Clea, and I want you to love him after I am gone. Do it with him, will you, and think of me? Never mind all this beastly love business. Cannot a friend make love on another’s behalf? I ask you to sleep with him as I would ask the Panaghia to come down and bless him while he sleeps — like in the old ikons.”’ How purely Melissa, how Greek!

On Sundays we would walk down together to visit Scobie, I remember; Melissa in her bright cotton frock and straw hat, smiling and eager at the thought of a full holiday from the dusty cabaret. Along the Grande Corniche with the waves dancing and winking across the bar, and the old horse-drawn cabs with their black jarveys in red flowerpots driving their dilapidated and creaking ‘taxis-of-love’; and as we walked past they would call ‘Love-taxi sir, madam. Only ten piastres an hour. I know a quiet place….’ And Melissa would giggle and turn away as we walked to watch the minarets glisten like pearls upon the morning light and the bright children’s kites take the harbour wind.

Scobie usually spent Sundays in bed, and in winter nearly always contrived to have a cold. He would lie between the coarse linen sheets after having made Abdul give him what he called ‘a cinnamon rub’ (I never discovered what this was); with some formality, too, he would have a brick heated and placed at his feet to keep them warm. He had a small knitted cap on his head. As he read very little, he carried, like an ancient tribe, all his literature in his head and would, when alone, recite to himself for hours. He had quite an extensive repertoire of ballads which he thundered out with great energy, marking the beat with his hand. ‘The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed’ brought real tears to his good eye, as did ‘The harp that once through Tara’s Halls’; while among the lesser-known pieces was an astonishing poem the metre of which by its galloping quality virtually enabled him to throw himself out of bed and half-way across the room if recited at full gale force. I once made him write it out for me in order to study its construction closely:

‘By O’Neil close beleaguered, the spirits might droop

Of the Saxon three hundred shut up in their coop

Till Bagnal drew forth his Toledo and swore

On the sword of a soldier to succour Portmore.

His veteran troops in the foreign wars tried,

Their features how bronzed and how haughty their stride,

Step’t steadily on; Ah! ’twas thrilling to see

That thunder-cloud brooding o’er Beal-an-atha-Buidh!

Land of Owen Aboo! and the Irish rushed on.

The foe fired one volley — their gunners are gone.

Before the bare bosoms the steel coats have fled,

Or despite casque and corslet, lie dying or dead.

And the Irishgot clothing,coin, colours, great store,

Arms, forage, and provender — plunder go leor.

They munched the white manchets, they champed the brown chine,

Fuliluah! for that day how the natives did dine!’

Disappointingly, he could tell me nothing about it; it had lain there in his memory for half a century like a valuable piece of old silver which is only brought out on ceremonial occasions and put on view. Among the few other such treasures which I recognized was the passage (which he always declaimed with ardour) which ends:

‘Come the four corners of the world in arms,

We’ll shock ’em.

Trust Joshua Scobie to shock ’em!’

Melissa was devoted to him and found him extraordinarily quaint in his sayings and mannerisms. He for his part was fond of her — I think chiefly because she always gave him his full rank and title — Bimbashi Scobie — which pleased him and made him feel of consequence to her as a ‘high official’.

But I remember one day when we found him almost in tears. I thought perhaps he had moved himself by a recital of one of his more powerful poems (‘We Are Seven’ was another favourite); but no. ‘I’ve had a quarrel with Abdul — for the first time’ he admitted with a ludicrous blink. ‘You know what, old man, he wants to take up circumcision.’

It was not hard to understand: to become a barber-surgeon rather than a mere cutter and shaver was a normal enough step for someone like Abdul to want to take; it was like getting one’s Ph.D. But of course, I knew too Scobie’s aversion to circumcision. ‘He’s gone and bought a filthy great pot of leeches’ the old man went on indignantly. ‘Leeches! Started opening veins, he has. I said to him I said “If you think, my boy, that I set you up in business so as you could spend your time hyphenating young children for a piastre a time you’re wrong,” I said to him I said.’ He paused for breath, obviously deeply affected by this development. ‘But Skipper’ I protested, ‘it seems very natural for him to want to become a barber-surgeon. After all, circumcision is practised everywhere, even in England now.’ Ritual circumcision was such a common part of the Egyptian scene that I could not understand why he should be so obviously upset by the thought. He pouted, tucked his head down, and ground his false teeth noisily. ‘No’ he said obstinately. ‘I won’t have it.’ Then he suddenly looked up and said ‘D’you know what? He’s actually going to study under Mahmoud Enayet Allah — that old butcher!’

I could not understand his concern; at every festival or mulid the circumcision booth was a regular part of the festivities. Huge coloured pictures, heavily beflagged with the national colours, depicting barber-surgeons with pen-knives at work upon wretched youths spread out in dentists’ chairs were a normal if bizarre feature of the side-shows. The doyen of the guild was Mahmoud himself, a large oval man, with a long oiled moustache, always dressed in full fig and apart from his red tarbush conveying the vague impression of some French country practitioner on French leave. He always made a resounding speech in classical Arabic offering circumcision free to the faithful who were too poor to meet the cost of it. Then, when a few candidates were forthcoming, pushed forward by eager parents, his two negro clowns with painted faces and grotesque clothes used to gambol out to amuse and distract the boys, inveigling them by this means into the fatal chair where they were, in Scobie’s picturesque phrase, ‘hyphenated’, their screams being drowned by the noise of the crowd, almost before they knew what was happening.

I could not see what was amiss in Abdul’s wanting to learn all he could from this don, so to speak, of hyphenation. Then I suddenly understood as Scobie said ‘It’s not the boy — they can do him for all I care. It’s the girl, old man. I can’t bear to think of that little creature being mutilated. I’m an Englishman, old man, you’ll understand my feelings, I WON’T HAVE IT.’ Exhausted by the force of his own voice, he sank back upon his pillow and went on. ‘And what’s more, I told Abdul so in no uncertain terms. “Lay a finger on the girl” I said “and I’ll get you run in — see if I don’t.” But of course, it’s heart-breaking, old man, ‘cause they’ve been such friends, and the poor coon doesn’t understand. He thinks I’m mad!’ He sighed heavily twice. ‘Their friendship was the best I ever had with anyone except Budgie, and I’m not exaggerating, old man. It really was. And now they’re puzzled. They don’t understand an Englishman’s feelings. And I hate using the Influence of My Position.’ I wondered what this exactly meant. He went on. ‘Only last month we ran Abdel Latif in and got him closed down, with six months in chokey for unclean razors. He was spreading syphilis, old man. I had to do it, even though he was a friend. My duty. I warned him countless times to dip his razor. No, he wouldn’t do it. They’ve got a very poor sense of disinfection here, old man. You know, they use styptic — shaving styptic for the circumcisions. It’s considered more modern than the old mixture of black gunpowder and lemon-juice. Ugh! No sense of disinfection. I don’t know how they don’t all die of things, really I don’t. But they were quite scared when we ran Abdel Latif in and Abdul has taken it to heart. I could see him watching me while I was telling him off. Measuring my words, like.’

But the influence of company always cheered the old man up and banished his phantoms, and it was not long before he was talking in his splendid discursive vein about the life history of Toby Mannering. ‘It was he who put me on to Holy Writ, old man, and I was looking at The Book yesterday when I found a lot about circumcision in it. You know? The Amalekites used to collect foreskins like we collect stamps. Funny, isn’t it?’ He gave a sudden snort of a chuckle like a bull-frog. ‘I must say they were ones! I suppose they had dealers, assorted packets, a regular trade, eh? Paid more for perforations!’ He made a straight face for Melissa who came into the room at this moment. ‘Ah well’ he said, still shaking visibly at his own jest. ‘I must write to Budgie tonight and tell him all the news.’ Budgie was his oldest friend. ‘Lives in Horsham, old man, makes earth-closets. He’s collected a regular packet from them, has old Budgie. He’s an FRZS, I don’t quite know what it means, but he had it on his notepaper. Charles Donahue Budgeon FRZS. I write to him every week. Punctual. Always have done, always will do. Staunch, that’s me. Never give up a friend.’

It was to Budgie, I think, the unfinished letter which was found in his rooms after his death and which read as follows:

‘Dear old pal, The whole world seems to have turned against me since I last wrote. I should have’

Scobie and Melissa! In the golden light of those Sundays they live on, bright still with the colours that memory gives to those who enrich our lives by tears or by laughter — unaware themselves that they have given us anything. The really horrible thing is that the compulsive passion which Justine lit in me was quite as valuable as it would have been had it been ‘real’; Melissa’s gift was no less an enigma — what could she have offered me, in truth, this pale waif of the Alexandrian littoral? Was Clea enriched or beggared by her relations with Justine? Enriched — immeasurably enriched, I should say. Are we then nourished only by fictions, by lies? I recall the words Balthazar wrote down somewhere in his tall grammarian’s handwriting: ‘We live by selected fictions’ and also: ‘Everything is true of everybody….’ Were these words of Pursewarden’s quarried from his own experience of men and women, or simply from a careful observation of us, our behaviours and their result? I don’t know. A passage comes to mind from a novel in which Pursewarden speaks about the role of the artist in life. He says something like this: ‘Aware of every discord, of every calamity in the nature of man himself, he can do nothing to warn his friends, to point, to cry out in time and to try to save them. It would be useless. For they are the deliberate factors of their own unhappiness. All the artist can say as an imperative is: “Reflect and weep.”’

Was it consciousness of tragedy irremediable contained — not in the external world which we all blame — but in ourselves, in the human conditions, which finally dictated his unexpected suicide in that musty hotel-room? I like to think it was, but perhaps I am in danger of putting too much emphasis on the artist at the expense of the man. Balthazar writes: ‘Of all things his suicide has remained for me an extraordinary and quite inexplicable freak. Whatever stresses and strains he may have been subjected to I cannot quite bring myself to believe it. But then I suppose we live in the shallows of one another’s personalities and cannot really see into the depths beneath. Yet I should have said this was surprisingly out of character. You see, he was really at rest about his work which most torments the artists, I suppose, and really had begun to regard it as “divinely unimportant” — a characteristic phrase. I know this for certain because he once wrote me out on the back of an envelope an answer to the question “What is the object of writing?” His answer was this: “The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art.”

‘He had odd ideas about the constitution of the psyche. For example, he said “I regard it as completely unsubstantial as a rainbow — it only coheres into identifiable states and attributes when attention is focused on it. The truest form of right attention is of course love. Thus ‘people’ are as much of an illusion to the mystic as ‘matter’ to the physicist when he is regarding it as a form of energy.”

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

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

The truth is great and will prevail

When none care whether it prevail or not.

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

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

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

‘“Are you serious about all this?”

‘“Not a bit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Justine raced ahead of me up the staircases of the gaunt hotel which he had loved so much (indeed, he had christened it Mount Vulture Hotel — I presume from the swarm of whores who fluttered about in the street outside it, like vultures).

‘Nessim had locked himself into the room — we had to knock and he let us in with a certain annoyance, or so it seemed to me. The place was in the greatest disorder you can imagine. Drawers turned out, clothes and manuscripts and paintings everywhere; Pursewarden was lying on the bed in the corner with his nose pointing aloofly at the ceiling. I paused to unpack my big-intestine kit — method is everything in moments of stress — while Justine went unerringly across to the bottle of gin on the corner by the bed and took a long swig. I knew that this might contain the poison but said nothing — at such times there is little to say. The minute you get hysterical you have to take this kind of chance. I simply unpacked and unwound my aged stomach-pump which has saved more useless lives (lives impossible to live, shed like ill-fitting garments) than any such other instrument in Alexandria. Slowly, as befits a third-rate doctor, I unwound it, and with method, which is all a third-rate doctor has left to face the world with….

‘Meanwhile Justine turned to the bed and leaning down said audibly: “Pursewarden, wake up.” Then she put her palms to the top of her head and let out a long pure wail like an Arab woman — a sound abruptly shut off, confiscated by the night in that hot airless little room. Then she began to urinate in little squirts all over the carpet. I caught her and pushed her into the bathroom. It gave me the respite I needed to have a go at his heart. It was silent as the Great Pyramid. I felt angry about it, because it was clear he had resorted to some beastly cyanide preparation — favoured, by the way, by your famous Secret Service. I was so exasperated that I clipped him over the ear — a blow he had long merited!

‘All this time I had been aware that Nessim was suddenly active, but now I recovered, so to speak, and could turn my attention to him. He was turning out drawers and desks and cupboards like a maniac, examining manuscripts and papers, tossing things aside and picking things up with a complete lack of his usual phlegm. “What the hell are you doing?” I said angrily, to which he replied “There must be nothing for the Egyptian Police to find.” And then he stopped as if he had said too much. Every mirror bore a soap-inscription. Nessim had partly obliterated one. I could only make out the letters OHEN… PALESTINE….

‘It was not long before there came the familiar knocking at the door and the faces and tumult inseparable from such scenes everywhere in the world. Men with notebooks, and journalists, and priests — Father Paul of all people turned up. At this, I half-expected the corpse to rise up and throw something… but no; Pursewarden remained with his nose cocked to the ceiling, in his amused privacy.

‘We stumbled out together, the three of us, and drove back to the studio where the great failed paintings soothed us, and where whisky gave us new courage to continue living. Justine said not a word. Not a mortal word.’

* * * * *

VII

I turn now to another part of the Interlinear, the passage which Balthazar marked: ‘So Narouz decided to act,’ underlining the last word twice. Shall I reconstruct it — the scene I see so clearly, and which his few crabbed words in green ink have detonated in my imagination? Yes, it will enable me to dream for a moment about an unfrequented quarter of Alexandria which I loved.

The city, inhabited by these memories of mine, moves not only backwards into our history, studded by the great names which mark every station of recorded time, but also back and forth in the living present, so to speak — among its contemporary faiths and races: the hundred little spheres which religion or lore creates and which cohere softly together like cells to form the great sprawling jellyfish which is Alexandria today. Joined in this fortuitous way by the city’s own act of will, isolated on a slate promontory over the sea, backed only by the moonstone mirror of Mareotis, the salt lake, and its further forevers of ragged desert (now dusted softly by the spring winds into satin dunes, patternless and beautiful as cloudscapes), the communities still live and communicate — Turks with Jews, Arabs and Copts and Syrians with Armenians and Italians and Greeks. The shudders of monetary transactions ripple through them like wind in a wheatfield; ceremonies, marriages and pacts join and divide them. Even the place-names on the old tram-routes with their sandy grooves of rail echo the unforgotten names of their founders — and the names of the dead captains who first landed here, from Alexander to Amr; founders of this anarchy of flesh and fever, of money-love and mysticism. Where else on earth will you find such a mixture?

And when night falls and the white city lights up the thousand candelabra of its parks and buildings, tunes in to the soft unearthly drum-music of Morocco or Caucasus, it looks like some great crystal liner asleep there, anchored to the horn of Africa — her diamond and fire-opal reflections twisting downwards like polished bars into the oily harbour among the battleships.

At dusk it can become like a mauve jungle, anomalous, stained with colours as if from a shattered prism; and rising into the pearly sky of the sunset falter up the steeples and minarets like stalks of giant fennel in a swamp rising up over the long pale lines of the sea-shore and the barbaric cafés where the negroes dance to the pop and drub of a finger-drum or to the mincing of clarinets.

‘There are only as many realities as you care to imagine’ writes Pursewarden.

Narouz always shunned Alexandria while he loved it passionately, with an exile’s love; his hare-lip had made him timid to visit the centre, to encounter those he might know. He always hovered about its outskirts, not daring to go directly into the great lighted heart of it where his brother lived a life of devoted enterprise and mondanité. He came into it always humbly, on horseback, dressed as he was always dressed, to fulfil the transactions which concerned the property. It took a great effort to persuade him to put on a suit and visit it by car, though when absolutely necessary he had been known to do this also, but reluctantly. For the most part he preferred to do his work through Nessim; and of course the telephone guarded him from many such unwelcome journeys. Yet when his brother rang up one day and said that his agents had been unable to make the Magzub tell them what he knew about Justine’s child, Narouz felt suddenly elated — as if fired by the consciousness that this task had now devolved on him. ‘Nessim’ he said, ‘what is the month? Yes, Misra. Quite soon there will come the feast of Sitna Mariam, eh? I shall see if he is there and try to make him tell us something.’ Nessim pondered this offer for so long that Narouz thought the line had been cut and cried sharply ‘Hallo — hallo!’ Nessim answered at once. ‘Yes, yes. I am here. I am just thinking: you will be careful, won’t you?’ Narouz chuckled hoarsely and promised that he would. But he was always stirred by the thought that perhaps he might be able to help his brother. Curiously, he thought not at all about Justine herself, or what such information might mean to her; she was simply an acquisition of Nessim’s whom he liked, admired, loved deeply, indeed automatically, because of Nessim. It was his duty to do whatever was necessary to help Nessim help her. No more. No less.

So it was that with soft stride, the awkward jaunty step (rising and falling on his toes, swinging his arms), he walked across the brown dusk-beshadowed meidan outside the main railway station of Alexandria on the second day of Sitna Mariam. He had stabled his horse in the yard of a friend, a carpenter, not far from the place Where the festivities of the saint were held. It was a hot rank summer night.

With the dusk that vast and threadbare expanse of empty ground always turned first gold and then brown — to brown cracked cardboard — and then lastly to violet as the lights began to prick the on-coming darkness, as the backcloth of the European city itself began to light up window by window, street by street, until the whole looked like a cobweb in which the frost has set a million glittering brilliants.

Camels somewhere snorted and gnarred, and the music and odour of human beings came across the night towards him, rich with the memories of the fairs he had visited with his parents as a child. In his red tarbush and work-stained clothes he knew he would not be singled out by the crowd as one different from themselves. It was characteristic too that, though the festival of Sitna Mariam celebrated a Christian Coptic saint, it was attended and enjoyed by all, not least the Moslem inhabitants of the town, for Alexandria is after all still Egypt: all the colours run together.

A whole encampment of booths, theatres, brothels and shops — a complete township — had sprung up in the darkness, fitfully lit by oil and paraffin stoves, by pressure lamps and braziers, by candle-light and strings of dazzling coloured electric bulbs. He walked lightly into the press of human beings, his nostrils drinking in the scent of aromatic foods and sweetmeats, of stale jasmine and sweat, and his ears the hum of voices which provided a background to those common sounds which always followed the great processions through the town, lingering on the way at every church for a recital of sacred texts, and coming gradually to the site of the festival.

To him all this scattered novelty — the riches of bear-dancers and acrobats, the fire-swallowers blowing six-foot plumes of flame from up-cast mouths: the dancers in rags and parci-coloured caps: indeed everything that to the stranger would have been a delight was so to him only because it was so utterly commonplace — so much a belonging part of his own life. Like the small child he once had been he walked in the brilliance of the light, stopping here and there with smiling eyes to stare at some familiar feature of the fair. A conjurer dressed in tinsel drew from his sleeve endless many-coloured handkerchiefs, and from his mouth twenty small live chicks, crying all the time in the voice of the seabird: ‘Galli-Galli-Galli-Galli Houp!’; Manouli the monkey in a paper hat brilliantly rode round and round his stall on the back of a goat. Towering on either side of the thoroughfare rose the great booths with their sugar figurines brilliant with tinsel, depicting the loves and adventures of the creatures inhabiting the folk-lore of the Delta — heroes like Abu Zeid and Antar, lovers like Yuna and Aziz. He walked slowly, with an unpremeditated carelessness, stopping for a while to hear the storytellers, or to buy a lucky talisman from the famous blind preacher Hussein who stood like an oak tree, magnificent in the elf-light, reciting the ninety-nine holy names.

From the outer perimeter of darkness came the crisp click of sportsmen at singlestick, dimly sounding against the hoarse rumble of the approaching procession with its sudden bursts of wild music — kettle-drums and timbrels like volleys of musketry — and the long belly-thrilling rolls of the camel-drums which drowned and refreshed the quavering deep-throated flute-music. ‘They are coming. They are coming.’ A confused shouting rose and the children darted here and there like mice among the stalls. From the throat of a narrow alley, spilled like a widening circle of fire upon the darkness, burst a long tilting gallery of human beings headed by the leaping acrobats and dwarfs of Alexandria, and followed at a dancing measure by the long grotesque cavalcade of gonfalons, rising and falling in a tide of mystical light, treading the peristaltic measures of the wild music—nibbled out everywhere by the tattling flutes and the pang of drums or the long shivering orgasm of tambourines struck by the dervishes in their habits as they moved towards the site of the festival. ‘All-ah All-ah’ burst from every throat.

Narouz took a stick of sugar-cane from a stall and nibbled it as he watched the wave moving forward to engulf him. Here came the Rifiya dervishes, who could in their trances walk upon embers or drink molten glass or eat live scorpions — or dance the turning measure of the universe out, until reality ran down like an overwound spring and they fell gasping to the earth, dazed like birds. The banners and torches, the great openwork braziers full of burning wood, the great paper lanterns inscribed with texts, they made staggering loops and patterns of light upon the darkness of the Alexandrian night, rising and falling, and now the pitches were swollen with spectators, worrying at the procession like mastiffs, screaming and pulling; and still the flood poured on with its own wild music (perhaps the very music that the dying Antony in Cavafy’s poem heard) until it engulfed the darkness of the great meidan, spreading around it the fitful contours of robes and faces and objects without context but whose colours sprang up and darkened the edges of the sky with colour. Human beings were setting fire to each other.

Somewhere in that black hinterland of smashed and tumbled masonry, of abandoned and disembowelled houses, was a small garden with a tomb in it marking the site which was the sum and meaning of this riot. And here, before a glimmering taper would be read a Christian prayer for a Christian saint, while all around rode the dark press and flood of Alexandria. The dozen faiths and religions shared a celebration which time had sanctified, which was made common to all and dedicated to a season and a landscape, completely obliterating its canon referents in lore and code. To a religious country all religions were one and while the faithful uttered prayers for a chosen saint, the populace enjoyed the fair which had grown up around the celebration, a rocking carnival of light and music.

And through it all (sudden reminders of the city itself and the full-grown wants and powers of a great entrepôt) came the whistle of steam-engines from the dark goods-yards or a sniff of sound from the siren of a liner, negotiating the tortuous fairways of the harbour as it set off for India. The night accommodated them all — a prostitute singing in the harsh chipped accents of the land to the gulp and spank of a finger-drum, the cries of children on the swings and sweating roundabouts and goose-nests, the cock-shies and snake-charmers, the freaks (Zubeida the bearded woman and the calf with five legs), the great canvas theatre outside which the muscle-dancers stood, naked except for loin-cloths, to advertise their skill, and motionless, save for the incredible rippling of their bodies — the flickering and toiling of pectoral, abdominal and dorsal muscles, deceptive as summer lightning.

Narouz was rapt and looked about him with the air of a drunkard, revelling in it all, letting his footsteps follow the haphazard meanderings of this township of light. At the end of one long gallery, having laughingly shaken off the grasp of a dozen girls who plied their raucous trade in painted canvas booths among the stalls, he came to the brilliantly lighted circumcision booths of which the largest and most colourful was that of Abdul’s master, Mahmoud Enayet Allah, splendid with lurid cartoons of the ceremony, painted and framed, and from whose lintel hung a great glass jar cloying with leeches. The doyen himself was there tonight, haranguing the crowd and promising free circumcision to any of the faithful too poor to pay the ordinary fee. His great voice rolled out and boomed, while his two assistants stood at attention behind the ancient brass-bound shoe-black’s chair with their razors at the alert. Inside the booth, two elderly men in dark suits sipped coffee with the air of philologists at a congress.

Business was slack. ‘Come along, come along, be purified, ye faithful’ boomed the old man, his thumbs behind the lapels of his ancient frock-coat, the sweat pouring down his face under his red tarbush. A little to one side, rapt in the performance of his trade sat a cousin of Mahmoud, tattooing the breast of a magnificent-looking male prostitute whose oiled curls hung down his back and whose eyes and lips were heavily painted. A glass panel of great brilliance hung beside him, painted with a selection of designs from which his clients could choose — purely geometric for Moslems, or Texts, or the record of a vow, or simply beloved names. Touch by touch he filled in the pores of his subject’s skin, like a master of needlecraft, smiling from time to time as if at a private joke, building up his pointilliste picture while the old doyen roared and boomed from the step above him ‘Come along, come along, ye faithful!’

Narouz bent to the tattooist and said in a hoarse voice: ‘Is the Magzub here tonight?’ and the man raised his startled eye and paused. ‘Yes’ he said, ‘I think. By the tombs.’

Narouz thanked him and turned back once more to the crowded booths, picking his way haphazardly among the narrow thoroughfares until he reached the outskirts of the light. Somewhere ahead of him in the darkness lay a small cluster of abandoned shrines shadowed by leaning palms, and here the gaunt and terrible figure of the famous religious maniac stood, shooting out the thunderbolts of hypnotic personality on to a fearful but fascinated crowd.

Even Narouz shuddered as he gazed upon that ravaged face, the eyes of which had been painted with crayon so that they looked glaring, inhuman, like the eyes of a monster in a cartoon. The holy man hurled oaths and imprecations at the circle of listeners, his fingers curling and uncurling into claws as he worked upon them, dancing this way and that like a bear at bay, turning and twirling, advancing and retreating upon the crowd with grunts and roars and screams until it trembled before him, fascinated by his powers. He had ‘come already into his hour’, as the Arabs say, and the power of the spirit had filled him.

The holy man stood in an island of the fallen bodies of those he had hypnotized, some crawling about like scorpions, some screaming or bleating like goats, some braying. From time to time he would leap upon one of them uttering hideous screams and ride him across the ring, thrashing at his buttocks like a maniac, and then suddenly turning, with the foam bursting from between his teeth, he would dart into the crowd and pick upon some unfortunate victim, shouting: ‘Are you mocking me?’ and catching him by his nose or an ear or an arm, drag him with superhuman force into the ring where with a sudden quick pass of his talons he would ‘kill his light’ and hurl him down among the victims already crawling about in the sand at his feet, to utter shrill cries for mercy which were snuffled out by the braying and hooting of those already under his spell. One felt the power of his personality shooting out into the tense crowd like sparks from an anvil.

Narouz sat down on a tombstone to watch, in the darkness outside the circle. ‘Fiends, unclean ones’ shrieked the Magzub, thrusting forward his talons so that the circle gave before each onslaught. ‘You and You and You and You’ his voice rising to a terrible roar. He feared and respected no-one when he was ‘in his hour’.

A respectable-looking sheik with the green turban which proclaimed him to be of the seed of the Prophet was walking across the outskirts of the crowd when the Magzub caught sight of him and with flying robes burst through the crowd to the old man’s side, shouting: ‘He is impure.’ The old sheik turned upon his accuser with angry eyes and started to expostulate, but the fanatic thrust his face close to him and sank those terrible eyes into him. The old sheik suddenly went dull, his head wobbled on his neck and with a shout the Magzub had him down on all fours, grunting like a boar, and dragged him by the turban to hurl him among the others. ‘Enough’ cried the crowd, outraged at this indifference to a man of holiness, but the Magzub twisted round and with flickering fingers rushed back towards the crowd, shrieking: ‘Who cries “enough”, who cries “enough”?’

And now, obedient to the commands of this terrible nightmare-mystic, the old sheik rose to his feet and began to perform a lonely little ceremonial dance, crying in thin bird-like tones: ‘Allah. Allah!’ as he trod a shaky measure round the circle of bodies, his voice suddenly breaking into the choking cries of a dying animal. ‘Desist’ called the crowd, ‘desist, O Magzub.’ And the hypnotist made a few blunt passes and thrust the old sheik out of the ring, heaping horrible curses upon him.

The old man staggered and recovered himself. He was wide awake now and seemed little the worse for his experience. Narouz came to his side as he was readjusting his turban and dusting his robes. He saluted him and asked him the name of the Magzub, but the old sheik did not know. ‘But he is a very good man, a holy man’ he said. ‘He was once alone in the desert for years.’ He walked serenely off into the night and Narouz went back to his tombstone to meditate on the beauty of his surroundings and to wait until he might approach the Magzub whose animal shrieks still sounded upon the night, piercing the blank hubbub of the fair and the drone of the holy men from some nearby shrine. He had as yet not decided how best to deal with the strange personage of the darkness. He waited upon the event, meditating.

It was late when the Magzub ended his performance, releasing the imprisoned menagerie about his feet and driving the crowd away by smacking his hands together — for all the world as if they were geese. He stood for a while shouting imprecations after them and then turned abruptly back among the tombs. ‘I must be careful’ thought Narouz, who intended using force upon him ‘not to get within his eyes.’ He had only a small dagger which he now loosened in its sheath. He began to follow, slowly and purposefully.

The holy man walked slowly, as if bowed down by the weight of preoccupations too many to number and almost too heavy for a mortal to bear. He still groaned and sobbed under his breath, and once he fell to his knees and crawled along the ground for a few paces, muttering. Narouz watched all this with head on one side, like a gun-dog, waiting. Together they skirted the ragged confines of the festival in the half-darkness of the hot night, and at last the Magzub came to a long broken wall of earth-bricks which had once demarcated gardens now abandoned and houses now derelict. The noise of the fair had diminished to a hum, but a steam-engine still pealed from somewhere near at hand. They walked now in a peninsula of darkness, unable to gauge relative distances, like wanderers in an unknown desert. But the Magzub had become more erect now, and walked more quickly, with the eagerness of a fox that is near its earth. He turned at last into a great deserted yard, slipping through a hole in the mud-brick wall. Narouz was afraid he might lose trace of him among these shattered fragments of dwellings and dust-blown tombs. He came around a corner full upon him — the figure of a man now swollen by darkness into a mirage of a man, twelve foot high. ‘O Magzub’ he called softly, ‘give praise to God,’ and all of a sudden his apprehension gave place, as it always did when there was violence to be done, to a savage exultation as he stepped forward into the radius of this holy man’s power, loosening the dagger and half-drawing it from the sheath.

The fanatic stepped back once and then twice; and suddenly they were in a shaft of light which, leaking across the well of darkness from some distant street-lamp, set them both alive, giving to each other only a lighted head like a medallion. Dimly Narouz saw the man’s arms raised in doubt, perhaps in fear, like a diver, and resting upon some rotten wooden beam which in some forgotten era must have been driven into the supporting wall of a byre as a foundation for a course of the soft earth-brick. Then the Magzub turned half sideways to join his hands, perhaps in prayer, and with precise and deft calculation Narouz performed two almost simultaneous acts. With his right hand he drove his dagger into the wood, pinning the Magzub’s arms to it through the long sleeves of his coarse gown; with his left he seized the beard of the man, as one might seize a cobra above its hood to prevent it striking. Lastly, instinctively, he thrust his face forward, spreading his split lip to the full, and hissing (for deformity also confers magical powers in the East) in almost the form of an obscene kiss, as he whispered ‘O beloved of the Prophet.’

They stood like this for a long moment, like effigies of a forgotten action entombed in clay or bronze, and the silence of the night about them took up its palpitating proportions once more. The Magzub breathed heavily, almost plaintively, but he said nothing; but now staring into those terrible eyes, which he had seen that evening burning like live coals, Narouz could discern no more power. Under the cartoon image of the crayon, they were blank and lustreless, and their centres were void of meaning, hollow, dead. It was as if he had pinned a man already dead to this corner of the wall in this abandoned yard. A man about to fall into his arms and breathe his last.

The knowledge that he had nothing to fear, now that the Magzub was ‘not in his hour’, flooded into Narouz’ mind on waves of sadness — apologetic sadness: for he knew he could measure the divinity of the man, the religious power from which he took refuge in madness. Tears came into his eyes and he released the saint’s beard, but only to rub the matted hair of his head with his hand and whisper in a voice full of loving tears ‘Ah, beloved of the Prophet! Ah! Wise one and beloved’ — as if he were caressing an animal — as if the Magzub now had transformed himself into some beloved hunting-dog. Narouz ruffled his ears and hair, repeating the words in the low magical voice he always used with his favourite animals. The magician’s eye rolled, focused and became bleary, like that of a child suddenly overcome with self-pity. A single sob broke from his very heart. He sank to a kneeling position on the dry earth with both hands still crucified to the wall. Narouz bowed and fell with him, comforting him with hoarse inarticulate sounds. Nor was this feigned. He was in a passion of reverence for one who he knew had sought the final truths of religion beneath the mask of madness.

But one side of his mind was still busy with the main problem, so that he now said, not in the tender voice of a hunter wheedling a favourite, but in the tone of a man who carries a dagger: ‘Now you will tell me what I wish to know, will you not?’ The head of the magician still lolled wearily, and he turned his eyes upwards into his skull with what seemed to be a fatigue which almost resembled death. ‘Speak’ he said hoarsely; and quickly Narouz leaped up to reclaim his dagger, and then, kneeling beside him with one hand still laid about his neck, told him what he wanted to know.

‘They will not believe me’ moaned the man. ‘And I have seen it by my own scope. Twice I have told them. I did not touch the child.’ And then with a sudden flashing return in voice and glance to his own lost power, he cried: ‘Shall I show you too? Do you wish to see?’ — but sank back again. ‘Yes’ cried Narouz, who trembled now from the shock of the encounter, ‘yes.’ It was as if an electric current were passing in his legs, making them tremble. ‘Show me.’

The Magzub began to breathe heavily, letting his head fall back on his bosom after every breath. His eyes were closed. It was like watching an engine charge itself, from the air. Then he opened his eyes and said, ‘Look into the ground.’

Kneeling upon that dry baked earth he made a circle in the dust with his index finger, and then smoothed out the sand with the palm of his hand. ‘Here where the light is’ he whispered, touching the dust slowly, purposefully; and then ‘look with your eye into the breast of the earth’ indicating with his finger a certain spot. ‘Here.’

Narouz knelt down awkwardly and obeyed. ‘I see nothing’ he said quietly after a moment. The Magzub blew his breath out slowly in a series of long sighs. ‘Think to see in the ground’ he insisted. Narouz allowed his eyes to enter the earth and his mind to pour through them into the spot under the magician’s finger. All was still. ‘I conceive’ he admitted at last. Now suddenly, clearly, he saw a corner of the great lake with its interlinking network of canals and the old palm-shaded house of faded bricks where once Arnauti and Justine had lived — where indeed he had started Moeurs and where the child…. ‘I see her’ he said at last. ‘Ah!’ said the Magzub. ‘Look well.’

Narouz felt as if he were subtly drugged by the haze rising from the water of the canals. ‘Playing by the river’ he went on. ‘She has fallen’; he could hear the breathing of his mentor becoming deeper. She has fallen’ intoned the Magzub. Narouz went on: ‘No-one is near her. She is alone. She is dressed in blue with a butterfly brooch.’ There was a long silence; then the magician groaned softly before saying in a thick, almost gurgling tone: ‘You have seen — to the very place. Mighty is God. In Him is my scope.’ And he took a pinch of dust and rubbed it upon his forehead as the vision faded.

Narouz, deeply impressed by these powers, kissed and embraced the Magzub, never for one moment doubting the validity of the information he had been granted in the vision. He rose to his feet and shook himself like a dog. They greeted one another now in low whispers and parted. He left the magician sitting there, as if exhausted, upon the ground, and turned his steps once more towards the fair-lights. His body was still shaking with the reaction as if afflicted by pins and needles — or as if an electric current were discharging through his loins and thighs. He had, he realised; been very much afraid. He yawned and shivered as he walked and struck his arms against his legs for warmth — as if to restore a sluggish circulation.

In order to reach the carpenter’s yard where his horse was stabled, he had to traverse the eastern corner of the festival ground, where despite the lateness of the hour there was a good deal of hubbub around the swings, and the lights still blazed. It was the time when the prostitutes came into their own, the black, bronze and citron women, impenitent seekers for the money-flesh of men; flesh of every colour, ivory or gold or black. Sudanese with mauve gums and tongues as blue as chows’. Waxen Egyptians. Circassians golden-haired and blue of eye. Earth-blue negresses, pungent as wood-smoke. Every variety of the name of flesh, old flesh quailing upon aged bones, or the unquenched flesh of boys and women on limbs infirm with the desires that could be represented in effigy but not be slaked except in mime — for they were desires engendered in the forests of the mind, belonging not to themselves but to remote ancestors speaking through them. Lust belongs to the egg and its seat is below the level of psyche.

The hot blank Alexandrian night burned as brightly as a cresset, reaching up through the bare soles of the black feet to warm the incorrigible hearts and minds. In all this frenzy and loveliness Narouz felt himself borne along, buoyant as a lily floating on a river, yet burrowing deeply into the silence of his own mind as he went to where the archetypes of these marvellous images waited for him.

It was now that he saw, idly, a short scene enacted before his eyes — a scene whose meaning he did not grasp, and which indeed concerned someone he had never met and would never meet: except in the pages of this writing — Scobie.

Somewhere in the direction of the circumcision booths a riot had started. The frail canvas and paper walls with their lurid iconography trembled and shook, voices snarled and screamed and hobnailed boots thundered upon the impermanent flooring of duckboards; and then, bursting through those paper walls into the white light, holding a child wrapped in a blanket, staggered an old man dressed in the uniform of an Egyptian Police Officer, his frail putteed shanks quavering under him as he ran. Behind him streamed a crowd of Arabs yelling and growling like savage but cowardly dogs. This whole company burst in a desperate sortie right across Narouz’ tracks. The old man in uniform was shouting in a frail voice, but what he shouted was lost in the hubbub; he staggered across the road to an ancient cab and climbed into it. It set off at once at a ragged trot followed by a fusillade of stones and curses. That was all.

As Narouz watched this little scene, his curiosity aroused by it, a voice spoke out of the shadows at his side — a voice whose sweetness and depth could belong to one person only: Clea. He was stabbed to the quick — drawing his breath sharply, painfully, and joining his hands in a sudden gesture of childish humility at the sound. The voice was the voice of the woman he loved but it came from a hideous form, seated in half-shadow — the grease-folded body of a Moslem woman who sat unveiled before her paper hut on a three-legged stool. As she spoke, she was eating a sesame cake with the air of some huge caterpillar nibbling a lettuce — and at the same time speaking in the veritable accents of Clea!

Narouz went to her side at once, saying in a low wheedling voice: ‘O my mother, speak to me’; and once more he heard those perfectly orchestrated tones murmuring endearments and humble blandishments to draw him towards the little torture-chamber. (Petesouchos the crocodile goddess, no less.)

Blind now to everything but the cadences of the voice he followed her like an addict, standing inside the darkened room with eyes closed, his hands upon her great quivering breasts — as if to drink up the music of these slowly falling words of love in one long wholesome draught. Then he sought her mouth feverishly, as if he would suck the very image of Clea from her breath — from that sesame-laden breath. He trembled with excitement — the perilous feeling of one about to desecrate a sacred place by some irresistible obscenity whose meaning flickered like lightning in the mind with a horrible beauty of its own. (Aphrodite permits every conjugation of the mind and sense in love.)

He loosened his clothing and pressed this great doll of flesh slowly down upon the dirty bed, coaxing from her body with his powerful hands the imagined responses he might have coaxed perhaps from another and better-loved form. ‘Speak, my mother’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘speak while I do it. Speak.’ Expressing from this great white caterpillar-form one rare and marvellous image, rare perhaps as an Emperor moth, the beauty of Clea. Oh, but how horrible and beautiful to lie there at last, squeezed out like an old paint-tube among the weeping ruins of intestate desires: himself, his own inner man, thrown finally back into the isolation of a personal dream, transitory as childhood, and not less heartbreaking: Clea!

But he was interrupted, yes; for now as I refashion these scenes in the light of the Interlinear, my memory revives something which it had forgotten; memories of a dirty booth with a man and woman lying together in a bed and myself looking down at them, half-drunk, waiting my turn. I have described the whole scene in another place — only then I took the man to be Mnemjian. I now wonder if it was Narouz. ‘They lay there like the victims of some terrible accident, clumsily engaged, as if in some incoherent experimental fashion they were the first partners in the history of the human race to think out this peculiar means of communication.’

And this woman, with her ‘black spokes of toiling hair’, that lay in Narouz’ arms — would Clea or Justine recognize themselves in a mother-image of themselves woven out of moneyed flesh? Narouz was drinking Clea thirstily out of this old body hired for pleasure, just as I myself wished only to drink Justine. Once again ‘the austere, mindless primeval face of Aphrodite!’

Yes, but thirst can be quenched like this, by inviting a succubus to one’s bed; and Narouz later wandered about in the darkness, incoherent as a madman, swollen with a relief he could barely stand. He felt like singing. Indeed, if one cannot say that he had completely forgotten Clea at this moment, one can at least assert that the act had delivered him from her image. He was wholly purged of her — and indeed would have had at this moment even the courage to hate her. Such is the polarity of love. ‘True’ love.

He went back slowly, by winding ways, to his carpenter friend and claimed his horse, after first rousing the family to reassure them that it was not a thief who was making a noise in the stable at this hour.

Then he rode back to his lands, the happiest young man alive, and reached the manor as the first streaks of dawn were in the sky. As no-one was about he wrapped himself in a cloak and rested on the balcony until the sun should wake him up. He wanted to tell his brother the news.

But Nessim listened quietly and seriously to his whole story the next morning, wondering that the human heart makes no sound when the blood drains out of it drop by drop — for he thought he saw in this piece of information a vital check to the growth of the confidence he wished to foster in his wife. ‘I do not suppose’ said Narouz ‘that after so long we could find the body but I’ll go over with Faraj and some grapnels and see — there can be no harm in trying. Shall I?’ Nessim’s shoulders had contracted. His brother paused for a moment and then went on in the same level tone: ‘Now I did not know anything before about how the child was dressed. But I will describe what I saw in the ground. She had a blue frock with a brooch in the shape of a butterfly.’ Nessim said, almost impatiently: ‘Yes. Perfectly true. It was the description Justine gave to the Parquet. I remember the description. So, well, Narouz … what can I say? It is true. I want to thank you. But as for the dragging — it has been done at least a dozen times by the Parquet. Yes, without result. There is a cut there in the canal and a runaway with a strong undercurrent.’

‘I see’ said Narouz, cast down.

‘It is difficult to know.’ But Nessim’s voice sharpened its edge as he added: ‘But one thing, promise me. She must never know the truth from your lips. Promise.’

‘I promise you that’ said his brother as Nessim turned aside from the hall telephone and came face to face with his wife. Her face was pale and her great eyes searched his with suspense and curiosity. ‘I must go now’ said Nessim hurriedly and put down the receiver as he turned to face her and take her hands in his. In memory, I always see them like this, staring at each other with clasped hands, so near together, so far apart. The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place.

* * * * *

VIII

‘I told you of Scobie’s death (so wrote Balthazar) but I did not tell you in detail the manner of it. I myself did not know him very well but I knew of your affection for him. It was not a very pleasant business and I was concerned in it entirely by accident — indeed, only because Nimrod, who runs the Secretariat, and was Scobie’s chief at three removes, happened to be dining with me on that particular evening.

‘You remember Nimrod? Well, we had recently been competing for the favours of a charming young Athenian actor known by the delightful name of Socrates Pittakakis, and as any serious rivalry might have caused a bad feeling between us which neither could afford on the official level (I am in some sense a consultant to his department) we had sensibly decided to bury our jealousy and frankly share the youth — as all good Alexandrians should. We were therefore dining à trois at the Auberge Bleue with the young man between us like the filling in a meat sandwich. I must admit that I had a slight advantage over Nimrod whose Greek is poor, but in general the spirit of reason and measure reigned. The actor, who drank champagne in stout all evening — he was recovering he explained from a wasting malady by this method — in the last analysis refused to have anything to do with either of us, and indeed turned out to be passionately in love with a heavily moustached Armenian girl in my clinic. So all this effort was wasted — I must say Nimrod was particularly bitter as he had had to pay for this grotesque dinner. Well, as I say, here we all were when the great man was called away to the telephone.

‘He came back after a while, looking somewhat grave, and said: “It was from the Police Station by the docks. Apparently an old man has been kicked to death by the ratings of H.M.S. Milton. I have reason to believe that it might be one of the eccentrics of Q branch — there is an old Bimbashi employed there….” He stood irresolutely on one leg. “At any rate” he went on “I must go down and make sure. You never know. Apparently” he lowered his voice and drew me to one side in confidence “he was dressed in woman’s clothes. There may be a scandal.”

‘Poor Nimrod! I could see that while his duty pressed him hard, he was most reluctant that I should be left alone with the actor. He hovered and pondered heavily. At last, however, my finer nature came to my rescue just when I had given up hope. I too rose. Undying sportsmanship! “I had better come with you” said I. The poor man broke into troubled smiles and thanked me warmly for the gesture. We left the young man eating fish (this time for brain fag) and hurried to the car park where Nimrod’s official car was waiting for him. It did not take us very long to race along the Corniche and turn down into the echoing darkness of the dock-area with its cobbled alleys and the flickering gas light along the wharves which makes it seem so like a corner of Marseilles circa 1850. I have always hated the place with its smells of sea-damp and urinals and sesame.

‘The police post was a red circular building like a Victorian post office consisting of a small charge-room and two dark sweating dungeons, airless and terrible in that summer night. It was packed with jabbering and sweating policemen all showing the startled whites of their eyes like horses in the gloom. Upon a stone bench in one of the cells lay the frail and ancient figure of an old woman with a skirt dragged up above the waist to reveal thin legs clad in green socks held by suspenders and black naval boots. The electric light had failed and a wavering candle on the sill above the body dripped wax on to one withered old hand, now beginning to settle with the approach of the rigor into a histrionic gesture — as of someone warding off a stage blow. It was your friend Scobie.

‘He had been battered to death in ugly enough fashion. A lot of broken crockery inside that old skin. As I examined him a phone started to nag somewhere. Keats had got wind of something: was trying to locate the scene of the incident. It could only be a matter of time before his battered old Citroën drew up outside. Obviously a grave scandal might well be the upshot and fear lent wings to Nimrod’s imagination. “He must be got out of these clothes” he hissed and started beating out right and left with his cane, driving the policemen out into the corridor and clearing the cell. “Right” I said, and while Nimrod stood with sweating averted face, I got the body out of its clothes as best I could. Not pleasant, but at last the old reprobate lay there “naked as a psalm” as they say in Greek. That was stage one. We mopped our faces. The little cell was like an oven.

‘“He must” said Nimrod hysterically “be somehow got back into uniform. Before Keats comes poking around here. I tell you what, let’s go to his digs and get it. I know where he lives.” So we locked the old man into his cell: his smashed glass eye gave him a reproachful, mournful look — as if he had been subjected to an amateur taxidermist’s art. Anyway, we jumped into the car and raced across the docks to Tatwig Street while Nimrod examined the contents of the natty little leatherette handbag with which the old man had equipped himself before setting out on his adventure. In it he found a few coins, a small missal, a master’s ticket, and a packet of those old-fashioned rice-papers (one hardly ever sees them now) resembling a roll of cigarette paper. That was all. “The bloody old fool” Nimrod kept saying as we went. “The bloody old fool.”

‘We were surprised to find that all was chaos in the old man’s lodgings, for in some mysterious way the neighbourhood had already got to hear of his death. At least, so I presumed. All the doors of his rooms had been burst open and cupboards rifled. In a sort of lavatory there was a bathtub full of some brew which smelt like arak and the local people had apparently been helping themselves freely, for there were prints from countless wet feet on the stairs and wet hands on the walls. The landing was awash. In the courtyard, a boab dancing round his stave and singing — a most unusual sight. Indeed, the whole neighbourhood seemed to wear an air of raffish celebration. It was most uncanny. Though most of Scobie’s things had been stolen, his uniform was hanging quite safely behind the door and we grabbed it. As we did so, we got a tremendous start for a green parrot in a cage in the corner of the room said in what Nimrod swore was a perfect imitation of Scobie’s voice:

“Come the four corners of the world in arms,

We’ll (hic) shock ’em.”

‘It was dear that the bird was drunk. Its voice sounded so strange in that dismal empty room. (I have not told Clea any of this, for fear that it would upset her, as she too cared for him very much.)

‘Well, back to the police post with the uniform, then. We were in luck, for there was no sign of Keats. We locked ourselves into the cell again, gasping at the heat. The body was setting so fast that it seemed impossible to get the tunic on without breaking his arms — which, God knows, were so frail that they would have snapped off like celery, or so it seemed: so I compromised by wrapping it round him. The trousers were easier. Nimrod tried to help me but was overtaken by violent nausea and spent most of the time retching in a corner. He was indeed much moved by the whole thing and kept repeating under his breath “Poor old bugger”. Anyway, by a smart bit of work, the scandal he feared was averted, and hardly had we brought your Scobie into line with the general proprieties than we heard the unmistakable rumble of the Globe car at the door and the voice of Keats in the charge-room.

‘Must not forget to add that during the following few days there were two deaths and over twenty cases of acute arak poisoning in the area around Tatwig Street so that Scobie may be said to have left his mark in the neighbourhood. We tried to get an analysis of the stuff he was brewing, but the Government analyst gave up after testing several samples. God knows what the old man was up to.

‘Nevertheless the funeral was a great success (he was buried with full honours as an officer killed in the execution of his duty) and everyone turned out for it. There was quite a contingent of Arabs from around his home. It is rare to hear Moslem ululations at a Christian graveside, and the R.C. Chaplain, Father Paul, was most put out, fearing perhaps the afreets of Eblis conjured up by homemade arak — who knows? Also there were the usual splendid inadvertencies, so characteristic of life here (grave too small, grave-diggers strike for more pay in the middle of widening it, Greek consul’s carriage runs away with him and deposits him in a bush, etc., etc.) I think I described all this in a letter. It was just what Scobie would have desired — to lie covered with honours while the Police Band blew the Last Post — albeit waveringly and with a strong suggestion of Egyptian quarter-tones — over the grave. And the speeches, the tears! You know how people let themselves go on such occasions. You would have thought he was a saint. I kept remembering the body of the old woman in the police cell!

‘Nimrod tells me that once he used to be very popular in his quartier, but that latterly he had started to interfere with ritual circumcision among the children and became much hated. You know how the Arabs are. Indeed, that they threatened to poison him more than once. These things preyed upon his mind as one may understand. He had been many years down there and I suppose he had no other life of his own. It happens to so many expatriates, does it not? Anyway, latterly he began to drink and to “walk in his sleep” as the Armenians say. Everyone tried to make allowances for him and two constables were detailed to look after him on these jaunts. But on the night of his death he gave them all the slip.

‘“Once they start dressing up” says Nimrod (he is really utterly humourless), “it’s the beginning of the end.” And so there it is. Don’t mistake my tone for flippancy. Medicine has taught me to look on things with ironic detachment and so conserve the powers of feeling which should by rights be directed towards those we love and which are wasted on those who die. Or so I think.

‘What on earth, after all, is one to make of life with its grotesque twists and turns? And how, I wonder, has the artist the temerity to try and impose a pattern upon it which he infects with his own meanings? (This is aimed slightly in your direction) I suppose you would reply that it is the duty of the pilot to make comprehensible the shoals and quicksands, the joys and misfortunes, and so give the rest of us power over them. Yes, but….

‘I desist for tonight. Clea took in the old man’s parrot; it was she who paid the expenses of his funeral. Her portrait of him still stands I believe upon a shelf in her now untenanted room. As for the parrot, it apparently still spoke in his voice and she said she was frequently startled by the things it came out with. Do you think one’s soul could enter the body of a green Amazon parrot to carry the memory of one forward a little way into Time? I would like to think so. But this is old history now.’

IX

Whenever Pombal was grievously disturbed about something (‘Mon Dieu! Today I am decomposed!’ he would say in his quaint English) he would take refuge in a magistral attack of gout in order to remind himself of his Norman ancestry. He kept an old-fashioned high-backed court chair, covered in red velveteen, for such occasions. He would sit with his wadded leg up on a footstool to read the Mercure and ponder on the possible reproof and transfer which might follow upon his latest gaffe whatever that might happen to be. His whole Chancery, he knew, was against him and considered his conduct (he drank too much and chased women) as prejudicial to the service. In fact, they were jealous because his means, which were not large enough to free him altogether from the burden of working for a living, permitted him nevertheless to live more or less en prince — if you could call the smoky little flat we shared princely.

As I climbed the stairs today I knew that he was in a decomposed state from the peevish tone in which he spoke. ‘It is not news’ he was repeating hysterically. ‘I forbid you to publish.’ One-eyed Hamid met me in the hall which smelt of frying, and waved a tender hand in the air. ‘The Miss has gone’ he whispered, indicating Melissa’s departure, ‘back six o’clock. Mr. Pombal very not good.’ He pronounced my friend’s name as if it contained no vowels: thus: Pmbl.

I found Keats was with him in the sitting-room, his large and perspiring frame stretched awkwardly across the sofa. He was grinning and his hat was on the back of his head. Pombal was perched in his gout-chair, looking mournful and peevish. I recognized the signs not only of a hangover but of yet another committed gaffe. What had Keats got hold of now? ‘Pombal’ I said, ‘what the devil has happened to your car?’ He groaned and clutched his dewlaps as if imploring me to leave the whole subject alone; obviously Keats had been teasing him about just that.

The little car in question, so dear to Pombal’s heart, now stood outside the front door, badly buckled and smashed. Keats gave a snuffle-gulp. ‘It was Sveva’ he explained, ‘and I’m not allowed to print it.’ Pombal moaned and rocked. ‘He won’t tell me the whole story.’

Pombal began to get really angry. ‘Will you please get out?’ he said, and Keats, always easily discountenanced before someone whose name appeared on the diplomatic list, rose and pocketed his notebook, wiping the smile off his face as he did so. ‘All right’ he said, punning feebly ‘Chacun à son gout, I suppose’ and clambered slowly down the stairs. I sat down opposite Pombal and waited for him to calm down.

‘Another gaffe, my dear boy’ he said at last; ‘the worst yet in the affaire Sveva. It was she … my poor car … you have seen it? Here, feel this bump on my neck. Eh? A bloody rock.’

I asked Hamid for some coffee while he recounted his latest mishap with the usual anguished gesticulations. He had been unwise ever to embark on this affair with the fiery Sveva, for now she loved him. ‘Love!’ Pombal groaned and twisted in his chair. ‘I am so weak about women’ he admitted, ‘and she was so easy. God, it was like having something put on one’s plate which one hadn’t ordered — or which someone else had and which had been sent to one’s table by mistake; she came into my life like a bifteck à point, like a stuffed eggplant…. What was I to do?

‘And then yesterday I thought: “Taking everything into account, her age, the state of her teeth, and so on, illness might very well intervene and cause me expense.” Besides, I don’t want a mistress in perpetuum mobile. So I decided to take her out to a quiet spot on the lake and say good-bye. She went mad. In a flash she was on the bank of the river where she found a huge pile of rocks. Before I knew what to say Piff Paff Pang Bong.’ His gestures were eloquent. ‘The air was full of rocks. Windscreen, headlights, everything … I was lying beside the clutch screaming. Feel this lump on my neck. She had gone mad. When all the glass was gone, she picked up a huge boulder and began to stove the car in screaming the word “Amour, Amour” to puctuate each bang like a maniac. I never want to hear the word again. Radiator gone, all the wings twisted. You have seen? You would never believe a girl could do such a thing. Then what? Then I’ll tell you what. She threw herself into the river. Figure to yourself my feelings. She can’t swim, nor can I. The scandal if she died! I threw myself in after her. We held each other and screamed like a pair of cats making love. The water I swallowed! Some policemen came and pulled us out. Long procèsverbal, etc. I simply dare not ring the Chancery this morning. Life isn’t worth living.’

He was on the point of tears. ‘This is my third scandal this month’ he said. ‘And tomorrow is carnival. Do you know what? After long thought I have evolved an idea.’ He smiled a wintry smile. ‘I shall make sure about the carnival — even if I do drink too much and get in a scrape as I usually do. I shall go in an impenetrable disguise. Yes.’ He rinsed his fingers and repeated ‘An impenetrable disguise.’ Then he considered me for a moment as if to decide whether to trust me or not. His scrutiny seemed to satisfy him for he turned abruptly towards the cupboard and said: ‘If I show you, you’ll keep my secret, eh? We are friends after all. Fetch me the hat from the top shelf in there. You will get a laugh.’