The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

They turned out to be Greek sailors who had been bathing from their corvette when, by some accident, a depth-charge had been detonated, killing them instantly by concussion. Their unmarked bodies, glittering like mackerel, had been harvested laboriously in an old torpedo net, and laid out upon dripping decks to dry before burial. Flung overboard once more in the traditional funeral dress of mariners the curling tide had brought them to Narouz’ island.

It will sound strange, perhaps, to describe how quickly we got used to these silent visitants of the pool. Within a matter of days we had accommodated them, accorded them a place of their own. We swam between them to reach the outer water, bowing ironically to their bent attentive heads.

It was not to flout death — it was rather that they had become friendly and appropriate symbols of the place, these patient, intent figures. Neither their thick skin-parcels of canvas, nor the stout integuments of rope which bound them showed any sign of disintegration. On the contrary they were covered by a dense silver dew, like mercury, which heavily proofed canvas always collects when it is immersed. We spoke once or twice of asking the Greek naval authorities to remove them to deeper water, but by long experience I knew we should find them unco-operative if we tried, and the subject was dropped by common consent. Once I thought I saw the flickering shadow of a great catfish moving among them but I must have been mistaken. We even thought later of giving them names, but were deterred by the thought that they must already have names of their own — the absurd names of ancient sophists and generals like Anaximander, Plato, Alexander….

So this halcyon summer moved towards its end, free from omens — the long sunburnt ranks of marching days. It was, I think, in the late autumn that Maskelyne was killed in a desert sortie, but this was a passing without echoes for me — so little substance had he ever had in my mind as a living personage. It was, in very truth, a mysterious thing to find Telford sitting red-eyed at his desk one afternoon repeating brokenly: ‘The old Brig’s copped it. The poor old Brig’ and wringing his purple hands together. It was hard to know what to say. Telford went on, with a kind of incoherent wonder in his voice that was endearing. ‘He had no-one in the world. D’you know what? He gave me as his next-of-kin.’ He seemed immeasurably touched by this mark of friendship. Nevertheless it was with a reverent melancholy that he went through Maskelyne’s exiguous personal effects. There was little enough to inherit save a few civilian clothes of unsuitable size, several campaign medals and stars, and a credit account of fifteen pounds in the Tottenham Court Road Branch of Lloyds Bank. More interesting relics to me were those contained in a little leather wallet — the tattered pay-book and parchment certificate of discharge which had belonged to his grandfather. The story they told had the eloquence of a history which unfolded itself within a tradition. In the year 1861 this now forgotten Suffolk farm-boy had enlisted at Bury St Edmunds. He served in the Coldstream Guards for thirty-two years, being discharged in 1893. During his service he was married in the Chapel of the Tower of London and his wife bore him two sons. There was a faded photograph of him taken on his return from Egypt in 1882. It showed him dressed in white pith helmet, red jacket and blue serge trousers with smart black leather gaiters and pipe-clayed cross belts. On his breast was pinned the Egyptian War Medal with a clasp for the battle of Tel-el-Kebir and the Khedive’s Star. Of Maskelyne’s own father there was no record among his effects.

‘It’s tragic’ said little Telford with emotion. ‘Mavis couldn’t stop crying when I told her. She only met him twice. It shows what an effect a man of character can have on you. He was always the perfect gentleman, was the Brig.’ But I was brooding over this obscure faded figure in the photograph with his grim eyes and heavy black moustache, with the pipe-clayed cross belts and the campaign medals. He seemed to lighten the picture of Maskelyne himself, to give it focus. Was it not, I wondered, a story of success — a success perfectly complete within the formal pattern of something greater than the individual life, a tradition? I doubted whether Maskelyne himself could have wanted things to fall out otherwise. In every death there is the grain of something to be learned. Yet Maskelyne’s quiet departure made little impact on my feelings, though I did what I could to soothe the forlorn Telford. But the tide-lines of my own life were now beginning to tug me invisibly towards an unforeseeable future. Yes, it was this beautiful autumn, with its torrent of brass brown leaves showering down from the trees in the public gardens, that Clea first became a matter of concern to me. Was it, in truth, because she heard the weeping? I do not know. She never openly admitted it. At times I tried to imagine that I heard it myself — this frail cry of a small child, or a pet locked out: but I knew that I heard nothing, absolutely nothing. Of course one could look at it in a matter-of-fact way and class it with the order of natural events which time revises and renews according to its own caprices. I mean love can wither like any other plant. Perhaps she was simply falling out of love? But in order to record the manner of its falling out I feel almost compelled to present it as something else — preposterous as it may sound — as a visitation of an agency, a power initiated in some uncommon region beyond the scope of the ordinary imagination. At any rate its onset was quite definitive, marked up like a date on a blank wall. It was November the fourteenth, just before dawn. We had been together during the whole of the previous day, idling about the city, gossiping and shopping. She had bought some piano music, and I had made her a present of a new scent from the Scent Bazaar. (At the very moment when I awoke and saw her standing, or rather crouching by the window, I caught the sudden breath of scent from my own wrist which had been dabbed with samples from the glass-stoppered bottles.) Rain had fallen that night. Its delicious swishing had lulled our sleep. We had read by candle-light before falling asleep.

But now she was standing by the window listening, her whole body stiffened into an attitude of attentive interrogation so acute that it suggested something like a crisis of apprehension. Her head was turned a little sideways, as if to present her ear to the uncurtained window behind which, very dimly, a rain-washed dawn was beginning to break over the roofs of the city. What was she listening for? I had never seen this attitude before. I called to her and briefly she turned a distraught and unseeing face to me — impatiently, as if my voice had ruptured the fine membrane of her concentration. And as I sat up she cried, in a deep choked voice: ‘Oh no!’, and clapping her hands over her ears fell shuddering to her knees. It was as if a bullet had been fired through her brain. I heard her bones creak as she hung crouching there her features contorted into a grimace. Her hands were locked so tightly over her ears that I could not disengage them, and when I tried to lift her by her wrists she simply sank back to her knees on the carpet, with shut eyes, like a dement. ‘Clea, what on earth is it?’ For a long moment we knelt there together, I in great perplexity. Her eyes were fast shut. I could feel the cool wind from the window pouring into the room. The silence, save for our exclamations, was complete. At last she gave a great sigh of relaxation, a long sobbing respiration, and unfastened her ears, stretched her limbs slowly, as if unbinding them from painful cramps. She shook her head at me as if to say that it was nothing. And walking like a drunkard to the bathroom she was violently sick in the wash-basin. I stood there like a sleepwalker; feeling as if I had been uprooted. At last she came back, got into bed and turned her face to the wall. ‘What is it, Clea?’ I asked again, feeling foolish and importunate. Her shoulders trembled slightly under my hand, her teeth chattered lightly from cold. ‘It is nothing, really nothing. A sudden splitting headache. But it has gone. Let me sleep now, will you?’

In the morning she was up early to make the breakfast. I thought her exceptionally pale — with the sort of pallor that might come after a long and agonizing toothache. She complained of feeling listless and weary.

‘You frightened me last night’ I said, but she did not answer, turning away evasively from the subject with a curious look of anxiety and distress. She asked to be allowed to spend the day alone painting, so I took myself off for a long walk across the town, teased by half-formulated thoughts and premonitions which I somehow could not make explicit to myself. It was a beautiful day. High seas were running. The waves flailed the Spouting Rocks like the pistons of some huge machine. Immense clouds of spray were flung high into the air like the explosion of giant puff-balls only to fall back in hissing spume upon the crown of the next wave. I stood watching the spectacle for a long time, feeling the tug of the wind at the skirt of my overcoat and the cool spray on my cheeks. I think I must have known that from this point onward everything would be subtly changed. That we had entered, so to speak, a new constellation of feelings which would alter our relationship.

One speaks of change, but in truth there was nothing abrupt, coherent, definitive about it. No, the metamorphosis came about with comparative slowness. It waxed and waned like a tide, now advancing now retreating. There were even times when, for whole weeks, we were apparently completely restored to our former selves, reviving the old raptures with an intensity born now of insecurity. Suddenly for a spell we would be once more completely identified in each other, inseparable: the shadow had lifted. I tell myself now — and with what truth I still do not know — that these were periods when for a long time she had not heard the weeping which she once long ago described as belonging to a she-camel in distress or some horrible mechanical toy. But what could such nonsense really mean to anyone — and how could it elucidate those other periods when she fell into silence and moroseness, became a nervous and woebegone version of her old self? I do not know. I only know that this new personage was subject to long distracted silences now, and to unusual fatigues. She might, for example, fall asleep on a sofa in the middle of a party and begin to snore: as if overcome with weariness after an immensely long vigil. Insomnia too began to play its part, and she resorted to relatively massive doses of barbiturates in order to seek release from it. She was smoking very heavily indeed.

‘Who is this new nervy person I do not recognize?’ asked Balthazar in perplexity one evening when she had snapped his head off after some trivial pleasantry and left the room, banging the door in my face.

‘There’s something wrong’ I said. He looked at me keenly for a moment over a lighted match. ‘She isn’t pregnant?’ he asked, and I shook my head. ‘I think she’s beginning to wear me out really.’ It cost me an effort to bring out the words. But they had the merit of offering something like a plausible explanation to these moods — unless one preferred to believe that she were being gnawed by secret fears.

‘Patience’ he said. ‘There is never enough of it.’

‘I’m seriously thinking of absenting myself for a while.’

‘That might be a good idea. But not for too long.’

‘I shall see.’

Sometimes in my clumsy way I would try by some teasing remark to probe to the sources of this disruptive anxiety. ‘Clea, why are you always looking over your shoulder — for what?’ But this was a fatal error of tactics. Her response was always one of ill-temper or pique, as if in every reference to her distemper, however oblique, I was in some way mocking her. It was intimidating to see how rapidly her face darkened, her lips compressed themselves. It was as if I had tried to put my hand on a secret treasure which she was guarding with her life.

At times she was particularly nervous. Once as we were coming out of a cinema I felt her stiffen on my arm. I turned my eyes in the direction of her gaze. She was staring with horror at an old man with a badly gashed face. He was a Greek cobbler who had been caught in a bombardment and mutilated. We all knew him quite well by sight, indeed Amaril had repaired the damage as well as he was able. I shook her arm softly, reassuringly and she suddenly seemed to come awake. She straightened up abruptly and said ‘Come. Let us go.’ She gave a little shudder and hurried me away.

At other such times when I had unguardedly made some allusion to her inner preoccupations — this maddening air of always listening for something — the storms and accusations which followed seriously suggested the truth of my own hypothesis — namely that she was trying to drive me away: ‘I am no good for you, Darley. Since we have been together you haven’t written a single line. You have no plans. You hardly read any more.’ So stern those splendid eyes had become, and so troubled! I was forced to laugh, however. In truth I now knew, or thought I did, that I would never become a writer. The whole impulse to confide in the world in this way had foundered, had guttered out. The thought of the nagging little world of print and paper had become unbearably tedious to contemplate. Yet I was not unhappy to feel that the urge had abandoned me. On the contrary I was full of relief— a relief from the bondage of these forms which seemed so inadequate an instrument to convey the truth of feelings. ‘Clea, my dear’ I said, still smiling ineffectually, and yet desiring in a way to confront this accusation and placate her. ‘I have been actually meditating a book of criticism.’

‘Criticism!’ she echoed sharply, as if the word were an insult. And she smacked me full across the mouth — a stinging blow which brought tears to my eyes and cut the inside of my lip against my teeth. I retired to the bathroom to mop my mouth for I could feel the salty taste of the blood. It was interesting to see my teeth outlined in blood. I looked like an ogre who had just taken a mouthful of bleeding flesh from his victims. I washed my mouth, furiously enraged. She came in and sat down on the bidet, full of remorse. ‘Please forgive me’ she said. ‘I don’t know what sort of impulse came over me. Darley, please forgive’ she said.

‘One more performance like this’ I said grimly, ‘and I’ll give you a blow between those beautiful eyes which you’ll remember.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She put her arms round my shoulders from behind and kissed my neck. The blood had stopped. ‘What the devil is wrong?’ I said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘What has come over you these days? We’re drifting apart, Clea.’

‘I know.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ But her face had once more become hard and obstinate. She sat down on the bidet and stroked her chin thoughtfully, suddenly sunk in reflection once more. Then she lit a cigarette and walked back into her living-room. When I returned she was sitting silently before a painting gazing at it with an inattentive malevolent fixity.

‘I think we should separate for a while’ I said.

‘If you wish’ she rapped out mechanically.

‘Do you wish it?’

Suddenly she started crying and said ‘Oh, stop questioning me. If only you would stop asking me question after question. It’s like being in court these days.’

‘Very well’ I said.

This was only one of several such scenes. It seemed clear to me that to absent myself from the city was the only way to free her — to give her the time and space necessary to … what? I did not know. Later that winter I thought that she had begun running a small temperature in the evenings and incurred another furious scene by asking Balthazar to examine her. Yet despite her anger she submitted to the stethoscope with comparative quietness. Balthazar could find nothing physically wrong, except that her pulse rate was advanced and her blood pressure higher than normal. His prescription of stimulants she ignored, however. She had become much thinner at this time.

By patient lobbying I at last unearthed a small post for which I was not unsuitable and which somehow fitted into the general rhythm of things — for I did not envisage my separation from Clea as something final, something in the nature of a break. It was simply a planned withdrawal for a few months to make room for any longer-sighted resolutions which she might make. New factors were there, too, for with the ending of the war Europe was slowly becoming accessible once more — a new horizon opening beyond the battle-lines. One had almost stopped dreaming of it, the recondite shape of a Europe hammered flat by bombers, raked by famine and discontents. Nevertheless it was still there. So it was that when I came to tell her of my departure it was not with despondency or sorrow — but as a matter-of-fact decision which she must welcome for her own part. Only the manner in which she pronounced the word ‘Away’ with an indrawn breath suggested for a brief second that perhaps, after all, she might be afraid to be left alone. ‘You are going away, after all?’

‘For a few months. They are building a relay station on the island, and there is need for someone who knows the place and can speak the language.’

‘Back to the island?’ she said softly — and here I could not read the meaning of her voice or the design of her thought.

‘For a few short months only.’

‘Very well.’

She walked up and down the carpet with an air of perplexity, staring downwards at it, deep in thought. Suddenly she looked up at me with a soft expression that I recognized with a pang — the mixture of remorse and tenderness at inflicting unwitting sorrow upon others. It was the face of the old Clea. But I knew that it would not last, that once more the peculiar shadow of her discontent would cast itself over our relationship. There was no point in trusting myself once more to what could only prove a short respite. ‘Oh, Darley’ she said, ‘when do you go, my dear?’ taking my hands.

‘In a fortnight. Until then I propose not to see you at all. There is no point in our upsetting each other by these wrangles.’

‘As you wish.’

‘I’ll write to you.’

‘Yes of course.’

It was a strange listless way of parting after such a momentous relationship. A sort of ghostly anaesthesia had afflicted our emotions. There was a kind of deep ache inside me but it wasn’t sorrow. The dead handshake we exchanged only expressed a strange and truthful exhaustion of the spirit. She sat in a chair, quietly smoking and watching me as I gathered my possessions together and stuffed them into the old battered briefcase which I had borrowed from Telford and forgotten to return the summer before. The toothbrush was splayed. I threw it away. My pyjamas were torn at the shoulder but the bottom half, which I had never used, were still crisp and new. I assembled these objects with the air of a geologist sorting specimens of some remote age. A few books and papers. It all had a sort of unreality, but I cannot say that a single sharp regret was mixed with it.

‘How this war has aged and staled us’ she said suddenly, as if to herself. ‘In the old days one would have thought of going away in order, as we said, to get away from oneself. But to get away from it….’

Now, writing the words down in all their tedious banality, I realize that she was really trying to say good-bye. The fatality of human wishes. For me the future lay open, uncommitted; and there was no part of it which I could then visualize as not containing, somehow, Clea. This parting was … well, it was only like changing the bandages until a wound should heal. Being unimaginative, I could not think definitively about a future which might make unexpected demands upon me; as something entirely new. It must be left to form itself upon the emptiness of the present. But for Clea the future had already closed, was already presenting a blank wall. The poor creature was afraid!

‘Well, that’s everything’ I said at last, shoving the briefcase under my arm. ‘If there’s anything you need, you have only to ring me, I’ll be at the flat.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m off then for a while. Good-bye.’

As I closed the door of the little flat I heard her call my name once — but this again was one of those deceptions, those little accesses of pity or tenderness which deceive one. It would have been absurd to pay any attention to it, to return on my tracks, and open a new cycle of disagreements. I went on down the stairs, determined to let the future have every chance to heal itself.

It was a brilliantly sunny spring day and the streets looked washed with colour. The feeling of having nowhere to go and nothing to do was both depressing and inspiriting. I returned to the flat and found on the mantelpiece a letter from Pombal in which he said that he was likely to be transferred to Italy shortly and did not think he would be able to keep the flat on. I was delighted as this enabled me to terminate the lease, my share of which I would soon not be able to afford.

It was at first somewhat strange, even perhaps a little numbing, to be left entirely to my own devices, but I rapidly became accustomed to it. Moreover there was quite a lot of work to be done in winding up my censorship duties and handing over the post to a successor while at the same time collecting practical information for the little unit of technicians which was to install the radio post. Between the two departments with their different needs I was kept busy enough. During these days I kept my word and saw nothing of Clea. The time passed in a sort of limbo pitched between the world of desire and of farewell — though there were no emotions in very clear definition for me: I was not conscious of regrets or longings.

So it was that when at last that fatal day presented itself, it did so under the smiling guise of a spring sunshine hot enough to encourage the flies to begin hatching out upon the window-panes. It was their buzzing which awoke me. Sunlight was pouring into the room. For a moment, dazzled by it, I hardly recognized the smiling figure seated at the foot of my bed, waiting for me to open my eyes. It was the Clea of some forgotten original version, so to speak, clad in a brilliant summer frock of a crisp vine-leaf pattern, white sandals, and with her hair arranged in a new style. She was smoking a cigarette whose smoke hung in brilliant ash-veined whorls in the sunlight above us, and her smiling face was completely relaxed and unshadowed by the least preoccupation. I stared, for she seemed so precisely and unequivocally the Clea I should always have remembered; the mischievous tenderness was back in the eyes. ‘Well’ I said in sleepy amazement. ‘What …?’ and I felt her warm breath on my cheek as she leaned down to embrace me.

‘Darley’ she said, ‘I suddenly realized that it’s tomorrow you are leaving; and that today is the Mulid of El Scob. I couldn’t resist the idea of spending the day together and visiting the shrine this evening. Oh, say you will! Look at the sunshine. It’s warm enough for a bathe, and we could take Balthazar.’

I was still not properly awake. I had completely forgotten the Name Day of the Pirate. ‘But it’s long past St George’s Day’ I said. ‘Surely that’s at the end of April.’

‘On the contrary. Their absurd method of lunar calendar reckoning has turned him into a movable feast like all the others. He slides up and down the calendar now like a domestic saint. In fact it was Balthazar who telephoned yesterday and told me or I would have missed it myself.’ She paused to puff her cigarette. ‘We shouldn’t miss it, should we?’ she added a little wistfully.

‘But of course not! How good of you to come.’

‘And the island? Perhaps you could come with us?’

The time was just ten o’clock. I could easily telephone to Telford to make some excuse for absenting myself for the day. My heart leaped.

‘I’d love to’ I said. ‘How does the wind sit?’

‘Calm as a nun with easterly freshets. Ideal for the cutter I should say. Are you sure you want to come?’

She had a wicker-covered demijohn and a basket with her. ‘I’ll go on and provision us up; you dress and meet me at the Yacht Club in an hour.’

‘Yes.’ It would give me ample time to visit my office and examine the duty mail. ‘A splendid idea.’

And in truth it was, for the day was clear and ringing with a promise of summer heat for the afternoon. Clip-clopping down the Grande Corniche I studied the light haze on the horizon and the flat blue expanse of sea with delight. The city glittered in sunshine like a jewel. Brilliantly rode the little craft in the inner basin, parodied by their shining reflections. The minarets shone loudly. In the Arab quarter the heat had hatched out the familiar smells of offal and drying mud, of carnations and jasmine, of animal sweat and clover. In Tatwig Street dark gnomes on ladders with scarlet flower-pot hats were stretching strings of flags from the balconies. I felt the sun warm on my fingers. We rolled past the site of the ancient Pharos whose shattered fragments still choke the shallows. Toby Mannering, I remembered, had once wanted to start a curio trade by selling fragments of the Pharos as paperweights. Scobie was to break them up with a hammer for him and he was to deliver them to retailers all over the world. Why had the scheme foundered? I could not remember. Perhaps Scobie found the work too arduous? Or perhaps it had got telescoped with that other scheme for selling Jordan water to Copts at a competitive price? Somewhere a military band was banging away.

They were down on the slip waiting for me. Balthazar waved his stick cheerfully. He was dressed in white trousers and sandals and a coloured shirt, and sported an ancient yellowing Panama hat.

‘The first day of summer’ I called cheerfully.

‘You’re wrong’ he croaked. ‘Look at that haze. It’s altogether too hot. I’ve betted Clea a thousand piastres we have a thunder-storm by this afternoon.’

‘He’s always got something gloomy to say’ smiled Clea.

‘I know my Alexandria’ said Balthazar.

And so amidst these idle pleasantries we three set forth, Clea at the tiller of her little craft. There was hardly a breath of wind inside the harbour and she lagged somewhat, only gathering way by the momentum of the currents which curved down towards the harbour entrance. We stole past the battleships and liners, breasting the choppy main-channel hesitantly, the mainsail hardly drawing as yet, until at last we reached the huddle of grey forts which marked the main harbour entrance. Here there was always a bundle of choppy water piled up by the tide and we wallowed and yawed for a while until suddenly she heeled and threaded herself upon the wind and settled her bowsprit true. We began to hiss through the sea like a flying fish, as if she were going to impale a star. I lay in the sheets now, staring up at the gold sun shining through the sails, hearing the smattering of the wavelets on the elegant prow of the cutter. Balthazar was humming an air. Clea’s brown wrist lay upon the tiller with a deceptive soft negligence. The sails were stiff. These are the heart-lifting joys of small sailing-craft in ideal weather. A speechless delight held me, a mixture of luxuries born of the warm sun, the racing wind, and the light cool touches of spray which dashed our cheeks from time to time. We went far out on an easterly course in order to come about and tack inshore. By now we had performed this manoeuvre so often that it had become second nature to Clea: to ride down upon the little island of Narouz and to judge the exact moment at which to turn into the eye of the wind and hang, fluttering like an eyelash, until I had run the sail in and scrambled ashore to make fast….

‘Smart work indeed’ said Balthazar approvingly as he stepped into the water; and then ‘By God! It is quite fantastically warm.’

‘What did I tell you?’ said Clea busy in the locker.

‘It only proves my point about a thunderstorm.’

And curiously enough, at this moment, there came a distinct rumble of thunder out of that cloudless sky. ‘There’ said Balthazar in triumph. ‘We will get a fine soaking and you will owe me some money, Clea.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘It was a shore battery’ I said.

‘Rubbish’ said Balthazar.

So we secured the cutter and carried our provisions ashore. Balthazar lay on his back with his hat over his nose in the best of humours. He would not bathe, pleading the indifference of his swimming, so Clea and I dived once more into the familiar pool which we had neglected all winter long. Nothing had changed. The sentinels were still there, grouped in silent debate, though the winter tides had altered their dispositions somewhat, grouping them a little nearer to the wreck. Ironically yet respectfully we greeted them, recognizing in these ancient gestures and underwater smiles a familiar happiness growing up in the sheer act of swimming once more together. It was as if the blood had started to flow again in veins long withered from disuse. I caught her by the heel and rolled her in a long somersault towards the dead mariners, and turning expertly she repaid the debt by coming up behind me to drag me down by the shoulders and climb surfacewards before I could retaliate. It was here, spiralling up through the water with her hair coiled out behind her, that the image of Clea was restored once more. Time had rendered her up, whole and intact again — “natural as a city’s grey-eyed Muse” — to quote the Greek poem. Swiftly, precisely the fingers which pressed upon my shoulder re-evoked her as we slid through the silent pool.

And then: to sit once more in the simple sunlight, sipping the red wine of St Menas as she broke up the warm brown loaf of French bread, and hunted for a particular cheese or a cluster of dates: while Balthazar talked discursively (half asleep) of the Vineyard of Ammon, the Kings of the Harpoon Kingdom and their battles, or of the Mareotic wine to which, not history, but the gossiping Horace once attributed Cleopatra’s distempers of mind … (‘History sanctions everything, pardons everything — even what we do not pardon ourselves.’)

So the warm noon drew on as we lay there on the hot pebbles: and so at last — to Balthazar’s great delight and Clea’s discomfiture — the predicted thunderstorm made its appearance, heralded by a great livid cloud which rolled up from the east and squatted over the city, bruising the sky. So suddenly too — as when an ink-squid in alarm puffs out its bag and suddenly fogs clear water in a cloud of black — rain flowed down in glittering sheets, thunder bellowed and insisted. At each peal Balthazar clapped his hands with delight — not only to be proved right, but also because here we were sitting in full sunlight, fully at our ease, eating oranges and drinking wine beside an untroubled blue sea.

‘Stop crowing’ said Clea severely.

It was one of those freak storms so prevalent in the early spring with its sharp changes of temperature born of sea and desert. They turned the streets to torrents in the twinkling of an eye, yet never endured above half an hour. Suddenly the cloud would be whisked away by a scrap of wind, utterly to disappear. ‘And mark me now’ said Balthazar, inebriated by the success of his prediction. ‘By the time we get back to harbour everything will be dry again, dry as a bone.’

But now the afternoon brought us another phenomenon to delight us — something rarely seen in summer in the waters of Alexandria, belonging as it did to those days preceding winter storms when the glass was falling steeply. The waters of the pool darkened appreciably, curdled, and then became phosphorescent. It was Clea who first noticed. ‘Look’ she cried with delight, crushing her heels down in the shallows to watch the twinkling prickling light spark from them. ‘Phosphorus!’ Balthazar started saying something learned about the organism which causes this spectacle but unheeding we plunged side by side and ranged down into the water, transformed into figures of flame, the sparks flashing from the tips of our fingers and toes with the glitter of static electricity. A swimmer seen underwater looks like an early picture of the fall of Lucifer, literally on fire. So bright was the electrical crackle that we could not help wondering how it was that we were not scorched by it. So we played, glittering like comets, among the quiet mariners who sat, watching us perhaps in their thoughts, faintly echoing the twitching of the tide in their canvas sacks.

‘The cloud’s lifting already’ cried Balthazar as I surfaced at last for air. Soon even the fugitive phosphorescence would dwindle and vanish. For some reason or other he had climbed into the stern of the cutter, perhaps to gain height and more easily watch the thunderstorm over the city. I rested my forearms on the gunwale and took my breath. He had unwrapped the old harpoon gun of Narouz and was holding it negligently on his knee. Clea surfaced with a swish of delight and pausing just long enough to cry: ‘The fire is so beautiful’ doubled her lithe body back and ducked downward again.

‘What are you doing with that?’ I asked idly.

‘Seeing how it works.’

He had in fact pushed the harpoon to rest in the barrel. It had locked the spring. ‘It’s cocked’ I said. ‘Have a care.’

‘Yes, I’m going to release it.’

Then Balthazar leaned forward and uttered the only serious remark he had made all that day. ‘You know’ he said, ‘I think you had better take her with you. I have a feeling you won’t be coming back to Alexandria. Take Clea with you!’

And then, before I could reply, the accident happened. He was fumbling with the gun as he spoke. It slipped from between his fingers and fell with a crash, the barrel striking the gunwale six inches from my face. As I reared back in alarm I heard the sudden cobra-like hiss of the compressor and the leaden twang of the trigger-release. The harpoon whistled into the water beside me rustling its long green line behind it. ‘For Christ’s sake’ I said. Balthazar had turned white with alarm and vexation. His half-muttered apologies and expressions of horrid amazement were eloquent. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ I had heard the slight snick of steel settling into a target, somewhere down there in the pool. We stayed frozen for a second for something else had occurred simultaneously to our minds. As I saw his lips starting to shape the word ‘Clea’ I felt a sudden darkness descending on my spirit — a darkness which lifted and trembled at the edges; and a rushing like the sough of giant wings. I had already turned before he uttered the word. I crashed back into the water, now following the long green thread with all the suspense of Ariadne; and to it added the weight of slowness which only heartsick apprehension brings. I knew in my mind that I was swimming vigorously — yet it seemed like one of those slow-motion films where human actions, delayed by the camera, are drawn unctuously out to infinity, spooled out like toffee. How many light-years would it take to reach the end of that thread? What would I find at the end of it? Down I went, and down, in the dwindling phosphorescence, into the deep shadowed coolness of the pool.

At the far end, by the wreck, I distinguished a convulsive, coiling movement, and dimly recognized the form of Clea. She seemed intently busy upon some childish underwater game of the kind we so often played together. She was tugging at something, her feet braced against the woodwork of the wreck, tugging and relaxing her body. Though the green thread led to her I felt a wave of relief — for perhaps she was only trying to extricate the harpoon and carry it to the surface with her. But no, for she rolled drunkenly. I slid along her like an eel, feeling with my hands. Feeling me near she turned her head as if to tell me something. Her long hair impeded my vision. As for her face I could not read the despairing pain which must have been written on it — for the water transforms every expression of the human features into the goggling imbecile grimace of the squid. But now she arched out and flung her head back so that her hair could flow freely up from her scalp — the gesture of someone throwing open a robe to exhibit a wound. And I saw. Her right hand had been pierced and nailed to the wreck by the steel arrow. At least it had not passed through her body, my mind cried out in relief, seeking to console itself; but the relief turned to sick malevolent despair when, clutching the steel shaft, I myself braced my feet against the wood, tugging until my thigh muscles cracked. It would not be budged by a hair’s breadth. (No, but all this was part of some incomprehensible dream, fabricated perhaps in the dead minds of the seven brooding figures which attended so carefully, so scrupulously to the laboured evolutions we now performed — we no longer free and expeditious as fish, but awkward, splayed, like lobsters trapped in a pot.) I struggled frantically with that steel arrow, seeing out of the corner of my eye the long chain of white bubbles bursting from the throat of Clea. I felt her muscles expending themselves, ebbing. Gradually she was settling in the drowsiness of the blue water, being invaded by the water-sleep which had already lulled the mariners to sleep. I shook her.

I cannot pretend that anything which followed belonged to my own volition — for the mad rage which now possessed me was not among the order of the emotions I would ever have recognized as belonging to my proper self. It exceeded, in blind violent rapacity, anything I had ever before experienced. In this curious timeless underwater dream I felt my brain ringing like the alarm bell of an ambulance, dispelling the lulling languorous ebb and flow of the marine darkness. I was suddenly rowelled by the sharp spur of terror. It was as if I were for the first time confronting myself — or perhaps an alter ego shaped after a man of action I had never realized, recognized. With one wild shove I shot to the surface again, emerging under Balthazar’s very nose.

‘The knife’ I said sucking in the air.

His eyes gazed into mine, as if over the edge of some sunken continent, with an expression of pity and horror; emotions preserved, fossilized, from some ice age of human memory. And native fear. He started to stammer out all the questions which invaded his mind — words like ‘what’ ‘where’ ‘when’ ‘whither’ — but could achieve no more than a baffled ‘wh——’: a vague sputtering anguish of interrogation.

The knife which I had remembered was an Italian bayonet which had been ground down to the size of a dirk and sharpened to razor keenness. Ali the boatman had manufactured it with pride. He used it to trim ropes, for splicing and rigging. I hung there for a second while he reached out for it, eyes closed, lungs drinking in the whole sky it seemed. Then I felt the wooden haft in my fingers and without daring to look again at Balthazar I turned my toes to heaven and returned on my tracks, following the green thread.

She hung there limp now, stretched languorously out, while her long hair unfurled behind her; the tides rippled out along her body, passing through it, it seemed like an electric current playing. Everything was still, the silver coinage of sunlight dappling the floor of the pool, the silent observers, the statues whose long beards moved slowly, unctuously to and fro. Even as I began to hack at her hand I was mentally preparing a large empty space in my mind which would have to accommodate the thought of her dead. A large space like an unexplored sub-continent on the maps of the mind. It was not very long before I felt the body disengage under this bitter punishment. The water was dark. I dropped the knife and with a great push sent her reeling back from the wreck: caught her under the arms: and so rose. It seemed to take an age — an endless progression of heartbeats — in that slow-motion world. Yet we hit the sky with a concussion that knocked the breath from me — as if I had cracked my skull on the ceiling of the universe. I was standing in the shallows now rolling the heavy sodden log of her body. I heard the crash of Balthazar’s teeth falling into the boat as he jumped into the water beside me. We heaved and grunted like stevedores scrabbling about to grasp that injured hand which was spouting. He was like an electrician trying to capture and insulate a high-tension wire which had snapped. Grabbing it, he held on to it like a vice. I had a sudden picture of him as a small child holding his mother’s hand nervously among a crowd of other children, or crossing a park where the boys had once thrown stones at him…. Through his pink gums he extruded the word ‘Twine’ — and there was some luckily in the cutter’s locker which kept him busy.

‘But she’s dead’ I said, and the word altered my heartbeats, so that I felt about to faint. She was lying, like a fallen seabird, on the little spit of pebbles. Balthazar squatted almost in the water, holding frenziedly on to the hand at which I could hardly bear to look. But again this unknown alter ego whose voice came from far away helped me to adjust a tourniquet, roll a pencil in it and hand it to him. With a heave now I straightened her out and fell with a thump upon her, crashing down as if from a very great height upon her back. I felt the soggy lungs bounce under this crude blow. Again and again, slowly but with great violence I began to squeeze them in this pitiful simulacrum of the sexual act — life saving, life-giving. Balthazar appeared to be praying. Then came a small sign of hope for the lips of that pale face opened and a little sea water mixed with vomit trickled from them. It meant nothing, of course, but we both cried out at the omen. Closing my eyes I willed my wrists to seek out those waterlogged lungs, to squeeze and void them. Up and down, up and down in this slow cruel rhythm, I pumped at her. I felt her fine bones creaking under my hands. But still she lay lifeless. But I would not accept the thought that she was dead, though I knew it with one part of my mind. I felt half mad with determination to disprove it, to overthrow, if necessary, the whole process of nature and by an act of will force her to live. These decisions astonished me, for they subsisted like clear and sharply defined images underneath the dazed physical fatigue, the groan and sweat of this labour. I had, I realized, decided either to bring her up alive or to stay down there at the bottom of the pool with her; but where, from which territory of the will such a decision had come, I could not guess! And now it was hot. I was pouring with sweat. Balthazar still sat holding the hand, the painter’s hand, humbly as a child at its mother’s knee. Tears trickled down his nose. His head went from side to side in that Jewish gesture of despairing remorse and his toothless gums formed the sound of the old Wailing Wall ‘Aiee, Aiee’. But very softly, as if not to disturb her.

But at last we were rewarded. Suddenly, like a spout giving in a gutter under the pressure of rain, her mouth opened and expelled a mass of vomit and sea-water, fragments of breadsoak and orange. We gazed at this mess with a lustful delight, as if at a great trophy. I felt the lungs respond slowly to my hand. A few more strokes of this crude engine and a secondary ripple seemed to stir in the musculature of her body. At almost every downward thrust now the lungs gave up some water, reluctantly, painfully. Then, after a long time, we heard a faint whimper. It must have hurt, as the first few breaths hurt a newly born child. The body of Clea was protesting at this forcible rebirth. And all of a sudden the features of that white face moved, composed themselves to express something like pain and protest. (Yes, but it hurts to realize.)

‘Keep it up’ cried Balthazar in a new voice, shaky and triumphant. There was no need to tell me. She was twitching a little now, and making a soundless whimpering face at each lunge. It was like starting a very cold diesel engine. Finally yet another miracle occurred — for she opened very blue sightless unfocused eyes for a second to study, with dazed concentration, the stones before her nose. Then she closed them again. Pain darkened her features, but even the pain was a triumph — for at least they expressed living emotions now — emotions which had replaced the pale set mask of death. ‘She’s breathing’ I said. ‘Balthazar, she’s breathing.’

‘She’s breathing’ he repeated with a kind of idiotic rapture.

She was breathing, short staggering inspirations which were clearly painful. But now another kind of help was at hand. We had not noticed, so concentrated were we on this task, that a vessel had entered the little harbour. This was the Harbour Patrol motorboat. They had seen us and guessed that something was wrong. ‘Merciful God’ cried Balthazar flapping his arms like an old crow. Cheerful English voices came across the water asking if we needed help; a couple of sailors came ashore towards us. ‘We’ll have her back in no time’ said Balthazar, grinning shakily.

‘Give her some brandy.’

‘No’ he cried sharply. ‘No brandy.’

The sailors brought a tarpaulin ashore and softly we baled her up like Cleopatra. To their brawny arms she must have seemed as light as thistledown. Their tender clumsy movements were touching, brought tears to my eyes. ‘Easy up there, Nobby. Gently with the little lady.’ ‘That tourniquet will have to be watched. You go too, Balthazar.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ll bring her cutter back.’

We wasted no more time. In a few moments the powerful motors of the patrol vessel began to bustle them away at a good ten knots. I heard a sailor say: ‘How about some hot Bovril?’

‘Capital’ said Balthazar. He was soaked to the skin. His hat was floating in the water beside me. Leaning over the stern a thought suddenly struck him.

‘My teeth. Bring my teeth!’

I watched them out of sight and then sat for a good while with my head in my hands. I found to my surprise that I was trembling all over like a frightened horse with shock. A splitting headache assailed me. I climbed into the cutter and foraged for the brandy and a cigarette. The harpoon gun lay on the sheets. I threw it overboard with an oath and watched it slowly crawling downwards into the pool. Then I shook out the jib, and turning her through her own length on the stern anchor pressed her out into the wind. It took longer than I thought, for the evening wind had shifted a few points and I had to tack widely before I could bring her in. Ali was waiting for me. He had already been apprised of the situation, and carried a message from Balthazar to the effect that Clea had been taken up to the Jewish hospital.

I took a taxi as soon as one could be found. We travelled across the city at a great pace. The streets and buildings passed me in a sort of blur. So great was my anxiety that I saw them as if through a rain-starred window-pane. I could hear the meter ticking away like a pulse. Somewhere in a white ward Clea would be lying drinking blood through the eye of a silver needle. Drop by drop it would be passing into the median vein heart-beat by heart-beat. There was nothing to worry about, I told myself; and then, thinking of that shattered hand, I banged my fist with rage against the padded wall of the taxi.

I followed a duty nurse down the long anonymous green corridors whose oil-painted walls exuded an atmosphere of damp. The white phosphorescent bulbs which punctuated our progress wallowed in the gloom like swollen glow-worms. They had probably put her, I reflected, in the little ward with the single curtained bed which in the past had been reserved for critical cases whose expectation of life was short. It was now the emergency casualty ward. A sense of ghostly familiarity was growing upon me. In the past it was here that I had come to see Melissa. Clea must be lying in the same narrow iron bed in the corner by the wall. (‘It would be just like real life to imitate art at this point.’)

In the corridor outside, however, I came upon Amaril and Balthazar standing with a curious chastened expression before a trolley which had just been wheeled to them by a duty nurse. It contained a number of wet and glistening X-ray photographs, newly developed and pegged upon a rail. The two men were studying them anxiously, gravely, as if thinking out a chess problem. Balthazar caught sight of me and turned, his face lighting up. ‘She’s all right’ he said, but in rather a broken voice, as he squeezed my hand. I handed him his teeth and he blushed, and slipped them into his pocket. Amaril was wearing horn-rimmed reading glasses. He turned from his intent study of those dripping dangling sheets with an expression of utter rage. ‘What the bloody hell do you expect me to do with this mess?’ he burst out waving his insolent white hand in the direction of the X-rays. I lost my temper at the implied accusation and in a second we were shouting at each other like fishmongers, our eyes full of tears. I think we would have come to blows out of sheer exasperation had not Balthazar got between us. Then at once the rage dropped from Amaril and he walked round Balthazar to embrace me and mutter an apology. ‘She’s all right’ he murmured, patting me consolingly on the shoulder. ‘We’ve tucked her up safely.’

‘Leave the rest to us’ said Balthazar.

‘I’d like to see her’ I said enviously — as if, by bringing her to life, I had made her, in a way, my own property too. ‘Could I?’

As I pushed open the door and crept into the little cell like a miser I heard Amaril say peevishly: ‘It’s all very well to talk about surgical repair in that glib way——’

It was immensely quiet and white, the little ward with its tall windows. She lay with her face to the wall in the uncomfortable steel bed on castors of yellow rubber. It smelt of flowers, though there were none to be seen and I could not identify the odour. It was perhaps a synthetic atomizer spray — the essence of forget-me-nots? I softly drew up a chair beside the bed and sat down. Her eyes were open, gazing at the wall with the dazed look which suggested morphia and fatigue combined. Though she gave no sign of having heard me enter she said suddenly.

‘Is that you Darley?’

‘Yes.’

Her voice was clear. Now she sighed and moved slightly, as if with relief at my coming. ‘I’m so glad.’ Her voice had a small weary lilt which suggested that somewhere beyond the confines of her present pain and drowsiness a new self-confidence was stirring. ‘I wanted to thank you.’

‘It is Amaril you’re in love with’ I said — rather, blurted out. The remark came as a great surprise to me. It was completely involuntary. Suddenly a shutter seemed to roll back across my mind. I realized that this new fact which I was enunciating was one that I had always known, but without being aware of the knowing!Foolish as it was the distinction was a real one. Amaril was like a playing card which had always been there, lying before me on the table, face downwards. I had been aware of its existence but had never turned it over. Nor, I should add, was there anything in my voice beyond genuine scientific surprise; it was without pain, and full of sympathy only. Between us we had never used this dreadful word — this synonym for derangement or illness — and if I deliberately used it now it was to signify my recognition of the thing’s autonomous nature. It was rather like saying ‘My poor child, you have got cancer!’

After a moment’s silence she said: ‘Past tense now, alas!’ Her voice had a puzzled drawling quality. ‘And I was giving you good marks for tact, thinking you had recognized him in my Syrian episode! Had you really not? Yes, Amaril turned me into a woman I suppose. Oh, isn’t it disgusting? When will we all grow up? No, but I’ve worn him out in my heart, you know. It isn’t as you imagine it. I know he is not the man for me. Nothing would have persuaded me to replace Semira. I know this by the fact of having made love to him, been in love with him! It’s odd, but the experience prevented me from mistaking him for the other one, the once-for-aller! Though who and where he is remains to discover. I haven’t really affronted the real problems yet, I feel. They lie the other side of these mere episodes. And yet, perverse as it is, it is nice to be close to him — even on the operating-table. How is one to make clear a single truth about the human heart?’

‘Shall I put off my journey?’

‘But no. I wouldn’t wish it at all. I shall need a little time to come to myself now that at last I am free from the horror. That at least you have done for me — pushed me back into midstream again and driven off the dragon. It’s gone and will never come back. Put your hand on my shoulder and squeeze, instead of a kiss. No. Don’t change plans. Now at last we can take things a bit easily. Unhurriedly. I shall be well cared for here as you know. Later when your job is done we shall see, shall we? Try and write. I feel perhaps a pause might start you off.’

‘I will.’ But I knew I wouldn’t.

‘Only one thing I want you to do. Please visit the Mulid of El Scob tonight so that you can tell me all about it; you see it is the first time since the war that they are allowing the customary lighting in that quartier. It should be fun to see. I don’t want you to miss it. Will you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Thank you, my dear.’

I stood up and after a moment’s pause said: ‘Clea what exactly was the horror?’

But she had closed her eyes and was fading softly into sleep. Her lips moved but I could not catch her answer. There was the faintest trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

A phrase of Pursewarden’s came into my mind as I softly closed the door of the ward. ‘The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.’

* * * * *

It was already late when at last I managed to locate a gharry to take me back to the town. At the flat I found a message to say that my departure had been put forward by six hours; the motor-launch would be leaving at midnight. Hamid was there, standing quite still and patient, as if he already knew the contents of the message. My luggage had been collected by an Army truck that afternoon. There was nothing left to do except kill the time until twelve, and this I proposed to do in the fashion suggested by Clea: by visiting the Mulid of El Scob. Hamid still stood before me, gravid with the weight of another parting. ‘You no come back this time, sir’ he said bunking his eye at me with sorrow. I looked at the little man with emotion. I remembered how proudly he had recounted the saving of this one eye. It was because he had been the younger and uglier brother of the two. His mother had put out his brother’s two eyes in order to prevent him from being conscripted; but he, Hamid, being puny and ugly — he had escaped with one. His brother was now a blind muezzin in Tanta. But how rich he was, Hamid, with his one eye! It represented a fortune to him in well-paid work for rich foreigners.

‘I come to you in London’ he said eagerly, hopefully.

‘Very well. I’ll write to you.’

He was all dressed up for the Mulid in his best clothes — the crimson cloak and the red shoes of soft morocco leather; in his bosom he had a clean white handkerchief. It was his evening off I remembered. Pombal and I had saved up a sum of money to give him as a parting present. He took the cheque between finger and thumb, inclining his head with gratitude. But self-interest could not buoy him up against the pain of parting from us. So he repeated ‘I come to you in London’ to console himself; shaking hands with himself as he said the words.

‘Very well’ I said for the third time, though I could hardly see one-eyed Hamid in London. ‘I will write. Tonight I shall visit the Mulid of El Scob.’

‘Very good.’ I shook him by the shoulders and the familiarity made him bow his head. A tear trickled out of his blind eye and off the end of his nose.

‘Good-bye ya Hamid’ I said, and walked down the stairs, leaving him standing quietly at the top, as if waiting for some signal from outer space. Then suddenly he rushed after me, catching me at the front door, in order to thrust into my hand, as a parting present, his cherished picture of Melissa and myself walking down Rue Fuad on some forgotten afternoon.

* * * * *

IX

The whole quarter lay drowsing in the umbrageous violet of approaching nightfall. A sky of palpitating velours which was cut into by the stark flare of a thousand electric light bulbs. It lay over Tatwig Street, that night, like a velvet rind. Only the lighted tips of the minarets rose above it on their slender invisible stalks — appeared hanging suspended in the sky; trembling slightly with the haze as if about to expand their hoods like cobras. Drifting idly down those remembered streets once more I drank in (forever: keepsakes of the Arab town) the smell of crushed chrysanthemums, ordure, scents, strawberries, human sweat and roasting pigeons. The procession had not arrived as yet. It would form somewhere beyond the harlots’ quarter, among the tombs, and wind its slow way to the shrine, geared to a dancing measure; calling on the way at each of the mosques to offer up a verse or two of the Book in honour of El Scob. But the secular side of the festival was in full swing. In the dark alleys people had brought their dinner tables into the street, candle-lit and decked with roses. So sitting they could catch the chipped headtones of the girl singers who were already standing on the wooden platforms outside the cafés, piercing the heavy night with their quartertones. The streets were beflagged, and the great framed pictures of the circumcision doctors rippled on high among the cressets and standards. In a darkened yard I saw them pouring the hot sugar, red and white, into the little wooden moulds from which would emerge the whole bestiary of Egypt — the ducks, horsemen, rabbits, and goats. The great sugar figurines too of the Delta folklore — Yuna and Aziz the lovers interlocked, interpenetrated — and the bearded heroes like Abu Zeid, armed and mounted among his brigands. They were splendidly obscene — surely the stupidest word in our language? — and brilliantly coloured before being dressed in their garments of paper, tinsel, and spangled gold, and set up on display among the Sugar Booths for the children to gape at and buy. In every little square now the coloured marquees had been run up, each with its familiar sign. The Gamblers were already busy — Abu Firan, the Father of Rats, was shouting cheerfully for customers. The great board stood before him on trestles, each of the twelve houses marked with a number and a name. In the centre stood the live white rat which had been painted with green stripes. You placed your money on the number of a house, and won, if the rat entered it. In another box the same game was in play, but with a pigeon this time; when all the bets were laid a handful of grain was tossed into the centre and the pigeon, in eating it, entered one of the numbered stalls.

I bought myself a couple of sugar figurines and sat down outside a café to watch the passing show with its brilliant pristine colour. These little ‘arusas’ or brides I would have liked to keep, but I knew that they would crumble or be eaten by ants. They were the little cousins of the santons de Provence or the bonhommes de paind’épices of the French country fair: of our own now extinct gilt gingerbread men. I ordered a spoon of mastika to eat with the cool fizzing sherbet. From where I sat at an angle between two narrow streets I could see the harlots painting themselves at an upper window before coming down to set up their garish booths among the conjurers and tricksters; Showal the dwarf was teasing them from his booth at ground level and causing screams of laughter at his well-aimed arrows. He had a high tinny little voice and the most engaging of acrobatic tricks despite his stunted size. He talked continuously even when standing on his head, and punctuated the point of his patter with a double somersault. His face was grotesquely farded and his lips painted in a clown’s grin. At the other corner under a hide curtain sat Faraj the fortune-teller with his instruments of divination — ink, sand, and a curious hairy ball like a bull’s testicles only covered in dark hair. A radiantly beautiful prostitute squatted before him. He had filled her palm with ink and was urging her to scry.

Little scenes from the street life. A mad wild witch of a woman who suddenly burst into the street, foaming at the lips and uttering curses so terrible that silence fell and everyone’s blood froze. Her eyes blazed like a bear’s under the white matted hair. Being mad she was in some sort holy, and no-one dared to face the terrible imprecations she uttered which, if turned on him, might spell ill luck. Suddenly a grubby child darted from the crowd and tugged her sleeve. At once calmed she took his hand and turned away into an alley. The festival closed over the memory of her like a skin.

I was sitting here, drunk on the spectacle, when the voice of Scobie himself suddenly sounded at my elbow. ‘Now, old man’ it said thoughtfully. ‘If you have Tendencies you got to have Scope. That’s why I’m in the Middle East if you want to know….’

‘God, you gave me a start’ I said, turning round. It was Nimrod the policeman who had been one of the old man’s superiors in the police force. He chuckled and sat down beside me, removing his tarbush to mop his forehead. ‘Did you think he’d come to life?’ he enquired.

‘I certainly did.’

‘I know my Scobie, you see.’

Nimrod laid his flywhisk before him and with a clap of his hands commanded a coffee. Then giving me a sly wink he went on in the veritable voice of the saint. ‘The thing about Budgie was just that. In Horsham there’s no Scope. Otherwise I would have joined him years ago in the earth-closet trade. The man’s a mechanical genius, I don’t mind admitting. And not having any income except what the old mud-slinger — as he laughingly calls it — brings him in, he’s stymied. He’s in baulk. Did I ever tell you about the Bijou Earth Closet? No? Funny I thought I did. Well, it was a superb contrivance, the fruit of long experiment. Budgie is an FRZS you know. He got it by home study. That shows you what a brain the man has. Well it was a sort of lever with a trigger. The seat of the closet was on a kind of spring. As you sat down it went down, but when you got up it sprang up of its own accord and threw a spadeful of earth into the bin. Budgie says he got the idea from watching his dog clear up after himself with his paws. But how he adapted it I just can’t fathom. It’s sheer genius. You have a magazine at the back which you fill with earth or sand. Then when you get up the spring goes bang and presto! He’s making about two thousand a year out of it, I don’t mind admitting. Of course it takes time to build up a trade, but the overheads are low. He has just one man working for him to build the box part, and he buys the springs — gets them made to specification in Hammersmith. And they’re very prettily painted too, with astrology all round the rim. It looks queer, I admit. In fact it looks arcane. But it’s a wonderful contrivance the little Bijou. Once there was a crisis while I was home on leave for a month. I called in to see Budgie. He was almost in tears. The chap who helped, Tom the carpenter, used to drink a bit and must have misplaced the sprockets on one series of Bijous. Anyway complaints started to pour in. Budgie said that his closets had gone mad all over Sussex and were throwing earth about in a weird and unwholesome way. Customers were furious. Well, there was nothing for it but to visit all his parishioners on a motor-bike and adjust the sprockets. I had so little time that I didn’t want to miss his company — so he took me along with him. It was quite an adventure I don’t mind telling you. Some of them were quite mad with Budgie. One woman said the sprocket was so strong her closet threw mud the length of the drawing-room. We had a time quietening her down. I helped by lending a soothing influence I don’t mind admitting, while Budgie tinkered with the springs. I told stories to take their minds off the unhappy business. But finally it got straightened out. And now it’s a profitable industry with members everywhere.’

Nimrod sipped his coffee reflectively and cocked a quizzical eye in my direction, proud of his mimicry. ‘And now’ he said, throwing up his hands, ‘El Scob….’

A crowd of painted girls passed down the street, brilliant as tropical parrots and almost as loud in their chattering and laughing. ‘Now that Abu Zeid’ said Nimrod ‘has taken the Mulid under his patronage it’s likely to grow into a bit of headache for us. It’s such a crowded quarter. This morning he sent a whole string of he-camels on heat into the town with bercim clover. You know how horrible they smell. And when they’re in season they get that horrible jelly-like excrescence on their necks. It must irritate them or suppurate or something for they’re scratching their necks the whole time on walls and posts. Two of them had a fight. It took hours to untangle the affair. The place was blocked.’

Suddenly a series of bangs sounded from the direction of the harbour and a series of bright coloured rockets traced their splendid grooves across the night, drooping and falling away with a patter and a hiss. ‘Aha!’ said Nimrod with self-satisfaction. ‘There goes the Navy. I’m glad they remembered.’

‘Navy?’ I echoed as another long line of rockets tossed their brilliant plumage across the soft night.

‘The boys of H.M.S. Milton’ he chuckled. ‘I happened to dine on board last night. The wardroom was much taken by my story of an old Merchant Seaman who had been beatified. I naturally did not tell them very much about Scobie; least of all about his death. But I did hint that a few fireworks would be appropriate as coming from British mariners, and I also added that as a political gesture of respect it would earn them good marks with the worshippers. The idea caught on at once, and the Admiral was asked for permission. And there we go!’

We sat for a while in companionable silence watching the fireworks and the highly delighted crowd which saluted each salvo with long quivering exclamations of pleasure. ‘All—ah! All—ah!’ Finally Nimrod cleared his throat and said: ‘Darley, can I ask you a question? Do you know what Justine is up to?’ I must have looked very blank for he went on at once without hesitation. ‘I only ask you because she rang me yesterday and said that she was going to break parole today, come into town deliberately, and that she wanted me to arrest her. It sounds quite absurd — I mean to come all the way into town to give herself up to the Police. She said she wanted to force a personal interview with Memlik. It had to be me as reports from the British officers on the force would carry weight and draw Memlik’s attention. It sounds a bit of a rigmarole doesn’t it? But I’ve got a date with her at the Central Station in half an hour.’

‘I know nothing about the matter.’

‘I wondered if you did. Anyway, keep it under your hat.’

‘I will.’

He stood up and held out his hand to say good-bye. ‘You’re off tonight I gather. Good luck.’ As he stepped down from the little wooden platform he said: ‘By the way, Balthazar is looking for you. He’s somewhere down at the shrine — what a word!’ With a brief nod his tall figure moved away into the brilliant swirling street. I paid for my drink and walked down towards Tatwig Street, bumped and jostled by the holiday crowd.

Ribbons and bunting and huge coloured gonfalons had been hung from every balcony along the street. The little piece of waste land under the arched doors was now the most sumptuous of saloons. Huge tents with their brilliant embroidered designs had been set up creating a ceremonial parade ground where the dancing and chanting would be held when the procession reached its destination. This area was crowded with children. The drone of prayers and the shrill tongue-trills of women came from the shrine which was dimly lit. The suppliants were invoking fruitfulness of Scobie’s bath-tub. The long quavering lines of the Suras spun themselves on the night in a web of melodious sound. I quested round a bit among the crowd like a gun-dog, hunting for Balthazar. At last I caught sight of him sitting somewhat apart at an outdoor café. I made my way to his side. ‘Good’ he said. ‘I was on the look out for you. Hamid said you were off tonight. He telephoned to ask for a job and told me. Besides I wanted to share with you my mixture of shame and relief over this hideous accident. Shame at the stupidity, relief that she isn’t dead. Both mixed. I’m rather drunk with relief, and dazed with the shame.’ He was indeed rather tipsy. ‘But it will be all right, thank God!’

‘What does Amaril think?’

‘Nothing as yet. Or if he does he won’t say. She must have a comfortable twenty-four hours of rest before anything is decided. Are you really going?’ His voice fell with reproof. ‘You should stay, you know.’

‘She doesn’t want me to stay.’

‘I know. I was a bit shocked when she said she had told you to go; but she said “You don’t understand. I shall see if I can’t will him back again. We aren’t quite ripe for each other yet. It will come.” I was amazed to see her so self-confident and radiant again. Really amazed. Sit down, my dear chap, and have a couple of stiff drinks with me. We’ll see the procession quite well from here. No crowding.’ He clapped his hands rather unsteadily and called for more mastika.

When the glasses were brought he sat for a long while silent with his chin on his hands, staring at them. Then he gave a sigh and shook his head sadly.

‘What is it?’ I said, removing his glass from the tray and placing it squarely before him on the tin table.

‘Leila is dead’ he said quietly. The words seemed to weight him down with sorrow. ‘Nessim telephoned this evening to tell me. The strange thing is that he sounded exhilarated by the news. He has managed to get permission to fly down and make arrangements for her funeral. D’you know what he said?’ Balthazar looked at me with that dark all-comprehending eye and went on. ‘He said: “While I loved her and all that, her death has freed me in a curious sort of way. A new life is opening before me. I feel years younger.” I don’t know if it was a trick of the telephone or what but he sounded younger. His voice was full of suppressed excitement. He knew, of course, that Leila and I were the oldest of friends but not that all through this period of absence she was writing to me. She was a rare soul, Darley, one of the rare flowers of Alexandria. She wrote: “I know I am dying, my dear Balthazar, but all too slowly. Do not believe the doctors and their diagnoses, you of all men. I am dying of heartsickness like a true Alexandrian.”’ Balthazar blew his nose in an old sock which he took from the breast-pocket of his coat; carefully folded it to resemble a clean handkerchief and pedantically replaced it. ‘Yes’ he said again, gravely, ‘what a word it is — “heartsickness”! And it seems to me that while (from what you tell me) Liza Pursewarden was administering her death-warrant to her brother, Mountolive was giving the same back-hander to Leila. So we pass the loving-cup about, the poisoned loving-cup!’ He nodded and took a loud sip of his drink. He went on slowly, with immense care and effort, like someone translating from an obscure and recondite text. ‘Yes, just as Liza’s letter to Pursewarden telling him that at last the stranger had appeared was his coup de grâce so to speak, so Leila received, I suppose, exactly the same letter. Who knows how these things are arranged? Perhaps in the very same words. The same words of passionate gratitude: “I bless you, I thank you with all my heart that through you I am at last able to receive the precious gift which can never come to those who are ignorant of its powers.” Those are the words of Mountolive. For Leila quoted them to me. All this was after she went away. She wrote to me. It was as if she were cut off from Nessim and had nobody to turn to, nobody to talk to. Hence the long letters in which she went over it all, backwards and forwards, with that marvellous candour and clear-sightedness which I so loved in her. She refused every self-deception. Ah! but she fell between two stools, Leila, between two lives, two loves. She said something like this in explaining it to me: “I thought at first when I got his letter that it was just another attachment — as it was in the past for his Russian ballerina. There was never any secret between us of his loves, and that is what made ours seem so truthful, so immortal in its way. It was a love without reserves. But this time everything became clear to me when he refused to tell me her name, to share her with me, so to speak! I knew then that everything was ended. Of course in another corner of my mind I had always been waiting for this moment; I pictured myself facing it with magnanimity. This I found, to my surprise, was impossible. That was why for a long time, even when I knew he was in Egypt, and anxious to see me, I could not bring myself to see him. Of course I pretended it was for other reasons, purely feminine ones. But it was not that. It wasn’t lack of courage because of my smashed beauty, no! For I have in reality the heart of a man.”’

Balthazar sat for a moment staring at the empty glasses with wide eyes, pressing his fingers softly together. His story meant very little to me — except that I was amazed to imagine Mountolive capable of any very deep feeling, and at a loss to imagine this secret relationship with the mother of Nessim.

‘The Dark Swallow!’ said Balthazar and clapped his hands for more drink to be brought. ‘We shall not look upon her like again.’

But gradually the raucous night around us was swelling with the deeper rumour of the approaching procession. One saw the rosy light of the cressets among the roofs. The streets, already congested, were now black with people. They buzzed like a great hive with the contagion of the knowledge. You could hear the distant bumping of drums and the hissing splash of cymbals, keeping time with the strange archaic peristaltic rhythms of the dance — its relatively slow walking pace broken by queer halts, to enable the dancers, as the ecstasy seized them, to twirl in and out of their syncopated measures and return once more to their places in the line of march. It pushed its way through the narrow funnel of the main street like a torrent whose force makes it overleap its bed; for all the little side streets were full of sightseers running along, keeping pace with it.

First came the grotesque acrobats and tumblers with masks and painted faces, rolling and contorting, leaping in the air and walking on their hands. They were followed by a line of carts full of candidates for circumcision dressed in brilliant silks and embroidered caps, and surrounded by their sponsors, the ladies of the harem. They rode proudly, singing in juvenile voices and greeting the crowd: like the bleating of sacrificial lambs. Balthazar croaked: ‘Foreskins will fall like snow tonight, by the look of it. It is amazing that there are no infections. You know, they use black gunpowder and lime-juice as a styptic for the wound!’

Now came the various orders with their tilting and careening gonfalons with the names of the holy ones crudely written on them. They trembled like foliage in the wind. Magnificently robed sheiks held them aloft walking with difficulty because of their weight, yet keeping the line of the procession straight. The street-preachers were gabbling the hundred holy names. A cluster of bright braziers outlined the stern bearded faces of a cluster of dignitaries carrying huge paper lanterns, like balloons, ahead of them. Now as they overran us and flowed down the length of Tatwig Street in a long ripple of colour we saw the various orders of Dervishes climb out of the nether darkness and emerge into the light, each order distinguished by its colour. They were led by the black-capped Rifiya — the scorpion-eaters of legendary powers. Their short barking cries indicated that the religious ecstasy was already on them. They gazed around with dazed eyes. Some had run skewers through their cheeks, others licked red-hot knives. At last came the courtly figure of Abu Zeid with his little group of retainers on magnificently caparisoned ponies, their cloaks swelling out behind them, their arms raised in salutation like knights embarking on a tournament. Before them ran a helter skelter collection of male prostitutes with powdered faces and long flowing hair, chuckling and ejaculating like chickens in a farmyard. And to all this queer discontinuous and yet somehow congruent mass of humanity the music lent a sort of homogeneity; it bound it and confined it within the heart-beats of the drums, the piercing skirl of the flutes, the gnashing of the cymbals. Circling, proceeding, halting: circling, proceeding, halting, the long dancing lines moved on towards the tomb, bursting through the great portals of Scobie’s lodgings like a tide at full, and deploying across the brilliant square in clouds of dust.

And as the chanters moved forward to recite the holy texts six Mevlevi dervishes suddenly took the centre of the stage, expanding in a slow fan of movement until they had formed a semicircle. They wore brilliant white robes reaching to their green slippered feet and tall brown hats shaped like huge bombes glacées. Calmly, beautifully, they began to whirl, these ‘tops spun by God’, while the music of the flutes haunted them with their piercing quibbles. As they gathered momentum their arms, which at first they hugged fast to their shoulders, unfolded as if by centrifugal force and stretched out to full reach, the right palm turned upward to heaven, the left downward to the ground. So, with heads and tall rounded hats tilted slightly, like the axis of the earth, they stayed there miraculously spinning, their feet hardly seeming to touch the floor, in this wonderful parody of the heavenly bodies in their perpetual motion. On and on they went, faster and faster, until the mind wearied of trying to keep pace with them. I thought of the verses of Jalaluddin which Pursewarden used sometimes to recite. On the outer circles the Rifiya had begun their display of self-mutilation, so horrible to behold and yet so apparently harmless. The touch of a sheik’s finger would heal all these wounds pierced in the cheeks and breasts. Here a dervish drove a skewer through his nostrils, there another fell upon the point of a dirk, driving it up through his throat into his skull. But still the central knot of dancers continued its unswerving course, spinning in the sky of the mind.

‘My goodness’ said Balthazar at my elbow, with a chuckle, ‘I thought he was familiar. There’s the Magzub himself. The one at the further end. He used to be an absolute terror, more than half mad. The one who was supposed to have stolen the child and sold it to a brothel. Look at him.’

I saw a face of immense world-weary serenity, the eyes closed, the lips curved in a half-smile; as the dancer spun slowly to a halt this slender personage, with an air of half-playful modesty, took up a bundle of thorns and lighting it at a brazier thrust the blazing mass into his bosom against the flesh, and started to whirl once more like a tree in flames. Then as the circle came to a swaying halt he plucked it out once more and gave the dervish next to him a playful slap upon the face with it.

But now a dozen dancing circles intervened and took up the measure and the little courtyard overflowed with twisting turning figures. From the little shrine came the steady drone of the holy word, punctuated by the shrill tongue trills of the votaries.

‘Scobie’s going to have a heavy night’ said Balthazar with irreverence. ‘Counting foreskins up there in the Moslem heaven.’

Somewhere far away I heard the siren of a ship boom in the harbour, recalling me to my senses. It was time to be going. ‘I’ll come down with you’ said Balthazar, and together we started to push and wriggle our way down the crowded street towards the Corniche.

We found a gharry and sat silent in it, hearing the music and drumming gradually receding as we traversed the long rolling line of the marine parade. The moon was up, shining on the calm sea, freckled by the light breeze. The palms nodded. We clip-clopped down the narrow twisted streets and into the commercial harbour at last with its silent ghostly watercraft. A few lights winked here and there. A liner moved out of its berth and slid softly down the channel — a long glittering crescent of light.

The little launch which was to carry me was still being loaded with provisions and luggage.

‘Well’ I said, ‘Balthazar. Keep out of mischief.’

‘We’ll be meeting again quite soon’ he said quietly. ‘You can’t shake me off. The Wandering Jew, you know. But I’ll keep you posted about Clea. I’d say something like “Come back to us soon”, if I didn’t have the feeling that you weren’t going to. I’m damned if I know why. But that we’ll meet again I’m sure.’

‘So am I’ I said.

We embraced warmly, and with an abrupt gesture he climbed back into the gharry and settled himself once more.

‘Mark my words’ he said as the horse started up to the flick of a whip.

I stood, listening to the noise of its hooves until the night swallowed them up. Then I turned back to the work in hand.

* * * * *

X

Dearest Clea:

Three long months and no word from you. I would have been very much disquieted had not the faithful Balthazar sent me his punctual postcard every few days to report so favourably on your progress: though of course he gives me no details. You for your part must have grown increasingly angry at my callous silence which you so little deserve. Truthfully, I am bitterly ashamed of it. I do not know what curious inhibition has been holding me back. I have been unable either to analyse it or to react against it effectively. It has been like a handle of a door which won’t turn. Why? It is doubly strange because I have been deeply conscious of you all the time, of you being actively present in my thoughts. I’ve been holding you, metaphorically, cool against my throbbing mind like a knife-blade. Is it possible that I enjoyed you better as a thought than as a person alive, acting in the world? Or was it that words themselves seemed so empty a consolation for the distance which has divided us? I do not know. But now that the job is nearly completed I seem suddenly to have found my tongue.

Things alter their focus on this little island. You called it a metaphor once, I remember, but it is very much a reality to me — though of course vastly changed from the little haven I knew before. It is our own invasion which has changed it. You could hardly imagine that ten technicians could make such a change. But we have imported money, and with it are slowly altering the economy of the place, displacing labour at inflated prices, creating all sorts of new needs of which the lucky inhabitants were not conscious before. Needs which in the last analysis will destroy the tightly woven fabric of this feudal village with its tense blood-relationships, its feuds and archaic festivals. Its wholeness will dissolve under these alien pressures. It was so tightly woven, so beautiful and symmetrical like a swallow’s nest. We are picking it apart like idle boys, unaware of the damage we inflict. It seems inescapable the death we bring to the old order without wishing it. It is simply done too — a few steel girders, some digging equipment, a crane! Suddenly things begin to alter shape. A new cupidity is born. It will start quietly with a few barbers’ shops, but will end by altering the whole architecture of the port. In ten years it will be an unrecognizable jumble of warehouses, dance-halls and brothels for merchant sailors. Only give us enough time!

The site which they chose for the relay station is on the mountainous eastward side of the island, and not where I lived before. I am rather glad of this in an obscure sort of way. I am sentimental enough about old memories to enjoy them — but how much better they seem in the light of a small shift of gravity; they are renewed and refreshed all at once. Moreover this corner of the island is unlike any other part — a high wine-bearing valley overlooking the sea. Its soils are gold, bronze and scarlet — I suppose they consist of some volcanic marl. The red wine they make is light and very faintly pétillant, as if a volcano still slumbered in every bottle. Yes, here the mountains ground their teeth together (one can hear them during the frequent tremors!) and powdered up these metamorphic rocks into chalk. I live in a small square house of two rooms built over a wine-magazine. A terraced and tiled courtyard separates it from several other such places of storage — deep cellars full of sleeping wine in tuns.

We are in the heart of the vineyards; on all sides, ruled away on the oblong to follow the spine of the blue hill above the sea, run the shallow canals of humus and mould between the symmetrical vines which are now flourishing. Galleries — no, bowling-alleys of the brown ashy earth, every mouthful finger-and-fist-sifted by the industrious girls. Here and there figs and olives intrude upon this rippling forest of green, this vine-carpet. It is so dense that once you are in it, crouched, your field of visibility is about three feet, like a mouse in the corn. As I write there are a dozen invisible girls tunnelling like moles, turning the soil. I hear their voices but see nothing. Yes, they are crawling about in there like sharpshooters. They rise and start work before dawn. I wake and hear them arriving often, sometimes singing a snatch of a Greek folk-song! I am up at five. The first birds come over and are greeted by the small reception committee of optimistic hunters who pot idly at them and then pass up the hill, chattering and chaffing each other.

Shading my terrace stands a tall tree of white mulberries, with the largest fruit I have ever seen — as big as caterpillars. The fruit is ripe and the wasps have found it and are quite drunk on the sweetness. They behave just like human beings, laughing uproariously about nothing, falling down, picking fights….

The life is hard, but good. What pleasure to actually sweat over a task, actually use one’s hands! And while we are harvesting steel to raise, membrane by membrane, this delicate mysterious ex-voto to the sky — why the vines are ripening too with their reminder that long after man has stopped his neurotic fiddling with the death-bringing tools with which he expresses his fear of life, the old dark gods are there, underground, buried in the moist humus of the chthonian world (that favourite world of P’). They are forever sited in the human wish. They will never capitulate! (I am talking at random simply to give you an idea of the sort of life I lead here.)

The early hill-barley is being gathered. You meet walking haystacks — haystacks with nothing but a pair of feet below them trudging along these rocky lanes. The weird shouts the women give, either at cattle or calling to one another from hillside to hillside. ‘Wow’ ‘hoosh’ ‘gnaiow’. This barley is laid upon the flat roofs for threshing out the chaff which they do with sticks. Barley! hardly is the word spoken before the ant-processions begin, long chains of dark ants trying to carry it away to their private storehouses. This in turn has alerted the yellow lizards; they prowl about eating the ants, lying in ambush winking their eyes. And, as if following out the octave of causality in nature, here come the cats to hunt and eat the lizards. This is not good for them, and many die of a wasting disease attributed to this folly. But I suppose the thrill of the chase is on them. And then? Well, now and then a viper kills a cat stone dead. And the man with his spade breaks the snake’s back. And the man? Autumn fevers come on with the first rain. The old men tumble into the grave like fruit off a tree. Finita la guerra! These people were occupied by Italians and quite a few learned the language which they speak with a Sienese accent.

In the little square is a fountain where the women gather. They proudly display their babies, and fancy them as if they were up for sale. This one is fat, that one thin. The young men pass up and down the road with hot shy glances. One of them sings archly ‘Solo, per te, Lucia’. But they only toss their heads and continue with their gossip. There is an old and apparently completely deaf man filling his pitcher. He is almost electrocuted by the phrase ‘Dmitri at the big house is dead.’ It lifts him off the ground. He spins round in a towering rage. ‘Dead? Who’s dead? Eh? What?’ His hearing is much improved all at once.

There is a little acropolis now called Fontana, high up there in the clouds. Yet it isn’t far. But a steep climb up clinker-dry river-beds amid clouds of black flies; you come upon herds of rushing black goats like satans. There is a tiny hospice on the top with one mad monk; built as if on a turntable like a kiln of rusk. From here you can drink the sweet indolent misty curves of the island to the west.

And the future?

Well, this is a sketch of a nearly ideal present which will not last forever; indeed has almost expired, for within another month or so my usefulness will come to an end, and with it presumably the post upon which I depend for my exiguous livelihood. I have no resources of my own and must consider ways and means. No, the future rolls about inside me with every roll of the ship, so to speak, like a cargo which has worked loose. Were it not to see you again I doubt if I could return again to Alexandria. I feel it fade inside me, in my thoughts, like some valedictory mirage — like the sad history of some great queen whose fortunes have foundered among the ruins of armies and the sands of time! My mind has been turning more and more westward, towards the old inheritance of Italy or France. Surely there is still some worthwhile work to be done among their ruins — something which we can cherish, perhaps even revive? I ask myself this question, but it really addresses itself to you. Uncommitted as yet to any path, nevertheless the one I would most like to take leads westward and northward. There are other reasons. The terms of my contract entitle me to free ‘repatriation’ as they call it; to reach England would cost me nothing. Then, with the handsome service gratuity which all this bondage has earned me, I think I could afford a spell in Europe. My heart leaps at the thought.

But something in all this must be decided for me; I have a feeling, I mean, that it is not I who shall decide.

Please forgive me my silence for which I cannot offer any excuse and write me a line.

Last Saturday I found myself with a free day and a half, so I walked across the island with a pack to spend a night in the little house where I lived on my previous visit. What a contrast to this verdant highland it was to strike that wild and windy promontory once more, the acid green seas and fretted coastlines of the past. It was indeed another island — I suppose the past always is. Here for a night and a day I lived the life of an echo, thinking much about the past and about us all moving in it, the ‘selective fictions’ which life shuffles out like a pack of cards, mixing and dividing, withdrawing and restoring. It did not seem to me that I had the right to feel so calm and happy: a sense of Plenitude in which the only unanswered question was the one which arose with each memory of your name.

Yes, a different island, harsher and more beautiful of aspect. One held the night-silence in one’s hands; feeling it slowly melting — as a child holds a piece of ice! At noon a dolphin rising from the ocean. Earthquake vapours on the sea-line. The great grove of plane trees with their black elephant hides which the wind strips off in great scrolls revealing the soft grey ashen skin within…. Much of the detail I had forgotten.

It is rather off the beaten track this little promontory; only olive-pickers might come here in season. Otherwise the only visitants are the charcoal burners who ride through the grove before light every day with a characteristic jingle of stirrups. They have built long narrow trenches on the hill. They crouch over them all day, black as demons.

But for the most part one might be living on the moon. Slightly noise of sea, the patient stridulation of cigales in the sunlight. One day I caught a tortoise at my front door; on the beach was a smashed turtle’s egg. Small items which plant themselves in the speculative mind like single notes of music belonging to some larger composition which I suppose one will never hear. The tortoise makes a charming and undemanding pet. I can hear P say: ‘Brother Ass and his tortoise. The marriage of true minds!’

For the rest: the picture of a man skimming flat stones upon the still water of the lagoon at evening, waiting for a letter out of silence.

* * * * *

But I had hardly confided this letter to the muleteer-postman who took our mail down to the town before I received a letter with an Egyptian stamp, addressed to me in an unknown hand. It read as follows:

‘You did not recognize it, did you? I mean the handwriting on the envelope? I confess that I chuckled as I addressed it to you, before beginning this letter: I could see your face all of a sudden with its expression of perplexity. I saw you turn the letter over in your fingers for a moment trying to guess who had sent it!

‘It is the first serious letter I have attempted, apart from short notes, with my new hand: this strange accessory-after-the-fact with which the good Amaril has equipped me! I wanted it to become word-perfect before I wrote to you. Of course I was frightened and disgusted by it at first, as you can imagine. But I have come to respect it very much, this delicate and beautiful steel contrivance which lies beside me so quietly on the table in its green velvet glove! Nothing falls out as one imagines it. I could not have believed myself accepting it so completely — steel and rubber seem such strange allies for human flesh. But the hand has proved itself almost more competent even than an ordinary flesh-and-blood member! In fact its powers are so comprehensive that I am a little frightened of it. I can undertake the most delicate of tasks, even turning the pages of a book, as well as the coarser ones. But most important of all — ah! Darley I tremble as I write the words — IT can paint!

‘I have crossed the border and entered into the possession of my kingdom, thanks to the Hand. Nothing about this was premeditated. One day it took up a brush and lo! pictures of truly troubling originality and authority were born. I have five of them now. I stare at them with reverent wonder. Where did they come from? But I know that the Hand was responsible. And this new handwriting is also one of its new inventions, tall and purposeful and tender. Don’t think I boast. I am speaking with the utmost objectivity, for I know that I am not responsible. It is the Hand alone which has contrived to slip me through the barriers into the company of the Real Ones as Pursewarden used to say. Yet it is a bit frightening; the elegant velvet glove guards its secret perfectly. If I wear both gloves a perfect anonymity is preserved! I watch with wonder and a certain distrust, as one might a beautiful and dangerous pet like a panther, say. There is nothing, it seems, that it cannot do impressively better than I can. This will explain my silence and I hope excuse it. I have been totally absorbed in this new hand-language and the interior metamorphosis it has brought about. All the roads have opened before me, everything seems now possible for the first time.

‘On the table beside me as I write lies my steamship ticket to France; yesterday I knew with absolute certainty that I must go there. Do you remember how Pursewarden used to say that artists, like sick cats, knew by instinct exactly which herb they needed to effect a cure: and that the bitter-sweet herb of their self-discovery only grew in one place, France? Within ten days I shall be gone! And among so many new certainties there is one which has raised its head — the certainty that you will follow me there in your own good time. I speak of certainty not prophecy — I have done with fortune-tellers once and for all!

‘This, then, is simply to give you the dispositions which the Hand has imposed on me, and which I accept with eagerness and gratitude — with resignation also. This last week I have been paying a round of good-bye visits, for I think it will be some long time before I see Alexandria again. It has become stale and profitless to me. And yet how can we but help love the places which have made us suffer? Leave-takings are in the air; it’s as if the whole composition of our lives were being suddenly drawn away by a new current. For I am not the only person who is leaving the place — far from it. Mountolive, for example, will be leaving in a couple of months; by a great stroke of luck he has been given the plum post of his profession, Paris! With this news all the old uncertainties seem to have vanished; last week he was secretly married! You will guess to whom.

‘Another deeply encouraging thing is the return and recovery of dear old Pombal. He is back at the Foreign Office now in a senior post and seems to have recovered much of his old form to judge by the long exuberant letter he sent me. “How could I have forgotten” he writes “that there are no women in the world except French women? It is quite mysterious. They are the most lovely creation of the Almighty. And yet … dear Clea, there are so very many of them, and each more perfect than the other. What is one poor man to do against so many, against such an army? For Godsake ask someone, anyone, to bring up reinforcements. Wouldn’t Darley like to help an old friend out for old times’ sake?”

‘I pass you the invitation for what it is worth. Amaril and Semira will have a child this month — a child with the nose I invented! He will spend a year in America on some job or other, taking them with him. Balthazar also is off on a visit to Smyrna and Venice. My most piquant piece of news, however, I have saved for the last. Justine!

‘This I do not expect you to believe. Nevertheless I must put it down. Walking down Rue Fuad at ten o’clock on a bright spring morning I saw her come towards me, radiant and beautifully turned out in a spring frock of eloquent design: and flop flop flop beside her on the dusty pavements, hopping like a toad, the detested Memlik! Clad in elastic-sided boots with spats. A cane with a gold knob. And a newly minted flower-pot on his fuzzy crown. I nearly collapsed. She was leading him along like a poodle. One almost saw the cheap leather leash attached to his collar. She greeted me with effusive warmth and introduced me to her captive who shuffled shyly and greeted me in a deep groaning voice like a bass saxophone. They were on their way to meet Nessim at the Select. Would I go too? Of course I would. You know how tirelessly curious I am. She kept shooting secret sparks of amusement at me without Memlik seeing. Her eyes were sparkling with delight, a sort of impish mockery. It was as if, like some powerful engine of destruction, she had suddenly switched on again. She has never looked happier or younger. When we absented ourselves to powder our noses I could only gasp: “Justine! Memlik! What on earth?” She gave a peal of laughter and giving me a great hug said: “I have found his point faible. He is hungry for society. He wants to move in social circles in Alexandria and meet a lot of white women!” More laughter. “But what is the object?” I said in bewilderment. Here all at once she became serious, though her eyes sparkled with clever malevolence. “We have started something, Nessim and I. We have made a break through at last. Clea, I am so happy, I could cry. It is something much bigger this time, international. We will have to go to Switzerland next year, probably for good. Nessim’s luck has suddenly changed. I can’t tell you any details.”

‘When we reached the table upstairs Nessim had already arrived and was talking to Memlik. His appearance staggered me, he looked so much younger, and so elegant and self-possessed. It gave me a queer pang, too, to see the passionate way they embraced, Nessim and Justine, as if oblivious to the rest of the world. Right there in the café, with such ecstatic passion that I did not know where to look.

‘Memlik sat there with his expensive gloves on his knee, smiling gently. It was clear that he enjoyed the life of high society, and I could see from the way he offered me an ice that he also enjoyed the company of white women!

‘Ah! it is getting tired, this miraculous hand. I must catch the evening post with this letter. There are a hundred things to attend to before I start the bore of packing. As for you, wise one, I have a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to take possession of it once and for all. Write and tell me — or save it for some small café under a chestnut-tree, in smoky autumn weather, by the Seine.

‘I wait, quite serene and happy, a real human being, an artist at last.

‘Clea.’

* * * * *

But it was to be a little while yet before the clouds parted before me to reveal the secret landscape of which she was writing, and which she would henceforward appropriate, brushstroke by slow brushstroke. It had been so long in forming inside me, this precious image, that I too was as unprepared as she had been. It came on a blue day, quite unpremeditated, quite unannounced, and with such ease I would not have believed it. I had been until then like some timid girl, scared of the birth of her first child.

Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four faces!) with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow-men. Words which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: ‘Once upon a time….’

And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!

* * * * *

WORKPOINTS

Hamid’s story of Darley and Melissa.

* * *

Mountolive’s child by the dancer Grishkin. The result of the duel. The Russian letters. Her terror of Liza when after her mother’s death she is sent to her father.

* * *

Memlik and Justine in Geneva. Nessim’s new ventures.

* * *

Balthazar’s encounter with Arnauti in Venice. The violet sunglasses, the torn overcoat, pockets full of crumbs to feed the pigeons. The scene in Florian’s. The shuffling walk of general paralysis. Conversations on the balcony of the little pension over the rotting backwater of the canal. Was Justine actually Claudia? He cannot be sure. ‘Time is memory, they say; the art however is to revive it and yet avoid remembering. You speak of Alexandria. I can no longer even imagine it. It has dissolved. A work of art is something which is more like life than life itself!’ The slow death.

* * *

The northern journey of Narouz, and the great battle of the sticks.

Smyrna. The manuscripts, The Annals of Time. The theft.

SOME NOTES FOR CLEA (by Pursewarden)

* Page 737

Big advances are not made by analytical procedures but by direct vision. Yes, but how?

* * *

Art is not art unless it threatens your very existence. Could you repeat that, please, more slowly?

* * *

As you get older and want to die more a strange kind of happiness seizes you; you suddenly realize that all art must end in a celebration. This is what drives the impotent mad with rage. They cannot provoke that fruitful compulsion of the Present, even though their scrotums be as hairy as Cape Gooseberries.

* * *

Peine dure! Would you rather read Henry James or be pressed to death by weights? I have made my choice. I believe in the Holy Boast and the Communion of Aints. I do not belong to the Stream-of-Pompousness school, nor that of the desert fathers — prickeaters of the void.

* * *

Language is not an accident of poetry but the essence. The lingo is the nub.

* * *

A dévot of the Ophite sect,

With member more or less erect,

Snake-worship is the creed I hold

And shall do till I get too old.

The saucy serpent symbolizes

A hundred Freudian surprises;

With mine, I do the Indian trick

Though it’s become a shade too thick

To stand up like an actual rope —

I leave that to the Band of Hope.

Nor can I manage kundalini

And play on it like Paganini …

Mere beanstalk with a tower atop

I’m just like Jack, I cannot stop,

Hand over curious hand I climb

Until I hear the belfries chime

And some companionable she

Asks is there honey still for tea?

* * *

Perhaps it would be better just to start rewriting La Rochefoucauld, beginning with some such aphorism as ‘Jouir c’est pourrir unpeu?’

* * *

You must put yourself into deep soak, psychologically speaking.

* * *

A phrase from Bacon: ‘Prize bulls made fierce by dark keeping.’

* * *

Ah, my compatriots! What shall it profit a man to become a utilitarian jujube — to go thrilling off each morning in his electric brougham to the offices of the Spectator? How low can you rise?

* * *

To become a poet is to take the whole field of human knowledge and human desire for one’s province; yes but, this field can only be covered by continual inner abdications.

* * *

The more I read of those artists who have reached the bounds of human knowledge — and there is a permissible bound to the humanly knowable — the more it becomes apparent to me that statement becomes simpler as it becomes profounder. Finally it becomes platitude. At this point one begins to understand the religious claim that only initiates can communicate with each other because they use, not concept but symbol. For them all speech based on concept becomes an indiscretion; one can only really exchange what is mutually understood. In this sense every work of art is an indiscretion — but a calculated indiscretion.

* * *

Death is a metaphor; nobody dies to himself.

* * *

There must always be a breath of hope if you are to fully enjoy the quality of our despair; yes, and also remember that where there is faith there is doubt.

* * *

Art is as unimportant as banking, unless it comes from a spirit in free play — then it really is banking.

* * *

Vision is exorcism.

NOTES IN THE TEXT

* Page 680

THE AFTERNOON SUN

This little room, how well I know it!

Now they’ve rented this and the next door one

As business premises, the whole house

Has been swallowed up by merchants’ offices,

By limited companies and shipping agents …

O how familiar it is, this little room!

Once here, by the door, stood a sofa,

And before it a little Turkish carpet.

Exactly here. Then the shelf with the two

Yellow vases, and on the right of them:

No. Wait. Opposite them (how time passes)

The shabby wardrobe and the little mirror.

And here in the middle the table

Where he always used to sit and write.

And round it the three cane chairs.

How many years … And by the window over there

The bed we made love on so very often.

Somewhere all these old sticks of furniture

Must still be knocking about …

And beside the window, yes, that bed.

The afternoon sun climbed half way up it.

We parted at four o’clock one afternoon,

Just for a week, on just such an afternoon.

I would have never

Believed those seven days could last forever.

free translation from C. P. Cavafy

* Page 681

FAR AWAY

This fugitive memory … I should so much

Like to record it, but it’s dwindled …

Hardly a print of it remaining …

It lies so far back, back in my earliest youth,

Before my gifts had kindled.

A skin made of jasmine-petals on a night …

An August evening … but was it August?

I can barely reach it now, barely remember …

Those eyes, the magnificent eyes …

Or was it perhaps in September … in the dog days …

Irrevocably blue, yes, bluer than

A sapphire’s mineral gaze.

free translation from C. P. Cavafy

* Page 704

ONE OF THEIR GODS

Moving through the market-place of Seleukeia

Towards the hour of dusk there came one,

A tall, rare and perfectly fashioned youth

With the rapt joy of absolute incorruptibility

Written in his glance; and whose dark

Perfumed head of hair uncombed attracted

The curious glances of the passers-by.

They paused to ask each other who he was,

A Greek of Syria perhaps or some other stranger?

But a few who saw a little deeper drew aside,

Thoughtfully, to follow him with their eyes,

To watch him gliding through the dark arcades,

Through the shadow-light of evening silently

Going towards those quarters of the town

Which only wake at night in shameless orgies

And pitiless debaucheries of flesh and mind.

And these few who knew wondered which of Them he was,

And for what terrible sensualities he hunted

Through the crooked streets of Seleukeia,

A shadow-visitant from those divine and hallowed

Mansions where They dwell.

free translation from C. P. Cavafy

* Page 761

CHE FECE … IL GRAN RIFIUTO

To some among us comes that implacable day

Demanding that we stand our ground and utter

By choice of will the great Yea or Nay.

And whosoever has in him the affirming word

Will straightway then be heard.

The pathways of his life will clear at once

And all rewards will crown his way.

But he, the other who denies,

No-one can say he lies; he would repeat

His Nay in louder tones if pressed again.

It is his right — yet by such little trifles,

A ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’ his whole life sinks and stifles.

free translation from C. P. Cavafy

* Page 812

The incidents recorded in Capodistria’s letter have been borrowed and expanded from a footnote in Franz Hartmann’s Life of Paracelsus.

About the Author

LAWRENCE DURRELL was born in 1912 in India, where his father was an English civil engineer. As a boy he attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling, and he was later sent to St Edmund’s School, Canterbury. His first authentic literary work was The Black Book, which appeared in Paris in 1938 under the aegis of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. ‘In the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice …’ he later wrote. The novel was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his first collection of poems A Private Country in 1943. The first of the island books, Prospero’s Cell, a guide to Corfu, appeared in 1945. It was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes. Bitter Lemons, his account of life in Cyprus, won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize in 1957. Subsequently he drew on his years in Greece for The Greek Islands.

Durrell’s wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in southern France, where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and The Avignon Quintet (Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastianand Quinx),he wrote the two-decker Tune and Nunquam,now united as The Revolt of Aphrodite. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writings (Spirit of Place),Collected Poems,a thriller, White Eagles OverSerbia,and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps. His correspondence with his lifelong friend Henry Miller has also been published. Caesar’s VastGhost,his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death at his home in Sommières in 1990.

Copyright

First published in 1962

by Faber and Faber Ltd

Bloomsbury House

74–77 Great Russell Street

London WC1B 3DA

This ebook edition first published in 2012

All rights reserved

© Lawrence Durrell, 1962

Justine first published in 1957 © Lawrence Durrell, 1957

Balthazar first published in 1958 © Lawrence Durrell, 1958

Mountolive first published in 1958 © Lawrence Durrell, 1958

Clea first published in 1960 © Lawrence Durrell, 1960

Introduction © Jan Morris, 2012

The right of Lawrence Durrell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–0–571–26723–1