The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

Mountolive sank back into the accustomed pattern of things with a sense of sureness, almost of beatitude. Nessim had, so to speak, gone back into place like a picture into an alcove built for it, and the companionship of Justine — this dark-browed, queenly beauty at his side — enhanced rather than disturbed his relations with the outer world. Mountolive liked her, liked to feel her dark appraising eyes upon him lit with a sort of compassionate curiosity mixed with admiration. They made a splendid couple, he thought, with almost a touch of envy: like people trained to work together from childhood, instinctively responding to each other’s unspoken needs and desires, moving up unhesitatingly to support one another with their smiles. Though she was handsome and reserved and appeared to speak little, Mountolive thought he detected an endearing candour cropping up the whole time among her sentences — as if from some hidden spring of secret warmth. Was she pleased to find someone who valued her husband as deeply as she herself did? The cool, guileless pressure of her fingers suggested that, as did her thrilling voice when she said ‘I have known you so long from hearsay as David that it will be hard to call you anything else.’ As for Nessim, he had lost nothing during the time of separation, had preserved all his graces, adding to them only the weight of a worldly judgement which made him seem strikingly European in such provincial surroundings. His tact, for example, in never mentioning any subject which might have an official bearing to Mountolive was deeply endearing — and this despite the fact that they rode and shot together frequently, swam, sailed and painted. Such information upon political affairs as he had to put forward was always scrupulously relayed through Pursewarden. He never compromised their friendship by mixing work with pleasure, or forcing Mountolive to struggle between affection and duty.

Best of all, Pursewarden himself had reacted most favourably to his new position of eminence and was wearing what he called ‘his new leaf’. A couple of brusque minutes in the terrible red ink — the use of which is the prerogative only of Heads of Mission — had quelled him and drawn from him a promise to ‘turn over a new fig-leaf’, which he had dutifully done. His response had indeed been wholehearted and Mountolive was both grateful and relieved to feel that at last he could rely upon a judgement which was determined not to overrun itself, or allow itself to founder among easy dependences and doubts. What else? Yes, the new Summer Residence was delightful and set in a cool garden full of pines above Roushdi. There were two excellent hard courts which rang all day to the pang of racquets. The staff seemed happy with their new head of mission. Only … Leila’s silence was still an enigma. Then one evening Nessim handed him an envelope on which he recognized her familiar hand. Mountolive put it in his pocket to read when he was alone.

‘Your reappearance in Egypt — you perhaps have guessed? — has upset me somehow: upset my apple-cart. I am all over the place and cannot pick up the pieces as yet. It puzzles me, I admit. I have been living with you so long in my imagination — quite alone there — that now I must almost reinvent you to bring you back to life. Perhaps I have been traducing you all these years, painting your picture to myself? You may be now simply a figment instead of a flesh and blood dignitary, moving among people and lights and policies. I can’t find the courage to compare the truth to reality as yet; I’m scared. Be patient with a silly headstrong woman who never seems to know her own mind. Of course, we should have met long since — but I shrank like a snail. Be patient. Somewhere inside me I must wait for a tide to turn. I was so angry when I heard you were coming that I cried with sheer rage. Or was it panic? I suppose that really I had managed to forget … my own face, all these years. Suddenly it came back over me like an Iron Mask. Bah! soon my courage will come back, never fear. Sooner or later we must meet and shock one another. When? I don’t know as yet. I don’t know.’

Disconsolately reading the words as he sat upon the terraces at dusk he thought: ‘I cannot assemble my feelings coherently enough to respond to her intelligently. What should I say or do? Nothing.’ But the word had a hollow ring. ‘Patience’ he said softly to himself, turning the word this way and that in his mind the better to examine it. Later, at the Cervonis’ ball among the blue lights and the snapping of paper streamers, it seemed easy once more to be patient. He moved once more in a glad world in which he no longer felt cut off from his fellows — a world full of friends in which he could enjoy the memory of the long rides with Nessim, conversations with Amaril, or the troubling pleasure of dancing with the blonde Clea. Yes, he could be patient here, so close at hand. The time, place and circumstances were all of them rewards for patience. He felt no omens rising from the unclouded future, while even the premonitions of the slowly approaching war were things which he could share publicly with the others. ‘Can they really raze whole capitals, these bombers?’ asked Clea quietly. ‘I’ve always believed that our inventions mirror our secret wishes, and we wish for the end of the city-man, don’t we? All of us? Yes, but how hard to surrender London and Paris. What do you think?’

What did he think? Mountolive wrinkled his fine brows and shook his head. He was thinking of Leila draped in a black veil, like a nun, sitting in her dusty summerhouse at Karm Abu Girg, among the splendid roses, with only a snake for company….

So the untroubled, unhurried summer moved steadily onwards — and Mountolive found little to daunt him professionally in a city so eager for friendship, so vulnerable to the least politeness, so expert in taking pleasure. Day after day the coloured sails fluttered and loitered in the harbour mirror among the steel fortresses, the magical white waves moved in perfect punctuation over desert beaches burnt white as calx by the African suns. By night, sitting above a garden resplendent with fireflies, he heard the deep booming tread of screws as the Eastern-bound liners coasted the deeper waters outside the harbour, heading for the ports on the other side of the world. In the desert they explored oases of greenness made trembling and insubstantial as dreams by the water mirages, or stalked the bronze knuckles of the sandstone ridges around the city on horses, which, for all their fleetness, carried food and drink to assuage their talkative riders.

He visited Petra and the strange coral delta along the Red Sea coast with its swarming population of rainbow-coloured tropical fish. The long cool balconies of the summer residence echoed night after night to the clink of ice in tall glasses, the clink of platitudes and commonplaces made thrilling to him by their position in place and time, by their appositeness to a city which knew that pleasure was the only thing that made industry worth while; on these balconies, hanging out over the blue littoral of the historic coast, warmly lit by candle-light, these fragmentary friendships flowered and took shape in new affections whose candour made him no longer feel separated from his fellow-men by the powers he wielded. He was popular and soon might be well-beloved. Even the morbid spiritual lassitude and self-indulgence of the city was delightful to one who, secure in income, could afford to live outside it. Alexandria seemed to him a very desirable summer cantonment, accessible to every affection and stranger-loving in the sense of the Greek word. But why should he not feel at home?

The Alexandrians themselves were strangers and exiles to the Egypt which existed below the glittering surface of their dreams, ringed by the hot deserts and fanned by the bleakness of a faith which renounced worldly pleasure: the Egypt of rags and sores, of beauty and desperation. Alexandria was still Europe — the capital of Asiatic Europe, if such a thing could exist. It could never be like Cairo where his whole life had an Egyptian cast, where he spoke ample Arabic; here French, Italian and Greek dominated the scene. The ambience, the social manner, everything was different, was cast in a European mould where somehow the camels and palm-trees and cloaked natives existed only as a brilliantly coloured frieze, a backcloth to a life divided in its origins.

Then the autumn came and his duties drew him back once more to the winter capital, albeit puzzled and indeed a little aggrieved by the silence of Leila; but back to the consuming interests of a professional life which he found far from displeasing. There were papers to be constructed, miscellaneous reports, economic-social and military, to be made. His staff had shaken down well now, and worked with diligence and a will; even Pursewarden gave of his best. The enmity of Errol, never very deep, had been successfully neutralized, converted into a long-term truce. He had reason to feel pleased with himself.

Then at carnival time there came a message to say that Leila had at last signified her intention of meeting him — but both of them, it was understood, were to wear the conventional black domino of the season — the mask in which the Alexandrians revelled. He understood her anxiety. Nevertheless he was delighted by the thought and spoke warmly to Nessim on the telephone as he accepted the invitation, planning to remove his whole Chancery up to Alexandria for the carnival, so that his secretaries might enjoy the occasion with him. Remove he did, to find the city now basking under crisp winter skies as blue as a bird’s egg and hardly touched at night by the desert frosts.

But here another disappointment awaited him; for when in the midst of the hubbub at the Cervoni ball Justine took his arm and piloted him through the garden to the place of rendezvous among the tall hedges, all they found was an empty marble seat with a silk handbag on it containing a note scrawled in lipstick. ‘At the last moment my nerve fails me. Forgive.’ He tried to hide his chagrin and discomfiture from Justine. She herself seemed almost incredulous, repeating: ‘But she came in from Karm Abu Girg specially for the meeting. I cannot understand it. She has been with Nessim all day.’ He felt a sympathy in the warm pressure of her hand upon his elbow as they returned, downcast, from the scene, brushing impatiently past the laughing masked figures in the garden.

By the pool he caught a glimpse of Amaril, sitting uncowled before a slender masked figure, talking in low, pleading tones, and leaning forward from time to time to embrace her. A pang of envy smote him, though God knew there was nothing he recognized as passional now in his desire to see Leila. It was, in a paradoxical way, that Egypt itself could not fully come alive for him until he had seen her — for she represented something like a second, almost mythical image of the reality which he was experiencing, expropriating day by day. He was like a man seeking to marry the twin images in a camera periscope in order to lay his lens in true focus. Without having gone through the experience of having seen her once more, he felt vaguely helpless, unable either to confirm his own memories of this magical landscape, or fully assess his newest impressions of it. Yet he accepted his fate with philosophical calm. There was, after all, no real cause for alarm. Patience — there was ample room for patience now, to wait upon her courage.

Besides, other friendships had ripened now to fill the gap — friendships with Balthazar (who often came to dine and play chess), friendships with Amaril, Pierre Balbz, the Cervoni family. Clea too had begun her slow portrait of him at this time. His mother had been begging him to have a portrait in oils made for her; now he was able to pose in the resplendent uniform which Sir Louis had so obligingly sold him. The picture would make a surprise gift for Christmas, he thought, and was glad to let Clea dawdle over it, reconstructing the portions which displeased her. Through her (for she talked as she worked in order to keep her subjects’ faces alive) he learned much during that summer about the lives and pre-occupations of the Alexandrians — the fantastic poetry and grotesque drama of life as these exiles of circumstance lived it; tales of the modern lake-dwellers, inhabitants of the stone skyscrapers which stared out over the ruins of the Pharos towards Europe.

One such tale struck his fancy — the love-story of Amaril (the elegant, much beloved doctor) for whom he had come to feel a particular affection. The very name on Clea’s lips sounded with a common affection for this diffident and graceful man, who had so often sworn that he would never have the luck to be loved by a woman. ‘Poor Amaril’ sighing and smiling as she painted she said: ‘shall I tell you his story? It is somehow typical. It has made all his friends happy, for we were always apt to think that he had left the matter of love in this world until too late — had missed the bus.’

‘But Amaril is going abroad to England,’ said Mountolive. ‘He has asked us for a visa. Am I to assume that his heart is broken? And who is Semira? Please tell me.’

‘The virtuous Semira!’ Clea smiled again tenderly, and pausing on her work, put a portfolio into his hands. He turned the pages. ‘All noses’ he said with surprise, and she nodded. ‘Yes, noses. Amaril has kept me busy for nearly three months, travelling about and collecting noses for her to choose from; noses of the living and the dead. Noses from the Yacht Club, the Etoile, from frescoes in the Museum, from coins…. It has been hard work assembling them all for comparative study. Finally, they have chosen the nose of a soldier in a Theban fresco.’

Mountolive was puzzled. ‘Please, Clea, tell me the story.’

‘Will you promise to sit still, not to move?’

‘I promise.’

‘Very well, then. You know Amaril quite well now; well, this romantic, endearing creature — so true a friend and so wise a doctor — has been our despair for years. It seemed that he could never, would never fall in love. We were sad for him — you know that despite our hardness of surface we Alexandrians are sentimental people, and wish our friends to enjoy life. Not that he was unhappy — and he has had lovers from time to time: but never une amie in our special sense. He himself bemoaned the fact frequently — I think not entirely to provoke pity or amusement, but to reassure himself that there was nothing wrong: that he was sympathetic and attractive to the race of women. Then last year at the Carnival, the miracle happened. He met a slender masked domino. They fell madly in love — indeed went farther than is customary for so cautious a lover as Amaril. He was completely transformed by the experience, but … the girl disappeared, still masked, without leaving her name. A pair of white hands and a ring with a yellow stone was all he knew of her — for despite their passion she had refused to unmask so that oddly enough, he had been denied so much as a kiss, though granted … other favours. Heavens, I am gossiping! Never mind.

‘From then on Amaril became insupportable. The romantic frenzy, I admit, suited him very well — for he is a romantic to his finger-tips. He hunted through the city all year long for those hands, sought them everywhere, beseeched his friends to help him, neglected his practice, became almost a laughing-stock. We were amused and touched by his distress, but what could we do? How could we trace her? He waited for Carnival this year with burning impatience for she had promised to return to the place of rendezvous. Now comes the fun. She did reappear, and once more they renewed their vows of devotion; but this time Amaril was determined not to be given the slip — for she was somewhat evasive about names and addresses. He became desperate and bold, and refused to be parted from her which frightened her very much indeed. (All this he told me himself — for he appeared at my flat in the early morning, walking like a drunkard and with his hair standing on end, elated and rather frightened.)

‘The girl made several attempts to give him the slip but he stuck to her and insisted on taking her home in one of those old horse-drawn cabs. She was almost beside herself, indeed, and when they reached the eastern end of the city, somewhat shabby and unfrequented, with large abandoned properties and decaying gardens, she made a run for it. Demented with romantic frenzy, Amaril chased the nymph and caught her up as she was slipping into a dark courtyard. In his eagerness he snatched at her cowl when the creature, her face at last bared, sank to the doorstep in tears. Amaril’s description of the scene was rather terrifying. She sat there, shaken by a sort of snickering and whimpering and covering her face with her hands. She had no nose. For a moment he got a tremendous fright for he is the most superstitious of mortals, and knows all the beliefs about vampires appearing during carnival. But he made the sign of the cross and touched the clove of garlic in his pocket — but she didn’t disappear. And then the doctor in him came to the fore, and taking her into the courtyard (she was half-fainting with mortification and fear) he examined her closely. He tells me he heard his own brain ticking out possible diagnoses clearly and watchfully, while at the same time he felt that his heart had stopped beating and that he was suffocating…. In a flash he reviewed the possible causes of such a feature, repeating with terror words like syphilis, leprosy, lupus, and turning her small distorted face this way and that. He cried angrily: “What is your name?” And she blurted out “Semira — the virtuous Semira.” He was so unnerved that he roared with laughter.

‘Now this is an oddity. Semira is the daughter of a very old deaf father. The family was once rich and famous, under the Khedives, and is of Ottoman extraction. But it was plagued by misfortunes and the progressive insanity of the sons, and has so far today decayed as to be virtually forgotten. It is also poverty-stricken. The old half-mad father locked Semira away in this rambling house, keeping her veiled for the most part. Vaguely, in society, one had heard tales of her — of a daughter who had taken the veil and spent her life in prayer, who had never been outside the gates of the house, who was a mystic; or who was deaf, dumb and bedridden. Vague tales, distorted as tales always are in Alexandria. But while the faint echo remained of the so-called virtuous Semira — she was really completely unknown to us and her family forgotten. Now it seemed that at carnival-time her curiosity about the outer world overcame her and she gate-crashed parties in a domino!

‘But I am forgetting Amaril. Their footsteps had brought down an old manservant with a candle. Amaril demanded to see the master of the house. He had already come to a decision. The old father lay asleep in an old-fashioned four-poster bed, in a room covered in bat-droppings, at the top of the house. Semira was by now practically insensible. But Amaril had come to a great decision. Taking the candle in one hand and the small Semira in the crook of his arm, he walked the whole way up to the top and kicked open the door of the father’s room. It must have been a strange and unfamiliar scene for the old man to witness as he sat up in bed — and Amaril describes it with all the touching flamboyance of the romantic, even moving himself in the recital so that he is in tears as he recalls it. He is touched by the magnificence of his own fancy, I think; I must say, loving him as much as I do, I felt tears coming into my own eyes as he told me how he put down the candle beside the bed, and kneeling down with Semira, said “I wish to marry your daughter and take her back into the world.” The terror and incomprehension of the old man at this unexpected visit took some time to wear off, and for a while it was hard to make him understand. Then he began to tremble and wonder at this handsome apparition kneeling beside his bed holding up his noseless daughter with his arm and proposing the impossible with so much pride and passion.

‘“But” the old man protested “no-one will take her, for she has no nose.” He got out of bed in a stained nightshirt and walked right round Amaril, who remained kneeling, studying him as one might an entomological specimen. (I am quoting.) Then he touched him with his bare foot — as if to see whether he was made of flesh and blood — and repeated: “Who are you to take a woman without a nose?” Amaril replied: “I am a doctor from Europe and I will give her a new nose,” for the idea, the fantastic idea, had been slowly becoming clear in his own mind. At the words, Semira gave a sob and turned her beautiful, horrible face to his, and Amaril thundered out: “Semira, will you be my wife?” She could hardly articulate her response and seemed little less doubtful of the whole issue than was her father. Amaril stayed and talked to them, convincing them.

‘The next day when he went back, he was received with a message that Semira was not to be seen and that what he proposed was impossible. But Amaril was not to be put off, and once more he forced his way in and bullied the father.

‘This, then, is the fantasy in which he has been living. For Semira, as loving and eager as ever, cannot leave her house for the open world until he fulfils his promise. Amaril offered to marry her at once, but the suspicious old man wants to make sure of the nose. But what nose? First Balthazar was called in and together they examined Semira, and assured themselves that the illness was due neither to leprosy nor syphilis but to a rare form of lupus — a peculiar skin T.B. of rare kind of which many cases have been recorded from the Damietta region. It had been left untreated over the years and had finally collapsed the nose. I must say, it is horrible — just a slit like the gills of a fish. For I too have been sharing the deliberations of the doctors and have been going regularly to read to Semira in the darkened rooms where she has spent most of her life. She has wonderful dark eyes like an odalisque and a shapely mouth and well-modelled chin: and then the gills of a fish! It is too unfair. And it has taken her ages to actually believe that surgery can restore the defect. Here again Amaril has been brilliant, in getting her interested in her restoration, conquering her self-disgust, allowing her to choose the nose from that portfolio, discuss the whole project with him. He has let her choose her nose as one might let one’s mistress choose a valuable bracelet from Pierantoni. It was just the right approach, for she is beginning to conquer her shame, and feel almost proud of being free to choose this valuable gift — the most treasured feature of a woman’s face which aligns every glance and alters every meaning: and without which good eyes and teeth and hair become useless treasures.

‘But now they have run into other difficulties, for the restoration of the nose itself requires techniques of surgery which are still very new; and Amaril, though a surgeon, does not wish there to be any mistake about the results. You see, he is after all building a woman of his own fancy, a face to a husband’s own specifications; only Pygmalion had such a chance before! He is working on the project as if his life depended on it — which in a way I suppose it does.

‘The operation itself will have to be done in stages, and will take ages to complete. I have heard them discussing it over and over again in such detail that I feel I could almost perform it myself. First you cut off a strip of the costal cartilage, here, where the rib joins the breastbone, and make a graft from it. Then you cut out a triangular flap of skin from the forehead and pull downwards to cover the nose — the Indian technique, Balthazar calls it; but they are still debating the removal of a section of flesh and skin from inside the thigh…. You can imagine how fascinating this is for a painter and sculptor to think about. But meanwhile Amaril is going to England to perfect the operative technique under the best masters. Hence his demand for a visa. How many months he will be away we don’t know yet, but he is setting out with all the air of a knight in search of the Holy Grail. For he intends to complete the operation himself. Meanwhile, Semira will wait for him here, and I have promised to visit her frequently and keep her interested and amused if I can. It is not difficult, for the real world outside the four walls of her house sounds to her strange and cruel and romantic. Apart from a brief glimpse of it at carnival-time, she knows little of our lives. For her, Alexandria is as brilliantly coloured as a fairy-story. It will be some time before she sees it as it really is — with its harsh, circumscribed contours and its wicked, pleasure-loving and unromantic inhabitants. But you have moved!’

Mountolive apologized and said: ‘Your use of the word “unromantic” startled me, for I was just thinking how romantic it all seems to a newcomer.’

‘Amaril is an exception, though a beloved one. Few are as generous, as unmercenary as he. As for Semira — I cannot at present see what the future holds for her beyond romance.’ Clea sighed and smiled and lit a cigarette.

‘Espérons’ she said quietly.

* * * * *

VIII

‘A hundred times I’ve asked you not to use my razor’ said Pombal plaintively ‘and you do so again. You know I am afraid of syphilis. Who knows what spots, when you cut them, begin to leak?’

‘Mon cher collègue’ said Pursewarden stiffly (he was shaving his lip), and with a grimace which was somewhat intended to express injured dignity, ‘what can you mean? I am British. Hein?’

He paused, and marking time with Pombal’s cut-throat declaimed solemnly:

‘The British who perfected the horseless carriage

Are now working hard on the sexless marriage.

Soon the only permissible communion

Will be by agreement with one’s Trade Union.’

‘Your blood may be infected’ said his friend between grunts as he ministered to a broken suspender with one fat calf exposed upon the bidet. ‘You never know, after all.’

‘I am a writer’ said Pursewarden with further and deeper dignity. ‘And therefore I do know. There is no blood in my veins. Plasma’ he said darkly, wiping his ear-tip, ‘that is what flows in my veins. How else would I do all the work I do? Think of it. On the Spectator I am Ubique, on the New Statesman I am Mens Sana. On the Daily Worker I sign myself as Corpore Sano. I am also Paralysis Agitans on The Times and Ejaculatio Praecox in New Verse. I am …’ But here his invention failed him.

‘I never see you working’ said Pombal.

‘Working little, I earn less. If my work earned more than one hundred pounds a year I should not be able to take refuge in being misunderstood.’ He gave a strangled sob.

‘Compris. You have been drinking. I saw the bottle on the hall table as I came in. Why so early?’

‘I wished to be quite honest about it. It is your wine, after all. I wished to hide nothing. I have drunk a tot or so.’

‘Celebration?’

‘Yes. Tonight, my dear Georges, I am going to do something rather unworthy of myself. I have disposed of a dangerous enemy and advanced my own position by a large notch. In our service, this would be regarded as something to crow about. I am going to offer myself a dinner of self-congratulation.’

‘Who will pay it?’

‘I will order, eat and pay for it myself.’

‘That is not much good.’

Pursewarden made an impatient face in the mirror.

‘On the contrary’ he said. ‘A quiet evening is what I most need. I shall compose a few more fragments of my autobiography over the good oysters at Diamandakis.’

‘What is the title?’

‘Beating about the Bush. The opening words are “I first met Henry James in a brothel in Algiers. He had a naked houri on each knee.”

‘Henry James was a pussy, I think.’

Pursewarden turned the shower on full and stepped into it crying: ‘No more literary criticism from the French, please.’

Pombal drove a comb through his dark hair with a laborious impatience and then consulted his watch. ‘Merde’ he said, ‘I am going to be retarded again.’

Pursewarden gave a shriek of delight. They adventured freely in each other’s languages, rejoicing like schoolboys in the mistakes which cropped up among their conversations. Each blunder was greeted with a shout, was turned into a war-cry. Pursewarden hopped with pleasure and shouted happily above the hissing of the water: ‘Why not stay in and enjoy a nice little nocturnal emission on the short hairs?’ (Pombal had described a radio broadcast thus the day before and had not been allowed to forget it.) He made a round face now to express mock annoyance. ‘I did not say it’ he said.

‘You bloody well did.’

‘I did not say “the short hairs” but the “short undulations”— des ondes courtes.’

‘Equally dreadful. You Quai d’Orsay people shock me. Now my French may not be perfect, but I have never made a ——’

‘If I begin with your mistakes — ha! ha!’

Pursewarden danced up and down in the bath, shouting ‘Nocturnal emissions on the short hairs’. Pombal threw a rolled towel at him and lumbered out of the bathroom before he could retaliate effectively.

Their abusive conversation was continued while the Frenchman made some further adjustments to his dress in the bedroom mirror. ‘Will you go down to Etoile later for the floor-show?’

‘I certainly will’ said Pursewarden. ‘I shall dance a Fox-Macabre with Darley’s girl-friend or Sveva. Several Fox-Macabres, in fact. Then, later on, like an explorer who has run out of pemmican, purely for body-warmth, I shall select someone and conduct her to Mount Vulture. There to sharpen my talons on her flesh.’ He made what he imagined to be the noise a vulture makes as it feeds upon flesh — a soft, throaty croaking. Pombal shuddered.

‘Monster’ he cried. ‘I go — good-bye.’

‘Good-bye. Toujours la maladresse!’

‘Toujours.’ It was their war-cry.

Left alone, Pursewarden whistled softly as he dried himself in the torn bath-towel and completed his toilet. The irregularities in the water system of the Mount Vulture Hotel often drove him across the square to Pombal’s flat in search of a leisurely bath and a shave. From time to time too, when Pombal went on leave, he would actually rent the place and share it, somewhat uneasily, with Darley who lived a furtive life of his own in the far corner of it. It was good from time to time to escape from the isolation of his hotel-room, and the vast muddle of paper which was growing up around his next novel. To escape — always to escape…. The desire of a writer to be alone with himself—‘the writer, most solitary of human animals’; ‘I am quoting from the great Pursewarden himself’ he told his reflection in the mirror as he wrestled with his tie. Tonight he would dine quietly, self-indulgently, alone! He had gracefully refused a halting dinner invitation from Errol which he knew would involve him in one of those gauche, haunting evenings spent in playing imbecile paper-games or bridge. ‘My God’ Pombal had said, ‘your compatriots’ methods of passing the time! Those rooms which they fill with their sense of guilt! To express one idea is to stop a dinner party dead in its tracks and provoke an awkwardness, a silence…. I try my best, but always feel I’ve put my foot in it. So I always automatically send flowers the next morning to my hostess…. What a nation you are! How intriguing for us French because how repellent is the way you live!’

Poor David Mountolive! Pursewarden thought of him with compassion and affection. What a price the career diplomat had to pay for the fruits of power! ‘His dreams must forever be awash with the memories of fatuities endured — deliberately endured in the name of what was most holy in the profession, namely the desire to please, the determination to captivate in order to influence. Well! It takes all sorts to unmake a world.’

Combing his hair back he found himself thinking of Maskelyne, who must at this moment be sitting in the Jerusalem express jogging stiffly, sedately down among the sand-dunes and orange-groves, sucking a long pipe; in a hot carriage, fly-tormented without and roasted within by the corporate pride of a tradition which was dying…. Why should it be allowed to die? Maskelyne, full of the failure, the ignominy of a new post which carried advancement with it. The final cruel thrust. (The idea gave him a twinge of remorse for he did not underestimate the character of the unself-seeking soldier.) Narrow, acid, desiccated as a human being, nevertheless the writer somewhere treasured him while the man condemned him. (Indeed, he had made extensive notes upon him — a fact which would certainly have surprised Maskelyne had he known.) His way of holding his pipe, of carrying his nose high, his reserves…. It was simply that he might want to use him one day. ‘Are real human beings becoming simply extended humours capable of use, and does this cut one off from them a bit? Yes. For observation throws down a field about the observed person or object. Yes. Makes the unconditional response more difficult — the response to the common ties, affections, love and so on. But this is not only the writer’s problem — it is everyone’s problem. Growing up means separation in the interests of a better, more lucid joining up…. Bah!’ He was able to console himself against his furtive sympathy with Maskelyne by recalling a few of the man’s stupidities. His arrogance! ‘My dear fellow, when you’ve been in “I” as long as I have you develop intuition. You can see things a mile off.’ The idea of anyone like Maskelyne developing intuition was delightful. Pursewarden gave a long crowing laugh and reached for his coat.

He slipped lightly downstairs into the dusky street, counting his money and smiling. It was the best hour of the day in Alexandria — the streets turning slowly to the metallic blue of carbon paper but still giving off the heat of the sun. Not all the lights were on in the town, and the large mauve parcels of dusk moved here and there, blurring the outlines of everything, repainting the hard outlines of buildings and human beings in smoke. Sleepy cafés woke to the whine of mandolines which merged in the shrilling of heated tyres on the tarmac of streets now crowded with life, with white-robed figures and the scarlet dots of tarbushes. The window-boxes gave off a piercing smell of slaked earth and urine. The great limousines soared away from the Bourse with softly crying horns, like polished flights of special geese. To be half-blinded by the mauve dusk, to move lightly, brushing shoulders with the throng, at peace, in that dry inspiriting air … these were the rare moments of happiness upon which he stumbled by chance, by accident. The pavements still retained their heat just as water-melons did when you cut them open at dusk; a damp heat slowly leaking up through the thin soles of one’s shoes. The sea-winds were moving in to invest the upper town with their damp coolness, but as yet one only felt them spasmodically. One moved through the dry air, so full of static electricity (the crackle of the comb in his hair), as one might swim through a tepid summer sea full of creeping cold currents. He walked towards Baudrot slowly through little isolated patches of smell — a perfume shed by a passing woman, or the reek of jasmine from a dark archway — knowing that the damp sea air would soon blot them all out. It was the perfect moment for an apéritif in the half-light.

The long wooden outer balconies, lined with potted plants which exhaled the twilight smell of watered earth, were crowded now with human beings, half melted by the mirage into fugitive cartoons of gestures swallowed as soon as made. The coloured awnings trembled faintly above the blue veils which shifted uneasily in the darkening alleys, like the very nerves of the lovers themselves who hovered here, busy on the assignations, their gestures twinkling like butterflies full of the evening promises of Alexandria. Soon the mist would vanish and the lights would blaze up on cutlery and white cloth, on ear-rings and flashing jewellery, on sleek oiled heads and smiles made brilliant by their darkness, brown skins slashed by white teeth. Then the cars would begin once more to slide down from the upper town with their elegant precarious freight of diners and dancers…. This was the best moment of the day. Sitting here, with his back against a wooden trellis, he could gaze sleepily into the open street, unrecognized and ungreeted. Even the figures at the next table were unrecognizable, the merest outlines of human beings. Their voices came lazily to him in the dusk, the mauve-veiled evening voices of Alexandrians uttering stockyard quotations or the lazy verses from Arabic love-poems — who could tell?

How good the taste of Dubonnet with a zeste de citron, with its concrete memory of a Europe long-since abandoned yet living on unforgotten below the surface of this unsubstantial life in Alexander’s shabby capital! Tasting it he thought enviously of Pombal, of the farmhouse in Normandy to which his friend hoped one day to return heart-whole. How marvellous it would be to feel the same assured relations with his own country, the same certainty of return! But his gorge rose at the mere thought of it; and at the same time the pain and regret that it should be so. (She said: ‘I have read the books so slowly — not because I cannot read fast as yet in Braille; but because I wanted to surrender to the power of each word, even the cruelties and the weaknesses, to arrive at the grain of the thought.’) The grain! It was a phrase which rang in one’s ear like the whimper of a bullet which passes too close. He saw her — the marble whiteness of the sea-goddess’ face, hair combed back upon her shoulders, staring out across the park where the dead autumn leaves and branches flared and smoked; a Medusa among the snows, dressed in her old tartan shawl. The blind spent all day in that gloomy subterranean library with its pools of shadow and light, their fingers moving like ants across the perforated surfaces of books engraved for them by a machine. (‘I so much wanted to understand, but I could not.’) Good, this is where you break into a cold sweat; this is where you turn through three hundred and sixty-five degrees, a human earth, to bury your face in your pillow with a groan! (The lights were coming on now, the veils were being driven upwards into the night, evaporating. The faces of human beings….) He watched them intently, almost lustfully, as if to surprise their most inward intentions, their basic designs in moving here, idle as fireflies, walking in and out of the bars of yellow light; a finger atwinkle with rings, a flashing ear, a gold tooth set firmly in the middle of an amorous smile. ‘Waiter, kaman wahed, another please.’ And the half-formulated thoughts began to float once more across his mind (innocent, purged by the darkness and the alcohol): thoughts which might later dress up, masquerade as verses…. Visitants from other lives.

Yes, he would do another year — one more whole year, simply out of affection for Mountolive. He would make it a good one, too. Then a transfer — but he averted his mind from this, for it might result in disaster. Ceylon? Santos? Something about this Egypt, with its burning airless spaces and its unrealized vastness — the grotesque granite monuments to dead Pharaohs, the tombs which became cities — something in all this suffocated him. It was no place for memory — and the strident curt reality of the day-world was almost more than a human being could bear. Open sores, sex, perfumes, and money.

They were crying the evening papers in a soup-language which was deeply thrilling — Greek, Arabic, French were the basic ingredients. The boys ran howling through the thoroughfares like winged messengers from the underworld, proclaiming … the fall of Byzantium? Their white robes were tucked up about their knees. They shouted plaintively, as if dying of hunger. He leaned from his wooden porch and bought an evening paper to read over his solitary meal. Reading at meals was another self-indulgence which he could not refuse himself.

Then he walked quietly along the arcades and through the street of the cafés, past a mauve mosque (sky-floating), a library, a temple (grilled: ‘Here once lay the body of the great Alexander’); and so down the long curving inclines of the street which took one to the seashore. The cool currents were still nosing about hereabouts, tantalizing to the cheek.

He suddenly collided with a figure in a mackintosh and belatedly recognized Darley. They exchanged confused pleasantries, weighed down by a mutual awkwardness. Their politenesses got them, so to speak, suddenly stuck to each other, suddenly stuck to the street as if it had turned to flypaper. Then at last Darley managed to break himself free and turn back down the dark street saying: ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you. I’m dead tired myself. Going home for a wash.’ Pursewarden stood still for a moment looking after him, deeply puzzled by his own confusion and smitten by the memory of the damp bedraggled towels which he had left lying about Pombal’s bathroom, and the rim of shaving-soap grey with hairs around the washbasin…. Poor Darley! But how was it that, liking and respecting the man, he could not feel natural in his presence? He at once took on a hearty, unnatural tone with him purely out of nervousness. This must seem rude and contemptuous. The brisk hearty tone of some country medico rallying a patient… damn! He must some time take him back to the hotel for a solitary drink and try to get to know him a little. And yet, he had tried to get to know him on several occasions on those winter walks together. He rationalized his dissatisfaction by saying to himself ‘But the poor bastard is still interested in literature.’

But his good humour returned when he reached the little Greek oyster-tavern by the sea whose walls were lined with butts and barrels of all sizes, and from whose kitchens came great gusts of smoke and smell of whitebait and octopus frying in olive oil. Here he sat, among the ragged boatmen and schooner-crews of the Levant, to eat his oysters and dip into the newspaper, while the evening began to compose itself comfortably around him, untroubled by thought or the demands of conversation with its wicked quotidian platitudes. Later he might be able to relate his ideas once more to the book which he was trying to complete so slowly, painfully, in these hard-won secret moments stolen from an empty professional life, stolen even from the circumstances which he built around himself by virtue of laziness, of gregariousness. (‘Care for a drink?’ — ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ How many evenings had been lost like this?)

And the newspapers? He dwelt mostly upon the Faits Divers — those little oddities of human conduct which mirrored the true estate of man, which lived on behind the wordier abstractions, pleading for the comic and miraculous in lives made insensitive by drabness, by the authority of bald reason. Beside a banner headline which he would have to interpret in a draft despatch for Mountolive the next day — ARAB UNION APPEALS AGAIN — he could find the enduring human frailties in GREAT RELIGIOUS LEADER TRAPPED IN LIFT OR LUNATIC BREAKS MONTE CARLO BANK which reflected the macabre unreason of fate and circumstance.

Later, under the influence of the excellent food at the Coin de France he began to smoke his evening more enjoyably still — like a pipe of opium. The inner world with its tensions unwound its spools inside him, flowing out and away in lines of thought which flickered intermittently into his consciousness like morse. As if he had become a real receiving apparatus — these rare moments of good dictation!

At ten he noted on the back of a letter from his bank a few of the gnomic phrases which belonged to his book. As ‘Ten. No attacks by the hippogriff this week. Some speeches for Old Parr?’ And then, below it, disjointedly, words which, condensing now in the mind like dew, might later be polished and refashioned into the armature of his characters’ acts.

(a) With every advance from the known to the unknown, the mystery increases.

(b) Here I am, walking about on two legs with a name — the whole intellectual history of Europe from Rabelais to de Sade.

(c) Man will be happy when his Gods perfect themselves.

(d) Even the Saint dies with all his imperfections on his head.

(e) Such a one as might be above divine reproach, beneath human contempt.

(f) Possession of a human heart — disease without remedy.

(g) All great books are excursions into pity.

(h) The yellow millet dream is everyman’s way.

Later these oracular thoughts would be all brushed softly into the character of Old Parr, the sensualist Tiresias of his novel, though erupting thus, at haphazard, they offered no clue as to the order in which they would really be placed finally.

He yawned. He was pleasantly tipsy after his second Armagnac. Outside the grey awnings, the city had once more assumed the true pigmentation of night. Black faces now melted into blackness; one saw apparently empty garments walking about, as in The Invisible Man. Red pill-boxes mounted upon cancelled faces, the darkness of darkness. Whistling softly, he paid his bill and walked lightly down to the Corniche again to where, at the end of a narrow street, the green bubble of the Etoile flared and beckoned; he dived into the narrow bottleneck staircase to emerge into an airless ballroom, half blinded now by the incandescent butcher’s light and pausing only to let Zoltan take his mackintosh away to the cloakroom. For once he was not irked by the fear of his unpaid drink-chits — for he had drawn a substantial advance upon his new salary. ‘Two new girls’ said the little waiter hoarsely in his ear, ‘both from Hungary.’ He licked his lips and grinned. He looked as if he had been fried very slowly in olive oil to a rich dark brown.

The place was crowded, the floor-show nearly over. There were no familiar faces to be seen around, thank God. The lights went down, turned blue, black — and then with a shiver of tambourines and the roll of drums threw up the last performer into a blinding silver spot. Her sequins caught fire as she turned, blazing like a Viking ship, to jingle down the smelly corridor to the dressing-rooms.

He had seldom spoken to Melissa since their initial meeting months before, and her visits to Pombal’s flat now rarely if ever coincided with his. Darley too was painstakingly secretive — perhaps from jealousy, or shame? Who could tell? They smiled and greeted one another in the street when their paths crossed, that was all. He watched her reflectively now as he drank a couple of whiskies and slowly felt the lights beginning to burn more brightly inside him, his feet respond to the dull sugared beat of the nigger jazz. He enjoyed dancing, enjoyed the comfortable shuffle of the four-beat bar, the rhythms that soaked into the floor under one’s toes. Should he dance?

But he was too good a dancer to be adventurous, and holding Melissa in his arms thus he hardly bothered to do more than move softly, lightly round the floor, humming to himself the tune of Jamais de la vie. She smiled at him and seemed glad to see a familiar face from the outer world. He felt her narrow hand with its slender wrist resting upon his shoulder, fingers clutching his coat like the claw of a sparrow. ‘You are en forme’ she said. ‘I am en forme’ he replied. They exchanged the meaningless pleasantries suitable to the time and place. He was interested and attracted by her execrable French. Later she came across to his table and he stood her a couple of coups de champagne — the statutory fee exacted by the management for private conversations. She was on duty that night, and each dance cost the dancer a fee; therefore this interlude won her gratitude, for her feet were hurting her. She talked gravely, chin on hand, and watching her he found her rather beautiful in an etiolated way. Her eyes were good — full of small timidities which recorded perhaps the shocks which too great an honesty exacts from life? But she looked, and clearly was, ill. He jotted down the words: ‘The soft bloom of phthisis.’ The whisky had improved his sulky good humour, and his few jests were rewarded by an unforced laughter which, to his surprise, he found delightful. He began to comprehend dimly what Darley must see in her — the gamine appeal of the city, of slenderness and neatness: the ready street-arab response to a hard world. Dancing again he said to her, but with drunken irony: ‘Melissa, comment vous défendez-vous contre la foule?’ Her response, for some queer reason, cut him to the heart. She turned upon him an eye replete with all the candour of experience and replied softly: ‘Monsieur, jeneme défendsplus.’The melancholy of the smiling face was completely untouched by self-pity. She made a little gesture, as if indicating a total world, and said ‘Look’ — the shabby wills and desires of the Etoile’s patrons, clothed in bodily forms, spread around them in that airless cellar. He understood and suddenly felt apologetic for never having treated her seriously. He was furious at his own complacency. On an impulse, he pressed his cheek to hers, affectionately as a brother. She was completely natural!

A human barrier dissolved now and they found that they could talk freely to each other, like old friends. As the evening wore on he found himself dancing with her more and more often. She seemed to welcome this, even though on the dance-floor itself he danced silently now, relaxed and happy. He made no gestures of intimacy, yet he felt somehow accepted by her. Then towards midnight a fat and expensive Syrian banker arrived and began to compete seriously for her company. Much to his annoyance, Pursewarden felt his anxiety rise, form itself almost into a proprietary jealousy. This made him swear under his breath! But he moved to a table near the floor the better to be able to claim her as soon as the music started. Melissa herself seemed oblivious to this fierce competition. She was tired. At last he asked her ‘What will you do when you leave here? Will you go back to Darley tonight?’ She smiled at the name, but shook her head wearily. ‘I need some money for — never mind’ she said softly, and then abruptly burst out, as if afraid of not being taken for sincere, with ‘For my winter coat. We have so little money. In this business, one has to dress. You understand?’ Pursewarden said: ‘Not with that horrible Syrian?’ Money! He thought of it with a pang. Melissa looked at him with an air of amused resignation. She said in a low voice, but without emphasis, without shame: ‘He has offered me 500 piastres to go home with him. I say no now, but later — I expect I shall have to.’ She shrugged her shoulders.

Pursewarden swore quietly. ‘No’ he said. ‘Come with me. I shall give you 1,000 if you need it.’

Her eyes grew round at the mention of so great a sum of money. He could see her telling it over coin by coin, fingering it, as if on an abacus, dividing it up into food, rent and clothes. ‘I mean it’ he said sharply. And added almost at once: ‘Does Darley know?’

‘Oh yes’ she said quietly. ‘You know, he is very good. Our life is a struggle, but he knows me. He trusts me. He never asks for any details. He knows that one day when we have enough money to go away I will stop all this. It is not important for us.’ It sounded quaint, like some fearful blasphemy in the mouth of a child. Pursewarden laughed. ‘Come now’ he said suddenly; he was dying to possess her, to cradle and annihilate her with the disgusting kisses of a false compassion. ‘Come now, Melissa darling’ he said, but she winced and turned pale at the word and he saw that he had made a mistake, for any sexual transaction must be made strictly outside the bounds of her personal affection for Darley. He was disgusted by himself and yet rendered powerless to act otherwise; ‘I tell you what’ he said ‘I shall give Darley a lot of money later this month — enough to take you away.’ She did not seem to be listening. ‘I’ll get my coat’ she said in a small mechanical voice ‘and meet you in the hall.’ She went to make her peace with the manager, and Pursewarden waited for her in an agony of impatience. He had hit upon the perfect way to cure these twinges of a puritan conscience which lurked on underneath the carefree surface of an amoral life.

Several weeks before, he had received through Nessim a short note from Leila, written in an exquisite hand, which read as follows:

Dear Mr. Pursewarden,

I am writing to ask you to perform an unusual service for me. A favourite uncle of mine has just died. He was a great lover of England and the English language which he knew almost better than his own; in his will he left instructions that an epitaph in English should be placed upon his tomb, in prose or verse, and if possible original. I am anxious to honour his memory in this most suitable way and to carry out his last wishes, and this is why I write: to ask you if you would consider such an undertaking, a common one for poets to perform in ancient China, but uncommon today. I would be happy to commission you in the sum of £500 for such a work.

The epitaph had been duly delivered and the money deposited in his bank, but to his surprise he found himself unable to touch it. Some queer superstition clung to him. He had never written poetry to order before, and never an epitaph. He smelt something unlucky almost about so large a sum. It had stayed there in his bank, untouched. Now he was suddenly visited by the conviction that he must give it away to Darley! It would, among other things, atone for his habitual neglect of his qualities, his clumsy awkwardness.

She walked back to the hotel with him, pressed as close as a scabbard to his thigh — the professional walk of a woman of the streets. They hardly spoke. The streets were empty.

The old dirty lift, its seats trimmed with dusty brown braid and its mirrors with rotting lace curtains, jerked them slowly upwards into the cobwebbed gloom. Soon, he thought to himself, he would drop through the trap-door feet first, arms pinioned by arms, lips by lips, until he felt the noose tighten about his throat and the stars explode behind his eyeballs. Surcease, forgetfulness, what else should one seek from an unknown woman’s body?

Outside the door he kissed her slowly and deliberately, pressing into the soft cone of her pursed lips until their teeth met with a slight click and a jar. She neither responded to him nor withdrew, presenting her small expressionless face to him (sightless in the gloom) like a pane of frosted glass. There was no excitement in her, only a profound and consuming world-weariness. Her hands were cold. He took them in his own, and a tremendous melancholy beset him. Was he to be left once more alone with himself? At once he took refuge in a comic drunkenness which he well knew how to simulate, and which would erect a scaffolding of words about reality, to disorder and distemper it. ‘Viens, viens!’ he cried sharply, reverting almost to the false jocularity he assumed with Darley, and now beginning to feel really rather drunk again. ‘Le maîtrevousinvite.’ Unsmiling, trustful as a lamb, she crossed the threshold into the room, looking about her. He groped for the bed-lamp. It did not work. He lit a candle which stood in a saucer on the night-table and turned to her with the dark shadows dancing in his nostrils and in the orbits of his eyes. They looked at one another while he conducted a furious mercenary patter to disguise his own unease. Then he stopped, for she was too tired to smile. Then, still unspeaking and unsmiling, she began to undress, item by item, dropping her clothes about her on the ragged carpet.

For a long moment he lay, simply exploring her slender body with its slanting ribs (structure of ferns) and the small, immature but firm breasts. Troubled by his silence, she sighed and said something inaudible. ‘Laissez. Laissez parler les doigts … comme ça’he whispered to silence her. He would have liked to say some simple and concrete word. In the silence he felt her beginning to struggle against the luxurious darkness and the growing powers of his lust, struggling to compartment her feelings, to keep them away from her proper life among the bare transactions of existence. ‘A separate compartment’ he thought; and ‘Is it marked Death?’ He was determined to exploit her weakness, the tenderness he felt ebbing and flowing in her veins, but his own moral strength ebbed now and guttered. He turned pale and lay with his bright feverish eyes turned to the shabby ceiling, seeing backwards into time. A clock struck coarsely somewhere, and the sound of the hours woke Melissa, driving away her lassitude, replacing it once more with anxiety, with a desire to be done, to be poured back into the sleep with which she struggled.

They played with each other, counterfeiting a desultory passion which mocked its own origins, could neither ignite nor extinguish itself. (You can lie with lips apart, legs apart, for numberless eternities, telling yourself it is something you have forgotten, it is on the tip of your tongue, the edge of your mind. For the life of you you cannot remember what it is, the name, the town, the day, the hour … the biological memory fails.) She gave a small sniff, as if she were crying, holding him in those pale, reflective fingers, tenderly as one might hold a fledgling fallen from the nest. Expressions of doubt and anxiety flitted across her face — as if she were herself guilty for the failure of the current, the broken communication. Then she groaned — and he knew that she was thinking of the money. Such a large sum! His improvidence could never be repeated by other men! And now her crude solicitude, her roughness began to make him angry.

‘Chéri.’ Their embraces were like the dry conjunction of waxworks, of figures modelled in gesso for some classical tomb. Her hands moved now charmlessly upon the barrel-vaulting of his ribs, his loins, his throat, his cheek; her fingers pressing here and there in darkness, finger of the blind seeking a secret panel in a wall, a forgotten switch which would slide back, illuminate another world, out of time. It was useless, it seemed. She gazed wildly around her. They lay under a nightmarish window full of sealight, against which a single curtain moved softly like a sail, reminding her of Darley’s bed. The room was full of the smell of stale joss, decomposing manuscripts, and the apples he ate while he worked. The sheets were dirty.

As usual, at a level far below the probings of self-disgust or humiliation, he was writing, swiftly and smoothly in his clear mind. He was covering sheet upon sheet of paper. For so many years now he had taken to writing out his life in his own mind — the living and the writing were simultaneous. He transferred the moment bodily to paper as it was lived, warm from the oven, naked and exposed….

‘Now’ she said angrily, determined not to lose the piastres which in her imagination she had already spent, already owed, ‘now I will make you La Veuve’ and he drew his breath in an exultant literary thrill to hear once more this wonderful slang expression stolen from the old nicknames of the French guillotine, with its fearful suggestion of teeth reflected in the concealed metaphor for the castration complex. La Veuve! The shark-infested seas of love which closed over the doomed sailor’s head in a voiceless paralysis of the dream, the deep-sea dream which dragged one slowly downwards, dismembered and dismembering … until with a vulgar snick the steel fell, the clumsy thinking head (‘use your loaf’) smacked dully into the basket to spurt and wriggle like a fish…. ‘Mon coeur’ he said hoarsely, ‘monange’; simply to taste the commonest of metaphors, hunting through them a tenderness lost, torn up, cast aside among the snows. ‘Monange.’A sea-widow into something rich and strange!

Suddenly she cried out in exasperation: ‘Ah God! But what is it? You do not want to?’ her voice ending almost in a wail. She took his soft rather womanish hand upon her knee and spread it out like a book, bending over it a despairing curious face. She moved the candle the better to study the lines, drawing up her thin legs. Her hair fell about her face. He touched the rosy light on her shoulder and said mockingly ‘You tell fortunes.’ But she did not look up. She answered shortly ‘Everyone in the city tells fortunes.’ They stayed like this, like a tableau, for a long moment. ‘The caput mortuum of a love-scene’ he thought to himself. Then Melissa sighed, as if with relief, and raised her head. ‘I see now’ she said quietly. ‘You are all closed in, your heart is closed in, completely so.’ She joined index finger to index finger, thumb to thumb in a gesture such as one might use to throttle a rabbit. Her eyes flashed with sympathy. ‘Your life is dead, closed up. Not like Darley’s. His is wide … very wide … open.’ She spread her arms out for a moment before dropping them to her knee once more. She added with the tremendous unconscious force of veracity: ‘He can still love.’ He felt as if he had been hit across the mouth. The candle flickered. ‘Look again’ he said angrily. ‘Tell me some more.’ But she completely missed the anger and the chagrin in his voice and bent once more to that enigmatic white hand. ‘Shall I tell you everything?’ she whispered, and for a minute his breath stopped. ‘Yes’ he said curtly. Melissa smiled a stranger, private smile.

‘I am not very good’ she said softly, ‘I’ll tell you only what I see.’ Then she turned her candid eyes to him and added: ‘I see death very close.’ Pursewarden smiled grimly. ‘Good’ he said. Melissa drew her hair back to her ear with a finger and bent to his hand once more. ‘Yes, very close. You will hear about it in a matter of hours. What rubbish!’ She gave a little laugh. And then, to his complete surprise she went on to describe his sister. ‘The blind one — not your wife.’ She closed her eyes and spread her repellent arms out before her like a sleep-walker. ‘Yes’ said Pursewarden, ‘that is her. That is my sister.’ ‘Your sister?’ Melissa was astounded. She dropped his hand. She had never in playing this game made an accurate prediction before. Pursewarden told her gravely: ‘She and I were lovers. We shall never be able to love other people.’ And now, with the recital begun he suddenly found it easy to tell the rest, to tell her everything. He was completely master of himself and she gazed at him with pity and tenderness. Was it easy because they spoke French? In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he had always qualified it as ‘an unsniggerable language’. Or was it simply that the fugitive sympathy of Melissa made these events easy to speak of? She herself did not judge, everything was known, had been experienced. She nodded gravely as he spoke of his love and his deliberate abandoning of it, of his attempt at marriage, of its failure.

Between pity and admiration they kissed, but passionately now, united by the ties of recorded human experience, by the sensation of having shared something. ‘I saw it in the hand’ she said, ‘in your hand.’ She was somewhat frightened by the unwonted accuracy of her own powers. And he? He had always wanted someone to whom he could speak freely — but it must be someone who could not fully understand! The candle flickered. On the mirror with shaving soap he had written the mocking verses for Justine which began:

Oh Dreadful is the check!

Intense the agony.

When the ear begins to hear

And the eye begins to see!

He repeated them softly to himself, in the privacy of his own mind, as he thought of the dark composed features which he had seen here, by candle-light — the dark body seated in precisely the pose which Melissa now adopted, watching him with her chin on her knee, holding his hand with sympathy. And as he went on in his quiet voice to speak of his sister, of his perpetual quest for satisfactions which might be better than those he could remember, and which he had deliberately abandoned, other verses floated through his mind; the chaotic commentaries thrown up by his reading no less than by his experiences. Even as he saw once again the white marble face with its curling black hair thrown back about the nape of a slender neck, the ear-points, chin cleft by a dimple — a face which led him back always to those huge empty eye-sockets — he heard his inner mind repeating:

Amors par force vos demeine!

Combien durra vostre folie?

Trop avez mene ceste vie.

He heard himself saying things which belonged elsewhere. With a bitter laugh, for example: ‘The Anglo-Saxons invented the word “fornication” because they could not believe in the variety of love.’ And Melissa, nodding so gravely and sympathetically, began to look more important — for here was a man at last confiding in her things she could not understand, treasures of that mysterious male world which oscillated always between sottish sentimentality and brutish violence! ‘In my country almost all the really delicious things you can do to a woman are criminal offences, grounds for divorce.’ She was frightened by his sharp, cracked laugh. Of a sudden he looked so ugly. Then he dropped his voice again and continued pressing her hand to his cheek softly, as one presses upon a bruise; and inside the inaudible commentary continued:

‘What meaneth Heaven by these diverse laws?

Eros, Agape — self-division’s cause?’

Locked up there in the enchanted castle, between the terrified kisses and intimacies which would never now be recovered, they had studied La Lioba! What madness! Would they ever dare to enter the lists against other lovers? Jurata fornicatio — those verses dribbling away in the mind; and her body, after Rudel, ‘gras, delgat et gen’. He sighed, brushing away the memories like a cobweb and saying to himself: ‘Later, in search of an askesis he followed the desert fathers to Alexandria, to a place between two deserts, between the two breasts of Melissa. O morosa delectatio. And he buried his face there among the dunes, covered by her quick hair.’

Then he was silent, staring at her with his clear eyes, his trembling lips closing for the first time about endearments which were now alight, now truly passionate. She shivered suddenly, aware that she would not escape him now, that she would have to submit to him fully.

‘Melissa’ he said triumphantly.

They enjoyed each other now, wisely and tenderly, like friends long sought for and found among the commonplace crowds which thronged the echoing city. And here was a Melissa he had planned to find—eyes closed, warm open breathing mouth, torn from sleep with a kiss by the rosy candle-light. ‘It is time to go.’ But she pressed nearer and nearer to his body, whimpering with weariness. He gazed down fondly at her as she lay in the crook of his arm. ‘And the rest of your prophecy?’ he said gaily. ‘Rubbish, all rubbish’ she answered sleepily. ‘I can sometimes learn a character from a hand — but the future! I am not so clever.’

The dawn was breaking behind the window. On a sudden impulse he went to the bathroom and turned on the bathwater. It flowed boiling hot, gushing into the bath with a swish of steam! How typical of the Mount Vulture Hotel, to have hot bathwater at such an hour and at no other. Excited as a schoolboy he called her. ‘Melissa, come and soak the weariness out of your bones or I’ll never get you back to your home.’ He thought of ways and means of delivering the five hundred pounds to Darley in such a way as to disguise the source of the gift. He must never know that it came from a rival’s epitaph on a dead Copt! ‘Melissa’ he called again, but she was asleep.

He picked her up bodily and carried her into the bathroom. Lying snugly in the warm bath, she woke up, uncurled from sleep like one of those marvellous Japanese paper-flowers which open in water. She paddled the warmth luxuriously over her shallow pectorals and glowed, her thighs beginning to turn pink. Pursewarden sat upon the bidet with one hand in the warm water and talked to her as she woke from sleep. ‘You mustn’t take too long’ he said, ‘or Darley will be angry.’

‘Darley! Bah! He was out with Justine again last night.’ She sat up and began to soap her breasts, breathing in the luxury of soap and water like someone tasting a rare wine. She pronounced her rival’s name with small cringing loathing that seemed out of character. Pursewarden was surprised. ‘Such people — the Hosnanis’ she said with contempt. ‘And poor Darley believes in them, in her. She is only using him. He is too good, too simple.’

‘Using him?’

She turned on the shower and revelling in the clouds of steam nodded a small pinched-up face at him. ‘I know all about them.’

‘What do you know?’

He felt inside himself the sudden stirring of a discomfort so pronounced that it had no name. She was about to overturn his world as one inadvertently knocks over an inkpot or a goldfish-bowl. Smiling a loving smile all the time. Standing there in the clouds of steam like an angel emerging from heaven in some seventeenth-century engraving.

‘What do you know?’ he repeated.

Melissa examined the cavities in her teeth with a handmirror, her body still wet and glistening. ‘I’ll tell you. I used to be the mistress of a very important man, Cohen, very important and very rich.’ There was something pathetic about such boasting. ‘He was working with Nessim Hosnani and told me things. He also talked in his sleep. He is dead now. I think he was poisoned because he knew so much. He was helping to take arms into the Middle East, into Palestine, for Nessim Hosnani. Great quantities. He used to say “Pour faire sauter les Anglais!”’ She ripped out the words vindictively, and all of a sudden, after a moment’s thought added: ‘He used to do this.’ It was grotesque, her imitation of Cohen bunching up his fingers to kiss them and then waving them in a gesture as he said ‘Tout à toi, John Bull!’ Her face crumpled and screwed up into an imitation of the dead man’s malice.

‘Dress now’ said Pursewarden in a small voice. He went into the other room and stood for a moment gazing distractedly at the wall above the bookshelf. It was as if the whole city had crashed down about his ears.

‘That is why I don’t like the Hosnanis’ cried Melissa from the bathroom in a new, brassy fishwife’s voice. ‘They secretly hate the British.’

‘Dress’ he called sharply, as if he were speaking to a horse. ‘And get a move on.’

Suddenly chastened she dried herself and tiptoed out of the bathroom saying ‘I am ready immediately.’ Pursewarden stood quite still staring at the wall with a fixed, dazed expression. He might have fallen there from some other planet. He was so still that his body might have been a statue cast in some heavy metal. Melissa shot small glances at him as she dressed. ‘What is it?’ she said. He did not answer. He was thinking furiously.

When she was dressed he took her arm and together they walked in silence down the staircase and into the street. The dawn was beginning to break. There were still street-lamps alight and they still cast shadows. She looked at his face from time to time, but it was expressionless. Punctually as they approached each light their shadows lengthened, grew narrower and more contorted, only to disappear into the half-light before renewing their shape. Pursewarden walked slowly, with a tired, deliberate trudge, still holding her arm. In each of these elongated capering shadows he saw now quite clearly the silhouette of the defeated Maskelyne.

At the corner by the square he stopped and with the same abstracted expression on his face said: ‘Tiens! I forgot. Here is the thousand I promised you.’

He kissed her upon the cheek and turned back towards the hotel without a word.

* * * * *

IX

Mountolive was away on an official tour of the cotton-ginning plants in the Delta when the news was phoned through to him by Telford. Between incredulity and shock, he could hardly believe his ears. Telford spoke self-importantly in the curious slushy voice which his ill-fitting dentures conferred upon him; death was a matter of some importance in his trade. But the death of an enemy! He had to work hard to keep his tone sombre, grave, sympathetic, to keep the self-congratulation out of it. He spoke like a county coroner. ‘I thought you’d like to know, sir, so I took the liberty of interrupting your visit. Nimrod Pasha phoned me in the middle of the night and I went along. The police had already sealed up the place for the Parquet inquiry; Dr Balthazar was there. I had a look around while he issued the certificate of death. I was allowed to bring away a lot of personal papers belonging to the … the deceased. Nothing of much interest. Manuscript of a novel. The whole business came as a complete surprise. He had been drinking very heavily — as usual, I’m afraid. Yes.’

‘But …’ said Mountolive feebly, the rage and incredulity mixing in his mind like oil and water. ‘What on earth….’ His legs felt weak. He drew up a chair and sat down at the telephone crying peevishly: ‘Yes, yes, Telford — go on. Tell me what you can.’

Telford cleared his throat, aware of the interest his news was creating, and tried to marshal the facts in his fuddled brain. ‘Well, sir, we have traced his movements. He came up here, very unshaven and haggard (Errol tells me) and asked for you. But you had just left. Your secretary says that he sat down at your desk and wrote something — it took him some time — which he said was to be delivered to you personally. He insisted on her franking it “Secret” and sealing it up with wax. It is in your safe now. Then he appears to have gone off on a … well, a binge. He spent all day at a tavern on the seashore near Montaza which he often visited. It’s just a shack down by the sea — a few timbers with a palm-leaf roof, run by a Greek. He spent the whole day there writing and drinking. He drank quite a lot of zibib according to the proprietor. He had a table set right down by the sea-shore in the sand. It was windy and the man suggested he would be better off in the shelter. But no. He sat there by the sea. In the late afternoon he ate a sandwich and took a tram back to town. He called on me.’

‘Good: well.’

Telford hesitated and gasped. ‘He came to the office. I must say that although unshaven he seemed in very good spirits. He made a few jokes. But he asked me for a cyanide tablet — you know the kind. I won’t say any more. This line isn’t really secure. You will understand, sir.’

‘Yes, yes’ cried Mountolive. ‘Go on, man.’

Reassured Telford continued breathlessly: ‘He said he wanted to poison a sick dog. It seemed reasonable enough, so I gave him one. That is probably what he used according to Dr Balthazar. I hope you don’t feel, sir, that I was in any way….’

Mountolive felt nothing except a mounting indignation that anyone in his mission should confer such annoyance by a public act so flagrant! No, this was silly. ‘It is stupid’ he whispered to himself. But he could not help feeling that Pursewarden had been guilty of something. Damn it, it was inconsiderate and underbred — as well as being mysterious. Kenilworth’s face floated before him for a moment. He joggled the receiver to get a clear contact, and shouted: ‘But what does it all mean?’

‘I don’t know’ said Telford, helplessly. ‘It’s rather mysterious.’

A pale Mountolive turned and made some muttered apologies to the little group of pashas who stood about the telephone in that dreary outhouse. Immediately they spread self-deprecating hands like a flock of doves taking flight. There was no inconvenience. An Ambassador was expected to be entrained in great events. They could wait.

‘Telford’ said Mountolive, sharply and angrily.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me what else you know.’

Telford cleared his throat and went on in his slushy voice:

‘Well, there isn’t anything of exceptional importance from my point of view. The last person to see him alive was that man Darley, the schoolteacher. You probably don’t know him, sir. Well, he met him on the way back to the hotel. He invited Darley in for a drink and they stayed talking for some considerable time and drinking gin. In the hotel. The deceased said nothing of any special interest — and certainly nothing to suggest that he was planning to take his own life. On the contrary, he said he was going to take the night train to Gaza for a holiday. He showed Darley the proofs of his latest novel, all wrapped up and addressed, and a mackintosh full of things he might need for the journey — pyjamas, toothpaste. What made him change his mind? I don’t know, sir, but the answer may be in your safe. That is why I rang you.’

‘I see’ said Mountolive. It was strange, but already he was beginning to get used to the idea of Pursewarden’s disappearance from the scene. The shock was abating, diminishing: only the mystery remained. Telford still spluttered on the line. ‘Yes’ he said, recovering mastery of himself. ‘Yes.’

It was only a matter of moments before Mountolive recovered his demure official pose and reoriented himself to take a benign interest in the mills and their thumping machinery. He worked hard not to seem too abstracted and to seem suitably impressed by what was shown to him. He tried too to analyse the absurdity of his anger against Pursewarden having committed an act which seemed … a gross solecism! How absurd. Yet, as an act, it was somehow typical because so inconsiderate: perhaps he should have anticipated it? Profound depression alternated with his feelings of anger.

He motored back in haste, full of an urgent expectancy, an unease. It was almost as if he were going to take Pursewarden to task, demand an explanation of him, administer a Well-earned reproof. He arrived to find that the Chancery was just closing, though the industrious Errol was still busy upon State papers in his office. Everyone down to the cipher clerks seemed to be afflicted by the air of gravid depression which sudden death always confers upon the uncomfortably living. He deliberately forced himself to walk slowly, talk slowly, not to hurry. Haste, like emotion, was always deplorable because it suggested that impulse or feeling was master where only reason should rule. His secretary had already left but he obtained the keys to his safe from Archives and sedately walked up the two short flights to his office. Heartbeats are mercifully inaudible to anyone but oneself.

The dead man’s ‘effects’ (the poetry of causality could not be better expressed than by the word) were stacked on his desk, looking curiously disembodied. A bundle of papers and manuscript, a parcel addressed to a publisher, a mackintosh and various odds and ends conscripted by the painstaking Telford in the interests of truth (though they had little beauty for Mountolive). He got a tremendous start when he saw Pursewarden’s bloodless features staring up at him from his blotter — a death-mask in plaster of Paris with a note from Balthazar saying ‘I took the liberty of making an impression of the face after death. I trust this will seem sensible.’ Pursewarden’s face! From some angles death can look like a fit of the sulks. Mountolive touched the effigy with reluctance, superstitiously, moving it this way and that. His flesh crept with a small sense of loathing; he realized suddenly that he was afraid of death.

Then to the safe with its envelope whose clumsy seals he cracked with a trembling thumb as he sat at his desk. Here at least he should find some sort of rational exegesis for this gross default of good manners! He drew a deep breath.

My dear David,

I have torn up half a dozen other attempts to explain this in detail. I found I was only making literature. There is quite enough about. My decision has to do with life. Paradox! I am terribly sorry, old man.

Quite by accident, in an unexpected quarter, I stumbled upon something which told me that Maskelyne’s theories about Nessim were right, mine wrong. I do not give you my sources, and will not. But I now realize Nessim is smuggling arms into Palestine and has been for some time. He is obviously the unknown source, deeply implicated in the operations which were described in Paper Seven — you will remember. (Secret Mandate File 341. Intelligence.)

But I simply am not equal to facing the simpler moral implications raised by this discovery. I know what has to be done about it. But the man happens to be my friend. Therefore … a quietus. (This will solve other deeper problems too.) Ach! what a boring world we have created around us. The slime of plot and counterplot. I have just recognized that it is not my world at all. (I can hear you swearing as you read.)

I feel in a way a cad to shelve my own responsibilities like this, and yet, in truth, I know that they are not really mine, never have been mine. But they are yours! And jolly bitter you will find them. But … you are of the career … and you must act where I cannot bring myself to!

I know I am wanting in a sense of duty, but I have let Nessim know obliquely that his game has been spotted and the information passed on. Of course, in this vague form you could also be right in suppressing it altogether, forgetting it. I don’t envy you your temptations. Mine, however, not to reason why. I’m tired, my dear chap; sick unto death, as the living say.

And so …

Will you give my sister my love and say that my thoughts were with her? Thank you.

Affectionately yours,

L. P.

Mountolive was aghast. He felt himself turning pale as he read. Then he sat for a long time staring at the expression on the face of the death-mask — the characteristic air of solitary impertinence which Pursewarden’s profile always wore in repose; and still obstinately struggling with the absurd sense of diplomatic outrage which played about his mind, flickering like stabs of sheet-lightning.

‘It is folly!’ he cried aloud with vexation, as he banged the desk with the flat of his hand. ‘Utter folly! Nobody kills himself for an official reason!’ He cursed the stupidity of the words as he uttered them. For the first time complete confusion overtook his mind.

In order to calm it he forced himself to read Telford’s typed report slowly and carefully, spelling out the words to himself with moving lips, as if it were an exercise. It was an account of Pursewarden’s movements during the twenty-four hours before his death with depositions by the various people who had seen him. Some of the reports were interesting, notably that of Balthazar who had seen him during the morning in the Café Al Aktar where Pursewarden was drinking arak and eating a croissant. He had apparently received a letter from his sister that morning and was reading it with an air of grave preoccupation. He put it in his pocket abruptly when Balthazar arrived. He was extremely unshaven and haggard. There seemed little enough of interest in the conversation which ensued save for one remark (probably a jest?) which stayed in Balthazar’s memory. Pursewarden had been dancing with Melissa the evening before and said something about her being a desirable person to marry. (‘This must have been a joke’ added Balthazar.) He also said that he had started another book ‘all about Love’. Mountolive sighed as he slowly ran his eye down the typed page. Love! Then came an odd thing. He had bought a printed Will form and filled it in, making his sister his literary executor, and bequeathing five hundred pounds to the schoolteacher Darley and his mistress. This, for some reason, he had antedated by a couple of months — perhaps he forgot the date? He had asked two cipher clerks to witness it.

The letter from his sister was there also, but Telford had tactfully put it into a separate envelope and sealed it. Mountolive read it, shaking his bewildered head, and then thrust it into his pocket shamefacedly. He licked his lips and frowned heavily at the wall. Liza!

Errol put his head timidly round the door and was shocked to surprise tears upon the cheek of his Chief. He ducked back tactfully and retreated hastily to his office, deeply shaken by a sense of diplomatic inappropriateness somewhat similar to the feelings which Mountolive himself had encountered when Telford telephoned him. Errol sat at his desk with attentive nervousness thinking: ‘A good diplomat should never show feeling.’ Then he lit a cigarette with sombre deliberation. For the first time he realized that his Ambassador had feet of clay. This increased his sense of self-respect somewhat. Mountolive was, after all, only a man…. Nevertheless, the experience had been disorienting.

Upstairs Mountolive too had lighted a cigarette in order to calm his nerves. The accent of his apprehension was slowly transferring itself from the bare act of Pursewarden (this inconvenient plunge into anonymity) — was transferring itself to the central meaning of the act — to the tidings it brought with it. Nessim! And here he felt his own soul shrink and contract and a deeper, more inarticulate anger beset him. He had trusted Nessim! (‘Why?’ said the inner voice. ‘There was no need to do so.’) And then, by this wicked somersault, Pursewarden had, in effect, transferred the whole weight of the moral problem to Mountolive’s own shoulders. He had started up the hornets’ nest: the old conflict between duty, reason and personal affection which every political man knows is his cross, the central weakness of his life! What a swine, he thought (almost admiringly), Pursewarden had been to transfer it all so easily — the enticing ease of such a decision: withdrawal! He added sadly: ‘I trusted Nessim because of Leila!’ Vexation upon vexation. He smoked and stared now, seeing in the dead white plaster face (which the loving hands of Clea had printed from Balthazar’s clumsy negative) the warm living face of Leila’s son: the dark abstract features from a Ravenna fresco! The face of his friend. And then, his very thoughts uttered themselves in whispers: ‘Perhaps after all Leila is at the bottom of everything.’

(‘Diplomats have no real friends’ Grishkin had said bitterly, trying to wound him, to rouse him. ‘They use everyone.’ He had used, she was implying, her body and her beauty: and now that she was pregnant….)

He exhaled slowly and deeply, invigorated by the nicotine-laden oxygen which gave his nerves time to settle, his brain time to clear. As the mist lifted he discerned something like a new landscape opening before him; for here was something which could not help but alter all the dispositions of chance and friendship, alter every date on the affectionate calendar his mind had compiled about his stay in Egypt: the tennis and swimming and riding. Even these simple motions of joining with the ordinary world of social habit and pleasure, of relieving the taedium vitae of his isolation, were all infected by the new knowledge. Moreover, what was to be done with the information which Pursewarden had so unceremoniously thrust into his lap? It must be of course reported. Here he was able to pause. Must it be reported? The data in the letter lacked any shred of supporting evidence — except perhaps the overwhelming evidence of a death which…. He lit a cigarette and whispered the words: ‘While the balance of his mind was disturbed.’ That at least was worth a grim smile! After all, the suicide of a political officer was not such an uncommon event; there had been that youth Greaves, in love with a cabaret-girl in Russia…. Somehow he still felt aggrieved at so malicious a betrayal of his friendship for the writer.

Very well. Suppose he simply burnt the letter, disposing with the weight of moral onus it bore? It could be done quite simply, in his own grate, with the aid of a safety-match. He could continue to behave as if no such revelation had ever been made — except for the fact that Nessim knew it had! No, he was trapped.

And here his sense of duty, like ill-fitting shoes, began to pinch him at every step. He thought of Justine and Nessim dancing together, silently, blindly, their dark faces turned away from each other, eyes half-closed. They had attained a new dimension in his view of them already — the unsentimental projection of figures in a primitive fresco. Presumably they also struggled with a sense of duty and responsibility — to whom? ‘To themselves, perhaps’ he whispered sadly, shaking his head. He would never be able to meet Nessim eye to eye again.

It suddenly dawned on him. Up to now their personal relationship had been forced from any prejudicial cast by Nessim’s tact — and Pursewarden’s existence. The writer, in supplying the official link, had freed them in the personal lives. Never had the two men been forced to discuss anything remotely connected with official matters. Now they could not meet upon this happy ground. In this context too Pursewarden had traduced his freedom. As for Leila, perhaps here lay the key to her enigmatic silence, her inability to meet him face to face.

Sighing, he rang for Errol. ‘You’d better glance at this’ he said. His Head of Chancery sat himself down and began to read the document greedily. He nodded slowly from time to time. Mountolive cleared his throat: ‘It seems pretty incoherent to me’ he said, despising himself for so trying to cast a doubt upon the clear words, to influence Errol in a judgement which, in his own secret mind, he had already made. Errol read it twice slowly, and handed it back across the desk. ‘It seems pretty extraordinary’ he said tentatively, respectfully. It was not his place to offer evaluations of the message. They must by rights come from his Chief. ‘It all seems a bit out of proportion’ he added helpfully, feeling his way.

Mountolive said sombrely: ‘I’m afraid it is typical of Pursewarden. It makes me sorry that I never took up your original recommendations about him. I was wrong, it seems, and you were right about his suitability.’

Errol’s eye glinted with modest triumph. He said nothing, however, as he stared at Mountolive. ‘Of course,’ said the latter, ‘as you well know, Hosnani has been suspect for some time.’

‘I know, sir.’

‘But there is no evidence here to support what he says.’ He tapped the letter irritably twice. Errol sat back and breathed through his nose. ‘I don’t know’ he said vaguely. ‘It sounds pretty conclusive to me.’

‘I don’t think’ said Mountolive ‘it would support a paper. Of course we’ll report it to London as it stands. But I’m inclined not to give it to the Parquet to help them with their inquest. What do you say?’

Errol cradled his knees. A slow smile of cunning crept around his mouth. ‘It might be the best way of getting it to the Egyptians’ he said softly, ‘and they might choose to act on it. Of course, it would obviate the diplomatic pressure we might have to bring if … later on, the whole thing came out in a more concrete form. I know Hosnani was a friend of yours, sir.’

Mountolive felt himself colouring slightly. ‘In matters of business, a diplomat has no friends’ he said stiffly, feeling that he spoke in the very accents of Pontius Pilate.

‘Quite, sir.’ Errol gazed at him admiringly.

‘Once Hosnani’s guilt is established we shall have to act. But without supporting evidence we should find ourselves in a weak position. With Memlik Pasha — you know he isn’t very pro-British … I’m thinking….’

‘Yes, sir?’

Mountolive waited, drinking the air like a wild animal, scenting that Errol was beginning to approve his judgement. They sat silently in the dusk for a while, thinking. Then, with a histrionic snap, the Ambassador switched on the desk-light and said decisively: ‘If you agree, we’ll keep this out of Egyptian hands until we are better documented. London must have it. Classified of course. But not private persons, even next-of-kin. By the way, are you capable of undertaking the next-of-kin correspondence? I leave it to you to make up something.’ He felt a pang as he saw Liza Pursewarden’s face rise up before him.

‘Yes. I have his file here. There is only a sister at the Imperial Institute for the Blind, I think, apart from his wife.’ Errol fussily consulted a green folder, but Mountolive said ‘Yes, yes. I know her.’ Errol stood up.

Mountolive added: ‘And I think in all fairness we should copy to Maskelyne in Jerusalem, don’t you?’

‘Most certainly, sir.’

‘And for the moment keep our own counsel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Thank you very much’ said Mountolive with unusual warmth. He felt all of a sudden very old and frail. Indeed he felt so weak that he doubted if his limbs could carry him downstairs to the Residence. ‘That is all at present.’ Errol took his leave, closing the door behind him with the gravity of a mute.

Mountolive telephoned to the buttery and ordered himself a glass of beef-tea and biscuits. He ate and drank ravenously, staring the while at the white mask and the manuscript of a novel. He felt both a deep disgust and a sense of enormous bereavement — he could not tell which lay uppermost. Unwittingly, too, Pursewarden had, he reflected, separated him forever from Leila. Yes, that also, and perhaps forever.

That night, however, he made his witty prepared speech (written by Errol) to the Alexandrian Chamber of Commerce, delighting the assembled bankers by his fluent French. The clapping swelled and expanded in the august banquet room of the Mohammed Ali Club. Nessim, seated at the opposite end of the long table, undertook the response with gravity and a calm address. Once or twice during the dinner Mountolive felt the dark eyes of his friend seeking his own, interrogating them, but he evaded them. A chasm now yawned between them which neither would know how to bridge. After dinner, he met Nessim briefly in the hall as he was putting on his coat. He suddenly felt the almost irresistible desire to refer to Pursewarden’s death. The subject obtruded itself so starkly, stuck up jaggedly into the air between them. It shamed him as a physical deformity might; as if his handsome smile were disfigured by a missing front tooth. He said nothing and neither did Nessim. Nothing of what was going on beneath the surface showed in the elastic and capable manner of the two tall men who stood smoking by the front door, waiting for the car to arrive. But a new watchful, obdurate knowledge had been born between them. How strange that a few words scribbled on a piece of paper should make them enemies!

Then leaning back in his beflagged car, drawing softly on an excellent cigar, Mountolive felt his innermost soul become as dusty, as airless as an Egyptian tomb. It was strange too that side by side with these deeper preoccupations the shallower should coexist; he was delighted by the extent of his success in captivating the bankers! He had been undeniably brilliant. Discreetly circulated copies of his speech would, he knew, be printed verbatim in tomorrow’s papers, illustrated by new photographs of himself. The Corps would be envious as usual. Why had nobody thought of making a public statement about the Gold Standard in this oblique fashion? He tried to keep his mind effervescent, solidly anchored to this level of self-congratulation, but it was useless. The Embassy would soon be moving back to its winter quarters. He had not seen Leila. Would he ever see her again?

Somewhere inside himself a barrier had collapsed, a dam had been broached. He had engaged upon a new conflict with himself which gave a new tautness to his features, a new purposeful rhythm to his walk.

That night he was visited by an excruciating attack of the ear-ache with which he always celebrated his return home. This was the first time he had ever been attacked while he was outside the stockade of his mother’s security, and the attack alarmed him. He tried ineffectually to doctor himself with the homely specific she always used, but he heated the salad oil too much by mistake and burnt himself severely in the process. He spent three restless days in bed after this incident, reading detective stories and pausing for long moments to stare at the whitewashed wall. It at least obviated his attendance at Pursewarden’s cremation — he would have been sure to meet Nessim there. Among the many messages and presents which began to flow in when the news of his indisposition became known, was a splendid bunch of flowers from Nessim and Justine, wishing him a speedy recovery. As Alexandrians and friends, they could hardly do less!

He pondered deeply upon them during those long sleepless days and nights and for the first time he saw them, in the light of this new knowledge, as enigmas. They were puzzles now, and even their private moral relationship haunted him with a sense of something he had never properly understood, never clearly evaluated. Somehow his friendship for them had prevented him from thinking of them as people who might, like himself, be living on several different levels at once. As conspirators, as lovers — what was the key to the enigma? He could not guess.

But perhaps the clues that he sought lay further back in the past — further than either he or Pursewarden could see from a vantage-point in the present time.

There were many facts about Justine and Nessim which had not come to his knowledge — some of them critical for an understanding of their case. But in order to include them it is necessary once more to retrace our steps briefly to the period immediately before their marriage.

* * * * *

X

The blue Alexandrian dusk was not yet fully upon them. “But do you … how shall one say it? … Do you really care for her, Nessim? I know of course how you have been haunting her; and she knows what is in your mind.’

Clea’s golden head against the window remained steady, her gaze was fixed upon the chalk drawing she was doing. It was nearly finished; a few more of those swift, flowing strokes and she could release her subject. Nessim had put on a striped pullover to model for her. He lay upon her uncomfortable little sofa holding a guitar which he could not play, and frowning. ‘How do you spell love in Alexandria?’ he said at last, softly. ‘That is the question. Sleeplessness, loneliness, bonheur, chagrin — I do not want to harm or annoy her, Clea. But I feel that somehow, somewhere, she must need me as I need her. Speak, Clea.’ He knew he was lying. Clea did not.

She shook her head doubtfully, still with her attention on the paper, and then shrugged her shoulders. ‘Loving you both as I do, who could wish for anything better? And I have spoken to her, as you asked me, tried to provoke her, probe her. It seems hopeless.’ Was this strictly true, she asked herself? She had too great a tendency to believe what people said.

‘False pride?’ he said sharply.

‘She laughs hopelessly and’ Clea imitated a gesture of hopelessness ‘like that! I think she feels that she has had all the clothes stripped off her back in the street by that book Moeurs. She thinks herself no longer able to bring anyone peace of mind! Or so she says.’

‘Who asks for that?’

‘She thinks you would. Then of course, there is your social position. And then she is, after all, a Jew. Put yourself in her place.’ Clea was silent for a moment. Then she added in the same abstract tone: ‘If she needs you at all it is to use your fortune to help her search for the child. And she is too proud to do that. But … you have read Moeurs. Why repeat myself?’

‘I have never read Moeurs’ he said hotly, ‘and she knows that I never will. I have told her that. Oh, Clea dear!’ He sighed. This was another lie.

Clea paused, smiling, to consider his dark face. Then she continued, rubbing at the corner of the drawing with her thumb as she said: ‘Chevalier sans peur, etc. That is like you, Nessim. But is it wise to idealize us women so? You are a bit of a baby still, for an Alexandrian.’

‘I don’t idealize; I know exactly how sad, mad or bad she is. Who does not? Her past and her present … they are known to everyone. It is just that I feel she would match perfectly my own….’

‘Your own what?’

‘Aridity’ he said surprisingly, rolling over, smiling and frowning at the same time. ‘Yes, I sometimes think I shall never be able to fall in love properly until after my mother dies — and she is still comparatively young. Speak, Clea!’

The blonde head shook slowly. Clea took a puff from the cigarette burning in the ashtray beside the easel and bent once more to the work in hand. ‘Well’ said Nessim, ‘I shall see her myself this evening and make a serious attempt to make her understand.’

‘You do not say “make her love”!’

‘How could I?’

‘If she cannot love, it would be dishonourable to pretend.’

‘I do not know whether I can yet either; we are both âmes veuves in a queer way, don’t you see?’

‘Oh, la, la!’ said Clea, doubtfully but still smiling.

‘Love may be for a time incognito with us’ he said, frowning at the wall and setting his face. ‘But it is there. I must try to make her see.’ He bit his lip. ‘Do I really present such an enigma?’ He really meant ‘Do I succeed in deluding you?’

‘Now you’ve moved’ she said reproachfully; and then after a moment went on quietly: ‘Yes. It is an enigma. Your passion sounds so voulue. A besoin d’aimer without a besoin d’être aimé? Damn!’ He had moved again. She stopped in vexation and was about to reprove him when she caught sight of the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s time to go’ she said. ‘You must not keep her waiting.’

‘Good’ he said sharply, and rising, stripped off the pullover and donned his own well-cut coat, groping in the pocket for the keys of the car as he turned. Then, remembering, he brushed his dark hair back swiftly, impatiently, in the mirror, trying suddenly to imagine how he must look to Justine. ‘I wish I could say exactly what I mean. Do you not believe in love-contracts for those whose souls aren’t yet up to loving? A tendresse against an amour-passion, Clea? If she had parents I would have bought her from them unhesitatingly. If she had been thirteen she would have had nothing to say or feel, eh?’

‘Thirteen!’ said Clea in disgust; she shuddered and pulled his coat down at the back for him. ‘Perhaps’ he went on ironically, ‘unhappiness is a diktat for me…. What do you think?’

‘But then you would believe in passion. You don’t.’

‘I do … but….’

He gave his charming smile and made a tender hopeless gesture in the air, part resignation, part anger. ‘Ah, you are no use’ he said. ‘We are all waiting for an education of sorts.’

‘Go’ said Clea, ‘I’m sick of the subject. Kiss me first.’

The two friends embraced and she whispered: ‘Good luck’ while Nessim said between his teeth ‘I must stop this childish interrogation of you. It is absurd. I must do something decisive about her myself.’ He banged a doubled fist into the palm of his hand, and she was surprised at such unusual vehemence in one so reserved. ‘Well’ she said, with surprise opening her blue eyes, ‘this is new!’ They both laughed.

He pressed her elbow and turning ran lightly down the darkening staircase to the street. The great car responded to his feather-deftness of touch on the controls; it bounded crying its klaxon-warnings, down Saad Zaghloul and across the tramlines to roll down the slope towards the sea. He was talking to himself softly and rapidly in Arabic. In the gaunt lounge of the Cecil Hotel she would perhaps be waiting, gloved hands folded on her handbag, staring out through the windows upon which the sea crawled and sprawled, climbing and subsiding, across the screen of palms in the little municipal square which flapped and creaked like loose sails.

As he turned the corner, a procession was setting out raggedly for the upper town, its brilliant banners pelted now by a small rain mixed with spray from the harbour; everything flapped confusedly. Chanting and the noise of triangles sounded tentatively on the air. With an expression of annoyance he abandoned the car, locked it, and looked anxiously at his watch, ran the last hundred yards to the circular glass doors which would admit him upon the mouldering silence of the great lounge. He entered breathless but very much aware of himself. This siege of Justine had been going on for months now. How would it end — with victory or defeat?

He remembered Clea saying: ‘Such creatures are not human beings at all, I think. If they live, it is only inasmuch as they represent themselves in human form. But then, anyone possessed by a single ruling passion presents the same picture. For most of us, life is a hobby. But she seems like a tense and exhaustive pictorial representation of nature at its most superficial, its most powerful. She is possessed — and the possessed can neither learn nor be taught. It doesn’t make her less lovely for all that it is death-propelled; but my dear Nessim — from what angle are you to accept her?’

He did not as yet know; they were sparring still, talking in different languages. This might go on forever, he thought despairingly.

They had met more than once, formally, almost like business partners to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger. But this is the way of the city.

With a gesture which he himself thought of as characteristic he had offered her a large sum of money saying: ‘Lest an inequality of fortune may make your decision difficult, I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person — simply as a woman, Justine. This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone’s thoughts in the city, poisoning everything! Let us be free of it before deciding anything.’

But this had not answered; or rather had provoked only the insulting, uncomprehending question: ‘Is it that you really want to sleep with me? You may. Oh, I would do anything for you, Nessim.’ This disgusted and angered him. He had lost himself. There seemed no way forward along this line. Then suddenly, after a long moment of thought, he saw the truth like a flashing light. He whispered to himself with surprise: ‘But that is why I am not understood; I am not being really honest.’ He recognized that though he might have initially been swayed by his passion, he could think of no way to stake a claim on her attention, except, first, by the gift of money (ostensibly to ‘free’ her but in fact only to try and bind her to him) — and then, as his desperation increased, he realized that there was nothing to be done except to place himself entirely at her mercy. In one sense it was madness — but he could think of no other way to create in her the sense of obligation on which every other tie could be built. In this way a child may sometimes endanger itself in order to canvass a mother’s love and attention which it feels is denied to it.

‘Look’ he said in a new voice, full of new vibrations, and now he had turned very pale. ‘I want to be frank. I have no interest in real life.’ His lips trembled with his voice. ‘I am visualizing a relationship far closer in a way than anything passion could invent — a bond of a common belief.’ She wondered for a moment whether he had some strange new religion, whether this was what was meant. She waited with interest, amused yet disturbed to see how deeply moved he was. ‘I wish to make you a confidence now which, if betrayed, might mean irreparable harm to myself and my family; and indeed to the cause I am serving. I wish to put myself utterly in your power. Let us suppose we are both dead to love … I want to ask you to become part of a dangerous….’

The strange thing was that as he began to talk thus, about what was nearest to his thoughts, she began to care, to really notice him as a man for the first time. For the first time he struck a responsive chord in her by a confession which was paradoxically very far from a confession of the heart. To her surprise, to her chagrin and to her delight, she realized that she was not being asked merely to share his bed — but his whole life, the monomania upon which it was built. Normally, it is only the artist who can offer this strange and selfless contract — but it is one which no woman worth the name can ever refuse. He was asking, not for her hand in marriage (here his lies had created the misunderstanding) but for her partnership in allegiance to his ruling daimon. It was in the strictest sense, the only meaning he could put upon the word ‘love’. Slowly and quietly he began, passionately collecting his senses now that he had decided to tell her, marshalling his words, husbanding them. ‘You know, we all know, that our days are numbered since the French and the British have lost control in the Middle East. We, the foreign communities, with all we have built up, are being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide, the Moslem tide. Some of us are trying to work against it; Armenians, Copts, Jews, and Greeks here in Egypt, while others elsewhere are organizing themselves. Much of this work I have undertaken here…. To defend ourselves, that is all, defend our lives, defend the right to belong here only. You know this, everyone knows it. But to those who see a little further into history….’

Here he smiled crookedly — an ugly smile with a trace of complacency in it. ‘Those who see further know this to be but a shadow-play; we will never maintain our place in this world except it be by virtue of a nation strong and civilized enough to dominate the whole area. The day of France and England is over — much as we love them. Who, then, can take their place?’ He drew a deep breath and paused, then he squeezed his hands together between his knees, as if he were squeezing out the unuttered thought, slowly, luxuriously from a sponge.

He went on in a whisker: ‘There is only one nation which can determine the future of everything in the Middle East. Everything — and by a paradox, even the standard of living of the miserable Moslems themselves depends upon it, its power and resources. Have you understood me, Justine? Must I utter its name? Perhaps you are not interested in these things?’ He gave her a glittering smile. Their eyes met. They sat staring at each other in the way that only those who are passionately in love can stare. He had never seen her so pale, so alert, with all her intelligence suddenly mobilized in her looks. ‘Must I say it?’ he said, more sharply; and suddenly expelling her breath in a long sigh she shook her head and whispered the single word.

‘Palestine.’

There was a long silence during which he looked at her with a triumphant exultation. ‘I was not wrong’ he said at last, and she suddenly knew what he meant: that his long-formulated judgement of her had not been at fault. ‘Yes, Justine, Palestine. If only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease. It is the only hope for us … the dispossessed foreigners.’ He uttered the word with a slight twist of bitterness. They both slowly lit cigarettes now with shaking fingers and blew the smoke out towards each other, enwrapped by a new atmosphere of peace, of understanding. ‘The whole of our fortune has gone into the struggle which is about to break out there’ he said under his breath. ‘On that depends everything. Here, of course, we are doing other things which I will explain to you. The British and French help us, they see no harm. I am sorry for them. Their condition is pitiable because they have no longer the will to fight or even to think.’ His contempt was ferocious, yet full of controlled pity. ‘But with the Jews — there is something young there: the cockpit of Europe in these rotten marshes of a dying race.’ He paused and suddenly said in a sharp, twanging tone: ‘Justine.’ Slowly and thoughtfully, at the same moment they put out their hands to each other. Their cold fingers locked and squeezed hard. On the faces of both there was expressed an exultant determination of purpose, almost of terror!

His image had suddenly been metamorphosed. It was now lit with a new, a rather terrifying grandeur. As she smoked and watched him, she saw someone different in his place — an adventurer, a corsair, dealing with the lives and deaths of men; his power too, the power of his money, gave a sort of tragic backcloth to the design. She realized now that he was not seeing her — the Justine thrown back by polished mirrors, or engraved in expensive clothes and fards — but something even closer than the chamber-mate of a passional life.

This was a Faustian compact he was offering her. There was something more surprising: for the first time she felt desire stir within her, in the loins of that discarded, pre-empted body which she regarded only as a pleasure-seeker, a mirror-reference to reality. There came over her an unexpected lust to sleep with him — no, with his plans, his dreams, his obsessions, his money, his death! It was as if she had only now understood the nature of the love he was offering her; it was his all, his only treasure, this pitiable political design so long and so tormentingly matured in his heart that it had forced out every other impulse or wish. She felt suddenly as if her feelings had become caught up in some great cobweb, imprisoned by laws which lay beneath the level of her conscious will, her desires, the self-destructive flux and reflux of her human personality. Their fingers were still locked, like a chord in music, drawing nourishment from the strength transmitted by their bodies. Just to hear him say: ‘Now my life is in your keeping’ set her brain on fire, and her heart began to beat heavily in her breast. ‘I must go now’ she said, with a new terror — one that she had never experienced before — ‘I really must go.’ She felt unsteady and faint, touched as she was by the coaxings of a power stronger than any physical attraction could be. ‘Thank God’ he said under his breath, and again ‘Oh Thank God.’ Everything was decided at last.

But his own relief was mixed with terror. How had he managed at last to turn the key in the lock? By sacrificing to the truth, by putting himself at her mercy. His unwisdom had been the only course left open. He had been forced to take it. Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions — however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. In this response to a common field of action, Justine was truer to herself than she had ever been, responding as a flower responds to light. And it was now, while they talked quietly and coldly, their heads bent towards each other like flowers, that she could at last say, magnificently: ‘Ah, Nessim, I never suspected that I should agree. How did you know that I only exist for those who believe in me?’

He stared at her, thrilled and a little terrified, recognizing in her the perfect submissiveness of the oriental spirit — the absolute feminine submissiveness which is one of the strongest forces in the world.

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

‘Nothing. You must start living.’ The paradoxes of true love are endless. She felt as if she had received a smack across the face. She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate. She drank it with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain.

It was some hours later, when he was sitting at his desk, that Nessim, after a long moment of thought, picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria’s number. ‘Da Capo’ he said quietly, ‘you remember my plans for marrying Justine? All is well. We have a new ally. I want you to be the first to announce it to the committee. I think now they will show no more reservation about my not being a Jew — since I am to be married to one. What do you say?’ He listened with impatience to the ironical congratulations of his friend. ‘It is impertinent’ he said at last, coldly ‘to imagine that I am not motivated by feelings as well as by designs. As an old friend I must warn you not to take that tone with me. My private life, my private feelings, are my own. If they happen to square with other considerations, so much the better. But do not do me the injustice of thinking me without honour. I love her.’ He felt quite sick as he said the words: sick with a sudden self-loathing, Yet the word was utterly exact — love.

Now he replaced the receiver slowly, as if it weighed a ton, and sat staring at his own reflection in the polished desk. He was telling himself: ‘It is all that I am not as a man which she thinks she can love. Had I no such plans to offer her, I might have pleaded with her for a century. What is the meaning of this little four-letter word we shake out of our minds like poker-dice — love?’ His self-contempt almost choked him.

That night she arrived unexpectedly at the great house just as the clocks were chiming eleven. He was still up and dressed and sitting by the fire, sorting his papers. ‘You did not telephone?’ he cried with delight, with surprise. ‘How wonderful!’ She stood in grave silence at the door until the servant who had showed her in retired. Then she took a step forward letting her fur cape slide from her shoulders. They embraced passionately, silently. Then, turning her regard upon him in the firelight, that look at once terrified and exultant, she said: ‘Now at last I know you, Nessim Hosnani.’ Love is every sort of conspiracy. The power of riches and intrigue stirred within her now, the deputies of passion. Her face wore the brilliant look of innocence which comes only with conversion to a religious way of life! ‘I have come for your directions, for further instructions’ she said. Nessim was transfigured. He ran upstairs to his little safe and brought down the great folders of correspondence — as if to show that he was honest, that his words could be verified there and then, on the spot. He was now revealing to her something which neither his mother nor his brother knew — the extent of his complicity in the Palestine conspiracy. They crouched down before the fire talking until nearly dawn.

‘You will see from all this my immediate worries. You can deal with them. First the doubts and hesitations of the Jewish Committee. I want you to talk to them. They think that there is something questionable about a Copt supporting them while the local Jews are staying clear, afraid of losing their good name with the Egyptians. We must convince them, Justine. It will take a little while at least to complete the arms build-up. Then, all this must be kept from our well-wishers here, the British and the French. I know they are busy trying to find out about me, my underground activities. As yet, I think they don’t suspect. But among them all there are two people who particularly concern us. Darley’s liaison with the little Melissa is one point néuralgique; as I told you she was the mistress of old Cohen who died this year. He was our chief agent for arms shipments, and knew all about us. Did he tell her anything? I don’t know. Another person even more equivocal is Pursewarden; he clearly belongs to the political agency of the Embassy. We are great friends and all that but … I am not sure what he suspects. We must if necessary reassure him, try and sell him an innocent community movement among the Copts! What else does he, might he, know or fear? You can help me here. Oh, Justine, I knew you would understand!’ Her dark intent features, so composed in the firelight, were full of a new clarity, a new power. She nodded. In her hoarse voice she said ‘Thank you, Nessim Hosnani. I see now what I have to do.’

Afterwards they locked the tall doors, put away the papers, and in the dead of night lay down before the fire in each other’s arms, to make love with the passionate detachment of succubi. Savage and exultant as their kisses were, they were but the lucid illustrations of their human case. They had discovered each other’s inmost weakness, the true site of love. And now at last there were no reserves and no inhibitions in Justine’s mind, and what may seem wantonness in other terms was really the powerful coefficient of a fully realized abandonment to love itself — a form of true identity she had never shared with anyone else! The secret they shared made her free to act. And Nessim foundering in her arms with his curiously soft — almost virginal — femininity, felt shaken and banged by her embrace like a rag doll. The nibbling of her lips reminded him of the white Arab mare he had owned as a child; confused memories flew up like flocks of coloured birds. He felt exhausted, on the point of tears, and yet irradiated by a tremendous gratitude and tenderness. In these magnificent kisses all his loneliness was expurgated. He had found someone to share his secret — a woman after his own special heart. Paradox within paradox!

As for her, it was as if she had rifled the treasury of his spiritual power symbolized so queerly in the terms of his possessions; the cold steel of rifles, the cold nipples of bombs and grenades which had been born from tungsten, gum arabic, jute, shipping, opals, herbs, silks and trees.

He felt her on top of him, and in the plunge of her loins he felt the desire to add to him — to fecundate his actions; and to fructify him through these fatality-bearing instruments of his power, to give life to those death-burdening struggles of a truly barren woman. Her face was expressionless as a mask of Siva. It was neither ugly nor beautiful, but naked as power itself. It seemed coeval (this love) with the Faustian love of saints who had mastered the chilly art of seminal stoppage in order the more clearly to recognize themselves — for its blue fires conveyed not heat but cold to the body. But will and mind burned up as if they had been dipped in quicklime. It was a true sensuality with nothing of the civilized poisons about it to make it anodyne, palatable to a human society constructed upon a romantic idea of truth. Was it the less love for that? Paracelsus had described such relationships among the Caballi. In all this one may see the austere mindless primeval face of Aphrodite.

And all the time he was thinking to himself: ‘When all this is over, when I have found her lost child — by that time we shall be so close that there will never be any question of leaving me.’ The passion of their embraces came from complicity, from something deeper, more wicked, than the wayward temptings of the flesh or the mind. He had conquered her in offering her a married life which was both a pretence and yet at the same time informed by a purpose which might lead them both to death! This was all that sex could mean to her now! How thrilling, sexually thrilling, was the expectation of their death!

He drove her home in the first faint trembling light of dawn; waited to hear the lift climb slowly, painfully, to the third floor and return again. It stopped with a slight bounce before him and the light went out with a click. The personage had gone, but her perfume remained.

It was a perfume called ‘Jamais de la vie’.

* * * * *

XI

Throughout that summer and autumn the conspirators had worked together to mount entertainments on a scale seldom seen in the city. The big house was seldom quiet now for hours together. It was perpetually alive to the cool fern-like patterns of a quartet, or to the foundering plunge of saxophones crying to the night like cuckolds. The once cavernous and deserted kitchens were now full of the echoing bustle of servants preparing for a new feast or clearing up after one which had ended. In the city it was said that Nessim had deliberately set himself to launch Justine in society — as if the provincial splendours of Alexandria held any promise or charm to one who had become at heart a European, as he had. No, these planned assaults upon the society of the second capital were both exploratory and diversionary. They offered a backcloth against which the conspirators could move with a freedom necessary to their work. They worked indefatigably — and only when the pressure of things became too great stole short holidays in the little summer lodge which Nessim had christened ‘Justine’s Summer Palace’; here they could read and write and bathe, and enjoy those friends who were closest to them — Clea and Amaril and Balthazar.

But always after these long evenings spent in a wilderness of conversation, a forest of plates and wine-bottles, they locked the doors, shot the great bolts themselves and turned sighing back to the staircase, leaving the sleepy domestics to begin the task of clearing up the débris; for the house must be completely set to rights by morning; they walked slowly arm in arm, pausing to kick off their shoes on the first landing and to smile at each other in the great mirror. Then, to quieten their minds, they would take a slow turn up and down the picture-gallery, with its splendid collection of Impressionists, talking upon neutral topics while Nessim’s greedy eyes explored the great canvases slowly, mute testimony to the validity of private worlds and secret wishes.

So at last they came to those warm and beautifully furnished private bedrooms, adjoining one another, on the cool north side of the house. It was always the same; while Nessim lay down on the bed fully dressed, Justine lit the spirit-lamp to prepare the infusion of valerian which he always took to soothe his nerves before he slept. Here too she would set out the small card-table by the bed, and together they played a hand or two of cribbage or picquet as they talked, obsessively talked about the affairs which occupied their waking minds. At such times their dark, passionate faces glowed in the soft light with a sort of holiness conferred by secrecy, by the appetities of a shared will, by desires joined at the waist. Tonight it was the same. As she dealt the first hand, the telephone by the bed rang. Nessim picked up the receiver, listened for a second, and then passed it to her without a word. Smiling, she raised her eyebrows in interrogation and her husband nodded. ‘Hullo’ the hoarse voice counterfeited sleepiness, as if she had been woken from her bed. ‘Yes, my darling. Of course. No, I was awake. Yes, I am alone.’ Nessim quietly and methodically fanned out his hand and studied the cards without visible expression. The conversation ran stutteringly on and then the caller said good-night and rang off. Sighing, Justine replaced the receiver, and then made a slow gesture, as of someone removing soiled gloves, or of someone disembarrassing herself of a skein of wool. ‘It was poor Darley’ she said, picking up her cards. Nessim raised his eyes for a moment, put down a card, and uttered a bid. As the game began, she started to talk again softly, as if to herself. ‘He is absolutely fascinated by the diaries. Remember? I used to copy out all Arnauti’s notes for Moeurs in my own handwriting when he broke his wrist. We had them bound up. All the parts which he did not use in the end. I have given them to Darley as my diary.’ She depressed her cheeks in a sad smile. ‘He accepts them as mine, and says, not unnaturally, that I have a masculine mind! He also says my French is not very good — that would please Arnauti, wouldn’t it?’

‘I am sorry for him’ said Nessim quietly, tenderly. ‘He is so good. One day I will be quite honest, explain everything to him.’

‘But I don’t see your concern for the little Melissa’ said Justine, again as if engaged in a private debate rather than a conversation. ‘I have tried to sound him in every way. He knows nothing. I am convinced that she knows nothing. Just because she was Cohen’s mistress … I don’t know.’

Nessim laid down his cards and said: ‘I cannot get rid of a feeling she knows something. Cohen was a boastful and silly man and he certainly knew all that there was to know.’

‘But why should he tell her?’

‘It is simply that after his death, whenever I ran across her, she would look at me in a new way — as if in the light of something she had heard about me, a piece of new knowledge. It’s hard to describe.’

They played in silence until the kettle began to whine. Then Justine put down her cards, went across to prepare the valerian. As he sipped it she went into the other room to divest herself of her jewellery. Sipping the cup, and staring reflectively at the wall, Nessim heard the small snap of her ear-rings as she plucked them off, and the small noise of the sleeping-tablets falling into a glass. She came back and sat down at the card-table.

‘Then if you feared her, why did you not get her removed somehow?’ He looked startled and she added: ‘I don’t mean to harm her, but to get her sent away.’

Nessim smiled. ‘I thought I would, but then when Darley fell in love with her, I … had a sympathy for him.’

‘There is no room for such ideas’ she said curtly, and he nodded, almost humbly. ‘I know’ he said. Justine dealt the cards once more, and once more they consulted their hands in silence.

‘I am working now to get her sent away — by Darley himself. Amaril says that she is really seriously ill and has already recommended that she go to Jerusalem for special treatment. I have offered Darley the money. He is in a pitiable state of confusion. Very English. He is a good person, Nessim, though now he is very much afraid of you and invents all sorts of bogies with which to frighten himself. He makes me feel sad, he is so helpless.’

‘I know.’

‘But Melissa must go. I have told him so.’

‘Good.’ Then, in a totally different voice, raising his dark eyes to hers, he said: ‘What about Pursewarden?’

The question hung between them in the still air of the room, quivering like a compass needle. Then he slung his eyes once more to the cards in his hand. Justine’s face took on a new expression, both bitter and haggard. She lit a cigarette carefully and said: ‘As I told you, he is someone quite out of the ordinary — c’est un personnage. It would be quite impossible to get a secret out of him. It’s hard to describe.’

She stared at him for a long time, studying those dark averted features with an expression of abstraction. ‘What I am trying to say is this: about the difference between them. Darley is so sentimental and so loyal to me that he constitutes no danger at all. Even if he came into the possession of information which might harm us, he would not use it, he would bury it. Not Pursewarden!’ Now her eyes glittered. ‘He is somehow cold and clever and self-centred. Completely amoral — like an Egyptian! He would not deeply care if we died tomorrow. I simply cannot reach him. But potentially he is an enemy worth reckoning with.’

He raised his eyes to her and they sat for a long moment staring sightlessly into each other’s minds. His eyes were now full of a burning passionate sweetness like the eyes of some strange noble bird of prey. He moistened his lips with his tongue but did not speak. He had been on the point of blurting out the words: ‘I am terrified that you may be falling in love with him.’ But a queer feeling of pudicity restrained him.

‘Nessim.’

‘Yes.’

She stubbed out her cigarette now and, deep in thought, rose to walk up and down the room, her hands hugged in her armpits. As always when she was thinking deeply, she moved in a strange, almost awkward way — a prowling walk which reminded him of some predatory animal. His eye had become vague now, and lustreless. He picked up the cards mechanically and shuffled them once, twice. Then he put them down and raised his palms to his burning cheeks.

At once she was at his side with her warm hand upon his brow. ‘You have a temperature again.’

‘I don’t think so’ he said rapidly, mechanically.

‘Let me take it.’

‘No.’

She sat down opposite him, leaning forward, and stared once more into his eyes. ‘Nessim, what has been happening? Your health … these temperatures, and you don’t sleep?’ He smiled wearily and pressed tie back of her hand to his hot cheek.

‘It is nothing’ he said. ‘Just strain now that everything is coming to an end. Also having to tell Leila the whole truth. It has alarmed her to understand the full extent of our plans. Also it has made her relationship with Mountolive much harder. I think that is the reason she refused to see him at the Carnival meeting, remember? I had told her everything that morning. Never mind. Another few months and the whole build-up is complete. The rest is up to them. But of course Leila does not like the idea of going away. I knew she wouldn’t. And then, I have other serious problems.’

‘What problems?’

But he shook his head, and getting up started to undress. Once in bed he finished his valerian and lay, hands and feet folded like the effigy of a Crusader. Justine switched off the light and stood in the doorway in silence. At last she said: ‘Nessim. I am afraid that something is happening to you which I don’t understand. These days … are you ill? Please speak to me!’

There was a long silence. Then she said: ‘How is all this going to turn out?’

He raised himself slightly on the pillows and stared at her. ‘By the autumn, when everything is ready, we shall have to take up new dispositions. It may mean a separation of perhaps a year, Justine. I want you to go there and stay there while it all happens. Leila must go to the farm in Kenya. There will certainly be sharp reactions here which I must stay to face.’

‘You talk in your sleep.’

‘I am exhausted’ he cried shortly, angrily.

Justine stood still, motionless in silhouette, in the lighted doorway. ‘What about the others?’ she asked softly, and once more he raised himself on the pillows to answer peevishly. ‘The only one who concerns us at the moment is Da Capo. He must be apparently killed, or must disappear, for he is very much compromised. I have not worked out the details properly. He wants me to claim his insurance, anyway, as he is completely in debt, ruined, so his disappearance would fit in. We will speak of this later. It should be comparatively easy to arrange.’

She turned thoughtfully back into the lighted room and began to prepare for sleep. She could hear Nessim sighing and turning restlessly in the next room. In the great mirror she studied her own sorrowful, haunted face, stripping it of its colours, and combing her black hair luxuriously. Then she slipped naked between the sheets and snapped out the light, tumbling lightly, effortlessly into sleep in a matter of moments.

It was almost dawn when Nessim came barefoot into her room. She woke to feel his arms about her shoulders; he was kneeling by the bed, shaken by a paroxysm which at first she took to be a fit of weeping. But he was trembling, as if with a fever, and his teeth were chattering. ‘What is it?’ she began incoherently, but he put a hand over her mouth to silence her. ‘I simply must tell you why I have been acting so strangely. I cannot bear the strain any longer. Justine, I have been brought face to face with another problem. I am faced with the terrible possibility of having to do away with Narouz. That is why I have been feeling half-mad. He has got completely out of hand. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do!’

This conversation took place some little time before the unexpected suicide of Pursewarden in the Mount Vulture Hotel.

* * * * *

XII

But it was not only for Mountolive that all the dispositions on the chessboard had been abruptly altered now by Pursewarden’s solitary act of cowardice — and the unexpected discovery which had supplied its motive, the mainspring of his death. Nessim too, so long self-deluded by the same dreams of a perfect finite action, free and heedless as the impulse of a directed will, now found himself, like his friend, a prey to the gravitational forces which lie inherent in the time-spring of our acts, making them spread, ramify and distort themselves; making them spread as a stain will spread upon a white ceiling. Indeed, now the masters were beginning to find that they were, after all, the servants of the very forces which they had set in play, and that nature is inherently ungovernable. They were soon to be drawn along ways not of their choosing, trapped in a magnetic field, as it were, by the same forces which unwind the tides at the moon’s bidding, or propel the glittering forces of salmon up a crowded river — actions curving and swelling into futurity beyond the powers of mortals to harness or divert. Mountolive knew this, vaguely and uneasily, lying in bed watching the lazy spirals of smoke from his cigar rise to the blank ceiling; Nessim and Justine knew it with greater certainty, lying brow to cold brow, eyes wide open in the magnificent darkened bedroom, whispering to each other. Beyond the connivance of the will they knew it, and felt the portents gathering around them — the paradigms of powers unleashed which must fulfil themselves. But how? In what manner? That was not as yet completely clear.

Pursewarden, before lying down on that stale earthly bed beside the forgotten muttering images of Melissa or Justine — and whatever private memories besides — had telephoned to Nessim in a new voice, full of a harsh resignation, charged with the approaching splendours of death. ‘It is a matter of life and death, as they say in books. Yes, please, come at once. There is a message for you in an appropriate place: the mirror.’ He rang off with a simple chuckle which frightened the alert, frozen man at the other end of the line; at once Nessim had divined the premonition of a possible disaster. On the mirror of that shabby hotel-room, among the quotations which belonged to the private workshop of the writer’s life, he found the following words written in capitals with a wet shaving-stick:

NESSIM. COHEN PALESTINE ETC. ALL DISCOVERED AND REPORTED.

This was the message which he had all but managed to obliterate before there came the sound of voices in the hall and the furtive rapping at the panels of the door; before Balthazar and Justine had tiptoed softly into the room. But the words and the memory of that small parting chuckle (like a sound of some resurrected Pan) were burned forever into his mind. His expression was one of neuralgic vacancy as he repeated all these facts to Justine in later times for the exposure of the act itself had numbed him. It would be impossible to sleep, he had begun to see; it was a message which must be discussed at length, sifted, unravelled where they lay, motionless as the effigies upon Alexandrian tombs, side by side in the dark room, their open eyes staring into each other with the sightlessness of inhuman objects, mirrors made of quartz, dead stars. Hand in hand they sighed and murmured, and even as he whispered: ‘I told you it was Melissa … The way she always looked at me…. I suspected it.’ The other troubling problems of the case interlocked and overlapped in his mind, the problem of Narouz among them.

He felt as a beleaguered knight must feel in the silence of a fortress who suddenly hears the click of spades and mattocks, the noise of iron feet, and divines that the enemy sappers are burrowing inch by inch beneath the walls. What would Mountolive feel bound to do now, supposing he had been told? (Strange how the very phrase betrayed them both as having moved out of the orbit of human free will.) They were both bound now, tied like bondsmen to the unrolling action which illustrated the personal predispositions of neither. They had embarked on a free exercise of the will only to find themselves shackled, bricked up by the historical process. And a single turn of the kaleidoscope had brought it about. Pursewarden! The writer who was so fond of saying ‘People will realize one day that it is only the artist who can make things really happen; that is why society should be founded upon him.’ A deus ex machina! In his dying he had used them both like … a public convenience, as if to demonstrate the truth of his own aphorism! There would have been many other issues to take without separating them by the act of his death, and setting them at odds by the dispensation of a knowledge which could benefit neither! Now everything hung upon a hair — the thinnest terms of a new probability. Act Mountolive would, but if he must; and his one word to Memlik Pasha would entrain new forces, new dangers…..

The city with its obsessive rhythms of death twanged round them in the darkness — the wail of tyres in empty squares, the scudding of liners, the piercing whaup of a tug in the inner harbour; he felt the dusty, deathward drift of the place as never before, settling year by year more firmly into the barren dunes of Mareotis. He turned his mind first this way and then that, like an hourglass; but it was always the same sand which sifted through it, the same questions which followed each other unanswerably at the same leaden pace. Before them stretched the potential of a disaster for which — even though they had evaluated the risk so thoroughly and objectively — they had summoned up no reserves of strength. It was strange. Yet Justine, savagely brooding with her brows drawn down and her knuckle against her teeth, seemed still unmoved, and his heart went out to her, for the dignity of her silence (the unmoved sibyl’s eye) gave him the courage to think on, assess the dilemma. They must continue as if nothing had changed when, in fact, everything had changed. The knowledge of the fact that they must, expressionless as knights nailed into suits of armour, continue upon a predetermined course, constituted both a separation and a new, deeper bond; a more passionate comradeship, such as soldiers enjoy upon the field of battle, aware that they have renounced all thought of human continuity in terms of love, family, friends, home — become servants of an iron will which exhibits itself in the mailed mask of duty. ‘We must prepare for every eventuality’ he said, his lips dry from the cigarettes he had smoked ‘and hold on until things are complete. We may have more time in hand than we imagine; indeed, nothing whatsoever may come of it all. Perhaps Mountolive has not been told.’ But then he added in a smaller voice, full of the weight of realization: ‘But if he has been, we shall know; his manner will show it at once.’

He might suddenly find himself, at any street corner, face to face with a man armed with a pistol — in any dark corner of the town; or else he might find his food poisoned some day by some suborned servant. Against these eventualities he could at least react, by a study of them, by a close and careful attention to probabilities. Justine lay silent, with wide eyes. ‘And then’ he said ‘tomorrow I must speak to Narouz. He must be made to see.’

Some weeks before he had walked into his office to find the grave, silver-haired Serapamoun sitting in the visitor’s chair, quietly smoking a cigarette. He was by far the most influential and important of the Coptic cotton-kings, and had played a decisive role in supporting the community movement which Nessim had initiated. They were old friends though the older man was of another generation. His serene mild face and low voice carried the authority of an education and a poise which spoke of Europe. His conversation had the quick pulse of a reflective mind. ‘Nessim’ he said softly, ‘I am here as a representative of our committee, not just as myself. I have a rather disagreeable task to perform. May I speak to you frankly, without heat or rancour? We are very troubled.’

Nessim closed and locked the door, unplugged his telephone and squeezed Serapamoun’s shoulder affectionately as he passed behind his visitor’s chair to reach his own. ‘I ask nothing better’ he said. ‘Speak.’

‘Your brother, Narouz.’

‘Well, what of him?’

‘Nessim, in starting this community movement you had no idea of initiating a jehad — a holy war of religion — or of doing anything subversive which might unsettle the Egyptian Government? Of course not. That is what we thought, and if we joined you it was from a belief in your convictions that the Copts should unite and seek a larger place in public affairs.’ He smoked in silence for a minute, lost in deep thought. Then he went on: ‘Our community patriotism in no way qualified our patriotism as Egyptians, did it? We were glad to hear Narouz preach the truths of our religion and race, yes, very glad, for these things needed saying, needed feeling. But … you have not been to a meeting for nearly three months. Are you aware what a change has come about? Narouz has been so carried away by his own powers that he is saying things today which could seriously compromise us all. We are most alarmed. He is filled now with some sort of mission. His head is a jumble of strange fragments of knowledge, and when he preaches all sorts of things pour out of him in a torrent which would look bad on paper if they were to reach Memlik Pasha.’ Another long silence. Nessim found himself growing gradually pale with apprehension. Serapamoun continued in his low smoothly waxed voice. ‘To say that the Copts will find a place in the sun is one thing; but to say that they will sweep away the corrupt régime of the pashas who own ninety per cent of the land … to talk of taking over Egypt and setting it to rights…..’

‘Does he?’ stammered Nessim, and the grave man nodded.

‘Yes. Thank God our meetings are still secret. At the last he started raving like someone melboos (possessed) and shouted that if it was necessary to achieve our ends he would arm the Bedouin. Can you improve on that?’

Nessim licked his dry lips. ‘I had no idea’ he said.

‘We are very troubled and concerned about the fate of the whole movement with such preaching. We are counting on you to act in some way. He should, my dear Nessim, be restrained; or at least given some understanding of our role. He is seeing too much of old Taor — he is always out there in the desert with her. I don’t think she has any political ideas, but he gets religious fervour from these meetings with her. He spoke of her and said that they kneel together for hours in the sand, under the blazing sun, and pray together. “I see her visions now and she sees mine.” That is what he said. Also, he has begun to drink very heavily. It is something which needs urgent attention.’

‘I shall see him at once’ Nessim had said, and now, turning to stare once more into the dark, untroubled gaze of a Justine he knew to be much stronger than himself, he repeated the phrase softly, trying it with his mind as one might try the blade of a knife to test its keenness. He had put off the meeting on one pretext or another, though he knew that sooner or later it would have to be, he would have to assert himself over Narouz — but over a different Narouz to the one he had always known.

And now Pursewarden had clumsily intervened, interpolated his death and betrayal, to load him still more fully with the preoccupations with all that concerned affairs about which Narouz himself knew nothing; setting his fevered mind to run upon parallel tracks towards an infinity…. He had the sensation of things closing in upon him, of himself beginning slowly to suffocate under the weight of the cares he had himself invented. It had all begun to happen suddenly — within a matter of weeks. Helplessness began to creep over him, for every decision now seemed no longer a product of his will but a response to pressures built up outside him; the exigencies of the historical process in which he himself was being sucked as if into a quicksand.

But if he could no longer control events, it was necessary that he should take control of himself, his own nerves. Sedatives had for weeks now taken the place of self-control, though they only exorcized the twitchings of the subconscious temporarily; pistol-practice, so useless and childish a training against assassination, offered little surcease. He was possessed, assailed by the dreams of his childhood, erupting now without reason or consequence, almost taking over his waking life. He consulted Balthazar, but was of course unable to let him share the true preoccupations which burdened him, so that his wily friend suggested that he should record the dreams whenever possible on paper, and this also was done. But psychic pressures are not lifted unless one faces them squarely and masters them, does battle with the perils of the quivering reason….

He had put off the interview with Narouz until he should feel stronger and better able to endure it. Fortunately the meetings of the group were infrequent. But daily he felt less and less equal to confronting his brother and it was in fact Justine who, with a word spoken in season at last, drove him out to Karm Abu Girg. Holding the lapels of his coat she said slowly and distinctly: ‘I would offer to go out and kill him myself, if I did not know that it would separate us forever. But if you have decided that it must be done, I have the courage to give the orders for you.’ She did not mean it, of course. It was a trick to bring him to his senses and in a trice his mind cleared, the mist of his irresolution dissolved. These words, so terrible and yet so quietly spoken, with not even the pride of resolution in them, reawakened his passionate love for her, so that the tears almost started to his eyes. He gazed upon her like a religious fanatic gazing upon an ikon — and in truth her own features, sullen now and immobile, her smouldering eyes, were those of some ancient Byzantine painting.

‘Justine’ he said with trembling hands.

‘Nessim’ she said hoarsely, licking her dry lips, but with a barbaric resolution gleaming in her eyes. It was almost exultantly (for the impediment had gone) that he said: ‘I shall be going out this evening, never fear. Everything will be settled one way or the other.’ He was all of a sudden flooded with power, determined to bring his brother to his senses and avert the danger of a second compromising order to his people, the Copts.

Nor had the new resolute mood deserted him that afternoon when he set off in the great car, driving with speed and deliberation along the dusty causeways of the canals to where the horses for which he had telephoned would be waiting for him. He was positively eager to see his brother, now, to outface him, to reassert himself, restore himself in his own eyes. Ali the factor met him at the ford with the customary politeness which seemed comfortably to reaffirm this new mood of resolution. He was after all the elder son. The man had brought Narouz’ own white Arab and they cantered along the edge of the canals at great speed, with their reflections racing beside them in the tumbled water. He had asked only if his brother were now at home and had received a taciturn admission of the fact that he was. They exchanged no further word on the ride. The violet light of dusk was already in the air and the earth-vapours were rising from the lake. The gnats rose into the eye of the dying sun in silver streams, to store the last memories of the warmth upon their wings. The birds were collecting their families. How peaceful it all seemed! The bats had begun to stitch and stitch slowly across the darker spaces. The bats!

The Hosnani house was already in cool violet half-darkness, tucked as it was under the shoulder of the low hillock, in the shadow of the little village whose tall white minaret blazed still in the sunset. He heard now the sullen crack of the whip as he dismounted, and caught a glimpse of the man standing upon the topmost balcony of the house, gazing intently down into the blue pool of the courtyard. It was Narouz: and yet somehow also not Narouz. Can a single gesture from someone with whom one is familiar reveal an interior transformation? The man with the whip, standing there, so intently peering into the sombre well of the courtyard, registered in his very stance a new, troubling flamboyance, an authority which did not belong, so to speak, to the repertoire of Narouz’ remembered gestures. ‘He practises’ said the factor softly, holding the bridle of the horse ‘every evening now with his whip he practises upon the bats.’ Nessim suddenly had a feeling of incoherence. ‘The bats?’ he repeated softly, under his breath. The man on the balcony — the Narouz of this hastily raised impression — gave a sudden chuckle and exclaimed in a hoarse voice: ‘Thirteen.’ Nessim threw back the doors and stood framed now against the outer light. He spoke upwards in the darkening sky in a quiet, almost conversational voice, casting it like a ventriloquist towards the cloaked figure which stood at the top of the staircase in silhouette, with the long whip coiled at its side, at rest. ‘Ya Narouz’ he said, uttering the traditional greeting of their common childhood with affection.

‘Ya Nessim’ came the response after a pause, and then a long ebbing silence fell. Nessim, whose eyes had become accustomed to the dusk, now saw that die courtyard was full of the bodies of bats, like fragments of torn umbrella, some fluttering and crawling in puddles of their own blood, some lying still and torn up. So this was what Narouz did in the evenings — ‘practising upon the bats’! He stood for a while unsure of himself, unsure what to say next. The factor closed the great doors abruptly behind him, and at once he stood, black against the darkness now, staring up the stairway to where his unknown brother stood with a kind of watchful impenitent awareness. A bat ripped across the light and he saw Narouz’ arm swing with an involuntary motion and then fall to the side again; from his vantage point at the top of the stairway he could shoot, so to speak, downwards upon his targets. Neither said anything for a while; then a door opened with a creak, throwing out a shaft of light across his path, and the factor came out of the outhouse with a broom with which he started to sweep up the fragments of fluttering bodies of Narouz’ victims which littered the earthen floor of the courtyard. Narouz leaned forward a little to watch him intently as he did so, and when he had almost swept the pile of tattered bodies to the door of the outhouse, said in a hoarse voice: ‘Thirteen, eh?’

‘Thirteen.’

His voice gave Nessim a dull neuralgic thrill, for he sounded drugged — the harsh authoritative voice of someone drunk on hashish, perhaps, or opium; the voice of someone signalling from a new orbit in an unknown universe. He drew his breath slowly until his lungs were fully inflated and then spoke upwards once more to the figure on the stair. ‘Ya Narouz. I have come to speak to you on a matter of great urgency.’

‘Mount’ said Narouz gruffly, in the voice of a sheepdog. ‘I wait for you here, Nessim.’ The voice made many things clear to Nessim, for never before had the voice of his brother been completely free from a note of welcome, of joy even. At any other time he would have run down the stairs in clumsy welcome, taking them two at a time and calling out ‘Nessim, how good you have come!’ Nessim walked across the courtyard and placed his hand upon the dusty wooden rail. ‘It is important’ he said sharply, crisply, as if to establish his own importance in this tableau — the shadowy courtyard with the solitary figure standing up against the sky in silhouette, holding the long whip lightly, effortlessly, and watching him. Narouz repeated the word ‘Mount’ in a lower key, and suddenly sat down putting his whip beside him on the top stair. It was the first time, thought Nessim, that there had been no greeting for him on his return to Karm Abu Girg. He walked up the steep stairs slowly, peering upwards.

It was much lighter on the first floor, and at the top of the second there was enough light to see his brother’s face. Narouz sat quite still, in cloak and boots. His whip lay lightly coiled over the balustrade with its handle upon his knees. Beside him on the dusty wooden floor stood a half-empty bottle of gin. His chin was sunk upon his chest and he stared crookedly up under shaggy brows at the approaching stranger with an expression which combined truculence with a queer, irresolute sorrow. He was at his old trick of pressing his back teeth together and releasing them so that the cords of muscle at his temples expanded and contracted as if a heavy pulse were beating there. He watched his brother’s slow ascent with this air of sombre self-divided uncertainty into which there crept from time to time the smouldering glow of an anger banked up, held under control. As Nessim reached the final landing and set foot upon the last flight of stairs, Narouz stirred and gave a sudden gargling bark — a sound such as one might make to a hound — and held out a hairy hand. Nessim paused and heard his brother say: ‘Stay there, Nessim’ in a new and authoritative voice, but which contained no particular note of menace. He hesitated, leaning forward keenly the better to interpret this unfamiliar gesture — the square hand thrown out in an attitude almost of imprecation, fingers stretched, but not perfectly steady.

‘You have been drinking’ he said at last, quietly but with a profound ringing disgust. ‘Narouz, this is new for you.’ The shadow of a smile, as if of self-contempt, played upon the crooked lips of his brother. It broadened suddenly to a slow grin which displayed his hare-lip to the full: and then vanished, was swallowed up, as if abruptly recalled by a thought which it could not represent. Narouz now wore a new air of unsteady self-congratulation, of pride at once mawkish and dazed. ‘What do you wish from me?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Say it here, Nessim. I am practising.’

‘Let us go indoors to speak privately.’

Narouz shook his head slowly and after consideration said crisply:

‘You can speak here.’

‘Narouz’ cried Nessim sharply, stung by these unfamiliar responses, and in the voice one would use to awaken a sleeper. ‘Please.’ The seated man at the head of the stairs stared up at him with the strange inflamed but sorrowful air and shook his head again. ‘I have spoken, Nessim’ he said indistinctly. Nessim’s voice broke, it was pitched so sharply against the silence of the courtyard. He said, almost pitifully now, ‘I simply must speak to you, do you understand?’

‘Speak now, here. I am listening.’ This was indeed a new and unexpected personage, the man in the cloak. Nessim felt the colour rising in his cheeks. He climbed a couple of steps more and hissed assertively: ‘Narouz, I come from them. In God’s name what have you been saying to them? The committee has become terrified by your words.’ He broke off and irresolutely waved the memorandum which Serapamoun had deposited with him, crying: ‘This … this paper is from them.’

Narouz’ eyes blazed up for a second with a maudlin pride made somehow regal by the outward thrust of his chin and a straightening of the huge shoulders. ‘My words, Nessim?’ he growled, and then nodding: ‘And Taor’s words. When the time comes we will know how to act. Nobody needs to fear. We are not dreamers.’

‘Dreamers!’ cried Nessim with a gasp, almost beside himself now with apprehension and disgust and mortified to his very quick by this lack of conventional address in a younger brother. ‘You are the dreamers! Have I not explained a thousand times what we are trying to do … what we mean by all this? Peasant, idiot that you are…..’ But these words which once might have lodged like goads in Narouz’ mind seemed blunt, ineffectual. He tightened his mouth hard and made a slow cutting movement with his palm, cutting the air from left to right before his own body. ‘Words’ he cried harshly. ‘I know you now, my brother.’ Nessim glanced wildly about him for a moment, as if to seek help, as if to seek some instrument heavy enough to drive the truth of what he had to say into the head of the seated man. A hysterical fury had beset him, a rage against this sottish figure which raised so incomprehending a face to his pleas. He was trembling; he had certainly anticipated nothing like this when he set out from Alexandria with his resolution bright and his mind composed.

‘Where is Leila?’ he cried sharply, as if he might invoke her aid, and Narouz gave a short clicking chuckle. He raised his finger to his temple gravely and muttered: ‘In the summer-house, as you know. Why not go to her if you wish?’ He chuckled again, and then added, nodding his head with an absurdly childish expression. ‘She is angry with you, now. For once it is with you, not with me. You have made her cry, Nessim.’ His lower lip trembled.

‘Drunkard’ hissed Nessim helplessly. Narouz’ eyes flashed. He gave a single jarring laugh, a short bark, throwing his head right back. Then suddenly, without warning, the smile vanished and he put on once more his watchful, sorrowing expression. He licked his lips and whispered ‘Ya Nessim’ under his breath, as if he were slowly recovering his sense of proportion. But Nessim, white with rage, was now almost beside himself with frustration. He stepped up the last few stairs and shook Narouz by the shoulder, almost shouting now: ‘Fool, you are putting us all in danger. Look at these, from Serapamoun. The committee will disband unless you stop talking like this. Do you understand? You are mad, Narouz. In God’s name, Narouz, understand what I am saying….’ But the great head of his brother looked dazed now, beset by the flicker of contradictory expressions, like the lowered crest of a bull badgered beyond endurance. ‘Narouz, listen to me.’ The face that was slowly raised to Nessim’s seemed to have grown larger and more vacant, the eyes more lustreless, yet full of the pain of a new sort of knowledge which owed little to the sterile revolutions of reason; it was full too of a kind of anger and incomprehension, confused and troubling, which was seeking expression. They stared angrily at each other. Nessim was white to the lips and panting, but his brother sat simply staring at him, his lips drawn back over his white teeth as if he were hypnotized.

‘Do you hear me? Are you deaf?’ Nessim shook, but with a motion of his broad shoulders Narouz shook off the importunate hand while his face began to flush. Nessim ran on, heedless, carried away by the burning preoccupations which poured out of him clothed in a torrent of reproaches. ‘You have put us all in danger, even Leila, even yourself, even Mountolive.’ Why should chance have led him to that fatal name? The utterance of it seemed to electrify Narouz and fill him with a new, almost triumphant desperation.

‘Mountolive’ he shouted the word in a deep groaning voice and ground his teeth together audibly; he seemed as if he were about to go berserk. Yet he did not move, though his hand moved involuntarily to the handle of the great whip which lay in his lap. ‘That British swine!’ he brought out with a thunderous vehemence, almost spitting the words.

‘Why do you say that?’

And then another transformation occurred with unexpected suddenness, for Narouz’ whole body relaxed and subsided; he looked up with a sly air now, and said with a little chuckle, in a tone pitched barely above a whisper: ‘You sold our mother to him, Nessim. You knew it would cause our father’s death.’

This was too much. Nessim fell upon him, flailing at him with his doubled fists, uttering curse after guttural curse in Arabic, beating him. But his blows fell like chaff upon the huge body. Narouz did not move, did not make any attempt to avert or to respond to his brother’s blows — here at least Nessim’s seniority held. He could not bring himself to strike back at his elder brother. But sitting doubled up and chuckling under the futile rain of blows, he repeated venomously over and over again the words: ‘You sold our mother!’

Nessim beat him until his own knuckles were bruised and aching. Narouz stooped under this febrile onslaught, bearing it with the same composed smile of maudlin bitterness, repeating the triumphant phrase over and over again in that thrilling whisper. At last Nessim shrieked ‘Stop’ and himself desisted, falling against the rail of the balustrade and sinking under the weight of his own exhaustion down to the first landing. He was trembling all over. He shook his fist upwards at the dark seated figure and said incoherently ‘I shall go to Serapamoun myself. You will see who is master.’ Narouz gave a small contemptuous chuckle, but said nothing.

Putting his dishevelled clothes to rights, Nessim tottered down the stairway into the now darkened courtyard. His horse and Ali’s had been tethered to the iron hitching post outside the great front door. As he mounted, still trembling and muttering, the factor raced out of the arches and unbolted the doors. Narouz was standing up now, visible only against the yellow light of the living-room. Flashes of incoherent rage still stormed Nessim’s mind — and with them irresolution, for he realized that the mission he had set himself was far from completed, indeed, had gone awry. With some half-formulated idea of offering the silent figure another chance to open up a discussion with him or seek a rapprochement, he rode his horse into the courtyard and sat there, looking up into the darkness. Narouz stirred.

‘Narouz’ said Nessim softly. ‘I have told you once and for all now. You will see who is going to be master. It would be wise for you….’

But the dark figure gave a bray of laughter.

‘Master and servant’ he cried contemptuously. ‘Yes, Nessim. We shall see. And now—’ He leaned over the rail and in the darkness Nessim heard the great whip slither along the dry boards like a cobra and then lick the still twilight air of the courtyard. There was a crack and a snap like a giant mousetrap closing, and the bundle of papers in his arm was flicked out peremptorily and scattered over the cobbles. Narouz laughed again, on a more hysterical note. Nessim felt the heat of the whipstroke on his hand though the lash had not touched him.

‘Now go’ cried Narouz, and once more the whip hissed in the air to explode menacingly behind the buttocks of his horse. Nessim rose in his stirrups and shaking his fist once more at his brother, cried ‘We shall see!’

But his voice sounded thin, choked by the imprecations which filled his mind. He drove his heels in the horse’s flanks and twisted suddenly about to gallop abruptly out of the courtyard throwing up sparks from the stone threshold, bending low in the saddle. He rode back to the ford now, where the car awaited, like a madman his face distorted with rage; but as he rode his pulse slowed and his anger emptied itself into the loathsome disgust which flooded up into his mind in slow coils, like some venomous snake. Unexpected waves of remorse, too, began to invade him, for something had now been irreparably damaged, irreparably broken, in the iron ceinture of the family relation. Dispossessed of the authority vested in the elder son by the feudal pattern of life, he felt all at once a prodigal, almost an orphan. In the heart of his rage there was also guilt; he felt unclean, as if he had debauched himself in this unexpected battle with one of his own kin. He drove slowly back to the city, feeling the luxurious tears of a new exhaustion, a new self-pity, rolling down his cheeks.

How strange it was that he had somehow, inexplicably, foreseen this irreparable break with his brother — from the first discreet phrases of Serapamoun he had divined it and feared it. It raised once more the spectre of duties and responsibilities to causes which he himself had initiated and must now serve. Ideally, then, he should be prepared in such a crisis to disown Narouz, to depose Narouz, even if necessary to … him! (He slammed on the brakes of the car, brought it to a standstill, and sat muttering. He had censored the thought in his mind, for the hundredth time. But the nature of the undertaking should be clear enough to anyone in a similar situation. He had never understood Narouz, he thought wistfully. But then, you do not have to understand someone in order to love them. His hold had not really been deep, founded in understanding: it had been conferred by the family conventions to which both belonged. And now the tie had suddenly snapped.) He struck the wheel of the car with aching palms and cried ‘I shall never harm him.’

He threw in the clutch, repeating ‘Never’ over and over again in his mind. Yet he knew this decision to be another weakness, for in it his love traduced his own ideal of duty. But here his alter ego came to his rescue with soothing formulations such as: ‘It is really not so serious. We shall, of course, have to disband the movement temporarily. Later I shall ask Serapamoun to start something similar. We can isolate and expel this … fanatic’ He had never fully realized before how much he loved this hated brother whose mind had now become distended by dreams whose religious poetry conferred upon their Egypt a new, an ideal future. ‘We must seek to embody the frame of the eternal in nature here upon earth, in our hearts, in this very Egypt of ours.’ That is what Narouz had said, among so many other things which filled the fragmentary transcription which Serapamoun had ordered to be made. ‘We must wrestle here on earth against the secular injustice, and in our hearts against the injustice of a divinity which respects only man’s struggle to possess his own soul.’ Were these simply the ravings of Taor, or were they part of a shared dream of which the ignorant fanatic had spoken? Other phrases, barbed with the magnificence of poetry, came into his mind. ‘To rule is to be ruled; but ruler and ruled must have a divine consciousness of their role, of their inheritance in the Divine. The mud of Egypt rises to choke our lungs, the lungs with which we cry to living God.’

He had a sudden picture of that contorted face, the little gasping voice in which Narouz had, that first day of his possession, invoked the divine spirit to visit him with a declared truth. ‘Meded! Meded!’ He shuddered. And then it slowly came upon him that in a paradoxical sort of way Narouz was right in his desire to inflame the sleeping will — for he saw the world, not so much as a political chessboard but as a pulse beating within a greater will which only the poetry of the psalms could invoke and body forth. To awaken not merely the impulses of the forebrain with its limited formulations, but the sleeping beauty underneath — the poetic consciousness which lay, coiled like a spring, in the heart of everyone. This thought frightened him not a little; for he suddenly saw that his brother might be a religious leader, but for the prevailing circumstances of time and place — these, at least, Nessim could judge. He was a prodigy of nature but his powers were to be deployed in a barren field which could never nourish them, which indeed would stifle them forever.

He reached the house, abandoned the car at the gate, and raced up the staircase, taking the steps three at a time. He had been suddenly assailed by one of the customary attacks of diarrhoea and vomiting which had become all too frequent in recent weeks. He brushed past Justine who lay wide-eyed upon the bed with the reading-lamp on and the piano-score of a concerto spread upon her breast. She did not stir, but smoked thoughtfully, saying only, under her breath, ‘You are back so soon.’ Nessim rushed into the bathroom, turning on the taps of the washbasin and the shower at the same time to drown his retching. Then he stripped his clothes off with disgust, like dirty bandages, and climbed under the hail of boiling water to wash away all the indignities which flooded his thoughts. He knew she would be listening thoughtfully, smoking thoughtfully, her motions as regular as a pendulum, waiting for him to speak, lying at length under the shelf of books with the mask smiling down ironically at her from the wall. Then the water was turned off and she heard him scrubbing himself vigorously with a towel.

‘Nessim’ she called softly.

‘It was a failure’ he cried at once. ‘He is quite mad, Justine, I could get nothing out of him. It was ghastly.’

Justine continued to smoke on silently, with her eyes fixed upon the curtains. The room was full of the scent of the pastels burning in the great rose-bowl by the telephone. She placed her score beside the bed. ‘Nessim’ she said in the hoarse voice which he had come to love so much.

‘Yes.’

‘I am thinking.’

He came out at once, his hair wet and straggly, his feet bare, wearing the yellow silk dressing-gown, his hands thrust deep into the pockets, a lighted cigarette smouldering in the corner of his mouth. He walked slowly up and down at the foot of her bed. He said with an air of considered precision: ‘All this unease comes from my fear that we may have to do him harm. But, even if we are endangered by him, we must never harm him, never. I have told myself that. I have thought the whole thing out. It will seem a failure of duty, but we must be clear about it. Only then can I become calm again. Are you with me?’

He looked at her once more with longing, with the eyes of his imagination. She lay there, as if afloat upon the dark damascened bed-spread, her feet and hands crossed in the manner of an effigy, her dark eyes upon him. A lock of dark hair curled upon her forehead. She lay in the silence of a room which had housed (if walls have ears) their most secret deliberations, under a Tibetan mask with lighted eyeballs. Behind her gleamed the shelves of books which she had gathered though not all of which she had read. (She used their texts as omens for the future, riffling the pages to place her finger at hazard upon a quotation — ‘bibliomancy’ the art is called.) Schopenhauer, Hume, Spengler, and oddly enough some novels, including three of Pursewarden’s. Their polished bindings reflected the light of the candles. She cleared her throat, extinguished her cigarette, and said in a calm voice: ‘I can be resigned to whatever you say. At the moment, this weakness of yours is a danger to both of us. And besides, your health is troubling us all, Balthazar not least. Even unobservant people like Darley are beginning to notice. That is not good.’ Her voice was cold and toneless.

‘Justine’ his admiration overflowed. He came and sat down beside her on the bed, putting his arms around her to embrace her fiercely. His eyes glittered with a new elation, a new gratitude. ‘I am so weak’ he said.

He extended himself beside her, put his arms behind his head, and lay silent, thinking. For a long time now they lay thus, silently side by side. At last she said:

‘Darley came to dinner tonight and left just before you arrived. I heard from him that the Embassies will all be packing up next week to return to Cairo. Mountolive won’t get back to Alexandria much before Christmas. This is also our chance to take a rest and recuperate our forces. I’ve told Selim that we are going out to Abousir next week for a whole month. You must rest now, Nessim. We can swim and ride in the desert and think about nothing, do you hear? After a while I shall invite Darley to come and stay with us for a while so that you have someone to talk to apart from me. I know you like him and find him a pleasant companion. It will do us both good. From time to time I can come in here for a night and see what is happening … what do you say?’

Nessim groaned softly and turned his head. ‘Why?’ she whispered softly, her lips turned away from him. ‘Why do you do that?’

He sighed deeply and said: ‘It is not what you think. You know how much I like him and how well we get on. It is only the pretence, the eternal play-acting one has to indulge in even with one’s friends. If only we did not have to keep on acting a part, Justine.’

But he saw that she was looking at him wide-eyed now, with an expression suggesting something that was close to horror or dismay. ‘Ah’ she said thoughtfully, sorrowfully after a moment, closing her eyes, ‘ah, Nessim! Then I should not know who I was.’

* * * * *

The two men sat in the warm conservatory, silently facing each other over the magnificent chessboard with its ivories — in perfect companionship. The set was a twenty-first birthday gift, from Mountolive’s mother. As they sat, each occasionally mused aloud, absently. It wasn’t conversation, but simply thinking aloud, a communion of minds which were really occupied by the grand strategy of chess: a by-product of friendship which was rooted in the fecund silences of the royal game. Balthazar spoke of Pursewarden. ‘It annoys me, his suicide. I feel I had somehow missed the point. I take it to have been an expression of contempt for the world, contempt for the conduct of the world.’

Mountolive glanced up quickly. ‘No, no. A conflict between duty and affection.’ Then he added swiftly ‘But I can’t tell you very much. When his sister comes, she will tell you more, perhaps, if she can.’ They were silent. Balthazar sighed and said ‘Truth naked and unashamed. That’s a splendid phrase. But we always see her as she seems, never as she is. Each man has his own interpretation.’

Another long silence. Balthazar loquitur, musingly, to himself. ‘Sometimes one is caught pretending to be God and learns a bitter lesson. Now I hated Dmitri Randidi, though not his lovely daughter; but just to humiliate him (I was disguised as a gipsy woman at the carnival ball), I told her fortune. Tomorrow, I said, she would have a life-experience which she must on no account miss — a man sitting in the ruined tower at Taposiris. “You will not speak” I said “but walk straight into his arms, your eyes closed. His name begins with an L, his family name with J.” (I had in fact already thought of a particularly hideous young man with these initials, and he was across the road at the Cervonis’ ball. Colourless eyelashes, a snout, sandy hair.) I chuckled when she believed me. Having told her this prophecy — everyone believes the tale of a gipsy, and with my black face and hook nose I made a splendid gipsy — having arranged this, I went across the road and sought out L. J., telling him I had a message for him. I knew him to be superstitious. He did not recognize me. I told him of the part he should play. Malign, spiteful, I suppose. I only planned to annoy Randidi. And it all turned out as I had planned. For the lovely girl obeyed the gipsy and fell in love with this freckled toad with the red hair. A more unsuitable conjunction cannot be imagined. But that was the idea — to make Randidi hop! It did, yes, very much, and I was so pleased by my own cleverness. He of course forbade the marriage. The lovers — which I invented, my lovers — were separated. Then Gaby Randidi, the beautiful girl, took poison. You can imagine how clever I felt. This broke her father’s health and the neurasthenia (never very far from the surface in the family) overwhelmed him at last. Last autumn he was found hanging from the trellis which supports the most famous grapevine in the city and from which….’

In the silence which followed he could be heard to add the words: ‘It is only another story of our pitiless city. But check to your Queen, unless I am mistaken….’

* * * * *

XIII

With the first thin effervescence of autumn rain Mountolive found himself back for the winter spell in Cairo with nothing of capital importance as yet decided in the field of policy; London was silent on the revelations contained in Pursewarden’s farewell letter and apparently disposed rather to condole with a Chief of Mission whose subordinates proved of doubtful worth than to criticize him or subject the whole matter to any deep scrutiny. Perhaps the feeling was best expressed in the long and pompous letter in which Kenilworth felt disposed to discuss the tragedy, offering assurances that everyone ‘at the Office’ was sad though not surprised. Pursewarden had always been considered rather outré, had he not? Apparently some such outcome had long been suspected. ‘His charm’ wrote Kenilworth in the august prose style reserved for what was known as ‘a balanced appraisal’, ‘could not disguise his aberrations. I do not need to dilate on the personal file which I showed you. In Pace Requiescat. But you have our sympathy for the loyal way in which you brushed aside these considerations to give him another chance with a Mission which had already found his manners insupportable, his views unsound.’ Mountolive squirmed as he read; yet his repugnance was irrationally mixed with a phantom relief for he saw, cowering behind these deliberations as it were, the shadows of Nessim and Justine, the outlaws.

If he had been reluctant to leave Alexandria, it was only because the unresolved problem of Leila nagged him still. He was afraid of the new thoughts he was forced to consider concerning her and her possible share in the conspiracy — if such it was — he felt like a criminal harbouring the guilt for some as yet undiscovered deed. Would it not be better to force his way in upon her — to arrive unannounced at Karm Abu Girg one day and coax the truth out of her? He could not do it. His nerve failed him at this point. He averted his mind from the ominous future and packed with many a sigh for his journey, planning to plunge once more into the tepid stream of his social activities in order to divert his mind.

For the first time now the aridities of his official duty seemed almost delightful, almost enticing. Time-killers and pain-killers at once, he followed out the prescribed round of entertainments with a concentration and attention that made them seem almost a narcotic. Never had he radiated such calculated charm, such attentiveness to considered trifles which turned them into social endearments. A whole colony of bores began to seek him out. It was a little time before people began to notice how much and in how short a time he had been aged, and to attribute the change to the unceasing round of pleasure into which he cast himself with such ravenous enthusiasm. What irony! His popularity expanded around him in waves. But now it began to seem to him that there was little enough behind the handsome indolent mask which he exposed to the world save a terror and uncertainty which were entirely new. Cut off in this way from Leila, he felt dispossessed, orphaned. All that remained was the bitter drug of duties to which he held desperately.

Waking in the morning to the sound of his curtains being drawn by the butler — slowly and reverently as one might slide back the curtains of Juliet’s tomb — he would call for the papers and read them eagerly as he tackled a breakfast-tray loaded with the prescribed delicacies to which his life had made him accustomed. But already he was impatient for the tapping on the door which would herald the appearance of his young bearded third secretary, bringing him his appointments book and other impedimenta of his work. He would hope frantically that the day would be a full one, and felt almost anguish on those rare occasions when there were few engagements to be met. As he lay back on his pillows with controlled impatience Donkin would read the day’s agenda in the manner of someone embarking on a formal recitation of the Creed. Dull as they always sounded, these official engagements, they rang in Mountolive’s ear with a note of promise, a prescription for boredom and unease. He listened like an anxious voluptuary to the voice reciting: ‘There is a call on Rahad Pasha at eleven to deliver an aide-mémoire on investment by British subjects. Chancery have the data. Then Sir John and Lady Gilliatt are coming to lunch. Errol met the plane. Yes, we sent the flowers to the hotel for her. They will sign the book at eleven today. Their daughter is indisposed which rather mucked up the lunch-seating, but as you already had Haida Pasha and the American Minister, I took the liberty of popping in Errol and wife; the placement works out like this. I didn’t need to consult protocol because Sir John is here on a private visit — this has been publicly announced in the Press.’ Laying down all the beautifully-typed memoranda on its stiff crested paper, Mountolive sighed and said ‘Is the new chef any good? You might send him to me later in my office. I know a favourite dish of the Gilliatts’.’

Donkin nodded and scribbled a note before continuing in his toneless voice: ‘At six there is a cocktail party for Sir John at Haida’s. You have accepted to dine at the Italian Embassy — a dinner in honour of Signor Maribor. It will be a tight fit.’

‘I shall change before’ said Mountolive thoughtfully.

‘There are also one or two notes here in your hand which I couldn’t quite decipher, sir. One mentions the Scent Bazaar, Persian Lilac.’

‘Good, yes. I promised to take Lady Gilliatt. Arrange transport for the visit please, and let them know I am coming. After lunch — say, three-thirty.’

‘Then there is a note saying “Luncheon gifts”.’

‘Aha, yes’ said Mountolive, ‘I am becoming quite an oriental. You see, Sir John may be most useful to us in London, at the Office, so I thought I would make his visit as memorable as possible, knowing his interests. Will you be good enough to go down to Karda in Suleiman Pasha and shop me a couple of those little copies of the Tel Al Aktar figurines, the coloured ones? I’d be most grateful. They are pretty toys. And see that they are wrapped with a card to put beside their plates? Thank you very much.’

Once more alone he sipped his tea and committed himself mentally to the crowded day which he saw stretching before him, rich in the promise of distractions which would leave no room for the more troubling self-questionings. He bathed and dressed slowly, deliberately, concentrating his mind on a choice of clothes suitable for his mid-morning official call, tying his tie carefully in the mirror. ‘I shall soon have to change my life radically’ he thought ‘or it will become completely empty. How best should that be done?’ Somewhere in the link of cause and effect he detected a hollow space which crystallized in his mind about the word ‘companionship’. He repeated it aloud to himself in the mirror. Yes, there was where a lack lay. ‘I shall have to get myself a dog’ he thought, somewhat pathetically ‘to keep me company. It will be something to look after. I can take it for walks by the Nile.’ Then a sense of absurdity beset him and he smiled. Nevertheless, in the course of his customary tour of the Embassy offices that morning, he stuck his head into the Chancery and asked Errol very seriously what sort of dog would make a good house pet. They had a long and pleasurable discussion of the various breeds and decided that some sort of fox-terrier might be the most suitable pet for a bachelor. A fox-terrier! He repeated the words as he crossed the landing to visit the Service attachés, smiling at his own asininity. ‘What next!’

His secretary had neatly stacked his papers in their trays and placed the red despatch cases against the wall; the single bar of the electric fire kept the office at a tepid norm suitable for the routine work of the day. He settled to his telegrams with an exaggerated attention, and to the draft replies which had already been dictated by his team of juniors. He found himself chopping and changing phrases, inverting sentences here and there, adding marginalia; this was something new, for he had never had excessive zeal in the matter of official English and indeed dreaded the portentous circumlocutions which his own drafts had been forced to harbour when he himself had been a junior, under a Minister who fancied himself as a stylist — are there any exceptions in the Foreign Service? No. He had always been undemanding in this way, but now the forcible concentration with which he lived and worked had begun to bear fruit in a series of meddlesome pedantries which had begun mildly to irritate the diligent Errol and his staff. Though he knew this, nevertheless Mountolive persisted unshrinkingly; he criticized, quizzed and amended work which he knew to be well enough done already, working with the aid of the Unabridged Oxford Dictionary and a Skeat — for all the world like some medieval scholar splitting theological hairs. He would light a cheroot and smoke thoughtfully as he jotted and scored on the marbled minute-paper.

Today at ten there came the customary welcome clinking of cups and saucers and Bohn, the Chancery Guard, presented himself somewhat precariously with the cup of Bovril and a plate of rusks to announce a welcome interval for refreshment. Mountolive relaxed in an armchair for a quarter of an hour as he sipped, staring heavily at the white wall with its group of neutral Japanese prints — the standard decoration chosen by the Ministry of Works for the offices of Ambassadors. In a little while it would be time to deal with the Palestine bag; already it was being sorted in the Archives Department — the heavy canvas ditty-bags lying about the floor with their mouths agape, the clerks sorting swiftly upon trestle tables, covered with green baize, the secretaries of the various departments waiting patiently outside the wooden pen each for her share of the spoils…. He felt a small premonitory unease this morning as he waited, for Maskelyne had not as yet shown any sign of life. He had not even acknowledged, let alone commented upon, Pursewarden’s last letter. He wondered why.

There was a tap at the door, and Errol entered with his diffident ungainly walk, holding a bulky envelope impressively sealed and superscribed. ‘From Maskelyne, sir’ he said, and Mountolive rose and stretched with an elaborate show of nonchalance. ‘Good Lord!’ he said, weighing the parcel in his hand before handing it back to Errol. ‘So this came by pigeon-post, eh? Wonder what it can be? It looks like a novel, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, open it up, dear boy’ (he had picked up a lot of avuncular tricks of speech from Sir Louis, he noted sadly; he must make a note to reform the habit before it was too late.)

Errol slit the huge envelope clumsily with the paper-knife. A fat memorandum and a bundle of photostats tumbled out on to the desk between them. Mountolive felt a small sense of shrinking as he recognized the spidery handwriting of the soldier upon the crowned notepaper of the covering letter. ‘What have we here?’ he said, settling himself at his desk. ‘My dear Ambassador’; the rest of the letter was faultlessly typed in Primer. As Errol turned over the neatly stapled photostats with a curious finger, reading a few words here and there, he whistled softly. Mountolive read:

My dear Ambassador,

I am sure you will be interested in the enclosed data, all of which has been recently unearthed by my department in the course of a series of widespread investigations here in Palestine.