The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [130]
‘Nessim’ she said foolishly. ‘On one sole condition — that we sleep together absolutely tonight.’ His features drew tight against his skull and he set his teeth tightly as he said angrily: ‘You should have some intelligence to go with your lack of breeding — where is it?’
‘I’m sorry’ seeing how deeply and suddenly she had annoyed him. ‘I felt in need of reassurance.’ He had become quite pale.
‘I proposed something so different’ he said, replacing the cheque in his wallet. ‘I am rather staggered by your lack of understanding. Of course we can sleep together if you wish to make it a condition. Let us take a room at the hotel here, now, this minute.’ He looked
really splendid when he was wounded like this, and suddenly there stirred inside her the realization that his quietness was not weak-ness, and than an uncommon sort of sensibility underlay these confusing thoughts and deliberate words, perhaps not altogether good, either. ‘What could we prove to each other’ he went on more gently ‘by it or by its opposite: never making love?’ She saw now how hopelessly out of context her words had been. ‘I’m bit-terly ashamed of my vulgarity.’ She said this without really mean-ing the words, as a concession to his world as much as to himself
— a world which dealt in the refinements of manners she was as yet too coarse to enjoy, which could afford to cultivate emotions posées by taste. A world which could only be knocked off its feet when you were skin to skin with it, so to speak! No, she did not mean the words, for vulgar as the idea sounded, she knew that she was right by the terms of her intuition since the thing she proposed is really, for women, the vital touchstone to a man’s being; the knowledge, not of his qualities which can be analysed or inferred, but of the very flavour of his personality. Nothing except the act of physical love tells us this truth about one another. She bitterly regretted his unwisdom in denying her a concrete chance to see for herself what underlay his beauty and persuasion. Yet how could one insist?
‘Good’ he said, ‘for our marriage will be a delicate affair, and very much a question of manners, until….’
‘I’m sorry’ she said. ‘I really did not know how to treat honour-ably with you and avoid disappointing you.’
He kissed her lightly on the mouth as he stood up. ‘I must go first and get the permission of my mother, and tell my brother. I am terribly happy, even though now I am furious with you.’
They went out to the car together and Justine suddenly felt very weak, as if she had been carried far out of her depth and abandoned in mid-ocean. ‘I don’t know what more to say.’
‘Nothing. You must start living’ he said as the car began to draw away, and she felt as if she had received a smack across the mouth. She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate which she drank with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain. No, somewhere she was truly a woman.
Nessim took the lift up to his office, and sitting down at his desk wrote upon a card the following words: ‘My dearest Clea, Justine has agreed to marry me. I could never do this if I thought it would qualify or interfere in any way with either her love for you or mine….’
Then, appalled by the thought that whatever he might write to Clea might sound mawkish, he tore the note up and folded his arms. After a long moment of thought he picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria’s number. ‘Da Capo’ he said quietly. ‘You remember my plans for marrying Justine? All is well.’
He replaced the receiver slowly, as if it weighed a ton, and sat staring at his own reflection in the polished desk.
* * * * *
IV
t was now, having achieved the major task of persuasion, that his self-assurance fled and left him face to face with a sensation I entirely new to him, namely an acute shyness, an acute unwill-ingness to face his mother directly, to confront her with his inten-tions. He himself was puzzled by it, for they had always been close together, their confidences linked by an affection too deep to need the interpretation of words. If he had ever been shy or awkward it was with his awkward brother, never with her. And now? It was not as if he even feared her disfavour