The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [144]
‘It is very good news’ he cried on returning to Nessim’s side, as if the little gallop across the moonlit dunes had given him all the time and detachment he needed to come to a considered opinion.
‘Will you bring her to us next week — to Leila? I think I must have met her but cannot remember. Very dark? “A firefly’s light in darkness for such eyes” as the song goes?’ He laughed his down-ward laugh. Nessim yawned sleepily. ‘Ach! my bones ache. That is what I get for living in Alexandria. Narouz, before I fall asleep there was one other thing I meant to ask you. I have not seen Pursewarden. The meetings?’
Narouz drew a hissing inward breath and turned his bright eyes to his brother, saying ‘Yes. Very well. The next one is to be at the mulid of St Damiana, in the desert.’ He flexed the great muscles of
his shoulders. ‘The whole ten families are coming — can you believe it?’
‘You will be careful’ said his brother ‘to see that everything is done privately and there are no leaks.’
‘Of course!’ he cried.
‘I mean’ said Nessim ‘that in the early stages this should not have a political character. It must grow slowly with the understanding of the matter. Eh? I do not think, for example, it is necessary for you to actually speak to them, but rather to discuss. We can’t risk. You see, it is not only the British.’
Narouz jaunted a leg impatiently and picked his teeth. He thought of Mountolive and sighed.
‘It is also the French — and they are at cross-purposes. If we are to use them both….’
‘I know, I know’ said Narouz impatiently. Nessim looked at him keenly. ‘Attend’ he said sharply, ‘for much depends on your under-standing just how far we can go at this stage.’
His reproof crushed Narouz. He flushed and joined his hands together as he looked at his brother. ‘I do’ he said in a low hoarse voice. Nessim at once felt ashamed of himself and took his arm. He went on in his low confiding tone.
‘You see, there are mysterious leaks from time to time. Old Cohen, for example, the furrier who died last month. He was work-ing for the French in Syria. On his return, the Egyptians knew all about his mission. How? Nobody knows. Among our friends we certainly have enemies — in Alexandr ia itself. Do you see?’
‘I see.’
The next morning it was time for Nessim to return and the two brothers rode out across the fields at a leisurely pace to the point of rendezvous at the ferry. ‘Why do you never come into the town?’
said Nessim. ‘Come with me today. There’s a ball at the Randidis’. You ’d enjoy it as a change.’ Narouz as always wore a hang-dog expression when anyone suggested an excursion into the city. ‘I shall come at Carnival’ he said slowly, looking at the ground, and his brother laughed and touched his arm. ‘I knew you’d say that!
Always, once a year at Carnival. I wonder why!’
But he knew; Narouz’ mortal shyness about his hare-lip had driven him into a seclusion almost as unbroken as that of his mother. Only the black domino of the carnival balls permitted him
to disguise the face he had come to loathe so much that he could no longer bear to see it even in a shaving-mirror. At the carnival ball he felt free. And yet there was another and indeed unexpected reason — a passion for Clea which had lasted for years now; for a Clea to whom he had never spoken, and indeed only twice seen when she came down with Nessim to ride on the estate. This was a secret which could not have been dragged out of him under tor-ture, but to every carnival dance he came and drifted about in the crowd hoping vaguely that he might by accident meet this young woman whose name he had never uttered aloud to anyone until that day.
(He did not know that Clea loathed the carnival season and spent the time quietly drawing and reading in her studio.)
They parted now with a warm embrace and Nessim’s car scrib-bled its pennants of dust across the warm air of the fields, eager to regain the coast road once more. A battleship in the basin was firing a twenty-one gun salute, in honour perhaps of some Egyptian dignitary, and the explosions appeared to make the clouds of pearl which always overhung the harbour in spring, tremble and change colour. The sea was high today, and four fishing-boats tacked furiously towards the town harbour with their catch. Nessim stopped only once, to buy himself a carnation for his buttonhole from the flower-vendor on the corner of Saad Zagloul. Then he went to his office, pausing to have his shoe-shine on the way up. The city had never seemed more beautiful to him. Sitting at his desk he thought of Leila and then of Justine. What would his mother have to say about his decision?