The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [160]
Yes. Yes. But what? What sort of fate lies in store for such a romantic — such a devoted, loving, patient student of women?
These are the questions I ask myself as I see him, elegantly gloved and hatted, driving with Balthazar to the hospital for an opera-tion…. He described to me Melissa’s condition add ing on ly: ‘It would help her very much if she could be loved a bit.’ A remark which
filled me with shame. It was that very night that I had borrowed the money from Justine to send her to a clinic in Palestine much against her own will.
We walked together to the flat after having spent a few minutes in the public gardens discussing her case. The palms looked brilliant in the moonlight and the sea glittered under the spring winds. It seemed so out of place — serious illness — in this scheme of things. Amaril took my arms as we climbed the stairs and squeezed them gently. ‘Life is hard’ he said. And when we entered the bedroom once more to find her lying there in a trance with her pallid little face turned to the ceiling and the hashish pipe beside her on the table, he added, taking up his hat: ‘It is always …
don’t think I blame you … no, I envy you Justine … yet it is always in extremis that we doctors make the last desperate pre-scription for a woman patient — when all the resources of science have failed. Then we say “If only she could be loved!” He sighed and shook his handsome head.
There are always a hundred ways of justifying oneself but the sophistries of paper logic cannot alter the fact that after this kind of information in the Interlinear, the memory of those days haunts me afresh, torments me with guilts which I might never have been aware of before! I walk now beside the child which Melissa had by Nessim during that brief love-affair (was it ‘love’ again, or was he trying to use her to find out all he could about his wife? Perhaps one day I shall discover): I walk beside the child I say on these deserted beaches like a criminal, going over and over these frag-ments of the white city’s life with regrets too deep to alter the tone of voice in which I talk to her. Where does one hunt for the key to such a pattern?
But it is clear that I was not alone in feeling such guilt: Purse-warden himself must have been feeling guilty — how else can I explain the money he left me in his will with the express request that it should be spent with Melissa? That at least is one problem solved.
Clea too, I know, felt the guilt of the wound we were all of us causing Melissa — though she felt it, so to speak, on behalf of Justine. She took it, so to speak, upon herself — appalled at the mischief which her lover was causing to us both for so little cause. It was she who now became Melissa’s friend, champion and
counsellor and who remained her closest confidante until she died. The selfless and innocent Clea, another fool! It does not pay to be honest in love! She said of Melissa: ‘It is terrible to depend so utterly on powers that do not wish you well. To see someone al-ways in your thoughts, like a stain upon reality….’ I think she was also thinking, perhaps, of Justine, up there in the big house among the tall candles and the oil-paintings by forgotten masters. Melissa also said to her of me: ‘With his departure everything in nature disappeared.’ This was when she was dying. But nobody has the right to occupy such a place in another’s life, nobody! You can see now upon what raw material I work in these long and passionate self-communings over a winter sea. ‘She loved you’
said Clea again ‘because of your weakness — this is what she found endearing in you. Had you been strong you would have frightened away so timid a love.’ And then lastly, before I bang the pages of my manuscript shut with anger and resentment, one last remark of Clea