The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [181]
‘Take it off, for God’s sake!’
He did so and sat grinning at me, consumed by the brilliance of his plan. At least, he thought, such indiscretions as he might com-mit would not be attributable to him. ‘I have a whole costume’ he added proudly. ‘So look out for me, will you? You are going, aren’t you? I hear that there are two full-scale balls going so we shall weave about from one to the other, eh? Good. I am a bit relieved, aren’t you?’
But it was this fatal hat of Pombal’s which led directly to Toto de Brunel’s mysterious death next evening at the Cervonis’ — the death which Justine believed her husband had reserved for her and which I … But I must follow the Interlinear back upon my tracks.
‘The question of the watch-key’ writes Balthazar ‘ — the one you helped me hunt for among the crevices of the Grande Corniche on that winter day — turned out oddly. As you know, my time-piece stopped and I had to order another little gold ankh to be made for it. But in the interval the key was returned under strange circumstances. One day Justine came into the clinic and, kissing me warmly, produced it from her handbag. “Do you recognize this?” she asked me smiling, and then went on apolo-getically “I am so sorry for your concern, my dear Balthazar. It is the first time in my life that I have been forced to turn pickpocket. You see, there is a wall-safe in the house to which I was determined to gain access. At first glance the keys seemed similar and I wanted to see whether your watch-key fitted the lock. I had intended to return it next morning before you had time to worry, but I found that someone had removed it from my dressing-table. You won’t repeat this. I thought that perhaps Nessim himself had caught sight of it, and had suspected my motive, and had therefore con-fiscated it in order to try it in the lock of his safe himself. For-tunately (or unfortunately) it does not fit, and I could not open the little safe. But, nor could I make a fuss about the thing for fear that he had not in fact seen it; I did not want to draw his attention to its existence and its similarity to his own. I asked Fatma discreetly and went through my jewel-cases. No luck. Then two days later Nessim himself produced it and said he had found it in his stud-box; he recognized its similarity to his own but did not mention the safe. He simply asked me to give it back to you, which I herewith do, with genuine apologies for the delay.”
‘I was of course annoyed, and told her so. “And anyway, why should you wish to poke about in Nessim’s private safe?” I said.
“It seems to me unlike your normal behaviour, and I must say I feel a good deal of contempt for you after the way Nessim has treated you.” She hung her head and said “I only hoped to dis-cover something about the child — something which I think he is hiding from me.”’
* * * * *
PART III
X
suppose (writes Balthazar) that if you wished somehow to incorporate all I am telling you into your own Justine manu-I script now, you would find yourself with a curious sort of book
— the story would be told, so to speak, in layers. Unwittingly I may have supplied you with a form, something out of the way! Not unlike Pursewarden’s idea of a series of novels with “sliding panels”
as he called them. Or else, perhaps, like some medieval palimpsest where different sorts of truth are thrown down one upon the other, the one obliterating or perhaps supplementing another. Industrious monks scraping away an elegy to make room for a verse of Holy Writ!
‘I don’t suppose such an analogy would be a bad one to apply to the reality of Alexandria, a city at once sacred and profane; between Theocritus, Plotinus, and the Septuagint one moves on intermediate levels which are those of race as much as anything —
like saying Copt, Greek and Jew or Moslem, Turk and Armenian.
… Am I wrong? These are the slow accretions of time itself on place. Just as life on the individual face lays down, wash by suc-cessive wash, the wrinkles of experiences in which laughter and tears are utterly indistinguishable. Wormcasts of experience on the sands of life