The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [183]
According to Balthazar, I have misread the order of Justine’s fears in so far as they concerned Nessim. The incident of the car I have recorded elsewhere; how she was racing towards Cairo one night to meet Pursewarden when the lights of the great moth-coloured Rolls went out. Blinded by darkness she lost control of it and it swarmed off the road, bouncing from dune to dune and throwing up spouts of sand like the spray thrown up by the death-agonies of a whale. Then ‘whistling like an arrow’ it buried itself to
the windscreens in a dune and lay trembling and murmuring. For-tunately, she was not hurt and had the presence of mind to switch off the engine. But how had the accident come about? In telling me of it she said that when the car was examined the wiring was found to have been filed down — by whom?
This was, as far as I know, the first time that her fears concerning Nessim, and a possible attempt on her own life, became articu-late. She had spoken of his jealousy before, yes; but not of any-thing like this, not of anything so concrete — so truly Alexandrian. My own alarm may well be imagined.
Yet now Balthazar in his notes says that some ten days before this incident, she had seen Selim from the studio window walk across the lawn towards the car, and there believing himself un-observed, lift the bonnet to take out from under it one of the little wax rollers which she thought she recognized as part of the equip-ment belonging to the dictaphone which Nessim often used in the office. He had wrapped the object in a cloth and carried it indoors. She sat at the window for a long time, musing and smoking before acting. Then she took the car out on to the desert road to a lonely place the better to examine it. Under the bonnet she found a small apparatus which she did not recognize but which seemed to her to be possibly a recording machine. Presumably a wire lead con-nected it to a small microphone buried somewhere among the coloured coils of the dashboard wiring, but she could not trace it. With her nail file, however, she cut the wire at several points while leaving the whole contrivance in place and apparently in working order. It was now, according to Balthazar, that she must by accident have disturbed or half-severed one of the leads to the car’s headlights. At least, this is what she told him, though she gave me no such explanation. If I am to believe him, all this time, while she went on and on about the heedless folly of our public behaviour and the risks we were taking, she was really drawing me on —
trailing me before the eyes of Nessim like a cape before a bull!
But this was only at first; later, says my friend, came something which really made her feel that some action against her was con-templated by her husband: namely the murder of Toto de Brunel during the carnival ball at the Cervonis’. Why have I never men-tioned this? It is true that I was even there at the time, and yet somehow the whole incident though it belonged to the atmosphere
of the moment escaped me in the press of other matters. Alexandria had many such unsolved mysteries at that time. And while I knew the interpretation Justine put upon it I did not myself believe it at the time. Nevertheless, it is strange that I should not have men-tioned it, even in passing. Of course, the true explanation of the matter was only given to me months later: almost when I myself was on the point of leaving Alexandria for ever as I thought. The carnival in Alexandria is a purely social affair