The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [198]
The great car was waiting, drawn up off the road in the darkness under the pepper-trees. She opened the door for me silently and I got in, spellbound by my fears.
‘Well’ she said at last, and giving a little groan which expressed everything, sank into my arms and pressed her warm mouth on mine. ‘Did you go? Is it over?’
‘Yes.’
She let in the clutch and the driving wheels spurned the gravel as the car moved out into the pearly nightfall and began to follow the coast road to the outer desert. I studied her harsh Semitic profile in the furry light flung back by the headlights from the common objects of the roadside. It belonged so much to the city which I now saw as a series of symbols stretching away from us on either side — minarets, pigeons, statues, ships, coins, camels and palms; it lived in a heraldic relation to the exhausted landscapes which enclosed it — the loops of the great lake: as proper to the scene as the Sphinx was to the desert.
‘My ring’ she said. ‘You brought it?’
‘Yes.’ I polished it once more on my tie and slipped it back once more on to its appropriate finger. Involuntarily I said now:
‘Justine, what is to become of us?’
She gave me a wild frowning look like a Bedouin woman, and then smiled that warm smile. ‘Why?’
‘Surely you see? We shall have to stop this altogether. I can’t bear to think you might be in danger…. Or else I should go straight to Nessim and confront him with….’ With what? I did not know.
‘No’ she said softly, ‘no. You could not do it. You are an Anglo-Saxon … you couldn’t step outside the law like that, could you?
You are not one of us. Besides, you could tell Nessim nothing he does not guess if not actually know…. Darling’ she laid her warm hand upon mine, ‘simply wait … simply love, above all … and we shall see.’
It is astonishing now for me to realize, as I record this scene, that she was carrying within her (invisible as the already con-ceived foetus of a child) Pursewarden’s death: that her kisses were, for all I know, falling upon the graven image of my friend — the death-mask of the writer who himself did not love her, indeed regarded her with derision. But such a demon is love that I would
not be surprised if in a queer sort of way his death actually en-riched our own love-making, filling it with the deceits on which the minds of women feed — the compost of secret pleasures and treacheries which are an inseparable part of every human relation.
Yet what have I to complain of? Even this half-love filled my heart to overflowing. It is she, if anyone, who had cause for com-plaint. It is very hard to understand these things. Was she already planning her flight from Alexandria then? ‘The power of woman is such’ writes Pursewarden ‘that a single kiss can paraphrase the reality of man’s life and turn it …’ but why go on? I was happy sitting beside her, feeling the warmth of her hand as it lay in mine. The blue night was hoary with stars and the attentive desert stretched away on either side with its grotesque amphitheatres —
like the empty rooms in some great cloud-mansion. The moon was late and wan tonight, the air still, the dunes wind-carved. ‘What are you thinking?’ said my lover.
What was I thinking? Of a passage in Proclus which says that Orpheus ruled over the silver race, meaning those who led a
‘silver’ life; on Balthazar’s mantelpiece presumably among the pipe-cleaners and the Indian wood-carving of monkeys which neither saw, spoke nor heard evil, under a magic pentacle from Pythagoras. What was I thinking? The foetus in its waxen wallet, the locust squatting in the horn of the wheat, an Arab quoting a proverb which reverberated in the mind.