The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [226]
‘Let us not think of that now’ said Mountolive. Indeed, he felt quite deprived of any power to confront this parting coolly.
‘Let us talk of other things. Look, I went into Alexandria yesterday and hunted about until I found something suitable to give Ali and the other servants.’
‘What was it?’
In his suitcase upstairs he had some Mecca water in sealed blue bottles from the Holy Well of Zem Zem. These he proposed to give as pourboires. ‘Do you think it will be well taken coming from an infide l?’ he asked anxiously, and Leila was delighted.
‘What a good idea, David. How typical and how tactful! Oh what are we going to do with ourselves when you have gone?’ He felt quite absurdly pleased with himself. Was it possible to imagine a time when they might no longer embrace like this or sit hand in hand in the darkness to feel each other’s pulses marking time quietly away into silence — the dead reaches of experience past?
He averted his mind from the thought — feebly resisting the sharply-pointed truth. But now she said: ‘But fear nothing. I have already planned our relations for years ahead; don’t smile — it may even be better when we have stopped making love and started … what? I don’t know — somehow thinking about each other from a neutral position; as lovers, I mean, who have been forced to separate; who perhaps never should have become lovers; I shall write to you often. A new sort of relationship will begin.’
‘Please stop’ he said, feeling hopelessness steal over him.
‘Why?’ she said, and smiling now lightly kissed his temples.
‘I am more experienced than you are. We shall see.’ Underneath her lightness he recognized something strong, resistant and durable
— the very character of an experience he lacked. She was a gallant creature, and it is only the gallant who can remain light-hearted in adversity. But the night before he left she did not, despite her promises, come to his room. She was woman enough to wish to sharpen the pangs of separation, to make them more durable. And his tired eyes and weary air at breakfast filled her with an un-diminished pleasure at his obvious suffering. She rode to the ferry with him when he left, but the presence of Narouz and Nessim made private conversation impossible, and once again she was almost glad of the fact. There was, in fact, nothing left for either to say. And she unconsciously wished to avoid the tiresome iteration which goes with all love-making and which in the end stales it. She wanted his image of her to remain sharply in focus, and stainless; for she alone recognized that this parting was the pattern, a sample so to speak, of a parting far more definitive and final, a parting which, if their communication was to
remain only through the medium of words and paper, might altogether lose her Mountolive. You cannot write more than a dozen love-letters without finding yourself gravelled for fresh matter. The richest of human experiences is also the most limited in its range of expression. Words kill love as they kill everything else. She had already planned to turn their intercourse away upon another plane, a richer one; but Mountolive was still too young to take advantage of what she might have to offer him — the treasures of the imagination. She would have to give him time to grow. She realized quite clearly that she both loved him dearly, and could resign herself to never seeing him again. Her love had already encompassed and mastered the object’s disappearance — its own death! This thought, defined so sharply in her own mind, gave her a stupendous advantage over him — for he was still wallow ing in the choppy sea of his own illogical and entangled emotions, desire, self-regard, and all the other nursery troubles of a teething love, whereas she was already drawing strength and self-assurance from the very hopelessness of her own case. Her pride of spirit and intelligence lent her a new and unsuspected strength. And though she was sorry with one part of her mind to see him go so soon, though she was glad to see him suffer, and prepared never to see him return, yet she knew she already possessed him, and in a paradoxical way, to say good-bye to him was almost easy. They said good-bye at the ferry and all four participated in the long farewell embrace. It was a fine, ringing morning, with low mists trammelling the outlines of the great lake. Nessim had ordered a car which stood under the further palm-tree, a black, trembling dot. Mountolive took one wild look around him as he stepped into the boat