The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [238]
She bent her pale head once more to her codes. There it was, the flimsy pink membrane of paper with its neatly typed message. He sat down in a chair and read it over slowly twice. Lit a cigarette. Miss Steele raised her head. ‘May I congratulate you, sir?’ —
‘Thank you’ said Mountolive vaguely. He reached his hands to the electric fire for a moment to warm his fingers as he thought deeply. He was beginn ing to feel a vastly different person. The sensation bemused him.
After a while he walked slowly and thoughtfully upstairs to his own office, still deep in this new and voluptuous dream. The curtains had been drawn back — that meant that his secretary had come in; he stood for a while watching the sentries cross and recross the snowlit entrance to the main gate with its ironwork
piled heavily with ice. While he stood there with his dark eyes fixed upon an imagined world lying somewhere behind this huge snowscape, his secretary came in. She was smiling with jubilance.
‘It’s come at last’ she said. Mountolive smiled slowly back. ‘Yes. I wonder if H.E. will stand in my way?’
‘Of course not’ she said emphatically. ‘Why should he?’
Mountolive sat once more at his familiar desk and rubbed his chin. ‘He himself will be off in three months or so’ said the girl. She looked at him curiously, almost angrily, for she could read no pleasure, no self-congratulation in his sober expression. Even good fortune could not pierce that carefully formulated reserve.
‘Well’ he said slowly, for he was still swaddled by his own amaze-ment, the voluptuous dream of an unmerited success. ‘We shall see.’ He had been possessed now by another new and even more vertiginous thought. He opened his eyes widely as he stared at the window. Surely now, he would at long last be free to act? At last the long discipline of self-effacement, of perpetual delegation, was at an end? This was frightening to contemplate, but also exciting. He felt as if now his true personality would be able to find a field of expression in acts; and still full of this engrossing delusion he stood up and smiled at the girl as he said: ‘At any rate, I must ask H.E.’s blessing before we answer. He is not on deck this morning, so lock up. Tomorrow will do.’ She hovered disappointedly for a moment over him before gathering up his tray and taking out the key to his private safe. ‘Very well’ she said.
‘There’s no hurry’ said Mountolive. He felt that his real life now stretched before him; he was about to be reborn. ‘I don’t see my exequatur coming through for a time yet. And so on.’
But his mind was already racing upon a parallel track, saying: ‘In summer the whole Embassy moves to Alexandria, to summer quarters. If I could time my arrival….’
And then, side by side with this sense of exhilaration, came a twinge of characteristic meanness. Mountolive like most people who have nobody on whom to lavish affection, tended towards meanness in money matters. Unreasonable as it was, he suddenly felt a pang of depression at the thought of the costly dress uniform which his new position would demand. Only last week there had
been a catalogue from Skinners showing a greatly increased scale for Foreign Service uniforms.
He got up and went into the room next door to see the private secretary. It was empty. An electric fire glowed. A lighted cigarette smoked in the ashtray beside the two bells marked respective ly
‘ His Ex. ’ and ‘ Her Ex’ . On the pad beside them the Secretary had written in his round feminine hand ‘Not to be woken before eleven.’ This obviously referred to ‘ His Ex. ’. As for ‘ Her Ex. ’, she had only managed to last six months in Moscow before retiring to the amenities of Nice where she awaited her husband upon his retirement. Mountolive stubbed out the cigarette.
It would be useless to call on his Chief before midday, for the morning in Russia afflicted Sir Louis with a splenetic apathy which often made him unresponsive to ideas; and while he could not, in all conscience, do anything to qualify Mountolive