The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [244]
sentences with little motions of the ivory paper-weight. Mount-olive fell in naturally with the charm of his language — the English of fine breeding and polish which carried those invisible diacritical marks, the expression of its caste.
‘You looked in on the Berlin mission, I gather? Good. Anyway, if you’ve been following P.E. you will see the shape of things to come perhaps, and be able to judge the extent of our preoccu-pations with your own appointment. Eh?’ He did not like to use the word ‘war’. It sounded theatrical. ‘If the worst comes to the worst we don’t need to emphasize a concern for Suez — indeed, for the whole Arab complex of states. But since you’ve served out there I won’t pretend to lecture you about it. But we’ll look forward to your papers with interest. And moreover as you know Arabic’
‘My Arabic has all gone, rusted away.’
‘Hush’ said Granier, ‘not too loud. You owe your appointment in a very large measure to it. Can you get it back swiftly?’
‘If I am allowed the leave I have accrued.’
‘Of course. Besides, now that the Commission is wound up, we shall have to get agrément and so on. And of course the Sec-retary of State will want to confer when he gets back from Wash-ington. Then what about investiture, and kissing hands and all that? Though we regard every appointment of the sort as urgent
… well, you know as well as I do the mandarin calm of F.O. movements’ He smiled his clever and indulgent smile, lighting a Turkish cigarette. ‘I’m not so sure it isn’t a good philosophy either’ he went on. ‘At any rate, as a bias for policy. After all, we are always facing the inevitable, the irremediable; more haste, more muddle! More panic and less confidence. In diplomacy one can only propose, never dispose. That is up to God, don’t you think?’ Granier was one of those worldly Catholics who regarded God as a congenial club-member whose motives are above question. He sighed and was silent for a moment before adding:
‘No, we’ll have to set the chessboard up for you properly. It’s not everyone who’d consider Egypt a plum. All the better for you.’
Mountolive was mentally unrolling a map of Egypt with its green central spine bounded by deserts, the dusty anomalies of its peoples and creeds; and then watching it fade in three directions
into incoherent desert and grassland; to the north Suez like a caesarian section through which the East was untimely ripped; then again the sinuous complex of mountains and dead granite, orchards and plains which were geographically distributed about the map at hazard, boundaries marked by dots…. The metaphor from chess was an apposite one. Cairo lay to the centre of this cobweb. He sighed and took his leave, preparing a new face with which to greet the unhappy Kenilworth.
As he walked thoughtfully back to the janitors on the first floor he noted with alarm that he was already ten minutes late for his second interview and prayed under his breath that this would not be regarded as a deliberate slight.
‘Mr. Kenilworth has phoned down twice, sir. I told him where you were.’
Mountolive breathed more freely and addressed himself once more to the staircase, only to turn right this time and wind down several cold but odourless corridors to where Kenilworth waited, tapping his rimless pince-nez against a large and shapely thumb. They greeted one another with a grotesque effusion which effec-tively masked a reciprocal distaste. ‘My dear David’…. Was it, Mountolive wondered, simply an antipathy to a physical type?
Kenilworth was of a large and porcine aspect, over two hundred pounds of food-and-culture snob. He was prematurely grey. His fat, well-manicured fingers held a pen with a delicacy suggest-ing inc ipient crewel-work or crochet. ‘My dear David!’ They embraced warmly. All the fat on Kenilworth’s large body hung down when he stood up. His flesh was knitted in a heavy cable stitch. ‘My dear Kenny’ said Mountolive with apprehension and self-disgust. ‘What splendid news. I flatter myself Kenilworth put on an arch expression ‘that I may have had something, quite small, quite ins ignificant, to do with it. Your Arabic weighed with the S. of S. and it was I who remembered it! A long memory. Paper work.