The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [290]
The letter from his sister was there also, but Telford had tact-fully put it into a separate envelope and sealed it. Mountolive read it, shaking his bewildered head, and then thrust it into his pocket shamefacedly. He licked his lips and frowned heavily at the wall. Liza!
Errol put his head timidly round the door and was shocked to surprise tears upon the cheek of his Chief. He ducked back
tactfully and retreated hastily to his office, deeply shaken by a sense of diplomatic inappropriateness somewhat similar to the feelings which Mountolive himself had encountered when Telford tele-phoned him. Errol sat at his desk with attentive nervousness thinking: ‘A good diplomat should never show feeling.’ Then he lit a cigarette with sombre deliberation. For the first time he realized that his Ambassador had feet of clay. This increased his sense of self-respect somewhat. Mountolive was, after all, only a man…. Nevertheless, the experience had been disorienting. Upstairs Mountolive too had lighted a cigarette in order to calm his nerves. The accent of his apprehension was slowly transferring itself from the bare act of Pursewarden (this incon-venient plunge into anonymity) — was transferring itself to the central meaning of the act — to the tidings it brought with it. Nessim! And here he felt his own soul shrink and contract and a deeper, more inarticulate anger beset him. He had trusted Nessim! (‘Why?’ said the inner voice. ‘There was no need to do so.’) And then, by this wicked somersault, Pursewarden had, in effect, transferred the whole weight of the moral problem to Mountolive’s own shoulders. He had started up the hornets’ nest: the old conflict between duty, reason and personal affection which every political man knows is his cross, the central weakness of his life! What a swine, he thought (almost admiringly), Purse-warden had been to transfer it all so easily — the enticing ease of such a decision : withdrawal! He added sadly: ‘I trusted Nessim because of Leila!’ Vexation upon vexation. He smoked and stared now, seeing in the dead white plaster face (which the loving hands of Clea had printed from Balthazar’s clumsy negative) the warm living face of Leila’s son: the dark abstract features from a Ravenna fresco! The face of his friend. And then, his very thoughts uttered themselves in whispers: ‘Perhaps after all Leila is at the bottom of everything.’
(‘Diplomats have no real friends’ Grishkin had said bitterly, trying to wound him, to rouse him. ‘They use everyone.’ He had used, she was implying, her body and her beauty: and now that she was pregnant….)
He exhaled slowly and deeply, invigorated by the nicotine-laden oxygen which gave his nerves time to settle, his brain time to clear. As the mist lifted he discerned something like a new land-
scape opening before him; for here was something which cou ld not help but alter all the dispositions of chance and friendship, alter every date on the affectionate calendar his mind had com-piled about his stay in Egypt: the tennis and swimming and riding. Even these simple motions of joining with the ordinary world of social habit and pleasure, of relieving the medium vitae of his isolation, were all infected by the new knowledge. Moreover, what was to be done with the information which Pursewarden had so unceremoniously thrust into his lap? It must be of course reported. Here he was able to pause. Must it be reported? The data in the letter lacked any shred of supporting evidence — except perhaps the overwhelming evidence of a death which…. He lit a cigarette and whispered the words: ‘While the balance of his mind was disturbed.’ That at least was worth a grim smile! After all, the suicide of a political officer was not such an uncommon event; there had been that youth Greaves, in love with a cabaret-girl in Russia