The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [292]
‘Yes. I have his file here. There is only a sister at the Imperial Institute for the Blind, I think, apart from his wife.’ Errol fussily consulted a green folder, but Mountolive said ‘Yes, yes. I know her.’
Errol stood up.
Mountolive added: ‘And I think in all fairness we should copy to Maskelyne in Jerusalem, don’t you?’
‘Most certainly, sir.’
‘And for the moment keep our own counsel?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Thank you very much’ said Mountolive with unusual warmth. He felt all of a sudden very old and frail. Indeed he felt so weak that he doubted if his limbs could carry him downstairs to the Residence. ‘That is all at present.’ Errol took his leave, closing the door behind him with the gravity of a mute.
Mountolive telephoned to the buttery and ordered himself a glass of beef-tea and biscuits. He ate and drank ravenously, staring the while at the white mask and the manuscript of a novel. He felt both a deep disgust and a sense of enormous bereavement —
he could not tell which lay uppermost. Unwittingly, too, Purse-warden had, he reflected, separated him forever from Leila. Yes, that also, and perhaps forever.
That night, however, he made his witty prepared speech
(written by Errol) to the Alexandrian Chamber of Commerce, delighting the assembled bankers by his fluent French. The clap-ping swelled and expanded in the august banquet room of the Mohammed Ali Club. Nessim, seated at the opposite end of the long table, undertook the response with gravity and a calm address. Once or twice during the dinner Mountolive felt the dark eyes of his friend seeking his own, interrogating them, but he evaded them. A chasm now yawned between them which neither would know how to bridge. After dinner, he met Nessim briefly in the hall as he was putting on his coat. He suddenly felt the almost irresistible desire to refer to Pursewarden’s death. The subject obtruded itself so starkly, stuck up jaggedly into the air between them. It shamed him as a physical deformity might; as if his handsome smile were disfigured by a missing front tooth. He said nothing and neither did Nessim. Nothing of what was going on beneath the surface showed in the elastic and capable manner of the two tall men who stood smoking by the front door, waiting for the car to arrive. But a new watchful, obdurate knowledge had been born between them. How strange that a few words scribbled on a piece of paper should make them enemies!
Then leaning back in his beflagged car, drawing softly on an excellent cigar, Mountolive felt his innermost soul become as dusty, as airless as an Egyptian tomb. It was strange too that side by side with these deeper preoccupations the shallower should coexist; he was delighted by the extent of his success in captivating the bankers! He had been undeniably brilliant. Discreetly cir-culated copies of his speech would, he knew, be printed verbatim in tomorrow’s papers, illustrated by new photographs of himself. The Corps would be envious as usual. Why had nobody thought of making a public statement about the Gold Standard in this oblique fashion? He tried to keep his mind effervescent, solidly anchored to this level of self-congratulation, but it was useless. The Embassy would soon be moving back to its winter quarters. He had not seen Leila. Would he ever see her again?
Somewhere inside himself a barrier had collapsed, a dam had been broached. He had engaged upon a new conflict with himself which gave a new tautness to his features, a new purposeful rhythm to his walk.
That night he was visited by an excruciating attack of the ear-ache with which he always celebrated his return home. This was the first time he had ever been attacked while he was outside the stockade of his mother’