The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [312]
He sighed deeply and said: ‘It is not what you think. You know how much I like him and how well we get on. It is only the pretence, the eternal play-acting one has to indulge in even with one’s friends. If only we did not have to keep on acting a part, Justine.’
But he saw that she was looking at him wide-eyed now, with an expression suggesting something that was close to horror or dismay. ‘Ah’ she said thoughtfully, sorrowfully after a moment, closing her eyes, ‘ah, Nessim! Then I should not know who I was.’
* * * * *
The two men sat in the warm conservatory, silently facing each other over the magnificent chessboard with its ivories — in perfect companionship. The set was a twenty-first birthday gift, from Mountolive’s mother. As they sat, each occasionally mused
aloud, absently. It wasn’t conversation, but simply thinking aloud, a communion of minds which were really occupied by the grand strategy of chess: a by-product of friendship which was rooted in the fecund silences of the royal game. Balthazar spoke of Pursewarden. ‘It annoys me, his suicide. I feel I had somehow missed the point. I take it to have been an expression of contempt for the world, contempt for the conduct of the world.’
Mountolive glanced up quickly. ‘No, no. A conflict between duty and affection.’ Then he added swiftly ‘But I can’t tell you very much. When his sister comes, she will tell you more, perhaps, if she can.’ They were silent. Balthazar sighed and said ‘Truth naked and unashamed. That’s a splendid phrase. But we always see her as she seems, never as she is. Each man has his own interpretation.’
Another long silence. Balthazar loquitur, musingly, to himself.
‘Sometimes one is caught pretending to be God and learns a bitter lesson. Now I hated Dmitri Randidi, though not his lovely daughter; but just to humiliate him (I was disguised as a gipsy woman at the carnival ball), I told her fortune. Tomorrow, I said, she would have a life-experience which she must on no account miss — a man sitting in the ruined tower at Taposiris. “You will not speak” I said “but walk straight into his arms, your eyes closed. His name begins with an L, his family name with J.” (I had in fact already thought of a particularly hideous young man with these initials, and he was across the road at the Cervonis’
ball. Colourless eyelashes, a snout, sandy hair.) I chuckled when she believed me. Having told her this prophecy — everyone believes the tale of a gipsy, and with my black face and hook nose I made a splendid gipsy — having arranged this, I went across the road and sought out L. J., telling him I had a message for him. I knew him to be superstitious. He did not recognize me. I told him of the part he should play. Malign, spiteful, I suppose. I only planned to annoy Randidi. And it all turned out as I had planned. For the lovely girl obeyed the gipsy and fell in love with this freckled toad with the red hair. A more unsuitable conjunction cannot be imagined. But that was the idea — to make Randidi hop! It did, yes, very much, and I was so pleased by my own cleverness. He of course forbade the marriage. The lovers —
which I invented, my lovers — were separated. Then Gaby Ran-
didi, the beautiful girl, took poison. You can imagine how clever I felt. This broke her father’s health and the neurasthenia (never very far from the surface in the family) overwhelmed him at last. Last autumn he was found hanging from the trellis which sup-ports the most famous grapevine in the city and from which….’
In the silence which followed he could be heard to add the words: ‘It is only another story of our pitiless city. But check to your Queen, unless I am mistaken….’
* * * * *
XIII
ith the first thin effervescence of autumn rain Mount-olive found himself back for the winter spell in Cairo W with nothing of capital importance as yet decided
in the field of policy; London was silent on the revelations con-tained in Pursewarden’s farewell letter and apparently disposed rather to condole with a Chief of Mission whose subordinates proved of doubtful worth than to criticize him or subject the whole matter to any deep scrutiny. Perhaps the feeling was best expressed in the long and pompous letter in which Kenilworth felt disposed to discuss the tragedy, offering assurances that everyone