The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [328]
She was staring unsmilingly at him. ‘I am nervous’ she said at last with a little shiver. ‘Nessim, let us drive by the Nile for an hour and collect our thoughts before we go to bed.’
He was glad to indulge her, and for an hour the car nosed softly along the noble tree-lined roads of the Nile river-bank under the jacarandas, its engine purring, while they talked inter-mittently in low voices. ‘What worries me’ she said, ‘is that you will have Memlik’s hand upon your shoulder. How will you ever shake it off? If he has firm evidence against you, he will never relax his grip until you are squeezed dry.’
‘Either way’ said Nessim quietly ‘it would be bad for us. For if he proceeded with an open enquiry, you know very well that it would give the Government a chance to sequestrate our properties. I would rather satisfy his private cupidity as long as I can. Afterwards, we shall see. The main thing is to concentrate on this coming … battle.’
As he uttered the word they were passing the brilliantly lighted gardens of the British Embassy. Justine gave a little start and plucked his sleeve, for she had caught sight of a slender pyjama-clad figure walking about the green lawns with an air of familiar distraction. ‘Mountolive’ she said. Nessim looked sorrowfully across the gardens at his friend, suddenly possessed by a temp-tation to stop the car and enter the gardens to surprise him.
Such a gesture would have been in keeping with their behaviour towards each other — not three months before. What had happened to everything now? ‘He’ll catch cold’ said Justine; ‘he is barefooted. Holding a telegram.’
Nessim increased speed and the car curved on down the avenue. ‘I expect’ he said ‘that he suffers from insomnia and wanted to cool his feet in the grass before trying to get to sleep. You often used to do that. Remember?’
‘But the telegram?’
There was really no great mystery about the telegram which the sleepless Ambassador held in his hand and which he studied from time to time as he walked slowly about in his own demesne, smoking a cigar. Once a week he played a game of chess with Balthazar by telegram — an event which nowadays gave him great solace, and some of the refreshment which tired men of affairs draw from crossword puzzles. He did not see the great car as it purred on past the gardens and headed for the town.
* * * * *
XV
hey were to stay like this for many weeks now, the
actors: as if trapped once and for all in postures which T might illustrate how incalculable a matter naked pro-vidence can be. To Mountolive, more than the others, came a disenchanting sense of his own professional inadequacy, his powerlessness to act now save as an instrument (no longer a factor), so strongly did he feel himself gripped by the gravitationa l field of politics. Private humours and impulses were alike disinherited, counting for nothing. Did Nessim also feel the mounting flavour of stagnation in everything? He thought back bitterly and often to the casually spoken words of Sir Louis as he was combing his hair in the mirror. ‘The illusion that you are free to act!’ He suffered from excruciating headaches now from time to time and his teeth began to give him trouble. For some reason or another he took the fancy that this was due to over-smoking
and tried to abandon the habit unsuccessfully. The struggle with tobacco only increased his misery.
Yet if he himself were powerless, now, how much more so the others? Like the etiolated projections of a sick imagination, they seemed, drained of meaning, empty as suits of clothes; taking up emplacements in this colourless drama of contending wills. Nessim, Justine, Leila — they had an unsubstantial air now — as of dream projections acting in a world populated by expressionless waxworks. It was difficult to feel that he owed them even love any lon ger. Leila’s silence above all suggested, even more clearly, the guilt of her complicity.
Autumn drew to an end and still Nur could produce no proof of action. The life-lines which tied Mountolive’s Mission to London became clogged with longer and longer telegrams full of the shrewish iterations of minds trying to influence the operation of what Mountolive now knew to be not merely chance, but in fact destiny. It was interesting, too, in a paradoxical sort of way, this first great lesson which his profession had to teach him; for outside the circumscribed area of his personal fears and hesitations, he watched the whole affair with a kind of absorbed attention, with almost a sense of dreadful admiration. But it was like some fretful mummy that he now presented himself to the gaze of Nur, almost ashamed of the splendours of that second-hand uniform, so clearly was it intended to admonish or threaten the Minister. The old man was full of a feverish desire to accommodate him; he was like a monkey jumping enthusiastically on the end of a chain. But what could he do? He made faces to match his trans-parent excuses. The investigations undertaken by Memlik were not as yet complete. It was essential to verify the truth. The threads were still being followed up. And so forth.