The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [335]
Could anything be more absurd than these words? He felt bitterly ashamed as he uttered them. ‘Leila, good -bye’ he said hurriedly under his breath, and squeezed her hand once more before he turned. He took to his heels. He unlocked his car and climbed into it panting and overcome by a sense of ghastly folly. The cab moved off into the darkness. He watched it curve slowly along the Corniche and disappear. Then he lit a cigarette and started his engine. All of a sudden there seemed nowhere in particular to go. Every impulse, every desire had faltered and faded out.
After a long pause, he drove slowly and carefully back to the Summer Residence, talking to himself under his breath. The house was in darkness and he let himself in with his key. He
walked from room to room switching on all the lights, feeling all of a sudden quite light-headed with loneliness; he could not accuse the servants of desertion since he had already told Ali that he would be dining out. But he walked up and down the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets for a long time. He smelt the damp unhealed rooms around him; the blank reproachful face of the clock told him that it was only just after nine. Abruptly, he went over to the cocktail cabinet and poured himself a very strong whisky and soda which he drank in one movement — gasping as if it were a dose of fruit salts. His mind was humming now like a high-tension wire. He supposed that he would have to go out and have some dinner by himself. But where? Suddenly the whole of Alexandria, the whole of Egypt, had become distasteful, burden-some, wearisome to his spirit. He drank several more whiskies, enjoying the warmth they brought to his blood — so unused was he to spirits which usually he drank very sparingly. Leila had suddenly left him face to face with a reality which, he supposed, had always lain lurking behind the dusty tapestry of his romantic notions. In a sense, she had been Egypt, his own private Egypt of the mind; and now this old image had been husked, stripped bare. ‘It would be intemperate to drink any more’ he told himself as he drained his glass. Yes, that was it! He had never been intemperate, never been natural, outward-going in his attitude to life. He had always hidden behind measure and compromise; and this defection had somehow lost him the picture of the Egypt which had nourished him for so long. Was it, then, all a lie?
He felt as if somewhere inside himself a dam were threatened, a barrier was on the point of giving way. It was with some idea of restoring this lost contact with the life of this embodied land that he hit upon the idea of doing something he had never done since his youth: he would go out and dine in the Arab quarter, humbly and simply, like a small clerk in the city, like a tradesman, a merchant. Somewhere in a small native restaurant he would eat a pigeon and some rice and a plate of sweetmeats; the food would sober and steady him while the surroundings would restore in him the sense of contact with reality. He could not remember ever having felt so tipsy and leaden-footed before. His thoughts were awash with inarticulate self-reproaches.
Still with this incoherent, half-rationalized desire in mind he suddenly went out to the hall cupboard to unearth the red felt tarbush which someone had left behind after a cocktail party last summer. He had suddenly remembered it. It lay among a litter of golf-clubs and tennis racquets. He put it on with a chuckle. It transformed his appearance completely. Looking at himself un-steadily in the hall mirror, he was quite surprised by the trans-formation : he was confronting not a distinguished foreign visitor to Egypt now, but