The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [363]
‘The Ambassador?’ It was bewildering.
‘He’s a friend of yours, is he not?’
‘I hardly know him.’
‘Nevertheless I am bound to accept his direction, even though I am in charge of this operation.’
There were forms to be filled in. The fat man, who was not unamiable, and whose name was Kenilworth, obliged by helping
me. ‘It is a bit of mystery’ I said. He shrugged his shoulders and spread his white hands. ‘I suggest you discuss it with him when you meet.’
‘But I had no intention …’ I said. But it seemed pointless to discuss the matter further until I discovered what lay behind it. How could Mountolive…? But Kenilworth was talking again.
‘I suppose you might need a week to find yourself lodgings here before you settle in. Shall I tell the department so?’
‘If you wish’ I said in bewilderment. I was dismissed and spent some time in the cellars unearthing my battered cabin-trunk and selecting from it a few respectable city-clothes. With these in a brown paper parcel I walked slowly along the Corniche towards the Cecil, where I purposed to take a room, have a bath and shave, and prepare myself for the visit to the country house. This had begun to loom up rather in my mind, not exactly with anxiety but with the disquiet which suspense always brings. I stood for a while staring down at the still sea, and it was while I was standing thus that the silver Rolls with the daffodil hub-cups drew up and a large bearded personage jumped out and came galloping towards me with hands out-stretched. It was only when I felt his arms hugging my shoulders and the beard brushing my cheek in a Gallic greeting that I was able to gasp ‘Pombal!’
‘Darley’. Still holding my hands as tenderly, and with tears in his eyes, he drew me to one side and sat down heavily on one of the stone benches bordering the marine parade. Pombal was in the most elegant tenue. His starched cuffs rattled crisply. The dark beard and moustache gave him an imposing yet somehow forlorn air. Inside all these trappings he seemed quite unchanged. He peered through them, like a Tiberius in fancy-dress. We gazed at each other for a long moment of silence, with emotion. Both knew that the silence we observed was one of pain for the fall of France, an event which symbolized all too clearly the psychic collapse of Europe itself. We were like mourners at an invisible cenotaph during the two minutes’ silence which commemorates an irre-mediable failure of the human will. I felt in his handclasp all the shame and despair of this graceless tragedy and I sought desper-ately for the phrase which might console him, might reassure him that France itself could never truly die so long as artists were being born into the world. But this world of armies and battles
was too intense and too concrete to make the thought seem more than of secondary importance — for art really means freedom, and it was this which was at stake. At last the words came. ‘Never mind. Today I’ve seen the little blue cross of Lorraine flowering everywhere.’
‘You understand’ he murmured and squeezed my hand again.
‘I knew you would understand. Even when you most criticized her you knew that she meant as much to you as to us.’ He blew his nose suddenly, with startling loudness, in a clean handker-chief and leaned back on the stone bench. With amazing sudden-ness he had become his old self again, the timid, fat, irrepressible Pombal of the past. ‘There is so much to tell you. You will come with me now. At once. Not a word. Yes, it is Nessim’s car. I bought it to save it from the Egyptians. Mountolive has fixed you an excellent post. I am still in the old flat, but now we have taken the building. You can have the whole top floor. It will be like old times again.’ I was carried off my feet by his volubility and by the bewildering variety of prospects he described so rapidly and con-fident ly, without apparently expecting comment. His English had become practically perfect.