The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [382]
‘You ’ve had me chasing my tail all day.’
‘I had work to do. But Darley, how you’ve changed! You don’t stoop any more. And your spectacles….’
‘I broke them by accident ages ago, and then found I didn’t really need them.’
‘I’m delighted for you. Bravo! Tell me, do you notice my wrinkles? I’m getting some, I fear. Have I changed very much, would you say?’
She was more beautiful than I could remember her to have been, slimmer, and with a subtle range of new gestures and expressions suggesting a new and troubling maturity.
‘You ’ve grown a new laugh.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes. It’s deeper and more melodious. But I must not flatter you! A nightingale’s laugh — if they do laugh.’
‘Don’t make me self-conscious because I so much want to laugh with you. You’ll turn it into a croak.’
‘Clea, why didn’t you come and meet me?’
She wrinkled up her nose for a moment, and putting her hand on my arm, bent her head once more to the coffee grounds which were drying fast into little whorls and curves like sand-dunes.
‘Light me a cigarette’ she said pleadingly.
‘Nessim said you turned tail at the last moment.’
‘Yes, I did, my dear.’
‘Why?’
‘I suddenly felt it might be inopportune. It might have been a complication somehow. You had old accounts to render, old scores to settle, new relationships to explore. I really felt powerless to do anything about you until … well, until you had seen Justine. I don’t know why. Yes I do, though. I wasn’t sure that the cycle would really change, I didn’t know how much you had or hadn’t changed yourself. You are such a bloody correspondent I hadn’t any way of judging about your inside state of mind. Such a long time since you wrote, isn’t it? And then the child and all that. After all, people sometimes get stuck like an old disc and can’t move out of a groove. That might have been your fate with Justine. So it wasn’t for me to intrude, since my side of you…. Do you see? I had to give you air.’
‘And supposing I have stuck like some old disc?’
‘No it hasn’t turned out like that.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘From your face, Darley. I could tell in a flash!’
‘I don’t know quite how to explain….’
‘You don’t need to’ her voice curved upwards with elation and her bright eyes smiled. ‘We have such totally different claims upon each other. We are free to forget! You men are the strangest creatures. Listen, I have arranged this first day together like a tableau, like a charade. Come first and see the queer immortality one of us has gained. Will you put yourself in my hands? I have been so looking forward to acting as dragoman on , . . but no, I won’t tell you. Just let me pay for this coffee.’
‘What does your fortune say in the grounds?’
‘Chance meetings!’
‘I think you invent.’
The afternoon had been overcast and dusk fell early. Already the sunset violets had begun to tamper with the perspectives of the streets along the seafront. We took an old horse-drawn gharry
which was standing forlornly in a taxi rank by Ramleh Station. The ancient jarvey with his badly cicatriced face asked hopefully if we wished for a ‘carriage of love’ or an ‘ordinary carriage’, and Clea, giggling, selected the latter variety of the same carriage as being cheaper. ‘O son of truth!’ she said. ‘What woman would take a lusty husband in such a thing when she has a good bed at home which costs nothing.’
‘Merciful is God’ said the old man with sublime resignation. So we set off down the white curving Esplanade with its fluttering awnings, the quiet sea spreading away to the right of us to a blank horizon. In the past we had so often come this way to visit the old pirate in his shabby rooms in Tatwig Street.
‘Clea, where the devil are we going?’
‘Wait and see.’
I could see him so clearly, the old man. I wondered for a moment if his shabby ghost still wandered about those dismal rooms, whistling to the green parrot and reciting: ‘ Taisez-vous,
petit babouin. ’ I felt Clea’s arm squeeze mine as we sheered off left and entered the smoking ant-heap of the Arab town, the streets choked with smoke from the burning refuse-heaps, or richly spiced with cooking meat and whiffs of baking bread from the bakeries.