The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [423]
Dinner was wheeled in by a servant, and still exchanging small talk we sat down to eat it; Liza ate swiftly, as if she were hungry, and quite unerringly, from the plate which Mountolive filled for her. I noticed when she reached for her wineglass that her ex-pressive fingers trembled slightly. At last, when the meal was over, Mountolive rose with an air of scarcely disguised relief and excused himself. ‘I’m going to leave you alone to talk shop to Liza. I shall have to do some work in the Chancery this evening. You will excuse me, won’t you?’ I saw an apprehensive frown shadow Liza’s face for a moment, but it vanished almost at once and was re-placed by an expression which suggested something between des-pair and resignation. Her fingers picked softly, suggestively at the tassel of a cushion. When the door had closed behind him she still sat silent, but now preternaturally still, her head bent down-
wards as if she were trying to decipher a message written in the palm of her hand. At last she spoke in a small cold voice, pro-nouncing the words incisively as if to make her meaning plain.
‘I had no idea it would be difficult to explain when first I thought of asking your help. This book….’
There was a long silence. I saw that little drops of perspiration had come out on her upper lip and her temples looked as if they had tightened under stress. I felt a certain compassion for her distress and said: ‘I can’t claim to have known him well, though I saw him quite frequently. In truth, I don’t think we liked each other very much.’
‘Originally’ she said sharply, cutting across my vagueness with impatience ‘I thought I might persuade you to do the book about him. But now I see that you will have to know everything. It is not easy to know where to begin. I myself doubt whether the facts of his life are possible to put down and publish. But I have been driven to think about the matter, first because his publishers ins ist on it — they say there is a great public demand; but mostly because of the book which this shabby journalist is writing, or has written. Keats.’
‘Keats’ I echoed with surprise.
‘He is here somewhere I believe; but I do not know him. He has been put up to the idea by my brother’s wife. She hated him, you know, after she found out; she thought that my brother and I had between us ruined her life. Truthfully I am afraid of her. I do not know what she has told Keats, or what he will write. I see now that my original idea in having you brought here was to get you to write a book which would … disguise the truth somehow. It only became clear to me just now when I was confronted by you. It would be inexpressibly painful to me if anything got out which harmed my brother’s memory.’
Somewhere to the east I heard a grumble of thunder. She stood up with an air of panic and after a moment’s hesitation crossed to the grand piano and struck a chord. Then she banged the cover down and turned once more to me, saying: ‘I am afraid of thunder. Please may I hold your hand in a firm grip.’ Her own was deathly cold. Then, shaking back her black hair she said: ‘We were lovers, you know. That is really the meaning of his story and mine. He tried to break away. His marriage foundered on this
question. It was perhaps dishonest of him not to have told her the truth before he married her. Things fall out strangely. For many years we enjoyed a perfect happiness, he and I. That it ended tragically is nobody’s fault I suppose. He could not free himself from my inside hold on him, though he tried and struggled. I could not free myself from him, though truthfully I never wished to until … until the day arrived which he had predicted so many years before when the man he always called “the dark stranger”
arrived. He saw him so clearly when he gazed into the fire. It was David Mountolive. For a little while I did not tell him that I had fallen in love, the fated love. (David would not let me. The only person we told was Nessim’s mother. David asked my permission.) But my brother knew it quite unerringly and wrote after a long silence asking me if the stranger had come. When he got my letter he seemed suddenly to realize that our relationship might be endangered or crushed in the way his had been with his wife