The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [425]
She gave a queer blind smile at the memory and I had a sudden compassionate picture of Mountolive sitting before the fire, reading these letters in a slow faltering voice, stunned by the revelation of his own part in this weird masque, which had been planned for him years before, without his knowing. Liza sat beside me, lost in deep thought, her head hanging. Her lips moved slowly as if she were spelling something out in her own mind, following some interior recitation. I shook her hand softly as if to waken her.
‘I should leave you now’ I said softly. ‘And why should I see the private letters at all? There is no need.’
‘Now that you know the worst and best I would like you to advise me about destroying them. It was his wish. But David feels that they belong to his writings, and that we have a duty to preserve them. I cannot make up my mind about this. You are a writer. Try and read them as a writer, as if you had written them, and then tell me whether you would wish them preserved or not. They are all together in that suitcase. There are one or two other fragments which you might help me edit if you have time or if you think them suitable. He always puzzled me —
except when I had him in my arms.’
A sudden expression of savage resentment passed across her white face. As if she had been goaded by a sudden disagreeable memory. She passed her tongue over her dry lips and as we stood up together she added in a small husky voice: ‘There is one thing more. Since you have seen so far into our lives why should
you not look right to the bottom? I always keep this close to me.’
Reaching down into her dress she took out a snapshot and handed it to me. It was faded and creased. A small child with lon g ha ir done up in ribbons sat upon a park bench, gazing with a melan-choly and wistful smile at the camera and holding out a white stick. It took me a moment or so to identify those troubling lines of mouth and nose as the features of Pursewarden himself and to realize that the little girl was blind.
‘Do you see her?’ said Liza in a thrilling whisper that shook the nerves by its strange tension, its mixture of savagery, bitterness and triumphant anguish. ‘Do you see her? She was our child. It was when she died that he was overcome with remorse for a situation which had brought us nothing but joy before. Her death suddenly made him guilty. Our relationship foundered there; and yet it became in another way even more intense, closer. We were united by our guilt from that moment. I have often asked myself why it should be so. Tremendous unbroken happiness and then
… one day, like an iron shutter falling, guilt.’
The word dropped like a falling star and expired in the silence. I took this unhappiest of all relics and pressed it into her cold hands.
‘I will take the letters’ I said.
‘Thank you’ she replied with an air now of dazed exhaustion.
‘I knew we had a friend in you. I shall count on your help.’
As I softly closed the front door behind me I heard a chord struck upon the piano — a single chord which hung in the silent air, its vibrations diminishing like an echo. As I crossed among the trees I caught a glimpse of Mountolive sneaking towards the side door of the house. I suddenly divined that he had been walking up and down outside the house in an agony of apprehen-sion, with the air of a schoolboy waiting outside his housemaster’s study to receive a beating. I felt a pang of sympathy for him, for his weakness, for the dreadful entanglement in which he had, found himself.
I found to my surprise that it was still early. Clea had gone to Cairo for the day and was not expected back. I took the little suitcase to her flat and sitting on the floor unpacked it. In that quiet room, by the light of her candles, I began to read the private letters with a curious interior premonition, a stirring
of something like fear — so dreadful a thing is it to explore the inmost secrets of another human being’s life. Nor did this feeling diminish as I proceeded, rather it deepened into a sort of terror almost a horror of what might be coming next. The letters!