The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [467]
When the glasses were brought he sat for a long while silent with his chin on his hands, staring at them. Then he gave a sigh and shook his head sadly.
‘What is it?’ I said, removing his glass from the tray and placing it squarely before him on the tin table.
‘Leila is dead’ he said qu ietly. The words seemed to weight him down with sorrow. ‘Nessim telephoned this evening to tell
me. The strange thing is that he sounded exhilarated by the news. He has managed to get permission to fly down and make arrange-ments for her funeral. D’you know what he said?’ Balthazar looked at me with that dark all-comprehending eye and went on.
‘He said: “While I loved her and all that, her death has freed me in a curious sort of way. A new life is opening before me. I feel years younger.” I don’t know if it was a trick of the telephone or what but he sounded younger. His voice was full of suppressed excitement. He knew, of course, that Leila and I were the oldest of friends but not that all through this period of absence she was writing to me. She was a rare soul, Darley, one of the rare flowers of Alexandria. She wrote: “I know I am dying, my dear Balthazar, but all too slowly. Do not believe the doctors and their diagnoses, you of all men. I am dying of heartsickness like a true Alexan-drian.” ’ Balthazar blew his nose in an old sock which he took from the breast-pocket of his coat; carefully folded it to resemble a clean handkerchief and pedantically replaced it. ‘Yes’ he said again, grave ly, ‘what a word it is — “heartsickness”! And it seems to me that while (from what you tell me) Liza Pursewarden was administering her death-warrant to her brother, Mountolive was giving the same back-hander to Leila. So we pass the loving-cup about, the poisoned loving-cup!’ He nodded and took a loud sip of his drink. He went on slowly, with immense care and effort, like someone translating from an obscure and recondite text.
‘Yes, just as Liza’s letter to Pursewarden telling him that at last the stranger had appeared was his coup de grâce so to speak, so Leila received, I suppose, exactly the same letter. Who knows how these things are arranged? Perhaps in the very same words. The same words of passionate gratitude: “I bless you, I thank you with all my heart that through you I am at last able to receive the precious gift which can never come to those who are ignorant of its powers.” Those are the words of Mountolive. For Leila quoted them to me. All this was after she went away. She wrote to me. It was as if she were cut off from Nessim and had nobody to turn to, nobody to talk to. Hence the long letters in which she went over it all, backwards and forwards, with that marvellous candour and clear-sightedness which I so loved in her. She refused every self-deception. Ah! but she fell between two stools, Leila, between two lives, two loves. She said something like this
in explaining it to me: ‘‘I thought at first when I got his letter that it was just another attachment — as it was in the past for his Russian ballerina. There was never any secret between us of his loves, and that is what made ours seem so truthful, so immortal in its way. It was a love without reserves. But this time everything became clear to me when he refused to tell me her name, to share her with me, so to speak! I knew then that everything was ended. Of course in another corner of my mind I had always been waiting for this moment; I pictured myself facing it with magnanimity. This I found, to my surprise, was impossible. That was why for a long time, even when I knew he was in Egypt, and anxious to see me, I could not bring myself to see him. Of course I pretended it was for other reasons, purely feminine ones. But it was not that. It wasn’t lack of courage because of my smashed beauty, no! For I have in reality the heart of a man.