The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [99]
The faces surging round us sipping toasts prevent my answering him, and I am glad of it for I have nothing to say. I gaze at him with a portentous numbness, nodding my head. Clea catches my
wrist and draws me aside to whisper: ‘A card from Justine. She is working in a Jewish kibbutz in Palestine. Shall I tell Nessim?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’
‘She asks me not to.’
‘Then don’t.’
I am too proud to ask if there is any message for me. The com-pany has started to sing the old song ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ in a variety of times and accents. Pombal has turned pink with pleasure. I gently shake off Clea’s hand in order to join in the singing. The little consul-general is fawning and gesticulating over Pombal; his relief at my friend’s departure is so great that he has worked himself up into a paroxysm of friendship and regret. The English consular group has the disconsolate air of a family of moulting turkeys. Madame de Venuta is beating time with an elegant gloved hand. The black servants in their long white gloves move swiftly from group to group of the guests like eclipses of the moon. If one were to go away, I catch myself thinking, to Italy perhaps or to France: to start a new sort of life: not a city life this time, perhaps an island in the Bay of Naples…. But I realise that what remains unresolved in my life is not the problem of Justine but the problem of Melissa. In some curious way the future, if there is one, has always been vested in her. Yet I feel powerless to influence it by decisions or even hopes. I feel that I must wait patiently until the shallow sequences of our history match again, until we can fall into step once more. This may take years —
perhaps we will both be grey when the tide suddenly turns. Or perhaps the hope will die stillborn, broken up like wreckage by the tides of events. I have so little faith in myself. The money Pursewarden left is still in the bank — I have not touched a penny of it. For such a sum we might live for several years in some cheap spot in the sun.
Melissa still writes the spirited nonchalant letters which I have such difficulty in answering save by whining retorts about my cir-cumstances or my improvidence. Once I leave the city it will be easier. A new road will open. I will write to her with absolute frank-ness, telling her all I feel — even those things which I believe her forever incapable of understanding properly. ‘I shall return in the spring’ Nessim is saying to the Baron Thibault ‘and take up my summer quarters at Abousir. I am determined to slack off for
about two years. I’ve been working too hard at business and it isn’t worth it.’ Despite the haunted pallor of his face one cannot help seeing in him a new repose, a relaxation of the will; the heart may be distracted, but the nerves are at last at rest. He is weak, as a convalescent is weak; but he is no longer ill. We talk and joke quietly for a while; it is clear that our friendship will repair itself sooner or later — for we now have a common fund of unhappiness upon which to draw. ‘Justine’ I say, and he draws in his breath slightly, as if one had run a small thorn under his fingernail, ‘writes from Palestine.’ He nods quickly and motions me with a small gesture. ‘I know. We have traced her. There is no need to … I’m writing to her. She can stay away as long as she wishes. Come back in her own good time.’ It would be foolish to deprive him of the hope and the consolation it must give him, but I know now that she will never return on the old terms. Every phrase of her letter to me made this clear. It is not us she had abandoned so much but a way of life which threatened her reason — the city, love, the sum of all that we had shared. What had she written to him, I wondered, as I recalled the short sobbing breath he had drawn as he leaned against the whitewashed wall?
* * * * *
On these spring mornings while the island slowly uncurls from the sea in the light of an early sun I walk about on the deserted beaches, trying to recover my memories of the time spent in Upper Egypt. It is strange when everything about Alexandria is so vivid that I can recover so little of that lost period. Or perhaps it is not so strange