The Alexandria Quartet (103 page)

‘And you?'

‘I shall stay on a little while to keep things in place here. The Community needs me. There is a lot to be done politically still. Then I shall come to you and we can have a long holiday in Europe or anywhere you choose.…'

She was staring unsmilingly at him. ‘I am nervous' she said at last with a little shiver. ‘Nessim, let us drive by the Nile for an hour and collect our thoughts before we go to bed.'

He was glad to indulge her, and for an hour the car nosed softly along the noble tree-lined roads of the Nile river-bank under the jacarandas, its engine purring, while they talked intermittently in low voices. ‘What worries me' she said, ‘is that you will have Memlik's hand upon your shoulder. How will you ever shake it off? If he has firm evidence against you, he will never relax his grip until you are squeezed dry.'

‘Either way' said Nessim quietly ‘it would be bad for us. For if he proceeded with an open enquiry, you know very well that it would give the Government a chance to sequestrate our properties. I would rather satisfy his private cupidity as long as I can. Afterwards, we shall see. The main thing is to concentrate on this coming … battle.'

As he uttered the word they were passing the brilliantly lighted gardens of the British Embassy. Justine gave a little start and plucked his sleeve, for she had caught sight of a slender pyjamaclad figure walking about the green lawns with an air of familiar distraction. ‘Mountolive' she said. Nessim looked sorrowfully across the gardens at his friend, suddenly possessed by a temptation to stop the car and enter the gardens to surprise him. Such a gesture would have been in keeping with their behaviour towards each other — not three months before. What had happened to everything now? ‘He'll catch cold' said Justine; ‘he is barefooted. Holding a telegram.'

Nessim increased speed and the car curved on down the avenue. ‘I expect' he said ‘that he suffers from insomnia and wanted to cool his feet in the grass before trying to get to sleep. You often used to do that. Remember?'

‘But the telegram?'

There was really no great mystery about the telegram which the sleepless Ambassador held in his hand and which he studied from time to time as he walked slowly about in his own demesne, smoking a cigar. Once a week he played a game of chess with Balthazar by telegram — an event which nowadays gave him great solace, and some of the refreshment which tired men of affairs draw from crossword puzzles. He did not see the great car as it purred on past the gardens and headed for the town.

XV

T
hey were to stay like this for many weeks now, the actors: as if trapped once and for all in postures which might illustrate how incalculable a matter naked providence can be. To Mountolive, more than the others, came a disenchanting sense of his own professional inadequacy, his powerlessness to act now save as an instrument (no longer a factor), so strongly did he feel himself gripped by the gravitational field of politics. Private humours and impulses were alike disinherited, counting for nothing. Did Nessim also feel the mounting flavour of stagnation in everything? He thought back bitterly and often to the casually spoken words of Sir Louis as he was combing his hair in the mirror. ‘The illusion that you are free to act!' He suffered from excruciating headaches now from time to time and his teeth began to give him trouble. For some reason or another he took the fancy that this was due to over-smoking and tried to abandon the habit unsuccessfully. The struggle with tobacco only increased his misery.

Yet if he himself were powerless, now, how much more so the others? Like the etiolated projections of a sick imagination, they seemed, drained of meaning, empty as suits of clothes; taking up emplacements in this colourless drama of contending wills. Nessim, Justine, Leila — they had an unsubstantial air now — as of dream projections acting in a world populated by expressionless waxworks. It was difficult to feel that he owed them even love any longer. Leila's silence above all suggested, even more clearly, the guilt of her complicity.

Autumn drew to an end and still Nur could produce no proof of action. The life-lines which tied Mountolive's Mission to London became clogged with longer and longer telegrams full of the shrewish iterations of minds trying to influence the operation of what Mountolive now knew to be not merely chance, but in fact destiny. It was interesting, too, in a paradoxical sort of way, this first great lesson which his profession had to teach him; for outside the circumscribed area of his personal fears and hesitations, he watched the whole affair with a kind of absorbed attention, with almost a sense of dreadful admiration. But it was like some fretful mummy that he now presented himself to the gaze of Nur, almost ashamed of the splendours of that second-hand uniform, so clearly was it intended to admonish or threaten the Minister. The old man was full of a feverish desire to accommodate him; he was like a monkey jumping enthusiastically on the end of a chain. But what could he do? He made faces to match his transparent excuses. The investigations undertaken by Memlik were not as yet complete. It was essential to verify the truth. The threads were still being followed up. And so forth.

Mountolive did what he had never done before in his official life, colouring up and banging the dusty table between them with friendly exasperation. He adopted the countenance of a thundercloud and predicted a rupture of diplomatic relations. He went so far as to recommend Nur for a decoration … realizing that this was his last resort. But in vain.

The broad contemplative figure of Memlik squatted athwart the daylight, promising everything, performing nothing; immovable, imperturbable, and only faintly malign. Each was now pressing the other beyond the point of polite conciliation: Maskelyne and the High Commissioner were pressing London for action; London, full of moralizing grandeurs, pressed Mountolive; Mountolive pressed Nur, overwhelming the old man with a sense of his own ineffectuality, for he too was powerless to grapple with Memlik without the help of the King: and the King was ill, very ill. At the bottom of this pyramid sat the small figure of the Minister for Interior, with his priceless collection of Korans locked away in dusty cupboards.

Constrained nevertheless to keep up the diplomatic pressure, Mountolive was now irradiated by an appalling sense of futility as he sat (like some ageing
jeune premier)
and listened to the torrent of Nur's excuses, drinking the ceremonial coffee and prying into those ancient and imploring eyes. ‘But what more evidence do you need, Pasha, than the papers I brought you?' The Minister's hands spread wide, smoothing the air between them as if he were rubbing cold-cream into it; he exuded a conciliatory and apologetic affection, like an unguent. ‘He is going into the matter' he croaked helplessly. ‘There is more than one Hosnani, to begin with' he added in desperation. Backwards and forwards moved the tortoise's wrinkled head, regular as a pendulum. Mountolive groaned inside himself as he thought of those long telegrams following one another, endless as a tapeworm. Nessim had now, so to speak, wedged himself neatly in between his various adversaries, in a position where neither could reach him — for the time being. The game was in baulk.

Donkin alone derived a quizzical amusement from these exchanges — so characteristic of Egypt. His own affection for the Moslem had taught him to see clearly into his motives, to discern the play of childish cupidities underneath the histrionic silence of a Minister, under his facile promises. Even Mountolive's gathering hysteria in the face of these checks was amusing for a junior secretary. His Chief had become a puffy and petulant dignitary, under all this stress. Who could have believed such a change possible?

The observation that there was more than one Hosnani was a strange one, and it was a fruit of the prescient Rafael's thought as he quietly shaved his master one morning, according to custom; Memlik paid great attention to what the barber said — was he not a European? While the little barber shaved him in the morning they discussed the transactions of the day. Rafael was full of ideas and opinions, but he uttered them obliquely, simplifying them so that they presented themselves in readily understandable form. He knew that Memlik had been troubled by Nur's insistence, though he had not shown it; he knew, moreover, that Memlik would act only if the King recovered enough to grant Nur an audience. It was a matter of luck and time; meanwhile, why not pluck Hosnani as far as possible? It was only one of a dozen such matters which lay gathering dust (and perhaps bribes) while the King was ill.

One fine day His Majesty would feel much better under his new German doctors and would grant audience once again. He would send for Nur. That is the manner in which the matter would fall out. The next thing: the old goose-necked telephone by the yellow divan would tingle and the old man's voice (disguising its triumphant tone) would say, ‘I am Nur, speaking from the very Divan of the Very King, having received audience. That matter of which we spoke concerning the British Government. It must now be advanced and go forward. Give praise to God!'

‘Give praise to God!' and from this point forward Memlik's hands would be tied. But for the moment he was still a free agent, free to express his contempt for the elder Minister by inaction.

‘There are two brothers, Excellence,' Rafael had said, putting on a story-book voice and casting an expression of gloomy maturity upon his little doll's face. ‘Two brothers Hosnani, not one, Excellence.' He sighed as his white fingers took up small purses of Memlik's dark skin for the razor to work upon. He proceded slowly, for to register an idea in a Moslem mind is like trying to paint a wall: one must wait for the first coat to dry (the first idea) before applying a second. ‘Of the two brothers, one is rich in land, and the other rich in money — he of the Koran. Of what good are lands to my Excellence? But one whose purse is fathomless.…' His tone suggested all the landless man's contempt for good ground.

‘Well, well, but.…' said Memlik with a slow, unemphatic impatience, yet without moving his lips under the kiss of the crisp razor. He was impatient for the theme to be developed. Rafael smiled and was silent for a moment. ‘Indeed' he said thoughtfully, ‘the papers you received from his Excellence were signed Hosnani — in the family name. Who is to say which brother signed them, which is guilty and which innocent? If you were wise in deed would you sacrifice a moneyed man to a landed one? I not, Excellence, I not.'

‘What would you do, my Rafael?'

‘For people like the British it could be made to seem that the poor one was guilty, not the rich. I am only thinking aloud, Excellence, a small man among great affairs.'

Memlik breathed quietly through his mouth, keeping his eyes shut. He was skilled in never showing surprise. Yet the thought, suspended idly in his mind, filled him with a reflective astonishment. In the last month he had received three additions to his library which had left in little doubt the comparative affluence of his client, the elder Hosnani. It was getting on for the Christian Christmastide. He pondered heavily. To satisfy both the British and his own cupidity.… That would be very clever!

Not eight hundred yards away from the chair in which Memlik sprawled, across the brown Nile water, sat Mountolive at his papers. On the polished desk before him lay the great florid invitation card which enjoined his participation in one of the great social events of the year — Nessim's annual duckshoot on Lake Mareotis. He propped it against his inkwell in order to read it again with an expression of fugitive reproach.

But there was another communication of even greater importance; even after this long silence he recognized Leila's nervous handwriting on the lined envelope smelling of
chypre
. But inside it he found a page torn from an exercise book scrawled over with words and phrases set down anyhow, as if in great haste.

‘David, I am going abroad, perhaps long perhaps short, I cannot tell; against my will. Nessim insists. But I must see you before I leave. I must take courage and meet you the evening before. Don't fail. I have something to ask, something to tell. “This business”! I knew nothing about it till carnival I swear; now only you can save.…'

So the letter ran on pell-mell; Mountolive felt a queer mixture of feelings — an incoherent relief which somehow trembled on the edge of indignation. After all this time she would be waiting for him after dark near the
Auberge Bleue
in an old horse-drawn cab pulled back off the road among the palms! That plan was at least touched with something of her old fantasy. For some reason Nessim was not to know of this meeting — why should he disapprove? But the information that she at least had had no part in the conspiracies fostered by her son — that flooded him with relief and tenderness. And all this time he had been seeing Leila as a hostile extension of Nessim, had been training himself to hate her! ‘My poor Leila' he said aloud, holding the envelope to his nose to inhale the fragrance of
chypre
. He picked up the phone and spoke softly to Errol: ‘I suppose the whole Chancery has been invited to the Hosnani shoot? Yes? I agree, he has got rather a nerve at such a time.… I shall, of course, have to decline, but I would like you chaps to accept and apologize for me. To keep up a public appearance of normality merely. Will you then? Thank you very much. Now one more thing. I shall go up the evening before the shoot for private business and return the next day — we shall probably pass each other on the desert road. No, I'm
glad
you fellows have the chance. By all means, and good hunting.'