The Alexandria Quartet (28 page)

‘Of course you will refuse. You will not go?' Justine spoke so sharply that I understood that her gaze followed mine. She stood over me in the misty early morning light, and between sentences cocked an ear towards the heavily-breathing wraith of Hamid behind the door. ‘You are not to tempt providence. Will you? Answer me.' And as if to make persuasion certain she slipped off her skirt and shoes and fell softly into bed beside me — warm hair and mouth, and the treacherous nervous movements of a body which folded against one as if hurt, as if tender from unhealed wounds. It seemed to me then — and the compulsion had nothing of bravado in it — it seemed to me then that I could no longer deprive Nessim of the satisfaction he sought of me, or indeed the situation of its issue. There was, too, underneath it all a vein of relief which made me fell almost gay until I saw the grave sad expression of my companion-in-arms. She lay, staring out of those wonderfully expressive dark eyes, as if from a high window in her own memory. She was looking, I knew, into the eyes of Melissa — into the troubled candid eyes of one who, with every day of increasing danger, moved nearer and nearer to us. After all, the one most to be wounded by the issue Nessim might be contemplating was Melissa — who else? I thought back along the iron chain of kisses which Justine had forged, steadily back into memory, hand over fist, like a mariner going down an anchor-chain into the darkest depths of some great stagnant harbour, memory.

From among many sorts of failure each selects the one which least compromises his self-respect: which lets him down the lightest. Mine had been in art, in religion, and in people. In art I had failed (it suddenly occurred to me at this moment) because I did not believe in the discrete human personality. (‘Are people' writes Pursewarden ‘continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features — the temporal flicker of old silent film?') I lacked a belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them. In religion? Well, I found no religion worth while which contained the faintest grain of propitiation — and which can escape the charge?
Pace
Balthazar it seemed to me that all churches, all sects, were at the best mere academies of self-instruction against fear. But the last, the worst failure (I buried my lips in the dark living hair of Justine), the failure with people: it had been brought about by a gradually increasing detachment of spirit which, while it freed me to sympathize, forbade me possession. I was gradually, inexplicably, becoming more and more deficient in love, yet better and better at self-giving — the best part of loving. This, I realized with horror, was the hold I now had over Justine. As a woman, a natural possessive, she was doomed to try and capture the part of myself which was forever beyond reach, the last painful place of refuge which was for me laughter and friendship. This sort of loving had made her, in a way, desperate for I did not depend on her; and the desire to possess can, if starved, render one absolutely possessed in the spirit oneself. How difficult it is to analyse these relationships which lie under the mere skin of our actions; for loving is only a sort of skin-language, sex a terminology merely.

And further to render down this sad relationship which had caused me so much pain — I saw that pain itself was the only food of memory: for pleasure ends in itself — all they had bequeathed me was a fund of permanent health — life-giving detachment. I was like a dry-cell battery. Uncommitted, I was free to circulate in the world of men and women like a guardian of the true rights of love — which is not passion, nor habit (they only qualify it) but which is the divine trespass of an immortal among mortals — Aphrodite-in-arms. Beleaguered thus, I was nevertheless defined and realized in myself by the very quality which (of course) hurt me most: selflessness.
This
is what Justine loved in me — not my personality. Women are sexual robbers, and it was this treasure of detachment she hoped to steal from me — the jewel growing in the toad's head. It was the signature of this detachment she saw written across my life with all its haphazardness, discordance, disorderliness. My value was not in anything I achieved or anything I owned. Justine loved me because I presented to her something which was indestructible — a person already formed who could not be broken. She was haunted by the feeling that even while I was loving her I was wishing at the same time only to die! This she found unendurable.

And Melissa? She lacked of course the insight of Justine into my case. She only knew that my strength supported her where she was at her weakest — in her dealings with the world. She treasured every sign of my human weakness — disorderly habits, incapacity over money affairs, and so on. She loved my weaknesses because there she felt of use to me; Justine brushed all this aside as unworthy of her interest. She had detected another kind of strength. I interested her only in this one particular which I could not offer her as a gift nor she steal from me. This is what is meant by possession — to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other's personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?

And yet, so entangled are human motives: it would be Melissa herself who had driven Nessim from his refuge in the world of fantasy towards an action which he knew we would all bitterly regret — our death. For it was she who, overmastered by the impulse of her unhappiness one night, approached the table at which he sat, before an empty champagne-glass, watching the cabaret with a pensive air: and blushing and trembling in her false eyelashes, blurted out eight words, ‘
Your wife is no longer faithful to you
' — a phrase which stood quivering in his mind from then on, like a thrown knife. It is true that for a long time now his dossiers had been swollen with reports of this dreaded fact but these reports were like newspaper-accounts of a catastrophe which had occurred a long way off, in a country which one had not visited. Now he was suddenly face to face with an eye-witness, a victim, a survivor.… The resonance of this one phrase refecundated his powers of feeling. The whole dead tract of paper suddenly rose up and screeched at him.

Melissa's dressing-room was an evil-smelling cubicle full of the coiled pipes which emptied the lavatories. She had a single poignant strip of cracked mirror and a little shelf dressed with the kind of white paper upon which wedding-cakes are built. Here she always set out the jumble of powders and crayons which she misused so fearfully.

In this mirror the image of Selim blistered and flickered in the dancing gas-jets like a spectre from the underworld. He spoke with an incisive finish which was a copy of his master's; in this copied voice she could feel some of the anxiety the secretary felt for the only human being he truly worshipped, and to whose anxieties he reacted like a planchette.

Melissa was afraid now, for she knew that offence given to the great could, by the terms of the city, be punished swiftly and dreadfully. She was aghast at what she had done and fought back a desire to cry as she picked off her eyelashes with trembling hands. There was no way of refusing the invitation. She dressed in her shabby best and carrying her fatigue like a heavy pack followed Selim to the great car which stood in deep shadow. She was helped in beside Nessim. They moved off slowly into the dense crepuscular evening of an Alexandria which, in her panic, she no longer recognized. They scouted a sea turned to sapphire and turned inland, folding up the slums, towards Mareotis and the bituminous slag-heaps of Mex where the pressure of the headlights now peeled off layer after layer of the darkness, bringing up small intimate scenes of Egyptian life — a drunkard singing, a biblical figure on a mule with two children escaping from Herod, a porter sorting sacks — swiftly, like someone dealing cards. She followed these familiar sights with emotion, for behind lay the desert, its emptiness echoing like a seashell. All this time her companion had not spoken, and she had not dared to risk so much as a glance in his direction.

Now when the pure steely lines of the dunes came up under the late moon Nessim drew the car to a standstill. Groping in his pocket for his cheque-book he said in a trembling voice, his eyes full of tears: ‘What is the price of your silence?' She turned to him and, seeing for the first time the gentleness and sorrow of that dark face, found her fear replaced by an overwhelming shame. She recognized in his expression the weakness for the good which could never render him an enemy of her kind. She put a timid hand on his arm and said: ‘I am so ashamed. Please forgive me. I did not know what I was saying.' And her fatigue overcame her so that her emotion which threatened her with tears turned to a yawn. Now they stared at one another with a new understanding, recognizing each other as innocents. For a minute it was almost as if they had fallen in love with each other from sheer relief.

The car gathered momentum again like their silence — and soon they were racing across the desert towards the steely glitter of stars, and a horizon stained black with the thunder of surf. Nessim, with this strange sleepy creature at his side, found himself thinking over and over again: ‘Thank God I am not a genius — for a genius has nobody in whom he can confide.'

The glances he snatched at her enabled him to study her, and to study me in her. Her loveliness must have disarmed and disturbed him as it had me. It was a beauty which filled one with the terrible premonition that it had been born to be a target for the forces of destruction. Perhaps he remembered an anecdote of Pursewarden's in which she figured, for the latter had found her as Nessim himself had done, in the same stale cabaret; only on this particular evening she had been sitting in a row of dance-hostesses selling dance-tickets. Pursewarden, who was gravely drunk, took her to the floor and, after a moment's silence, addressed her in his sad yet masterful way:
‘Comment vous défendez-vous contre la solitude
?' he asked her. Melissa turned upon him an eye replete with all the candour of experience and replied softly:
‘Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude mime
.' Pursewarden was sufficiently struck to remember and repeat this passage later to his friends, adding: ‘I suddenly thought to myself that here was a woman one might very well love.' Yet he did not, as far as I know, take the risk of revisiting her, for the book was going well, and he recognized in the kindling of this sympathy a trick being played on him by the least intent part of his nature. He was writing about love at the time and did not wish to disturb the ideas he had formed on the subject. (‘I cannot fall in love' he made a character exclaim ‘for I belong to that ancient secret society — the Jokers!'; and elsewhere speaking about his marriage he wrote: ‘I found that as well as displeasing another I also displeased myself; now, alone, I have only myself to displease. Joy!')

Justine was still standing over me, watching my face as I composed these scorching scenes in my mind. ‘You will make some excuse' she repeated hoarsely. ‘You will not go.' It seemed to me impossible to find a way out of this predicament. ‘How
can
I refuse?' I said. ‘How can you?'

They had driven across that warm, tideless desert night, Nessim and Melissa, consumed by a sudden sympathy for each other, yet speechless. On the last scarp before Bourg El Arab he switched off the engine and let the car roll off the road. ‘Come' he said. ‘I want to show you Justine's Summer Palace.'

Hand in hand they took the road to the little house. The caretaker was asleep but he had the key. The rooms smelt damp and uninhabited, but were full of light reflected from the white dunes. It was not long before he had kindled a fire of thorns in the great fireplace, and taking his old
abba
from the cupboard he clothed himself in it and sat down before it saying: ‘Tell me now, Melissa, who sent you to persecute me?' He meant it as a joke but forgot to smile, and Melissa turned crimson with shame and bit her lip. They sat there for a long time enjoying the firelight and the sensation of sharing something — their common hopelessness.

(Justine stubbed out her cigarette and got slowly out of bed. She began to walk slowly up and down the carpet. Fear had overcome her and I could see that it was only with an effort that she overcame the need for a characteristic outburst. ‘I have done so many things in my life' she said to the mirror. ‘Evil things, perhaps. But never inattentively, never wastefully. I've always thought of acts as messages, wishes from the past to the future, which invited self-discovery. Was I wrong? Was I wrong?' It was not to me she addressed the question now but to Nessim. It is so much easier to address questions intended for one's husband to one's lover. ‘As for the dead' she went on after a moment, ‘I have always thought that the dead think of us as dead. They have rejoined the living after this trifling excursion into quasi-life.' Hamid was stirring now and she turned to her clothes in a panic. ‘So you must go' she said sadly, ‘and so must I. You are right. We must go.' And then turning to the mirror to complete her toilet she added: ‘Another grey hair' studying that wicked fashionable face.

Watching her thus, trapped for a moment by a rare sunbeam on the dirty window-pane, I could not help reflecting once more that in her there was nothing to control or modify the intuition which she had developed out of a nature gorged upon introspection: no education, no resources of intellection to battle against the imperatives of a violent heart. Her gift was the gift one finds occasionally in ignorant fortune-tellers. Whatever passed for thought in her was borrowed — even the remark about the dead which occurs in
Moeurs
; she had picked out what was significant in books not by reading them but by listening to the matchless discourses of Balthazar, Arnauti, Pursewarden, upon them. She was a walking abstract of the writers and thinkers whom she had loved or admired — but what clever woman is more?)

Nessim now took Melissa's hands between his own (they lay there effortless, cool, like wafers) and began to question her about me with an avidity which might have easily suggested that his passion was not Justine, but myself. One always falls in love with the love-choice of the person one loves. What would I not give to learn all that she told him, striking ever more deeply into his sympathies with her candours, her unexpected reserves? All I know is that she concluded stupidly, ‘Even now they are not happy: they quarrel dreadfully: Hamid told me so when last I met him.' Surely she was experienced enough to recognize in these reported quarrels the very subject-matter of our love? I think she saw only the selfishness of Justine — that almost deafening lack of interest in other people which characterized my tyrant. She utterly lacked the charity of mind upon which Melissa's good opinion alone could be grounded. She was not really human — nobody wholly dedicated to the ego is. What on earth could I see in her? — I asked this question of myself for the thousandth time. Yet Nessim, in beginning to explore and love Melissa as an extension of Justine, delineated perfectly the human situation. Melissa would hunt in him for the qualities which she imagined I must have found in his wife. The four of us were unrecognized complementaries of one another, inextricably bound together. (‘We who have travelled much and loved much: we who have — I will not say suffered for we have always recognized through suffering our own self-sufficiency — only we appreciate the complexities of tenderness, and understand how narrowly love and friendship are related.'
Moeurs
.)