The Alexandria Quartet (77 page)

‘Not too badly' said Sir Louis. ‘The King of Siam pinched it in the door of his private motor-car. Honourable scar.' He smiled once more and continued dressing, humming to himself. He took an absurd delight in this bargaining. Suddenly he turned round.

‘Make it fifty' he said. Mountolive shook his head thoughtfully.

‘That is too much, sir.'

‘Forty-five.'

Mountolive rose and took a turn up and down the room, amused by the old man's evident delight in this battle of wills. ‘I'll give you forty' he said at last and sat down once more with deliberation. Sir Louis brushed his silver hair furiously with his heavy tortoiseshell-backed brushes. ‘Have you any drink in your cellar?'

‘As a matter of fact, yes, I have.”

‘Well then, you can have it for forty if you throw in a couple of cases of … what have you? Have you a respectable champagne?'

‘Yes.'

‘Very well. Two — no,
three
cases of same.'

They both laughed and Mountolive said ‘It's a hard bargain you drive.' Sir Louis was delighted by the compliment. They shook hands upon it and the Ambassador was about to turn back to the cocktail tray when his junior said: ‘Forgive me, sir. Your third.'

‘Well?' said the old diplomat with a well-simulated start and a puzzled air. ‘What of it?' He knew perfectly well. Mountolive bit his lip. ‘You expressly asked me to warn you.' He said it reproachfully. Sir Louis threw himself further back with more simulated surprise. ‘What's wrong with a final boneshaker before lunch, eh?'

‘You'll only hum' said Mountolive sombrely.

‘Oh, pouf, dear boy!' said Sir Louis.

‘You will, sir.'

Within the last year, and on the eve of retirement, the Ambassador had begun to drink rather too heavily — though never quite reaching the borders of incoherence. In the same period a new and somewhat surprising tic had developed. Enlivened by one cocktail too many he had formed the habit of uttering a low continuous humming noise at receptions which had earned him a rather questionable notoriety. But he himself had been unaware of this habit, and indeed at first indignantly denied its existence. He found to his surprise that he was in the habit of humming, over and over again, in
basso profundo
, a passage from the Dead March in Saul. It summed up, appropriately enough, a lifetime of acute boredom spent in the company of friendless officials and empty dignitaries. In a way, it was his response perhaps to a situation which he had subconsciously recognized as intolerable for a number of years; and he was grateful that Mountolive had had the courage to bring the habit to his notice and to help him overcome it. Nevertheless, he always felt bound to protest in spite of himself at his junior's reminder.
‘Hum?'
he repeated now, indignantly pouting, ‘I never heard such nonsense.' But he put down the glass and returned to the mirror for a final criticism of his toilet. ‘Well, anyway' he said, ‘time is up.' He pressed a bell and Merritt appeared with a gardenia on a plate. Sir Louis was somewhat pedantic about flowers and always insisted on wearing his favourite one in his buttonhole when in
tenue de ville
. His wife flew up boxes of them from Nice and Merritt kept them in the buttery refrigerator, to be rationed out religiously.

‘Well, David' he said, and patted Mountolive's arm with affection. ‘I owe you many a good turn. No humming today, however appropriate.'

They walked slowly down the long curving staircase and into the hall where Mountolive saw his Chief gloved and coated before signalling the official car by house-telephone. ‘When do you want to go?' The old voice trembled with genuine regret.

‘By the first of next month, sir. That leaves time to wind up and say good-bye.'

‘You won't stay and see me out?'

‘If you order me to, sir.'

‘You know I wouldn't do that' said Sir Louis, shaking his white head, though in the past he had done worse things. ‘Never.'

They shook hands warmly once more while Merritt walked past them to throw back the heavy front door, for his ears had caught the slither and scrape of tyre-chains on the frosty drive outside. A blast of snow and wind burst upon them. The carpets rose off the floor and subsided again. The Ambassador donned his great fur helmet and thrust his hands into the carmuff. Then, bowed double, he stalked out to the wintry greyness. Mountolive sighed and heard the Residence clock clear its dusty throat carefully before striking one.

Russia was behind him.

Berlin was also in the grip of snow, but here the sullen goaded helplessness of the Russias was replaced by a malignant euphoria hardly less dispiriting. The air was tonic with gloom and uncertainty. In the grey-green lamplight of the Embassy he listened thoughtfully to the latest evaluations of the new Attila, and a valuable summary of the measured predictions which for months past had blackened the marbled minute-papers of German Department, and the columns of the P.E. printings — political evaluations. Was it really by now so obvious that this nation-wide exercise in political diabolism would end by plunging Europe into bloodshed? The case seemed overwhelming. But there was one hope — that Attila might turn eastwards and leave the cowering west to moulder away in peace. If the two dark angels which hovered over the European subconscious could only fight and destroy each other.… There was some real hope of this. ‘The
only
hope, sir' said the young attache quietly, and not without a certain relish, so pleasing to a part of the mind is the prospect of total destruction, as the only cure for the classical
ennui
of modern man. ‘The only hope' he repeated. Extreme views, thought Mountolive, frowning. He had been taught to avoid them. It had become second nature to remain uncommitted in his mind.

That night he was dined somewhat extravagantly by the youthful Chargé d'Affaires, as the Ambassador was absent on duty, and after dinner was taken to the fashionable Tanzfest for the cabaret. The network of candle-lit cellars, whose walls were lined with blue damask, Was filled with the glow of a hundred cigarettes, twinkling away like fireflies outside the radius of white lights where a huge hermaphrodite with the face of a narwhal conducted the measures of the ‘Fox Macabre Totentanz'. Bathed in the pearly sweat of the nigger saxophonists the refrain ran on with its hysterical coda:

Berlin, dein Tanzer ist der Tod!

Berlin, du wuhlst mit Lust im Kot!

Halt ein! lass sein! und denk ein bischen nach:

Du tanzt dir dock vom Leibe nicht die Schmach
.

derm du boxt, und du jazzt, und du foxt auf dent Pulverfass!

It was an admirable commentary on the deliberations of the afternoon and underneath the frenetic licence and fervour of the singing he seemed to catch the drift of older undertones — passages from Tacitus, perhaps? Or the carousings of death-dedicated warriors heading for Valhalla? Somehow the heavy smell of the abattoir clung to it, despite the tinsel and the streamers. Thoughtfully Mountolive sat among the white whorls of cigar-smoke and watched the crude peristaltic movements of the Black Bottom. The words repeated themselves in his mind over and over again. ‘You won't dance the shame out of your belly,' he repeated to himself as he watched the dancers break out and the lights change from green and gold to violet.

Then he suddenly sat up and said ‘My Goodness!' He had caught sight of a familiar face in a far corner of the cellar: that of Nessim. He was seated at a table among a group of elderly men in evening-dress, smoking a lean cheroot and nodding from time to time. They were taking scant notice of the cabaret. A magnum of champagne stood upon the table. It was too far to depend upon signals and Mountolive sent over a card, waiting until he saw Nessim follow the waiter's pointing finger before he smiled and raised a hand. They both stood up, and Nessim at once came over to his table with his warm shy smile to utter the conventional exclamations of surprise and delight. He was, he said, in Berlin on a two-day business visit. ‘Trying to market tungsten' he added quietly. He was flying back to Egypt at dawn next morning. Mountolive introduced him to his own host and persuaded him to spend a few moments at their table. ‘It is such a rare pleasure — and now.' But Nessim had already heard the rumour of his impending appointment. ‘I know it isn't confirmed yet,' he said, ‘but it leaked just the same — needless to say via Pursewarden. You can imagine our delight after so long.'

They talked on for a while, Nessim smiling as he answered Mountolive's questions. Only Leila was at first not mentioned. After a while Nessim's face took on a curious expression — a sort of chaste cunning, and he said with hesitation: ‘Leila will be so delighted.' He gave him a swift upward glance from under his long lashes and then looked hastily away. He stubbed out his cheroot and gave Mountolive another equivocal glance. He stood up and glanced anxiously back in the direction of his party at the far table. ‘I must go' he said.

They discussed plans for a possible meeting in England before Mountolive should fly out to his new appointment. Nessim was vague, unsure of his movements. They would have to wait upon the event. But now Mountolive's host had returned from the cloak-room, a fact which effectively prevented any further private exchanges. They said good-bye with good grace and Nessim walked slowly back to his table.

‘Is your friend in armaments?' asked the Charge d'Affaires as they were leaving. Mountolive shook his head. ‘He's a banker. Unless tungsten plays a part in armaments — I don't really know.'

‘It isn't important. Just idle curiosity. You see, the people at his table are all from Krupps, and so I wondered. That was all.'

IV

T
o London he always returned with the tremulous eagerness of a lover who has been separated a long time from his mistress; he returned, so to speak, upon a note of interrogation. Had life altered? Had anything been changed? Perhaps the nation had, after all, woken up and begun to live? The thin black drizzle over Trafalgar Square, the soot-encrusted cornices of Whitehall, the slur of rubber tyres spinning upon macadam, the haunting conspiratorial voice of river traffic behind the veils of mist — they were both a reassurance and a threat. He loved it inarticulately, the melancholy of it, though he knew in his heart he could no longer live here permanently, for his profession had made an expatriate of him. He walked in the soft clinging rain towards Downing Street, muffled in his heavy overcoat, comparing himself from time to time, not without a certain complacence, to the histrionic Grand Duke who smiled at him from the occasional hoardings advertising De Reszke cigarettes.

He smiled to himself as he remembered some of Pursewarden's acid strictures on their native capital, repeating them in his own mind with pleasure, as compliments almost. Pursewarden transferring his sister's hand from one elbow to another in order to complete a vague gesture towards the charred-looking figure of Nelson under its swarming troops of pigeons befluffed against the brute cold. ‘Ah, Mountolive! Look at it all. Home of the eccentric and the sexually disabled. London! Thy food as appetizing as a barium meal, thy gloating discomforts, thy causes not lost but gone before.' Mountolive had protested laughingly. ‘Never mind, It is
our own
— and it is greater than the sum of its defects.' But his companion had found such sentiments uncongenial. He smiled now as he remembered the writer's wry criticisms of gloom, discomfort and the native barbarism. As for Mountolive, it nourished him, the gloom; he felt something like the fox's love for its earth. He listened with a comfortable smiling indulgence while his companion perorated with mock fury at the image of his native island, saying: ‘Ah, England! England where the members of the R.S.P.CA. eat meat twice a day and the nudist devours imported fruit in the snow. The only country which is ashamed of poverty.'

Big Ben struck its foundering plunging note. Lamps had begun to throw out their lines of prismatic light. Even in the rain there was the usual little cluster of tourists and loungers outside the gates of Number Ten. He turned sharply away and entered the silent archways of the Foreign Office, directing his alien steps to the bag-room, virtually deserted now, where he declared himself and gave instructions about the forwarding of his mail, and left an order for the printing of new and more resplendent invitation cards.