The Alexandria Quartet (87 page)

‘Now this is an oddity. Semira is the daughter of a very old deaf father. The family was once rich and famous, under the Khedives, and is of Ottoman extraction. But it was plagued by misfortunes and the progressive insanity of the sons, and has so far today decayed as to be virtually forgotten. It is also poverty-stricken. The old half-mad father locked Semira away in this rambling house, keeping her veiled for the most part. Vaguely, in society, one had heard tales of her — of a daughter who had taken the veil and spent her life in prayer, who had never been outside the gates of the house, who was a mystic; or who was deaf, dumb and bedridden. Vague tales, distorted as tales always are in Alexandria. But while the faint echo remained of the so-called virtuous Semira — she was really completely unknown to us and her family forgotten. Now it seemed that at carnival-time her curiosity about the outer world overcame her and she gate-crashed parties in a domino!

‘But I am forgetting Amaril. Their footsteps had brought down an old manservant with a candle. Amaril demanded to see the master of the house. He had already come to a decision. The old father lay asleep in an old-fashioned four-poster bed, in a room covered in bat-droppings, at the top of the house. Semira was by now practically insensible. But Amaril had come to a great decision. Taking the candle in one hand and the small Semira in the crook of his arm, he walked the whole way up to the top and kicked open the door of the father's room. It must have been a strange and unfamiliar scene for the old man to witness as he sat up in bed — and Amaril describes it with all the touching flamboyance of the romantic, even moving himself in the recital so that he is in tears as he recalls it. He is touched by the magnificence of his own fancy, I think; I must say, loving him as much as I do, I felt tears coming into my own eyes as he told me how he put down the candle beside the bed, and kneeling down with Semira, said “I wish to marry your daughter and take her back into the world.” The terror and incomprehension of the old man at this unexpected visit took some time to wear off, and for a while it was hard to make him understand. Then he began to tremble and wonder at this handsome apparition kneeling beside his bed holding up his noseless daughter with his arm and proposing the impossible with so much pride and passion.

‘“But” the old man protested “no-one will take her, for she has no nose.” He got out of bed in a stained nightshirt and walked right round Amaril, who remained kneeling, studying him as one might an entomological specimen. (I am quoting.) Then he touched him with his bare foot — as if to see whether he was made of flesh and blood — and repeated: “Who are you to take a woman without a nose?” Amaril replied: “I am a doctor from Europe and I will give her a new nose,” for the idea, the fantastic idea, had been slowly becoming clear in his own mind. At the words, Semira gave a sob and turned her beautiful, horrible face to his, and Amaril thundered out: “Semira, will you be my wife?” She could hardly articulate her response and seemed little less doubtful of the whole issue than was her father. Amaril stayed and talked to them, convincing them.

‘The next day when he went back, he was received with a message that Semira was not to be seen and that what he proposed was impossible. But Amaril was not to be put off, and once more he forced his way in and bullied the father.

‘This, then, is the fantasy in which he has been living. For Semira, as loving and eager as ever, cannot leave her house for the open world until he fulfils his promise. Amaril offered to marry her at once, but the suspicious old man wants to make sure of the nose. But what nose? First Balthazar was called in and together they examined Semira, and assured themselves that the illness was due neither to leprosy nor syphilis but to a rare form of lupus — a peculiar skin T.B. of rare kind of which many cases have been recorded from the Damietta region. It had been left untreated over the years and had finally collapsed the nose. I must say, it is horrible — just a slit like the gills of a fish. For I too have been sharing the deliberations of the doctors and have been going regularly to read to Semira in the darkened rooms where she has spent most of her life. She has wonderful dark eyes like an odalisque and a shapely mouth and well-modelled chin: and then the gills of a fish! It is too unfair. And it has taken her ages to actually believe that surgery can restore the defect. Here again Amaril has been brilliant, in getting her interested in her restoration, conquering her self-disgust, allowing her to choose the nose from that portfolio, discuss the whole project with him. He has let her choose her nose as one might let one's mistress choose a valuable bracelet from Pierantoni. It was just the right approach, for she is beginning to conquer her shame, and feel almost proud of being free to choose this valuable gift — the most treasured feature of a woman's face which aligns every glance and alters every meaning: and without which good eyes and teeth and nan become useless treasures.

‘But now they have run into other difficulties, for the restoration of the nose itself requires techniques of surgery which are still very new; and Amaril, though a surgeon, does not wish there to be any mistake about the results. You see, he is after all building a woman of his own fancy, a face to a husband's own specifications; only Pygmalion had such a chance before! He is working on the project as if his life depended on it — which in a way I suppose it does.

‘The operation itself will have to be done in stages, and will take ages to complete. I have heard them discussing it over and over again in such detail that I feel I could almost perform it myself. First you cut off a strip of the costal cartilage, here, where the rib joins the breastbone, and make a graft from it. Then you cut out a triangular flap of skin from the forehead and pull down-wards to cover the nose — the Indian technique, Balthazar calls it; but they are still debating the removal of a section of flesh and skin from inside the thigh.… You can imagine how fascinating this is for a painter and sculptor to think about. But meanwhile Amaril is going to England to perfect the operative technique under the best masters. Hence his demand for a visa. How many months he will be away we don't know yet, but he is setting out with all the air of a knight in search of the Holy Grail. For he intends to complete the operation himself. Meanwhile, Semira will wait for him here, and I have promised to visit her frequently and keep her interested and amused if I can. It is not difficult, for the real world outside the four walls of her house sounds to her strange and cruel and romantic. Apart from a brief glimpse of it at carnival-time, she knows little of our lives. For her, Alexandria is as brilliantly coloured as a fairy-story. It will be some time before she sees it as it really is — with its harsh, circumscribed contours and its wicked, pleasure-loving and unromantic inhabitants. But you have moved!'

Mountolive apologized and said: ‘Your use of the word “unromantic” startled me, for I was just thinking how romantic it all seems to a newcomer.'

‘Amaril is an exception, though a beloved one. Few are as generous, as unmercenary as he. As for Semira — I cannot at present see what the future holds for her beyond romance.' Clea sighed and smiled and lit a cigarette.

‘Espérons'
she said quietly.

VIII

‘A
hundred times I've asked you not to use my razor' said Pombal plaintively ‘and you do so again. You
know
I am Aafraid of syphilis. Who knows what spots, when you cut them, begin to leak?'

‘Mon cher collègue'
said Pursewarden stiffly (he was shaving his lip), and with a grimace which was somewhat intended to express injured dignity, ‘what can you mean? I am British.
Hein?'

He paused, and marking time with Pombal's cut-throat declaimed solemnly:

‘The British who perfected the horseless carriage

Are now working hard on the sexless marriage
.

Soon the only permissible communion

Will be by agreement with one's Trade Union.'

‘Your blood may be infected' said his friend between grunts as he ministered to a broken suspender with one fat calf exposed upon the
bidet
. ‘You never know, after all.'

‘I am a writer' said Pursewarden with further and deeper dignity. ‘And therefore I
do
know. There is no blood in my veins. Plasma' he said darkly, wiping his ear-tip, ‘that is what flows in my veins. How else would I do all the work I do? Think of it. On the
Spectator
I am
Ubique
, on the
New Statesman
I am
Mens Sana
. On the
Daily Worker
I sign myself as
Corpore Sana
. I am also
Paralysis Agitans
on
The Times
and
Ejaculatio Praecox
in
New Verse
. I am …' But here his invention failed him.

‘I never see you working' said Pombal.

‘Working little, I earn less. If my work earned more than one hundred pounds a year I should not be able to take refuge in being misunderstood.' He gave a strangled sob.

‘Compris
. You have been drinking. I saw the bottle on the hall table as I came in. Why so early?'

‘I wished to be quite honest about it. It is your wine, after all. I wished to hide nothing. I
have
drunk a tot or so.'

‘Celebration?'

‘Yes. Tonight, my dear Georges, I am going to do something rather unworthy of myself. I have disposed of a dangerous enemy and advanced my own position by a large notch. In our service, this would be regarded as something to crow about. I am going to offer myself a dinner of self-congratulation.'

Who will pay it?'

‘I will order, eat and pay for it myself.'

‘That is not much good.'

Pursewarden made an impatient face in the mirror.

‘On the contrary' he said. ‘A quiet evening is what I most need. I shall compose a few more fragments of my autobiography over the good oysters at Diamandakis.'

‘What is the title?'

‘Beating about the Bush
. The opening words are “I first met Henry James in a brothel in Algiers. He had a naked houri on each knee.”

Henry James was a pussy, I think.'

Pursewarden turned the shower on full and stepped into it crying: ‘No more literary criticism from the French, please.'

Pombal drove a comb through his dark hair with a laborious impatience and then consulted his watch.
‘Merde'
he said, ‘I am going to be retarded again.'

Pursewarden gave a shriek of delight. They adventured freely in each other's languages, rejoicing like schoolboys in the mistakes which cropped up among their conversations. Each blunder was greeted with a shout, was turned into a war-cry. Pursewarden hopped with pleasure and shouted happily above the hissing of the water: ‘Why not stay in and enjoy a nice little
nocturnal emission
on the short hairs?' (Pombal had described a radio broadcast thus the day before and had not been allowed to forget it.) He made a round face now to express mock annoyance. ‘I did
not
say it' he said.

‘You bloody well did.'

‘I did not say “the short hairs” but the “short undulations” —
des ondes courtes.'

‘Equally dreadful. You Quai d'Orsay people shock me. Now my French may not be perfect, but I have never made a ——'

‘If I begin with your mistakes — ha! ha!'

Pursewarden danced up and down in the bath, shouting ‘Nocturnal emissions on the short hairs'. Pombal threw a rolled towel at him and lumbered out of the bathroom before he could retaliate effectively.

Their abusive conversation was continued while the Frenchman made some further adjustments to his dress in the bedroom mirror. ‘Will you go down to Etoile later for the floor-show?'

‘I certainly will' said Pursewarden. ‘I shall dance a Fox-Macabre with Darley's girl-friend or Sveva. Several Fox-Macabres, in fact. Then, later on, like an explorer who has run out of pemmican, purely for body-warmth, I shall select someone and conduct her to Mount Vulture. There to sharpen my talons on her flesh.' He made what he imagined to be the noise a vulture makes as it feeds upon flesh — a soft, throaty croaking. Pombal shuddered.

‘Monster he cried. ‘I go — good-bye.'

‘Good-bye.
Toujours la maladresse
!'

‘Toujours.'
It was their war-cry.

Left alone, Pursewarden whistled softly as he dried himself in the torn bath-towel and completed his toilet. The irregularities in the water system of the Mount Vulture Hotel often drove him across the square to Pombal's flat in search of a leisurely bath and a shave. From time to time too, when Pombal went on leave, he would actually rent the place and share it, somewhat uneasily, with Darley who lived a furtive life of his own in the far corner of it. It was good from time to time to escape from the isolation of his hotel-room, and the vast muddle of paper which was growing up around his next novel. To escape — always to escape.… The desire of a writer to be alone with himself — ‘the writer, most solitary of human animals'; ‘I am quoting from the great Pursewarden himself' he told his reflection in the mirror as he wrestled with his tie. Tonight he would dine quietly, self-indulgently, alone! He had gracefully refused a halting dinner invitation from Errol which he knew would involve him in one of those gauche, haunting evenings spent in playing imbecile paper-games or bridge. ‘My God' Pombal had said, ‘your compatriots' methods of passing the time! Those rooms which they fill with their sense of guilt! To express
one
idea is to stop a dinner party dead in its tracks and provoke an
awkwardness
, a
silence
.… I try my best, but always feel I've put my foot in it. So I always automatically send flowers the next morning to my hostess.… What a nation you are! How intriguing for us French because how
repellent
is the way you live!'