The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [101]
Don’t deny it…. I know my darling…. I’m even jealous of your imagination…. Horrible to have self-reproach heaped on top of the other miseries…. Never mind.’ She blew her nose shakily and managed a smile. ‘I need rest so badly…. And now Nessim has fallen in love with me.’ I put my hand over her sad mouth. The taxi throbbed on remorselessly, like someone living on his nerves. All round us walked the wives of the Alexandrians, smartly turned out, with the air of well-lubricated phantoms. The driver watched us in the mirror like a spy. The emotions of white people, he per-haps was thinking, are odd and excite prurience. He watched as one might watch cats making love.
‘I shall never forget you.’
‘Nor I. Write to me.’
‘I shall always come back if you want.’
‘Never doubt it. Get well, Melissa, you must get well. I’ll wait for you. A new cycle will begin. It is all there inside me, intact. I feel it.’
The words that lovers use at such times are charged with distorting emotions. Only their silences have the cruel precision which aligns them to truth. We were silent, holding hands. She embraced me and signalled to the driver to set off.
‘With her going the city took on an unnerving strangeness for him’ writes Arnauti. ‘Wherever his memory of her turned a familiar corner she recreated herself swiftly, vividly, and superimposed those haunted eyes and hands on the streets and squares. Old conversations leaped up and hit him among the polished table-tops of cafés where once they had sat, gazing like drunkards into each other’s eyes. Sometimes she appeared walking a few paces ahead of him in the dark street. She would stop to adjust the strap of a sandal and he would overtake her with beating heart — only to find it was someone else. Particular doors seemed just about to admit her. He would sit and watch them doggedly. At other times he was suddenly seized by the irresistible conv iction that she was about to arrive on a particular train, and he hurried to the station and breasted the crowd of passengers like a man fording a river. Or he might sit in the stuffy waiting-room of the airport after mid-night watching the departures and arrivals, in case she were coming back to surprise him. In this way she controlled his imagination and taught him how feeble reason was; and he carried the con-sciousness of her going heavily about with him — like a dead baby from which one could not bring oneself to part.’
The night after Justine went away there was a freak thunder-storm of tremendous intensity. I had been wandering about in the rain for hours, a prey not only to feelings which I could not control but also to remorse for what I imagined Nessim must be feeling. Frankly, I hardly dared to go back to the empty flat, lest I should be tempted along the path Pursewarden had already taken so easily, with so little premeditation. Passing Rue Fuad for the seventh time, coatless and hatless in that blinding downpour, I happened to catch sight of the light in Clea’s high window and on an impulse rang the bell. The front door opened with a whine and I stepped into the silence of the building from the dark street with its boom-ing of rain in gutters and the splash of overflowing manholes. She opened the door to me and at a glance took in my condition. I was made to enter, peel off my sodden clothes and put on the blue
dressing-gown. The little electric fire was a blessing, and Clea set about making me hot coffee.
She was already in pyjamas, her gold hair combed out for the night. A copy of A Rebours lay face down on the floor beside the ash-tray with the smouldering cigarette in it. Lightning kept flash-ing fitfully at the window, lighting up her grave face with its magnesium flashes. Thunder rolled and writhed in the dark heavens outside the window. In this calm it was possible partly to exorcise my terrors by speaking of Justine. It appeared she knew all — nothing can be hidden from the curiosity of the Alexandrians. She knew all about Justine,