The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [104]
Melissa still writes the spirited nonchalant letters which I have such difficulty in answering save by whining retorts about my cir-cumstances or my improvidence. Once I leave the city it will be easier. A new road will open. I will write to her with absolute frank-ness, telling her all I feel — even those things which I believe her forever incapable of understanding properly. ‘I shall return in the spring’ Nessim is saying to the Baron Thibault ‘and take up my summer quarters at Abousir. I am determined to slack off for
about two years. I’ve been working too hard at business and it isn’t worth it.’ Despite the haunted pallor of his face one cannot help seeing in him a new repose, a relaxation of the will; the heart may be distracted, but the nerves are at last at rest. He is weak, as a convalescent is weak; but he is no longer ill. We talk and joke quietly for a while; it is clear that our friendship will repair itself sooner or later — for we now have a common fund of unhappiness upon which to draw. ‘Justine’ I say, and he draws in his breath slightly, as if one had run a small thorn under his fingernail, ‘writes from Palestine.’ He nods quickly and motions me with a small gesture. ‘I know. We have traced her. There is no need to … I’m writing to her. She can stay away as long as she wishes. Come back in her own good time.’ It would be foolish to deprive him of the hope and the consolation it must give him, but I know now that she will never return on the old terms. Every phrase of her letter to me made this clear. It is not us she had abandoned so much but a way of life which threatened her reason — the city, love, the sum of all that we had shared. What had she written to him, I wondered, as I recalled the short sobbing breath he had drawn as he leaned against the whitewashed wall?
* * * * *
On these spring mornings while the island slowly uncurls from the sea in the light of an early sun I walk about on the deserted beaches, trying to recover my memories of the time spent in Upper Egypt. It is strange when everything about Alexandria is so vivid that I can recover so little of that lost period. Or perhaps it is not so strange — for compared to the city life I had lived my new life was dull and uneventful. I remember the back-breaking sweat of school work: walks in the flat rich fields with their bumper crops feeding upon dead men’s bones: the black silt-fed Nile moving corpulently through the Delta to the sea: the bilharzia-ridden peasantry whose patience and nobility shone through their rags like patents of dispossessed royalty: village patriarchs inton-ing: the blind cattle turning the slow globe of their waterwheels, blind-folded against monotony — how small can a world become?
Throughout this period I read nothing, thought nothing, was nothing. The fathers of the school were kindly and left me alone
in my spare time, sensing perhaps my distaste for the cloth, for the apparatus of the Holy Office. The children of course were a tor-ment — but then what teacher of sensibility does not echo in his heart the terrible words of Tolstoy: ‘Whenever I enter a school and see a multitude of children, ragged thin and dirty but with their clear eyes and sometimes angelic expressions, I am seized with restlessness and terror, as though I saw people drowning’?
Unreal as all correspondence seemed, I kept up a desultory contact with Melissa whose letters arrived punctually. Clea wrote once or twice, and surprisingly enough old Scobie who appeared to be rather annoyed that he should miss me as much as he obviously did. His letters were full of fantastic animadversion against Jews (who were always referred to jeeringly as ‘snipcocks’) and, surprisingly enough, to passive pederasts (whom he labelled
‘Herms’, i.e. Hermaphrodites). I was not surprised to learn that the