The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [121]
hunchback, tactful as a diplomat, elaborated a full-scale haircut out of mere air — for Scobie’s glittering dome was very lightly fringed by the kind of fluff one sees on a duckling’s bottom, and he had of late years sacrificed the torpedo beard of a wintry sparseness.
‘I must say’ he is about to say throatily (in the presence of so many suspicious people we ‘spies’ must speak ‘normally’), ‘I must say, old man, you get a spiffing treatment here, Mnemjian really does understand.’ Clearing his throat, ‘The whole art.’ His voice became portentous in the presence of technical terms. ‘It’s all a question of Graduation — I had a close friend who told me, a barber in Bond Street. You simply got to graduate.’ Mnemjian thanked him in his pinched ventriloquist’s voice. ‘Not at all’ said the old man largely. ‘I know the wrinkles.’ Now he could wink at me. I winked back. We both looked away.
Released, he stood up, his bones creaking, and set his piratical jaw in a look of full-blooded health. He examined his reflection in the mirror with complacence. ‘Yes’ he said, giving a short authori-tative nod, ‘it’ll do.’
‘Electric friction for scalp, sir?’
Scobie shook his head masterfully as he placed his red flower-pot tarbush on his skull. ‘It brings me out in goose pimples’ he said, and then, with a smirk, ‘I’ll nourish what’s left with arak. ’
Mnemjian saluted this stroke of wit with a little gesture. We were free.
But he was really not elated at all. He drooped as we walked slowly down Chérif Pacha together towards the Grande Corniche. He struck moodily at his knee with the horsehair fly-swatter, puffing moodily at his much-mended briar. Thought. All he said with sudden petulance was ‘I can’t stand that Toto fellow. He’s an open nancy-boy. In my time we would have….’ He grumbled away into his skin for a long time and then petered into silence again.
‘What is it, Scobie?’ I said.
‘I’m troubled’ he admitted. ‘Really troubled.’
When he was in the upper town his walk and general bearing had an artificial swagger — it suggested a White Man at large, brooding upon problems peculiar to White Men — their Burden as they call it. To judge by Scobie, it hung heavy. His least gesture had a resounding artificiality, tapping his knees, sucking his lip, falling into brooding attitudes before shop windows. He gazed at
the people around him as if from stilts. These gestures reminded me in a feeble way of the heroes of domestic English fiction who stand before a Tudor fireplace, impressively whacking their riding-boots with a bull’s pizzle. By the time we had reached the outskirts of the Arab quarter, however, he had all but shed these mannerisms. He relaxed, tipped his tarbush up to mop his brow, and gazed around him with the affection of long familiarity. Here he belonged by adoption, here he was truly at home. He would defiantly take a drink from the leaden spout sticking out of a wall near the Goharri mosque (a public drinking fountain) though the White Man in him must have been aware that the water was far from safe to drink. He would pick a stick of sugar-cane off a stall as he passed, to gnaw it in the open street: or a sweet locust-bean. Here, everywhere, the cries of the open street greeted him and he responded radiantly.
‘ Y’alla, effendi, Skob’
‘ Naharak said, ya Skob’
‘ Allah salimak. ’
He would sigh and say ‘Dear people’; and ‘How I love the place you have no idea!’ dodging a liquid-eyed camel as it humped down the narrow street threatening to knock us down with its bulging sumpters of bercim, the wild clover which is used as fodder.
‘May your prosperity increase’
‘By your leave, my mother’
‘May your day be blessed’
‘Favour me, O sheik.’
Scobie walked here with the ease of a man who has come into his own estate, slowly, sumptuously, like an Arab.
Today we sat together for a while in the shade of the ancient mosque listening to the clicking of the palms and the hooting