The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [136]
— a world which dealt in the refinements of manners she was as yet too coarse to enjoy, which could afford to cultivate emotions posées by taste. A world which could only be knocked off its feet when you were skin to skin with it, so to speak! No, she did not mean the words, for vulgar as the idea sounded, she knew that she was right by the terms of her intuition since the thing she proposed is really, for women, the vital touchstone to a man’s being; the knowledge, not of his qualities which can be analysed or inferred, but of the very flavour of his personality. Nothing except the act of physical love tells us this truth about one another. She bitterly regretted his unwisdom in denying her a concrete chance to see for herself what underlay his beauty and persuasion. Yet how could one insist?
‘Good’ he said, ‘for our marriage will be a delicate affair, and very much a question of manners, until….’
‘I’m sorry’ she said. ‘I really did not know how to treat honour-ably with you and avoid disappointing you.’
He kissed her lightly on the mouth as he stood up. ‘I must go first and get the permission of my mother, and tell my brother. I am terribly happy, even though now I am furious with you.’
They went out to the car together and Justine suddenly felt very weak, as if she had been carried far out of her depth and abandoned in mid-ocean. ‘I don’t know what more to say.’
‘Nothing. You must start living’ he said as the car began to draw away, and she felt as if she had received a smack across the mouth. She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate which she drank with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain. No, somewhere she was truly a woman.
Nessim took the lift up to his office, and sitting down at his desk wrote upon a card the following words: ‘My dearest Clea, Justine has agreed to marry me. I could never do this if I thought it would qualify or interfere in any way with either her love for you or mine….’
Then, appalled by the thought that whatever he might write to Clea might sound mawkish, he tore the note up and folded his arms. After a long moment of thought he picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria’s number. ‘Da Capo’ he said quietly. ‘You remember my plans for marrying Justine? All is well.’
He replaced the receiver slowly, as if it weighed a ton, and sat staring at his own reflection in the polished desk.
* * * * *
IV
t was now, having achieved the major task of persuasion, that his self-assurance fled and left him face to face with a sensation I entirely new to him, namely an acute shyness, an acute unwill-ingness to face his mother directly, to confront her with his inten-tions. He himself was puzzled by it, for they had always been close together, their confidences linked by an affection too deep to need the interpretation of words. If he had ever been shy or awkward it was with his awkward brother, never with her. And now? It was not as if he even feared her disfavour — he knew she would fall in with his wishes as soon as they were spoken. What then in-hibited him? He could not tell. Yet he flushed as he thought of her now, and passed the whole of that morning in restless auto-matic acts, picking up a novel only to lay it down, mixing a drink only to abandon it, starting to sketch and then abruptly dropping the charcoal to walk out into the garden of the great house, ill at ease. He had telephoned his office to say that he was indisposed and then, as always when he had told a lie, began to suffer in truth with an attack of indigestion.
Then he started to ask for the number of the old country house where Leila and Narouz lived, but changed