The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [143]
She was now never seen in society and had become something of a legend amongst those who remembered her in the past, and who indeed had once nicknamed her the ‘dark swallow’. Now she sat all day at a rough deal table, writing in that tall thoughtful hand-writing, dipping her quill into a golden inkpot. Her letters had become her very life, and in the writing of them she had begun to suffer from that curious sense of distorted reality which writers have when they are dealing with real people; in the years of writing to Mountolive, for example, she had so to speak re-invented him so successfully that he existed for her now not so much as a real human being but as a character out of her own imagination. She had even almost forgotten what he looked like, what to expect of his physical presence, and when his telegram came to say that he expected to be in Egypt again within a few months, she felt at first nothing but irritation that he should intrude, bodily as it were, upon the picture projected by her imagination. ‘I shall not see him’
she muttered at first, angrily; and only then did she start to tremble and cover her ravaged face with her hands.
‘Mountolive will want to see you’ said Nessim, at last, as the conversation veered round in his direction again. ‘When may I bring him? The Legation is moving up to summer quarters soon, so he will be in Alexandria all the time.’
‘He must wait until I am ready’ she said, once more feeling the anger stir in her at the intrusion of this beloved figment. ‘After all these years.’ And then she asked with a pathetic lustful eagerness, ‘Is he old now — is he grey? Is his leg all right? Can he walk?
That ski-ing fall in Austria….’
To all this Narouz listened with cocked head and sullen heavy heart: he could follow the feeling in her voice as one follows a line of music.
‘He is younger than ever’ said Nessim, ‘hasn’t aged by a day’: and to his surprise she took his hand, and putting it to her cheek she said brokenly ‘Oh — you are horrible, both of you. Go. Leave me alone now. I have letters to write.’
She permitted no mirrors in the harim since the illness which had deprived her of her self-esteem; but privately in a gold-backed pocket-mirror, she touched and pencilled her eyes in secret — her remaining treasure — practising different make-ups on them, practising different glances and matching them to different remarks
— trying to give what was left of her looks a vocabulary as large as her lively mind. She was like a man struck suddenly blind learn-ing to spell, with the only member left him, his hands. Now the two men walked back into the old house, with its cool but dusty rooms whose walls were hung with ancient carpets and embroidered mats, and crowded with gigantic carcasses of furni-ture long since outmoded — a sort of Ottoman Buhl such as one sees in the old houses of Egypt. Nessim’s heartstrings were tugged by the memory of its ugliness, its old-fashioned Second Empire pieces and its jealously guarded routines. The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said ‘Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether.’ These ancient and hereditary polite-nesses filled Nessim with emotion. Even the primitive sanitary arrangements — there were no bathrooms — seemed to him some-how in keeping with the character of things, though he loved hot water. Narouz himself slept naked winter and summer. He washed in the courtyard — a servant threw water over him from a pitcher. Indoors, he usually wore an old blue cloak and Turkish slippers. He smoked tobacco too in a narguileh the length of a musket.
While the elder brother unpacked his clothes, Narouz sat on the end of the bed studying the papers which filled the briefcase, musing with a quiet intentness, for they related to the machinery with