The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [151]
(He did not know that Clea loathed the carnival season and spent the time quietly drawing and reading in her studio.)
They parted now with a warm embrace and Nessim’s car scrib-bled its pennants of dust across the warm air of the fields, eager to regain the coast road once more. A battleship in the basin was firing a twenty-one gun salute, in honour perhaps of some Egyptian dignitary, and the explosions appeared to make the clouds of pearl which always overhung the harbour in spring, tremble and change colour. The sea was high today, and four fishing-boats tacked furiously towards the town harbour with their catch. Nessim stopped only once, to buy himself a carnation for his buttonhole from the flower-vendor on the corner of Saad Zagloul. Then he went to his office, pausing to have his shoe-shine on the way up. The city had never seemed more beautiful to him. Sitting at his desk he thought of Leila and then of Justine. What would his mother have to say about his decision?
Narouz walked out to the summer-house that morning to dis-charge his mission; but first he picked a mass of blooms from the red and yellow roses with which to refill the two great vases which stood on either side of his father’s portrait. His mother was asleep at her desk but the noise he made lifting the latch woke her at once. The snake hissed drowsily and then lowered its head to the ground once more.
‘Bless you, Narouz’ she said as she saw the flowers and rose at once to empty her vases. As they started to trim and arrange the new blooms, Narouz broke the news of his brother’s marriage. His mother stood quite still for a long time, undisturbed but serious as if she were consulting her own inmost thoughts and emotions.
At last she said, more to herself than anyone, ‘Why not?’ repeating the phrase once or twice as if testing its pitch.
Then she bit her thumb and turning to her younger son said
‘But if she is an adventuress, after his money, I won’t have it. I shall take steps to have her done away with. He needs my per-mission anyhow.’
Narouz found this overwhelmingly funny and gave an apprecia-tive laugh. She took his hairy arm between her fingers. ‘I will’ she said.
‘Please.’
‘I swear it.’
He laughed now until he showed the pink roof of his mouth. But she remained abstracted, still listening to an inner monologue. Absently she patted his arm as he laughed and whispered ‘Hush’; and then after a long pause she said, as if surprised by her own thoughts. ‘The strange thing is, I mean it.’
‘And you can’t count on me, eh?’ he said, still laughing but with the germ of seriousness in his words. ‘You can’t trust me to watch over my own brother’s honour.’ He was still swollen up toad-like by the laughter, though his expression had now become serious.
‘My God’ she thought, ‘how ugly he is.’ And her fingers went to the black veil, pressing through it to the rough cicatrices in her own complexion, touching them fiercely as if to smooth them out.
‘My good Narouz’ she said, almost tearfully, and ran her fingers through his hair; the wonderful poetry of the Arabic stirred and soothed him in one. ‘My honeycomb, my dove, my good Narouz. Tell him yes, with my embrace. Tell him yes.’
He stood still, trembling like a colt, and drinking in the music of her voice and the rare caresses of that warm and capable hand.
‘But tell him he must bring her here to us.’
‘I will.’
‘Tell him today.’
And he walked with his queer jerky sawing stride to the tele-phone in the old house. His mother sat at her dusty table and re-peated twice in a low puzzled