The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [17]
placed. Justine was breathing harshly in a manner which sug-gested that she was on the point of tears. We pounced on her, I suppose, and dragged her out into the street; at any rate I can only remember the three of us reached the sea and driving the whole length of the Corniche in clean bronze moonlight, Nessim’s sad and silent face reflected in the driving-mirror, and the figure of his silent wife seated beside him, gazing out at the crashing silver waves and smoking the cigarette which she had burrowed from the pockets of his jacket. Later, in the garage, before we left the car, she kissed Nessim tenderly on the eyes.
* * * * *
All this I have come to regard as a sort of overture to that first real meeting face to face, when such understanding as we had enjoyed until then — a gaiety and friendship founded in tastes which were common to the three of us — disintegrated into some-thing which was not love — how could it have been? — but into a sort of mental possession in which the bonds of a ravenous sexuality played the least part. How did we let it come about —
matched as we were so well in experience, weathered and seasoned by the disappointments of love in other places?
In autumn the female bays turn to uneasy phosphorus and after the long chafing days of dust one feels the first pa lpitations of the autumn, like the wings of a butterfly fluttering to unwrap them-selves. Mareotis turns lemon-mauve and its muddy flanks are starred by sheets of radiant anemones, growing through the quickened plaster-mud of the shore. One day while Nessim was away in Cairo I called at the house to borrow some books and to my surprise found Justine alone in the studio, darning an old pull-over. She had taken the night train back to Alexandria, leaving Nessim to attend some business conference. We had tea together and then, on a sudden impulse took our bathing things and drove out through the rusty slag-heaps of Mex towards the sand-beaches off Bourg El Arab, glittering in the mauve-lemon light of the fast-fading afternoon. Here the open sea boomed upon the carpets of fresh sand the colour of oxidized mercury; its deep melodious
percussion was the background to such conversation as we had. We walked ankle deep in the spurge of those shallow dimpled pools, choked here and there with sponges torn up by the roots and flung ashore. We passed no one on the road I remember save a gaunt Bedouin youth carrying on his head a wire crate full of wild birds caught with lime-twigs. Dazed quail.
We lay for a long time, side by side in our wet bathing costumes to take the last pale rays of the sun upon our skins in the delicious evening coolness. I lay with half-shut eyes while Justine (how clearly I see her!) was up on one elbow, shading her eyes with the palm of one hand and watching my face. Whenever I was talking she had the habit of gazing at my lips with a curious half-mocking, an almost impertinent intentness, as if she were waiting for me to mispronounce a word. If indeed it all began at this point I have forgotten the context, but I remember the hoarse troubled voice saying something like: ‘And if it should happen to us — what would you say?’ But before I could say anything she leaned down and kissed me — I should say derisively, antagonistically, on the mouth. This seemed so much out of character that I turned with some sort of half-formulated reproach on my lips — but from here on her kisses were like tremendous soft breathless stabs punctua-ting the savage laughter which seemed to well up in her — a jeer-ing unstable laughter. It struck me then that she was like someone who had had a bad fright. If I said now: ‘It must not happen to us’
she must have replied: ‘But let us suppose. What if it did?’ Then —
and this I remember clearly — the mania for self-justification seized her (we spoke French: language creates national character) and between those breathless half-seconds when I felt her strong mouth on my own and those worldly brown arms closing upon mine: ‘I would not mistake it for gluttony or self-indulgence. We are