The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [18]
What was it? ‘And is this the way?’ I remember asking as I saw the tall toppling figure of Nessim upon the evening sky. ‘I do not know’ she said with a savage, obstinate desperate expression of humility upon her face, ‘I do not know’; and she pressed herself upon me like someone pressing upon a bruise. It was as if she wished to expunge the very thought of me, and yet in the fragile quivering context of every kiss found a sort of painful surcease —
like cold water on a sprain. How well I recognized her now as a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find!
She got up now and walked away down the long curving per-spective of the beach, crossing the pools of lava slowly, her head bent; and I thought of Nessim’s handsome face smiling at her from every mirror in the room. The whole of the scene which we had just enacted was invested in my mind’ with a dream-like improbability. It was curious in an objective sort of way to notice how my hands trembled as I lit a cigarette and rose to follow her.
But when I overtook her and halted her the face she turned to me was that of a sick demon. She was in a towering rage. ‘You thought I simply wanted to make love? God! haven’t we had enough of that? How is it that you do not know what I feel for once? How is it?’ She stamped her foot in the wet sand. It was not merely that a geological fault had opened in the ground upon which we had been treading with such self-confidence. It was as if some long-disused mineshaft in my own character had suddenly fallen in. I recognized that this barren traffic in ideas and feelings had driven a path through towards the denser jungles of the heart; and that here we became bondsmen in the body, possessors of an enigmatic knowledge which could only be passed on — received, deciphered, understood — by those rare complementaries of ours in the world. (How few they were, how seldom one found them!)
‘After all’ I remember her saying, ‘this has nothing to do with sex’
which tempted me to laugh though I recognized in the phrase her desperate attempt to dissociate the flesh from the message it carried. I suppose this sort of thing always happens to bankrupts when they fall in love. I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other. I think we were both horrified by the thought; for exhausted as we were we could not help but quail before such a relationship. We did not say any more but walked back along the beach to where we had left our clothes, speechless and hand in hand. Justine looked utterly exhausted. We were both dying to get away from each other, in order to examine our own feelings. We did not
speak to each other again. We drove into the city and she dropped me at the usual corner near my flat. I snapped the door of the car closed and she drove off without a word or a glance in my direction. As I opened the door of my room I could still see the imprint of Justine’s foot in the wet sand. Melissa was reading, and looking up at me she said with characteristic calm foreknowledge: ‘Some-thing has happened — what is it?’ I could not tell her since I did not myself know. I took her face in my hands and examined it silent ly, with a care and attention, with a sadness and hunger I don’t ever remember feeling before. She said: ‘It is not me you are seeing, it is someone else.’ But in truth I was seeing Melissa for the first time. In some paradoxical way it was Justine who was now permitting me to see Melissa as she really was — and to recognize my love for her. Melissa smilingly reached for a cigar-ette and said: ‘You are falling in love with Justine’ and I answered as sincerely, as honestly, as painfully as I could: ‘No Melissa, it is worse than that’ — though I could not for the life of me have explained how or why.
When I thought of Justine I thought