The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [211]
‘I sat down opposite him on the sofa, not knowing quite what to say. “What exactly happened?” I asked him. All of a sudden his eyes narrowed and grew small, suspicious -look ing. Then he sighed and hung his head, tracing the design of the carpet with his finger.
“It is not for you to hear” he whispered, his lips trembling.
‘We waited like this, and all of a sudden, to my intense em-barrassment and disgust, he began to talk of his love for me, but in the tone of a man talking to himself. He seemed almost oblivious of me, never once looking up into my face. And I felt all the apolo-getic horror that comes over me when I am admired or desired and cannot reciprocate the feeling. I was somehow ashamed too, looking at that brutal tear-stained face, simply because I could not feel the slightest stirring of sympathy within my heart. He sat there on the carpet like some great brown toad, talking; like some story-book troglodyte. What the devil was I to do? “When have you seen me?” I asked him. He had only seen me three times in his life, though frequently at night he passed through the street to see if my light was on. I swore under my breath. It was so unfair. I had done nothing to merit this grotesque passion.
‘Then at last came a reprieve. The telephone rang, and he trembled all over like a hound as he heard the unmistakable hoarse tones of the woman he thought he had killed. There was nothing wrong that she knew of, and she was on her way home with Nessim. Everything was as it should be at the Cervoni house and the ball was still going on at full blast. As I said good night I felt Narouz clasp my slippers and begin kissing them with gratitude. “Thank you. Thank you” he repeated over and over again.
‘ “Come on. Get up. It’s time to go home.” I was deathly tired by now. I advised him to go straight back home and to confide his
story to nobody. “Perhaps you have imagined the whole thing” I said, and he gave me a tired but brilliant smile.
‘He walked slowly and heavily downstairs before me, still shaken by his experience, it was clear, but the hysteria had left him. I opened the front door, and he tried once more to express his in-coherent gratitude and affection. He seized my hands and kissed them repeatedly with great wet hairy kisses. Ugh! I can feel them now. And then, before turning into the night, he said in a low voice, smiling: “Clea, this is the happiest day of my life, to have seen and touched you and to have seen your little room.” ’
Clea sipped her drink, nodding into the middle distance for a moment with a sad smile on her face. Then she looked at her own brown hands and gave a little shudder. ‘Ugh! The kisses’ she said under her breath and with an involuntary movement began to rub her hands, palms upward, upon the red plush arm of the chair, as if to obliterate the kisses once and for all, to expunge the memory of them.
But now the band had begun to play a Paul Jones (perhaps the very dance in which Arnauti first met Justine?) and the warm lighted gallery of faces began to fan out once more from the centre of the darkness, the brilliance of flesh and cloth and jewels in the huge gaunt ballroom where the palms splintered themselves in the shivering mirrors: leaking through the windows to where the moonlight waited patiently among the deserted public gardens and highways, troubling the uneasy water of the outer harbour with its glittering heartless gestures. ‘Come’ said Clea, ‘why do you never play a part in these things? Why do you prefer to sit apart and study us all?’
But I was thinking as I watched the circle of lovely faces move forward and reverse among the glitter of jewellery and the rustle of silks, of the Alexandrians to whom these great varieties of