The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [221]
Here and there too the men began to fight off the birds, striking at the dark air around them with sticks until amid the swarming scrolls of captured fish one could see surprisingly rainbow feathers of magical hue and broken beaks from which blood trickled upon the silver scales of the fish. For three-quarters of an hour the scene continued thus until the dark boats were brimming. Now Nessim was alongside, shouting to them in the darkness. ‘We must go back.’ He pointed to a lantern waving across the water, creating a warm cave of light in which they glimpsed the smooth turning flanks of a horse and the serrated edge of palm-leaves.
‘My mother is waiting for us’ cried Nessim. His flawless head bent down to take the edge of a light-pool as he smiled. His was a Byzantine face such as one might find among the frescoes of Ravenna — almond-shaped, dark-eyed, clear-featured. But Mountolive was looking, so to speak, through the face of Nessim and into that of Leila who was so like him, his mother. ‘Narouz’
he called hoarsely, for the younger brother had jumped into the water to fasten a net. ‘Narouz!’ One could hardly make oneself heard in the commotion. ‘We must go back.’
And so at last the two boats each with its Cyclops-eye of light turned back across the dark water to the far jetty where Leila
waited patiently for them with the horses in the mosquito-loud silence. A young moon was up now.
Her voice came laughingly across the variable airs of the lake, chiding them for being late, and Narouz chuckled. ‘We’ve brought lots of fish’ cried Nessim. She stood, slightly darker than the darkness, and their hands met as if guided by some perfected instinct which found no place in their conscious minds. Mount-olive’s heart shook as he stood up and climbed on to the jetty with her help. But no sooner were the two brothers ashore than Narouz cried: ‘Race you home, Nessim’ and they dived for their horses which bucked and started at the laughing onslaught.
‘Careful’ she cried sharply, but before a second had passed they were off, hooves drumming on the soft rides of the embankment, Narouz chuckling like a Mephistopheles. ‘What is one to do?’ she said with mock resignation, and now the factor came forward with their own horses.
They mounted and set off for the house. Ordering the servant to ride on before with the lantern, Leila brought her horse close in so that they might ride knee-to-knee, solaced by the touch of each other’s bodies. They had not been lovers for very long —
barely ten days — though to the youthful Mountolive it seemed a century, an eternity of despair and delight. He had been formally educated in England, educated not to wish to feel. All the other valuable lessons he had already mastered, despite his youth — to confront the problems of the drawing-room and the street with sang-froid; but towards personal emotions he could only oppose the nervous silence of a national sensibility almost anaesthetized into clumsy taciturnity: an education in selected reticences and shames. Breeding and sensibility seldom march together, though the breach can be carefully disguised in codes of manners, forms of address towards the world. He had heard and read of passion, but had regarded it as something which would never impinge on him, and now here it was, bursting into the secret life which, like every overgrown schoolboy, lived on autonomously behind the indulgent screen of everyday manners and transactions, everyday talk and affections. The social man in him was overripe before the inner man had grown up. Leila had turned him out as one might turn out an old trunk, throwing everything into confusion. He suspected himself now to be only a mawkish and callow youth, his reserves
depleted. With indignation almost, he realized that here at last there was something for which he might even be prepared to die —
something whose very crudity carried with it a winged message which pierced to the quick of his mind. Even in