The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [225]
a ten-day holiday in Alexandria which always brought the colour back into her cheeks. But even these visits became in time more rare: she had insensibly slipped out of society and found herself less and less practised in the small talk and small ideas upon which it is based. The life of the city bored her. It was shallow as the waters of the great lake itself, derived; her powers of introspection sharpened with the years, and as her friends fell away only a few names and faces remained — Balthazar the doctor, for example, and Amaril and a few others. But Alexandria was soon to belong more fully to Nessim than to herself. When his studies ended he was to be conscripted into the banking house with its rapidly ramifying ancillaries, roots pushing out into shipping and oil and tungsten, roots needing water…. But by this time she would have become virtually a hermit.
This lonely life had made her feel somewhat unprepared for Mountolive, for the arrival of a stranger in their midst. On that first day she came in late from a desert ride and slipped into her place between her husband and his guest with some pleasurable excitement. Mountolive hardly looked at her, for the thrilling voice alone set up odd little vibrations in his heart which he registered but did not wish to study. She wore white jodhpurs and a yellow shirt with a scarf. Her smooth small hands were white and ringless. Neither of her sons appeared at lunch that day, and after the meal it was she who elected to show him round the house and gardens, already pleasantly astonished by the young man’s respectable Arabic and sound French. She treated him with the faintly apprehensive solicitude of a woman towards her only man-child. His genuine interest and desire to learn filled her with the emotions of a gratitude which surprised her. It was absurd; but then never had a stranger shown any desire to study and assess them, their language, religion and habits. And Mount-olive’s manners were as perfect as his self-command was weak.
They both walked about the rose-garden hearing each other’s voices in a sort of dream. They felt short of breath, almost as if they were suffocating.
When he said good-bye that night and accepted her husband’s inv itation to return and stay with them, she was nowhere to be found. A servant brought a message to say that she was feeling ind isposed with a headache and was lying down. But she waited for his return with a kind of obstinate and apprehensive attention. He did, of course, meet both the brothers on the evening of that first day, for Nessim appeared in the afternoon from Alex-andria and Mountolive instantly recognized in him a person of his own kind, a person whose life was a code. They responded to each other nervously, like a concord in music.
And Narouz. ‘Where is this old Narouz?’ she asked her husband as if the second son were his concern rather than hers, his stake in the world. ‘He has been locked in the incubators for forty days. Tomorrow he will return.’ Leila looked faintly embarrassed. ‘He is to be the farmer of the family, and Nessim the banker’ she explained to Mountolive, flushing slightly. Then, turning to her husband again, she said ‘May I take Mountolive to see Narouz at work?’ ‘Of course.’ Mountolive was enchanted by her pro-nunciation of his name. She uttered it with a French intonation,
‘Montolif’, and it sounded to him a most romantic name. This thought also was new. She took his arm and they walked through the rose-gardens and across the palm-plantations to where the incubators were housed in a long low building of earth-brick, constructed well below ground level. They knocked once or twice on a sunken door, but at last Leila impatiently pushed it open and they entered a narrow corridor with ten earthen ovens ranged along each side facing each other.
‘Close the door’ shouted a deep voice as Narouz rose from among a nest of cobwebs and came through the gloom to identify the intruders. Mountolive was somewhat intimidated