The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [238]
— just as a gardener will plant sticks for a climbing sweet-pea. If the one love died, another grew up in its place. Leila became his only mentor and confidant, his only source of encouragement. It was to meet these demands of hers that he taught himself to write well in English and French. Taught himself to appreciate things which normally would have been outside the orbit of his interests — painting and music. He informed himself in order to inform her.
‘You say you will be in Zagreb next month. Please visit and des-cribe to me …’ she would write, or ‘How lucky you will be in passing through Amsterdam; there is a retrospective Klee which has received tremendous notices in the French press. Please pay it a visit and describe your impressions honestly to me, even if unfavourable. I have never seen an original myself.’ This was Leila’s parody of love, a flirtation of minds, in which the roles were now reversed; for she was deprived of the riches of Europe and she fed upon his long letters and parcels of books with the double gluttony. The young man strained every nerve to meet these demands, and suddenly found the hitherto padlocked worlds of paint, architecture, music and writing opening on every side of him. So she gave him almost a gratuitous education in the world which he would never have been able to compass by himself. And where the old dependence of his youth slowly foundered, the new one grew. Mountolive, in the strictest sense of the words, had now found a woman after his own heart.
The old love was slowly metamorphosed into admiration, just as his physical longing for her (so bitter at first) turned into a con-suming and depersonalized tenderness which fed upon her absence instead of dying from it. In a few years she was able to confess:
‘I feel somehow nearer to you today, on paper, than I did before we parted. Why is this?’ But she knew only too well. Yet she added at once, for honesty’s sake: ‘Is this feeling a little unhealthy perhaps? To outsiders it might even seem a little pathetic or ludicrous — who can say? And these long long letters, David —
are they the bitter-sweet of a Sanseverina’s commerce with her nephew Fabrizio? I often wonder if they were lovers — their intimacy is so hot and close? Stendhal never actually says so. I wish I knew Italy. Has your lover turned aunt in her old age?
Don’t answer even if you know the truth. Yet it is lucky in a way that we are both solitaries, with large blank unfilled areas of heart
— like the early maps of Africa? — and need each other still. I mean, you as an only child with only your mother to think of, and I — of course, I have many cares, but live within a very narrow cage. Your description of the ballerina and your love-affair was amusing and touching; thank you for telling me. Have a care, dear friend, and do not wound yourself.’
It was a measure of the understanding which had grown up between them that he was now able to confide in her without reserve details of the few personal histories which occupied him: the love-affair with Grishkin which almost entangled him in a premature marriage; his unhappy passion for an Ambassador’s mistress which exposed him to a duel, and perhaps disgrace. If she felt any pangs, she concealed them, writing to advise and console him with the warmth of an apparent detachment. They were frank with each other, and sometimes her own deliberate exchanges all but shocked him, dwelling