The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [253]
They talked on for a while, Nessim smiling as he answered Mountolive’s questions. Only Leila was at first not mentioned. After a while Nessim’s face took on a curious expression — a sort of chaste cunning, and he said with hesitation : ‘Leila will be so delighted.’ He gave him a swift upward glance from under his long lashes and then looked hastily away. He stubbed out his cheroot and gave Mountolive another equivocal glance. He stood up and glanced anxiously back in the direction of his party at the far table. ‘I must go’ he said.
They discussed plans for a possible meeting in England before Mountolive should fly Out to his new appointment. Nessim was vague, unsure of his movements. They would have to wait upon the event. But now Mountolive’s host had returned from the cloak-room, a fact which effectively prevented any further private exchanges. They said good-bye with good grace and Nessim walked slowly back to his table.
‘Is your friend in armaments?’ asked the Chargé d’Affaires as they were leaving. Mountolive shook his head. ‘He’s a banker. Unless tungsten plays a part in armaments — I don’t really know.’
‘It isn’t important. Just idle curiosity. You see, the people at his table are all from Krupps, and so I wondered. That was all.’
* * * * *
IV
o London he always returned with the tremulous eagerness of a lover who has been separated a long time from his T mistress; he returned, so to speak, upon a note of inter-rogation. Had life altered? Had anything been changed? Perhaps the nation had, after all, woken up and begun to live? The thin black drizzle over Trafalgar Square, the soot-encrusted cornices of Whitehall, the slur of rubber tyres spinning upon macadam, the haunting conspiratorial voice of river traffic behind the veils of mist — they were both a reassurance and a threat. He loved it inarticulately, the melancholy of it, though he knew in his heart he could no longer live here permanently, for his profession had
made an expatriate of him. He walked in the soft clinging rain towards Downing Street, muffled in his heavy overcoat, comparing himself from time to time, not without a certain complacence, to the histrionic Grand Duke who smiled at him from the occasional hoardings advertising De Reszke cigarettes.
He smiled to himself as he remembered some of Pursewarden’s acid strictures on their native capital, repeating them in his own mind with pleasure, as compliments almost. Pursewarden trans-ferring his sister’s hand from one elbow to another in order to complete a vague gesture towards the charred-look ing figure of Nelson under its swarming troops of pigeons befluffed against the brute cold. ‘Ah, Mountolive! Look at it all. Home of the eccentric and the sexually disabled. London! Thy food as appetizing as a barium meal, thy gloating discomforts, thy causes not lost but gone before.’ Mountolive had protested laughingly. ‘Never mind, It is our own — and it is greater than the sum of its defects.’ But his companion had found such sentiments uncongenial. He smiled now as he remembered the writer’s wry criticisms of gloom, dis-comfort and the native barbarism. As for Mountolive, it nourished him, the gloom; he felt something like the fox’s love for its earth. He listened with a comfortable smiling indulgence while his companion perorated with mock fury at the image of his native island, saying: ‘Ah, England! England where the members of the R.S.P.C.A. eat meat twice a day and the nudist devours imported fruit in the snow. The only country which is ashamed of poverty.’
Big Ben struck its foundering plunging note. Lamps had begun to throw out their lines of prismatic light. Even in the rain there was the usual little cluster of tourists and loungers outside the gates of Number Ten. He turned sharply away and entered the silent archways of the Foreign Office, directing his alien steps to the bag-room, virtually deserted now, where he declared himself and gave instructions about the forwarding of his mail,