The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [279]
They said goodnight.
The next day was full of familiar routines for Mountolive, but conducted, so to speak, from a new angle — the unfamiliar angle of a position which brought people immediately to their feet. It was exciting and also disturbing; even up to the rank of councillor he had managed to have a comfortably-based relationship with the junior staff at every level. Even the hulking Marines who staffed the section of Chancery Guards were friendly and equable towards him in the happiest of colloquial manners. Now they shrank into postures of reserve, almost of self-defence. These
were the bitter fruits of power, he reflected, accepting his new role with resignation.
However, the opening moves were smoothly played; and even his staff party of the evening went off so well that people seemed reluctant to leave. He was late in changing for his dinner-party and Maskelyne had already been shown into the anodyne drawing-room when he finally appeared, bathed and changed. ‘Ah, Mount-olive!’ said the soldier, standing up and extending his hand with a dry expressionless calm. ‘I have been waiting for your arrival with some anxiety.’ Mountolive felt a sudden sting of pique after all the deference shown to him during the day to be left thus untitled by this personage. (‘Heavens’ he thought, ‘am I really a provincial at heart?’)
‘My dear Brigadier,’ his opening remarks carried a small but perceptible coolness as a result. Perhaps the soldier simply wished to make it clear that he was a War Office body, and not a Foreign Office one? It was a clumsy way to do it. Nevertheless, and some-what to his own annoyance, Mountolive felt himself rather drawn to this lean and solitary-look ing figure with its tired eyes and lustreless voice. His ugliness had a certain determined elegance. His ancient dinner-clothes were not very carefully pressed and brushed, but the quality of the material and cut were both ex-cellent. Maskelyne sipped his drink slowly and calmly, lowering his greyhound’s muzzle towards his glass circumspectly. He scrutinized Mountolive with the utmost coolness. They ex-changed the formal politeness of host and guest for a while, and somewhat to his own annoyance, Mountolive found himself liking him despite the dry precarious manner. He suddenly seemed to see in him one who, like himself, had hesitated to ascribe any particular meaning to life.
The presence of servants excluded any but the most general exchanges during the dinner they shared, seated out upon the lawn, and Maskelyne seemed content to bide his time. Only once the name of Pursewarden came up and he said with his offhand air: ‘Yes. I hardly know him, of course, except offi-cially. The odd thing is that his father — surely the name is too uncommon for me to be wrong? — his father was in my company during the war. He picked up an M.C. Indeed, I actually com-posed the citation which put him up for it: and of course, I had the
disagreeable next-of-kin jobs. The son must have been a mere child then, I suppose. Of course, I may be wrong — not that it matters.’
Mountolive was intrigued. ‘As a matter of fact’ he said, ‘I think you are right — he mentioned something of the kind to me once. Have you ever talked to him about it?’
‘Good Heavens, no! Why should I?’ Maskelyne seemed very faintly shocked. ‘The son isn’t really … my kind of person’ he said quietly but without animus, simply as a statement of fact.
‘He … I … well, I read a book of his once.’ He stopped abruptly as if everything had been said; as if the subject had been disposed of for all time.
‘He must have been a brave man’ said Mountolive after an interval.
‘Yes — or perhaps not’ said his guest slowly, thoughtfully. He paused. ‘One wonders. He wasn’t a real soldier. One saw it quite often at the front. Sometimes acts of gallantry come as much out of cowardice as bravery — that is the queer thing. His act, particularly, I mean, was really an unsoldierly one. Oddly enough.’
‘But ——’ protested Mountolive.
‘Let me make myself clear. There is a difference between a necessary act