The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [283]
my own face, all these years. Suddenly it came back over me like an Iron Mask. Bah! soon my courage will come back, never fear. Sooner or later we must meet and shock one another. When?
I don’t know as yet. I don’t know.’
Disconsolately reading the words as he sat upon the terraces at dusk he thought: ‘I cannot assemble my feelings coherently enough to respond to her intelligently. What should I say or do? Nothing.’ But the word had a hollow ring. ‘Patience’ he said softly to himself, turning the word this way and that in his mind the better to examine it. Later, at the Cervonis’ ball among the blue lights and the snapping of paper streamers, it seemed easy once more to be patient. He moved once more in a glad world in which he no longer felt cut off from his fellows — a world full of friends in which he could enjoy the memory of the long rides with Nessim, conversations with Amaril, or the troubling pleasure of dancing with the blonde Clea. Yes, he could be patient here, so close at hand. The time, place and circumstances were all of them rewards for patience. He felt no omens rising from the unclouded future, while even the premonitions of the slowly approaching war were things which he could share publicly with the others.
‘Can they really raze whole capitals, these bombers?’ asked Clea quietly. ‘I’ve always believed that our inventions mirror our secret wishes, and we wish for the end of the city-man, don’t we? All of us? Yes, but how hard to surrender London and Paris. What do you think?’
What did he think? Mountolive wrinkled his fine brows and shook his head. He was thinking of Leila draped in a black veil, like a nun, sitting in her dusty summerhouse at Karm Abu Girg, among the splendid roses, with only a snake for company…. So the untroubled, unhurried summer moved steadily onwards
— and Mountolive found little to daunt him professionally in a city so eager for friendship, so vulnerable to the least politeness, so expert in taking pleasure. Day after day the coloured sails fluttered and loitered in the harbour mirror among the steel fortresses, the magical white waves moved in perfect punc-tuation over desert beaches burnt white as calx by the African suns. By night, sitting above a garden resplendent with fireflies, he heard the deep booming tread of screws as the Eastern-bound liners coasted the deeper waters outside the harbour, heading
for the ports on the other side of the world. In the desert they explored oases of greenness made trembling and insubstant ial as dreams by the water mirages, or stalked the bronze knuckles of the sandstone ridges around the city on horses, which, for all their fleetness, carried food and drink to assuage their talkative riders. He visited Petra and the strange coral delta along the Red Sea coast with its swarming population of rainbow-coloured tropical fish. The long cool balconies of the summer residence echoed night after night to the clink of ice in tall glasses, the clink of platitudes and commonplaces made thrilling to him by their position in place and time, by their appositeness to a city which knew that pleasure was the only thing that made industry worth while; on these balconies, hanging out over the blue littoral of the historic coast, warmly lit by candle-light, these fragmentary friendships flowered and took shape in new affections whose candour made him no longer feel separated from his fellow-men by the powers he wielded. He was popular and soon might be well-beloved. Even the morbid spiritua l lassitude and self-indulgence of the city was delightful to one who, secure in income, could afford to live outside it. Alexandr ia seemed to him a very desirable sum-mer cantonment, accessible to every affection and stranger-lov ing in the sense of the Greek word. But why should he not feel at home?
The Alexandrians themselves were strangers and exiles to the Egypt which existed below the glittering surface of their dreams, ringed by the hot deserts and fanned by the bleakness of a faith