The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [297]
‘The caput mortuum of a love-scene’ he thought to himself. Then Melissa sighed, as if with relief, and raised her head. ‘I see now’
she said quietly. ‘You are all closed in, your heart is closed in, completely so.’ She joined index finger to index finger, thumb to thumb in a gesture such as one might use to throttle a rabbit. Her eyes flashed with sympathy. ‘Your life is dead, closed up. Not like Darley’s. His is wide … very wide … open.’ She spread her arms out for a moment before dropping them to her knee once more. She added with the tremendous unconscious force of veracity:
‘ He can still love.’ He felt as if he had been hit across the mouth. The candle flickered. ‘Look again’ he said angrily. ‘Tell me some more.’ But she completely missed the anger and the chagrin in his voice and bent once more to that enigmatic white hand. ‘Shall I tell you everything?’ she whispered, and for a minute his breath stopped. ‘Yes’ he said curtly. Melissa smiled a stranger, private smile.
‘I am not very good’ she said softly, ‘I’ll tell you only what I see.’
Then she turned her candid eyes to him and added: ‘I see death very close.’ Pursewarden smiled grimly. ‘Good’ he said. Melissa drew her hair back to her ear with a finger and bent to his hand once more. ‘Yes, very close. You will hear about it in a matter of hours. What rubbish!’ She gave a little laugh. And then, to his complete surprise she went on to describe his sister. ‘The blind
one — not your wife.’ She closed her eyes and spread her repellent arms out before her like a sleep-walker. ‘Yes’ said Pursewarden,
‘that is her. That is my sister.’ ‘Your sister?’ Melissa was astounded. She dropped his hand. She had never in playing this game made an accurate prediction before. Pursewarden told her gravely: ‘She and I were lovers. We shall never be able to love other people.’
And now, with the recital begun he suddenly found it easy to tell the rest, to tell her everything. He was completely master of himself and she gazed at him with pity and tenderness. Was it easy because they spoke French? In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he had always qualified it as ‘an unsniggerable langua ge’. Or was it simply that the fugitive sympathy of Melissa made these events easy to speak of? She herself did not judge, everything was known, had been experienced. She nodded gravely as he spoke of his love and his deliberate abandoning of it, of his attempt at marriage, of its failure.
Between pity and admiration they kissed, but passionately now, united by the ties of recorded human experience, by the sensation of having shared something. ‘I saw it in the hand’ she said, ‘in your hand.’ She was somewhat frightened by the unwonted accuracy of her own powers. And he? He had always wanted someone to whom he could speak freely — but it must be someone who could not fully understand! The candle flickered. On the mirror with shaving soap he had written the mocking verses for Justine which began:
Oh Dreadful is the check!
Intense the agony.
When the ear begins to hear
And the eye begins to see!
He repeated them softly to himself, in the privacy of his own mind, as he thought of the dark composed features which he had seen here, by candle-light — the dark body seated in precisely the pose which Melissa now adopted, watching him with her chin on her knee, holding his hand with sympathy. And as he went on in his quiet voice to speak of his sister, of his perpetual quest for satisfactions which might be better than those he could remember, and which he had deliberately abandoned, other verses floated through his mind; the chaotic commentaries thrown up by his
reading no less than by his experiences. Even as he saw once again the white marble face with its curling black hair thrown back about the nape of a slender neck, the ear-points, chin cleft by a dimple —
a face which led him back always to those huge empty eye-sockets
— he heard his inner mind repeating:
Amors par force vos demeine!