The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [301]
‘I see’ said Mountolive. It was strange, but already he was beginning to get used to the idea of Pursewarden’s disappearance from the scene. The shock was abating, diminishing: only the mystery remained. Telford still spluttered on the line. ‘Yes’ he said, recovering mastery of himself. ‘Yes.’
It was only a matter of moments before Mountolive recovered his demure official pose and reoriented himself to take a benign interest in the mills and their thumping machinery. He worked hard not to seem too abstracted and to seem suitably impressed by what was shown to him. He tried too to analyse the absurdity of
his anger against Pursewarden having committed an act which seemed … a gross solecism! How absurd. Yet, as an act, it was somehow typical because so inconsiderate: perhaps he should have anticipated it? Profound depression alternated with his feelings of anger.
He motored back in haste, full of an urgent expectancy, an unease. It was almost as if he were going to take Pursewarden to task, demand an explanation of him, administer a well-earned reproof. He arrived to find that the Chancery was just clos ing, though the industrious Errol was still busy upon State papers in his office. Everyone down to the cipher clerks seemed to be afflicted by the air of gravid depression which sudden death always confers upon the uncomfortably living. He deliberately forced him-self to walk slowly, talk slowly, not to hurry. Haste, like emotion, was always deplorable because it suggested that impulse or feeling was master where only reason should rule. His secretary had already left but he obtained the keys to his safe from Archives and sedately walked up the two short flights to his office. Heartbeats are mercifully inaudible to anyone but oneself.
The dead man’s ‘effects’ (the poetry of causality could not be better expressed than by the word) were stacked on his desk, looking curiously disembodied. A bundle of papers and manu-script, a parcel addressed to a publisher, a mackintosh and various odds and ends conscripted by the painstaking Telford in the interests of truth (though they had little beauty for Mountolive). He got a tremendous start when he saw Pursewarden’s bloodless features staring up at him from his blotter — a death-mask in plaster of Paris with a note from Balthazar saying ‘I took the liberty of making an impression of the face after death. I trust this will seem sensible.’ Pursewarden’s face! From some angles death can look like a fit of the sulks. Mountolive touched the effigy with reluctance, superstitious ly, moving it this way and that. His flesh crept with a small sense of loathing; he realized suddenly that he was afraid of death.
Then to the safe with its envelope whose clumsy seals he cracked with a trembling thumb as he sat at his desk. Here at least he should find some sort of rational exegesis for this gross default of good manners! He drew a deep breath.
My dear David,
I have torn up half a dozen other attempts to explain this in detail. I found I was only making literature. There is quite enough about. My decision has to do with life. Paradox! I am terribly sorry, old man.
Quite by accident, in an unexpected quarter, I stumbled upon something which told me that Maskelyne’s theories about Nessim were right, mine wrong. I do not give you my sources, and will not. But I now realize Nessim is smuggling arms into Palestine and has been for some time. He is obviously the unknown source, deeply implicated in the operations which were described in Paper Seven
— you will remember. (Secret Mandate File 341. Intelligence.) But I simply am not equal to facing the simpler moral impli-cations raised by this discovery. I know what has to be done about it. But the man happens to be my friend. Therefore … a quietus. (This will solve other deeper problems too.) Ach! what a boring world we have created around us. The slime of plot and counter-plot. I have just recognized that it is not my world at all. (I can hear you swearing as you read.)
I feel in a way a cad to shelve my own responsibilities