The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [307]
Damn!’ He had moved again. She stopped in vexation and was about to reprove him when she caught sight of the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s time to go’ she said. ‘You must not keep her waiting.’
‘Good’ he said sharply, and rising, stripped off the pullover and donned his own well-cut coat, groping in the pocket for the keys of the car as he turned. Then, remembering, he brushed his dark hair back swiftly, impatiently, in the mirror, trying suddenly to imagine how he must look to Justine. ‘I wish I could say exactly what I mean. Do you not believe in love-contracts for those whose
souls aren’t yet up to loving? A tendresse against an amour-passion,
Clea? If she had parents I would have bought her from them unhesitatingly. If she had been thirteen she would have had nothing to say or feel, eh?’
‘Thirteen!’ said Clea in disgust; she shuddered and pulled his coat down at the back for him. ‘Perhaps’ he went on ironically,
‘unhappiness is a diktat for me…. What do you think?’
‘But then you would believe in passion. You don’t.’
‘I do … but….’
He gave his charming smile and made a tender hopeless gesture in the air, part resignation, part anger. ‘Ah, you are no use’ he said. ‘We are all waiting for an education of sorts.’
‘Go’ said Clea, ‘I’m sick of the subject. Kiss me first.’
The two friends embraced and she whispered: ‘Good luck’
while Nessim said between his teeth ‘I must stop this childish interrogation of you. It is absurd. I must do something decisive about her myself.’ He banged a doubled fist into the palm of his hand, and she was surprised at such unusual vehemence in one so reserved. ‘Well’ she said, with surprise opening her blue eyes, ‘this is new!’ They both laughed.
He pressed her elbow and turning ran lightly down the darken-ing staircase to the street. The great car responded to his feather-deftness of touch on the controls; it bounded crying its klaxon-warnings, down Saad Zaghloul and across the tramlines to roll down the slope towards the sea. He was talking to himself softly and rapidly in Arabic. In the gaunt lounge of the Cecil Hotel she would perhaps be waiting, gloved hands folded on her handbag, staring out through the windows upon which the sea crawled and sprawled, climbing and subsiding, across the screen of palms in the little municipal square which flapped and creaked like loose sails. As he turned the corner, a procession was setting out raggedly for the upper town, its brilliant banners pelted now by a small rain mixed with spray from the harbour; everything flapped con-fusedly. Chanting and the noise of triangles sounded tentatively on the air. With an expression of annoyance he abandoned the car, locked it, and looked anxiously at his watch, ran the last hundred yards to the circular glass doors which would admit him upon the mouldering silence of the great lounge. He entered breathless but very much aware of himself. This siege of Justine had been
going on for months now. How would it end — with victory or defeat?
He remembered Clea saying: ‘Such creatures are not human beings at all, I think. If they live, it is only inasmuch as they represent themselves in human form. But then, anyone possessed by a single ruling passion presents the same picture. For most of us, life is a hobby. But she seems like a tense and exhaustive pictorial representation of nature at its most superficial, its most powerful. She is possessed — and the possessed can neither learn nor be taught. It doesn’t make her less lovely for all that it is death-propelled ; but my dear Nessim — from what angle are you to accept her?’
He did not as yet know; they were sparring still, talking in different languages. This might go on forever, he thought despairingly.
They had met more than once, formally, almost like business partners to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detach-ment of Alexandrian brokers plann ing a cotton merger. But this is the way of the city.
With a gesture which he himself thought of as characteristic he had offered her a large sum of money saying: ‘Lest an in-equality of