The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [334]
‘Cherished Sir’ said Nur with a beseeching smile and the gesture of a beggar importuning a rich man, ‘that would be out of order. For the matter is an internal one. It would not be proper for me to agree.’
And he was right there, reflected Mountolive, as they drove uneasily back to the Embassy; they could no longer give orders in Egypt as once the High Commission had been able to do. Donkin sat with a quizzical and reflective smile, studying his own fingers. The pennant on the car’s radiator fluttered merrily, reminding Mountolive of the quivering burgee of Nessim’s thirty-foot cutter as it slit the harbour waters…. ‘What did you make of it, Donkin?’ he said, putting his arm on the elbow of the bearded youth.
‘Frankly, sir, I doubted.’
‘So did I, really.’ Then he burst out: ‘But they will have to act, simply have to; I am not going to be put aside like this.’ (He was thinking: ‘London will make our lives a misery until I can give them some sort of satisfaction.’) Hate for an image of Nessim whose features had somehow — as if by a trick of double-exposure
— become merged with those of the saturnine Maskelyne, flooded him again. Crossing the hall he caught sight of his own face in the great pierglass and was surprised to notice that it wore an ex-pression of feeble petulance. That day he found himself becoming more and more short-tempered with his staff and the Residence servants. He had begun to feel almost persecuted.
* * * * *
XIV
f Nessim had the temerity to laugh softly now to himself as he studied the invitation: if he propped the florid thing I against his inkstand the better to study it, laughing softly and uneasily into the space before him; it was because he was thinking to himself:
‘To say that a man is unscrupulous implies that he was born with inherent scruples which he now chooses to disregard. But does one visualize a man born patently conscienceless? A man born without a common habit of soul? (Memlik).’
Yes, it would be easy if he were legless, armless, blind, to visualize him; but a particular deficit of a glandular secretion, a missing portion of soul, that would make him rather a target for wonder, perhaps even commiseration. (Memlik). There were men whose feelings dispersed in spray — became as fine as if squeezed through an atomizer: those who had frozen them —
‘pins and needles of the heart’; there were others born without a sense of value — the morally colour-blind ones. The very powerful were often like that — men walking ins ide a dream-cloud of their actions which somehow lacked meaning to them. Was this also Memlik? Nessim felt all the passionate curiosity about the man which an entomologist might have for an unclassified specimen. Light a cigarette. Get up and walk about the room, pausing from time to time to read the invitation and laugh again silently. The relief kept displacing anxiety, the anxiety relief. He lifted the telephone and spoke to Justine qu ietly, with a smiling voice:
‘The Mountain has been to Mahomet.’ (Code for Mountolive and Nur.) ‘Yes, my dear. It is a relief to know for certain. All my toxicology and pistol-practice! It looks silly now, I know. This is the way I would have wanted it to happen; but of course, one had to take precautions. Well, pressure is being put upon Mahomet, and he has delivered a small mouse in the form of an invitation to a Wird. ’ He heard her laugh incredulously. ‘Please, my darling’
he said, ‘obtain one of the finest Korans you can get and send it to the office. There are some old ones with ivory covers in the library collection. Yes, I shall take it to Cairo on Wednesday. He
must certainly have his Koran.’ (Memlik.) It was all very well to joke. The respite would only be a temporary one; but at least he need not for the moment