The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [345]
“This business”! I knew nothing about it till carnival I swear; now only you can save….’
So the letter ran on pell-mell; Mountolive felt a queer mixture of feelings — an incoherent relief which somehow trembled on the edge of indignation. After all this time she would be waiting
for him after dark near the Auberge Bleue in an old horse-drawn cab pulled back off the road among the palms! That plan was at least touched with something of her old fantasy. For some reason Nessim was not to know of this meeting — why should he disapprove? But the information that she at least had had no part in the conspiracies fostered by her son — that flooded him with relief and tenderness. And all this time he had been seeing Leila as a hostile extension of Nessim, had been training himself to hate her! ‘My poor Leila’ he said aloud, holding the envelope to his nose to inhale the fragrance of chypre. He picked up the phone and spoke softly to Errol: ‘I suppose the whole Chancery has been invited to the Hosnani shoot? Yes? I agree, he has got rather a nerve at such a time…. I shall, of course, have to decline, but I would like you chaps to accept and apologize for me. To keep up a public appearance of normality merely. Will you then?
Thank you very much. Now one more thing. I shall go up the evening before the shoot for private business and return the next day — we shall probably pass each other on the desert road. No, I’m glad you fellows have the chance. By all means, and good hunting.’
The next ten days passed in a sort of dream, punctuated only by the intermittent stabbings of a reality which was no longer a drug, a dissipation which gagged his nerves; his duties were a torment of boredom. He felt immeasurably expended, used-up, as he confronted his face in the bathroom mirror, presenting it to the razor’s edge with undisguised distaste. He had become quite noticeably grey now at the temples. From somewhere in the servants’ quarters a radio burred and scratched out the melody of an old song which had haunted a whole Alexandrian summer: ‘ Jamais de la vie’ . He had come to loathe it now. This new epoch — a limbo filled with the dispersing fragments of habit, duty and circumstance — filled him with a gnawing im-patience; underneath it all he was aware that he was gathering himself together for this long-awaited meeting with Leila. Some-how it would determine, not the physical tangible meaning of his return to Egypt so much as the psychic meaning of it in relation to his inner life. God! that was a clumsy way to put it —
but how else could one express these things? It was a sort of
barrier in himself which had to be crossed, a puberty of the feelings which had to be outgrown.
He drove up across the crackling desert in his pennoned car, rejoicing in the sweet whistle of its cooled engine, and the whickering of wind at the side-screens. It had been some time since he had been able to travel across the desert alone like this
— it reminded him of older and happier journeys. Flying across the still white air with the speedometer hovering in the sixties, he hummed softly to himself, despite his distaste, the refrain: Jamais de la vie,
Jamais dans la nuit
Quand ton coeur se démange de chagrin….
How long was it since he had caught himself singing like this? An age. It was not really happiness, but an overmastering relief of mind. Even the hateful song helped him to recover the lost image of an Alexandria he had once found charming. Would it, could it be so again?
It was already late afternoon by the time he reached the desert fringe and began the slow in-curving impulse which would lead him to the city’s bristling outer slums. The sky was covered with clouds. A thunderstorm was breaking over Alexandria. To the east upon the icy green waters of the lake poured a rainstorm —
flights of glittering needles pocking the waters; he could dimly hear the hush of rain above the whisper of the car. He glimpsed the pearly city through the