The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [362]
‘Thank you, Clea’ said Nessim shortly and with sadly downcast head; for some reason the word ‘disgusting’ had wounded him. He walked slowly back to the bedroom, noticing on the way that the courtyard was thronged with people — not only the house servants but many new curious visitors. Calamity draws people as an open wound draws flies, Nessim thought. Narouz was in a doze. They sat for a while talking in whispers. ‘Then he must really die?’ asked Nessim sadly, ‘without his mother?’ It seemed to him an added burden of guilt that it was through his agency that Leila had been forced to leave. ‘Alone like this.’ Balthazar made a grimace of impatience. ‘It is amazing he’s alive at all still’ he said.
‘And there is absolutely nothing….’ Slowly and gravely Balthazar shook that dark intelligent head. Nessim stood up and said: ‘Then I should tell them that there is no hope of recovery. They will want to prepare for his death.’
‘Do as you wish.’
‘I must send for Tobias the priest. He must have the last sacraments — the Holy Eucharist. The servants will know the truth from him.’
‘Act as seems good to you’ said Balthazar dryly, and the tall figure of his friend slipped down the staircase into the courtyard to give instructions. A rider was to be despatched at once to the priest with instructions to consecrate the holy elements in the church and then come post-haste to Karm Abu Girg to administer the last sacraments to Narouz. As this intelligence went abroad there went up a great sigh of dreadful expectancy and the faces of the servants lengthened with dread. ‘And the doctor?’ they cried in tones of anguish. ‘And the doctor?’
Balthazar smiled grimly as he sat on the chair beside the dying man. He repeated to himself softly, under his breath, ‘And the doctor?’ What a mockery! He placed his cool palm on Narouz’
forehead for a moment, with an air of certitude and resignation. A high temperature, a dozen bullet-ho les…. ‘And the doctor?’
Musing upon the futility of human affairs and the dreadful accidents to which life exposed the least distrustful, the most innocent of creatures, he lit a cigarette and went out on to the balcony. A hundred eager glances sought his, imploring him by the power of his magic to restore the patient to health. He frowned heavily at one and all. If he had been able to resort to the old-fashioned magic of the Egyptian fables, of the New Testament, he would gladly have told Narouz to rise. But … ‘And the doctor?’
Despite the internal haemorrhages, the drumming of the pulses in his ears, the fever and pain, the patient was only resting — in a sense — husbanding his energies for the appearance of Clea. He mistook the little flutter of voices and footsteps upon the staircase which heralded the appearance of the priest. His eyelashes fluttered and then sank down again, exhausted to hear the fat voice of the goose-shaped young man with the greasy face and the air of just having dined on sucking-pig. He returned to his own remote watchfulness, content that Tobias should treat him as insensible, as dead even, provided he could husband a small share of his dying space for the blonde image — intractable and remote as ever now to his mind — yet an image which might respond to all this hoarded suffering. Even from pity. He was swollen with desire, distended like a pregnant woman. When you are in love you know that love is a beggar, shameless as a beggar; and the responses of merely human pity can console one where love is absent by a false travesty of an imagined happiness. Yet the day dragged on and still she did not come. The anxiety of the house deepened with his own. And Balthazar, whose intuition had guessed rightly the cause of his patience, was tempted by the thought: ‘I could imitate Clea’s voice — would he know? I could soothe him with a few words spoken in her voice.’ He was a ventriloquist and mimic of the first order. But to the first