The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [386]
‘Have I changed very much?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Of course I have. We all have.’ She spoke now with a con-temptuous shrillness. She raised my hand briefly and put it to her cheek. Then nodding with a puzzled air she turned and drew me towards the balcony, walking with a stiff proud step. She was clad in a dress of dark taffeta which whispered loudly at every movement. The candlelight jumped and danced upon the walls. We stopped before a dark doorway and she called out
‘Nessim’ in a sharp tone which shocked me, for it was the tone in which one would call a servant. After a moment Nessim appeared from the shadowy bedroom, obedient as a djinn.
‘Darley’s here’ she said, with the air of someone handing over a parcel, and placing the candles on a low table reclined swiftly in a lon g wicker chair and placed her hand over her eyes. Nessim had changed into a suit of a more familiar cut, and he came nodding and smiling towards me with the accustomed expression of affection and solicitude. Yet it was somehow different again; he wore a faintly cowed air, shooting little glances sideways and downwards towards the figure of Justine, and speaking softly as one might in the presence of someone asleep. A con straint had suddenly fallen upon us as we seated ourselves on that shadowy balcony and lit cigarettes. The silence locked like a gear which would not engage.
‘The child is in bed, delighted with the palace as she calls it, and the promise of a pony of her own. I think she will be happy.’
Justine suddenly sighed deeply and without uncovering her eyes said slowly: ‘He says we have not changed.’
Nessim swallowed and continued as if he had not heard the interruption in the same low voice: ‘She wanted to stay awake till you came but she was too tired.’
Once again the reclining figure in the shadowy corner inter-rupted to say: ‘She found Narouz’ little circumcision cap in the cupboard. I found her trying it on.’ She gave a short sharp laugh like a bark, and I saw Nessim wince suddenly and turn away his face.
‘We are short of servants’ he said in a low voice, hastily as if to cement up the holes made in the silence by her last remark. His air of relief was quite patent when Ali appeared and bade us to dinner. He picked up the candles and led us into the house. It had a somewhat funereal flavour — the white-robed servant with his scarlet belt leading, holding aloft the candles in order to light Justine’s way. She walked with an air of preoccupation, of remoteness. I followed next with Nessim close behind me. So we went in Indian file down the unlighted corridors, across high-ceilinged rooms with their walls covered in dusty carpets, their floors of rude planks creaking under our feet. And so we came at last to a supper-room, long and narrow, and suggesting a forgotten sophistication which was Ottoman perhaps; say, a room in a for-gotten winter palace of Abdul Hamid, its highly carved window-screens of filigree looking out upon a neglected rose-garden. Here the candlelight with its luminous shadows was ideal as an adjunct to furnishings which were, in themselves, strident. The golds and the reds and the violets would in full light have seemed unbearable. By candle-light they had a subdued magnificence.
We seated ourselves at the supper-table and once more I became conscious of the almost cowed expression of Nessim as he gazed around him. It is perhaps not the word. It was as if he expected some sudden explosion, expected some unforeseen re-proach to break from her lips. He was mentally prepared to parry it, to fend it off with a tender politeness. But Justine ignored us. Her first act was to pour out a glass of red wine. This she raised to the light as if to verify its colour. Then she dipped it iron ically
to each of us in turn like a flag and drank it off all in one motion before replacing the glass on the table. The touches of rouge gave her an enflamed look which hardly matched the half-drowsy