The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [399]
‘So you haven’t changed. Still telling fortunes.’
‘Darley.’ She sprang up with a cry of pleasure and we embraced warmly. It was with a queer interior shock, almost like a new recognition, that I felt her warm laughing mouth on mine, her hands upon my shoulders. As though somewhere a window had been smashed, and the fresh air allowed to pour into a long-sealed room. We stood thus embracing and smiling for a moment. ‘You startled me! I was just coming on to the flat to find you.’
‘You ’ve had me chasing my tail all day.’
‘I had work to do. But Darley, how you’ve changed! You don’t stoop any more. And your spectacles….’
‘I broke them by accident ages ago, and then found I didn’t really need them.’
‘I’m delighted for you. Bravo! Tell me, do you notice my wrinkles? I’m getting some, I fear. Have I changed very much, would you say?’
She was more beautiful than I could remember her to have been, slimmer, and with a subtle range of new gestures and expressions suggesting a new and troubling maturity.
‘You ’ve grown a new laugh.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes. It’s deeper and more melodious. But I must not flatter you! A nightingale’s laugh — if they do laugh.’
‘Don’t make me self-conscious because I so much want to laugh with you. You’ll turn it into a croak.’
‘Clea, why didn’t you come and meet me?’
She wrinkled up her nose for a moment, and putting her hand on my arm, bent her head once more to the coffee grounds which were drying fast into little whorls and curves like sand-dunes.
‘Light me a cigarette’ she said pleadingly.
‘Nessim said you turned tail at the last moment.’
‘Yes, I did, my dear.’
‘Why?’
‘I suddenly felt it might be inopportune. It might have been a complication somehow. You had old accounts to render, old scores to settle, new relationships to explore. I really felt powerless to do anything about you until … well, until you had seen Justine. I don’t know why. Yes I do, though. I wasn’t sure that the cycle would really change, I didn’t know how much you had or hadn’t changed yourself. You are such a bloody correspondent I hadn’t any way of judging about your inside state of mind. Such a long time since you wrote, isn’t it? And then the child and all that. After all, people sometimes get stuck like an old disc and can’t move out of a groove. That might have been your fate with Justine. So it wasn’t for me to intrude, since my side of you…. Do you see? I had to give you air.’
‘And supposing I have stuck like some old disc?’
‘No it hasn’t turned out like that.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘From your face, Darley. I could tell in a flash!’
‘I don’t know quite how to explain….’
‘You don’t need to’ her voice curved upwards with elation and her bright eyes smiled. ‘We have such totally different claims upon each other. We are free to forget! You men are the strangest creatures. Listen, I have arranged this first day together like a tableau, like a charade. Come first and see the queer immortality one of us has gained. Will you put yourself in my hands? I have been so looking forward to acting as dragoman on , . . but no, I won’t tell you. Just let me pay for this coffee.’
‘What does your fortune say in the grounds?’
‘Chance meetings!’
‘I think you invent.’
The afternoon had been overcast and dusk fell early. Already the sunset violets had begun to tamper with the perspectives of the streets along the seafront. We took an old horse-drawn gharry
which was standing forlornly in a taxi rank by Ramleh Station. The ancient jarvey with his badly cicatriced face asked hopefully if we wished for a ‘carriage of love’ or an ‘ordinary carriage’, and Clea, giggling, selected the latter