The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [407]
We did not stay late. As we came out into the cold damp air she shivered and half-fell against me, catching my arm.
‘What is it?’
‘I felt faint all of a sudden. It’s passed.’
So back into the city along the windless seafront, drugged by the clop of the horse’s hoofs on the macadam, the jingle of harness, the smell of straw, and the dying strains of music which flowed out of the ballroom and dwindled away among the stars. We paid off the cab at the Cecil and walked up the winding deserted street towards her flat arm-in-arm, hearing our own slow steps magnified by the silence. In a bookshop window there were a few novels, one by Pursewarden. We stopped for a moment to peer into the darkened shop and then resumed our leisurely way to the flat. ‘You ’ll come in for a moment?’ she said.
Here, too, the air of celebration was apparent, in the flowers and the small supper-table on which stood a champagne-bucket.
‘I did not know we’d stay to dine at the Auberge, and prepared to feed you here if necessary’ said Clea, dipping her fingers in the ice-water; she sighed with relief. ‘At least we can have a night-cap together.’
Here at least there was nothing to disorient or disfigure memory for everything was exactly as I remembered it; I had stepped back into this beloved room as one might step into some favourite painting. Here it all was, the crowded bookshelves, heavy drawing-boards, small cottage piano, and the corner with the tennis racquet and fencing foils; on the writing desk, with its disorderly jumble of letters, drawings and bills, stood the candlesticks which she was now in the act of lighting. A bundle of paintings stood against the wall. I turned one or two round and stared at them curiously.
‘My God! You’ve gone abstract, Clea.’
‘I know! Balthazar hates them. It’s just a phase I expect, so don’t regard it as irrevocable or final. It’s a different way of mobilizing one’s feelings about paint. Do you loathe them?’
‘No, they are stronger I think.’
‘Hum. Candle-light flatters them with false chiaroscuro.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Come, sit down; I’ve poured us a drink.’
As if by common consent we sat facing each other on the carpet as we had so often done in the past, cross-legged like
‘Armenian tailors’, as she had once remarked. We toasted each other in the rosy light of the scarlet candles which stood un-winking in the still air defining with their ghostly radiance the smiling mouth and candid features of Clea. Here, too, at last, on this memorable spot on the faded carpet, we embraced each other with — how to say it? — a momentous smiling calm, as if the cup of language had silently overflowed into these eloquent kisses which replaced words like the rewards of silence itself, perfecting thought and gesture. They were like soft cloud-formations which had distilled themselves out of a novel innocence, the veritable ache of desirelessness. My steps had led me back again, I realized, remembering the night so long ago when we had slept dreamlessly in each other’s arms, to the locked door which had once refused me admission to her. Led me back once more to that point in time,
that threshold, behind which the shade of Clea moved, smiling and irresponsible as a flower, after a huge arid detour in a desert of my own imaginings. I had not known then how to find the key to that door. Now of its own accord it was slowly opening. Whereas the other door which had once given me access to Justine had now locked irrevocably. Did not Pursewarden say something once about ‘sliding-pane ls’? But he was talking of books, not of the human heart. In her face now there was neither guile nor premeditation mirrored, but only a sort of magnificent mischief which had captured the fine eyes, expressed itself in the firm and thoughtful way she