The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [439]
•when first we met. She had a keen and mobile face whose pre-mature wrinkles suggested that perhaps she had been marked by her experiences as a refugee. She never laughed aloud, and her smile had a touch of reflective sadness in it. But she was wise, and always had a spirited and thoughtful answer ready — indeed the quality of esprit which the French so rightly prize in a woman. The fact that she was nearing the term of her pregnancy only
seemed to make Pombal more attentive and adoring — indeed he behaved with something like complacence about the child. Or was he simply trying to suggest that it was his own: as a show of face to a world which might think that he was ‘unmanned’? I could not decide. In the summer afternoons he would float about the harbour in his cutter while Fosca sat in the stern trailing one white hand in the sea. Sometimes she sang for him in a small true voice like a bird’s. This transported him, and he wore the look of a good bourgeois papa de famille as he beat time with his finger. At night they sat out the bombardment for preference over a chess board — a somewhat singular choice; but as the infernal racket of gunfire gave him nervous headaches he had skilfully constructed ear plugs for them both by cutting the filter-tips from cigarettes. So they were able to sit, concentrating in silence!
But once or twice this peaceful harmony was overshadowed by outside events which provoked doubts and misgivings under-standable enough in a relationship which was so nebulous — I mean so much discussed and anatomized and not acted out. One day I found him padding about in a dressing-gown and slippers look ing suspicious ly distraught, even a little red-eyed. ‘Ah, Darley!’ he sighed gustily, falling into his gout chair and catching his beard in his fingers as if he were about to dismantle it com-pletely. ‘We will never understand them, never. Women! What bad luck. Perhaps I am just stupid. Fosca! Her husband!’
‘He has been killed?’ I asked.
Pombal shook his head sadly. ‘No. Taken prisoner and sent to Germany.’
‘Well why the fuss?’
‘I am ashamed, that is all. I did not fully realize until this news came, neither did she, that we were really expecting him to be killed. Unconsciously, of course. Now she is full of self-disgust. But the whole plan for our lives was unconsciously built upon the notion of him surrendering his own. It is monstrous. His death would have freed us; but now the whole problem is deferred perhaps for years, perhaps forever….’
He looked quite distracted and fanned himself with a news-paper, muttering under his breath. ‘Things take the strangest turns’ he went on at last. ‘For if Fosca is too honourable to confess the truth to him while he is at the front, she would equally never
do it to a poor prisoner. I left her in tears. Everything is put off till the end of the war. ’
He ground his back teeth together and sat staring at me. It was difficult to know what one could say by way of consolation.
‘Why doesn’t she write and tell him?’
‘Impossible! Too cruel. And with the child coming on? Even I, Pombal, would not wish her to do such a thing. Never. I found her in tears, my friend, holding the telegram. She said in tones of anguish: “Oh, Georges-Gaston, for the first time I feel ashamed of my love, when I realize that we were wishing him to die rather than get captured this way.” It may sound complicated to you, but her emotions are so fine, her sense of honour and pride and so on. Then a queer thing happened. So great was our mutual pain that in trying to console her I slipped and we began to make real love without noticing it. It is a strange picture. And not an easy operation. Then when we came to ourselves she began to cry all over again and said: “Now for the first time I have a feeling of hate for you, Georges-Gaston,