The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [444]
‘Of course I will help you. But just how and in what sense?’
‘Advise me what to do! None of this would have arisen had not this shabby journalist intervened and been to see his wife.’
‘Did your brother appoint a literary executor?’
‘Yes. I am his executor.’
‘Then you have a right to refuse to allow any of his unsold writings to be published while they’re in copyright. Besides, I do not see how such facts could be made public without your own permission, even in an unauthorized biography. There is no cause whatsoever to worry. No writer in his senses could touch such material; no publisher in the world would undertake to print it if he did. I think the best thing I can do is to try and find
out something about this book of Keats’s. Then at least you will know where you stand.’
‘Thank you, Darley. I could not approach Keats myself because I knew he was working for her. I hate and fear her —
perhaps unjustly. I suppose too that I have a feeling of having wronged her without wishing it. It was a deplorable mistake on his part not to tell her before their marriage; I think he recog-nized it, too, for he was determined that I should not make the same mistake when at last David appeared. Hence the private letters, which leave no one in doubt. Yet it all fell out exactly as he had planned it, had prophesied it. That very first night when I told David I took him straight home to read them. We sat on the carpet in front of the gas-fire and he read them to me one by one in that unmistakable voice — the stranger’s voice.’
She gave a queer blind smile at the memory and I had a sudden compassionate picture of Mountolive sitting before the fire, reading these letters in a slow faltering voice, stunned by the revelation of his own part in this weird masque, which had been planned for him years before, without his knowing. Liza sat beside me, lost in deep thought, her head hanging. Her lips moved slowly as if she were spelling something out in her own mind, following some interior recitation. I shook her hand softly as if to waken her.
‘I should leave you now’ I said softly. ‘And why should I see the private letters at all? There is no need.’
‘Now that you know the worst and best I would like you to advise me about destroying them. It was his wish. But David feels that they belong to his writings, and that we have a duty to preserve them. I cannot make up my mind about this. You are a writer. Try and read them as a writer, as if you had written them, and then tell me whether you would wish them preserved or not. They are all together in that suitcase. There are one or two other fragments which you might help me edit if you have time or if you think them suitable. He always puzzled me —
except when I had him in my arms.’
A sudden expression of savage resentment passed across her white face. As if she had been goaded by a sudden disagreeable memory. She passed her tongue over her dry lips and as we stood up together she added in a small husky voice: ‘There is one thing more. Since you have seen so far into our lives why should
you not look right to the bottom? I always keep this close to me.’
Reaching down into her dress she took out a snapshot and handed it to me. It was faded and creased. A small child with lon g ha ir done up in ribbons sat upon a park bench, gazing with a melan-choly and wistful smile at the camera and holding out a white stick. It took me a moment or so to identify those troubling lines of mouth and nose as the features of Pursewarden himself and to realize that the little girl was blind.
‘Do you see her?’ said Liza in a thrilling