The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [451]
… Yes, and I’m glad. But I have the most curious feeling that one day I am going to marry her. Really. Don’t be silly about it. Of course I would never breathe a word, and it would happen years after this silly old war. But somewhere along the line I feel I’m bound to hitch up with her.’
‘Now what do you expect me to say?’
‘Well, there are a hundred courses open. Myself I would start yelling and screaming at once if you said such a thing to me. I’d knock your block off, push you out of the cab, anything. I’d punch me in the eye.’
The gharry drew up with a jolt outside the house. ‘Here we are’
I said, and helped my companion down into the road. ‘I’m not as drunk as all that’ he cried cheerfully, shaking off my help, ‘ ’tis but fatigue, dear friend.’ And while I argued out the cost of the trip
with the driver he went round and held a long private confab-ulation with the horse, stroking its nose. ‘I was giving it some maxims to live by’ he explained as we wound our weary way up the staircase. ‘But the champagne had muddled up my quotation-box. What’s that thing of Shakespeare’s about the lover and the cuckold all compact, seeking the bubble reputation e’en in the cannon’s mouth.’ The last phrase he pronounced in the strange (man-sawing-wood) delivery of Churchill. ‘Or something about swimmers into cleanness leaping — a pre-fab in the eternal mind no less!’
‘You are murdering them both.’
‘Gosh I’m tired. And there seems to be no bombardment tonight.’
‘They are getting less frequent.’
He collapsed on his bed fully dressed, slowly untying his suede desert boots and wriggling with his toes until they slid slowly off and plopped to the floor. ‘Did you ever see Pursewarden’s little book called Select Prayers for English Intellectuals? It was funny.
“Dear Jesus, please keep me as eighteenth century as possible —
but without the c*******d….” ’ He gave a sleepy chuckle, put his arms behind his head and started drifting into smiling sleep. As I turned out the light he sighed deeply and said: ‘Even the dead are overwhelming us all the time with kindnesses.’
I had a sudden picture of him as a small boy walking upon the very brink of precipitous cliffs to gather seabirds’ eggs. One slip….
But I was never to see him again. Vale!
* * * * *
VI
Ten thirsty fingers of my blind Muse
Confer upon my face their sensual spelling
he lines ran through my head as I pressed the bell of the summer residence the following evening. In my hand T I held the green leather suitcase which contained the private letters of Pursewarden — that brilliant sustained fusillade of words which still exploded in my memory like a firework display, scorching me. I had telephoned to Liza from my office in the morning to make the rendezvous. She opened the door and stood before me with a pale graven expression of expectancy. ‘Good’
she whispered as I murmured my name, and ‘Come.’ She turned and walked before me with a stiff upright expressive gait which re-minded me of a child dressed up as Queen Elizabeth for a charade. She looked tired and strained, and yet in a curious way proud. The living-room was empty. Mountolive, I knew, had returned to Cairo that morning. Rather surprisingly, for it was late in the year, a log-fire burned in the chimney-piece. She took up her stand before it, arching her back to the warmth, and rubbing her hands as if she were chilled.
‘You have been quick, very quick’ she said, almost sharply, almost with a hint of implied reproach in her tone. ‘But I am glad.’ I had already told her by telephone the gist of my con-versation with Keats about the non-existent book. ‘I am glad, because now we can decide something, finally. I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept imagining you reading them, the letters. I kept imagining him writing them.’
‘They are marvellous. I have never read anything like them in my whole life.’ I felt a note of chagrin in my own tones.
‘Yes’ she said, and fetched a deep sigh. ‘And yet I was afraid you would think so; afraid because you would share David’s opinion