The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [478]
‘Smart work indeed’ said Balthazar approvingly as he stepped into the water; and then ‘By God! It is quite fantastically warm.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said Clea busy in the locker.
‘It only proves my point about a thunderstorm.’
And curiously enough, at this moment, there came a distinct rumble of thunder out of that cloudless sky. ‘There’ said Balthazar
in triumph. ‘We will get a fine soaking and you will owe me some money, Clea.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘It was a shore battery’ I said.
‘Rubbish’ said Balthazar.
So we secured the cutter and carried our provisions ashore. Balthazar lay on his back with his hat over his nose in the best of humours. He would not bathe, pleading the indifference of his swimming, so Clea and I dived once more into the familiar pool which we had neglected all winter long. Nothing had changed. The sentinels were still there, grouped in silent debate, though the winter tides had altered their dispositions somewhat, grouping them a little nearer to the wreck. Ironically yet respect-fully we greeted them, recognizing in these ancient gestures and underwater smiles a familiar happiness growing up in the sheer act of swimming once more together. It was as if the blood had started to flow again in veins long withered from disuse. I caught her by the heel and rolled her in a long somersault towards the dead mariners, and turning expertly she repaid the debt by coming up behind me to drag me down by the shoulders and climb surfacewards before I could retaliate. It was here, spiralling up through the water with her hair coiled out behind her, that the image of Clea was restored once more. Time had rendered her up, whole and intact again — “natural as a city’s grey-eyed Muse “ —
to quote the Greek poem. Swiftly, precisely the fingers which pressed upon my shoulder re-evoked her as we slid through the silent pool.
And then: to sit once more in the simple sunlight, sipping the red wine of St Menas as she broke up the warm brown loaf of French bread, and hunted for a particular cheese or a cluster of dates: while Balthazar talked discursively (half asleep) of the Vineyard of Ammon, the Kings of the Harpoon Kingdom and their battles, or of the Mareotic wine to which, not history, but the gossiping Horace once attributed Cleopatra’s distempers of mind … (‘History sanctions everything, pardons everything —
even what we do not pardon ourselves.’)
So the warm noon drew on as we lay there on the hot pebbles: and so at last — to Balthazar’s great delight and Clea’s discom-fiture — the predicted thunderstorm made its appearance,
heralded by a great livid cloud which rolled up from the east and squatted over the city, bruising the sky. So suddenly too — as when an ink-squid in alarm puns out its bag and suddenly fogs clear water in a cloud of black — rain flowed down in glittering sheets, thunder bellowed and insisted. At each peal Balthazar clapped his hands with delight — not only to be proved right, but also because here we were sitting in full sunlight, fully at our ease, eating oranges and drinking wine beside an untroubled blue sea.
‘Stop crowing’ said Clea severely.
It was one of those freak storms so prevalent in the early spring with its sharp changes of temperature born of sea and desert. They turned the streets to torrents in the twinkling of an eye, yet never endured above half an hour. Suddenly the cloud would be whisked away by a scrap of wind, utterly to disappear. ‘And mark me now’ said Balthazar, inebriated by the success of his prediction. ‘By the time we get back to harbour everything will be dry again, dry as a bone.’
But now the afternoon brought us another phenomenon to delight us — something rarely seen in summer in the waters of Alexandria, belonging as it did to those days preceding