The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [488]
‘I was on the look out for you. Hamid said you were off tonight. He telephoned to ask for a job and told me. Besides I wanted to share with you my mixture of shame and relief over this hideous accident. Shame at the stupidity, relief that she isn’t dead. Both mixed. I’m rather drunk with relief, and dazed with the shame.’
He was indeed rather tipsy. ‘But it will be all right, thank God!’
‘What does Amaril think?’
‘Nothing as yet. Or if he does he won’t say. She must have a comfortable twenty-four hours of rest before anything is decided. Are you really going?’ His voice fell with reproof. ‘You should stay, you know.’
‘She doesn’t want me to stay.’
‘I know. I was a bit shocked when she said she had told you to go; but she said “You don’t understand. I shall see if I can’t will him back again. We aren’t quite ripe for each other yet. It will come.” I was amazed to see her so self-confident and radiant again. Really amazed. Sit down, my dear chap, and have a couple of stiff drinks with me. We’ll see the procession quite well from here. No crowding.’ He clapped his hands rather unsteadily and called for more mastika.
When the glasses were brought he sat for a long while silent with his chin on his hands, staring at them. Then he gave a sigh and shook his head sadly.
‘What is it?’ I said, removing his glass from the tray and placing it squarely before him on the tin table.
‘Leila is dead’ he said qu ietly. The words seemed to weight him down with sorrow. ‘Nessim telephoned this evening to tell
me. The strange thing is that he sounded exhilarated by the news. He has managed to get permission to fly down and make arrange-ments for her funeral. D’you know what he said?’ Balthazar looked at me with that dark all-comprehending eye and went on.
‘He said: “While I loved her and all that, her death has freed me in a curious sort of way. A new life is opening before me. I feel years younger.” I don’t know if it was a trick of the telephone or what but he sounded younger. His voice was full of suppressed excitement. He knew, of course, that Leila and I were the oldest of friends but not that all through this period of absence she was writing to me. She was a rare soul, Darley, one of the rare flowers of Alexandria. She wrote: “I know I am dying, my dear Balthazar, but all too slowly. Do not believe the doctors and their diagnoses, you of all men. I am dying of heartsickness like a true Alexan-drian.” ’ Balthazar blew his nose in an old sock which he took from the breast-pocket of his coat; carefully folded it to resemble a clean handkerchief and pedantically replaced it. ‘Yes’ he said again, grave ly, ‘what a word it is — “heartsickness”! And it seems to me that while (from what you tell me) Liza Pursewarden was administering her death-warrant to her brother, Mountolive was giving the same back-hander to Leila. So we pass the loving-cup about, the poisoned loving-cup!’ He nodded and took a loud sip of his drink. He went on slowly, with immense care and effort, like someone translating from an obscure and recondite text.
‘Yes, just as Liza’s letter to Pursewarden telling him that at last the stranger had appeared was his coup de grâce so to speak, so Leila received, I suppose, exactly the same letter. Who knows how these things are arranged? Perhaps in the very same words. The same words of passionate gratitude: “I bless you, I thank you with all my heart that through you I am at last able to receive the precious gift which can never come to those who are ignorant of its powers.” Those are the words of Mountolive. For Leila quoted them to me. All this was after she went away. She wrote to me. It was as if she were cut off from Nessim and had nobody to turn to, nobody to talk to. Hence the long letters in which she went over it all, backwards