The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [70]
I have always been very fond of ludicrous deaths and had great difficulty in containing my laughter as Scobie described this mis-adventure to me with portentous rotations of his glass eye. Yet as he talked and I listened to this, half my thoughts were running
upon a parallel track, busy about the new job I was to undertake, assessing it in terms of the freedom it offered me. Later that night Justine was to meet me near Montaza — the great car purring like a moth in the palm-cooled dusk of the road. What would she say to it? She would be delighted of course to see me freed from the shackles of my present work. But a part of her would groan in-wardly at the thought that this relief would only create for us further chances to consort, to drive home our untruth, to reveal ourselves more fully than ever to our judges. Here was another paradox of love; that the very thing which brought us closer to-gether — the boustrophedon — would, had we mastered the virtues which it illustrated, have separated us forever — I mean in the selves which preyed upon each other’s infatuated images.
‘Meanwhile’ as Nessim was to say in those gentle tones so full of the shadowy sobriety which comes into the voice of those who have loved truly and failed to be loved in return, ‘meanwhile I was dwelling in the midst of a vertiginous excitement for which there was no relief except through an action the nature of which I could not discern. Tremendous bursts of self-confidence were succeeded by depressions so deep that it seemed I would never recover from them. With a vague feeling that I was preparing myself for a con-test — as an athlete does — I began to take fencing lessons and learned to shoot with a pocket automatic. I studied the composi-tion and effects of poisons from a manual of toxicology which I borrowed from Dr Fuad Bey.’ (I am inventing only the words.) He had begun to harbour feelings which would not yield to analysis. The periods of intoxication were followed by others in which he felt, as if for the first time, the full weight of his lone-liness: an inner agony of spirit for which, as yet, he could find no outward expression, either in paint or in action. He mused now incessantly upon his early years, full of a haunting sense of rich-ness : his mother’s shadowy house among the palms and poinsettias of Aboukir: the waters pulling and slithering among the old fort’s emplacements, compiling the days of his early childhood in single condensed emotions born from visual memory. He clutched at these memories with a terror and clarity he had never experienced before. And all the time, behind the screen of nervous depression
— for the incomplete action which he meditated lay within him like a coitus interruptus — there lived the germ of a wilful and un-
controlled exaltation. It was as if he were being egged on, to ap-proach nearer and nearer … to what exactly? He could not tell; but here his ancient terror of madness stepped in and took posses-sion of him, disturbing his physical balance, so that he suffered at times from attacks of vertigo which forced him to grope around himself like a blind man for something upon which to sit down —
a chair or sofa. He would sit down, panting slightly and feeling the sweat beginning to start out on his forehead; but with relief that nothing of his interior struggle was visible to the casual onlooker. Now too he noticed that he involuntarily repeated phrases aloud to which his conscious mind refused to listen. ‘Good’ she heard him tell one of his mirrors, ‘so you are falling into a neurasthenia!’
And later as he was stepping out into the brilliant starlit air, dressed in his well-cut evening clothes Selim, at the wheel of the car, heard him add: ‘I think this Jewish fox has eaten my life.’
At times, too, he was sufficiently