The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [81]
— as if to compute the degree of good fortune left them after this latest plunge into the icy underground river of passion which she could neither subdue nor slake. (‘Minds dismembered by their sexual part’ Balthazar had said once ‘never find peace until old age and failing powers persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile.’)
Was all the discordance of their lives a measure of the anxiety which they had inherited from the city or the age? ‘Oh my God’ he
almost said. ‘Why don’t we leave this city, Justine, and seek an atmosphere less impregnated with the sense of deracination and failure?’ The words of the old poet came into his mind, pressed down like the pedal of a piano, to boil and reverberate around the frail hope which the thought had raised from its dark sleep.*
‘My problem’ he said to himself quietly, feeling his forehead to see if he had a fever ‘is that the woman I loved brought me a faultless satisfaction which never touched her own happiness’: and he thought over all the delusions which were now confirming them-selves in physical signs. I mean: he had beaten Justine, beaten her until his arm ached and the stick broke in his hands. All this was a dream of course. Nevertheless on waking he had found his whole arm aching and swollen. What could one believe when reality mocked the imagination by its performance?
At the same time, of course, he fully recognized that suffering, indeed all illness, was itself an acute form of self-importance, and all the teachings of the Cabal came like a following wind to swell his self-contempt. He could hear, like the distant reverberations of the city’s memory, the voice of Plotinus speaking, not of flight away from intolerable temporal conditions but towards a new light, a new city of Light. ‘This is no journey for the feet, however. Look into yourself, withdraw into yourself and look.’ But this was the one act of which he now knew himself for ever incapable. It is astonishing for me, in recording these passages, to recall how little of all this interior change was visible on the surface of his life — even to those who knew him intimately. There was little to put one’s finger on — only a sense of hollowness in the familiar
— as of a well-known air played slightly out of key. It is true that at this period he had already begun to entertain with a prodigality hitherto unknown to the city, even among the richest families. The great house was never empty now. The great kitchen-quarters where we so often boiled ourselves an egg or a glass of milk after a concert or a play — dusty and deserted then — were now held, by a permanent garrison of cooks, surgical and histrionic, capped in floury steeples. The upper rooms, tall staircase, galleries and salons echoing to the mournful twining of clocks were patrolled now by black slaves who moved as regally as swans about impor-tant tasks. Their white linen, smelling of the goose-iron, was spot-less — robes divided by scarlet sashes punctuated at the waist by
clasps of gold fashioned into turtles’ heads: the rebus Nessim had chosen for himself. Their soft porpoise eyes were topped by the conventional scarlet flower-pots, their gorilla hands were cased in white gloves. They were as soundless as death itself. If he had not so far outdone the great figures of Egyptian society in lavishness he might have been thought to be competing with them for advancement. The house was perpetually alive to the cool fern-like patterns of a quartet, or to the foundering plunge of saxophones crying to the night like cuckolds.