The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [82]
The long beautiful reception-rooms had been pierced with al-coves and unexpected corners to increase their already great seat-ing-capacity and sometimes as many as two or three hundred guests sat down to elaborate and meaningless dinners — observing their host lost in the contemplation of a rose lying upon an empty plate before him. Yet his was not a remarkable distraction for he could offer to the nonentities of common conversation a smile —
surprising as one who removes an upturned glass to show, hidden by it, some rare entomological creature whose scientific name he had not learned.
What else is there to add? The small extravagances of his dress were hardly noticeable in one whose fortune had always seemed oddly matched against a taste for old flannel trousers and tweed coats. Now in his ice-smooth sharkskin with the scarlet cummer-bund he seemed only what he should always have been — the richest and most handsome of the city’s bankers: those true found-lings of the gut. People felt that at last he had come into his own. This was how someone of his place and fortune should live. Only the diplomatic corps smelt in this new prodigality a run of hidden motives, a plot perhaps to capture the King, and began to haunt his drawing-room with their studied politenesses. Under the slothful or foppish faces one was conscious of curiosity stirring, a desire to study Nessim’s motives and designs, for nowadays the King was a frequent visitor to the great house.
Meanwhile all this advanced the central situation not at all. It was as if the action which Nessim had been contemplating grew with such infinite slowness, like a stalactite, that there was time for all this to fill the interval — the rockets ploughing their furrows of sparks across the velvet sky, piercing deeper and ever deeper into the night where Justine and I lay, locked in each other’s arms
and minds. In the still water of the fountains one saw the splash of human faces, ignited by these gold and scarlet stars as they rose hissing into heaven like thirsty swans. In the darkness, the warm hand on my arm, I could watch the autumn sky thrown into con-vulsions of coloured light with the calm of someone for whom the whole unmerited pain of the human world had receded and dif-fused itself — as pain does when it goes on too long, spreading from a specific member to flood a whole area of the body or the mind. The lovely grooves of the rockets upon the dark sky filled us only with the sense of a breath-taking con gruence to the whole nature of the world of love which was soon to relinquish us. This particular night was full of a rare summer lightning: and hardly had the display ended when from the desert to the east a thin crust of thunder formed like a scab upon the melodious silence. A light rain fell, youthful and refreshing, and all at once the dark-ness was full of figures hurrying back into the shelter of the lamplit houses, dresses held ankle-high and voices raised in shrill pleasure. The lamps printed for a second their bare bodies against the trans-parent materials which sheathed them. For our part we turned wordlessly into the alcove behind the sweet-smelling box-hedges and lay down upon the stone bench carved in the shape of a swan. The laughing chattering crowd poured across the entrance of the alcove towards the light; we lay in the cradle of darkness feeling the gentle prickle of the rain upon our faces. The last fuses were being defiantly lit by men in dinner-jackets and through her hair I saw the last pale comets gliding up into the darkness. I tasted, with the glowing pleasure of the colour in my brain, the warm guiltless pressure of her tongue upon mine, her arms upon mine. The mag-nitude of this happiness — we could not speak but gazed abun-dantly at each other with eyes full of unshed tears. From the house came the dry snap of champagne-corks and the laughter of human beings. ‘Never an evening alone now.’
‘What is happening to Nessim?’
‘I no longer know. When there is something to hide one becomes an actor. It forces all the people round one to act