The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [90]
Melissa’s dressing-room was an evil-smelling cubicle full of the coiled pipes which emptied the lavatories. She had a single poignant strip of cracked mirror and a little shelf dressed with the kind of white paper upon which wedding-cakes are built. Here she always set out the jumble of powders and crayons which she mis-used so fearfully. In this mirror the image of Selim blistered and flickered in the dancing gas-jets like a spectre from the underworld. He spoke with an inc isive finish which was a copy of his master’s; in this copied voice she could feel some of the anxiety the secretary felt for the
only human being he truly worshipped, and to whose anxieties he reacted like a planchette.
Melissa was afraid now, for she knew that offence given to the great could, by the terms of the city, be punished swiftly and dreadfully. She was aghast at what she had done and fought back a desire to cry as she picked off her eyelashes with trembling hands. There was no way of refusing the invitation. She dressed in her shabby best and carrying her fatigue like a heavy pack followed Selim to the great car which stood in deep shadow. She was helped in beside Nessim. They moved off slowly into the dense crepus-cular evening of an Alexandria which, in her panic, she no longer recognized. They scouted a sea turned to sapphire and turned inland, folding up the slums, towards Mareotis and the bitum inous slag-heaps of Mex where the pressure of the headlights now peeled off layer after layer of the darkness, bringing up small intimate scenes of Egyptian life — a drunkard singing, a biblical figure on a mule with two children escaping from Herod, a porter sorting sacks — swiftly, like someone dealing cards. She followed these familiar sights with emotion, for behind lay the desert, its empti-ness echoing like a seashell. All this time her companion had not spoken, and she had not dared to risk so much as a glance in his direction.
Now when the pure steely lines of the dunes came up under the late moon Nessim drew the car to a standstill. Groping in his pocket for his cheque-book he said in a trembling voice, his eyes full of tears: ‘What is the price of your silence?’ She turned to him and, seeing for the first time the gentleness and sorrow of that dark face, found her fear replaced by an overwhelming shame. She recognized in his expression the weakness for the good which could never render him an enemy of her kind. She put a timid hand on his arm and said: ‘I am so ashamed. Please forgive me. I did not know what I was saying.’ And her fatigue overcame her so that her emotion which threatened her with tears turned to a yawn. Now they stared at one another with a new understanding, recog-nizing each other as innocents. For a minute it was almost as if they had fallen in love with each other from sheer relief. The car gathered momentum again like their silence — and soon they were racing across the desert towards the steely glitter of stars, and a horizon stained black with the thunder of surf. Nessim, with
this strange sleepy creature at his side, found himself thinking over and over again: ‘Thank God I am not a genius — for a genius has nobody in whom he can confide.’
The glances he snatched at her enabled him to study her, and to study me in her. Her loveliness must have disarmed and disturbed him as it had me. It was a beauty which filled one with the terrible premonition that it had been born to be a target for the forces of destruction. Perhaps he remembered an anecdote of Pursewarden’s in which she figured, for the latter had found her as Nessim him-self had done, in the same stale cabaret; only on this particular evening she had been sitting in a row of dance-hostesses selling dance-tickets. Pursewarden, who was gravely drunk, took her to the floor and, after a moment