The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [91]
Yet he did not, as far as I know, take the risk of revisiting her, for the book was going well, and he recognized in the kindling of this sympathy a trick being played on him by the least intent part of his nature. He was writing about love at the time and did not wish to disturb the ideas he had formed on the subject. (‘I cannot fall in love’ he made a character exclaim ‘for I belong to that ancient secret society — the Jokers!’; and elsewhere speaking about his marriage he wrote: ‘I found that as well as displeasing another I also displeased myself; now, alone, I have only myself to displease. Joy!’)
Justine was still standing over me, watching my face as I com-posed these scorching scenes in my mind. ‘You will make some excuse’ she repeated hoarsely. ‘You will not go.’ It seemed to me impossible to find a way out of this predicament. ‘How can I refuse?’ I said. ‘How can you?’
They had driven across that warm, tideless desert night, Nessim and Melissa, consumed by a sudden sympathy for each other, yet speechless. On the last scarp before Bourg El Arab he switched off the engine and let the car roll off the road. ‘Come’ he said. ‘I want to show you Justine’s Summer Palace.’
Hand in hand they took the road to the little house. The care-taker was asleep but he had the key. The rooms smelt damp and uninhabited, but were full of light reflected from the white dunes. It was not long before he had kindled a fire of thorns in the great fireplace, and taking his old abba from the cupboard he clothed himself in it and sat down before it saying: ‘Tell me now, Melissa, who sent you to persecute me?’ He meant it as a joke but forgot to smile, and Melissa turned crimson with shame and bit her lip. They sat there for a long time enjoying the firelight and the sensa-tion of sharing something — their common hopelessness. (Justine stubbed out her cigarette and got slowly out of bed. She began to walk slowly up and down the carpet. Fear had overcome her and I could see that it was only with an effort that she over-came the need for a characteristic outburst. ‘I have done so many things in my life’ she said to the mirror. ‘Evil things, perhaps. But never inattentively, never wastefully. I’ve always thought of acts as messages, wishes from the past to the future, which invited self-discovery. Was I wrong? Was I wrong?’ It was not to me she ad-dressed the question now but to Nessim. It is so much easier to address questions intended for one’s husband to one’s lover. ‘As for the dead’ she went on after a moment, ‘I have always thought that the dead think of us as dead. They have rejoined the living after this trifling excursion into quasi-life.’ Hamid was stirring now and she turned to her clothes in a panic. ‘So you must go’ she said sadly, ‘and so must I. You are right. We must go.’ And then turn-ing to the mirror to complete her toilet she added: ‘Another grey hair’ studying that wicked fashionable face.
Watching her thus, trapped for a moment by a rare sunbeam on the dirty window-pane, I could not help reflecting once more that in her there was nothing to control or modify the intuition which she had developed out of a nature gorged upon introspection : no education, no resources of intellection to battle against the impera-tives of a violent heart. Her gift was the gift one finds occasionally in ignorant fortune-tellers. Whatever passed for thought in her was borrowed — even the remark about the dead which occurs in Moeurs; she had picked out what was significant in books not by reading them but by listening to the matchless discourses of Balthazar, Arnauti, Pursewarden, upon them. She was a