The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [92]
abstract of the writers and thinkers whom she had loved or ad-mired — but what clever woman is more?) Nessim now took Melissa’s hands between his own (they lay there effortless, cool, like wafers) and began to question her about me with an avidity which might have easily suggested that his passion was not Justine, but myself. One always falls in love with the love-choice of the person one loves. What would I not give to learn all that she told him, striking ever more deeply into his sympathies with her candours, her unexpected reserves? All I know is that she concluded stupidly, ‘Even now they are not happy: they quarrel dreadfully: Hamid told me so when last I met him.’ Surely she was experienced enough to recognize in these reported quarrels the very subject-matter of our love? I think she saw only the selfishness of Justine — that almost deafening lack of interest in other people which characterized my tyrant. She utterly lacked the charity of mind upon which Melissa’s good opinion alone could be grounded. She was not really human — nobody wholly dedicated to the ego is. What on earth could I see in her? —
I asked this question of myself for the thousandth time. Yet Nessim, in beginning to explore and love Melissa as an extension of Justine, delineated perfectly the human situation. Melissa would hunt in him for the qualities which she imagined I must have found in his wife. The four of us were unrecognized com-plementaries of one another, inextricably bound together. (‘We who have travelled much and loved much: we who have — I will not say suffered for we have always recognized through suffering our own self-sufficiency — only we appreciate the complexities of tenderness, and understand how narrowly love and friendship are related.’ Moeurs. )
They talked now as a doomed brother and sister might, re-newing in each other the sense of relief which comes to those who find someone to share the burden of unconfessed preoccupations. In all this sympathy an unexpected shadow of desire stirred within them, a wraith merely, the stepchild of confession and release. It foreshadowed, in a way, their own love-making, which was to come, and which was so much less ugly than ours — mine and Justine’s. Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds. It was already dawn when they rose from their conversation, stiff and cramped, the
fire long since out, and marched across the damp sand to the car, scouting the pale lavender light of dawn. Melissa had found a friend and patron; as for Nessim, he was transfigured. The sensa-tion of a new sympathy had enabled him, magically, to become his own man again — that is to say, a man who could act (could murder his wife’s lover if he so wished)!
Driving along that pure and natal coastline they watched the first tendrils of sunlight uncoil from horizon to horizon across the dark self-sufficient Mediterranean sea whose edges were at one and the same moment touching lost hallowed Carthage and Salamis in Cyprus.
Presently, where the road dips down among the dunes to the sea-shore Nessim once more slowed down and involuntarily suggested a swim. Changed as he was he felt a sudden desire that Melissa should see him naked, should approve the beauty which for so long had lain, like a suit of well-cut clothes in an attic cupboard, for-gotten. Naked and laughing, they waded out hand in hand, into the icy water feeling the tame sunlight glowing on their backs as they did so. It was like the first morning since the creation of the world. Melissa, too, had shed with her clothes the last residual encum-brance of the flesh, and had become the dancer she truly was; for nakedness always gave her fulness and balance: the craft she lacked in the cabaret.
They lay together for a long time in perfect silence, seeking through the darkness of their feelings for the way forward. He realized that he had won an instant compliance from her — that she was now his mistress in everything.
They set off together for the city, feeling at the same time happy and