The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [93]
At last Nessim remembered a tumbledown café in Mex where one could find a boiled egg and coffee. Early though it was the sleepy Greek proprietor was awake and set chairs for them under a barren fig-tree in a backyard full of hens and their meagre drop-pings. All around them towered corrugated iron wharves and
factories. The sea was present only as a dank and resonant smell of hot iron and tar.
He set her down at last on the street-corner she named and said good-bye in a ‘wooden perfunctory’ sort of way — afraid perhaps that some of his own office employees might oversee him. (This last is my own conjecture as the words ‘wooden’ and ‘perfunctory’, which smell of literature, seem somehow out of place.) The in-human bustle of the city intervened once more, committing them to past feelings and preoccupations. For her part, yawning, sleepy and utterly natural as she was, she left him only to turn into the little Greek church and set a candle to the saint. She crossed her-self from left to right as the orthodox custom is and brushed back a lock of hair with one hand as she stooped to the ikon, tasting in its brassy kiss all the consolation of a forgotten childhood habit. Then wearily she turned to find Nessim standing before her. He was deathly white and staring at her with a sweet burning curiosity. She at once understood everything. They embraced with a sort of anguish, not kissing, but simply pressing their bodies together, and he all at once began to tremble with fatigue. His teeth began to chatter. She drew him to a choir stall where he sat for some abstracted moments, struggling to speak, and drawing his hand across his forehead like someone who is recovering from drowning. It was not that he had anything to say to her, but this speechlessness made him fear that he was experiencing a stroke. He croaked:
‘It is terribly late, nearly half past six.’ Pressing her hand to his stubbled cheek he rose and like a very old man groped his way back through the great doors into the sunlight, leaving her sitting there gazing after him.
Never had the early dawn-light seemed so good to Nessim. The city looked to him as brilliant as a precious stone. The shrill tele-phones whose voices filled the great stone buildings in which the financiers really lived, sounded to him like the voices of great fruitful mechanical birds. They glittered with a pharaonic youth-fulness. The trees in the park had been rinsed down by an un-accustomed dawn rain. They were covered in brilliants and looked like great contented cats at their toilet.
Sailing upwards to the fifth floor in the lift, making awkward attempts to appear presentable (feeling the dark stubble on his chin, retying his tie) Nessim questioned his reflection in the cheap
mirror, puzzled by the whole new range of feelings and beliefs these brief scenes had given him. Under everything, however, aching like a poisoned tooth or finger, lay the qu ivering meaning of those eight words which Melissa had lodged in him. In a dazed sort of way he recognized that Justine was dead to him — from a mental picture she had become an engraving, a locket which one might wear over one’s heart for ever. It is always bitter to leave the old life for the new — and every woman is a new life, compact and self-contained and sui generis. As a person she had suddenly faded. He did not wish to possess her any longer but to free himself from her. From a woman she had become a situation.
He rang for Selim and when the secretary appeared he dictated to him a few of the duller business letters with a calm so surprising that the boy’s hand trembled as he took them down in his meti-culous crowsfoot shorthand. Perhaps Nessim had never been more terrifying to Selim than he appeared at this moment, sitting at his great polished desk with the gleaming battery of telephones ranged