The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [94]
Nessim did not meet Melissa for some time after this episode but he wrote her long letters, all of which he destroyed in the lavatory. It seemed necessary to him, for some fantastic reason, to explain and justify Justine to her and each of these letters began with a long painful exegesis of Justine’s past and his own. Without this preamble, he felt, it would be impossible ever to speak of the way in which Melissa had moved and captivated him. He was defending his wife, of course, not against Melissa, who had uttered no criticism of her (apart from the one phrase) but against all the new doubts about her which emerged precisely from his experience with Melissa. Just as my own experience of Justine had illuminated and re-evaluated Melissa for me so he looking into Melissa’s grey eyes saw a new and unsuspected Justine born therein. You see, he was now alarmed at the extent to which it might become possible to hate her. He recognized now that hate is only unachieved love. He felt envious when he remembered the single-mindedness of Pursewarden who on the flyleaf of the last book he gave Balthazar had scribbled the mocking words:
Pursewarden on Life
N.B. Food is for eating
Art is for arting
Women for ——————
Finish
RIP
And when next they met, under very different circumstances
… But I have not the courage to continue. I have explored Melissa deeply enough through my own mind and heart and cannot bear to recall what Nessim found in her — pages covered with erasures and emendations. Pages which I have torn from my diaries and destroyed. Sexual jealousy is the most curious of animals and can take up a lodgement anywhere, even in memory. I avert my face from the thought of Nessim’s shy kisses, of Melissa’s kisses which selected in Nessim only the nearest mouth to mine….
From a crisp packet I selected a strip of pasteboard on which, after so many shame-faced importunities, I had persuaded a local jobbing printer to place my name and address, and taking up my pen wrote:
mr —————— accepts with pleasure the
kind invitation of mr —————— to a duck
shoot on Lake Mareotis.
It seemed to me that now one might learn some important truths about human behaviour.
* * * * *
Autumn has settled at last into the clear winterset. High seas flogging the blank panels of stone along the Corniche. The migrants multiplying on the shallow reaches of Mareotis. Waters moving from gold to grey, the pigmentation of winter. The parties assemble at Nessim’s house towards twilight — a prodigious collection of cars and shooting-brakes. Here begins the long packing and unpacking of wicker baskets and gun-bags, con-ducted to the accompaniment of cocktails and sandwiches. Cos-tumes burgeon. Comparison of guns and cartridges, conversation inseparable from a shooter’s life, begin now, rambling, incon-sequent, wise. The yellowish moonless dusk settles: the angle of the sunlight turns slowly upwards into the vitreous lilac of the evening sky. It is brisk weather, clear as waterglass. Justine and I are moving through the spiderweb of our pre-occupations like people already parted. She wears the familiar
velveteen costume — the coat with its deeply cut and slanted pockets: and the soft velours hat pulled down over her brows — a schoolgirl’s hat: leather jack-boots. We do not look directly at each other any more, but talk with a hollow impersonality. I have a splitting headache. She has urged upon me her own spare gun — a beautiful stout twelve by Purdey, ideal for such an unpractised hand and eye as mine.
There is laughter and clapping as lots are drawn for the make-up of the various parties. We will have to take up widely dispersed positions around the lake, and those who draw the western butts will have to make a long detour by road through Mex and the desert fringes. The leaders of each party draw paper strips in turn from a hat, each with a guest’s name written upon it. Nessim has already drawn Capodistria who is clad in a natty leather jerkin with velvet cuffs, khaki gaberdine plus-fours and check socks. He wears an old tweed hat