The Alexandria Quartet (74 page)

But Leila would not have been a woman had she not been capable of one moment of weakness which all but prejudiced the whole unique pattern of their relationship. It came with her husband's death. But it was swiftly followed by a romantic punishment which drove her further back into the solitude which, for one wild moment, she dreamed of abandoning. It was perhaps as well, for everything might have been lost by it.

There was a silence after her telegram announcing Faltaus' death; and then a letter unlike anything she had written before, so full of hesitations and ambiguities was it. ‘My indecision has become to my surprise such an agony. I am really quite distraught. I want you to think most carefully about the proposal I am about to make. Analyse it, and if the least trace of disgust arises in your mind, the least reservation, we will banish it and never speak of it again. David! Today as I looked in my mirror, as critically and cruelly as I could, I found myself entertaining a thought which for years now I have rigorously excluded. The thought of
seeing you again
. Only I could not for the life of me see the terms and conditions of such a meeting. My vision of it was covered by a black cloud of doubt. Now that Faltaus is dead and buried the whole of
that
part of my life has snapped off short. I have no other except the one I shared with you — a paper life. Crudely, we have been like people drifting steadily apart in age as each year passed. Subconsciously I must have been waiting for Faltaus' death, though I never wished it, for how else should this hope, this delusion suddenly rise up in me now? It suddenly occurred to me last night that we might still have six months or a year left to spend together before the link snaps for good in the old sense. Is this rubbish? Yes! Would I in fact only encumber you, embarrass you by arriving in Paris as I plan to do in two months' time? For goodness' sake write back at once and dissuade me from my false hopes, from such folly — for I recognize deep within myself that it is a folly. But … to enjoy you for a few months before I return here to take up this life: how hard it is to abandon the hope. Scotch it, please, at once; so that when I do come I will be at peace, simply regarding you (as I have all these years) as something more than my closest friend.'

She knew it was unfair to put him in such a position; but she could not help herself. Was it fortunate then that fate prevented him from having to make such an elaborate decision — for her letter arrived on his desk in the same post as Nessim's long telegram announcing the onset of her illness? And while he was still hesitating between a choice of answers there came her post-card, written in a new sprawling hand, which absolved him finally by the words: ‘Do not write again until I can read you; I am bandaged from head to foot. Something very bad, very definitive has happened.'

During the whole of that hot summer the confluent smallpox — invented perhaps as the cruellest remedy for human vanity — dragged on, melting down what remained of her once celebrated beauty. It was useless to pretend even to herself that her whole life would not be altered by it. But how? Mountolive waited in an agony of indecision until their correspondence could be renewed, writing now to Nessim, now to Narouz. A void had suddenly opened at his feet.

Then: ‘It is an odd experience to look upon one's own features full of pot-holes and landslides — like a familiar landscape blown up. I fear that I must get used to the new sensation of being a hag. But by my own force. Of course, all this may strengthen other sides of my character — as acids can — I've lost the metaphor! Ach! what sophistry it is, for there is no way out. And how bitterly ashamed I am of the proposals contained in my last long letter.
This
is not the face to parade through Europe, nor would one dare to shame you by letting it claim your acquaintance at close range. Today I ordered a dozen black veils such as the poor people of my religion still wear! But it seemed so painful an act that I ordered my jeweller to come and measure me afresh for some new bracelets and rings. I have become so thin of late. A reward for bravery too, as children are bribed with a sweet for facing a nasty medicine. Poor little Hakim. He wept bitterly as he showed me his wares. I felt his tears on my fingers. Yet somehow, I was able to laugh. My voice too has changed. I have been so sick of lying in darkened rooms. The veils will free me. Yes, and of
course
I have been debating suicide — who does not at such times? No, but if I live on it won't be to pity myself. Or perhaps woman's vanity is not, as we think, a mortal matter — a killing business? I must be confident and strong. Please don't turn solemn and pity me. When you write, let your letters be gay as always, will you?'

But thereafter came a silence before their correspondence was fully resumed, and her letters now had a new quality — of bitter resignation. She had retired, she wrote, to the land once more, where she lived alone with Narouz. ‘His gentle savagery makes him an ideal companion. Besides, at times I am troubled in mind now, not quite
compos mentis
, and then I retire for days at a time to the little summer-house, remember? At the end of the garden. There I read and write with only my snake — the genius of the house these days is a great dusty cobra, tame as a cat. It is company enough. Besides, I have other cares now, other plans. Desert without and desert within!

‘The veil's a fine and private place:

But none, I think, do there embrace
.

‘If I should write nonsense to you during the times when the
afreet
has bewitched my mind (as the servants say) don't answer. These attacks only last a day or two at most.'

And so the new epoch began. For years she sat, an eccentric and veiled recluse in Karm Abu Girg, writing those long marvellous letters, her mind still ranging freely about the lost worlds of Europe in which he still found himself a traveller. But there were fewer imperatives of the old eager kind. She seldom looked outward now towards new experiences, but mostly backwards into the past as one whose memory of small things needed to be refreshed. Could one hear the cicadas on the Tour Magne? Was the Seine corn-green at Bougival? At the Pallio of Siena were the costumes of silk? The cherry-trees of Navarra.… She wanted to verify the past, to look back over her shoulder, and patiently Mountolive undertook these reassurances on every journey. Rembrandt's little monkey — had she seen or only imagined it in his canvases? No, it existed, he told her sadly. Very occasionally a request touching the new came up. ‘My interest has been aroused by some singular poems in Values (Sept) signed Ludwig Pursewarden. Something new and harsh here. As you are going to London next week, please enquire about him for me. Is he German? Is he the novelist who wrote those two strange novels about Africa? The name is the same.'

It was this request which led directly to Mountolive's first meeting with the poet who later was to play a part of some importance in his life. Despite the almost French devotion he felt (copied from Leila) for artists, he found Pursewarden's name an awkward, almost comical one to write upon the postcard which he addressed to him care of his publishers. For a month he heard nothing; but as he was in London on a three-months' course of instruction he could afford to be patient. When his answer came it was surprisingly enough, written upon the familiar Foreign Office notepaper; his post, it appeared, was that of a junior in the Cultural Department! He telephoned him at once and was agreeably surprised by the pleasant, collected voice. He had half-expected someone aggressively underbred, and was relieved to hear a civilized note of self-collected humour in Pursewarden's voice. They agreed to meet for a drink at the ‘Compasses' near Westminster Bridge that evening, and Mountolive looked forward to the meeting as much for Leila's sake as his own, for he intended to write her an account of it, carefully describing her artist for her.

It was snowing with light persistence, the snow melting as it touched the pavements, but lingering longer on coat-collars and hats. (A snowflake on the eyelash suddenly bursts the world asunder into the gleaming component colours of the prism.) Mountolive bent his head and came round the corner just in time to see a youthful-looking couple turn into the bar of the ‘Compasses'. The girl, who turned to address a remark to her companion over her shoulder as the door opened, wore a brilliant tartan shawl with a great white brooch. The warm lamplight splashed upon her broad pale face with its helmet of dark curling hair. She was strikingly beautiful with a beauty whose somehow shocking placidity took Mountolive a full second to analyse. Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target — the eyes of another. She stayed thus a full second before her companion said something laughingly and pressed her onwards into the bar. Mountolive entered on their heels and found himself at once grasping the warm steady hand of Pursewarden. The blind girl, it seemed, was his sister. A few moments of awkwardness ensued while they disposed themselves by the blazing coke fire in the corner and ordered drinks.

Pursewarden, though in no way a striking person, seemed agreeably normal. He was of medium height and somewhat pale in colouring with a trimmed moustache which made a barely noticeable circumflex above a well-cut mouth. He was, however, so completely unlike his sister in colouring that Mountolive concluded that the magnificent dark hair of the sightless girl must perhaps be dyed, though it seemed natural enough, and her slender eyebrows were also dark. Only the eyes might have given one a clue to the secret of this Mediterranean pigmentation, and they, of course, were spectacularly missing. It was the head of a Medusa, its blindness was that of a Greek statue — a blindness perhaps brought about by intense concentration through centuries upon sunlight and blue water? Her expression, however, was not magistral but tender and appealing. Long silken fingers curled and softened at the butts like the fingers of a concert pianist moved softly upon the oaken table between them, as if touching, confirming, certifying — hesitating to ascribe qualities to his voice. At times her own lips moved softly as if she were privately repeating the words they spoke to herself in order to recapture their resonance and meaning; then she was like someone following music with a private score.

‘Liza, my darling?' said the poet.

‘Brandy and soda.' She replied with her placid blankness in a voice at once clear and melodious — a voice which might have given some such overtone to the words ‘Honey and nectar'. They seated themselves somewhat awkwardly while the drinks were dispensed. Brother and sister sat side by side, which gave them a somewhat defensive air. The blind girl put one hand in the brother's pocket. So began, in rather a halting fashion, the conversation which lasted them far into the evening and which he afterwards transcribed so accurately to Leila, thanks to his formidable memory.

‘He was somewhat shy at first and took refuge in a pleasant diffidence. I found to my surprise that he was earmarked for a Cairo posting next year and told him a little about my friends there, offering to give him a few letters of introduction, notably to Nessim. He may have been a little intimidated by my rank but this soon wore off; he hasn't much of a head for drinks and after the second began to talk in a most amusing and cutting fashion. A rather different person now emerged — odd and equivocal as one might expect an artist to be — but with pronounced views on a number of subjects, some of them not at all to my taste. But they had an oddly personal ring. One felt they were deduced from experience and not worked out simply to
épater
. He is, for example, rather an old-fashioned reactionary in his outlook, and is consequently rather
mal vu
by his brother craftsmen who suspect him of Fascist sympathies; the prevailing distemper of left-wing thought, indeed all radicalism is repugnant to him. But his views were expressed humorously and without heat. I could not, for example, rouse him on the Spanish issue. (“All those little
beige
people trooping off to die for the Left Book Club!”)'

Mountolive had indeed been rather shocked by opinions as clear-cut as they were trenchant, for he at the time shared the prevailing egalitarian sympathies of the day — albeit in the anodyne liberalized form then current in The Office. Pursewarden's royal contempts made him rather a formidable person. ‘I confess' Mountolive wrote ‘that I did not feel I had exactly placed him in any one category. But he expressed views rather than attitudes, and I must say he said a number of striking things which I memorized for you, as: “The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow-men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn. That is why he can't dabble in politics, it isn't his job. He must concentrate on values rather than policies. Today it all looks to me like a silly shadow-play, for ruling is an art, not a science, just as a society is an organism, not a system. Its smallest unit is the family and really royalism is the right structure for it — for a Royal Family is a mirror image of the human, a legitimate idolatry. I mean, for us, the British, with our essentially quixotic temperament and mental sloth. I don't know about the others. As for capitalism, its errors and injustices are all remediable, by fair taxation. We should be hunting not for an imaginary equality among men, but simply for a decent equity. But then Kings should be manufacturing a philosophy of sorts, as they did in China; and absolute Monarchy is hopeless for us today because the philosophy of kingship is at a low ebb. The same goes for a dictatorship.

‘“As for Communism, I can see that is hopeless too; the analysis of man in terms of economic behaviourism takes all the fun out of living, and to divest him of a personal psyche is madness.” And so on. He has visited Russia for a month with a cultural delegation and did not like what he felt there; other
boutades
like “Sad Jews on whose faces one could see all the melancholia of a secret arithmetic; I asked an old man in Kiev if Russia was a happy place. He drew his breath sharply and after looking around him furtively said: ‘We say that once Lucifer had good intentions, a change of heart. He decided to perform a good act for a change — just one. So hell was born on earth, and they named it Soviet Russia.'”