The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

— when we lay together bemused by the silence, watching the yellow curtains breathing tenderly against the light — the quiet respirations of the wind off Mareotis which matched our own. Then she might rise and consult the clock after giving it a shake and listening to it intently: sit naked at the dressing-table to light a cigarette — looking so young and pretty, with her slender arm raised to show the cheap bracelet I had given her. (‘Yes, I am looking at myself, but it helps me to think about you.’) And turning aside from this fragile mirror-worship she would swiftly cross to the ugly scullery which was my only bath-room, and standing at the dirty iron sink would wash herself with deft swift movements, gasping at the coldness of the water, while I lay inhaling the warmth and sweetness of the pillow upon which her dark head had been resting: watching the long bereft Greek face, with its sane pointed nose and candid eyes, the satiny skin that is given only to the thymus-dominated, the mole upon her slender stalk of the neck. These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

* * * * *

Thinking of that summer when Pombal decided to let his flat to Pursewarden, much to my annoyance. I disliked this literary figure for the contrast he offered to his own work — poetry and prose of real grace. I did not know him well but he was financially successful as a novelist which made me envious, and through years of becoming social practice had developed a sort of savoir faire which I felt should never become part of my own equipment. He was clever, tallish and blond and gave the impression of a young man lying becalmed in his mother. I cannot say that he was not kind or good, for he was both — but the inconvenience of living in the flat with someone I did not like was galling. However it would have involved greater inconvenience to move so I accepted the box-room at the end of the corridor at a reduced rent, and did my washing in the grimy little scullery.

Pursewarden could afford to be convivial and about twice a week I was kept up by the noise of drinking and laughter from the flat. One night quite late there came a knock at the door. In the corridor stood Pursewarden, looking pale and rather perky — as if he had just been fired out of a gun into a net. Beside him stood a stout naval stoker of unprepossessing ugliness — looking like all naval stokers; as if he had been sold into slavery as a child. ‘I say’ said Pursewarden shrilly, ‘Pombal told me you were a doctor; would you come and take a look at somebody who is ill?’ I had once told Georges of the year I spent as a medical student with the result that for him I had become a fully-fledged doctor. He not only confided all his own indispositions to my care — which included frequent infestations of body-crabs — but he once went so far as to try and persuade me to perform an abortion for him on the dining-room table. I hastened to tell Pursewarden that I was certainly not a doctor, and advised him to telephone for one: but the phone was out of order, and the boab could not be roused from his sleep: so more in the spirit of disinterested curiosity than anything I put on a mackintosh over my pyjamas and made my way along the corridor. This was how we met!

Opening the door I was immediately blinded by the glare and smoke. The party did not seem to be of the usual kind, for the guests consisted of three or four maimed-looking naval cadets, and a prostitute from Golfo’s tavern, smelling of briny paws and taphia.* Improbably enough, too, she was bending over a figure seated on the end of a couch — the figure which I now recognize as Melissa, but which then seemed like a catastrophic Greek comic mask. Melissa appeared to be raving, but soundlessly for her voice had gone — so that she looked like a film of herself without a sound-track. Her features were a cave. The older woman appeared to be panic-sticken, and was boxing her ears and pulling her hair; while one of the naval cadets was splashing water rather inexpertly upon her from a heavily decorated chamber-pot which was one of Pombal’s dearest treasures and which bore the royal arms of France on its underside. Somewhere out of sight someone was being slowly, unctuously sick. Pursewarden stood beside me surveying the scene, looking rather ashamed of himself.

Melissa was pouring with sweat, and her hair was glued to her temples; as we broke the circle of her tormentors she sank back into an expressionless quivering silence, with this permanently engraved shriek on her face. It would have been wise to try and find out where she had been and what she had been eating and drinking, but a glance at the maudlin, jabbering group around me showed that it would be impossible to get any sense out of them. Nevertheless, seizing the boy nearest me I started to interrogate him when the hag from Golfo’s, who was herself in a state of hysterics, and was only restrained by a naval stoker (who had her pinioned from behind), began to shout in a hoarse chewed voice. ‘Spanish fly. He gave it to her.’ And darting out of the arms of her captor like a rat she seized her handbag and fetched one of the sailors a resounding crack over the head. The bag must have been full of nails for he went down swimming and came up with fragments of shattered crockery in his hair.

She now began to sob in a voice which wore a beard and call for the police. Three sailors converged upon her with blunt fingers extended advising, exhorting, imploring her to desist. Nobody wanted a brush with the naval police. But neither did anyone relish a crack from that Promethean handbag, bulging with french letters and belladonna bottles. She retreated carefully step by step. (Meanwhile I took Melissa’s pulse, and ripping off her blouse listened to her heart. I began to be alarmed for her, and indeed for Pursewarden who had taken up a strategic position behind an armchair and was making eloquent gestures at everyone.) By now the fun had started, for the sailors had the roaring girl cornered — but unfortunately against the decorative Sheraton cupboard which housed Pombal’s cherished collection of pottery. Reaching behind her for support her hands encountered an almost inexhaustible supply of ammunition, and letting go her handbag with a hoarse cry of triumph she began to throw china with a single-mindedness and accuracy I have never seen equalled. The air was all at once full of Egyptian and Greek tear-bottles, Ushabti, and Sevres. It could not be long now before there came the familiar and much- dreaded banging of hob-nailed boots against the door-lintels, as lights were beginning to go on all round us in the building. Pursewarden’s alarm was very marked indeed; as a resident and moreover a famous one he could hardly afford the sort of scandal which the Egyptian press might make out of an affray like this. He was relieved when I motioned to him and started to wrap the by now almost insensible figure of Melissa in the soft Bukhara rug. Together we staggered with her down the corridor and into the blessed privacy of my box-room where, like Cleopatra, we unrolled her and placed her on the bed.

I had remembered the existence of an old doctor, a Greek, who lived down the street, and it was not long before I managed to fetch him up the dark staircase, stumbling and swearing in a transpontine demotic, dropping catheters and stethoscopes all the way. He pronounced Melissa very ill indeed but his diagnosis was ample and vague — in the tradition of the city. ‘It is everything’ he said, ‘malnutrition, hysteria, alcohol, hashish, tuberculosis, Spanish fly … help yourself’ and he made the gesture of putting his hand in his pocket and fetching it out full of imaginary diseases which he offered us to choose from. But he was also practical, and proposed to have a bed ready for her in the Greek Hospital next day. Meanwhile she was not to be moved.

I spent that night and the next on the couch at the foot of the bed. While I was out at work she was confided to the care of one-eyed Hamid, the gentlest of Berberines. For the first twelve hours she was very ill indeed, delirious at times, and suffered agonizing attacks of blindness — agonizing because they made her so afraid. But by being gently rough with her we managed between us to give her courage enough to surmount the worst, and by the afternoon of the second day she was well enough to talk in whispers. The Greek doctor pronounced himself satisfied with her progress. He asked her where she came from and a haunted expression came into her face as she replied ‘Smyrna’; nor would she give the name and address of her parents, and when he pressed her she turned her face to the wall and tears of exhaustion welled slowly out of her eyes. The doctor took up her hand and examined the wedding-finger. ‘You see’ he said to me with a clinical detachment, pointing out the absence of a ring, ‘that is why. Her family has disowned her and turned her out of doors. It is so often these days …’ and he shook a shaggy commiserating head over her. Melissa said nothing, but when the ambulance came and the stretcher was being prepared to take her away she thanked me warmly for my help, pressed Hamid’s hand to her cheek, and surprised me by a gallantry to which my life had unaccustomed me: ‘If you have no girl when I come out, think of me. If you call me I will come to you.’* I do not know how to reduce the gallant candour of the Greek to English.

So I had lost sight of her for a month or more; and indeed I did not think of her, having many other preoccupations at this time. Then, one hot blank afternoon, when I was sitting at my window watching the city unwrinkle from sleep I saw a different Melissa walk down the street and turn into the shadowy doorway of the house. She tapped at my door and walked in with her arms full of flowers, and all at once I found myself separated from that forgotten evening by centuries. She had in her something of the same diffidence with which I later saw her take up a collection for the orchestra in the night-club. She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.

A nerve-racking politeness beset me. I offered her a chair and she sat upon the edge of it. The flowers were for me, yes, but she had not the courage to thrust the bouquet into my arms, and I could see her gazing