The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

VIII

‘A hundred times I’ve asked you not to use my razor’ said Pombal plaintively ‘and you do so again. You know I am afraid of syphilis. Who knows what spots, when you cut them, begin to leak?’

‘Mon cher collegue’ said Pursewarden stiffly (he was shaving his lip), and with a grimace which was somewhat intended to express injured dignity, ‘what can you mean? I am British. Hein?’

He paused, and marking time with Pombal’s cut-throat declaimed solemnly:

‘The British who perfected the horseless carriage

Are now working hard on the sexless marriage.

Soon the only permissible communion

Will be by agreement with one’s Trade Union.’

‘Your blood may be infected’ said his friend between grunts as he ministered to a broken suspender with one fat calf exposed upon the bidet. ‘You never know, after all.’

‘I am a writer’ said Pursewarden with further and deeper dignity. ‘And therefore I do know. There is no blood in my veins. Plasma’ he said darkly, wiping his ear-tip, ‘that is what flows in my veins. How else would I do all the work I do? Think of it. On the Spectator I am Ubique, on the New Statesman I am Mens Sana. On the Daily Worker I sign myself as Corpore Sano. I am also Paralysis Agitans on The Times and Ejaculatio Praecox in New Verse. I am …’ But here his invention failed him.

‘I never see you working’ said Pombal.

‘Working little, I earn less. If my work earned more than one hundred pounds a year I should not be able to take refuge in being misunderstood.’ He gave a strangled sob.

‘Compris. You have been drinking. I saw the bottle on the hall table as I came in. Why so early?’

‘I wished to be quite honest about it. It is your wine, after all. I wished to hide nothing. I have drunk a tot or so.’

‘Celebration?’

‘Yes. Tonight, my dear Georges, I am going to do something rather unworthy of myself. I have disposed of a dangerous enemy and advanced my own position by a large notch. In our service, this would be regarded as something to crow about. I am going to offer myself a dinner of self-congratulation.’

‘Who will pay it?’

‘I will order, eat and pay for it myself.’

‘That is not much good.’

Pursewarden made an impatient face in the mirror.

‘On the contrary’ he said. ‘A quiet evening is what I most need. I shall compose a few more fragments of my autobiography over the good oysters at Diamandakis.’

‘What is the title?’

‘Beating about the Bush. The opening words are “I first met Henry James in a brothel in Algiers. He had a naked houri on each knee.”

‘Henry James was a pussy, I think.’

Pursewarden turned the shower on full and stepped into it crying: ‘No more literary criticism from the French, please.’

Pombal drove a comb through his dark hair with a laborious impatience and then consulted his watch. ‘Merde’ he said, ‘I am going to be retarded again.’

Pursewarden gave a shriek of delight. They adventured freely in each other’s languages, rejoicing like schoolboys in the mistakes which cropped up among their conversations. Each blunder was greeted with a shout, was turned into a war-cry. Pursewarden hopped with pleasure and shouted happily above the hissing of the water: ‘Why not stay in and enjoy a nice little nocturnal emission on the short hairs?’ (Pombal had described a radio broadcast thus the day before and had not been allowed to forget it.) He made a round face now to express mock annoyance. ‘I did not say it’ he said.

‘You bloody well did.’

‘I did not say “the short hairs” but the “short undulations”— des ondes courtes.’

‘Equally dreadful. You Quai d’Orsay people shock me. Now my French may not be perfect, but I have never made a ——’

‘If I begin with your mistakes — ha! ha!’

Pursewarden danced up and down in the bath, shouting ‘Nocturnal emissions on the short hairs’. Pombal threw a rolled towel at him and lumbered out of the bathroom before he could retaliate effectively.

Their abusive conversation was continued while the Frenchman made some further adjustments to his dress in the bedroom mirror. ‘Will you go down to Etoile later for the floor-show?’

‘I certainly will’ said Pursewarden. ‘I shall dance a Fox-Macabre with Darley’s girl-friend or Sveva. Several Fox-Macabres, in fact. Then, later on, like an explorer who has run out of pemmican, purely for body-warmth, I shall select someone and conduct her to Mount Vulture. There to sharpen my talons on her flesh.’ He made what he imagined to be the noise a vulture makes as it feeds upon flesh — a soft, throaty croaking. Pombal shuddered.

‘Monster’ he cried. ‘I go — good-bye.’

‘Good-bye. Toujours la maladresse!’

‘Toujours.’ It was their war-cry.

Left alone, Pursewarden whistled softly as he dried himself in the torn bath-towel and completed his toilet. The irregularities in the water system of the Mount Vulture Hotel often drove him across the square to Pombal’s flat in search of a leisurely bath and a shave. From time to time too, when Pombal went on leave, he would actually rent the place and share it, somewhat uneasily, with Darley who lived a furtive life of his own in the far corner of it. It was good from time to time to escape from the isolation of his hotel-room, and the vast muddle of paper which was growing up around his next novel. To escape — always to escape…. The desire of a writer to be alone with himself—‘the writer, most solitary of human animals’; ‘I am quoting from the great Pursewarden himself’ he told his reflection in the mirror as he wrestled with his tie. Tonight he would dine quietly, self-indulgently, alone! He had gracefully refused a halting dinner invitation from Errol which he knew would involve him in one of those gauche, haunting evenings spent in playing imbecile paper-games or bridge. ‘My God’ Pombal had said, ‘your compatriots’ methods of passing the time! Those rooms which they fill with their sense of guilt! To express one idea is to stop a dinner party dead in its tracks and provoke an awkwardness, a silence…. I try my best, but always feel I’ve put my foot in it. So I always automatically send flowers the next morning to my hostess…. What a nation you are! How intriguing for us French because how repellent is the way you live!’

Poor David Mountolive! Pursewarden thought of him with compassion and affection. What a price the career diplomat had to pay for the fruits of power! ‘His dreams must forever be awash with the memories of fatuities endured — deliberately endured in the name of what was most holy in the profession, namely the desire to please, the determination to captivate in order to influence. Well! It takes all sorts to unmake a world.’

Combing his hair back he found himself thinking of Maskelyne, who must at this moment be sitting in the Jerusalem express jogging stiffly, sedately down among the sand-dunes and orange-groves, sucking a long pipe; in a hot carriage, fly-tormented without and roasted within by the corporate pride of a tradition which was dying…. Why should it be allowed to die? Maskelyne, full of the failure, the ignominy of a new post which carried advancement with it. The final cruel thrust. (The idea gave him a twinge of remorse for he did not underestimate the character of the unself-seeking soldier.) Narrow, acid, desiccated as a human being, nevertheless the writer somewhere treasured him while the man condemned him. (Indeed, he had made extensive notes upon him — a fact which would certainly have surprised Maskelyne had he known.) His way of holding his pipe, of carrying his nose high, his reserves…. It was simply that he might want to use him one day. ‘Are real human beings becoming simply extended humours capable of use, and does this cut one off from them a bit? Yes.