The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

rubbish!’ She gave a little laugh. And then, to his complete surprise she went on to describe his sister. ‘The blind one — not your wife.’ She closed her eyes and spread her repellent arms out before her like a sleep-walker. ‘Yes’ said Pursewarden, ‘that is her. That is my sister.’ ‘Your sister?’ Melissa was astounded. She dropped his hand. She had never in playing this game made an accurate prediction before. Pursewarden told her gravely: ‘She and I were lovers. We shall never be able to love other people.’ And now, with the recital begun he suddenly found it easy to tell the rest, to tell her everything. He was completely master of himself and she gazed at him with pity and tenderness. Was it easy because they spoke French? In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience. In his own curious phrase he had always qualified it as ‘an unsniggerable language’. Or was it simply that the fugitive sympathy of Melissa made these events easy to speak of? She herself did not judge, everything was known, had been experienced. She nodded gravely as he spoke of his love and his deliberate abandoning of it, of his attempt at marriage, of its failure.

Between pity and admiration they kissed, but passionately now, united by the ties of recorded human experience, by the sensation of having shared something. ‘I saw it in the hand’ she said, ‘in your hand.’ She was somewhat frightened by the unwonted accuracy of her own powers. And he? He had always wanted someone to whom he could speak freely — but it must be someone who could not fully understand! The candle flickered. On the mirror with shaving soap he had written the mocking verses for Justine which began:

Oh Dreadful is the check!

Intense the agony.

When the ear begins to hear

And the eye begins to see!

He repeated them softly to himself, in the privacy of his own mind, as he thought of the dark composed features which he had seen here, by candle-light — the dark body seated in precisely the pose which Melissa now adopted, watching him with her chin on her knee, holding his hand with sympathy. And as he went on in his quiet voice to speak of his sister, of his perpetual quest for satisfactions which might be better than those he could remember, and which he had deliberately abandoned, other verses floated through his mind; the chaotic commentaries thrown up by his reading no less than by his experiences. Even as he saw once again the white marble face with its curling black hair thrown back about the nape of a slender neck, the ear-points, chin cleft by a dimple — a face which led him back always to those huge empty eye-sockets — he heard his inner mind repeating:

Amors par force vos demeine!

Combien durra vostre folie?

Trop avez mene ceste vie.

He heard himself saying things which belonged elsewhere. With a bitter laugh, for example: ‘The Anglo- Saxons invented the word “fornication” because they could not believe in the variety of love.’ And Melissa, nodding so gravely and sympathetically, began to look more important — for here was a man at last confiding in her things she could not understand, treasures of that mysterious male world which oscillated always between sottish sentimentality and brutish violence! ‘In my country almost all the really delicious things you can do to a woman are criminal offences, grounds for divorce.’ She was frightened by his sharp, cracked laugh. Of a sudden he looked so ugly. Then he dropped his voice again and continued pressing her hand to his cheek softly, as one presses upon a bruise; and inside the inaudible commentary continued:

‘What meaneth Heaven by these diverse laws?

Eros, Agape — self-division’s cause?’

Locked up there in the enchanted castle, between the terrified kisses and intimacies which would never now be recovered, they had studied La Lioba! What madness! Would they ever dare to enter the lists against other lovers? Jurata fornicatio — those verses dribbling away in the mind; and her body, after Rudel, ‘gras, delgat et gen’. He sighed, brushing away the memories like a cobweb and saying to himself: ‘Later, in search of an askesis he followed the desert fathers to Alexandria, to a place between two deserts, between the two breasts of Melissa. O morosa delectatio. And he buried his face there among the dunes, covered by her quick hair.’

Then he was silent, staring at her with his clear eyes, his trembling lips closing for the first time about endearments which were now alight, now truly passionate. She shivered suddenly, aware that she would not escape him now, that she would have to submit to him fully.

‘Melissa’ he said triumphantly.

They enjoyed each other now, wisely and tenderly, like friends long sought for and found among the commonplace crowds which thronged the echoing city. And here was a Melissa he had planned to find—eyes closed, warm open breathing mouth, torn from sleep with a kiss by the rosy candle-light. ‘It is time to go.’ But she pressed nearer and nearer to his body, whimpering with weariness. He gazed down fondly at her as she lay in the crook of his arm. ‘And the rest of your prophecy?’ he said gaily. ‘Rubbish, all rubbish’ she answered sleepily. ‘I can sometimes learn a character from a hand — but the future! I am not so clever.’

The dawn was breaking behind the window. On a sudden impulse he went to the bathroom and turned on the bathwater. It flowed boiling hot, gushing into the bath with a swish of steam! How typical of the Mount Vulture Hotel, to have hot bathwater at such an hour and at no other. Excited as a schoolboy he called her. ‘Melissa, come and soak the weariness out of your bones or I’ll never get you back to your home.’ He thought of ways and means of delivering the five hundred pounds to Darley in such a way as to disguise the source of the gift. He must never know that it came from a rival’s epitaph on a dead Copt! ‘Melissa’ he called again, but she was asleep.

He picked her up bodily and carried her into the bathroom. Lying snugly in the warm bath, she woke up, uncurled from sleep like one of those marvellous Japanese paper-flowers which open in water. She paddled the warmth luxuriously over her shallow pectorals and glowed, her thighs beginning to turn pink. Pursewarden sat upon the bidet with one hand in the warm water and talked to her as she woke from sleep. ‘You mustn’t take too long’ he said, ‘or Darley will be angry.’

‘Darley! Bah! He was out with Justine again last night.’ She sat up and began to soap her breasts, breathing in the luxury of soap and water like someone tasting a rare wine. She pronounced her rival’s name with small cringing loathing that seemed out of character. Pursewarden was surprised. ‘Such people — the Hosnanis’ she said with contempt. ‘And poor Darley believes in them, in her. She is only using him. He is too good, too simple.’

‘Using him?’

She turned on the shower and revelling in the clouds of steam nodded a small pinched-up face at him. ‘I know all about them.’

‘What do you know?’

He felt inside himself the sudden stirring of a discomfort so pronounced that it had no name. She was about to overturn his world as one inadvertently knocks over an inkpot or a goldfish-bowl. Smiling a loving smile all the time. Standing there in the clouds of steam like an angel emerging from heaven in some seventeenth-century engraving.

‘What do you know?’ he repeated.

Melissa examined the cavities in her teeth with a handmirror, her body still wet and glistening. ‘I’ll tell you. I used to be the mistress of a very important man, Cohen, very important and very rich.’ There was something pathetic about such boasting. ‘He was working with Nessim Hosnani and told me things. He also talked in his sleep. He is dead now. I think he was poisoned because he knew so much. He was helping to take arms into the Middle East, into Palestine, for Nessim Hosnani. Great quantities. He used to say “Pour faire sauter les Anglais!”’ She ripped out the words vindictively, and all of a sudden, after a moment’s thought added: ‘He used to do this.’ It was grotesque, her imitation of Cohen bunching up his fingers to kiss them and then waving them in a gesture as he said ‘Tout a toi, John Bull!’ Her face crumpled and screwed up into an imitation of the dead man’s malice.

‘Dress now’ said Pursewarden in a small voice. He went into the other room and stood for a moment gazing distractedly at the wall above the bookshelf. It was as if the whole city had crashed down about his ears.

‘That is why I don’t like the Hosnanis’ cried Melissa from the bathroom in a new, brassy fishwife’s voice. ‘They secretly hate the British.’