The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

She shook her head doubtfully, still with her attention on the paper, and then shrugged her shoulders. ‘Loving you both as I do, who could wish for anything better? And I have spoken to her, as you asked me, tried to provoke her, probe her. It seems hopeless.’ Was this strictly true, she asked herself? She had too great a tendency to believe what people said.

‘False pride?’ he said sharply.

‘She laughs hopelessly and’ Clea imitated a gesture of hopelessness ‘like that! I think she feels that she has had all the clothes stripped off her back in the street by that book Moeurs. She thinks herself no longer able to bring anyone peace of mind! Or so she says.’

‘Who asks for that?’

‘She thinks you would. Then of course, there is your social position. And then she is, after all, a Jew. Put yourself in her place.’ Clea was silent for a moment. Then she added in the same abstract tone: ‘If she needs you at all it is to use your fortune to help her search for the child. And she is too proud to do that. But … you have read Moeurs. Why repeat myself?’

‘I have never read Moeurs’ he said hotly, ‘and she knows that I never will. I have told her that. Oh, Clea dear!’ He sighed. This was another lie.

Clea paused, smiling, to consider his dark face. Then she continued, rubbing at the corner of the drawing with her thumb as she said: ‘Chevalier sans peur, etc. That is like you, Nessim. But is it wise to idealize us women so? You are a bit of a baby still, for an Alexandrian.’

‘I don’t idealize; I know exactly how sad, mad or bad she is. Who does not? Her past and her present … they are known to everyone. It is just that I feel she would match perfectly my own….’

‘Your own what?’

‘Aridity’ he said surprisingly, rolling over, smiling and frowning at the same time. ‘Yes, I sometimes think I shall never be able to fall in love properly until after my mother dies — and she is still comparatively young. Speak, Clea!’

The blonde head shook slowly. Clea took a puff from the cigarette burning in the ashtray beside the easel and bent once more to the work in hand. ‘Well’ said Nessim, ‘I shall see her myself this evening and make a serious attempt to make her understand.’

‘You do not say “make her love”!’

‘How could I?’

‘If she cannot love, it would be dishonourable to pretend.’

‘I do not know whether I can yet either; we are both ames veuves in a queer way, don’t you see?’

‘Oh, la, la!’ said Clea, doubtfully but still smiling.

‘Love may be for a time incognito with us’ he said, frowning at the wall and setting his face. ‘But it is there. I must try to make her see.’ He bit his lip. ‘Do I really present such an enigma?’ He really meant ‘Do I succeed in deluding you?’

‘Now you’ve moved’ she said reproachfully; and then after a moment went on quietly: ‘Yes. It is an enigma. Your passion sounds so voulue. A besoin d’aimer without a besoin d’etre aime? Damn!’ He had moved again. She stopped in vexation and was about to reprove him when she caught sight of the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s time to go’ she said. ‘You must not keep her waiting.’

‘Good’ he said sharply, and rising, stripped off the pullover and donned his own well-cut coat, groping in the pocket for the keys of the car as he turned. Then, remembering, he brushed his dark hair back swiftly, impatiently, in the mirror, trying suddenly to imagine how he must look to Justine. ‘I wish I could say exactly what I mean. Do you not believe in love-contracts for those whose souls aren’t yet up to loving? A tendresse against an amour-passion, Clea? If she had parents I would have bought her from them unhesitatingly. If she had been thirteen she would have had nothing to say or feel, eh?’

‘Thirteen!’ said Clea in disgust; she shuddered and pulled his coat down at the back for him. ‘Perhaps’ he went on ironically, ‘unhappiness is a diktat for me…. What do you think?’

‘But then you would believe in passion. You don’t.’

‘I do … but….’

He gave his charming smile and made a tender hopeless gesture in the air, part resignation, part anger. ‘Ah, you are no use’ he said. ‘We are all waiting for an education of sorts.’

‘Go’ said Clea, ‘I’m sick of the subject. Kiss me first.’

The two friends embraced and she whispered: ‘Good luck’ while Nessim said between his teeth ‘I must stop this childish interrogation of you. It is absurd. I must do something decisive about her myself.’ He banged a doubled fist into the palm of his hand, and she was surprised at such unusual vehemence in one so reserved. ‘Well’ she said, with surprise opening her blue eyes, ‘this is new!’ They both laughed.

He pressed her elbow and turning ran lightly down the darkening staircase to the street. The great car responded to his feather-deftness of touch on the controls; it bounded crying its klaxon-warnings, down Saad Zaghloul and across the tramlines to roll down the slope towards the sea. He was talking to himself softly and rapidly in Arabic. In the gaunt lounge of the Cecil Hotel she would perhaps be waiting, gloved hands folded on her handbag, staring out through the windows upon which the sea crawled and sprawled, climbing and subsiding, across the screen of palms in the little municipal square which flapped and creaked like loose sails.

As he turned the corner, a procession was setting out raggedly for the upper town, its brilliant banners pelted now by a small rain mixed with spray from the harbour; everything flapped confusedly. Chanting and the noise of triangles sounded tentatively on the air. With an expression of annoyance he abandoned the car, locked it, and looked anxiously at his watch, ran the last hundred yards to the circular glass doors which would admit him upon the mouldering silence of the great lounge. He entered breathless but very much aware of himself. This siege of Justine had been going on for months now. How would it end — with victory or defeat?

He remembered Clea saying: ‘Such creatures are not human beings at all, I think. If they live, it is only inasmuch as they represent themselves in human form. But then, anyone possessed by a single ruling passion presents the same picture. For most of us, life is a hobby. But she seems like a tense and exhaustive pictorial representation of nature at its most superficial, its most powerful. She is possessed — and the possessed can neither learn nor be taught. It doesn’t make her less lovely for all that it is death-propelled; but my dear Nessim — from what angle are you to accept her?’

He did not as yet know; they were sparring still, talking in different languages. This might go on forever, he thought despairingly.

They had met more than once, formally, almost like business partners to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger. But this is the way of the city.

With a gesture which he himself thought of as characteristic he had offered her a large sum of money saying: ‘Lest an inequality of fortune may make your decision difficult, I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person — simply as a woman, Justine. This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone’s thoughts in the city, poisoning everything! Let us be free of it before deciding anything.’

But this had not answered; or rather had provoked only the insulting, uncomprehending question: ‘Is it that you really want to sleep with me? You may. Oh, I would do anything for you, Nessim.’ This disgusted and angered him. He had lost himself. There seemed no way forward along this line. Then suddenly, after a long moment of thought, he saw the truth like a flashing light. He whispered to himself with surprise: ‘But that is why I am not understood; I am not being really honest.’ He recognized that though he might have initially been swayed by his passion, he could think of no way to stake a claim on her attention, except, first, by the gift of money (ostensibly to ‘free’ her but in fact only to try and bind her to him) — and then, as his desperation increased, he realized that there was nothing to be done except to place himself entirely at her mercy. In one sense it was madness — but he could think of no other way to create in her the sense of obligation on which every other tie could be built. In this way a child may sometimes endanger itself in order to canvass a mother’s love and attention which it feels is denied to it.

‘Look’ he said in a new voice, full of new vibrations, and now he had turned very pale. ‘I want to be frank. I have no interest in real life.’ His lips trembled with his voice. ‘I am visualizing a relationship far closer in a way than anything passion could invent — a bond of a common belief.’ She wondered for