The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

He blurted this out all in one breath, leaning on a silver-knobbed walking-stick to which he was clearly as unaccustomed. His violet eye roved somewhat disdainfully round our somewhat primitive cottage, and he refused a chair, doubtless because he did not wish to crease those formidable trousers. ‘You have a hard style of life here, eh? Not much luxe, Darley.’ Then he sighed and added, ‘But now you will be coming to us again.’ He made a vague gesture with the stick intended to symbolize the hospitality we should once more enjoy from the city. ‘Myself I cannot stay. I am on my way back. I did this purely as a favour to Hosnani.’ He spoke of Nessim with a sort of pearly grandeur, as if he were now his equal socially; then he caught sight of my smile and had the grace to giggle once before becoming serious again. ‘There is no time, anyway’ he said, dusting his sleeves.

This had the merit of being true, for the Smyrna boat stays only long enough to unload mail and occasional merchandise — a few cases of macaroni, some copper sulphate, a pump. The wants of the islanders are few. Together we walked back towards the village, across the olive-groves, talking as we went. Mnemjian still trudged with that slow turtle-walk. But I was glad, for it enabled me to ask him a few questions about the city, and from his answers to gain some inkling of what I was to find there in the matter of changed dispositions, unknown factors.

‘There are many changes since the Hosnani intrigue in Palestine? The collapse? The Egyptians are trying to sequestrate. They have taken much away. Yes, they are poor now, and still in trouble. She is still under house- detention at Karm Abu Girg. Nobody has seen her for an age. He works by special permission as an ambulance driver in the docks, twice a week. Very dangerous. And there was a bad air-raid; he lost one eye and a finger.’

‘Nessim?’ I was startled. The little man nodded self-importantly. This new, this unforeseen image of my friend struck me like a bullet. ‘Good God’ I said, and the barber nodded as if to approve the appropriateness of the oath. ‘It was bad’ he said. ‘It is the war, Darley.’ Then suddenly a happier thought came into his mind and he smiled the infant smile once more which reflected only the iron material values of the Levant. Taking my arm he continued: ‘But the war is also good business. My shops are cutting the armies’ hair day and night. Three saloons, twelve assistants! You will see, it is superb. And Pombal says, as a joke, “Now you are shaving the dead while they are still alive.”’ He doubled up with soundless refined laughter.

‘Is Pombal back there?’

‘Of course. He is a high man of the Free French now. He has conferences with Sir Mountolive. He is also still there. Many others too have remained from your time, Darley, you will see.’

Mnemjian seemed delighted to have been able to astonish me so easily. Then he said something which made my mind do a double somersault. I stood still and asked him to repeat it, thinking that I had misheard him. ‘I have just visited Capodistria.’ I stared at him. Capodistria! ‘But he died!’ I exclaimed, though I had not forgotten Balthazar’s enigmatic phrase about the false teeth.

The barber leaned far back, as if on a rocking-horse, and tittered profusely. It was a very good joke this time and lasted him a full minute. Then at last, still sighing luxuriously at the memory of it, he slowly took from his breast-pocket a postcard such as one buys upon any Mediterranean seafront and held it out to me, saying: ‘Then who is this?’

It was a murky enough photograph with the heavy developing-marks which are a feature of hasty street- photography. It depicted two figures walking along a seafront. One was Mnemjian. The other … I stared at it in growing recognition….

Capodistria was clad in tubular trousers of an Edwardian style and very pointed black shoes. With this he wore a long academician’s topcoat with a fur collar and cuffs. Finally, and quite fantastically, he was sporting a chapeau melon which made him look rather like a tall rat in some animal cartoon. He had grown a thin Rilkean moustache which drooped a little at the corner of his mouth. A long cigarette-holder was between his teeth. It was unmistakably Capodistria. ‘What on earth …’ I began, but the smiling Mnemjian shut one eye and laid a finger across his lips. ‘Always’ he said ‘there are mysteries’; and in the act of guarding them he swelled up toad-like, staring into my eyes with a mischievous content. He would perhaps have deigned to explain but at that minute a ship’s siren rang out from the direction of the village. He was flustered. ‘Quickly’; he began his trudging walk. ‘I mustn’t forget to give you the letter from Hosnani.’ It was carried in his breast pocket and he fished it out at last. ‘And now good-bye’ he said. ‘All is arranged. We will meet again.’

I shook his hand and stood looking after him for a moment, surprised and undecided. Then I turned back to the edge of the olive grove and sat down on a rock to read the letter from Nessim. It was brief and contained the details of the travel arrangements he had made for us. A little craft would be coming to take us off the island. He gave approximate times and instructions as to where we should wait for it. All this was clearly set out. Then, as a postcript Nessim added in his tall hand: ‘It will be good to meet again, without reserves. I gather that Balthazar has recounted all our misadventures. You won’t exact an unduly heavy repentance from people who care for you so much? I hope not. Let the past remain a closed book for us all.’

That was how it fell out.

For those last few days the island regaled us nobly with the best of its weather and those austere Cycladean simplicities which were like a fond embrace — for which I knew I should be longing when once more the miasma of Egypt had closed over my head.

On the evening of departure the whole village turned out to give us the promised farewell dinner of lamb on the spit and gold rezina wine. They spread the tables and chairs down the whole length of the small main street and each family brought its own offerings to the feast. Even those two proud dignitaries were there — mayor and priest — each seated at one end of the long table. It was cold to sit in the lamplight thus, pretending that it was really a summer evening, but even the frail spring moon collaborated, rising blindly out of the sea to shine upon the white tablecloths, polish the glasses of wine. The old burnished faces, warmed by drink, glowed like copperware. Ancient smiles, archaic forms of address, traditional pleasantries, courtesies of the old world which was already fading, receding from us. The old sea-captains of the sponge-fleets sucking their bounty of wine from blue enamel cans: their warm embraces smelt like wrinkled crab-apples, their great moustaches tanned by tobacco curled towards their ears.

At first I had been touched, thinking all this ceremony was for me; I was not the less so to find that it was for my country. To be English when Greece had fallen was to be a target for the affection and gratitude of every Greek, and the humble peasants of this hamlet felt it no less keenly than Greeks everywhere. The shower of toasts and pledges echoed on the night, and all the speeches flew like kites, in the high style of Greek, orotund and sonorous. They seemed to have the cadences of immortal poetry — the poetry of a desperate hour; but of course they were only words, the wretched windy words which war so easily breeds and which the rhetoricians of peace would soon wear out of use.

But tonight the war lit them up like tapers, the old men, giving them a burning grandeur. Only the young men were not there to silence and shame them with their hangdog looks — for they had gone to Albania to die among the snows. The women spoke shrilly, in voices made coarsely thrilling with unshed tears, and among the bursts of laughter and song fell their sudden silences — like so many open graves.

It had come so softly towards us over the waters, this war; gradually, as clouds which quietly fill in a horizon from end to end. But as yet it had not broken. Only the rumour of it gripped the heart with conflicting hopes and fears. At first it had seemed to portend the end of the so-called civilized world, but this hope soon proved vain. No, it was to be as always simply the end of kindness and safety and moderate ways; the end of the artist’s hopes, of nonchalance, of joy. Apart from this everything else about the human condition would be confirmed and emphasized; perhaps even a certain truthfulness had already begun to emerge from behind appearances, for death heightens every tension and permits us fewer of the half-truths by which we normally live.

This was all we had known of it, to date, this unknown dragon whose claws had already struck elsewhere. All? Yes, to be sure, once or twice the upper sky had swollen with the slur of invisible bombers, but their sounds could not drown the buzzing, nearer at hand, of the island bees: for each household owned a few whitewashed hives. What else? Once (this seemed more real) a submarine poked up a periscope in the bay and surveyed the coastline for minutes on end. Did it see us bathing on the point? We waved. But a periscope has no arms with which to wave back. Perhaps on the beaches to the north it had discovered something more rare — an old bull seal dozing in the sun like a Moslem on his prayer-mat. But this again could have had little to do with war.

Yet the whole business became a little more real when the little caique which Nessim had sent fussed into the dusk-filled harbour that night, manned by three sullen-looking sailors armed with automatics. They were not Greek, though they spoke the tongue with waspish authority. They had tales to tell of