‘I don’t see why. In fact this very discovery should encourage rather than hamper you. I mean about the mutability of all truth. Each fact can have a thousand motivations, all equally valid, and each fact a thousand faces. So many truths which have little to do with fact! Your duty is to hunt them down. At each moment of time all multiplicity waits at your elbow. Why, Darley, this should thrill you and give your writing the curves of a pregnant woman.’
‘On the contrary, it has faulted me. For the moment anyway. And now that I am back here in the real Alexandria from which I drew so many of my illustrations I don’t feel the need for more writing — or at any rate writing which doesn’t fulfil the difficult criteria I see lurking behind art. You remember Pursewarden writing: “A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!”’
‘Yes.’
‘And so indeed it should. But now I am confronted once more with my models I am ashamed to have botched them up. If I start again it will be from another angle. But there is still so much I don’t know, and presumably never will, about all of you. Capodistria, for example, where does he fit in?’
‘You sound as if you
‘Mnemjian told me so.’
‘Yes. The mystery isn’t a very complicated one. He was working for Nessim and compromised himself by a serious slip. It was necessary to clear out. Conveniently it happened at a time when he was all but bankrupt financially. The insurance money was most necessary! Nessim provided the setting and I provided the corpse. You know we get quite a lot of corpses of one sort or another. Paupers. People who donate their bodies, or actually sell them in advance for a fixed sum. The medical schools need them. It wasn’t hard to obtain a private one, relatively fresh. I tried to hint at the truth to you once but you did not take my meaning. Anyway the thing’s worked smoothly. Da Capo now lives in a handsomely converted Martello tower, dividing his time between studying black magic and working on certain schemes of Nessim’s about which I know nothing. Indeed I see Nessim only rarely, and Justine not at all. Though guests are permitted by special police order they never invite anyone out to Karm. Justine telephones people from time to time for a chat, that is all. You have been privileged, Darley. They must have got you a permit. But I am relieved to see you cheerful and undesponding. You have made a step forward somewhere, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know. I worry less.’
‘But you will be happy this time, I feel it; much has changed but much has remained the same. Mountolive tells me he has recommended you for a censorship post, and that you will probably live with Pombal, until you have had a chance to look round a bit.’
‘Another mystery! I hardly know Mountolive. Why has he suddenly constituted himself my benefactor?’
‘I don’t know, possibly because of Liza.’
‘Pursewarden’s sister?’
‘They are up at the summer legation for a few weeks. I gather you will be hearing from him, from them both.’
There was a tap at the door and a servant entered to tidy the flat; Balthazar propped himself up and issued his orders. I stood up to take my leave.
‘There is only one problem’ he said ‘which occupies me. Shall I leave my hair as it is? I look about two hundred and seventy when it isn’t dyed. But I think on the whole it would be better to leave it to symbolize my return from the dead with a vanity chastened by experience, eh? Yes, I shall leave it. I think I shall definitely leave it.’
‘Toss a coin.’
‘Perhaps I will. This evening I must get up for a couple of hours and practise walking about; extraordinary how weak one feels simply from lack of practice. After a fortnight in bed one loses the power of one’s legs. And I mustn’t fall down tomorrow or the people will think I am drunk again and that would never do. As for you, you must find Clea.’
‘I’ll go round to the studio and see if she is working.’
‘I’m glad you are back.’
‘In a strange way so am I.’
And in the desultory brilliant life of the open street it was hard not to feel like an ancient inhabitant of the city, returning from the other side of the grave to visit it. Where would I find Clea?
* * * * *
V
She was not at the flat, though her letter-box was empty, which suggested that she had already collected her mail and gone out to read it over a
But we met by chance, not design. I had gone out to buy some stationery, and had taken a short cut through the little square called Bab El Fedan. My heart heeled half-seas over for a moment, for she was sitting where once (that first day) Melissa had been sitting, gazing at a coffee cup with a wry reflective air of amusement, with her hands supporting her chin. The exact station in place and time where I had once found Melissa, and with such difficulty mustered enough courage at last to enter the place and speak to her. It gave me a strange sense of unreality to repeat this forgotten action at such a great remove of time, like unlocking a door which had remained closed and bolted for a generation. Yet it was in truth Clea and not Melissa, and her blonde head was bent with an air of childish concentration over her coffee cup. She was in the act of shaking the dregs three times and emptying them into the saucer to study them as they dried into the contours from which fortune-tellers ‘scry’ — a familiar gesture.
‘So you haven’t changed. Still telling fortunes.’
‘Darley.’ She sprang up with a cry of pleasure and we embraced warmly. It was with a queer interior shock, almost like a new recognition, that I felt her warm laughing mouth on mine, her hands upon my shoulders. As though somewhere a window had been smashed, and the fresh air allowed to pour into a long-sealed room. We stood thus embracing and smiling for a moment. ‘You startled me! I was just coming on to the flat to find you.’
‘You’ve had me chasing my tail all day.’
‘I had work to do. But Darley, how you’ve changed! You don’t stoop any more. And your spectacles….’
‘I broke them by accident ages ago, and then found I didn’t really need them.’
‘I’m delighted for you. Bravo! Tell me, do you notice my wrinkles? I’m getting some, I fear. Have I changed very much, would you say?’
She was more beautiful than I could remember her to have been, slimmer, and with a subtle range of new gestures and expressions suggesting a new and troubling maturity.
‘You’ve grown a new laugh.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes. It’s deeper and more melodious. But I must not flatter you! A nightingale’s laugh — if they do laugh.’
‘Don’t make me self-conscious because I so much want to laugh with you. You’ll turn it into a croak.’
‘Clea, why didn’t you come and meet me?’
She wrinkled up her nose for a moment, and putting her hand on my arm, bent her head once more to the coffee grounds which were drying fast into little whorls and curves like sand-dunes. ‘Light me a cigarette’ she said pleadingly.