The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

might to see friends in convict garb; out of shame and sympathy I feel like turning my face away. Oh, Darley, it isn’t very sensible, and I know I am doing them a grotesque injustice; possibly it is just selfishness. So I force myself to serve them teas at their various canteens, roll bandages, arrange concerts. But inside myself I shrink smaller every day. Yet I always believed that a love of human beings would flower more strongly out of a common misfortune. It isn’t true. And now I am afraid that you too will begin to like me the less for these absurdities of thought, these revulsions of feeling. To be here, just the two of us, sitting by candlelight is almost a miracle in such a world. You can’t blame me for trying to hoard and protect it against the intrusive world outside, can you? Curiously, what I hate most about it all is the sentimentality which spells violence in the end!’

I understood what she meant, and what she feared; and yet from the depths of my own inner selfishness I was glad of these external pressures, for they circumscribed our world perfectly, permed us up more closely together, isolated us! In the old world I would have had to share Clea with a host of other friends and admirers. Not now.

Curiously, too, some of these external factors around us, involving us in its death-struggles — gave our newest passion a fulfilment not based on desperation yet nevertheless built just as certainly upon the sense of impermanence. It was of the same order, though different in kind to the dull orgiastic rut of the various armies; it was quite impossible to repudiate the truth, namely, that death (not even at hand, but in the air) sharpens kisses, adds unbearable poignance to every smile and handclasp. Even though I was no soldier the dark question mark hovered over our thoughts, for the real issues of the heart were influenced by something of which we were all, however reluctantly, part: a whole world. If the war did not mean a way of dying, it meant a way of ageing, of tasting the true staleness in human things, and of learning to confront change bravely. No-one could tell what lay beyond the closed chapter of every kiss. In those long quiet evenings before the bombardment began we would sit upon that small square of carpet by the light of candles, debating these matters, punctuating our silences with embraces which were the only inadequate answer we could offer to the human situation. Nor, lying in each other’s arms during those long nights of fitful sleep broken by the sirens, did we ever (as if by a silent convention) speak of love. To have uttered the word might acknowledge a more rare yet less perfect variety of the state which now bewitched us, perfected in us this quite unpremeditated relationship. Somewhere in Moeurs there is a passionate denunciation of the word. I cannot remember into whose mouth the speech has been put — perhaps Justine’s. ‘It may be defined as a cancerous growth of unknown origin which may take up its site anywhere without the subject knowing or wishing it. How often have you tried to love the “right” person in vain, even when your heart knows it has found him after so much seeking? No, an eyelash, a perfume, a haunting walk, a strawberry on the neck, the smell of almonds on the breath — these are the accomplices the spirit seeks out to plan your overthrow.’

Thinking of such passages of savage insight — and they are many in that strange book — I would turn to the sleeping Clea and study her quiet profile in order to … to ingest her, drink the whole of her up without spilling a drop, mingle my very heart-beats with hers. ‘However near we would wish to be, so far exactly do we remain from each other’ wrote Arnauti. It seemed to be no longer true of our condition. Or was I simply deluding myself once more, refracting truth by the disorders inherent in my own vision? Strangely enough I neither knew nor cared now; I had stopped rummaging through my own mind, had learned to take her like a clear draught of spring water.

‘Have you been watching me asleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unfair! But what thinking?’

‘Many things.’

‘Unfair to watch a sleeping woman, off her guard.’

‘Your eyes have changed colour again. Smoke.”

(A mouth whose paint blurred slightly under kisses. The two small commas, which were almost cusps, almost ready to turn into dimples when the lazy smiles broke surface. She stretches and places her arms behind her head, pushing back the helmet of fair hair which captures the sheen of the candle-light. In the past she had not possessed this authority over her own beauty. New gestures, new tendrils had grown, languorous yet adept to express this new maturity. A limpid sensuality which was now undivided by hesitations, self-questionings. A transformation of the old ‘silly goose’ into this fine, indeed impressive, personage, quite at one with her own body and mind. How had this come about?)

I: ‘That commonplace book of Pursewarden’s. How the devil did you come by it? I took it to the office today.’

She: ‘Liza. I asked her for something to remember him by. Absurd. As if one could forget the brute! He’s everywhere. Did the notes startle you?’

I: ‘Yes. It was as if he had appeared at my elbow. The first thing I fell upon was a description of my new chief, Maskelyne by name. It seems Pursewarden worked with him once. Shall I read it to you?’

She: ‘I know it.’

(‘Like most of my compatriots he had a large hand-illuminated sign hanging up on the front of his mind reading ON NO ACCOUNT DISTURB. At some time in the distant past he had been set going like a quartz clock. He will run his course unfaltering as a metronome. Do not let the pipe alarm you. It is intended to give a judicial air. White man smoke puff puff, white man ponder puff puff. In fact white man is deeply deeply asleep under the badges of office, the pipe, the nose, the freshly starched handkerchief sticking out of his sleeve.’)

She: ‘Did you read it to Maskelyne?’

I: ‘Naturally not.’

She: ‘There are wounding things about all of us in it; perhaps that is why I took a fancy to it! I could hear the brute’s voice as he uttered them. You know, my dear, I think I am the only person to have loved old Pursewarden for himself while he was alive. I got his wavelength. I loved him for himself, I say, because strictly he had no self. Of course he could be tiresome, difficult, cruel — like everyone else. But he exemplified something—a grasp on something. That is why his work will live and go on giving off light, so to speak. Light me a cigarette. He had cut a foothold in the cliff a bit higher than I could dare to go — the point where one looks at the top because one is afraid to look down! You tell me that Justine also says something like this. I suppose she got the same thing in a way — but I suspect her of being merely grateful to him, like an animal whose master pulls a thorn from its paw. His intuition was very feminine and much sharper than hers — and you know that women instinctively like a man with plenty of female in him; there‚ they suspect, is the only sort of lover who can sufficiently identify himself with them to … deliver them of being just women, catalysts, strops, oil-stones. Most of us have to be content to play the role of machine a plaisir! ’

I: ‘Why do you laugh, suddenly like that?’

She: ‘I was remembering making a fool of myself with Pursewarden. I suppose I should feel ashamed of it! You will see what he says about me in the notebook. He calls me “a juicy Hanoverian goose, the only truly kallipygous girl in the city”! I cannot think what possessed me, except that I was so worried about my painting. It had dried up on me. I couldn’t get any further somehow, canvas gave me a headache. I finally decided that the question of my own blasted virginity was the root cause of the business. You know it is a terrible business to be a virgin — it is like not having one’s Matric or Bac. You long to be delivered from it yet … at the same time this valuable experience should be with someone whom you care for, otherwise it will be without value to your inside self. Well, there I was, stuck. So with one of those characteristic strokes of fancy which in the past confirmed for everyone my stupidity I decided — guess what? To offer myself grimly to the only artist I knew I could trust, to put me out of my misery. Pursewarden, I thought, might have an understanding of my state and some consideration for my feelings. I’m amused to remember that I dressed myself up in a very heavy tweed costume and flat shoes, and wore dark glasses. I was timid, you see, as well as desperate. I walked up and down the corridor of the hotel outside his room for ages in despair and apprehension, my dark glasses firmly on my nose. He was inside. I could hear him whistling as he always did when he was painting a water colour; a maddening tuneless whistle! At last I burst in on him like a fireman into a burning building, startling him, and said with trembling lips: “I have come to ask you to depuceler me, please, because I cannot get any further with my work unless you do.” I said it in French. It would have sounded dirty in English. He was startled. All sorts of conflicting emotions flitted across his face for a second. And then, as I burst into tears and sat down suddenly on a chair he threw his head back and roared with laughter. He laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks while I sat there in my dark glasses sniffing. Finally he collapsed exhausted on his bed and lay staring at the ceiling. Then he got up, put his