The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

cuckoos from a clock. Curiously enough there was nothing feigned in this sycophancy. It was in fact something like an administrative love-affair, for even when Maskelyne was not present Telford spoke of him with the greatest possible reverence, the profoundest hero-worship — compounded equally of social admiration for his rank and deep respect for his character and judgement. Out of curiosity I tried to see Maskelyne through my colleague’s eyes but failed to discern more than a rather bleak and well-bred soldier of narrow capacities and a clipped world-weary public school accent. Yet … ‘The Brig is a real cast-iron gentleman’ Telford would say with an emotion so great that it almost brought tears to his eyes. ‘He’s as straight as string, is the old Brig. Never stoop to do anything beneath him.’ It was perhaps true, yet it did not make our Chief less unremarkable in my eyes.

Telford had several little menial duties which he himself had elected to perform for his hero — for example, to buy the week-old Daily Telegraph and place it on the great man’s desk each morning. He adopted a curious finicky walk as he crossed the polished floor of Maskelyne’s empty office (for we arrived early at work): almost as if he were afraid of leaving footprints behind him. He positively stole across to the desk. And the tenderness with which he folded the paper and ran his fingers down the creases before laying it reverently on the green blotter reminded me of a woman handling a husband’s newly starched and ironed shirt.

Nor was the Brigadier himself unwilling to accept the burden of this guileless admiration. I imagine few men could resist it. At first I was puzzled by the fact that once or twice a week he would visit us, clearly with no special matter in mind, and would take a slow turn up and down between our desks, occasionally uttering an informal monochrome pleasantry — indicating the recipient of it by pointing the stem of his pipe at him lightly, almost shyly. Yet throughout these visitations his swarthy greyhound’s face, with its small crowsfeet under the eyes, never altered its expression, his voice never lost its studied inflections. At first, as I say, these appearances somewhat puzzled me, for Maskelyne was anything but a convivial soul and could seldom talk of anything but the work in hand. Then one day I detected, in the slow elaborate figure he traced between our desks, the traces of an unconscious coquetry — I was reminded of the way a peacock spreads its great studded fan of eyes before the female, or of the way a mannequin wheels in an arabesque designed to show off the clothes she is wearing. Maskelyne had in fact simply come to be admired, to spread out the riches of his character and breeding before Telford. Was it possible that this easy conquest provided him with some inner assurance he lacked? It would be hard to say. Yet he was inwardly basking in his colleague’s wide-eyed admiration. I am sure it was quite unconscious — this gesture of a lonely man towards the only whole-hearted admirer he had as yet won from the world. From his own side, however, he could only reciprocate with the condescension bred by his education. Secretly he held Telford in contempt for not being a gentleman. ‘Poor Telford’ he would be heard to sigh when out of the other’s hearing. ‘Poor Telford.’ The commiserating fall of the voice suggested pity for someone who was worthy but hopelessly uninspired.

These, then, were my office familiars during the whole of that first wearing summer, and their companionship offered me no problem. The work left me easy and untroubled in mind. My ranking was a humble one and carried with it no social obligations whatsoever. For the rest we did not frequent each other outside the office. Telford lived somewhere near Rushdi in a small suburban villa, outside the centre of the town, while Maskelyne seldom appeared to stir from the gaunt bedroom on the top floor of the Cecil. Once free from the office, therefore, I felt able to throw it off completely and once more resume the life of the town, or what was left of it.

With Clea also the new relationship offered no problems, perhaps because deliberately we avoided defining it too sharply, and allowed it to follow the curves of its own nature, to fulfil its own design. I did not, for example, always stay at her flat — for sometimes when she was working on a picture she would plead for a few days of complete solitude and seclusion in order to come to grips with her subject, and these intermittent intervals, sometimes of a week or more, sharpened and refreshed affection without harming it. Sometimes, however, after such a compact we would stumble upon each other by accident and out of weakness resume the suspended relationship before the promised three days or a week was up! It wasn’t easy.

Sometimes at evening I might come upon her sitting absently alone on the little painted wooden terrace of the Cafe Baudrot, gazing into space. Her sketching blocks lay before her, unopened. Sitting there as still as a coney, she had forgotten to remove from her lips the tiny moustache of cream from her cafe viennois! At such a moment it needed all my self-possession not to vault the wooden balustrade and put my arms round her, so vividly did this touching detail seem to light up the memory of her; so childish and serene did she look. The loyal and ardent image of Clea the lover rose up before my eyes and all at once separation seemed unendurable! Conversely I might suddenly (sitting on a bench in a public garden, reading) feel cool hands pressed over my eyes and turn suddenly to embrace her and inhale once more the fragrance of her body through her crisp summer frock. At other times, and very often at moments when I was actually thinking of her, she would walk miraculously into the flat saying: ‘I felt you calling me to come’ or else ‘It suddenly came over me to need you very much.’ So these encounters had a breathless sharp sweetness, unexpectedly re-igniting our ardour. It was as if we had been separated for years instead of days.

This self-possession in the matter of planned absences from each other struck a spark of admiration from Pombal, who could no more achieve the same measure in his relations with Fosca than climb to the moon. He appeared to wake in the morning with her name on his lips. His first act was to telephone her anxiously to find out if she were well — as if her absence had exposed her to terrible unknown dangers. His official day with its various duties was a torment. He positively galloped home to lunch in order to see her again. In all justice I must say that his attachment was fully reciprocated for all that their relationship was like that of two elderly pensioners in its purity. If he were kept late at an official dinner she would work herself into a fever of apprehension. (‘No, it is not his fidelity that worries me, it is his safety. He drives so carelessly, as you know.’) Fortunately during this period the nightly bombardment of the harbour acted upon social activities almost like a curfew, so that it was possible to spend almost every evening together, playing chess or cards, or reading aloud. Fosca I found to be a thoughtful, almost intense young woman, a little lacking in humour but devoid of the priggishness which I had been inclined to suspect from Pombal’s own description of her when first we met. She had a keen and mobile face whose premature wrinkles suggested that perhaps she had been marked by her experiences as a refugee. She never laughed aloud, and her smile had a touch of reflective sadness in it. But she was wise, and always had a spirited and thoughtful answer ready — indeed the quality of esprit which the French so rightly prize in a woman. The fact that she was nearing the term of her pregnancy only seemed to make Pombal more attentive and adoring — indeed he behaved with something like complacence about the child. Or was he simply trying to suggest that it was his own: as a show of face to a world which might think that he was ‘unmanned’? I could not decide. In the summer afternoons he would float about the harbour in his cutter while Fosca sat in the stern trailing one white hand in the sea. Sometimes she sang for him in a small true voice like a bird’s. This transported him, and he wore the look of a good bourgeois papa de famille as he beat time with his finger. At night they sat out the bombardment for preference over a chess board — a somewhat singular choice; but as the infernal racket of gunfire gave him nervous headaches he had skilfully constructed ear plugs for them both by cutting the filter-tips from cigarettes. So they were able to sit, concentrating in silence!

But once or twice this peaceful harmony was overshadowed by outside events which provoked doubts and misgivings understandable enough in a relationship which was so nebulous — I mean so much discussed and anatomized and not acted out. One day I found him padding about in a dressing-gown and slippers looking suspiciously distraught, even a little red-eyed. ‘Ah, Darley!’ he sighed gustily, falling into his gout chair and catching his beard in his fingers as if he were about to dismantle it completely. ‘We will never understand them, never. Women! What bad luck. Perhaps I am just stupid. Fosca! Her husband!’

‘He has been killed?’ I asked.

Pombal shook his head sadly. ‘No. Taken prisoner and sent to Germany.’

‘Well why the fuss?’

‘I am ashamed, that is all. I did not fully realize until this news came, neither did she, that we were really expecting him to be killed. Unconsciously, of course. Now she is full of self-disgust. But the whole plan for our lives was unconsciously built upon the notion of him surrendering his own. It is monstrous. His death would have freed us; but now the whole problem is deferred perhaps for years, perhaps forever….’

He looked quite distracted and fanned himself with a newspaper, muttering under his breath. ‘Things take the strangest turns’ he went on at last. ‘For if Fosca is too honourable to confess the truth to him while he is at the front, she would equally never do it to a poor prisoner. I left her in tears. Everything is put off till the end of the war.’

He ground his back teeth together and sat staring at me. It was difficult to know what one could say by way