The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

‘Yes. Keats is writing some absurd book ——’

‘But I just ran into him. He’s back from the desert for the night.’

I struggled to my feet. It seemed to me imperative that I should find him and discover what I could about his project. ‘He spoke’ said Clea ‘about going round to Pombal’s for a bath. I expect you’ll find him there if you hurry.’

Keats! I thought to myself as I hurried down the street towards the flat; he was also to play his part in this shadowy representation, this tableau of the artist’s life. For it is always a Keats that is chosen to interpret, to drag his trail of slime over the pitiful muddled life of which the artist, with such pain, recaptures these strange solitary jewels of self-enlightenment. After those letters it seemed to me more than ever necessary that people like Keats if possible be kept away from interfering in matters beyond their normal concerns. As a journalist with a romantic story (suicide is the most romantic act for an artist) he doubtless felt himself to be in the presence of what he, in the old days, would have called ‘A stunner. A Story in a Million’. I thought that I knew my Keats — but of course once more I had completely forgotten to take into account the operations of Time, for Keats had changed as we all had, and my meeting with him turned out to be as unexpected as everything else about the city.

I had mislaid my key and had to ring for Hamid to open the door for me. Yes, he said, Mr. Keats was there, in the bath. I traversed the corridor and tapped at the door behind which came the sound of rushing water and a cheerful whistling. ‘By God, Darley, how splendid’ he shouted in answer to my call. ‘Come in while I dry. I heard you were back.’

Under the shower stood a Greek god! I was so surprised at the transformation that I sat down abruptly on the lavatory and studied this … apparition. Keats was burnt almost black, and his hair had bleached white. Though slimmer, he looked in first-class physical condition. The brown skin and ashen hair had made his twinkling eyes bluer than ever. He bore absolutely no resemblance to my memories of him! ‘I just sneaked off for the night’ he said, speaking in a new rapid and confident voice. ‘I’m developing one of those blasted desert sores on my elbow, so I got a chit and here I am. I don’t know what the hell causes them, nobody does; perhaps all the tinned muck we eat up there in the desert! But two days in Alex and an injection and presto! The bloody thing clears up again! I say, Darley, what fun to meet again. There’s so much to tell you. This war!’ He was bubbling over with high spirits. ‘God, this water is a treat. I’ve been revelling.’

‘You look in tremendous shape.’

‘I am. I am.’ He smacked himself exuberantly on the buttocks ‘Golly though, it is good to come into Alex. Contrasts make you appreciate things so much better. Those tanks get so hot you feel like frying whitebait. Reach my drink, there’s a good chap.’ On the floor stood a tall glass of whisky and soda with an ice cube in it. He shook the glass, holding it to his ear like a child. ‘Listen to the ice tinkling’ he cried in ecstasy. ‘Music to the soul, the tinkle of ice.’ He raised his glass, wrinkled up his nose at me and drank my health. ‘You look in quite good shape, too’ he said, and his blue eyes twinkled with a new mischievous light. ‘Now for some clothes and then … my dear chap, I’m rich. I’ll give you a slap-up dinner at the Petit Coin. No refusals, I’ll not be baulked. I particularly wanted to see you and talk to you. I have news.’

He positively skipped into the bedroom to dress and I sat on Pombal’s bed to keep him company while he did so. His high spirits were quite infectious. He seemed hardly able to keep still. A thousand thoughts and ideas bubbled up inside him which he wanted to express simultaneously. He capered down the stairs into the street like a schoolboy, taking the last flight at a single bound. I thought he would break into a dance along Rue Fuad. ‘But seriously’ he said, squeezing my elbow so hard that it hurt. ‘Seriously, life is wonderful’ and as if to illustrate his seriousness he burst into ringing laughter. ‘When I think how we used to brood and worry.’ Apparently he included me in this new euphoric outlook on life. ‘How slowly we took everything, I feel ashamed to remember it!’

At the Petit Coin we secured a corner table after an amiable altercation with a naval lieutenant, and he at once took hold of Menotti and commanded champagne to be brought. Where the devil had he got this new laughing authoritative manner which instantly commanded sympathetic respect without giving offence?

‘The desert!’ he said, as if in answer to my unspoken question. ‘The desert, Darley, old boy. That is something to be seen.’ From a capacious pocket he produced a copy of the Pickwick Papers. ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘I mustn’t forget to get this copy replaced. Or the crew will bloody well fry me.’ It was a sodden, dog-eared little book with a bullet hole in the cover, smeared with oil. ‘It’s our only library, and some bastard must have wiped himself on the middle third. I’ve sworn to replace it. Actually there’s a copy at the flat. I don’t suppose Pombal would mind my pinching it. It’s absurd. When there isn’t any action we lie about reading it aloud to one another, under the stars! Absurd, my dear chap, but then everything is more absurd. More and more absurd every day.’

‘You sound so happy’ I said, not without a certain envy.

‘Yes’ he said in a smaller voice, and suddenly, for the first time, became relatively serious. ‘I am. Darley, let me make you a confidence. Promise not to groan.’

‘I promise.’

He leaned forward and said in a whisper, his eyes twinkling, ‘I’ve become a writer at last!’ Then suddenly he gave his ringing laugh. ‘You promised not to groan’ he said.

‘I didn’t groan.’

‘Well, you looked groany and supercilious. The proper response would have been to shout “Hurrah!”’

‘Don’t shout so loud or they’ll ask us to leave.’

‘Sorry. It came over me.’

He drank a large bumper of champagne with the air of someone toasting himself and leaned back in his chair, gazing at me quizzically with the same mischievous sparkle in his blue eyes.

‘What have you written?’ I asked.

‘Nothing’ he said, smiling. ‘Not a word as yet. It’s all up here.’ He pointed a brown finger at his temple. ‘But now at least I know it is. Somehow whether I do or don’t actually write isn’t important — it isn’t, if you like, the whole point about becoming a writer at all, as I used to think.’

In the street outside a barrel organ began playing with its sad hollow iteration. It was a very ancient English barrel organ which old blind Arif had found on a scrap heap and had fixed up in a somewhat approximate manner. Whole notes misfired and several chords were hopelessly out of tune.

‘Listen’ said Keats, with deep emotion, ‘just listen to old Arif.’ He was in that delicious state of inspiration which only comes when champagne supervenes upon a state of fatigue — a melancholy tipsiness which is wholly inspiriting. ‘Gosh!’ he went on in rapture, and began to sing in a very soft husky whisper, marking time with his finger, ‘Taisez-vous, petit babouin’. Then he gave a great sigh of repletion, and chose himself a cigar from Menotti’s great case of specimens, sauntering back to the table where he once more sat before me, smiling rapturously. ‘This war’ he said at last, ‘I really must tell you…. It is quite different to what I imagined it must be like.’

Under his champagne-bedizened tipsiness he had become relatively grave all at once. He said: ‘Nobody seeing it for the first time could help crying out with the whole of his rational mind in protest at it: crying out “It must stop!” My dear chap, to see the ethics of man at his norm you must see a battlefield. The general idea may be summed up in the expressive phrase: “If you can’t eat it or **** it, then **** on it.” Two thousand years of civilization! It peels off in a flash. Scratch with your little finger and you reach the woad or the ritual war paint under the varnish! Just like that!’ He scratched the air between us languidly with his expensive cigar. ‘And yet — you know what? The most unaccountable and baffling thing. It has made a man of me, as the saying goes. More, a writer! My soul is quite clear. I suppose you could regard me as permanently disfigured! I have begun it at last, that bloody joyful book of mine. Chapter by chapter it is forming in my old journalist’s noodle — no, not a journalist’s any more, a writer’s.’ He laughed again as if at the preposterous notion. ‘Darley, when I look around that … battlefield at night, I stand in an ecstasy of shame, revelling at the coloured lights, the flares wallpapering the sky, and I say: “All this had to be brought about so that poor Johnny Keats could grow into a man.” That’s what. It is a complete enigma to me, yet I am absolutely certain of it. No other way would have helped me because I was too damned stupid, do you see?’ He was silent for a while and somewhat distrait, drawing on his cigar. It was as if he were going over this last piece of conversation in his mind to consider its validity, word by word, as one tests a piece of machinery. Then he added, but with care and caution, and a certain expression of bemused concentration, like a man handling unfamiliar terms: ‘The man of action and the man of reflection are really the same man, operating on two different fields. But to the