business partners, in the lounge of the Cecil Hotel to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger. This is the way of the city. We are mental people, and wordly, and have always made a clear distinction between the passional life and the life of the family. These distinctions are part of the whole complex of Mediterranean life, ancient and touchingly prosaic.
‘And lest an inequality of fortune should make your decision difficult’ said Nessim, flushing and lowering his head, ‘I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person — simply as a woman, Justine. This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone’s thoughts in the city, poisoning everything! Let us be free of it before deciding anything.’ He passed across the table a slim green cheque with the words ‘Three Thousand Pounds’ written on it. She stared at it for a long time with surprise but did not touch it. ‘It has not offended you’ he said hastily at last, stammering in his anxiety. ‘No’ she said. ‘It is like everything you do. Only what can I do about not loving you?’
‘You must, of course, never try to.’
‘Then what sort of life could we make?’
Nessim looked at her with hot shy eyes and then lowered his glance to the table, as if under a cruel rebuke. ‘Tell me’ she said after a silence. ‘Please tell me. I cannot use your fortune and your position and give you nothing in exchange, Nessim.’
‘If you would care to try’ he said gently, ‘we need not delude each other. Life isn’t very long. One owes it to oneself to try and find a means to happiness.’
‘Is it that you want to sleep with me?’ asked Justine suddenly: disgusted yet touched beyond measure by his tone. ‘You may. Yes. Oh! I would do anything for you, Nessim — anything.’
But he flinched and said: ‘I am speaking about an understanding in which friendship and knowledge can take the place of love until and if it comes as I hope. Of course I shall sleep with you — myself a lover, and you a friend. Who knows? In a year perhaps. All Alexandrian marriages are business ventures after all. My God, Justine, what a fool you are. Can’t you see that we might possibly need each other without ever fully realizing it? It’s worth trying. Everything may stand in the way. But I can’t get over the thought that in the whole city the woman I most
‘You should have your doctor examine you, my dear. To take on a woman who has said that she can never love you — what sort of temerity is that? Ah, no!’
He did not say anything at all, recognizing that her words were really not addressed to him: they were part of a long internal argument with herself. How beautiful her disaffected face looked — chloroformed by its own simplicity: she simply could not believe that someone might value her for herself— if she had a self. He was indeed, he thought, like a gambler putting everything on the turn of a wheel. She was standing now upon the very edge of a decision, like a sleepwalker on a cliff: should she awake before she jumped, or let the dream continue? Being a woman, she still felt it necessary to pose conditions; to withdraw herself further into secrecy as this man encroached upon it with his steady beguiling gentleness. ‘Nessim’ she said, ‘wake up.’ And she shook him gently.
‘I am awake’ he said quietly.
Outside in the square with its palms nibbled by the sea-wind, a light rain was falling. It was the tenth Zu-el- Higga, the first day of Courban Bairam, and fragments of the great procession were assembling in their coloured robes, holding the great silk banners and censers, insignia of the religion they honoured, and chanting passages from the litany: litany of the forgotten Nubian race which every year makes its great resurrection at the Mosque of Nebi Daniel. The crowd was brilliant, spotted with primary colours. The air rippled with tambourines, while here and there in the lags of silence which fell over the shouts and chanting, there came the sudden jabbering of the long drums as their hide was slowly stiffened at the hissing braziers. Horses moaned and the gonfalons bellied like sails in the rain-starred afternoon. A cart filled with the prostitutes of the Arab town in coloured robes went by with shrill screams and shouts, and the singing of painted young men to the gnash of cymbals and scribbling of mandolines: the whole as gorgeous as a tropical animal.
‘Nessim’ she said foolishly. ‘On one sole condition — that we sleep together absolutely tonight.’ His features drew tight against his skull and he set his teeth tightly as he said angrily: ‘You should have some intelligence to go with your lack of breeding — where is it?’
‘I’m sorry’ seeing how deeply and suddenly she had annoyed him. ‘I felt in need of reassurance.’ He had become quite pale.
‘I proposed something so different’ he said, replacing the cheque in his wallet. ‘I am rather staggered by your lack of understanding. Of course we can sleep together if you wish to make it a condition. Let us take a room at the hotel here, now, this minute.’ He looked really splendid when he was wounded like this, and suddenly there stirred inside her the realization that his quietness was not weakness, and than an uncommon sort of sensibility underlay these confusing thoughts and deliberate words, perhaps not altogether good, either. ‘What could we prove to each other’ he went on more gently ‘by it or by its opposite: never making love?’ She saw now how hopelessly out of context her words had been. ‘I’m bitterly ashamed of my vulgarity.’ She said this without really meaning the words, as a concession to his world as much as to himself — a world which dealt in the refinements of manners she was as yet too coarse to enjoy, which could afford to cultivate emotions
‘Good’ he said, ‘for our marriage will be a delicate affair, and very much a question of manners, until ——’
‘I’m sorry’ she said. ‘I really did not know how to treat honourably with you and avoid disappointing you.’
He kissed her lightly on the mouth as he stood up. ‘I must go first and get the permission of my mother, and tell my brother. I am terribly happy, even though now I am furious with you.’
They went out to the car together and Justine suddenly felt very weak, as if she had been carried far out of her depth and abandoned in mid-ocean. ‘I don’t know what more to say.’
‘Nothing. You must start living’ he said as the car began to draw away, and she felt as if she had received a smack across the mouth. She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate which she drank with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain. No, somewhere she was truly a woman.
Nessim took the lift up to his office, and sitting down at his desk wrote upon a card the following words: ‘My dearest Clea, Justine has agreed to marry me. I could never do this if I thought it would qualify or interfere in any way with either her love for you or mine….’
Then, appalled by the thought that whatever he might write to Clea might sound mawkish, he tore the note up and folded his arms. After a long moment of thought he picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria’s number. ‘Da Capo’ he said quietly. ‘You remember my plans for marrying Justine? All is well.’ He replaced the receiver slowly, as if it weighed a ton, and sat staring at his own reflection in the polished desk.
* * * * *
IV
It was now, having achieved the major task of persuasion, that his self-assurance fled and left him face to face with a sensation entirely new to him, namely an acute shyness, an acute unwillingness to face his mother directly, to confront her with his intentions. He himself was puzzled by it, for they had always been close together, their confidences linked by an affection too deep to need the interpretation of words. If he had ever been shy or awkward it was with his awkward brother, never with her. And now? It was not as if he even feared her disfavour
