The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

what rapes the emotion of your audience without nourishing its values.”

‘Do you see? Do you see?

‘All this was brought to bear on Justine like a great charge of swan-shot, scattering her senses and bringing her for the first time something she had despaired of ever encountering: namely laughter. Imagine what one touch of ridicule can do to a Higher Emotion! “As for Justine” said Pursewarden to me when he was drunk once, “I regard her as a tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we must all pass — a somewhat vulpine Alexandrian Venus. By God, what a woman she would be if she were really natural and felt no guilt! Her behaviour would commend her to the Pantheon — but one cannot send her up there with a mere recommendation from the Rabbinate — a bundle of Old Testament ravings. What would old Zeus say?” He saw my reproachful glance at these cruelties and said, somewhat shamefacedly. “I’m sorry, Balthazar. I simply dare not take her seriously. One day I will tell you why.”

‘Justine herself wished very much to take him seriously but he absolutely refused to command sympathy or share the solitude from which he drew so much of his composure and self-possession.

‘Justine herself, you know, could not bear to be alone.

‘He was due, I remember, to lecture in Cairo to several societies affiliated to our own Arts Society, and Nessim, who was busy, asked Justine to take him down by car. That was how they came to find themselves together on a journey which threw up a sort of ludicrous shadow-image of a love-relationship, like a clever magic- lantern picture of a landscape, created by, strangely — not Justine at all — but a worse mischief-maker — the novelist himself. “It was Punch and Judy, all right!” said Pursewarden ruefully afterwards.

‘He was at that time deeply immersed in the novel he was writing, and as always he found that his ordinary life, in a distorted sort of way, was beginning to follow the curvature of his book. He explained this by saying that any concentration of the will displaces life (Archimedes’ bath-water) and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived. You will see from this that he was a serious fellow underneath much of his clowning and had quite comprehensive beliefs and ideas. But also, he had been drinking rather heavily that day as he always did when he was working. Between books he never touched a drop. Riding beside her in the great car, someone beautiful, dark and painted with great eyes like the prow of some Aegean ship, he had the sensation that his book was being rapidly passed underneath his life, as if under a sheet of paper containing the iron filings of temporal events, as a magnet is in that commonplace experiment one does at school: and somehow setting up a copying magnetic field.

‘He never flirted, mind you; and if he started to approach Justine it was simply to try out a few speeches and attitudes, to verify certain conclusions he had reached in the book before actually sending it to the printer, so to speak! Afterwards, of course, he bitterly repented of this piece of self-indulgence. He was at that moment trying to escape from the absurd dictates of narrative form in prose: “He said” “She said” “He cocked an eye, shot a cuff, lifted a lazy head, etc.” Was it possible, had he succeeded in “realizing” character without the help of such props? He was asking himself this as he sat there in the sand. (“Her eyelashes brushed his cheek.” Merde alors! Had he written that?) Justine’s thick black eyelashes were like … what? So it was that his kisses were really warm and wholehearted in an absent-minded way because they were in no way meant for her. (One of the great paradoxes of love. Concentration on the love-object and possession are the poisons.) And he discovered to her the fact that she was ridiculous, with a series of disarming and touching pleasantries at which she found herself laughing with a relief that seemed almost sinful. As for her: it was not only that his skin and hair were fresh and that his love-making was full of a lazy, unblushing enterprise; he was wholly himself in a curious way. It aroused in her an unfamiliar passionate curiosity. And then, the things he said! “Of course I’ve read Moeurs and had you pointed out a hundred times as the tragic central character. It’s all right, written by a born lettre, of course, and smells fashionably of armpits and eau de javel. But surely you are making yourself a little self-important about it all? You have the impertinence to foist yourself on us as a problem — perhaps because you have nothing else to offer? It is foolish. Or perhaps it is that the Jew loves punishment and always comes back for more?” And suddenly, but completely, to take her firmly by the nape of the neck and force her down into the hot sand before she could find time to measure the extent of the insult or form a response in her mind. And then, while he was still kissing, to say something so ludicrous that the laughter and tears in her mind became one and the same sort of things, a mixture of qualities hard to endure.

‘“For God’s sake!” she said, having decided to behave as if outraged. He had been too quick for her. He had surprised her while she was half-asleep in her mind, so to speak.

‘“Didn’t you want to make love? My mistake!”

‘She looked at him, a little disarmed by the mock-repentance of his expression. “No, of course not. Yes.” Something inside her repeated “Yes, yes.” An attachment without fingerprints — something as easy as sailing a boat or driving into deep water: “Fool!” she cried, and to her own surprise started laughing. A conquest by impudence? I don’t know. I am only putting down my own views.

‘She explained this to herself later by saying that for him sex was the nearest thing to laughter — quite free of particularity, neither sacred nor profane. Pursewarden himself has written that he thought it comic and sinister and divine in one. But she could not grasp and define the thing as she wished, for when she said to him “You are hopelessly promiscuous, like I am” he was really angry, really outraged. “Imbecile” he replied, “you have the soul of a clerk. For those who love poetry there is no such thing as vers libre.” She did not understand this.

‘“Oh, stop behaving like a pious old sin-cushion into which we all have to stick rusty pins of our admiration” he snapped. In his diary he added drily: “Moths are attracted by the flame of personality. So are vampires. Artists should take note and beware.” And in the mirror he cursed himself roundly for this lapse, a self-indulgence which had brought him what most bored him — an intimate relationship. But in the sleeping face he too saw the childish inhabitant of Justine, the “calcimined imprint of a fern in chalk”. He saw how she must have looked on the first night of love — hair torn and trailing over the pillow like a ruffled black dove, fingers like tendrils, warm mouth inhaling the airs of sleep; warm as a figure of pastry fresh from the oven. “Oh damn!” he cried aloud.

‘Then in bed with her in a hotel crowded with Alexandrian acquaintances who might easily observe their rashness and carry their gossip back to the city they had left together that morning, he swore again. Pursewarden had much to hide, you know. He was not all he seemed. And at this time he did not dare to prejudice his relations with Nessim. The Bloody woman! I hear his voice.

‘“Ecoute….”

‘“Rien — silence.”

‘“Mais cheri, nous sommes seuls.” She was still sleepy. Cast an eye to a bolted door. She felt a momentary disgust at this bourgeois fear of his; afraid of intruders, spies, a husband?

‘“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

‘“Je m’ecoute moi-meme.” Yellow eyes without a trace of discernible divinity in them; he was like a slender rock-god, with ruffled moustache. Past lives? “Le coeur qui bat.” Derisively he quoted a popular song.

‘“Tu n’es pas une femme pour moi — pas dans mon genre.”

‘This made her feel like a whipped dog specially as a moment ago he had been kissing her, breaking her down into successive images of pain and pleasure with an importunity which belonged, she now knew, only to his passion and not to himself.

‘“What do you want?” she said, and struck him across the face to feel at once the stinging retort on her own cheek — like spray dashing over her. And now he began to fool again until she could not prevent herself from laughing.

‘This weird translation of feelings into gestures which belied words and words which belied gestures, confused and disoriented her. She needed someone to tell her whether to laugh or to cry.

‘As for Pursewarden, he believed with Rilke that no woman adds anything to the sum of Woman, and from satiety he had now taken refuge in the plenty of the imagination — the true field of merit for the artist. This is perhaps what made him seem to her somehow cold and unfeeling. “Somewhere inside you there is a nasty little Anglican clergyman” she told him and he considered the remark gravely on its merits. “Perhaps” he said, and added after a pause “But your humourlessness has made you an enemy of pleasure. The enemy. You have a premeditated approach to experience. I am a truer pagan.” And he began to laugh. Great honesty can