The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

during that brief love-affair (was it ‘love’ again, or was he trying to use her to find out all he could about his wife? Perhaps one day I shall discover): I walk beside the child I say on these deserted beaches like a criminal, going over and over these fragments of the white city’s life with regrets too deep to alter the tone of voice in which I talk to her. Where does one hunt for the key to such a pattern?

But it is clear that I was not alone in feeling such guilt: Pursewarden himself must have been feeling guilty — how else can I explain the money he left me in his will with the express request that it should be spent with Melissa? That at least is one problem solved.

Clea too, I know, felt the guilt of the wound we were all of us causing Melissa — though she felt it, so to speak, on behalf of Justine. She took it, so to speak, upon herself—appalled at the mischief which her lover was causing to us both for so little cause. It was she who now became Melissa’s friend, champion and counsellor and who remained her closest confidante until she died. The selfless and innocent Clea, another fool! It does not pay to be honest in love! She said of Melissa: ‘It is terrible to depend so utterly on powers that do not wish you well. To see someone always in your thoughts, like a stain upon reality….’ I think she was also thinking, perhaps, of Justine, up there in the big house among the tall candles and the oil-paintings by forgotten masters.

Melissa also said to her of me: ‘With his departure everything in nature disappeared.’ This was when she was dying. But nobody has the right to occupy such a place in another’s life, nobody! You can see now upon what raw material I work in these long and passionate self-communings over a winter sea. ‘She loved you’ said Clea again ‘because of your weakness — this is what she found endearing in you. Had you been strong you would have frightened away so timid a love.’ And then lastly, before I bang the pages of my manuscript shut with anger and resentment, one last remark of Clea’s which burns like a hot iron: ‘Melissa said: “You have been my friend, Clea, and I want you to love him after I am gone. Do it with him, will you, and think of me? Never mind all this beastly love business. Cannot a friend make love on another’s behalf? I ask you to sleep with him as I would ask the Panaghia to come down and bless him while he sleeps — like in the old ikons.”’ How purely Melissa, how Greek!

On Sundays we would walk down together to visit Scobie, I remember; Melissa in her bright cotton frock and straw hat, smiling and eager at the thought of a full holiday from the dusty cabaret. Along the Grande Corniche with the waves dancing and winking across the bar, and the old horse-drawn cabs with their black jarveys in red flowerpots driving their dilapidated and creaking ‘taxis-of-love’; and as we walked past they would call ‘Love-taxi sir, madam. Only ten piastres an hour. I know a quiet place….’ And Melissa would giggle and turn away as we walked to watch the minarets glisten like pearls upon the morning light and the bright children’s kites take the harbour wind.

Scobie usually spent Sundays in bed, and in winter nearly always contrived to have a cold. He would lie between the coarse linen sheets after having made Abdul give him what he called ‘a cinnamon rub’ (I never discovered what this was); with some formality, too, he would have a brick heated and placed at his feet to keep them warm. He had a small knitted cap on his head. As he read very little, he carried, like an ancient tribe, all his literature in his head and would, when alone, recite to himself for hours. He had quite an extensive repertoire of ballads which he thundered out with great energy, marking the beat with his hand. ‘The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed’ brought real tears to his good eye, as did ‘The harp that once through Tara’s Halls’; while among the lesser- known pieces was an astonishing poem the metre of which by its galloping quality virtually enabled him to throw himself out of bed and half-way across the room if recited at full gale force. I once made him write it out for me in order to study its construction closely:

‘By O’Neil close beleaguered, the spirits might droop

Of the Saxon three hundred shut up in their coop

Till Bagnal drew forth his Toledo and swore

On the sword of a soldier to succour Portmore.

His veteran troops in the foreign wars tried,

Their features how bronzed and how haughty their stride,

Step’t steadily on; Ah! ’twas thrilling to see

That thunder-cloud brooding o’er Beal-an-atha-Buidh!

Land of Owen Aboo! and the Irish rushed on.

The foe fired one volley — their gunners are gone.

Before the bare bosoms the steel coats have fled,

Or despite casque and corslet, lie dying or dead.

And the Irishgot clothing,coin, colours, great store,

Arms, forage, and provender — plunder go leor.

They munched the white manchets, they champed the brown chine,

Fuliluah! for that day how the natives did dine!’

Disappointingly, he could tell me nothing about it; it had lain there in his memory for half a century like a valuable piece of old silver which is only brought out on ceremonial occasions and put on view. Among the few other such treasures which I recognized was the passage (which he always declaimed with ardour) which ends:

‘Come the four corners of the world in arms,

We’ll shock ’em.

Trust Joshua Scobie to shock ’em!’

Melissa was devoted to him and found him extraordinarily quaint in his sayings and mannerisms. He for his part was fond of her — I think chiefly because she always gave him his full rank and title — Bimbashi Scobie — which pleased him and made him feel of consequence to her as a ‘high official’.

But I remember one day when we found him almost in tears. I thought perhaps he had moved himself by a recital of one of his more powerful poems (‘We Are Seven’ was another favourite); but no. ‘I’ve had a quarrel with Abdul — for the first time’ he admitted with a ludicrous blink. ‘You know what, old man, he wants to take up circumcision.’

It was not hard to understand: to become a barber-surgeon rather than a mere cutter and shaver was a normal enough step for someone like Abdul to want to take; it was like getting one’s Ph.D. But of course, I knew too Scobie’s aversion to circumcision. ‘He’s gone and bought a filthy great pot of leeches’ the old man went on indignantly. ‘Leeches! Started opening veins, he has. I said to him I said “If you think, my boy, that I set you up in business so as you could spend your time hyphenating young children for a piastre a time you’re wrong,” I said to him I said.’ He paused for breath, obviously deeply affected by this development. ‘But Skipper’ I protested, ‘it seems very natural for him to want to become a barber-surgeon. After all, circumcision is practised everywhere, even in England now.’ Ritual circumcision was such a common part of the Egyptian scene that I could not understand why he should be so obviously upset by the thought. He pouted, tucked his head down, and ground his false teeth noisily. ‘No’ he said obstinately. ‘I won’t have it.’ Then he suddenly looked up and said ‘D’you know what? He’s actually going to study under Mahmoud Enayet Allah — that old butcher!’

I could not understand his concern; at every festival or mulid the circumcision booth was a regular part of the festivities. Huge coloured pictures, heavily beflagged with the national colours, depicting barber-surgeons with pen-knives at work upon wretched youths spread out in dentists’ chairs were a normal if bizarre feature of the side-shows. The doyen of the guild was Mahmoud himself, a large oval man, with a long oiled moustache, always dressed in full fig and apart from his red tarbush conveying the vague impression of some French country practitioner on French leave. He always made a resounding speech in classical Arabic offering circumcision free to the faithful who were too poor to meet the cost of it. Then, when a few candidates were forthcoming, pushed forward by eager parents, his two negro clowns with painted faces and grotesque clothes used to gambol out to amuse and distract the boys, inveigling them by this means into the fatal chair where they were, in Scobie’s picturesque phrase, ‘hyphenated’, their screams being drowned by the noise of the crowd, almost before they knew what was happening.

I could not see what was amiss in Abdul’s wanting to learn all he could from this don, so to speak, of hyphenation. Then I suddenly understood as Scobie said ‘It’s not the boy — they can do him for all I care. It’s the girl, old man. I can’t bear to think of that little creature being mutilated. I’m an Englishman, old man, you’ll