Nimrod said ‘Hah’ triumphantly and added ‘A good point there.’ Yes, but who were the other figures, snatched thus fortuitously out of nothingness by the flash-bulb? We stared at them and they stared expressionlessly back at us through their velvet slits like snipers.
‘No good’ said Balthazar at last with a sigh, and Nimrod switched off the humming machine. After an instant’s darkness the ordinary electric light came up in the room. His desk was stacked up with typed papers for signature — the
‘Sign up’ said Nimrod, indicating the paper ‘when you’ve read your copy, will you?’ He coughed behind his hand and added in a lower tone ‘And you can take the ring.’
Balthazar handed it to me. It felt cold, and it was faintly dusted with fingerprint powder. I cleaned it on my tie and put it in my fob-pocket. ‘Thank you’ I said, and took a seat at the desk to read through the Police formula, while the others lit cigarettes and talked in low voices. Beside the typewritten papers lay another, written in the nervous shallow hand of General Cervoni. It was the invitation list to the carnival ball, still echoing with the majestic poetry of the names which had come to mean so much to me, the names of the Alexandrians. Listen:
Pia dei Tolomei, Benedict Dangeau, Dante Borromeo, Colonel Neguib, Toto de Brunel, Wilmot Pierrefeu, Mehmet Adm, Pozzo di Borgo, Ahmed Hassan Pacha, Delphine de Francueil, Djamboulat Bey, Athena Trasha, Haddad Fahmy Amin, Gaston Phipps, Pierre Balbz, Jacques de Guery, Count Banubula, Onouphrios Papas, Dmitri Randidi, Paul Capodistria, Claude Amaril, Nessim Hosnani, Tony Umbada, Baldassaro Trivizani, Gilda Ambron….
I murmured the names as I read through the list, mentally adding the word ‘murderer’ after each, simply to see whether it sounded appropriate. Only when I reached the name of Nessim did I pause and raise my eyes to the dark wall — to throw his mental image there and study it as we had studied the pictures. I still saw the expression on his face as I had helped to tuck him into the great car — an expression of curious impish serenity, as of someone resting after a great expenditure of energy.
* * * * *
PART IV
XII
Despite the season the seafront of the city was gay with light — the long sloping lines of the Grande Corniche curving away to a low horizon; a thousand lighted panels of glass in which, like glorious tropical fish, the inhabitants of the European city sat at glittering tables stocked with glasses of mastic, aniseed or brandy. Watching them (I had eaten little lunch) my hunger overcame me, and as there was some time in hand before my meeting with Justine, I turned into the glittering doors of the Diamond Sutra and ordered a ham sandwich and a glass of whisky. Once again, as always when the drama of external events altered the emotional pattern of things, I began to see the city through new eyes — to examine the shapes and contours made by human beings with the detachment of an entomologist studying a hitherto unknown species of insect. Here it was, the race, each member of it absorbed in the solution of individual preoccupations, loves, hates and fears. A woman counting money on to a glass table, an old man feeding a dog, an Arab in a red flowerpot drawing a curtain.
Aromatic smoke poured from the small sailor taverns along the seafront where the iron spits loaded with a freight of entrails and spices turned monotonously back and forth, or bellied from under the lids of shining copper cauldrons, giving off hot gusts of squid, cuttlefish and pigeon. Here one drank from the blue cans and ate with one’s fingers as they do in the Cyclades even today.
I picked up a decrepit horse-cab and jogged along by die sighing sea towards the Aurore, drinking in the lighted darkness with regrets and fears so fugitive as to be beyond analysis; but underneath (like a toad under a cool stone, the surface airs of night) I still felt the stirrings of horror at the thought that Justine herself might be endangered by the love which ‘we bore one another’. I turned the thought this way and that in my mind, like a prisoner pressing with all his weight upon doors which denied him an exit from an intolerable bondage, trying to devise an issue from a situation which, it seemed, might as well end in her death as in mine.
The great car was waiting, drawn up off the road in the darkness under the pepper-trees. She opened the door for me silently and I got in, spellbound by my fears.
‘Well’ she said at last, and giving a little groan which expressed everything, sank into my arms and pressed her warm mouth on mine. ‘Did you go? Is it over?’
‘Yes.’
She let in the clutch and the driving wheels spurned the gravel as the car moved out into the pearly nightfall and began to follow the coast road to the outer desert. I studied her harsh Semitic profile in the furry light flung back by the headlights from the common objects of the roadside. It belonged so much to the city which I now saw as a series of symbols stretching away from us on either side — minarets, pigeons, statues, ships, coins, camels and palms; it lived in a heraldic relation to the exhausted landscapes which enclosed it — the loops of the great lake: as proper to the scene as the Sphinx was to the desert.
‘My ring’ she said. ‘You brought it?’
‘Yes.’ I polished it once more on my tie and slipped it back once more on to its appropriate finger. Involuntarily I said now: ‘Justine, what is to become of us?’
She gave me a wild frowning look like a Bedouin woman, and then smiled that warm smile. ‘Why?’
‘Surely you see? We shall have to stop this altogether. I can’t bear to think you might be in danger…. Or else I should go straight to Nessim and confront him with….’ With what? I did not know.
‘No’ she said softly, ‘no. You could not do it. You are an Anglo-Saxon … you couldn’t step outside the law like that, could you? You are not one of us. Besides, you could tell Nessim nothing he does not guess if not actually know…. Darling’ she laid her warm hand upon mine, ‘simply wait … simply love, above all … and we shall see.’
It is astonishing now for me to realize, as I record this scene, that she was carrying within her (invisible as the already conceived foetus of a child) Pursewarden’s death: that her kisses were, for all I know, falling upon the graven image of my friend — the death-mask of the writer who himself did not love her, indeed regarded her with derision. But such a demon is love that I would not be surprised if in a queer sort of way his death actually enriched our own love-making, filling it with the deceits on which the minds of women feed — the compost of secret pleasures and treacheries which are an inseparable part of every human relation.
Yet what have I to complain of? Even this half-love filled my heart to overflowing. It is she, if anyone, who had cause for complaint. It is very hard to understand these things. Was she already planning her flight from Alexandria then? ‘The power of woman is such’ writes Pursewarden ‘that a single kiss can paraphrase the reality of man’s life and turn it …’ but why go on? I was happy sitting beside her, feeling the warmth of her hand as it lay in mine.
The blue night was hoary with stars and the attentive desert stretched away on either side with its grotesque amphitheatres — like the empty rooms in some great cloud-mansion. The moon was late and wan tonight, the air still, the dunes wind-carved. ‘What are you thinking?’ said my lover.
What was I thinking? Of a passage in Proclus which says that Orpheus ruled over the silver race, meaning those who led a ‘silver’ life; on Balthazar’s mantelpiece presumably among the pipe-cleaners and the Indian wood- carving of monkeys which neither saw, spoke nor heard evil, under a magic pentacle from Pythagoras. What was I thinking? The foetus in its waxen wallet, the locust squatting in the horn of the wheat, an Arab quoting a proverb which reverberated in the mind. ‘The memory of man is as old as misfortune.’ The quails from the burst cage spread upon the ground softly like honey, having no idea of escape. In the Scent Bazaar the flavour of Persian lilac.
‘Fourteen thousand years ago’ I said aloud, ‘Vega in Lyra was the Pole Star. Look at her where she burns.’
The beloved head turned with its frowning deep-set eyes and once more I see the long boats drawing in to the Pharos, the tides running, the minarets a-glitter with dew; noise of the blind Hodja crying in the voice of a mole assaulted by sunlight; a shuffle-pad of a camel-train clumping to a festival carrying dark lanterns. An Arab woman makes my bed, beating the pillows till they fluff out like white egg under a whisk; a passage in Pursewarden’s book which reads: ‘They looked at each other, aware that there was neither youth nor strength enough between them to prevent their separation.’ When Melissa was pregnant by Nessim Amaril could not perform the abortion Nessim so much desired because of her illness and her weak heart. ‘She may die anyway’ he said, and Nessim nodded curtly and took up his overcoat. But she did not die then, she bore the child….
