Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

‘ “Come on. Get up. It’s time to go home.” I was deathly tired by now. I advised him to go straight back home and to confide his story to nobody. “Perhaps you have imagined the whole thing” I said, and he gave me a tired but brilliant smile.

‘He walked slowly and heavily downstairs before me, still shaken by his experience, it was clear, but the hysteria had left him. I opened the front door, and he tried once more to express his incoherent gratitude and affection. He seized my hands and kissed them repeatedly with great wet hairy kisses. Ugh! I can feel them now. And then, before turning into the night, he said in a low voice, smiling: “Clea, this is the happiest day of my life, to have seen and touched you and to have seen your little room.” ’ Clea sipped her drink, nodding into the middle distance for a moment with a sad smile on her face. Then she looked at her own brown hands and gave a little shudder. ‘Ugh! The kisses’ she said under her breath and with an involuntary movement began to rub her hands, palms upward, upon the red plush arm of the chair, as if to obliterate the kisses once and for all, to expunge the memory of them.

But now the band had begun to play a Paul Jones (perhaps the very dance in which Arnauti first met Justine?) and the warm lighted gallery of faces began to fan out once more from the centre of the darkness, the brilliance of flesh and cloth and jewels in the huge gaunt ballroom where the palms splintered themselves in the shivering mirrors: leaking through the windows to where the moonlight waited patiently among the deserted public gardens and highways, troubling the uneasy water of the outer harbour with its glittering heartless gestures. ‘Come’ said Clea, ‘why do you never play a part in these things? Why do you prefer to sit apart and study us all?’ But I was thinking as I watched the circle of lovely faces move forward and reverse among the glitter of jewellery and the rustle of silks, of the Alexandrians to whom these great varieties of experience meant only one more addition to the sum of an infinite knowledge husbanded by their world-weariness. Round and round the floor we went, the women unconsciously following the motion of the stars, of the earth as it curved into space; and then suddenly like a declaration of war, like an expulsion from the womb, silence came, and a voice crying: ‘Take your partners please.’ And the lights throbbed down the spectrum to purple and a waltz began.

For a brief moment at the far end of the darkness I caught a glimpse of Nessim and Justine dancing together, smiling into each other’s eyes. The shapely hand on his shoulder still wore the great ring taken from the tomb of a Byzantine youth. Life is short, art long.

Clea’s father was dancing with her, stiffly, happily like a clockwork mouse; and he was kissing the gifted hand upon which the unwanted kisses of Narouz had fallen on that forgotten evening.

A daughter is closer than a wife.

‘At first’ writes Pursewarden ‘we seek to supplement the emptiness of our individuality through love, and for a brief moment enjoy the illusion of completeness. But it is only an illusion. For this strange creature, which we thought would join us to the body of the world, succeeds at last in separating us most thoroughly from it. Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?’ How else indeed? But relieved to find myself once more partnerless I have already groped my way back to my dark corner where the empty chairs of the revellers stand like barren ears of corn.

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XIV

In the early summer I received a letter from Clea with which this brief memorial to Alexandria may well be brought to a close. It was unexpected.

‘ Tashkent , Syria

‘Your letter, so unexpected after a silence which I feared might endure all through life, followed me out of Persia to this small house perched high on a hillside among the cedars and pines. I have taken it for a few months in order to try my hand and brush on these odd mountains — rocks bursting with fresh water and Mediterranean flowers. Turtle doves by day and nightingales by night. What a relief after the dust. How long is it? Ah, my dear friend, I trembled a little as I slit open the envelope. Why? I was afraid that what you might have to say would drag me back by the hair to old places and scenes long since abandoned; the old stations and sites of the personality which belonged to the Alexandrian Clea you knew — not to me any longer, or at any rate, not wholly.

I’ve changed. A new woman, certainly a new painter is emerging, still a bit tender and shy like the horns of a snail — but new. A whole new world of experience stands between us…. How could you know all this? You would perhaps be writing to Clea, the old Clea; what would I find to say to you in reply? I put off reading your letter until tonight. It touched me and reply I must: so here it is — my own letter written at odd times, between painting sessions, or at night when I light the stove and make my dinner. Today is a good day to begin it for it is raining — and the whole mountain side is under the hush of the rain and the noise of swollen springs.

The trees are alive with giant snails.

‘So Balthazar has been disturbing you with his troublesome new information? I am not sure that I approve. It may be good for you, but surely not for your book or books which must, I suppose, put us all in a very special position regarding reality. I mean as

“characters” rather than human beings. No? And why, you ask me, did I never tell you a tithe of the things you know now? One never does, you know, one never does. As a spectator standing equidistant between two friends or lovers one is always torn by friendship to intervene, to interfere — but one never does. Rightly. How could I tell you what I knew of Justine — or for that matter what I felt about your neglect of Melissa? The very range of my sympathies for the three of you precluded it. As for love, it is so paradoxical a creature and so satisfying in itself that it would not have been much altered by the intervention of truths from outside. I am sure now, if you analyse your feelings, you will find you love Justine better because she betrayed you! The whore is man’s true darling, as I once told you, and we are born to love those who most wound us. Am I wrong? Besides, my own affection for you lay in another quarter. I was jealous of you as a writer — and as a writer I wanted you to myself and did so keep you. Do you see?

‘There is nothing I can do to help you now — I mean help your book. You will either have to ignore the data which Balthazar has so wickedly supplied, or to “rework reality” as you put it.

‘And you say you were unjust to Pursewarden; yes, but it is not important. He was equally unjust to you. Unknown to either of you, you joined hands in me! As writers. My only regret is that he did not manage to finish the last volume of God is a Humorist according to plan. It is a loss — though it cannot detract from his achievement. You, I surmise, will soon be coming into the same degree of self-possession — perhaps through this cursed city of ours, Alexandria, to which we most belong when we most hate it.

By the way, I have a letter from Pursewarden about the missing volume which I have carried around with me among my papers for ages, like a talisman. It helps not only to revive the man himself a bit, but to revive me also when I fall into a depression about my work. (I must go to the village to buy eggs. I shall copy it out tonight for you.)

‘Later. Here is the letter I spoke about, harsh and crabbed if you like, but none the less typical of our friend. Don’t take his remarks about you too seriously. He admired you and believed in you — so he once told me. Perhaps he was lying. Anyway.