Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

They said goodbye at the ferry and all four participated in the long farewell embrace. It was a fine, ringing morning, with low mists trammelling the outlines of the great lake. Nessim had ordered a car which stood under the further palm-tree, a black, trembling dot. Mountolive took one wild look around him as he stepped into the boat — as if he wished to furnish his memory forever with details of this land, these three faces smiling and wishing him good luck in his own tongue and theirs. ‘I’ll be back!’ he shouted, but in his tone she could detect all his anxiety and pain. Narouz raised a crooked arm and smiled his crooked smile; while Nessim put his arm about Leila’s shoulder as he waved, fully aware of what she felt, though he would have been unable to find words for feelings so equivocal and so true.

The boat pulled away. It was over. Ended.

*******

Late that autumn his posting came through. He was somewhat surprised to rind himself accredited to the Mission in Prague, as he had been given to understand that after his lengthy refresher in Arabic he might expect to find himself a lodgement somewhere in the Levant Consular where his special knowledge would prove of use. Yet despite an initial dismay he accepted his fate with good grace and joined in the elaborate game of musical chairs which the Foreign Office plays with such eloquent impersonality. The only consolation, a meagre one, was to find that everyone in his first mission knew as little as he did about the language and politics of the country. His Chancery consisted of two Japanese experts and three specialists in Latin American affairs. They all twisted their faces in melancholy unison over the vagaries of the Czech language and gazed out from their office windows on snow-lit landscapes: they felt full of a solemn Slav foreboding. He was in the Service now.

He had only managed to see Leila half a dozen times in Alexandria — meetings made more troubling and incoherent than thrilling by the enforced secrecy which surrounded them. He ought to have felt like a young dog — but in fact he felt rather a cad. He only returned to the Hosnani lands once, for a spell of three days’ leave — and here at any rate the old spiteful magic of circumstance and place held him; but so briefly — like a fugitive afterglow from the conflagration of the previous spring. Leila appeared to be somehow fading, receding on the curvature of a world moving in time, detaching herself from his own memories of her. The foreground of his new life was becoming crowded with the expensive coloured toys of his professional life — banquets and anniversaries and forms of behaviour new to him. His concentration was becoming dispersed.

For Leila, however, it was a different matter; she was already so intent upon the recreation of herself in the new role she had planned that she rehearsed it every day to herself, in her own private mind, and to her astonishment realized that she was waiting with actual impatience for the parting to become final, for the old links to snap. As an actor uncertain of a new part might wait in a fever of anxiety for his cue to be spoken. She longed for what she most dreaded, the word ‘Goodbye’.

But with his first sad letter from Prague, she felt something like a new sense of elation rising in her, for now at last she would be free to possess Mountolive as she wished — greedily in her mind. The difference in their ages — widening like the chasms in floating pack-ice — were swiftly carrying their bodies out of reach of each other, out of touch. There was no permanence in any of the records to be made by the flesh with its language of promises and endearments, these were all already compromised by a beauty no longer in its first flower. But she calculated that her inner powers were strong enough to keep him to herself in the one special sense most dear to maturity, if only she could gain the courage to substitute mind for heart. Nor was she wrong in realizing that had they been free to indulge passion at will, their relationship could not have survived more than a twelvemonth. But the distance and the necessity to transfer their commerce to new ground had the effect of refreshing their images in one another. For him the image of Leila did not dissolve but suffered a new and thrilling mutation as it took shape on paper. She kept pace with his growth in those long, well-written, ardent letters which betrayed only the hunger which is as poignant as anything the flesh is called upon to cure: the hunger for friendship, the fear of being forgotten.

From Prague, Oslo, Berne, this correspondence flowed backwards and forwards, the letters swelling or diminishing in size but always remaining constant to the mind directing it — the lively, dedicated mind of Leila. Mountolive, growing, found these long letters in warm English or concise French an aid to the process, a provocation. She planted ideas beside him in the soft ground of a professional life which demanded little beyond charm and reserve — just as a gardener will plant sticks for a climbing sweet-pea. If the one love died, another grew up in its place. Leila became his only mentor and confidant, his only source of encouragement.

It was to meet these demands of hers that he taught himself to write well in English and French. Taught himself to appreciate things which normally would have been outside the orbit of his interests — painting and music. He informed himself in order to inform her.

‘You say you will be in Zagreb next month. Please visit and describe to me …’ she would write, or ‘How lucky you will be in passing through Amsterdam; there is a retrospective Klee which has received tremendous notices in the French press. Please pay it a visit and describe your impressions honestly to me, even if unfavourable. I have never seen an original myself.’ This was Leila’s parody of love, a flirtation of minds, in which the roles were now reversed; for she was deprived of the riches of Europe and she fed upon his long letters and parcels of books with the double gluttony. The young man strained every nerve to meet these demands, and suddenly found the hitherto padlocked worlds of paint, architecture, music and writing opening on every side of him. So she gave him almost a gratuitous education in the world which he would never have been able to compass by himself.

And where the old dependence of his youth slowly foundered, the new one grew. Mountolive, in the strictest sense of the words, had now found a woman after his own heart.

The old love was slowly metamorphosed into admiration, just as his physical longing for her (so bitter at first) turned into a consuming and depersonalized tenderness which fed upon her absence instead of dying from it. In a few years she was able to confess:

‘I feel somehow nearer to you today, on paper, than I did before we parted. Why is this?’ But she knew only too well. Yet she added at once, for honesty’s sake: ‘Is this feeling a little unhealthy perhaps? To outsiders it might even seem a little pathetic or ludicrous — who can say? And these long long letters, David — are they the bitter-sweet of a Sanseverina’s commerce with her nephew Fabrizio? I often wonder if they were lovers — their intimacy is so hot and close? Stendhal never actually says so.

I wish I knew Italy. Has your lover turned aunt in her old age?

Don’t answer even if you know the truth. Yet it is lucky in a way that we are both solitaries, with large blank unfilled areas of heart — like the early maps of Africa? — and need each other still.

I mean, you as an only child with only your mother to think of, and I — of course, I have many cares, but live within a very narrow cage. Your description of the ballerina and your love-affair was amusing and touching; thank you for telling me. Have a care, dear friend, and do not wound yourself.’ It was a measure of the understanding which had grown up between them that he was now able to confide in her without reserve details of the few personal histories which occupied him: the love-affair with Grishkin which almost entangled him in a premature marriage; his unhappy passion for an Ambassador’s mistress which exposed him to a duel, and perhaps disgrace. If she felt any pangs, she concealed them, writing to advise and console him with the warmth of an apparent detachment. They were frank with each other, and sometimes her own deliberate exchanges all but shocked him, dwelling as they did upon the self-examinations which people transfer to paper only when there is no one to whom they can talk. As when she could write: ‘It was a shock, I mean, to suddenly see Nessim’s naked body floating in the mirror, the slender white back so like yours and the loins. I sat down and, to my own surprise, burst into tears, because I wondered suddenly whether my attachment for you wasn’t lodged here somehow among the feeble incestuous desires of the inner heart, I know so little about the penetralia of sex which they are exploring so laboriously, the doctors. Their findings fill me with misgivings.