Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

That night he was once more visited by the unaccountable affliction with which he always celebrated his return home — a crushing ear-ache which rapidly reduced him to a shivering painracked ghost of himself. It was a mystery, for no doctor had so far managed to allay — or even satisfactorily to diagnose — this onslaught of the petit mal. It never attacked him save when he was at home. As always, his mother overheard his groans and knew from old experience what they meant; she materialized out of the darkness by his bed bringing the comfort of ancient familiarity and the one specific which, since childhood, she had used to combat his distress. She always kept it handy now, in the cupboard beside her bed. Salad oil, warmed in a teaspoon over a candleflame. He felt the warmth of the oil penetrate and embalm his brain, while his mother’s voice upon the darkness soothed him with its promises of relief. In a little while the tide of agony receded to leave him, washed up so to speak, on the shores of sleep — a sleep stirred vaguely by those comforting memories of childhood illnesses which his mother had always shared — they fell ill together, as if by sympathy. Was it so that they might lie in adjoining rooms talking to each other, reading to each other, sharing the luxury of a common convalescence? He did not know.

He slept. It was a week before he addressed himself to his official papers and read the letter from Pursewarden.

*******

My dear David, You will be astonished to get a letter of such length from me, I don’t doubt. But the news of your appointment only reached me lately in rumoured form, and there is much you should know about the state of affairs here which I could not address to you formally as Ambassador Designate (Confidential: Under Flying Seal) ahem!

Ouf! What a bore! I hate writing letters as you well know. And yet … I myself shall almost certainly be gone by the time you arrive, for I have taken steps to get myself transferred. After a long series of calculated wickednesses I have at last managed to persuade poor Errol that I am unsuitable for the Mission which I have adorned these past months. Months! A lifetime! And Errol himself is so good, so honest, so worthy; a curious goat-like creature who nevertheless conveys the impression of being a breech-delivery! He has put in his paper against me with the greatest reluctance. Please do nothing to countermand the transfer which will result from it , as it squares with my own private wishes.

I implore you.

The deciding factor has been my desertion of my post for the past five weeks which has caused grave annoyance and finally decided Errol. I will explain everything. Do you remember, I wonder, the fat young French diplomat of the Rue du Bac?

Nessim took us round once for drinks? Pombal by name? Well, I have taken refuge with him — he is serving here. It is really quite gay chez lui. The summer over, the headless Embassy retired with the Court to winter in Cairo, but this time without Yours Truly.

I went underground. Nowadays we rise at eleven, turn out the girls, and after having a hot bath play backgammon until lunchtime; then an arak at the Cafe Al Aktar with Balthazar and Amaril (who send their love) and lunch at the Union Bar. Then perhaps we call on Clea to see what she is painting, or go to a cinema. Pombal is doing all this legitimately; he is on local leave.

I am en retraite. Occasionally the exasperated Errol rings up long distance in an attempt to trace me and I answer him in the voice of a poule from the Midi. It rattles him badly because he guesses it is me, but isn’t quite sure. (The point about a Wykehamist is that he cannot risk giving offence.) We have lovely, lovely conversations. Yesterday I told him that I, Pursewarden, was under treatment for a glandular condition chez Professor Pombal but was now out of danger. Poor Errol! One day I shall apologize to him for all the trouble I have caused him. Not now. Not until I get my transfer to Siam or Santos.

All this is very wicked of me, I know, but … the tedium of this Chancery with all these un-grown-up people! The Errols are formidably Britannic. They are, for example, both economists.

Why both , I ask myself? One of them must feel permanently redundant. They make love to two places of decimals only. Their children have all the air of vulgar fractions!

Well. The only nice ones are the Donkins; he is clever and highspirited, she rather common and fast-looking with too much rouge. But … poor dear, she is over-compensating for the fact that her little husband has grown a beard and turned Moslem!

She sits with a hard aggressive air on his desk, swinging her leg and smoking swiftly. Mouth too red. Not quite a lady and hence insecure? Her husband is a clever youth but far too serious. I do not dare to ask if he intends to put in for the extra allowance of wives to which he is entitled.

But let me tell you in my laboured fashion what lies behind all this nonsense. I was sent here, as you know, under contract, and I fulfilled my original task faithfully — as witness the giant roll of paper headed (in a lettering usually reserved for tomb—stones) Instruments for a Cultural Pact Between the Governments of His Britannic Majesty etc. Blunt instruments indeed — for what can a Christian culture have in common with a Moslem or a Marxist?

Our premises are hopelessly opposed. Never mind! I was told to do it and I done it. And much as I love what they’ve got here I don’t understand the words in relation to an educational system based on the abacus and a theology which got left behind with Augustine and Aquinas. Personally I think we both have made a mess of it, and I have no parti-pris in the matter. And so on. I just don’t see what D. H. Lawrence has to offer a pasha with seventeen wives, though I believe I know which one of them is happiest…. However, I done it, the Pact I mean.

This done I found myself rapidly sent to the top of the form as a Political and this enabled me to study papers and evaluate the whole Middle Eastern complex as a coherent whole, as a policy venture. Well, let me say that after prolonged study I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it is neither coherent nor even a policy — at any rate a policy capable of withstanding the pressures which are being built up here.

These rotten states, backward and venal as they are, must be seriously thought about; they cannot be held together just by encouraging what is weakest and most corrupt in them, as we appear to be doing. This approach would presuppose another fifty years of peace and no radical element in the electorate at home: that given, the status quo might be maintained. But given this prevailing trend, can England be as short-sighted as this?

Perhaps. I don’t know. It is not my job to know these things, as an artist ; as a political I am filled with misgiving. To encourage Arab unity while at the same time losing the power to use the poison-cup seems to me to be a very dubious thing: not policy but lunacy. And to add Arab unity to all the other currents which are running against us seems to me to be an engaging folly. Are we still beset by the doleful dream of the Arabian Nights, fathered on us by three generations of sexually disoriented Victorians whose subconscious reacted wholeheartedly to the thought of more than one legal wife? Or the romantic Bedouin-fever of the Bells and Lawrences? Perhaps. But the Victorians who fathered this dream on us were people who believed in fighting for the value of their currency; they knew that the world of politics was a jungle.

Today the Foreign Office appears to believe that the best way to deal with the jungle is to turn Nudist and conquer the wild beast by the sight of one’s nakedness. I can hear you sigh. ‘Why can’t Pursewarden be more precise. All these boutades! ’ Very well. I spoke of the pressures. Let us divide them into internal and external, shall we, in the manner of Errol? My views may seem somewhat heretical, but here they are.