Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

Best of all, Pursewarden himself had reacted most favourably to his new position of eminence and was wearing what he called

‘his new leaf’. A couple of brusque minutes in the terrible red ink — the use of which is the prerogative only of Heads of Mission — had quelled him and drawn from him a promise to ‘turn over a new fig-leaf’, which he had dutifully done. His response had indeed been wholehearted and Mountolive was both grateful and relieved to feel that at last he could rely upon a judgement which was determined not to overrun itself, or allow itself to founder among easy dependences and doubts. What else? Yes, the new Summer Residence was delightful and set in a cool garden full of pines above Roushdi. There were two excellent hard courts which rang all day to the pang of racquets. The staff seemed happy with their new head of mission. Only … Leila’s silence was still an enigma. Then one evening Nessim handed him an envelope on which he recognized her familiar hand. Mountolive put it in his pocket to read when he was alone.

‘Your reappearance in Egypt — you perhaps have guessed? — has upset me somehow: upset my apple-cart. I am all over the place and cannot pick up the pieces as yet. It puzzles me, I admit. I have been living with you so long in my imagination — quite alone there — that now I must almost reinvent you to bring you back to life. Perhaps I have been traducing you all these years, painting your picture to myself? You may be now simply a figment instead of a flesh and blood dignitary, moving among people and lights and policies. I can’t find the courage to compare the truth to reality as yet; I’m scared. Be patient with a silly headstrong woman who never seems to know her own mind. Of course, we should have met long since — but I shrank like a snail. Be patient.

Somewhere inside me I must wait for a tide to turn. I was so angry when I heard you were coming that I cried with sheer rage.

Or was it panic? I suppose that really I had managed to forget … my own face, all these years. Suddenly it came back over me like an Iron Mask. Bah! soon my courage will come back, never fear.

Sooner or later we must meet and shock one another. When?

I don’t know as yet. I don’t know.’ Disconsolately reading the words as he sat upon the terraces at dusk he thought: ‘I cannot assemble my feelings coherently enough to respond to her intelligently. What should I say or do? Nothing.’ But the word had a hollow ring. ‘Patience’ he said softly to himself, turning the word this way and that in his mind the better to examine it. Later, at the Cervonis’ ball among the blue lights and the snapping of paper streamers, it seemed easy once more to be patient. He moved once more in a glad world in which he no longer felt cut off from his fellows — a world full of friends in which he could enjoy the memory of the long rides with Nessim, conversations with Amaril, or the troubling pleasure of dancing with the blonde Clea. Yes, he could be patient here, so close at hand. The time, place and circumstances were all of them rewards for patience. He felt no omens rising from the unclouded future, while even the premonitions of the slowly approaching war were things which he could share publicly with the others.

‘Can they really raze whole capitals, these bombers?’ asked Clea quietly. ‘I’ve always believed that our inventions mirror our secret wishes, and we wish for the end of the city-man, don’t we? All of us? Yes, but how hard to surrender London and Paris. What do you think?’ What did he think? Mountolive wrinkled his fine brows and shook his head. He was thinking of Leila draped in a black veil, like a nun, sitting in her dusty summerhouse at Karm Abu Girg, among the splendid roses, with only a snake for company….

So the untroubled, unhurried summer moved steadily onwards — and Mountolive found little to daunt him professionally in a city so eager for friendship, so vulnerable to the least politeness, so expert in taking pleasure. Day after day the coloured sails fluttered and loitered in the harbour mirror among the steel fortresses, the magical white waves moved in perfect punctuation over desert beaches burnt white as calx by the African suns. By night, sitting above a garden resplendent with fireflies, he heard the deep booming tread of screws as the Eastern-bound liners coasted the deeper waters outside the harbour, heading for the ports on the other side of the world. In the desert they explored oases of greenness made trembling and insubstantial as dreams by the water mirages, or stalked the bronze knuckles of the sandstone ridges around the city on horses, which, for all their fleetness, carried food and drink to assuage their talkative riders.

He visited Petra and the strange coral delta along the Red Sea coast with its swarming population of rainbow-coloured tropical fish. The long cool balconies of the summer residence echoed night after night to the clink of ice in tall glasses, the clink of platitudes and commonplaces made thrilling to him by their position in place and time, by their appositeness to a city which knew that pleasure was the only thing that made industry worth while; on these balconies, hanging out over the blue littoral of the historic coast, warmly lit by candlelight, these fragmentary friendships flowered and took shape in new affections whose candour made him no longer feel separated from his fellow-men by the powers he wielded. He was popular and soon might be wellbeloved. Even the morbid spiritual lassitude and self-indulgence of the city was delightful to one who, secure in income, could afford to live outside it. Alexandria seemed to him a very desirable summer cantonment, accessible to every affection and stranger-loving in the sense of the Greek word. But why should he not feel at home?

The Alexandrians themselves were strangers and exiles to the Egypt which existed below the glittering surface of their dreams, ringed by the hot deserts and fanned by the bleakness of a faith which renounced worldly pleasure: the Egypt of rags and sores, of beauty and desperation. Alexandria was still Europe — the capital of Asiatic Europe, if such a thing could exist. It could never be like Cairo where his whole life had an Egyptian cast, where he spoke ample Arabic; here French, Italian and Greek dominated the scene. The ambience, the social manner, everything was different, was cast in a European mould where somehow the camels and palm-trees and cloaked natives existed only as a brilliantly coloured frieze, a backcloth to a life divided in its origins.

Then the autumn came and his duties drew him back once more to the winter capital, albeit puzzled and indeed a little aggrieved by the silence of Leila; but back to the consuming interests of a professional life which he found far from displeasing.

There were papers to be constructed, miscellaneous reports, economic-social and military, to be made. His staff had shaken down well now, and worked with diligence and a will; even Pursewarden gave of his best. The enmity of Errol, never very deep, had been successfully neutralized, converted into a longterm truce. He had reason to feel pleased with himself.

Then at carnival time there came a message to say that Leila had at last signified her intention of meeting him — but both of them, it was understood, were to wear the conventional black domino of the season — the mask in which the Alexandrians revelled.

He understood her anxiety. Nevertheless he was delighted by the thought and spoke warmly to Nessim on the telephone as he accepted the invitation, planning to remove his whole Chancery up to Alexandria for the carnival, so that his secretaries might enjoy the occasion with him. Remove he did, to find the city now basking under crisp winter skies as blue as a bird’s egg and hardly touched at night by the desert frosts.