Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

“Secret” and sealing it up with wax. It is in your safe now. Then he appears to have gone off on a … well, a binge. He spent all day at a tavern on the seashore near Montaza which he often visited.

It’s just a shack down by the sea — a few timbers with a palm-leaf roof, run by a Greek. He spent the whole day there writing and drinking. He drank quite a lot of zibib according to the proprietor. He had a table set right down by the seashore in the sand.

It was windy and the man suggested he would be better off in the shelter. But no. He sat there by the sea. In the late afternoon he ate a sandwich and took a tram back to town. He called on me.’

‘Good: well.’ Telford hesitated and gasped. ‘He came to the office. I must say that although unshaven he seemed in very good spirits. He made a few jokes. But he asked me for a cyanide tablet — you know the kind. I won’t say any more. This line isn’t really secure.

You will understand, sir.’

‘Yes, yes’ cried Mountolive. ‘Go on, man.’ Reassured Telford continued breathlessly: ‘He said he wanted to poison a sick dog. It seemed reasonable enough, so I gave him one. That is probably what he used according to Dr Balthazar.

I hope you don’t feel, sir, that I was in any way….’ Mountolive felt nothing except a mounting indignation that anyone in his mission should confer such annoyance by a public act so flagrant! No, this was silly. ‘It is stupid’ he whispered to himself. But he could not help feeling that Pursewarden had been guilty of something. Damn it, it was inconsiderate and underbred — as well as being mysterious. Kenilworth’s face floated before him for a moment. He joggled the receiver to get a clear contact, and shouted: ‘But what does it all mean?’

‘I don’t know’ said Telford, helplessly. ‘It’s rather mysterious.’ A pale Mountolive turned and made some muttered apologies to the little group of pashas who stood about the telephone in that dreary outhouse. Immediately they spread self-deprecating hands like a flock of doves taking flight. There was no inconvenience. An Ambassador was expected to be entrained in great events. They could wait.

‘Telford’ said Mountolive, sharply and angrily.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me what else you know.’ Telford cleared his throat and went on in his slushy voice:

‘Well, there isn’t anything of exceptional importance from my point of view. The last person to see him alive was that man Darley, the schoolteacher. You probably don’t know him, sir.

Well, he met him on the way back to the hotel. He invited Darley in for a drink and they stayed talking for some considerable time and drinking gin. In the hotel. The deceased said nothing of any special interest — and certainly nothing to suggest that he was planning to take his own life. On the contrary, he said he was going to take the night train to Gaza for a holiday. He showed Darley the proofs of his latest novel, all wrapped up and addressed, and a mackintosh full of things he might need for the journey — pyjamas, toothpaste. What made him change his mind? I don’t know, sir, but the answer may be in your safe. That is why I rang you.’

‘I see’ said Mountolive. It was strange, but already he was beginning to get used to the idea of Pursewarden’s disappearance from the scene. The shock was abating, diminishing: only the mystery remained. Telford still spluttered on the line. ‘Yes’ he said, recovering mastery of himself. ‘Yes.’ It was only a matter of moments before Mountolive recovered his demure official pose and reoriented himself to take a benign interest in the mills and their thumping machinery. He worked hard not to seem too abstracted and to seem suitably impressed by what was shown to him. He tried too to analyse the absurdity of his anger against Pursewarden having committed an act which seemed … a gross solecism! How absurd. Yet, as an act, it was somehow typical because so inconsiderate: perhaps he should have anticipated it? Profound depression alternated with his feelings of anger.

He motored back in haste, full of an urgent expectancy, an unease. It was almost as if he were going to take Pursewarden to task, demand an explanation of him, administer a well-earned reproof. He arrived to find that the Chancery was just closing, though the industrious Errol was still busy upon State papers in his office. Everyone down to the cipher clerks seemed to be afflicted by the air of gravid depression which sudden death always confers upon the uncomfortably living. He deliberately forced himself to walk slowly, talk slowly, not to hurry. Haste, like emotion, was always deplorable because it suggested that impulse or feeling was master where only reason should rule. His secretary had already left but he obtained the keys to his safe from Archives and sedately walked up the two short flights to his office. Heartbeats are mercifully inaudible to anyone but oneself.

The dead man’s ‘effects’ (the poetry of causality could not be better expressed than by the word) were stacked on his desk, looking curiously disembodied. A bundle of papers and manuscript, a parcel addressed to a publisher, a mackintosh and various odds and ends conscripted by the painstaking Telford in the interests of truth (though they had little beauty for Mountolive).

He got a tremendous start when he saw Pursewarden’s bloodless features staring up at him from his blotter — a death-mask in plaster of Paris with a note from Balthazar saying ‘I took the liberty of making an impression of the face after death. I trust this will seem sensible.’ Pursewarden’s face! From some angles death can look like a fit of the sulks. Mountolive touched the effigy with reluctance, superstitiously, moving it this way and that.

His flesh crept with a small sense of loathing; he realized suddenly that he was afraid of death.

Then to the safe with its envelope whose clumsy seals he cracked with a trembling thumb as he sat at his desk. Here at least he should find some sort of rational exegesis for this gross default of good manners! He drew a deep breath.

My dear David, I have torn up half a dozen other attempts to explain this in detail. I found I was only making literature. There is quite enough about. My decision has to do with life. Paradox! I am terribly sorry, old man.

Quite by accident, in an unexpected quarter, I stumbled upon something which told me that Maskelyne’s theories about Nessim were right, mine wrong. I do not give you my sources, and will not.

But I now realize Nessim is smuggling arms into Palestine and has been for some time. He is obviously the unknown source, deeply implicated in the operations which were described in Paper Seven — you will remember. (Secret Mandate File 341. Intelligence.)

But I simply am not equal to facing the simpler moral implications raised by this discovery. I know what has to be done about it.

But the man happens to be my friend. Therefore … a quietus.

(This will solve other deeper problems too.) Ach! what a boring world we have created around us. The slime of plot and counterplot. I have just recognized that it is not my world at all. (I can hear you swearing as you read.)

I feel in a way a cad to shelve my own responsibilities like this, and yet, in truth, I know that they are not really mine, never have been mine. But they are yours! And jolly bitter you will find them.

But … you are of the career … and you must act where I cannot bring myself to!

I know I am wanting in a sense of duty, but I have let Nessim know obliquely that his game has been spotted and the information passed on. Of course, in this vague form you could also be right in suppressing it altogether, forgetting it. I don’t envy you your temptations. Mine, however, not to reason why. I’m tired, my dear chap; sick unto death, as the living say.