Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

He felt exhausted, on the point of tears, and yet irradiated by a tremendous gratitude and tenderness. In these magnificent kisses all his loneliness was expurgated. He had found someone to share his secret — a woman after his own special heart. Paradox within paradox!

As for her, it was as if she had rifled the treasury of his spiritual power symbolized so queerly in the terms of his possessions; the cold steel of rifles, the cold nipples of bombs and grenades which had been born from tungsten, gum arabic, jute, shipping, opals, herbs, silks and trees.

He felt her on top of him, and in the plunge of her loins he felt the desire to add to him — to fecundate his actions; and to fructify him through these fatality-bearing instruments of his power, to give life to those death-burdening struggles of a truly barren woman. Her face was expressionless as a mask of Siva. It was neither ugly nor beautiful, but naked as power itself. It seemed coeval (this love) with the Faustian love of saints who had mastered the chilly art of seminal stoppage in order the more clearly to recognize themselves — for its blue fires conveyed not heat but cold to the body. But will and mind burned up as if they had been dipped in quicklime. It was a true sensuality with nothing of the civilized poisons about it to make it anodyne, palatable to a human society constructed upon a romantic idea of truth. Was it the less love for that? Paracelsus had described such relationships among the Caballi. In all this one may see the austere mindless primeval face of Aphrodite.

And all the time he was thinking to himself: ‘When all this is over, when I have found her lost child — by that time we shall be so close that there will never be any question of leaving me.’ The passion of their embraces came from complicity , from something deeper, more wicked, than the wayward temptings of the flesh or the mind. He had conquered her in offering her a married life which was both a pretence and yet at the same time informed by a purpose which might lead them both to death! This was all that sex could mean to her now! How thrilling, sexually thrilling, was the expectation of their death!

He drove her home in the first faint trembling light of dawn; waited to hear the lift climb slowly, painfully, to the third floor and return again. It stopped with a slight bounce before him and the light went out with a click. The personage had gone, but her perfume remained.

It was a perfume called ‘ Jamais de la vie ’ .

*******

Throughout that summer and autumn the conspirators had worked together to mount entertainments on a scale seldom seen in the city. The big house was seldom quiet now for hours together. It was perpetually alive to the cool fern-like patterns of a quartet, or to the foundering plunge of saxophones crying to the night like cuckolds. The once cavernous and deserted kitchens were now full of the echoing bustle of servants preparing for a new feast or clearing up after one which had ended. In the city it was said that Nessim had deliberately set himself to launch Justine in society — as if the provincial splendours of Alexandria held any promise or charm to one who had become at heart a European, as he had. No, these planned assaults upon the society of the second capital were both exploratory and diversionary. They offered a backcloth against which the conspirators could move with a freedom necessary to their work. They worked indefatigably — and only when the pressure of things became too great stole short holidays in the little summer lodge which Nessim had christened

‘Justine’s Summer Palace’; here they could read and write and bathe, and enjoy those friends who were closest to them — Clea and Amaril and Balthazar.

But always after these long evenings spent in a wilderness of conversation, a forest of plates and wine-bottles, they locked the doors, shot the great bolts themselves and turned sighing back to the staircase, leaving the sleepy domestics to begin the task of clearing up the debris ; for the house must be completely set to rights by morning; they walked slowly arm in arm, pausing to kick off their shoes on the first landing and to smile at each other in the great mirror. Then, to quieten their minds, they would take a slow turn up and down the picture-gallery, with its splendid collection of Impressionists, talking upon neutral topics while Nessim’s greedy eyes explored the great canvases slowly, mute testimony to the validity of private worlds and secret wishes.

So at last they came to those warm and beautifully furnished private bedrooms, adjoining one another, on the cool north side of the house. It was always the same; while Nessim lay down on the bed fully dressed, Justine lit the spirit-lamp to prepare the infusion of valerian which he always took to soothe his nerves before he slept. Here too she would set out the small card-table by the bed, and together they played a hand or two of cribbage or picquet as they talked, obsessively talked about the affairs which occupied their waking minds. At such times their dark, passionate faces glowed in the soft light with a sort of holiness conferred by secrecy, by the appetites of a shared will, by desires joined at the waist. Tonight it was the same. As she dealt the first hand, the telephone by the bed rang. Nessim picked up the receiver, listened for a second, and then passed it to her without a word. Smiling, she raised her eyebrows in interrogation and her husband nodded.

‘Hullo’ the hoarse voice counterfeited sleepiness, as if she had been woken from her bed. ‘Yes, my darling. Of course. No, I was awake. Yes, I am alone.’ Nessim quietly and methodically fanned out his hand and studied the cards without visible expression. The conversation ran stutteringly on and then the caller said goodnight and rang off. Sighing, Justine replaced the receiver, and then made a slow gesture, as of someone removing soiled gloves, or of someone disembarrassing herself of a skein of wool. ‘It was poor Darley’ she said, picking up her cards. Nessim raised his eyes for a moment, put down a card, and uttered a bid. As the game began, she started to talk again softly, as if to herself. ‘He is absolutely fascinated by the diaries. Remember? I used to copy out all Arnauti’s notes for Moeurs in my own handwriting when he broke his wrist. We had them bound up. All the parts which he did not use in the end. I have given them to Darley as my diary.’ She depressed her cheeks in a sad smile. ‘He accepts them as mine, and says, not unnaturally, that I have a masculine mind!

He also says my French is not very good — that would please Arnauti, wouldn’t it?’

‘I am sorry for him’ said Nessim quietly, tenderly. ‘He is so good. One day I will be quite honest, explain everything to him.’

‘But I don’t see your concern for the little Melissa’ said Justine, again as if engaged in a private debate rather than a conversation.

‘I have tried to sound him in every way. He knows nothing. I am convinced that she knows nothing. Just because she was Cohen’s mistress … I don’t know.’ Nessim laid down his cards and said: ‘I cannot get rid of a feeling she knows something. Cohen was a boastful and silly man and he certainly knew all that there was to know.’

‘But why should he tell her?’

‘It is simply that after his death, whenever I ran across her, she would look at me in a new way — as if in the light of something she had heard about me, a piece of new knowledge. It’s hard to describe.’ They played in silence until the kettle began to whine. Then Justine put down her cards, went across to prepare the valerian.

As he sipped it she went into the other room to divest herself of her jewellery. Sipping the cup, and staring reflectively at the wall, Nessim heard the small snap of her earrings as she plucked them off, and the small noise of the sleeping-tablets falling into a glass.