The Alexandria Quartet

  For a long time the figure stood there, as if in deep thought, perhaps listening. Then it shook its head once, slowly, and after a moment turned away with an air of perplexity to dissolve slowly on the glass. As it turned it seemed to slip something into the right-hand pocket of its coat. We heard the steps slowly diminishing — a dull descending scale of notes — on the iron ladder in the well. We neither of us spoke, but turned as if with deepened concentration to the little black radio from which the voice of Nessim still flowed with uninterrupted urbanity and gentleness. It seemed impossible that he could be in two places at once. It was only when the announcer informed us that the speech had been recorded that we understood. Why did he not open the door?

  I suppose the truth is that he had been seized by the vertiginous uncertainty which, in a peaceable nature, follows upon a decision to act. Something had been building itself up inside him all this time, grain by grain, until the weight of it had become insupportable. He was aware of a profound interior change in his nature which had at last shaken off the long paralysis of impotent love which had hitherto ruled his actions. The thought of some sudden concise action, some determining factor for good or evil, presented itself to him as an intoxicating novelty. He felt (or so I divined it) like a gambler about to stake the meagre remains of a lost fortune upon one desperate throw. But the nature of his action had not yet been decided upon. What form should it take? A mass of uneasy fantasies burst in.

  Let us suppose that two major currents had reached their confluence in this desire to act; on the one hand the dossier which his agents had collected upon Justine had reached such proportions that it could not be ignored; on the other he was haunted by a new and fearful thought which for some reason had not struck him before — namely that Justine was really falling in love at last. The whole temper of her personality seemed to be changing; for the first time she had become reflective, thoughtful, and full of the echoes of a sweetness which a woman can always afford to spend upon the man she does not love. You see, he too had been dogging her steps through the pages of Arnauti.

  ‘Originally I believed that she must be allowed to struggle towards me through the jungle of the Check. Whenever the wounding thought of her infidelity came upon me I reminded myself that she was not a pleasure-seeker, but a hunter of pain in search of herself — and me. I thought that if one man could release her from herself she would then become accessible to all men, and so to me who had most claim upon her. But when I began to see her melting like a summer ice-cap, a horrible thought came to me: namely that he who broke the Check must keep her forever, since the peace he gave her was precisely that for which she was hunting so frantically through our bodies and fortunes. For the first time my jealousy, helped forward by my fear, mastered me.’ He might have explained it thus.

  Yet it has always seemed fantastic to me that even now he was jealous of everyone except the true author of Justine’s present concern — myself. Despite the overwhelming mass of evidence he hardly dared to allow himself to suspect me. It was not love that is blind, but jealousy. It was a long time before he could bring himself to trust the mass of documentation his agents had piled up around us, around our meetings, our behaviour. But by now the facts had obtruded themselves so clearly that there was no possibility of error. The problem was how to dispose of me — I do not mean in the flesh so much. For I’d become merely an image standing in his light. He saw me perhaps dying, perhaps going away. He did not know. The very uncertainty was exciting to the pitch of drunkenness. Of course I am only supposing this.

  But side by side with these preoccupations were others — the posthumous problems which Arnauti had been unable to solve and which Nessim had been following up with true Oriental curiosity over a period of years. He was now near to the man with the black patch over one eye — nearer than any of us had ever been. Here was another piece of knowledge which as yet he could not decide how best to use. If Justine was really ridding herself of him, however, what good would there be in revenging himself upon the true person of the mysterious being? On the other hand if I was about to step into the place vacated by the image? …

  I asked Selim point-blank whether he had ever visited my flat to warn one-eyed Hamid. He did not reply but lowered his head and said under his breath, ‘My master is not himself these days.’

  Meanwhile my own fortunes had taken an absurd and unexpected turn. One night there came a banging on the door and I opened it to admit the dapper figure of an Egyptian Army officer clad in resplendent boots and tarbush, carrying under his arm a giant fly-whisk with an ebony handle. Yussouf Bey spoke nearly perfect English, allowing it to fall negligently from his lips, word by well-chosen word, out of an earnest coal-black face fitted with a dazzle of small perfect teeth like seed-pearls. He had some of the endearing solemnity of a talking water-melon just down from Cambridge. Hamid brought him habitual coffee and a sticky liqueur, and over it he told me that a great friend of mine in a high position very much wished to see me. My thoughts at once turned to Nessim; but this friend, the water-melon asserted, was an Englishman, an official. More he could not say. His mission was confidential. Would I go with him and visit my friend?

  I was full of misgivings. Alexandria, outwardly so peaceful, was not really a safe place for Christians. Only last week Pombal had come home with a story of the Swedish vice-consul whose car had broken down on the Matrugh road. He had left his wife alone in it while he walked to the nearest telephone-point in order to ring up the consulate and ask them to send out another car. He had arrived back to find her body sitting normally on the back seat — without a head. Police were summoned and the whole district was combed. Some Bedouin encamped nearby were among those interrogated. While they were busy denying any knowledge of the accident, out of the apron of one of the women rolled the missing head. They had been trying to extract the gold teeth which had been such an unpleasant feature of her party-smile. This sort of incident was not sufficiently uncommon to give one courage in visiting strange quarters of the town after dark, so it was with no feeling of jauntiness that I followed the soldier into the back of a staff-car behind a uniformed driver and saw myself being whirled towards the seedier quarters of the town. Yussouf Bey stroked his neat little brush-stroke moustache with the anticipatory air of a musician tuning an instrument. It was useless to question him further: I did not wish to betray any of the anxiety I felt. So I made a sort of inner surrender to the situation, lit a cigarette, and watched the long dissolving strip of the Corniche flow past us.

  Presently the car dropped us and the soldier led me on foot through a straggle of small streets and alleys near the Rue Des Soeurs. If the object here was to make me lose myself it succeeded almost immediately. He walked with a light self-confident step, humming under his breath. Finally we debouched into a suburban street full of merchants’ stores and stopped before a great carved door which he pushed open after having first rung a bell. A courtyard with a stunted palm-tree; the path which crossed it was punctuated by a couple of feeble lanterns standing on the gravel. We crossed it and ascended some stairs to where a frosted electric light bulb gleamed harshly above a tall white door. He knocked, entered and saluted in one movement. I followed him into a large, rather elegant and warmly-lighted room with neat polished floors enhanced by fine Arab carpets. In one corner seated at a high inlaid desk with the air of a man riding a penny-farthing sat Scobie, with a scowl of self-importance overlapping the smile of welcome with which he greeted me. ‘My God’ I said. The old pirate gave a Drury Lane chuckle and said: ‘At last, old man, at last.’ He did not rise however but sat on in his uncomfortable high-backed chair, tarbush on head, whisk on knee, with a vaguely impressive air. I noticed an extra pip on his shoulder, betokening heaven knows what increase of rank and power. ‘Sit down, old man’ he said with an awkward sawing movement of the hand which bore a faint resemblance to a Second Empire gesture. The soldier was dismissed and departed grinning. It seemed to me that Scobie did not look very much at ease in these
opulent surroundings. He had a slightly defensive air. ‘I asked them to get hold of you’ he said, sinking his voice to a theatrical whisper ‘for a very special reason.’ There were a number of green files on his desk and a curiously disembodied-looking tea-cosy. I sat down.

  He now rose quickly and opened the door. There was nobody outside. He opened the window. There was no one standing on the sill. He placed the tea-cosy over the desk telephone and reseated himself. Then, leaning forward and speaking carefully, he rolled his glass eye at me as with a conspiratorial solemnity he said: ‘Not a word to anyone, old man. Swear you won’t say a word’. I swore. ‘They’ve made me head of the Secret Service.’ The words fairly whistled in his dentures. I nodded in amazement. He drew a deep sucking breath as if he had been delivered of a weight and went on. ‘Old boy, there’s going to be a war. Inside information.’ He pointed a long finger at his own temple. ‘There’s going to be a war. The enemy is working night and day, old boy, right here among us.’ I could not dispute this. I could only marvel at the new Scobie who confronted me like a bad magazine illustration. ‘You can help us scupper them, old man’ he went on with a devastating air of authority. ‘We want to take you on our strength.’ This sounded most agreeable. I waited for details. ‘The most dangerous gang of all is right here, in Alexandria’ the old man creaked and boomed, ‘and you are in the centre of it. All friends of yours.’

  I saw through the knotted eyebrows and the rolling excited eye the sudden picture of Nessim, a brief flash, as of intuition, sitting at his huge desk in the cold steel-tube offices watching a telephone ring while the beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He was expecting a message about Justine — one more twist of the knife. Scobie shook his head. ‘Not him so much’ he said. ‘He’s in it, of course. The leader is a man called Balthazar. Look what the censorship have been picking up.’

  He extracted a card from a file and passed it to me. Balthazar writes an exquisite hand and the writing was obviously his; but I could not help smiling when I saw that the reverse of the postcard contained only the little chessboard diagram of the boustrophedon. Greek letters filled up the little squares. ‘He’s got so much damn cheek he sends them through the open post.’ I studied the diagram and tried to remember the little I had learned from my friend of the calculus. ‘It’s a nine-power system. I can’t read this one’ I said. Scobie added breathlessly: ‘They have regular meetings, old man, to pool information. We know this for a fact.’ I held the postcard lightly in my fingers and seemed to hear the voice of Balthazar saying: ‘The thinker’s job is to be suggestive: that of the saint to be silent about his discovery.’

  Scobie was leaning back in his chair now with unconcealed self-satisfaction. He had puffed himself out like a pouter-pigeon. He took his tarbush off his head, looked at it with an air of complaisant patronage, and placed it on the tea-cosy. Then he scratched his fissured skull with bony fingers and went on — ‘We simply can’t break the code’ he said. ‘We’ve got dozens of them’ — he indicated a file full of photostatic reproductions of similar postcards. ‘They’ve been round the code-rooms: even to the Senior Wranglers in the Universities. No good, old man.’ This did not surprise me. I laid the postcard on the pile of photostats and returned to the contemplation of Scobie. ‘That is where you come in’ he said with a grimace, ‘if you will come in, old man. We want you to break the code however long it takes you. We’ll put you on a damn good screw, too. What do you say?’

  What could I say? The idea was too delightful to be allowed to melt. Besides during the last months my schoolwork had fallen off so much that I was sure my contract was not going to be renewed at the end of the present term. I was always arriving late from some meeting with Justine. I hardly bothered to correct papers any more. I had become irritable and surly with my colleagues and directors. Here was a chance to become my own man. I heard Justine’s voice in my head saying: ‘Our love has become like some fearful misquotation in a popular saying’ as I leaned forward once more and nodded my head. Scobie expelled a breath of relieved pleasure and relaxed once more into the pirate. He confided his office to an anonymous Mustapha who apparently dwelt somewhere in the black telephone — Scobie always looked into the mouthpiece as he spoke, as if into a human eye. We left the building together and allowed a staff car to take us down towards the sea. Further details of my employment could be discussed over the little bottle of brandy in the bottom of the cake-stand by his bed.

  We allowed ourselves to be dropped on the Corniche and walked together the rest of the way by a brilliant bullying moonlight, watching the old city dissolve and reassemble in the graphs of evening mist, heavy with the inertia of its surrounding desert, of the green alluvial Delta which soaked into its very bones, informing its values. Scobie talked inconsequently of this and that. I remember him bemoaning the fact that he had been left an orphan at an early age. His parents had been killed together under dramatic circumstances which gave him much food for reflection. ‘My father was an early pioneer of motoring, old man. Early road races, flat out at twenty miles an hour — all that sort of thing. He had his own landau. I can see him now sitting behind the wheel with a big moustache. Colonel Scobie, M.C. A Lancer he was. My mother sat beside him, old man. Never left his side, not even for road races. She used to act as his mechanic. The newspapers always had pictures of them at the start, sitting up there in bee-keeper’s veils — God knows why the pioneers always wore those huge veils. Dust, I suppose.’

  The veils had proved their undoing. Rounding a hairpin in the old London–Brighton road-race his father’s veil had been sucked into the front axle of the car they were driving. He had been dragged into the road, while his companion had careered on to smash headlong into a tree. ‘The only consolation is that that is just how he would have liked to go out. They were leading by quarter of a mile.’

  I have always been very fond of ludicrous deaths and had great difficulty in containing my laughter as Scobie described this misadventure to me with portentous rotations of his glass eye. Yet as he talked and I listened to this, half my thoughts were running upon a parallel track, busy about the new job I was to undertake, assessing it in terms of the freedom it offered me. Later that night Justine was to meet me near Montaza — the great car purring like a moth in the palm-cooled dusk of the road. What would she say to it? She would be delighted of course to see me freed from the shackles of my present work. But a part of her would groan inwardly at the thought that this relief would only create for us further chances to consort, to drive home our untruth, to reveal ourselves more fully than ever to our judges. Here was another paradox of love; that the very thing which brought us closer together — the boustrophedon — would, had we mastered the virtues which it illustrated, have separated us forever — I mean in the selves which preyed upon each other’s infatuated images.

  ‘Meanwhile’ as Nessim was to say in those gentle tones so full of the shadowy sobriety which comes into the voice of those who have loved truly and failed to be loved in return, ‘meanwhile I was dwelling in the midst of a vertiginous excitement for which there was no relief except through an action the nature of which I could not discern. Tremendous bursts of self-confidence were succeeded by depressions so deep that it seemed I would never recover from them. With a vague feeling that I was preparing myself for a contest — as an athlete does — I began to take fencing lessons and learned to shoot with a pocket automatic. I studied the composition and effects of poisons from a manual of toxicology which I borrowed from Dr Fuad Bey.’ (I am inventing only the words.)

  He had begun to harbour feelings which would not yield to analysis. The periods of intoxication were followed by others in which he felt, as if for the first time, the full weight of his loneliness : an inner agony of spirit for which, as yet, he could find no outward expression, either in paint or in action. He mused now incessantly upon his early years, full of a haunting sense of richness : his mother’s shadowy house among the palms and poinsettias of Aboukir: the waters pull
ing and slithering among the old fort’s emplacements, compiling the days of his early childhood in single condensed emotions born from visual memory. He clutched at these memories with a terror and clarity he had never experienced before. And all the time, behind the screen of nervous depression — for the incomplete action which he meditated lay within him like a coitus interruptus — there lived the germ of a wilful and uncontrolled exaltation. It was as if he were being egged on, to approach nearer and nearer… to what exactly? He could not tell; but here his ancient terror of madness stepped in and took possession of him, disturbing his physical balance, so that he suffered at times from attacks of vertigo which forced him to grope around himself like a blind man for something upon which to sit down — a chair or sofa. He would sit down, panting slightly and feeling the sweat beginning to start out on his forehead; but with relief that nothing of his interior struggle was visible to the casual onlooker. Now too he noticed that he involuntarily repeated phrases aloud to which his conscious mind refused to listen. ‘Good’ she heard him tell one of his mirrors, ‘so you are falling into a neurasthenia!’ And later as he was stepping out into the brilliant starlit air, dressed in his well-cut evening clothes Selim, at the wheel of the car, heard him add: ‘I think this Jewish fox has eaten my life.’