The Alexandria Quartet

  And so, slowly, reluctantly, I have been driven back to my starting-point, like a man who at the end of a tremendous journey is told that he has been sleepwalking. ‘Truth’ said Balthazar to me once, blowing his nose in an old tennis sock, ‘Truth is what most contradicts itself in time.’

  And Pursewarden on another occasion, but not less memorably: ‘If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!’

  How will I ever deliver myself from this whore among cities — sea, desert, minaret, sand, sea?

  No. I must set it all down in cold black and white, until such time as the memory and impulse of it is spent. I know that the key I am trying to turn is in myself.

  II

  Le cénacle Capodistria used to call us in those days when we gathered for an early morning shave in the Ptolemaic parlour of Mnemjian, with its mirrors and palms, its bead curtains and the delicious mimicry of clear warm water and white linen: a laying out and anointing of corpses. The violet-eyed hunchback himself officiated, for we were valued customers all (dead Pharaohs at the natron baths, guts and brains to be removed, renovated and replaced). He himself, the barber, was often unshaven having just hurried down from the hospital after shaving a corpse. Briefly we met here in the padded chairs, in the mirrors, before separating to go about our various tasks — Da Capo to see his brokers, Pombal to totter to the French consulate (mouth full of charred moths, hangover, sensation of having walked about all night on his eyeballs), I to teach, Scobie to the Police Bureau, and so on.…

  I have somewhere a faded flashlight photograph of this morning ritual, taken by poor John Keats, the Global Agency correspondent. It is strange to look at it now. The smell of the gravecloth is on it. It is a speaking likeness of an Alexandrian spring morning: quiet rubbing of coffee pestles, curdling crying of fat pigeons. I recognize my friends by the very sounds they make: Capodistria’s characteristic ‘Quatsch’ and ‘Pouagh’ at some political remark, followed by that dry cachinnation — the retching of a metal stomach; Scobie’s tobacco cough ‘Teuch, Teuch’: Pombal’s soft ‘Tiens’, like someone striking a triangle. ‘Tiens’.

  And in one corner there I am, in my shabby raincoat — the perfected image of a schoolteacher. In the other corner sits poor little Toto de Brunel. Keats’s photograph traps him as he is raising a ringed finger to his temple — the fatal temple.

  Toto! He is an original, a numéro. His withered witch’s features and small boy’s brown eyes, widow’s peak, queer art nouveau smile. He was the darling of old society women too proud to pay for gigolos. ‘Toto, mon chou, c’est toi!’ (Madame Umbada), ‘Comme il est charmant, ce Toto!’ (Athena Trasha). He lives on these dry crusts of approbation, an old woman’s man, with the dimples sinking daily deeper into the wrinkled skin of an ageless face, quite happy, I suppose. Yes.

  ‘Toto — comment vas-tu?’ — ‘Si heureux de vous voir, Madame Martinengo!’

  He was what Pombal scornfully called ‘a Gentleman of the Second Declension.’ His smile dug one’s grave, his kindness was anaesthetic. Though his fortune was small, his excesses trivial, yet he was right in the social swim. There was, I suppose, nothing to be done with him for he was a woman: yet had he been born one he would long since have cried himself into a decline. Lacking charm, his pederasty gave him a kind of illicit importance. ‘Homme serviable, homme gracieux’ (Count Banubula, General Cervoni — what more does one want?).

  Though without humour, he found one day that he could split sides. He spoke indifferent English and French, but whenever at loss for a word he would put in one whose meaning he did not know and the grotesque substitution was often delightful. This became his standard mannerism. In it, he almost reached poetry — as when he said ‘Some flies have come off my typewriter’ or ‘The car is trepanned today’ or ‘I ran so fast I got dandruff.’ He could do this in three languages. It excused him from learning them. He spoke a Toto-tongue of his own.

  Invisible behind the lens itself that morning stood Keats — the world’s sort of Good Fellow, empty of ill intentions. He smelt lightly of perspiration. C’est le métier qui exige. Once he had wanted to be a writer but took the wrong turning, and now his profession had so trained him to stay on the superficies of real life (acts and facts about acts) that he had developed the typical journalist’s neurosis (they drink to still it): namely that Something has happened, or is about to happen, in the next street, and that they will not know about it until it is too late to ‘send’. This haunting fear of missing a fragment of reality which one knows in advance will be trivial, even meaningless, had given our friend the conventional tic one sees in children who want to go to the lavatory — shifting about in a chair, crossing and uncrossing of legs. After a few moments of conversation he would nervously rise and say ‘I’ve just forgotten something — I won’t be a minute.’ In the street he would expel his breath in a swish of relief. He never went far but simply walked around the block to still the unease. Everything always seemed normal enough, to be sure. He would wonder whether to phone Mahmoud Pasha about the defence estimates or wait till tomorrow.… He had a pocketful of peanuts which he cracked in his teeth and spat out, feeling restless, unnerved, he did not know why. After a walk he would come trotting back into the café, or barber’s shop, beaming shyly, apologetically: an ‘Agency Man’ — our best-integrated modern type. There was nothing wrong with John except the level on which he had chosen to live his life — but you could say the same about his famous namesake, could you not?

  I owe this faded photograph to him. The mania to perpetuate, to record, to photograph everything! I suppose this must come from the feeling that you don’t enjoy anything fully, indeed are taking the bloom off it with every breath you draw. His ‘files’ were enormous, bulging with signed menus, bands off memorial cigars, postage stamps, picture postcards.… Later this proved useful, for somehow he had captured some of Pursewarden’s obiter dicta.

  Farther to the east sits good old big-bellied Pombal, under each eye a veritable diplomatic bag. Now here is someone on whom one can really lavish a bit of affection. His only preoccupation is with losing his job or being impuissant: the national worry of every Frenchman since Jean-Jacques. We quarrel a good deal, though amicably, for we share his little flat which is always full of un-considered trifles and trifles more considered: les femmes. But he is a good friend, a tender-hearted man, and really loves women. When I have insomnia or am ill: ‘Dis donc, tu vas bien?’ Roughly, in the manner of a bon copain. ‘Ecoute — tu veux une aspirine?’ or else ‘Ou bien — j’ai une jaune amie dans ma chambre si tu veux.…’ (Not a misprint: Pombal called all poules ‘jaunes femmes’.) ‘Hein? Elle n’est pas mal — et c’est tout payé, mon cher. Mais ce matin, moi je me sens un tout petit peu antiféministe — j’en ai marre, hein!’ Satiety fell upon him at such times. ‘Je deviens de plus en plus anthropophage he would say, rolling that comical eye. Also, his job worried him; his reputation was pretty bad, people were beginning to talk, especially after what he calls ‘l’affaire Sveva’; and yesterday the Consul-General walked in on him while he was cleaning his shoes on the Chancery curtains.… ‘Monsieur Pombal! Je suis obligé de vous faire quelques observations sur votre comportement officiel!’ Ouf! A reproof of the first grade.…

  It explains why Pombal now sits heavily in the photograph, debating all this with a downcast expression. Lately we have become rather estranged because of Melissa. He is angry that I have fallen in love with her, for she is only a dancer in a night-club, and as such unworthy of serious attention. There is also a question of snobbery, for she is virtually living at the flat now and he feels this to be demeaning: perhaps even diplomatically unwise.

  ‘Love’ says Toto ‘is a liquid fossil’ — a felicitous epigram in all conscience. Now to fall in love with a banker’s wife, that would be forgivable, though ridiculous.… Or would it? In Alexandria, it is only intrigue per se which is wholeheartedly admired; but to fall in love renders one ridiculous in society. (Pombal
is a provincial at heart.) I think of the tremendous repose and dignity of Melissa in death, the slender body bandaged and swaddled as if after some consuming and irreparable accident. Well.

  And Justine? On the day this picture was taken, Clea’s painting was interrupted by a kiss, as Balthazar says. How am I to make this comprehensible when I can only visualize these scenes with such difficulty? I must, it seems, try to see a new Justine, a new Pursewarden, a new Clea.… I mean that I must try and strip the opaque membrane which stands between me and the reality of their actions — and which I suppose is composed of my own limitations of vision and temperament. My envy of Pursewarden, my passion for Justine, my pity for Melissa. Distorting mirrors, all of them.… The way is through fact. I must record what more I know and attempt to render it comprehensible or plausible to myself, if necessary, by an act of the imagination. Or can facts be left to themselves? Can you say ‘he fell in love’ or ‘she fell in love’ without trying to divine its meaning, to set it in a context of plausibilities? ‘That bitch’ Pombal said once of Justine. ‘Elle a l’air d’être bien chambrée!’ And of Melissa ‘Une pauvre petite poule quelconque …’ He was right, perhaps, yet the true meaning of them resides elsewhere. Here, I hope, on this scribbled paper which I have woven, spider-like, from my inner life.

  And Scobie? Well, he at least has the comprehensibility of a diagram — plain as a national anthem. He looks particularly pleased this morning for he has recently achieved apotheosis. After years as a Bimbashi in the Egyptian Police, in what he calls ‘the evening of his life’ he has just been appointed to … I hardly dare to write the words for I can see his shudder of secrecy, can see his glass eye rolling portentously round in its socket … the Secret Service. He is not alive any more, thank God, to read the words and tremble. Yes, the Ancient Mariner, the secret pirate of Tatwig Street, the man himself. How much the city misses him. (His use of the word ‘uncanny’!).…

  Elsewhere I have recounted how I answered a mysterious summons to find myself in a room of splendid proportions with my erstwhile pirate friend facing me across a desk, whistling through his ill-fitting dentures. I think his new assignment was as much a puzzle to him as it was to me, his only confidant. It is true of course that he had been long in Egypt and knew Arabic well; but his career had been comparatively obscure. What could an intelligence agency hope to get out of him? More than this — what did he hope to get out of me? I had already explained in detail that the little circle which met every month to hear Balthazar expound the principles of the Cabbala had no connection with espionage; it was simply a group of hermetic students drawn by their interest in the matter of the lectures. Alexandria is a city of sects — and the shallowest inquiry would have revealed to him the existence of other groups akin to the one concerned with the hermetic philosophy which Balthazar addressed: Steinerites, Christian Scientists, Ouspenskyists, Adventists.… What was it that riveted attention particularly on Nessim, Justine, Balthazar, Capodistria, etc.? I could not tell, nor could he tell me.

  ‘They’re up to something’ he repeated weakly. ‘Cairo says so.’ Apparently, he did not even know who his own masters were. His work was invisibly dictated by a scrambler telephone, as far as I could understand. But whatever ‘Cairo’ was it paid him well: and if he had money to throw about on nonsensical investigations who was I to prevent him throwing it to me? I thought that my first few reports on Balthazar’s Cabal would successfully damp all interest in it — but no. They wanted more and again more.

  And this very morning, the old sailor in the photograph was celebrating his new post and the increase of salary it carried by having a haircut in the upper town, at the most expensive of shops — Mnemjian’s.

  I must not forget that this photograph also records a ‘Secret Rendezvous’; no wonder Scobie looks distraught. For he is surrounded by the very spies into whose activities it is necessary to inquire — not to mention a French diplomat who is widely rumoured to be head of the French Deuxième.…

  Normally Scobie would have found this too expensive an establishment to patronize, living as he did upon a tiny nautical pension and his exiguous Police salary. But now he is a great man.

  He did not dare even to wink at me in the mirror as the hunchback, tactful as a diplomat, elaborated a full-scale haircut out of mere air — for Scobie’s glittering dome was very lightly fringed by the kind of fluff one sees on a duckling’s bottom, and he had of late years sacrificed the torpedo beard of a wintry sparseness.

  ‘I must say’ he is about to say throatily (in the presence of so many suspicious people we ‘spies’ must speak ‘normally’), ‘I must say, old man, you get a spiffing treatment here, Mnemjian really does understand.’ Clearing his throat, ‘The whole art.’ His voice became portentous in the presence of technical terms. ‘It’s all a question of Graduation — I had a close friend who told me, a barber in Bond Street. You simply got to graduate.’ Mnemjian thanked him in his pinched ventriloquist’s voice. ‘Not at all’ said the old man largely. ‘I know the wrinkles.’ Now he could wink at me. I winked back. We both looked away.

  Released, he stood up, his bones creaking, and set his piratical jaw in a look of full-blooded health. He examined his reflection in the mirror with complacence. ‘Yes’ he said, giving a short authoritative nod, ‘it’ll do.’

  ‘Electric friction for scalp, sir?’

  Scobie shook his head masterfully as he placed his red flowerpot tarbush on his skull. ‘It brings me out in goose pimples’ he said, and then, with a smirk, ‘I’ll nourish what’s left with arak.’ Mnemjian saluted this stroke of wit with a little gesture. We were free.

  But he was really not elated at all. He drooped as we walked slowly down Chérif Pacha together towards the Grande Corniche. He struck moodily at his knee with the horsehair fly-swatter, puffing moodily at his much-mended briar. Thought. All he said with sudden petulance was ‘I can’t stand that Toto fellow. He’s an open nancy-boy. In my time we would have.…’ He grumbled away into his skin for a long time and then petered into silence again.

  ‘What is it, Scobie?’ I said.

  ‘I’m troubled’ he admitted. ‘Really troubled.’

  When he was in the upper town his walk and general bearing had an artificial swagger — it suggested a White Man at large, brooding upon problems peculiar to White Men — their Burden as they call it. To judge by Scobie, it hung heavy. His least gesture had a resounding artificiality, tapping his knees, sucking his lip, falling into brooding attitudes before shop windows. He gazed at the people around him as if from stilts. These gestures reminded me in a feeble way of the heroes of domestic English fiction who stand before a Tudor fireplace, impressively whacking their riding-boots with a bull’s pizzle.

  By the time we had reached the outskirts of the Arab quarter, however, he had all but shed these mannerisms. He relaxed, tipped his tarbush up to mop his brow, and gazed around him with the affection of long familiarity. Here he belonged by adoption, here he was truly at home. He would defiantly take a drink from the leaden spout sticking out of a wall near the Goharri mosque (a public drinking fountain) though the White Man in him must have been aware that the water was far from safe to drink. He would pick a stick of sugar-cane off a stall as he passed, to gnaw it in the open street: or a sweet locust-bean. Here, everywhere, the cries of the open street greeted him and he responded radiantly.

  ‘Y’alla, effendi, Skob’

  ‘Naharak said, ya Skob’

  ‘Allah salimak:’

  He would sigh and say ‘Dear people’; and ‘How I love the place you have no idea!’ dodging a liquid-eyed camel as it humped down the narrow street threatening to knock us down with its bulging sumpters of bercim, the wild clover which is used as fodder.

  ‘May your prosperity increase’

  ‘By your leave, my mother’

  ‘May your day be blessed’

  ‘Favour me, O sheik.’

  Scobie walked here with the ease of a man who has come into his own estate,
slowly, sumptuously, like an Arab.

  Today we sat together for a while in the shade of the ancient mosque listening to the clicking of the palms and the hooting of sea-going liners in the invisible basin below.

  ‘I’ve just seen a directive’ said Scobie at last, in a sad withered little voice ‘about what they call a Peddyrast. It’s rather shaken me, old man. I don’t mind admitting it — I didn’t know the word. I had to look it up. At all costs, it says, we must exclude them. They are dangerous to the security of the net.’ I gave a laugh and for a moment the old man showed signs of wanting to respond with a weak giggle, but his depression overtook the impulse, to leave it buried, a small hollowness in those cherry-red cheeks. He puffed furiously at his pipe. ‘Peddyrast’ he repeated with scorn, and groped for his matchbox.

  ‘I don’t think they quite understand at Home’ he said sadly. ‘Now the Egyptians, they don’t give a damn about a man if he has Tendencies — provided he’s the Soul of Honour, like me.’ He meant it. ‘But now, old man, if I am to work for the … You Know What … I ought to tell them — what do you say?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Scobie.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know’ he said sadly. ‘I want to be honest with them. It isn’t that I cause any harm. I suppose one shouldn’t have Tendencies — any more than warts or a big nose. But what can I do?’

  ‘Surely at your age very little?’

  ‘Below the belt’ said the pirate with a flash of his old form. ‘Dirty. Cruel. Narky.’ He looked archly at me round his pipe and suddenly cheered up. He began one of those delightful rambling monologues — another chapter in the saga he had composed around his oldest friend, the by now mythical Toby Mannering. ‘Toby was once Driven Medical by his excesses — I think I told you. No? Well, he was. Driven Medical.’ He was obviously quoting and with relish. ‘Lord how he used to go it as a young man. Stretched the limit in beating the bounds. Finally he found himself under the Doctor, had to wear an Appliance.’ His voice rose by nearly an octave. ‘He went about in a leopard-skin muff when he had shore leave until the Merchant Navy rose in a body. He was put away for six months. Into a Home. They said “You’ll have to have Traction” — whatever that is. You could hear him scream all over Tewkesbury, so Toby says. They say they cure you but they don’t. They didn’t him at any rate. After a bit, they sent him back. Couldn’t do anything with him. He was afflicted with Dumb Insolence, they said. Poor Toby!’