The Alexandria Quartet

  And now came another unexpected phenomenon — for the sky itself began to thicken above them as the water had below. The darkness was suddenly swollen with unidentifiable shapes for the jumpers had alerted the sleepers from the shores of the lakes, and with shrill incoherent cries the new visitants from the sedge-lined outer estuary joined in the hunt — hundreds of pelican, flamingo, crane and kingfisher — coming in on irregular trajectories to careen and swoop and snap at the jumping fish. The waters and the air alike seethed with life as the fishermen aligned their nets and began to scoop the swarming catch into the boats, or turned out their nets to let the rippling cascades of silver pour over the gunwales until the helmsmen were sitting ankle-deep in the squirming bodies. There would be enough and to spare for men and birds, and while the larger waders of the lake folded and unfolded awkward wings like old-fashioned painted parasols, or hovered in ungainly parcels above the snapping, leaping water, the kingfishers and herring-gulls came in from every direction at the speed of thunderbolts, half mad with greed and excitement, flying on suicidal courses, some to break their necks outright upon the decks of the boats, some to flash beak forward into the dark body of a fisherman to split open a cheek or a thigh in their terrifying cupidity. The splash of water, the hoarse cries, the snapping of beaks and wings, and the mad tattoo of the finger-drums gave the whole scene an unforgettable splendour, vaguely recalling to the mind of Mountolive forgotten Pharaonic frescoes of light and darkness.

  Here and there too the men began to fight off the birds, striking at the dark air around them with sticks until amid the swarming scrolls of captured fish one could see surprisingly rainbow feathers of magical hue and broken beaks from which blood trickled upon the silver scales of the fish. For three-quarters of an hour the scene continued thus until the dark boats were brimming. Now Nessim was alongside, shouting to them in the darkness. ‘We must go back.’ He pointed to a lantern waving across the water, creating a warm cave of light in which they glimpsed the smooth turning flanks of a horse and the serrated edge of palm-leaves. ‘My mother is waiting for us’ cried Nessim. His flawless head bent down to take the edge of a light-pool as he smiled. His was a Byzantine face such as one might find among the frescoes of Ravenna — almond-shaped, dark-eyed, clear-featured. But Mountolive was looking, so to speak, through the face of Nessim and into that of Leila who was so like him, his mother. ‘Narouz’ he called hoarsely, for the younger brother had jumped into the water to fasten a net. ‘Narouz!’ One could hardly make oneself heard in the commotion. ‘We must go back.’

  And so at last the two boats each with its Cyclops-eye of light turned back across the dark water to the far jetty where Leila waited patiently for them with the horses in the mosquito-loud silence. A young moon was up now.

  Her voice came laughingly across the variable airs of the lake, chiding them for being late, and Narouz chuckled. ‘We’ve brought lots of fish’ cried Nessim. She stood, slightly darker than the darkness, and their hands met as if guided by some perfected instinct which found no place in their conscious minds. Mountolive’s heart shook as he stood up and climbed on to the jetty with her help. But no sooner were the two brothers ashore than Narouz cried: ‘Race you home, Nessim’ and they dived for their horses which bucked and started at the laughing onslaught. ‘Careful’ she cried sharply, but before a second had passed they were off, hooves drumming on the soft rides of the embankment, Narouz chuckling like a Mephistopheles. ‘What is one to do?’ she said with mock resignation, and now the factor came forward with their own horses.

  They mounted and set off for the house. Ordering the servant to ride on before with the lantern, Leila brought her horse close in so that they might ride knee-to-knee, solaced by the touch of each other’s bodies. They had not been lovers for very long — barely ten days — though to the youthful Mountolive it seemed a century, an eternity of despair and delight. He had been formally educated in England, educated not to wish to feel. All the other valuable lessons he had already mastered, despite his youth — to confront the problems of the drawing-room and the street with sang-froid; but towards personal emotions he could only oppose the nervous silence of a national sensibility almost anaesthetized into clumsy taciturnity: an education in selected reticences and shames. Breeding and sensibility seldom march together, though the breach can be carefully disguised in codes of manners, forms of address towards the world. He had heard and read of passion, but had regarded it as something which would never impinge on him, and now here it was, bursting into the secret life which, like every overgrown schoolboy, lived on autonomously behind the indulgent screen of everyday manners and transactions, everyday talk and affections. The social man in him was overripe before the inner man had grown up. Leila had turned him out as one might turn out an old trunk, throwing everything into confusion. He suspected himself now to be only a mawkish and callow youth, his reserves depleted. With indignation almost, he realized that here at last there was something for which he might even be prepared to die — something whose very crudity carried with it a winged message which pierced to the quick of his mind. Even in the darkness he could feel himself wanting to blush. It was absurd. To love was absurd, like being knocked off the mantelpiece. He caught himself wondering what his mother would think if she could picture them riding among the spectres of these palm-trees by a lake which mirrored a young moon, knee touching knee. ‘Are you happy?’ she whispered and he felt her lips brush his wrist. Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds. ‘Mountolive’ she said again, ‘David darling.’ — ‘Yes.’ — ‘You are so quiet. I thought you must be asleep.’ Mountolive frowned, confronting his own dispersed inner nature. ‘I was thinking’ he said. Once more he felt her lips on his wrist.

  ‘Darling.’

  ‘Darling.’

  They rode on knee-to-knee until the old house came into view, built four-square upon the network of embankments which carved up the estuary and the sweet-water canals. The air was full of fruit-bats. The upper balconies of the house were brightly lit and here the invalid sat crookedly in his wheel-chair, staring jealously out at the night, waiting for them. Leila’s husband was dying of some obscure disease of the musculature, a progressive atrophy which cruelly emphasized the already great difference in their ages. His infirmity had hollowed him out into a cadaverous shell composed of rugs and shawls from which protruded two long sensitive hands. Saturnine of feature and with an uncouthness of mien which was echoed in his younger son’s face, his head was askew on his shoulders and in some lights resembled those carnival masks which are carried on poles. It only remains to be added that Leila loved him!

  ‘Leila loved him.’ In the silence of his own mind Mountolive could never think the words without mentally shrieking them like a parrot. How could she? He had asked himself over and over again. How could she?

  As he heard the hooves of the horses on the cobbles of the courtyard, the husband urged his wheel-chair forward to the balcony’s edge, calling testily: ‘Leila, is that you?’ in the voice of an old child ready to be hurt by the warmth of her smile thrown upwards to him from the ground and the deep sweet contralto in which she answered him, mixing oriental submissiveness with the kind of comfort which only a child could understand. ‘Darling’. And running up the long wooden flights of stairs to embrace him, calling out ‘We are all safely back.’ Mountolive slowly dismounted in the courtyard, hearing the sick man’s sigh of relief. He busied himself with an unnecessary tightening of a girth rather than see them embrace. He was not jealous, but his incredulity pierced and wounded him. It was hateful to be young, to be maladroit, to feel carried out of one’s depth. How had all this come about? He felt a million miles away from England; his past had sloughed from him like a skin. The warm night was fragrant with jasmine and roses. Later if she came to his room he would become as still as a needle, speechless and thoughtless, taking that strangely youthful body
in his arms almost without desire or regrets; his eyes closed then, like a man standing under an icy waterfall. He climbed the stairs slowly; she had made him aware that he was tall, upright and handsome.

  ‘Did you like it, Mountolive?’ croaked the invalid, with a voice in which floated (like oil in water) pride and suspicion. A tall negro servant wheeled a small table forward on which the decanter of whisky stood — a world of anomalies: to drink ‘sundowners’ like colonials in this old rambling house full of magnificent carpets, walls covered with assegais captured at Omdurman, and weird Second Empire furniture of a Turkish cast. ‘Sit’ he said, and Mountolive, smiling at him, sat, noticing that even here in the reception rooms there were books and periodicals lying about — symbols of the unsatisfied hunger for thought which Leila had never allowed to master her. Normally, she kept her books and papers in the harim, but they always overflowed into the house. Her husband had no share of this world. She tried as far as possible not to make him conscious of it, dreading his jealousy which had become troublesome as his physical incapacity increased. His sons were washing — somewhere Mountolive heard the sound of pouring water. Soon he would excuse himself and retire to change into a white suit for dinner. He drank and talked to the crumpled man in the wheel-chair in his low melodious voice. It seemed to him terrifying and improper to be the lover of his wife; and yet he was always breathless with surprise to see how naturally and simply Leila carried off the whole deception. (Her cool honeyed voice, etc.; he should try not to think of her too much.) He frowned and sipped his drink.

  It had been quite difficult to find his way out to the lands to present his letter of introduction: the motor road still only ran as far as the ford, after which horses had to be used to reach the house among the canals. He had been marooned for nearly an hour before a kindly passer-by had offered him a horse on which he reached his destination. That day there had been nobody at home save the invalid. Mountolive noticed with some amusement that in reading the letter of introduction, couched in the flowery high style of Arabic, the invalid muttered aloud the conventional politenesses of reciprocity to the compliments he was reading just as if the writer of the letter had himself been present. Then at once he looked up tenderly into the face of the young Englishman and spoke, and Mountolive softly answered. ‘You will come and stay with us — it is the only way to improve your Arabic. For two months if you wish. My sons know English and will be delighted to converse with you; my wife also. It would be a blessing to them to have a new face, a stranger in the house. And my dear Nessim, though still so young, is in his last year at Oxford.’ Pride and pleasure glowed in his sunken eyes for a minute and flickered out to give place to the customary look of pain and chagrin. Illness invites contempt. A sick man knows it.

  Mountolive had accepted, and by renouncing both home and local leave had obtained permission to stay for two months in the house of this Coptic squire. It was a complete departure from everything he had known to be thus included in the pattern of a family life based in and nourished by the unconscious pageantry of a feudalism which stretched back certainly as far as the Middle Ages, and perhaps beyond. The world of Burton, Beckford, Lady Hester.… Did they then still exist? But here, seen from the vantage point of someone inside the canvas his own imagination had painted, he had suddenly found the exotic becoming completely normal. Its poetry was irradiated by the unconsciousness with which it was lived. Mountolive who had already found the open sesame of language ready to hand, suddenly began to feel himself really penetrating a foreign country, foreign moeurs, for the first time. He felt as one always feels in such a case, namely the vertiginous pleasure of losing an old self and growing a new one to replace it. He felt he was slipping, losing so to speak the contours of himself. Is this the real meaning of education? He had begun transplanting a whole huge intact world from his imagination into the soil of his new life.

  The Hosnani family itself was oddly assorted. The graceful Nessim and his mother were familiars of the spirit, belonging to the same intense world of intelligence and sensibility. He, the eldest son, was always on the watch to serve his mother, should she need a door opened or a handkerchief recovered from the ground. His English and French were perfect, impeccable as his manners, graceful and strong as his physique. Then, facing them across the candle-light, sat the other two: the invalid in his rugs, and the younger son, tough and brutish as a mastiff and with an indefinable air of being ready at any moment to answer a call to arms. Heavily built and ugly, he was nevertheless gentle; but you could see from the loving way he drank in each word uttered by his father where his love-allegiance lay. His simplicity shone in his eyes, and he too was ready to be of service, and indeed, when the work of the lands did not take him from the house, was always quick to dismiss the silent boy-servant who stood behind the wheel-chair and to serve his father with a glowing pride, glad even to pick him up bodily and take him tenderly, almost gloatingly to the lavatory. He regarded his mother with something like the pride and childish sadness which shone in the eyes of the cripple. Yet, though the brothers were divided in this way like twigs of olive, there was no breach between them — they were of the same branch and felt it, and they loved one another dearly, for they were in truth complementaries, the one being strong where the other was weak. Nessim feared bloodshed, manual work and bad manners: Narouz rejoiced in them all. And Leila? Mountolive of course found her a beautiful enigma when he might, had he been more experienced, have recognized in her naturalness a perfect simplicity of spirit and in her extravagant nature a temperament which had been denied its true unfolding, had fallen back with good grace among compromises. This marriage, for example, to a man so much older than herself had been one of arrangement — this was still Egypt. The fortunes of her family had been matched against the fortunes of the Hosnanis — it resembled, as all such unions do, a merger between two great companies. Whether she was happy or unhappy she herself had never thought to consider. She was hungry, that was all, hungry for the world of books and meetings which lay forever outside this old house and the heavy charges of the land which supported their fortunes. She was obedient and pliant, loyal as a finely-bred animal. Only a disorienting monotony beset her. When young she had completed her studies in Cairo brilliantly and for a few years nourished the hope of going to Europe to continue them. She had wanted to be a doctor. But at this time the women of Egypt were lucky if they could escape the black veil — let alone the narrow confines of Egyptian thought and society. Europe for the Egyptians was simply a shopping centre for the rich to visit. Naturally, she went several times to Paris with her parents and indeed fell in love with it as we all do, but when it came to attempting to breach the barriers of Egyptian habit and to escape the parental net altogether — escape into a life which might have nourished a clever brain — there she struck upon the rock of her parents’ conservatism. She must marry and make Egypt her home, they said coldly, and selected for her among the rich men of their acquaintance the kindliest and the most able they could find. Standing upon the cliff edge of these dreams, still beautiful and rich (and indeed, in Alexandrian society she was known as ‘the dark swallow’) Leila found everything becoming shadowy and insubstantial. She must conform. Of course, nobody would mind her visiting Europe with her husband every few years to shop or have a holiday.… But her life must belong to Egypt.

  She gave in, responding at first with despair, later with resignation, to the life they had designed for her. Her husband was kind and thoughtful, but mentally something of a dullard. The life sapped her will. Her loyalty was such that she immersed herself in his affairs, living because he wished it far from the only capital which bore the remotest traces of a European way of life — Alexandria. For years now she had surrendered herself to the blunting airs of the Delta, and the monotony of life on the Hosnani lands. She lived mostly through Nessim who was being educated largely abroad and whose rare visits brought some life to the house. But to allay her own active curiosity about the world, she subscribed to books
and periodicals in the four languages which she knew as well as her own, perhaps better, for nobody can think or feel only in the dimensionless obsolescence of Arabic. So it had been for many years now, a battle of resignations in which the element of despair only arose in the form of nervous illnesses for which her husband prescribed a not unintelligent specific — a ten-day holiday in Alexandria which always brought the colour back into her cheeks. But even these visits became in time more rare: she had insensibly slipped out of society and found herself less and less practised in the small talk and small ideas upon which it is based. The life of the city bored her. It was shallow as the waters of the great lake itself, derived; her powers of introspection sharpened with the years, and as her friends fell away only a few names and faces remained — Balthazar the doctor, for example, and Amaril and a few others. But Alexandria was soon to belong more fully to Nessim than to herself. When his studies ended he was to be conscripted into the banking house with its rapidly ramifying ancillaries, roots pushing out into shipping and oil and tungsten, roots needing water.… But by this time she would have become virtually a hermit.

  This lonely life had made her feel somewhat unprepared for Mountolive, for the arrival of a stranger in their midst. On that first day she came in late from a desert ride and slipped into her place between her husband and his guest with some pleasurable excitement. Mountolive hardly looked at her, for the thrilling voice alone set up odd little vibrations in his heart which he registered but did not wish to study. She wore white jodhpurs and a yellow shirt with a scarf. Her smooth small hands were white and ringless. Neither of her sons appeared at lunch that day, and after the meal it was she who elected to show him round the house and gardens, already pleasantly astonished by the young man’s respectable Arabic and sound French. She treated him with the faintly apprehensive solicitude of a woman towards her only man-child. His genuine interest and desire to learn filled her with the emotions of a gratitude which surprised her. It was absurd; but then never had a stranger shown any desire to study and assess them, their language, religion and habits. And Mountolive’s manners were as perfect as his self-command was weak. They both walked about the rose-garden hearing each other’s voices in a sort of dream. They felt short of breath, almost as if they were suffocating.