The Alexandria Quartet

  As the door closed behind her he sat down once more and raised his cup of tea to his lips as he stared unwinkingly and with distaste into the dog’s lustreless eyes. The clock chimed softly on the mantelpiece. It was time to be going to the office. There was much to be done. He had promised to finish the definitive economic report in time for this week’s bag. He must bully the bag room about that portrait of himself. He must.…

  Yet he sat on looking at the dispirited little creature on the mat and feeling suddenly as if he had been engulfed in a tidal wave of human contumely — so expressed by his admirers in this unwanted gift. He was to be garde-malade, a male nurse to a short-legged lap dog. Was this now the only way left of exorcizing his sadness… ? He sighed, and sighing pressed the bell.…

  XVI

  The day of his death was like any other winter day at Karm Abu Girg; or if it was different it was only in one small and puzzling detail, the significance of which did not strike him at first: the servants suddenly ebbing away to leave him alone in the house. All night long now he lay in troubled sleep among the luxuriant growths of his own fantasy, dense as a tropical vegetation; only waking from time to time to be comforted by the soft whewing of the cranes flying overhead in the darkness. It was full winter and the great bird migrations had begun. The long vitreous expanses of the lake had begun to fill up with their winged visitants like some great terminus. All night long one could hear the flights come in — the thick whirring of mallard-wings or the metallic kraonk kraonk of high-flying geese as they bracketed the winter moon. Among the thickets of reed and sedge, in places polished to black or viper-green by the occasional clinging frosts, you could hear the chuckling and gnatting of royal duck. The old house with its mildewed walls where the scorpions and fleas hibernated among the dusty interstices of the earth-brick felt very empty and desolate to him now that Leila had gone. He marched defiantly about it, making as much noise as he could with his boots, shouting at the dogs, cracking his whip across the courtyard. The little toy figures with windmill arms which lined the walls against the ubiquitous evil eye, worked unceasingly, flurried by the winter winds. Their tiny celluloid propellers made a furry sound as they revolved which was somehow comforting.

  Nessim had pleaded hard with him to accompany Leila and Justine but he had refused — and indeed behaved like a bear though he knew in truth that without his mother the loneliness of the house would be hard to support. He had locked himself into the egg-incubators, and to his brother’s feverish knocking and shouting had opposed a bitter silence. There had been no way of explaining things to Nessim. He would not emerge even when Leila came to plead with him — for fear that his resolve might weaken under her importunities. He had crouched there in silence with his back against the wall, his fist crammed into his mouth to stifle the noiseless sobbing — how heavy was the guilt one bore for filial disobedience! They had abandoned him at last. He heard the horses clatter out of the courtyard. He was alone.

  Then after that a whole month of silence before he heard his brother’s voice on the telephone. Narouz had walked all day long in a forest of his own heart-beats, attending to the work of the land with a concentrated fury of purpose, galloping along the slow-moving river of his inheritance on horseback, his reflection flying beside him: always with the great whip coiled at his saddle-bow. He felt immeasurably aged now — and yet, at one and the same time, as new to the world as a foetus hanging from the birth-cord. The land, his land, now brown and greasy as an old wineskin under the rain, compelled him. It was all he had left now to care for — trees bruised by frost, sand poisoned by desert salt, water-pans stocked with fish and geese; and silences all day except for the sighing and the groaning of the water-wheels with their eternal message (‘Alexander has asses’ ears’) carried away by the winds to the further corners of the land, to pollinate history once more with the infectious memory of the soldier-god; or the suck and pluck of the black ‘forehead-smasher’ buffalo wallowing in the ooze of the dykes. And then at night the haunting plural syllables of the duck deploying in darkness, calling to one another in anxiety or content — travellers’ codes. Screens of mist, low-lying clouds through which the dawns and sunsets burst with unexampled splendour each one the end of a world, a dying into amethyst and nacre.

  Normally, this would be the hunter’s season which he loved, brisk with great woodfires and roving gun-dogs: time for the dousing of boots with bear’s fat, for the tuning in of the long punt-guns, the sorting out of shot, the painting of decoys.… This year he had not even the heart to join in the great annual duck-shoot given by Nessim. He felt cut off, in a different world. He wore the bitter revengeful face of a communicant refused absolution. He could no longer exorcize his sadness privately with a dog and gun; he thought only of Taor now, and the dreams he shared with her — the fierce possessive recognition of his dedicated role here, among his own lands, and in the whole of Egypt.… These confusing dreams interlinked, overlapped, intersected — like so many tributaries of the great river itself. Even Leila’s love threatened them now — was like some brilliant parasite ivy which strangles the growth of a tree. He thought vaguely and without contempt of his brother still there in the city — (he was not to leave until later) — moving among people as insubstantial as waxworks, the painted society women of Alexandria. If he thought at all of his love for Clea it was for a love left now like some shining coin, forgotten in a beggar’s pocket.… Thus, galloping in savage exultation along moss-green wharves and embankments of the estuary with its rotting palms fretted by the wind, thus he lived.

  Once last week Ali had reported the presence of unknown men upon the land, but he had not given the matter a thought. Often a stray Bedouin took a short cut across the plantations or a stranger rode through the property bound for the road to the city. He was more interested when Nessim telephoned to say that he would be visiting Karm Abu Girg with Balthazar who wished to investigate reports of a new species of duck which had been seen on the lake. (From the roof of the house one could sweep the whole estuary with a powerful glass.)

  This indeed was what he was doing now, at this very moment. Tree by tree, reed-patch by reed-patch, turning a patient and curious eye upon the land through his ancient telescope. It lay, mysterious, unpeopled and silent in the light of the dawn. He intended to spend the whole day out there among the plantations in order to avoid, if possible, seeing his brother. But now the defection of the servants was puzzling, and indeed, inexplicable. Usually when he woke he roared for Ali who brought him a large copper can with a long spout full of hot water and sluiced him down as he stood in the battered Victorian hip-bath, gasping and hissing. But today? The courtyard was silent, and the room in which Ali slept was locked. The key hung in its place upon the nail outside. There was not a soul about.

  With sudden quick strides he climbed to the balcony for his telescope and then mounted the outer wooden staircase to the roof to stand among the turrets of the dovecots and scan the Hosnani lands. A long patient scrutiny revealed nothing out of the ordinary. He grunted and snapped the glass shut. He would have to fend for himself today. He climbed down from his perch and taking the old leather game-bag made his way to the kitchens to fill it with food. Here he found coflfee simmering and some pans set to heat upon the charcoal fire, but no trace of the cooks. Grumbling, he helped himself to a snag of bread which he munched while he assembed some food for lunch. Then an idea struck him. In the courtyard, his shrill angry whistle would normally have brought the gun-dogs growling and fawning about his boots from wherever they had taken refuge from the cold; but today the empty echo of his own whistle was all that the wind threw back to him. Had Ali perhaps taken them out on some excursion of his own? It did not seem likely. He whistled again more loudly and waited, his feet set squarely apart in his jackboots, his hands upon his hips. There was no answer. He went round to the stables and found his horse. Everything was perfectly normal here. He saddled and bridled it and led it round to the hitching post. Then he went upstairs for
his whip. As he coiled it, another thought struck him. He turned into the living-room and took a revolver from the writing-desk, checking it to see that the chambers were primed. He stuck this in his belt.

  Then he set out, riding softly and circumspectly towards the east, for he proposed first of all to make an exploratory circuit of the land before plunging into the dense green plantations where he wished to spend the day. It was crisp weather, rapidly clearing, the marsh-mist full of evanescent shapes and contours but rising fast. Horse and rider moved with smooth deftness along the familiar ways. He reached the desert fringe in half an hour, having seen nothing untoward though he looked about him carefully under his bushy brows. On the soft ground the horse’s hooves made little noise. In the eastern corner of the plantation, he halted for a good ten minutes, combing the landscape once more with his telescope. And once more there was nothing of particular importance. He neglected none of the smaller signs which might indicate a foreign visitation, tracks in the desert, footmarks on the soft embankment by the ferry. The sun was rising slowly but the land slept in its thinning mist. At one place he dismounted to check the depth-pumps, listening to their sullen heart-beats with pleasure, greasing a lever here and there. Then he remounted and turned his horse’s head towards the denser groves of the plantations with their cherished Tripoli olives and acacia, their humus-giving belts of juniper, the wind-breaks of rattling Indian corn. He was still on the alert, however, and rode in short swift spurts, reining in every now and again to listen for a full minute. Nothing but the distant gabble of birds, the slither of flamingo-wings on the lake-water, the melodious horns of teal or the splendour (as of a tuba in full pomp) of honking geese. All familiar, all known. He was still puzzled but not ill at ease.

  He made his way at last to the great nubk tree standing up starkly in its clearing, its great trophied branches dripping with condensing mist. Here, long ago, he had stood and prayed with Mountolive under the holy branches, still heavy with their curious human fruitage; everywhere blossomed the ex votos of the faithful in strips of coloured cloth, calico, beads. They were tied to every branch and twig and leaf so that it looked like some giant Christmas tree. Here he dismounted to take some cuttings which he wrapped and stowed carefully. Then he straightened up for he had heard the sounds of movement in the green glades around him. Difficult to identify, to isolate — slither of a body among the leaves, or perhaps a pack-saddle catching in a branch as horse and rider moved swiftly out of ambush? He listened and gave a small spicy chuckle, as if at some remembered private joke. He was sorry for anyone coming to molest him in such a place — every glade and ride of which he knew by memory. Here he was on his own ground — the master.

  He ran back to his horse with his curious bandy-legged stride, but noiselessly. He mounted and rode slowly out of the shadow of the great branches in order to give his long whip a wide margin for wrist-play and to cover the only two entrances to the plantation. His adversaries, if such there were, would have to come upon him down one of two paths. He had his back to the tree and its great stockade of thorns. He gave a small clicking laugh of pleasure as he sat there attentively, his head on one side like a listening gun-dog; he moved the coils of his whip softly and voluptuously along the ground, drawing circles with them, curling them in the grass like a snake.… It would probably turn out to be a false alarm — Ali coming to apologize for his neglect that morning? At any rate, his master’s posture of readiness would frighten him, for he had seen the whip in action before.… The noise again. A water-rat plopped into the channel and swam quickly away. Among the bushes on two sides of the ride he could see indistinct movements. He sat, as immobile as an equestrian statue, his pistol grasped lightly in the left hand, his whip lying slightly behind him, his arm curved in the position of a fisherman about to make a long cast. So he waited, smiling. His patience was endless.

  The sound of distant shooting upon the lake was a common-place among the vocabulary of lake-sounds; it belonged to the music of the gulls, visitants from the seashore, and the other water-birds which thronged the reed-haunted lagoons. When the big shoots were on the ripple of thirty guns in action at one and the same time flowed tidelessly out into the air of Mareotis like a cadenza. Habit taught one gradually to differentiate between the various sounds and to recognize them — and Nessim too had spent his childhood here with a gun. He could tell the difference between the deep tang of a punt gun aimed at highflying geese and the flat biff of a twelve-bore. The two men were standing by their horses at the ferry when it came, a small puckering of the air merely, falling upon the ear-drum in a patter: raindrops sliding from an oar, the drip of a tap in an old house, were hardly less in volume. But it was certainly shooting. Balthazar turned his head and gazed out over the lake. ‘That sounded pistolish’ he said; Nessim smiled and shook his head. ‘Small calibre rifle, I should say. A poacher after sitting duck?’ But there were more shots than could be accommodated at one time in the magazine of either weapon. They mounted, a little puzzled that the horses had been sent for them but that Ali had disappeared. He had tied the animals to the hitching-post of the ferry, commending them to the care of the ferryman, and vanished in the mist.

  They rode briskly down the embankments side by side. The sun was up now and the whole surface of the lake was rising into the sky like the floor of a theatre, pouring upwards with the mist; here and there reality was withered by mirages, landscapes hanging in the sky upside down or else four or five superimposed on each other with the effect of a multiple exposure. The first indication of anything amiss was a figure dressed in white robes which fled into the mist — an unheard-of action in that peaceful country. Who would fly from two horsemen on the Karm Abu Girg road? A vagabond? They stopped in bemused wonder. ‘I thought I heard shouts’ said Nessim at last in a small constrained voice, ‘towards the house.’ As if both were stimulated by the same simultaneous anxiety, they pushed their horses into a brisk gallop, heading them for the house.

  A horse, Narouz’ horse, now riderless, stood trembling outside the open gates of the manor house. It had been shot through the lips — a profusely-bleeding graze which gave it a weird bloody smile. It whinnied softly as they came up. Before they had time to dismount there came shouts from the palm-grove and a flying figure burst through the trees waving to them. It was Ali. He pointed down among the plantations and shouted the name of Narouz. The name, so full of omens for Nessim, had a curiously obituary ring already, though he was not as yet dead. ‘By the Holy Tree’ shouted Ali, and both men drove their heels into their horses’ flanks and crashed into the plantation as fast as they could go.

  He was lying on the grass underneath the nubk tree with his head and neck supported by it, an angle which cocked his face forward so that he appeared to be studying the pistol-wounds in his own body. His eyes alone were movable, but they could only reach up to the knee of his rescuers; and the pain had winced them from the normal periwinkle blue to the dull blue of plumbago. His whip had got coiled round his body in some manner, probably when he fell from the saddle. Balthazar dismounted and walked slowly and deliberately over to him, making the little clucking noise he always made with his tongue; it sounded sympathetic, but it was in fact a reproof to his own curiosity, to the elation with which one part of his professional mind responded to human tragedy. It always seemed to him that he had no right to be so interested. Tsck, tsck. Nessim was very pale and very calm but he did not approach the fallen figure of his brother. Yet it had for him a dreadful magnetism — it was as if Balthazar were laying some tremendously powerful explosive which might go off and kill them both. He was merely helping by holding the horse. Narouz said in a small peevish voice — the voice of a feverish child which can count on its illness for the indulgence it seeks — something unexpected. ‘I want to see Clea.’ It ran smoothly off his tongue, as if he had been rehearsing the one phrase in his mind for centuries. He licked his lips and repeated it more slowly. It seemed from Balthazar’s angle of vision that a smile settled upon
his lips, but he recognized that the contraction was a grimace of pain. He hunted swiftly for the old pair of surgical scissors which he had brought to use upon the soft wire duck-seals and slit the vest of Narouz stiffly from North to South. At this Nessim drew nearer and together they looked down upon the shaggy and powerful body on which the blue and bloodless bullet-holes had sunk like knots in an oak. But they were many, very many. Balthazar made his characteristic little gesture of uncertainty which parodied a Chinaman shaking hands with himself.

  Other people had now entered the clearing. Thinking became easier. They had brought an enormous purple curtain with which to carry him back to the house. And now, in some strange way, the place was full of servants. They had ebbed back like a tide. The air was dark with their concern. Narouz ground his teeth and groaned as they lifted him to the great purple cloak and bore him back, like a wounded stag, through the plantations. Once as he neared the house, he said in the same clear child’s voice: ‘To see Clea’ and then subsided into a feverish silence punctuated by occasional quivering sighs.

  The servants were saying: ‘Praise be to God that the doctor is here! All will be well with him!’

  Balthazar felt Nessim’s eyes turned upon him. He shook his head gravely and hopelessly and repeated his clucking sound softly. It was a matter of hours, of minutes, of seconds. So they reached the house like some grotesque religious procession bearing the body of the younger son. Softly mewing and sobbing, but with hope and faith in his recovery, the women gazed down upon the jutting head and the sprawled body in the purple curtain which swelled under his weight like a sail. Nessim gave directions, uttering small words like ‘Gently here’ and ‘Slowly at the corner’. So they gradually got him back to the gaunt bedroom from which he had sallied forth that morning, while Balthazar busied himself, breaking open a packet of medical supplies which were kept in a cupboard against lake-accidents, hunting for a hypodermic needle and a phial of morphia. Small croaks and groans were now issuing from the mouth of Narouz. His eyes were closed. He could not hear the dim conversation which Nessim, in another corner of the house, was having with Clea on the telephone.