VII

 

Once his official duties in the capital had been performed to his private satisfaction, Mountolive felt free to anticipate the Court by transferring his headquarters to the second capital, Alexandria.  So far everything had gone quite smoothly.  The King himself had praised his fluency in Arabic and he had won the unusual distinction of press popularity by his judicious public use of the language.  From every newspaper these days pictures of himself stared out, always with that crooked, diffident smile.  Sorting out the little mound of press cuttings he found himself wondering: 'My God, am I slowly becoming irresistible to myself?'  They were excellent pictures; he was undeniably handsome with his greying temples and crisply cut features.  'But the mere habit of culture is not enough to defend one from one's own charm.  I shall be buried alive among these soft, easy aridities of a social practice which I do not even enjoy.'  He thought with his chin upon his wrist: 'Why does not Leila write?  Perhaps when I am in Alexandria I shall have word?'  But he could at least leave Cairo with a good following wind.  The other foreign missions were mad with envy at his success!

      The move itself was completed with exemplary despatch by the diligent Errol and the Residence staff.  He himself could afford to saunter down late when the special train had been loaded with all the diplomatic impedimenta which would enable them to make a show of working while they were away ... suitcases and crates and scarlet despatch-boxes with their gold monograms.  Cairo had by this time become unbearably hot.  Yet their hearts were light as the train rasped out across the desert to the coast.

      It was the best time of the year to remove, for the ugly spring khamseens were over and the town had put on its summer wear - coloured awnings along the Grande Corniche, and the ranks of coloured island craft which lay in shelves below the black turrets of the battleships and framed the blue Yacht Club harbour, atwinkle with sails.  The season of parties had also begun and Nessim was able to give his long-promised reception for his returning friend.  It was a barbaric spread and all Alexandria turned out to do Mountolive honour, for all the world as if he were a prodigal son returning, though in fact he knew few people apart from Nessim and his family.  But he was glad to renew his acquaintance with Balthazar and Amaril, the two doctors who were always together, always chaffing each other; and with Clea whom he had once met in Europe.  The sunlight, fading over the evening sea, blazed in upon the great brass-framed windows, turning them to molten diamonds before it melted and softened once more into the acquamarine twilight of Egypt.  The curtains were drawn and now a hundred candles' breathing shone softly upon the white napery of the long tables, winking among the slender stems of the glasses.  It was the season of ease, for the balls and rides and swimming-parties had started or were about to be planned.  The cool sea-winds kept the temperature low, the air was fresh and invigorating.

      Mountolive sank back into the accustomed pattern of things with a sense of sureness, almost of beatitude.  Nessim had, so to speak, gone back into place like a picture into an alcove built for it, and the companionship of Justine - this dark-browed, queenly beauty at his side - enhanced rather than disturbed his relations with the outer world.  Mountolive liked her, liked to feel her dark appraising eyes upon him lit with a sort of compassionate curiosity mixed with admiration.  They made a splendid couple, he thought, with almost a touch of envy: like people trained to work together from childhood, instinctively responding to each other's unspoken needs and desires, moving up unhesitatingly to support one another with their smiles.  Though she was handsome and reserved and appeared to speak little, Mountolive thought he detected an endearing candour cropping up the whole time among her sentences - as if from some hidden spring of secret warmth.  Was she pleased to find someone who valued her husband as deeply as she herself did?  The cool, guileless pressure of her fingers suggested that, as did her thrilling voice when she said 'I have known you so long from hearsay as David that it will be hard to call you anything else.'  As for Nessim, he had lost nothing during the time of separation, had preserved all his graces, adding to them only the weight of a worldly judgement which made him seem strikingly European in such provincial surroundings.  His tact, for example, in never mentioning any subject which might have an official bearing to Mountolive was deeply endearing - and this despite the fact that they rode and shot together frequently, swam, sailed and painted.  Such information upon political affairs as he had to put forward was always scrupulously relayed through Pursewarden.  He never compromised their friendship by mixing work with pleasure, or forcing Mountolive to struggle between affection and duty.

      Best of all, Pursewarden himself had reacted most favourably to his new position of eminence and was wearing what he called 'his new leaf'.  A couple of brusque minutes in the terrible red ink - the use of which is the prerogative only of Heads of Mission - had quelled him and drawn from him a promise to 'turn over a new fig-leaf', which he had dutifully done.  His response had indeed been wholehearted and Mountolive was both grateful and relieved to feel that at last he could rely upon a judgement which was determined not to overrun itself, or allow itself to founder among easy dependences and doubts.  What else?  Yes, the new Summer Residence was delightful and set in a cool garden full of pines above Roushdi.  There were two excellent hard courts which rang all day to the pang of racquets.  The staff seemed happy with their new head of mission.  Only ... Leila's silence was still an enigma.  Then one evening Nessim handed him an envelope on which he recognized her familiar hand.  Mountolive put it in his pocket to read when he was alone.

      'Your reappearance in Egypt - you perhaps have guessed? - has upset me somehow: upset my apple-cart.  I am all over the place and cannot pick up the pieces as yet.  It puzzles me, I admit.  I have been living with you so long in my imagination - quite alone there - that now I must almost reinvent you to bring you back to life.  Perhaps I have been traducing you all these years, painting your picture to myself?  You may now be simply a figment instead off a flesh and blood dignitary, moving among people and lights and policies.  I can't find the courage to compare the truth to reality as yet; I'm scared.  Be patient with a silly headstrong woman who never seems to know her own mind.  Of course, we should have met long since - but I shrank like a snail.  Be patient.  Somewhere inside me I must wait for a tide to turn.  I was so angry when I heard you were coming that I cried with sheer rage.  Or was it panic?  I suppose that really I had managed to forget ... my own face, all these years.  Suddenly it came back over me like an Iron Mask.  Bah! soon my courage will come back, never fear.   Sooner or later we must meet and shock one another.  When?  I don't know as yet.  I don't know.'

      Disconsolately reading the words as he sat upon the terraces at dusk, he thought: 'I cannot assemble my feeling coherently enough to respond to her intelligently.  What should I say or do?  Nothing.'  But the word had a hollow ring.  'Patience,' he said softly to himself, turning the word this way and that in his mind the better to examine it.  Later, at the Cervoni's ball among the blue lights and the snapping of paper streamers, it seemed easy once more to be patient.  He moved once more in a glad world in which he no longer felt cut off from his fellows - a world full of friends in which he could enjoy the memory of the long rides with Nessim, conversations with Amaril, or the troubling pleasure of dancing with the blonde Clea.  Yes, he could be patient here, so close at hand.  The time, place and circumstances were all of them rewards for patience.  He felt no omens rising from the unclouded future, while even the premonitions of the slowly approaching war were things which he could share publicly with the others.  'Can they really raze whole capitals, these bombers?' asked Clea quietly.  'I've always believed that our inventions mirror our secret wishes, and we wish for the end of the city-man, don't we?  All of us?  Yes, but how hard to surrender London and Paris.  What do you think?'

      What did he think?  Mountolive wrinkled his fine brows and shook his head.  He was thinking of Leila draped in a black veil, like a nun, sitting in her dusty summerhouse at Karm Abu Girg, among the splendid roses, with only a snake for company....

      So the untroubled, unhurried summer moved steadily onwards - and Mountolive found little to daunt him professionally in a city so eager for friendship, so vulnerable to the least politeness, so expert in taking pleasure.  Day after day the coloured sails fluttered and loitered in the harbour mirror among the steel fortresses, the magical white waves moved in perfect punctuation over desert beaches burnt white as calx by the African suns.  By night, sitting above a garden resplendent with fireflies, he heard the deep booming tread of screws as the Eastern-bound liners coasted the deeper waters outside the harbour, heading for the ports on the other side of the world.  In the desert they explored oases of greenness made trembling and insubstantial as dreams by the water mirages, or stalked the bronze knuckles of the sandstone ridges around the city on horses, which, for all their fleetness, carried food and drink to assuage their talkative riders.

      He visited Petra and the strange coral delta along the Red Sea coast with its swarming population of rainbow-coloured tropical fish.  The long cool balconies of the summer residence echoed night after night to the clink of ice in tall glasses, the clink of platitudes and commonplaces made thrilling to him by their position in place and time, by their appositeness to a city which knew that pleasure was the only thing that made industry worthwhile; on these balconies, hanging out over the blue littoral of the historic coast, warmly lit by candlelight, these fragmentary friendship flowered and took shape in new affections whose candour made him no longer feel separated from his fellow-men by the powers he wielded.  He was popular and soon might be well-beloved.  Even the morbid spiritual lassitude and self-indulgence of the city was delightful to one who, secure in income, could afford to live outside it.  Alexandria seemed to him a very desirable summer cantonment, accessible to every affection and stranger-loving in the sense of the Greek word.  But why should he not feel at home?

      The Alexandrians themselves were strangers and exiles to the Egypt which existed below the glittering surface of their dreams, ringed by the hot deserts and fanned by the bleakness of a faith which renounced worldly pleasure: the Egypt of rags and sores, of beauty and desperation.  Alexandria was still Europe - the capital of Asiatic Europe, if such a thing could exist.  It could never be like Cairo where his whole life had an  Egyptian cast, where he spoke ample Arabic; here French, Italian and Greek dominated the scene.  The ambience, the social manner, everything was different, was cast in a European mould where somehow the camels and palm-trees and cloaked natives existed only as a brilliantly coloured frieze, a backcloth to a life divided in its origins.

      Then the autumn came and his duties drew him back once more to the winter capital, albeit puzzled and indeed a little aggrieved by the silence of Leila; but back to the consuming interests of a professional life which he found far from displeasing.  There were papers to be constructed, miscellaneous reports, economic-social and military, to be made.  His staff had shaken down well now, and worked with diligence and a will; even Pursewarden gave of his best.  The enmity of Errol, never very deep, had been successfully neutralized, converted into a long-term truce.  He had reason to feel pleased with himself.

      Then at carnival time there came a message to say that Leila had at last signified her intention of meeting him - but both of them, it was understood, were to wear the conventional black domino of the season - the mask in which the Alexandrians revelled.  He understood her anxiety.  Nevertheless he was delighted by the thought and spoke warmly to Nessim on the telephone as he accepted the invitation, planning to remove his whole Chancery up to Alexandria for the carnival, so that his secretaries might enjoy the occasion with him.  Remove he did, to find the city now basking under crisp winter skies as blue as a bird's egg and hardly touched at night by the desert frosts.

      But here another disappointment awaited him; for when in the midst of the hubbub at the Cervoni ball Justine took his arm and piloted him through the garden to the place of rendezvous among the tall hedges, all they found was an empty marble seat with a silk handbag on it containing a note scrawled in lipstick.  'At the last moment my nerve fails me.  Forgive.'  He tried to hide his chagrin and discomfiture from Justine.  She herself seemed almost incredulous, repeating: 'But she came in from Karm Abu Girg specially for the meeting.  I cannot understand it.  She has been with Nessim all day.'  He felt a sympathy in the warm pressure of her hand upon his elbow as they returned, downcast, from the scene, brushing impatiently past the laughing masked figures in the garden.

      By the pool he caught a glimpse of Amaril, sitting uncowled before a slender masked figure, talking in low, pleading tones, and leaning forward from time to time to embrace her.  A pang of envy smote him, though God knew there was nothing he recognized as passional now in his desire to see Leila.  It was, in a paradoxical way, that Egypt itself could not fully come alive for him until he had seen her - for she represented something like a second, almost mythical image of the reality which he was experiencing, expropriating day by day.  He was like a man seeking to marry the twin images in a camera periscope in order to lay his lens in true focus.  Without having gone through the experience of having seen her once more, he felt vaguely helpless, unable either to confirm his own memories of this magical landscape, or fully assess his newest impressions of it.  Yet he accepted his fate with philosophical calm.  There was, after all, no real cause for alarm.  Patience - there was ample room for patience now, to wait upon her courage.

      Besides, other friendships had ripened now to fill the gap - friendships with Balthazar (who often came to dine and play chess), friendships with Amaril, Pierre Balbz, the Cervoni family.  Clea too had begun her slow portrait of him at this time.  His mother had been begging him to have a portrait in oils made for her; now he was able to pose in the resplendent uniform which Sir Louis had so obligingly sold him.  The picture would make a surprise gift for Christmas, he thought, and was glad to let Clea dawdle over it, reconstructing the portions which displeased her.  Through her (for she talked as she worked in order to keep her subjects' faces alive) he learned much during that summer about the lives and preoccupations of the Alexandrians - the fantastic poetry and grotesque drama of life as these exiles of circumstance lived it; tales of the modern lake-dwellers, inhabitants of the stone skyscrapers which stared out over the ruins of the Pharos towards Europe.

      One such tale struck his fancy - the love-story of Amaril (the elegant, much beloved doctor) for whom he had come to feel a particular affection.  The very name on Clea's lips sounded with a common affection for this diffident and graceful man, who had so often sworn that he would never have the luck to be loved by a woman.  'Poor Amaril,' sighing and smiling as she painted she said: 'shall I tell you his story?  It is somehow typical.  It has made all his friends happy, for we were always apt to think that he had left the matter of love in this world until too late - had missed the bus.'

      'But Amaril is going abroad to England,' said Mountolive.  'He has asked us for a visa.  Am I to assume that his heart is broken?  And who is Semira?  Please tell me.'

      'The virtuous Semira!'  Clea smiled again tenderly and, pausing on her work, put a portfolio into his hands.  He turned the pages.  'All noses,' he said with surprise, and she nodded.  'Yes, noses.   Amaril has kept me busy for nearly three months, travelling about and collecting noses for her to choose from; noses of the living and the dead.  Noses from the Yacht Club, the Etoile, from frescoes in the Museum, from coins.... It has been hard work assembling them all for comparative study.  Finally, the have chosen the nose of a solider in a Theban fresco.'

      Mountolive was puzzled.  'Please, Clea, tell me the story.'

      'Will you promise to sit still, not to move?'

      'I promise.'

      'Very well, then.  You know Amaril quite well now; well, this romantic, endearing creature - so true a friend and so wise a doctor - has been our despair for years.  It seemed that he could never, would never fall in love.  We were sad for him - you know that despite our hardness of surface we Alexandrians are sentimental people, and wish our friends to enjoy life.  Not that he was unhappy - and he has had lovers from time to time: but never une amie in our special sense.  He himself bemoaned the fact frequently - I think not entirely to provoke pity or amusement, but to reassure himself that there was nothing wrong: that he was sympathetic and attractive to the race of women.  Then last year at the Carnival, the miracle happened.  He met a slender masked domino.  They fell madly in love - indeed went farther than is customary for so cautious a lover as Amaril.  He was completely transformed by the experience, but ... the girl disappeared, still masked, without leaving her name.  A pair of white hands and a ring with a yellow stone was all he knew of her - for despite their passion she had refused to unmask so that, oddly enough, he had been denied so much as a kiss, though granted ... other favours.  Heavens, I am gossiping!  Never mind.

      'From then on Amaril became insupportable.  The romantic frenzy, I admit, suited him very well - for he is a romantic to his fingertips.  He hunted through the city all year long for those hands, sought them everywhere, beseeched his friends to help him, neglected his practice, became almost a laughing-stock.  We were amused and touched by his distress, but what could we do?  How could we trace her?  He waited for Carnival this year with burning impatience, for she had promised to return to the place of rendezvous.  Now comes the fun.  She did reappear, and once more they renewed their vows of devotion; but this time Amaril was determined not to be given the slip - for she was somewhat evasive about names and addresses.  He became desperate and bold, and refused to be parted from her, which frightened her very much indeed.  (All this he told me himself - for he appeared at my flat in the early morning, walking like a drunkard and with his hair standing on end, elated and rather frightened.)

      'The girl made several attempts to give him the slip but he stuck to her and insisted on taking her home in one of those old horse-drawn cabs.  She was almost beside herself, indeed, and when they reached the eastern end of the city, somewhat shabby and unfrequented, with large abandoned properties and decaying gardens, she made a run for it.  Demented with romantic frenzy, Amaril chased the nymph and caught her up as she was slipping into a dark courtyard.  In his eagerness he snatched at her cowl when the creature, her face at last bared, sank to the doorstep in tears.  Amaril's description of the scene was rather terrifying.  She sat there, shaken by a sort of snickering and whimpering and covering her face with her hands.  She had no nose.  For a moment he got a tremendous fright, for he is the most superstitious of mortals and knows all the beliefs about vampires appearing during carnival.  But he made the sign of the cross and touched the clove of garlic in his pocket - but she didn't disappear.  And then the doctor in him came to the fore, and taking her into the courtyard (she was half-fainting with mortification and fear) he examined her closely.  He tells me he heard his own brain ticking out possible diagnoses clearly and watchfully, while at the same time he felt that his heart had stopped beating and that he was suffocating.... In a flash he reviewed the possible causes of such a feature, repeating with terror words of syphilis, leprosy, lupus, and turning her small distorted face this way and that.  He cried angrily: "What is your name?"  And she blurted out "Semira - the virtuous Semira."  He was so unnerved that he roared with laughter.

      'Now this is an oddity.  Semira is the daughter of a very old deaf father.  The family was once rich and famous, under the Khedives, and is of Ottoman extraction.  But it was plagued by misfortunes and the progressive insanity of the sons, and has so far today decayed as to be virtually forgotten.  It is also poverty-stricken.  The old half-mad father locked Semira away in this rambling house, keeping her veiled for the most part.  Vaguely, in society, one had heard tales of her - of a daughter who had taken the veil and spent her life in prayer, who had never been outside the gates of the house, who was a mystic; or who was deaf, dumb and bedridden.  Vague tales, distorted as tales always are in Alexandria.  But while the faint echo remained of the so-called virtuous Semira - she was really completely unknown to us and her family forgotten.  Now it seemed that at carnival-time her curiosity about the outer world overcame her and she gatecrashed parties in a domino!

      'But I am forgetting Amaril.  Their footsteps had brought down an old manservant with a candle.  Amaril demanded to see the master of the house.  He had already come to a decision.  The old father lay asleep in an old-fashioned four-poster bed, in a room covered in bat-droppings, at the top of the house.  Semira was by now practically insensible.  But Amaril had come to a great decision.  Taking the candle in one hand and the small Semira in the crook of his arm, he walked the whole way up to the top and kicked open the door of the father's room.  It must have been a strange and unfamiliar scene for the old man to witness as he sat up in bed - and Amaril describes it with all the touching flamboyance of the romantic, even moving himself in the recital so that he is in tears as he recalls it.  He is touched by the magnificence of his own fancy, I think; I must say, loving him as much as I do, I felt tears coming into my own eyes as he told me how he put down the candle beside the bed and, kneeling down with Semira, said "I wish to marry your daughter and take her back into the world."  The terror and incomprehension of the old man at this unexpected visit took some time to wear off, and for a while it was hard to make him understand.  Then he began to tremble and wonder at this handsome apparition kneeling beside his bed holding up his noseless daughter with his arm and proposing the impossible with so much pride and passion.

      '"But," the old man protested, "no-one will take her, for she has no nose."  He got out of bed in a stained nightshirt and walked right round Amaril, who remained kneeling, studying him as one might an entomological specimen.  (I am quoting.)  Then he touched him with his bare foot - as if to see whether he was made of flesh and blood - and repeated: "Who are you to take a woman without a nose?"  Amaril replied: "I am a doctor from Europe and I will give her a new nose," for the idea, the fantastic idea, had been slowly becoming clear in his own mind.  At the words, Semira gave a sob and turned her beautiful, horrible face to his, and Amaril thundered out: "Semira, will you be my wife?"  She could hardly articulate her response and seemed little less doubtful by the whole issue than was her father.  Amaril stayed and talked to them, convincing them.

      'The next day when he went back, he was received with a message that Semira was not to be seen and that what he proposed was impossible.  But Amaril was not to be put off, and once more he forced his way in and bullied the father.

      'This, then, is the fantasy in which he has been living.  For Semira, as loving and eager as ever, cannot leave her house for the open world until he fulfils his promise.  Amaril offered to marry her at once, but the suspicious old man wants to make sure of the nose.  But what nose?  First Balthazar was called in and together they examined Semira, and assured themselves that the illness was due neither to leprosy nor syphilis but to a rare form of lupus - a peculiar skin T.B. of rare kind of which many cases have been recorded from the Damietta region.  It had been left untreated over the years and had finally collapsed the nose.  I must say, it is horrible - just a slit like the gills of a fish.  For I too have been sharing the deliberations of the doctors and have been going regularly to read to Semira in the darkened rooms where she has spent most of her life.  She has wonderful dark eyes like an odalisque and a shapely mouth and well-modelled chin: and then the gills of a fish!  It is too unfair.  And it has taken her ages to actually believe that surgery can restore the defect.  Here again Amaril has been brilliant, in getting her interested in her restoration, conquering her self-disgust, allowing her to choose the nose from that portfolio, discuss the whole project with him.  He has let her choose her nose as one might let one's mistress choose a valuable bracelet from Pierantoni.  It was just the right approach, for she is beginning to conquer her shame, and feel almost proud of being free to choose this valuable gift - the most treasured feature of a woman's face which aligns every glance and alters every meaning: and without which good eyes and teeth and hair become useless treasures.

      'But now they have run into other difficulties, for the restoration of the nose itself requires techniques of surgery which are still very new; and Amaril, though a surgeon, does not wish there to be any mistake about the results.  You see, he is after all building a woman of his own fancy, a face to a husband's own specifications; only Pygmalion had such a chance before!  He is working on the project as if his life depended on it - which in a way I suppose it does.

      'The operation itself will have to be done in stages, and will take ages to complete.  I have heard them discussing it over and over again in such detail that I feel I could almost perform it myself.  First you cut off a strip of the costal cartilage, here, where the rib joins the breastbone, and make a graft from it.  Then you cut out a triangular flap of skin from the forehead and pull downwards to cover the nose - the Indian technique, Balthazar calls it; but they are still debating the removal of a section of flesh and skin from inside the thigh.... You can imagine how fascinating this is for a painter and sculptor to think about.  But meanwhile Amaril is going to England to perfect the operative technique under the best masters.  Hence his demand for a visa.  How many months he will be away we don't know yet, but he is setting out with all the air of a knight in search of the Holy Grail.  For he intends to complete the operation himself.  Meanwhile, Semira will wait for him here, and I have promised to visit her frequently and keep her interested and amused if I can.  It is not difficult, for the real world outside the four walls of her house sounds to her strange and cruel and romantic.  Apart from a brief glimpse of it at carnival-time, she knows little of our lives.  For her, Alexandria is as brilliantly coloured as a fairy-story.  It will be some time before she sees it as it really is - with its harsh, circumscribed contours and its wicked, pleasure-loving and unromantic inhabitants.  But you have moved!'

      Mountolive apologized and said: 'Your use of the word "unromantic" startled me, for I was just thinking how romantic it all seems to a newcomer.'

      'Amaril is an exception, though a beloved one.  Few are as generous, as unmercenary as he.  As for Semira - I cannot at present see what the future holds for her beyond romance.'  Clea sighed and smiled and lit a cigarette.

      'Espérons,' she said quietly.

 

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