XI

 

Throughout the summer and autumn the conspirators had worked together to mount entertainments on a scale seldom seen in the city.  The big house was seldom quiet now for hours together.  It was perpetually alive to the cool fern-like patterns of a quartet, or to the foundering plunge of saxophones crying to the night like cuckolds.  The once cavernous and deserted kitchens were now full of the echoing bustle of servants preparing for a new feast or clearing up after one which had ended.  In the city it was said that Nessim had deliberately set himself to launch Justine in society - as if the provincial splendours of Alexandria held any promise or charm to one who had become at heart a European, as he had.  No, these planned assaults upon the society of the second capital were both exploratory and diversionary.  They offered a backcloth against which the conspirators could move with a freedom necessary to their work.  They worked indefatigably - and only when the pressure of things became too great stole short holidays in the little summer lodge which Nessim had christened 'Justine's Summer Palace'; here they could read and write and bathe, and enjoy those friends who were closest to them - Clea and Amaril and Balthazar.

      But always after these long evenings spent in a wilderness of conversation, a forest of plates and wine-bottles, they locked the doors, shot the great bolts themselves and turned sighing back to the staircase, leaving the sleepy domestics to begin the task of clearing up the débris; for the house must be completely set to rights by morning; they walked slowly arm in arm, pausing to kick off their shoes on the first landing and to smile to each other in the great mirror.  Then, to quieten their minds, they would take a slow turn up and down the picture-gallery, with its splendid collection of Impressionists, talking upon neutral topics while Nessim's greedy eyes explored the great canvases slowly, mute testimony to the validity of private worlds and secret wishes.

      So at last they came to those warm and beautifully furnished private bedrooms, adjoining one another, on the cool north side of the house.  It was always the same; while Nessim lay down on the bed fully dressed, Justine lit the spirit-lamp to prepare the infusion of valerian which he always took to soothe his nerves before he slept.  Here, too, she would set out the small card-table by the bed, and together they played a hand or two of cribbage or picquet as they talked, obsessively talked about the affairs which occupied their waking minds.  At such times their dark, passionate faces glowed in the soft light with a sort of holiness conferred by secrecy, by the appetites of a shared will, by desires joined at the waist.  Tonight it was the same.  As she dealt the first hand, the telephone by the bed rang.  Nessim picked up the receiver, listened for a second, and then passed it to her without a word.  Smiling, she raised her eyebrows in interrogation and her husband nodded.  'Hullo,' the hoarse voice counterfeited sleepiness, as if she had been woken from her bed.  'Yes, my darling.  Of course.  No, I was awake.  Yes, I am alone.'  Nessim quietly and methodically fanned out his hand and studied the cards without visible expression.  The conversation ran stutteringly on and then the caller said goodnight and rang off.  Sighing, Justine replaced the receiver, and then made a slow gesture, as of someone removing soiled gloves, or of someone disembarrassing herself of a skein of wool.  'It was poor Darley,' she said, picking up her cards.  Nessim raised his eyes for a moment, put down a card, and uttered a bid.  As the game began, she started to talk again softly, as if to herself.  'He is absolutely fascinated by the diaries.  Remember?  I used to copy all of Arnauti's notes for Moeurs in my own handwriting when he broke his wrist.  We had them bound up.  All the parts which he did not use in the end.  I have given them to Darley as my diary.'  She depressed her cheeks in a sad smile.  'He accepts them as mine, and says, not unnaturally, that I have a masculine mind!  He also says my French is not very good - that would please Arnauti, wouldn't it?'

      'I am sorry for him,' said Nessim quietly, tenderly.  'He is so good.  One day I will be quite honest, explain everything to him.'

      'But I don't see your concern for the little Melissa,' said Justine, again as if engaged in a private debate rather than a conversation.  'I have tried to sound him in every way.  He knows nothing.  I am convinced that she knows nothing.  Just because she was Cohen's mistress ... I don't know.'

      Nessim laid down his cards and said: 'I cannot get rid of a feeling she knows something.  Cohen was a boastful and silly man and he certainly knew all that there was to know.'

      'But why should he tell her?'

      'It is simply that after his death, whenever I ran across her, she would look at me in a new way - as if in the light of something she had heard about me, a piece of new knowledge.  It's hard to describe.'

      They played in silence until the kettle began to whine.  Then Justine put down her cards, went across to prepare the valerian.  As he sipped it she went into the other room to divest herself of her jewellery.  Sipping the cup, and staring reflectively at the wall, Nessim heard the small snap of her earrings as she plucked them off, and the small noise of the sleeping-tablets falling into a glass.  She came back and sat down at the card-table.

      'Then if you feared her, why did you not get her removed somehow?'  He looked startled and she added: 'I don't mean to harm her, but to get her sent away.'

      Nessim smiled.  'I thought I would, but then when Darley fell in love with her, I ... had a sympathy for him.'

      'There is no room for such ideas,' she said curtly, and he nodded, almost humbly.  'I know,' he said.  Justine dealt the cards once more, and once more they consulted their hands in silence.

      'I am working now to get her sent away - by Darley himself.  Amaril says that she is really seriously ill and has already recommended that she go to Jerusalem for special treatment.  I have offered Darley the money.  He is in a pitiable state of confusion.  Very English.  He is a good person, Nessim, though now he is very much afraid of you and invents all sorts of bogies with which to frighten himself.  He makes me feel sick, he is so helpless.'

      'I know.'

      'But Melissa must go.  I have told him so.'

      'Good.'  Then, in a totally different voice, raising his dark eyes to hers, he said: 'What about Pursewarden?'

      The question hung between them in the still air of the room, quivering like a compass needle.  Then he slung his eyes once more to the cards in his hand.  Justine's face took on a new expression, both bitter and haggard.  She lit a cigarette carefully and said: 'As I told you, he is someone quite out of the ordinary - c'est un personnage.  It would be quite impossible to get a secret out of him.  It's hard to describe.'

      She stared at him for a long time, studying those dark averted features with an expression of abstraction.  'What I am trying to say is this: about the difference between them.  Darley is so sentimental and so loyal to me that he constitutes no danger at all.  Even if he came into the possession of information which might harm us, he would not use it, he would bury it.  Not Pursewarden!'  Now her eyes glittered.  'He is somehow cold and clever and self-centred.  Completely amoral - like an Egyptian!  He would not deeply care if we died tomorrow.  I simply cannot reach him.  But potentially he is an enemy worth reckoning with.'

      He raised his eyes to her and they sat for a long moment staring sightlessly into each other's minds.  His eyes were now full of a burning passionate sweetness like the eyes of some strange noble bird of prey.  He moistened his lips with his tongue but did not speak.  He had been on the point of blurting out the words: 'I am terrified that you may be falling in love with him.'  But a queer feeling of pudicity restrained him.

      'Nessim.'

      'Yes.'

      She stubbed out her cigarette now and, deep in thought, rose to walk up and down the room, her hands hugged in her armpits.  As always when she was thinking deeply, she moved in a strange, almost awkward way - a prowling walk which reminded him of some predatory animal.  His eye had become vague now, and lustreless.  He picked up the cards mechanically and shuffled them once, twice.  Then he put them down and raised his palms to his burning cheeks.

      At once she was at his side with her warm hand upon his brow.  'You have a temperature again.'

      'I don't think so,' he said rapidly, mechanically.

      'Let me take it.'

      'No.'

      She sat down opposite him, leaning forward, and stared once more into his eyes.  'Nessim, what has been happening?  Your health ... these temperatures, and you don't sleep?'  He smiled wearily and pressed the back of her hand to his hot cheek.

      'It is nothing,' he said.  'Just strain now that everything is coming to an end.  Also having to tell Leila the whole truth.  It has alarmed her to understand the full extent of our plans.  Also it has made her relationship with Mountolive much harder.  I think that is the reason she refused to see him at the Carnival meeting, remember?  I told her everything that morning.  Never mind.  Another few months and the whole build-up is complete.  The rest is up to them.  But of course Leila does not like the idea of going away.  I knew she wouldn't.  And then, I have other serious problems.'

      'What problems?'

      But he shook his head, and getting up started to undress.  Once in bed he finished his valerian and lay, hands and feet folded like the effigy of a Crusader.  Justine switched off the light and stood in the doorway in silence.  At last she said: 'Nessim.  I am afraid that something is happening to you which I don't understand.  These days ... are you ill?  Please speak to me!'

      There was a long silence.  Then she said: 'How is all this going to turn out?'

      He raised himself slightly on the pillows and stared at her.  'By the autumn, when everything is ready, we shall have to take up new dispositions.  It may mean a separation of perhaps a year, Justine.  I want you to go there and stay there while it all happens.  Leila must go to the farm in Kenya.  There will certainly be sharp reactions here which I must stay to face.'

      'You talk in your sleep.'

      'I am exhausted,' he cried shortly, angrily.

      Justine stood still, motionless in silhouette, in the lighted doorway.  'What about the others?' she asked softly, and once more he raised himself on the pillows to answer peevishly.  'The only one who concerns us at the moment is Da Capo.  He must be apparently killed, or must disappear, for he is very much compromised.  I have not worked out the details properly.  He wants me to claim his insurance, anyway, as he is completely in debt, ruined, so his disappearance would fit in.  We will speak of this later.  It should be comparatively easy to arrange.'

      She turned thoughtfully back into the lighted room and began to prepare for sleep.  She could hear Nessim sighing and turning restlessly in the next room.  In the great mirror she studied her own sorrowful, haunted face, stripping it of its colours, and combing her black hair luxuriously.  Then she slipped naked between the sheets and snapped out the light, tumbling lightly, effortlessly into sleep in a matter of moments.

      It was almost dawn when Nessim came barefoot into her room.  She woke to feel his arms about her shoulders; he was kneeling by the bed, shaken by a paroxysm which at first she took to be a fit of weeping.  But if was trembling, as if with a fever, and his teeth were chattering.  'What is it?' she began incoherently, but he put a hand over her mouth to silence her.  'I simply must tell you why I have been acting so strangely.  I cannot bear the strain any longer.  Justine, I have been brought face to face with another problem.  I am faced with the terrible possibility of having to do away with Narouz.  That is why I have been feeling half-mad.  He has got completely out of hand.  And I don't know what to do.  I don't know what to do!'

      This conversation took place some little time before the unexpected suicide of Pursewarden in the Mount Vulture Hotel.

 

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