VIII

 

So the year turned on its heel, through a winter of racing winds, frosts keener than grief, hardly preparing us for that last magnificent summer which followed the spring so swiftly.  It came curving in, this summer, as if from some long-forgotten latitude first dreamed of in Eden, miraculously rediscovered among the slumbering thoughts of mankind.  It rode down upon us like some famous snow-ship of the mind, to drop anchor before the city, its white sails folding like the wings of a seabird.  Ah! I am hunting for metaphors which might convey something of the piercing happiness too seldom granted to those who love; but words, which were first invented against despair, are too crude to mirror the properties of something so profoundly at peace with itself, at one with itself.  Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world's sorrows.  Unless perhaps it were simpler to repeat under one's breath some lines torn from a Greek poem, written once in the shadow of a sail, on a thirsty promontory in Byzantium.  Something like ...

 

                                                     Black bread, clear water, blue air.

                                                     Calm throat incomparably fair.

                                                     Mind folded upon mind

                                                     Eyes softly closed on eyes.

                                                     Lashes a-tremble, bodies bare.

 

      But they English badly; and unless one hears them in Greek falling softly, word by word, from a mouth made private and familiar by the bruised endearments of spent kisses they must remain always simply charmless photographs of a reality which overreaches the realm of the poet's scope.  Sad that all the brilliant plumage of that summer remains beyond capture - for one's old age will have little but such memories upon which to found its regretful happiness.  Will memory clutch it - that incomparable pattern of days, I wonder?  In the dense violet shadow of white sails, under the dark noon-lantern of figs, on the renowned desert roads where the spice caravans march and the dunes soothe themselves away to the sky, to catch in their dazed sleep the drumming of gulls' wings turning in spray?  Or in the cold whiplash of the waters crushing themselves against the fallen pediments of forgotten islands?  In the night-mist falling upon deserted harbours with the old Arab seamarks pointing eroded fingers?  Somewhere, surely, the sum of these things will still exist.  There were no hauntings yet.  Day followed day upon the calendar of desire, each night turning softly over in its sleep to reverse the darkness and drench us once more in the royal sunlight.  Everything conspired to make it what we needed.

      It is not hard, writing at this remove in time, to realize that it had all already happened, had been ordained in such a way and in no other.  That was, so to speak, only its 'coming to pass' - its stage of manifestation.  But the scenario had already been devised somewhere, the actors chosen, the timing rehearsed down to the last detail in the mind of that invisible author - which perhaps would prove to be only the city itself: the Alexandria of the human estate.  The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves.  They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature.  It is hard to believe, I know, when one thinks of the perfection of that summer and what followed it.

      Much had to do with the discovery of the island.  The island!  How had it eluded us for so long?  There was literally not a corner of this coast which we did not know, not a beach we had not tried, not an anchorage we have not used.  Yet it had been there, staring us in the face.  'If you wish to hide something,' says the Arabic proverb, 'hide it in the sun's eye.'  It lay, not hidden at all, somewhere to the west of the little shrine of Sidi El Agami - the white scarp with the snowy butt of a tomb emerging from a straggle of palms and figlets.  It was simply an upshouldered piece of granite pushed up from the seabed by an earthquake or some submarine convulsion in the distant past.  Of course, when the sea ran high it would be covered; but it is curious that it remains to this day unmarked on the Admiralty charts, for it would constitute quite a hazard to craft of medium draught.

      It was Clea who first discovered the little island of Narouz.  'Where has this sprung from?' she asked with astonishment; her brown wrist swung the cutter's tiller hard over and carried us fluttering down into its lee.  The granite boulder was tall enough for a windbreak.  It made a roundel of still blue water in the combing tides.  On the landward side there was a crude N carved in the rock above the old eroded iron ring which, with a stern anchor out to brace her, served as a secure mooring.  It would be ridiculous to speak of stepping ashore for the 'shore' consisted of a narrow strip of dazzling white pebbles no larger than a fireplace.  'Yes, it is, it is Narouz' island,' she cried, beside herself with delight at the discovery - for here at last was a place where she could fully indulge her taste for solitude.  Here one would be as private as a seabird.  The beach faced landward.  One could see the whole swaying line of the coast with its ruined Martello towers and dunes travelling away to ancient Taposiris.  We unpacked our provisions with delight, for here we could swim naked and sunbathe to our heart's content without interruption.

      Here that strange and solitary brother of Nessim had spent his time fishing.  'I always wondered where it could be, this island of his.  I thought perhaps it lay westerly beyond Abu El Suir.  Nessim could not tell me.  But he knew there was a deep rock-pool with a wreck.'

      'There is an N carved here.'

      Clea clapped her hands with delight and struggled out of her bathing costume.  'I'm sure of it.  Nessim said that for months he was fighting a duel with some big fish he couldn't identify.  That was when he gave me the harpoon-gun which Narouz owned.  Isn't it strange?  I've always carried it in the locker wrapped in an oilskin.  I thought it might shoot something one day.  But it is so heavy I can't manage it under water.'

      'What sort of fish was it?'

      'I don't know.'

      But she scrambled back to the cutter and produced the bulky package of greased rags in which this singular weapon was wrapped.  It was an ugly-looking contrivance, a compressed-air rifle no less, with a hollow butt.  It fired a slim steel harpoon about a metre and a half in length.  It had been made to specifications for him in Germany.  It looked deadly enough to kill quite a large fish.

      'Pretty horrible looking,' she said, eating an orange.

      'We must try it.'

      'It's too heavy for me.  Perhaps you will manage it.  I found that the barrel lagged in the water.  I couldn't bring it to bear properly.  But he was a marksman, so Nessim said, and shot a lot of quite large fish.  But there was one, a very big one, which made infrequent appearances.  He watched and waited in ambush for it for months.  He had several shots at it but always missed.  I hope it wasn't a shark - I'm scared of them.'

      'There aren't many in the Mediterranean.  It is down the Red Sea that you get them in numbers.'

      'Nevertheless I keep a sharp eye out.'

      It was too heavy an instrument, I decided, to lug about under water; besides I had no interest in shooting fish.  So I wrapped and stowed it once more in the cutter's ample locker.  She lay there naked in the sunlight, drowsing like a seal, to smoke a cigarette before exploring further.  The rock-pool glowed beneath the glimmering keel of the boat like a quivering emerald, the long ribbons of milky light penetrating it slowly, stealing down like golden probes.  About four fathoms, I thought, and drawing a deep breath rolled over and let my body wangle downwards like a fish, not using my arms.

      Its beauty was spellbinding.  It was like diving into the nave of a cathedral whose stained-glass windows filtered the sunlight through a dozen rainbows.  The sides of the amphitheatre - for it opened gradually towards the deep sea - seemed as if carved by some heartsick artist of the Romantic Age into a dozen half-finished galleries lined with statues.  Some of these were so like real statuary that I thought for a moment that I had made an archaeological find.  But these blurred caryatids were wave-born, pressed and moulded by the hazard of the tides into goddesses and dwarfs and clowns.  A light marine fucus of brilliant yellow and green had bearded them - shallow curtains of weed which swung lightly in the tide, parting and closing, as if to reveal their secrets suggestively and then cover them again.  I pushed my fingers through this scalp of dense and slipper foliage to press them upon the blind face of a Diana or the hooked nose of a medieval dwarf.  The floor of this deserted palace was of selenite plastic clay, soft to the touch and in no way greasy.  Terracotta baked in a dozen hues of mauve and violet and gold.  Inside close to the island it was not deep - perhaps a fathom and a half - but it feel away steeply where the gallery spread out to the sea, and the deeper lining of water faded from emerald to apple green, and from Prussian blue to black, suggesting great depth.  Here, too, was the wreck of which Clea had spoken.  I had hoped of finding perhaps a Roman amphora or two, but it was not, alas, a very old ship.  I recognized the flared curve of the poop as an Aegean design - the type of caique which the Greeks call 'trechandiri'.  She had been rammed astern.  Her back was broken.  She was full of a dead weight of dark sponges.  I tried to find the painted eyes on the prow and a name, but they had vanished.  Her wood was crawling with slime and every cranny winked full of hermit crabs.  She must have belonged to sponge fishers of Kalymnos I thought, for each year their fleet crosses to fish the African coast and carry its haul back for processing in the Dodecanese Islands.

      A blinding parcel of light struck through the ceiling now and down flashed the eloquent body of Clea, her exploding coils of hair swerved up behind her and we rolled and sideslipped down in each other's arms, playing like fish until lack of breath drove us upwards once more into the sunlight.  To sit at last panting in the shallows, gazing with breathless delight at each other.

      'What a marvellous pool.'  She clapped her hands in delight.

      'I saw the wreck.'

      And climbing back to the little sickle of beach with its warm pebbles with her drenched thatch of hair swinging behind her she said: 'I've thought of another thing.  This must be Timonium.  I wish I could remember the details more clearly.'

      'What is that?'

      'They've never found the site, you know.  I am sure this must be it.  Oh, let us believe that it is, shall we?  When Antony came back defeated from Actium - where Cleopatra fled with her fleet in panic and tore open the battle-line, leaving him at the mercy of Octavian; when he came back after that unaccountable failure of nerve, and when there was nothing for them to do but to wait for the certain death which would follow upon Octavian's arrival - why he built himself a cell on an islet.  It was named after a famous recluse and misanthrope - perhaps a philosopher? - called Timon.  And here he must have spent his leisure - here, Darley, going over the whole thing again and again in his mind.  That woman with the extraordinary spells she was able to cast.  His life in ruins!  And then the passing of the God, and all that, bidding him to say goodbye to her, to Alexandria - a whole world!'

      The brilliant eyes smiling a little wistfully interrogated mine.  She put her fingers to my cheek.

      'Are you waiting for me to say that it is?'

      'Yes.'

      'Very well.  It is.'

      'Kiss me.'

      'Your mouth tastes of oranges and wine.'

      It was so small, the beach -  hardly bigger than a bed.  It was strange to make love thus with one's ankles in blue water and the hot sun blazing on one's back.  Later we made one of many desultory attempts to locate the cell, or something which might correspond to her fancy, but in vain; on the seawide side lay a tremendous jumble of granite snags, falling steeply into black water.  A thick spoke of some ancient harbour level perhaps which explained the wind-and-sea-break properties of the island.  It was so silent, one heard nothing but the faint stir of wind across our ears, distant as the echo of some tiny seashell.  Yes, and sometimes a herring gull flew over to judge the depth of the beach as a possible theatre of operations.  But for the rest the sun-drunk bodies lay, deeply asleep, the quiet rhythms of the blood responding only to the deeper rhythms of sea and sky.  A haven of animal contents which words can never compass.

      It is strange, too, to remember what a curious sea-engendered rapport we shared during that memorable summer.  A delight almost as deep as the bondage of kisses - to enter the rhythm of the waters together, responding to each other and the play of the long tides.  Clea had always been a fine swimmer, I a poor one.  But thanks to my period spent in Greece I too was now expert, more than a match for her.  Under water we played and explored the submarine world of the pool, as thoughtlessly ass fishes of the fifth day of the Creation.  Eloquent and silent water-ballets which allowed us to correspond only by smile and gesture.  The water-silences captured and transformed everything human in movement, so that we were like the coloured projections of undines painted upon these brilliant screens of rock and weed, echoing and copying the water-rhythms.  Here thought itself perished, was converted into a fathomless content in physical action.  I see the bright figure travelling like a star across this twilit firmament, its hair combed up and out in a rippling whorl of colour.

      But not only here, of course.  When you are in love with one of its inhabitants a city can become a world.  A whole new geography of Alexandria was born through Clea, reviving old meanings, renewing ambiences half forgotten, laying down like a rich wash of colour a new history, a new biography to replace the old one.  Memory of old cafés along the seafront by bronze moonlight, their striped awnings a-flutter with the midnight sea-breeze.  To sit and dine late, until the glasses before one had brimmed with moonlight.  In the shadow of a minaret, or on some strip of sand lit by the twinkle of a paraffin lamp.  Or gathering the masses of shallow spring blossom on the Cape of Figs - brilliant cyclamen, brilliant anemone.  Or standing together in the tombs of Kom El Shugafa inhaling the damp exhalations of the darkness which welled out of those strange subterranean resting-places of Alexandrians long dead; tombs carved out of the black chocolate soil, one upon the other, like bunks in a ship.  Airless, mouldy and yet somehow piercingly cold.  ('Hold my hand.')  But if she shivered it was not then with the premonitions of death, but with the sheer weight of the gravid earth piled above us metre upon metre.  Any creature of the sunlight would shiver so.  That brilliant summer frock swallowed by the gloom.  'I'm cold.  Let us go.'  Yes, it was cold down there.  But with what pleasure one stepped from the darkness into the roaring, anarchic life of the open street once more.  So the sun-god must have risen, shaking himself free from the damp clutch of the soil, smiling up at the printed blue sky which spelt travel, release from death, renewal in the life of common creatures.

      Yes, but the dead are everywhere.  They cannot be so simply evaded.  One feels them pressing their sad blind fingers in deprivation upon the panels of our secret lives, asking to be remembered and re-enacted once more in the life of the flesh - encamping among our heartbeats, invading our embraces.  We carry in ourselves the biological trophies they bequeathed us by their failure to use up life - alignment of an eye, responsive curve of a nose; or in still more fugitive forms like someone's dead laugh, or a dimple which excites a long-buried smile.  The simplest of these kisses we exchanged had a pedigree of death.  In them we once more befriended forgotten loves which struggled to be reborn.  The roots of every sigh are buried in the ground.

      And when the dead invade?  For sometimes they emerge in person.  That brilliant morning, for example, with everything so deceptively normal, when bursting from the pool like a rocket she gasped, deathly pale: 'There are dead men down there': frightening me!  Yet she was not wrong, for when I mustered the courage to go down myself and look - there they were in very truth, seven of them, sitting in the twilight of the basin with an air of scrupulous attention, as if listening to some momentous debate which would decide everything for them.  This conclave of silent figures formed a small semicircle across the outer doorway of the pool.  They had been roped in sacks and leadweighted at the feet, so that now they stood upright, like chess pieces of human size.  One has seen statues covered in this way, travelling through a city on a lorry, bound for some sad provincial museum.  Slightly crouched, responding to the ligatures which bound them, and faceless, they nevertheless stood, flinching and flickering softly like figures in an early silent film.  Heavily upholstered in death by the coarse canvas wrappers which bound them.

      They turned out to be Greek sailors who had been bathing from their corvette when, by some accident, a depth-charge had been detonated, killing them instantly by concussion.  Their unmarked bodies, glittering like mackerel, had been harvested laboriously in an old torpedo net, and laid out upon dripping decks to dry before burial.  Flung overboard once more in the traditional funeral dress of mariners the curling tide had brought them to Narouz' island.

      It will sound strange, perhaps, to describe how quickly we got used to these silent visitants of the pool.  Within a matter of days we had accommodated them, accorded them a place of their own.  We swam between them to reach the outer water, bowing ironically to their bent attentive heads.

      It was not to flout death - it was rather that they had become friendly and appropriate symbols of the place, these patient, intent figures.  Neither their thick skin-parcels of canvas, nor the stout integuments of rope which bound them showed any sigh of disintegration.  On the contrary, they were covered by a dense silver dew, like mercury, which heavily proofed canvas always collects when it is immersed.  We spoke once or twice of asking the Greek naval authorities to remove them to deeper water, but by long experience I knew we should find them unco-operative if we tried, and the subject was dropped by common consent.  Once I thought I saw the flickering shadow of a great catfish moving among them but I must have been mistaken.  We even thought later of giving them names, but were deterred by the thought that they must already have names of their own - the absurd names of ancient sophists and generals like Anaximander, Plato, Alexander....

      So this halcyon summer moved towards its end, free from omens - the long sunburnt ranks of marching days.  It was, I think, in the late autumn that Maskelyne was killed in a desert sortie, but this was a passing without echoes for me - so little substance had he ever had in my mind as a living personage.  It was, in very truth, a mysterious thing to find Telford sitting red-eyed at his desk one afternoon repeating brokenly: 'The old Brig's copped it.  The poor old Brig,' and wringing his purple hands together.  It was hard to know what to say.  Telford went on, with a kind of incoherent wonder in his voice that was endearing.  'He had no-one in the world.  D'you know what?  He gave me as his next-of-kin.'  He seemed immeasurably touched by this mark of friendship.  Nevertheless it was with a reverent melancholy that he went through Maskelyne's exiguous personal effects.  There was little enough to inherit save a few civilian clothes of unsuitable size, several campaign medals and stars, and a credit account of fifteen pounds in the Tottenham Court Road Branch of Lloyds Bank.  More interesting relics to me were those contained in a little leather wallet - the tattered pay-book and parchment certificate of discharge which had belonged to his grandfather.  The story they told had the eloquence of a history which unfolded itself within a tradition.  In the year 1861 this now forgotten Suffolk farm-boy had enlisted at Bury St Edmunds.  He served in the Coldstream Guards for thirty-two years, being discharged in 1893.  During his service he was married in the Chapel of the Tower of London and his wife bore him two sons.  There was a faded photograph of him taken on his return from Egypt in 1882.  It showed him dressed in white pith helmet, red jacket and blue serge trousers with smart black leather gaiters and pipe-clayed cross belts.  On his breast was pinned the Egyptian War Medal with a clasp for the battle of Tel-el-Kebir and the Khedive's Star.  Of Maskelyne's own father there was no record among his effects.

      'It's tragic,' said little Telford with emotion.  'Mavis couldn't stop crying when I told her.  She only met him twice.  It shows what effect a man of character can have on you.  He was always the perfect gentleman, was the Brig.'  But I was brooding over this obscure faded figure in the photograph with his grim eyes and heavy black moustache, with the pipe-clayed cross belts and the campaign medals.  He seemed to lighten the picture of Maskelyne himself, to give it focus.  Was it not, I wondered, a story of success - a success perfectly complete within the formal pattern of something greater than the individual life, a tradition?  I doubted whether Maskelyne himself could have wanted things to fall out otherwise.  In every death there is the grain of something to be learned.  Yet Maskelyne's quiet departure made little impact on my feelings, though I did what I could to soothe the forlorn Telford.  But the tide-lines of my own life were now beginning to tug me invisibly towards an unforeseeable future.  Yes, it was this beautiful autumn, with its torrent of brass brown leaves showering down from the trees in the public gardens, that Clea first became a matter of concern to me.  Was it, in truth, because she heard the weeping?  I do not know.  She never openly admitted it.  At times I tried to imagine that I heard it myself - this frail cry of a small child, or a pet locked out: but I knew that I heard nothing, absolutely nothing.  Of course one could look at it in a matter-of-fact way and class it with the order of natural vents which time revises and renews according to its own caprices.  I mean love can wither like any other plant.  Perhaps she was simply falling out of love?  But in order to record the manner of its falling out I feel almost compelled to present it as something else - preposterous as it may sound - as a visitation of an agency, a power initiated in some uncommon region beyond the scope of the ordinary imagination.  At any rate its onset was quite definitive, marked up like a date on a blank wall.  It was November the fourteenth, just before dawn.  We had been together during the whole of the previous day, idling about the city, gossiping and shopping.  She had bought some piano music, and I made her a present of a new scent from the Scent Bazaar.  (At the very moment when I awoke and saw her standing, or rather crouching by the window, I caught the sudden breath of scent from my own wrist which had been dabbed with samples from the glass-stoppered bottles.)  Rain had fallen that night.  Its delicious swishing had lulled our sleep.  We had read by candlelight before falling asleep.

      But now she was standing by the window listening, her whole body stiffened into an attitude of attentive interrogation so acute that it suggested something like a crisis of apprehension.  Her head was turned a little sideways, as if to present her ear to the uncurtained window behind which, very dimly, a rain-washed dawn was beginning to break over the roofs of the city.  What was she listening for?  I had never seen this attitude before.  I called to her and briefly she turned a distraught and unseeing face to me - impatiently, as if my voice had ruptured the fine membrane of her concentration.  And as I sat up she cried, in a deep choked voice: 'Oh no!', and clapping her hands over her ears fell shuddering to her knees.  It was as if a bullet had been fired through her brain.  I heard her bones creak as she hung crouching there, her features contorted into a grimace.  Her hands were locked so tightly over her ears that I could not disengage them, and when I tried to lift her by her wrists she simply sank back to her knees on the carpet, with shut eyes, like a dement.  'Clea,' what on earth is it?'  For a long moment we knelt there together, I in great perplexity.  Her eyes were fast shut.  I could feel the cool wind from the window pouring into the room.  The silence, save for our exclamations, was complete.  At last she gave a great sigh of relaxation, a long sobbing respiration, and unfastened her ears, stretched her limbs slowly, as if unbinding them from painful cramps.  She shook her head at me as if to say that it was nothing.  And walking like a drunkard to the bathroom she was violently sick in the washbasin.  I stood there like a sleepwalker; feeling as if I had been uprooted.  At last she came back, got into bed and turned her face to the wall.  'What is it, Clea?' I asked again, feeling foolish and importunate.  Her shoulders trembled slightly under my hand, her teeth chattered lightly from cold.  'It is nothing, really nothing.  A sudden splitting headache.  But it has gone.  Let me sleep now, will you?'

      In the morning she was up early to make the breakfast.  I thought her exceptionally pale - with the sort of pallor that might come after a long and agonizing toothache.  She complained of feeling listless and weary.

      'You frightened me last night,' I said, but she did not answer, turning away evasively from the subject with a curious look of anxiety and distress.  She asked to be allowed to spend the day alone painting, so I took myself off for a long walk across the town, teased by half-formulated thoughts and premonitions which I somehow could not make explicit to myself.  It was a beautiful day.  High seas were running.  The waves flailed the Spouting Rocks like the pistons of some huge machine.  Immense clouds of spray were flung high into the air like the explosion of giant puffballs only to fall back in hissing spume upon the crown of the next wave.  I stood watching the spectacle for a long time, feeling the tug of the wind at the skirt of my overcoat and the cool spray on my cheeks.  I think I must have known that from this point onward everything would be subtly changed.  That we had entered, so to speak, a new constellation of feelings which would alter our relationship.

      One speaks of change, but in truth there was nothing abrupt, coherent, definitive about it.  No, the metamorphosis came about with comparative slowness.  It waxed and waned like a tide, now advancing now retreating.  There were even times when, for whole weeks, we were apparently completely restored to our former selves, reviving the old raptures with an intensity born now of insecurity.  Suddenly for a spell we would be once more completely identified in each other, inseparable: the shadow had lifted.  I tell myself now - and with what truth I still do not know - that these were periods when for a long time she had not heard the weeping which she once long ago described as belonging to a she-camel in distress or some horrible mechanical toy.  But what could such nonsense really mean to anyone - and how could it elucidate those other periods when she fell into silence and moroseness, became a nervous and woebegone version of her old self?  I do not know.  I only know that this new personage was subject to long distracted silences now, and to unusual fatigues.  She might, for example, fall asleep on a sofa in the middle of a party and begin to snore: as if overcome with weariness after an immensely long vigil.  Insomnia too began to play its part, and she resorted to relatively massive doses of barbiturates in order to seek release from it.  She was smoking very heavily indeed.

      'Who is this new nervy person I do not recognize?' asked Balthazar in perplexity one evening when she had snapped his head off after some trivial pleasantry and left the room, banging the door in my face.

      'There's something wrong,' I said.  He looked at me keenly for a moment over a lighted match.  'She isn't pregnant?' he asked, and I shook my head.  'I think she's beginning to wear me out really.'  It cost me an effort to bring out the words.  But they had the merit of offering something like a plausible explanation to these moods - unless one preferred to believe that she were being gnawed by secret fears.

      'Patience,' he said.  'There is never enough of it.'

      'I'm seriously thinking of absenting myself for a while.'

      'That might be a good idea.  But not for too long.'

      'I shall see.'

      Sometimes in my clumsy way I would try by some teasing remark to probe to the sources of this disruptive anxiety.  'Clea, why are you always looking over your shoulder - for what?'  But this was a fatal error of tactics.  Her response was always one of ill-temper or pique, as if in every reference to her distemper, however oblique, I was in some way mocking her.  It was intimidating to see how rapidly her face darkened, her lips compressed themselves.  It was as if I had tried to put my hand on a secret treasure which she was guarding with her life.

      At times she was particularly nervous.  Once as we were coming out of a cinema I felt her stiffen on my arm.  I turned my eyes in the direction of her gaze.  She was staring with horror at an old man with a badly gashed face.  He was a Greek cobbler who had been caught in a bombardment and mutilated.  We all knew him quite well by sight, indeed Amaril had repaired the damage as well as he was able.  I shook her arm softly, reassuringly and she suddenly seemed to come awake.  She straightened up abruptly and said 'Come.  Let us go.'  She gave a little shudder and hurried me away.

      At other such times when I had unguardedly made some allusion to her inner preoccupations - this maddening air of always listening for something - the storms and accusations which followed seriously suggested the truth of my own hypothesis - namely that she was trying to drive me away: 'I am not good for you, Darley.  Since we have been together you haven't written a single line.  You have no plans.  You hardly read any more.'  So stern those splendid eyes had become, and so troubled!  I was forced to laugh, however.  In truth I now knew, or thought I did, that I would never become a writer.  The whole impulse to confide in the world in this way had foundered, had guttered out.  The thought of the nagging little world of print and paper had become unbearably tedious to contemplate.  Yet I was not unhappy to feel that the urge had abandoned me.  On the contrary, I was full of relief - a relief from the bondage of these forms which seemed so inadequate an instrument to convey the truth of feelings.  'Clea,' my dear,' I said, still smiling ineffectually, and yet desiring in a way to confront this accusation and placate her.  'I have been actually meditating a book of criticism.'

      'Criticism!' she echoed sharply, as if the word were an insult.  And she smacked me full across the mouth - a stinging blow which brought tears to my eyes and cut the inside of my lips against my teeth.  I retired to the bathroom to mop my mouth, for I could feel the salty taste of the blood.  It was interesting to see my teeth outlined in blood.  I looked like an ogre who had just taken a mouthful of bleeding flesh from his victims.  I washed my mouth, furiously enraged.  She came in and sat down on the bidet, full of remorse.  'Please forgive me,' she said.  'I don't know what sort of impulse came over me.  Darley, please forgive,' she said.

      'One more performance like this,' I said grimly, 'and I'll give you a blow between those beautiful eyes which you'll remember.'

      'I'm sorry.'   She put her arms round my shoulders from behind and kissed my neck.  The blood had stopped.  'What the devil is wrong?' I said to her reflection in the mirror.  'What has come over you these days?  We're drifting apart, Clea.'

      'I know.'

      'Why?'

      'I don't know.'  But her face had once more become hard and obstinate.  She sat down on the bidet and stroked her chin thoughtfully, suddenly sunk in reflection once more.  Then she lit a cigarette and walked back into her living-room.  When I returned she was sitting silently before a painting gazing at it with an inattentive malevolent fixity.

      'I think we should separate for a while,' I said.

      'If you wish,' she rapped out mechanically.

      'Do you wish it?'

      Suddenly she started crying and said 'Oh, stop questioning me.  If only you would stop asking me question after question.  It's like being in court these days.'

      'Very well,' I said.

      This was only one of several such scenes.  It seemed clear to me that to absent myself from the city was the only way to free her - to give her the time and space necessary to ... what?  I did not know.  Later that winter I thought that she had begun running a small temperature in the evenings and incurred another furious scene by asking Balthazar to examine her.  Yet despite her anger she submitted to the stethoscope with comparative quietness.  Balthazar could find nothing physically wrong, except that her pulse rate was advanced and her blood pressure higher than normal.  His prescription of stimulants she ignored, however.  She had become much thinner at this time.

      By patient lobbying I at last unearthed a small post for which I was not unsuitable and which somehow fitted into the general rhythm of things - for I did not envisage my separation from Clea as something final, something in the nature of a break.  It was simply a planned withdrawal for a few months to make room for any longer-sighted resolutions which she might make.  New factors were there, too, for with the ending of the war Europe was slowly becoming accessible once more - a new horizon opening beyond the battle-lines.  One had almost stopped dreaming of it, the recondite shape of a Europe hammered flat by bombers, raked by famine and discontents.  Nevertheless it was still there.  So it was that when I came to tell her of my departure it was not with despondency or sorrow - but as a matter-of-fact decision which she must welcome for her own part.  Only the manner in which she pronounced the word 'Away' with an indrawn breath suggested for a brief second that perhaps, after all, she might be afraid to be left alone.  'You are going away, after all?'

      'For a few months.  They are building a relay station on the island, and there is need for someone who knows the place and can speak the language.'

      'Back to the island?' she said softly - and here I could not read the meaning of her voice or the design of her thought.

      'For a few short months only.'

      'Very well.'

      She walked up and down the carpet with an air of perplexity, staring downwards at it, deep in thought.  Suddenly she looked up at me with a soft expression that I recognized with a pang - the mixture of remorse and tenderness at inflicting unwitting sorrow upon others.  It was the face of the old Clea.  But I knew that it would not last, that once more the peculiar shadow of her discontent would cast itself over our relationship.  There was no point in trusting myself once more to what could only prove a short respite.  'Oh, Darley,' she said, 'when do you go, my dear?' taking my hands.

      'In a fortnight.  Until then I propose not to see you at all.  There is no point in our unsetting each other by these wrangles.'

      'As you wish.'

      'I'll write to you.'

      'Yes of course.'

      It was a strange listless way of parting after such a momentous relationship.  A sort of ghostly anaesthesia had afflicted our emotions.  There was a kind of deep ache inside me but it wasn't sorrow.  The dead handshake we exchanged only expressed a strange and truthful exhaustion of the spirit.  She sat in a chair, quietly smoking and watching me as I gathered my possessions together and stuffed them into the old battered briefcase which I had borrowed from Telford and forgotten to return the summer before.  The toothbrush was splayed.  I threw it away.  My pyjamas were torn at the shoulder but the bottom half, which I had never used, was still crisp and new.  I assembled these objects with the air of a geologist sorting specimens of some remote age.  A few books and papers.  It all had a sort of unreality, but I cannot say that a single sharp regret was mixed with it.

      'How this war has aged and staled us,' she said suddenly, as if to herself.  'In the old days one would have thought of going away in order, as we said, to get away from oneself.  But to get away from it....'

      Now, writing the words down in all their tedious banality, I realize that she was really trying to say goodbye.  The fatality of human wishes.  For me the future lay open, uncommitted; and there was no part of it which I could then visualize as not containing, somehow, Clea.  This parting was ... well, it was only like changing the bandages until a wound should heal.  Being unimaginative, I could not think definitively about a future which might make unexpected demands upon me; as something entirely new.  It must be left to form itself upon the emptiness of the present.  But for Clea the future had already closed, was already presenting a blank wall.  The poor creature was afraid!

      'Well, that's everything,' I said at last, shoving the briefcase under my arm.  'If there's anything you need, you have only to ring me, I'll be at the flat.'

      'I know.'

      'I'm off then for a while.  Goodbye.'

      As I closed the door of the little flat I heard her call my name once - but this again was one of those deceptions, those little accesses of pity or tenderness which deceive one.  It would have been absurd to pay any attention to it, to return on my tracks, and open a new cycle of disagreements.  I went on down the stairs, determined to let the future have every chance to heal itself.

      It was a brilliantly sunny spring day and the streets looked washed with colour.  The feeling of having nowhere to go and nothing to do was both depressing and inspiriting.  I returned to the flat and found on the mantelpiece a letter from Pombal in which he said that he was likely to be transferred to Italy shortly and did not think he would be able to keep the flat on.  I was delighted as this enabled me to terminate the lease, my share of which I would soon not be able to afford.

      It was at first somewhat strange, even perhaps a little numbing, to be left entirely to my own devices, but I rapidly became accustomed to it.  Moreover there was quite a lot of work to be done in winding up my censorship duties and handing over the post to a successor while at the same time collecting practical information for the little unity of technicians which was to install the radio post.  Between the two departments with their different needs I was kept busy enough.  During these days I kept my word and saw nothing of Clea.  The time passed in a sort of limbo pitched between the world of desire and of farewell - though there were no emotions in very clear definition for me: I was not conscious of regrets or longings.

      So it was that when at last that fatal day presented itself, it did so under the smiling guise of a spring sunshine hot enough to encourage the flies to begin hatching out upon the windowpanes.  It was their buzzing which awoke me.  Sunlight was pouring into the room.  For a moment, dazzled by it, I hardly recognized the smiling figure seated at the foot of my bed, waiting for me to open my eyes.  It was the Clea of some forgotten original version, so to speak, clad in a brilliant summer frock of a crisp vine-leaf pattern, white sandals, and with her hair arranged in a new style.  She was smoking a cigarette whose smoke hung in brilliant ash-veined whorls in the sunlight above us, and her smiling face was completely relaxed and unshadowed by the least preoccupation.  I stared, for she seemed so precisely and unequivocally the Clea I should always have remembered; the mischievous tenderness was back in the eyes.  'Well,' I said in sleepy amazement.  'What ...?' and I felt her warm breath on my cheek as she leaned down to embrace me.

      'Darley,' she said, 'I suddenly realized that it's tomorrow you are leaving; and that today in the Mulid of El Scob.  I couldn't resist the idea of spending the day together and visiting the shrine this evening.  Oh, say you will!  Look at the sunshine.  It's warm enough for a bathe, and we could take Balthazar.'

      I was still not properly awake.  I had completely forgotten the Name Day of the Pirate.  'But it's long past St George's Day,' I said.  'Surely that's at the end of April.'

      'On the contrary.  Their absurd method of lunar calendar reckoning has turned him into a movable feast like all the others.  He slides up and down the calendar now like a domestic saint.  In fact it was Balthazar who telephoned yesterday and told me or I would have missed it myself.'  She paused to puff her cigarette.  'We shouldn't miss it, should we?' she added a little wistfully.

      'But of course not!  How good of you to come.'

      'And the island?  Perhaps you could come with us?'

      The time was just ten o'clock.  I could easily telephone to Telford to make some excuse for absenting myself for the day.  My heart leaped.

      'I'd love to,' I said.  'How does the wind sit?'

      'Calm as a nun with easterly freshets.  Ideal for the cutter I should say.  Are you sure you want to come?'

      She had a wicker-covered demijohn and a basket with her.  'I'll go on and provision us up; you dress and meet me at the Yacht Club in an hour.'

      'Yes.'  It would give me ample time to visit my office and examine the duty mail.  'A splendid idea.'

      And in truth it was, for the day was clear and ringing with a promise of summer heat for the afternoon.  Clip-clopping down the Grande Corniche I studied the light haze on the horizon and the flat blue expanse of sea with delight.  The city glittered in sunshine like a jewel.  Brilliantly rode the little craft in the inner basin, parodied by their shining reflections.  The minarets shone loudly.  In the Arab quarter the heat had hatched out the familiar smells of offal and drying mud, of carnations and jasmine, of animal sweat and clover.  In Tatwig Street dark gnomes on ladders with scarlet flowerpot hats were stretching strings of flags from the balconies.  I felt the sun warm on my fingers.  We rolled past the site of the ancient Pharos whose shattered fragments still choke the shallows.  Toby Mannering, I remembered, had once wanted to start a curio trade by selling fragments of the Pharos as paperweights.  Scobie was to break them up with a hammer for him and he was to deliver them to retailers all over the world.  Why had the scheme foundered?  I could not remember.  Perhaps Scobie found the work too arduous?  Or perhaps it had got telescoped with the other scheme for selling Jordan water to Copts at a competitive price?  Somewhere a military band was banging away.

      They were down on the slip waiting for me.  Balthazar waved his stick cheerfully.  He was dressed in white trousers and sandals and a coloured shirt, and sported an ancient yellowing Panama hat.

      'The first day of summer,' I called cheerfully.

      'You're wrong,' he croaked.  'Look at that haze.  It's altogether too hot.  I've betted Clea a thousand piastres we have a thunderstorm by this afternoon.'

      'He's always got something gloomy to say,' smiled Clea.

      'I know my Alexandria,' said Balthazar.

      And so amidst these idle pleasantries we three set forth, Clea at the tiller of her little craft.  There was hardly a breath of wind inside the harbour and she lagged somewhat, only gathering way by the momentum of the currents which curved down towards the harbour entrance.  We stole past the battleships and liners, breasting the choppy main-channel hesitantly, the mainsail hardly drawing as yet, until at last we reached the huddle of grey forts which marked the main harbour entrance.  Here there was always a bundle of choppy water piled up by the tide and we wallowed and yawed for a while until suddenly she heeled and threaded herself through the wind and settled her bowsprit true.  We began to hiss through the sea like a flying fish, as if she were going to impale a star.  I lay in the sheets now, staring up at the gold sun shining through the sails, hearing the smattering of the wavelets on the elegant prow of the cutter.  Balthazar was humming an air.  Clea's brown wrist lay upon the tiller with a deceptive soft negligence.  The sails were stiff.  These are the heart-lifting joys of small sailing-craft in ideal weather.  A speechless delight held me, a mixture of luxuries born of the warm sun, the racing wind, and the light cool touches of spray which dashed our cheeks from time to time.  We went far out on an easterly coarse in order to come about and tack inshore.  By now we had performed this manoeuvre so often that it had become second nature to Clea: to ride down upon the little island of Narouz and to judge the exact moment at which to turn into the eye of the wind and hang, fluttering like an eyelash, until I had run the sail in and scrambled ashore to make fast....

      'Smart work indeed,' said Balthazar approvingly as he stepped into the water; and then 'By God!  It is quite fantastically warm.'

      'What did I tell you?' said Clea busy in the locker.

      'It only proves my point about a thunderstorm.'

      And curiously enough, at this moment, there came a distinct rumble of thunder out of that cloudless sky.  'There,' said Balthazar in triumph.  'We will get a fine soaking and you will owe me some money, Clea.'

      'We'll see.'

      'It was a shore battery,' I said.

      'Rubbish,' said Balthazar.

      So we secured the cutter and carried our provisions ashore.  Balthazar lay on his back with his hat over his nose in the best of humours.  He would not bathe, pleading the indifference of his swimming, so Clea and I dived once more into the familiar pool which we had neglected all winter long.  Nothing had changed.  The sentinels were still there, grouped in silent debate, though the winter tides had altered their dispositions somewhat, grouping them a little nearer to the wreck.  Ironically yet respectfully we greeted them, recognizing in these ancient gestures and underwater smiles a familiar happiness growing up in the sheer act of swimming once more together.  It was as if the blood had started to flow again in veins long withered from disuse.  I caught her by the heel and rolled her in a long somersault towards the dead mariners, and turning expertly she repaid the debt by coming up behind me to drag me down by the shoulders and climb surfacewards before I could retaliate.  It was here, spiralling up through the water with her hair coiled out behind her, that the image of Clear was restored once more.  Time had rendered her up, whole and intact again - "natural as a city's grey-eyed Muse" - to quote the Greek poem.  Swiftly, precisely the fingers which pressed upon my shoulder re-evoked her as we slid through the silent pool.

      And then: to sit once more in the simple sunlight, sipping the red wine of St Menas as she broke up the warm brown loaf of French bread, and hunted for a particular cheese or a cluster of dates: while Balthazar talked discursively (half asleep) of the Vineyard of Ammon, the Kings of the Harpoon Kingdom and their battles, or of the Mareotic wine to which, not history, butt the gossiping Horace once attributed Cleopatra's distempers of mind ... ('History sanctions everything, pardons everything - even what we do not pardon ourselves.')

      So the warm noon drew on as we lay there on the hot pebbles: and so at last - to Balthazar's great delight and Clea's discomfiture - the predicted thunderstorm made its appearance, heralded by a great livid cloud which rolled up from the east and squatted over the city, bruising the sky.  So suddenly too - as when an ink-squid in alarm puffs out its bag and suddenly fogs clear water in a cloud of black - rain flowed down in glittering sheets, thunder bellowed and insisted.  At each peal Balthazar clapped his hands with delight - not only to be proved right, but also because here we were sitting in full sunlight, fully at our ease, eating oranges and drinking wine beside an untroubled blue sea.

      'Stop crowing,' said Clea severely.

      It was one of those freak storms so prevalent in the early spring with its sharp changes of temperature born of sea and desert.  They turned the streets to torrents in the twinkling of an eye, yet never endured above half an hour.  Suddenly the cloud would be whisked away by a scrap of wind, utterly to disappear.  'And mark me now,' said Balthazar, inebriated by the success of his prediction.  'By the time we get back to harbour everything will be dry again, dry as a bone.'

      But now the afternoon brought us another phenomenon to delight us - something rarely seen in summer in the waters of Alexandria, belonging as it did to those days preceding winter storms when the glass was falling steeply.  The waters of the pool darkened appreciably, curdled, and then became phosphorescent.  It was Clea who first noticed.  'Look,' she cried with delight, crushing her heels down in the shallows to watch the twinkling prickling light spark from them.  'Phosphorus!'  Balthazar started saying something learned about the organism which causes this spectacle but unheeding we plunged side by side and ranged down into the water, transformed into figures of flame, the sparks flashing from the tips of our fingers and toes with the glitter of static electricity.  A swimmer seen underwater looks like an early picture of the fall of Lucifer, literally on fire.   So bright was the electrical crackle that we could not help wondering how it was that we were not scorched by it.  So we played, glittering like comets, among the quiet mariners who sat, watching us perhaps in their thoughts, faintly echoing the twitching of the tide in their canvas sacks.

      'The cloud's lifting already,' cried Balthazar as I surfaced at last for the air.  Soon even the fugitive phosphorescence would dwindle and vanish.  For some reason or other he had climbed into the stern of the cutter, perhaps to gain height and more easily watch the thunderstorm over the city.  I rested my forearms on the gunwale and took my breath.  he had unwrapped the old harpoon gun of Narouz and was holding it negligently on his knee.  Clea surfaced with a swish of delight and pausing just long enough to cry: 'The fire is so beautiful,' doubled her lithe body back and ducked downward again.

      'What are you doing with that?' I asked idly.

      'Seeing how it works.'

      He had in fact pushed the harpoon to rest in the barrel.  It had locked the spring.  'It's cocked,' I said.  'Have a care.'

      'Yes, I'm going to release it.'

      Then Balthazar leaned forward and uttered the only serious remark he had made all that day.  'You know,' he said, 'I think you had better take her with you.  I have a feeling you won't be coming back to Alexandria.  Take Clea with you!'

      And then, before I could reply, the accident happened.  He was fumbling with the gun as he spoke.  It slipped from between his fingers and fell with a crash, the barrel striking the gunwale six inches from my face.  As I reared back in alarm I heard the sudden cobra-like hiss of the compressor and the leaden twang of the trigger-release.  The harpoon whistled into the water beside me rustling its long green line behind it.  'For Christ's sake,' I said.  Balthazar had turned white with alarm and vexation.  His half-muttered apologies and expressions of horrid amazement were eloquent.  'I'm terribly sorry.'  I had heard the slight snick of steel settling into a target, somewhere down there in the pool.  We stayed frozen for a second, for something else had occurred simultaneously to our minds.  As I saw his lips starting to shape the word 'Clea' I felt a sudden darkness descending on my spirit - a darkness which lifted and trembled at the edges; and a rushing like a sough of giant wings.  I had already turned before he uttered the word.  I crashed back into the water, now following the long green thread with all the suspense of Ariadne; and to it added the weight of slowness which only heartsick apprehension brings.  I knew in my mind that I was swimming vigorously - yet it seemed like one of those slow-motion films where human actions, delayed by the camera, are drawn unctuously out to infinity, spooled out like toffee.  How many light-years would it take to reach the end of that thread?  What would I find at the end of it?  Down I went, and down, in the dwindling phosphorescence, into the deep shadowed coolness of the pool.

      At the far end, by the wreck, I distinguished a convulsive, coiling movement, and dimly recognized the form of Clea.  She seemed intently busy upon some childish underwater game of the kind we so often played together.  She was tugging at something, her feet braced against the woodwork of the wreck, tugging and relaxing her body.  Though the green thread led to her I felt a wave of relief - for perhaps she was only trying to extricate the harpoon and carry it to the surface with her.  But no, for she rolled drunkenly.  I slid along her like an eel, feeling with my hands.  Feeling me near she turned her head as if to tell me something.  Her long hair impeded my vision.  As for her face I could not read the despairing pain which must have been written on it - for the water transforms every expression of the human features into the goggling imbecile grimace of the squid.  But now she arched out and flung her head back so that her hair could flow freely up from her scalp - the gesture of someone throwing open a robe to exhibit a wound.  And I saw.  Her right hand had been pierced and nailed to the wreck by the steel arrow.  At least it had not passed through her body, my mind cried out in relief, seeking to console itself; but the relief turned to sick malevolent despair when, clutching the steel shaft, I myself braced my feet against the wood, tugging until my thigh muscles cracked.  It would not be budged by a hair's breadth.  (No, but all this was part of some incomprehensible dream, fabricated perhaps in the dead minds of the seven brooding figures which attended so carefully, so scrupulously to the laboured evolutions we now performed - we no longer free and expeditious as fish, but awkward, splayed, like lobsters trapped in a pot.)  I struggled frantically with that steel arrow, seeing out of the corner of my eye the long chain of white bubbles bursting from the throat of Clea.  I felt her muscles expending themselves, ebbing.  Gradually she was settling in the drowsiness of the blue water, being invaded by the water-sleep which had already lulled the mariners to sleep.  I shook her.

      I cannot pretend that anything which followed belonged to my own volition - for the mad rage which now possessed me was not among the order of the emotions I would ever have recognized as belonging to my proper self.  It exceeded, in blind violent rapacity, anything I had ever before experienced.  In this curious timeless underwater dream I felt my brain ringing like the alarm bell of an ambulance, dispelling the lulling languorous ebb and flow of the marine darkness.  I was suddenly rowelled by the sharp spur of terror.  It was as if I were for the first time confronting myself - or perhaps an alter ego shaped after a man of action I had never realized, recognized.  With one wild shove I shot to the surface again, emerging under Balthazar's very nose.

      'The knife,' I said, sucking in the air.

      His eyes gazed into mine, as if over the edge of some sunken continent, with an expression of pity and horror; emotions preserved, fossilized, from some ice age of human memory.  And native fear.  He started to stammer out all the questions which invaded his mind - words like 'what' 'where' 'when' 'whither' - but could achieve no more than a baffled 'wh----': a vague sputtering anguish of interrogation.

      The knife which I had remembered was an Italian bayonet which had been ground down tot he size of a dirk and sharpened to razor keenness.  Ali the boatman had manufactured it with pride.  He used it to trim ropes, for splicing and rigging.  I hung there for a second while he reached out for it, eyes closed, lungs drinking in the whole sky it seemed.  Then I felt the wooden half in my fingers and without daring to look again at Balthazar I turned my toes to heaven and returned on my tracks, following the green thread.

      She hung there limp now, stretched languorously out, while her long hair unfurled behind her; the tides rippled out along her body, passing through it, it seemed, like an electric current playing.  Everything was still, the silver coinage of sunlight dappling the floor of the pool, the silent observers, the statues whose long beards moved slowly, unctuously to and fro.  Even as I began to hack at her hand I was mentally preparing a large empty space in my mind which would have to accommodate the thought of her dead.  A large space like an unexplored subcontinent on the maps of the mind.  It was not very long before I felt the body disengage under this bitter punishment.  The water was dark.  I dropped the knife and with a great push sent her reeling back from the wreck: caught her under the arms: and so rose.  It seemed to take an age - an endless progression of heartbeats - in that slow-motion world.  Yet we hit the sky with a concussion that knocked the breath from me - as if I had cracked my skull on the ceiling of the universe.  I was standing in the shallows now rolling the heavy sodden log of her body.  I heard the crash of Balthazar's teeth falling into the boat as he jumped into the water beside me.  We heaved and grunted like stevedores scrabbling about to grasp that injured hand which was spouting.  He was like an electrician trying to capture and insulate a high-tension wire which had snapped.  Grabbing it, he held on to it like a vice.  I had a sudden picture of him as a small child holding his mother's hand nervously among a crowd of other children, or crossing a park where the boys had once thrown stones at him.... Through his pink gums he extruded the word 'Twine' - and there was some luckily in the cutter's locker which kept him busy.

      'But she's dead,' I said, and the word altered my heartbeats, so that I felt about to faint.  She was lying, like a fallen seabird, on the little spit of pebbles.  Balthazar squatted almost in the water, holding frenziedly on to the hand at which I could hardly bear to look.  But again this unknown alter ego whose voice came from far away helped me to adjust a tourniquet, roll a pencil in it and hand it to him.  What a heave how I straightened her out and fell with a thump upon her, crashing down as if from a very great height upon her back.  I felt the soggy lungs bounce under this crude blow.  Again and again, slowly but with great violence I began to squeeze them in this pitiful simulacrum of the sexual act - life saving, life-giving.  Balthazar appeared to be praying.  Then came a small sign of hope, for the lips of that pale face opened and a little sea water mixed with vomit trickled from them.  It meant nothing, of course, but we both cried out at the omen.  Closing my eyes I willed my wrists to seek out those waterlogged lungs, to squeeze and void them.  Up and down, up and down in this slow cruel rhythm, I pumped at her.  I felt her fine bones creaking under my hands.  But still she lay lifeless.  But I would not accept the thought that she was dead, though I knew it with one part of my mind.  I felt half mad with determination to disprove it, to overthrow, if necessary, the whole process of nature and by an act of will force her to live.  These decisions astonished me, for they subsisted like clear and sharply defined images underneath the dazed physical fatigue, the groan and sweat of this labour.  I had, I realized, decided either to bring her up alive or to stay down there at the bottom of the pool with her; but where, from which territory of the will such a decision had come, I could not guess!  And now it was hot.  I was pouring with sweat.  Balthazar still sat holding the hand, the painter's hand, humbly as a child at its mother's knee.  Tears trickled down his nose.  His head went from side to side in that Jewish gesture of despairing remorse and his toothless gums formed the sound of the old Wailing Wall 'Aiee, Aiee'.  But very softly, as if not to disturb her.

      But at last we were rewarded.  Suddenly, like a spout giving in a gutter under the pressure of rain, her mouth opened and expelled a mass of vomit and sea-water, fragments of breadsoak and orange.  We gazed at this mess with a lustful delight, as if at a great trophy.  I felt the lungs respond slowly to my hand.  A few more strokes of this crude engine and a secondary ripple seemed to stir in the musculature of her body.  At almost every downward thrust now the lungs gave up some water, reluctantly, painfully.  Then, after a long time, we heard a faint whimper.  It must have hurt, as the first breaths hurt a newly born child.  The body of Clea was protesting at this forcible rebirth.  And all of a sudden the features of that white face moved, composed themselves to express something like pain and protest.  (Yes, but it hurts to realize.)

      'Keep it up,' cried Balthazar in a new voice, shaky and triumphant.  There was no need to tell me.  She was twitching a little now, and making a soundless whimpering face at each lunge.  It was like starting a very cold diesel engine.  Finally yet another miracle occurred - for she opened very blue sightless unfocused eyes for a second to study, with dazed concentration, the stones before her nose.  Then she closed them again.  Pain darkened her features, but even the pain was a triumph - for at least they expressed living emotions now - emotions which had replaced the pale set mask of death.  'She's breathing,' I said.  'Balthazar, she's breathing.'

      'She's breathing,' he repeated with a kind of idiotic rapture.

      She was breathing, short staggering inspirations which were clearly painful.  But now another kind of help was at hand.  We had not noticed, so concentrated were we on this task, that a vessel had entered the little harbour.  This was the Harbour Patrol motorboat.  They had seen us and guessed that something was wrong.  'Merciful God,' cried Balthazar, flapping his arms like an old crow.  Cheerful English voices came across the water asking if we needed help; a couple of sailors came ashore towards us.  'We'll have her back in no time,' said Balthazar, grinning shakily.

      'Give her some brandy.'

      'No,' he cried sharply.  'No brandy.'

      The sailors brought a tarpaulin ashore and softly we baled her up like Cleopatra.  To their brawny arms she must have seemed as light as thistledown.  Their tender clumsy movements were touching, brought tears to my eyes.  'Easy up there, Nobby.  Gently with the little lady.'  'That tourniquet will have to be watched.  You go too, Balthazar.'

      'And you?'

      'I'll bring her cutter back.'

      We wasted no more time.  In a few moments the powerful motors of the patrol vessel began to bustle them away at a good ten knots.  I heard a sailor say: 'How about some hot Bovril?'

      'Capital,' said Balthazar.  He was soaked to the skin.  His hat was floating in the water beside me.  Leaning over the stern a thought suddenly struck him.

      'My teeth.  Bring my teeth!'

      I watched them out of sight and then sat for a good while with my head in my hands.  I found to my surprise that I was trembling all over like a frightened horse with shock.  A splitting headache assailed me.  I climbed into the cutter and foraged for the brandy and a cigarette.  The harpoon gun lay on the sheets.  I threw it overboard with an oath and watched it slowly crawling downwards into the pool.  Then I shook out the jib, and turning her through her own length on the stern anchor pressed her out into the wind.  It took longer than I thought, for the evening wind had shifted a few points and I had to tack widely before I could bring her in.  Ali was waiting for me.  He had already been apprised of the situation, and carried a message from Balthazar to the effect that Clea had been taken up to the Jewish hospital.

      I took a taxi as soon as one could be found.  We travelled across the city at a great pace.  The streets and buildings passed me in a sort of blur.  So great was my anxiety that I saw them as if ticking away like a pulse.  Somewhere in a white ward Clea would be lying drinking blood through the eye of a silver needle.  Drop by drop it would be passing into the median vein heartbeat by heartbeat.  There was nothing to worry about, I told myself; and then, thinking of that shattered hand, I banged my fist with rage against the padded wall of the taxi.

      I followed a duty nurse down the long anonymous green corridors whose oil-painted walls exuded an atmosphere of damp.  The white phosphorescent bulbs which punctuated our progress wallowed in the gloom like swollen glow-worms.  They had probably put her, I reflected, in the little ward with the single curtained bed which in the past had been reserved for critical cases whose expectation of life was short.  It was now the emergency casualty ward.  A sense of ghostly familiarity was growing upon me.  In the past it was here that I had come to see Melissa. Clea must be lying in the same narrow iron bed in the corner by the wall.  ('It would be just like real life to imitate art at this point.')

      In the corridor outside, however, I came upon Amaril and Balthazar standing with a curious chastened expression before a trolley which had just been wheeled to them by a duty nurse.  It contained a number of wet and glistening X-ray photographs, newly developed and pegged upon a rail.  The two men were studying them anxiously, gravely, as if thinking out a chess problem.  Balthazar caught sight of me and turned, his face lighting up.  'She's all right,' he said, but in rather a broken voice, as he squeezed my hand.  I handed him his teeth and he blushed, and slipped them into his pocket.  Amaril was wearing horn-rimmed reading glasses.  He turned from his intent study of those dripping dangling sheets with an expression of utter rage.  'What the bloody hell do you expect me to do with this mess?' he burst out waving his insolent white hand in the direction of the X-rays.  I lost my temper at the implied accusation and in a second we were shouting at each other like fishmongers, our eyes full of tears.  I think we would have come to blows out of sheer exasperation had not Balthazar got between us.  Then at once the rage dropped from Amaril and he walked around Balthazar to embrace me and mutter an apology.  'She's all right,' he murmured, patting my consolingly on the shoulder.  'We've tucked her up safely.'

      'Leave the rest to us,' said Balthazar.

      'I'd like to see her,' I said enviously - as if, by bringing her to life, I had made her, in a way, my own property too.  'Could I?'

      As I pushed open the door and crept into the little cell like a miser I heard Amaril say peevishly: 'It's all very well to talk about surgical repair in that glib way----'

      It was immensely quiet and white, the little ward with its tall windows.  She lay with her face to the wall in the uncomfortable steel bed on castors of yellow rubber.  It smelt of flowers, though there were none to be seen and I could not identify the odour.  It was perhaps a synthetic atomizer spray - the essence of forget-me-nots?  I softly drew up a chair beside the bed and sat down.  Her eyes were open, gazing at the wall with the dazed look which suggested morphia and fatigue combined.  Though she gave no sign of having heard me enter she said suddenly:-

      'Is that you Darley?'

      'Yes.'

      Her voice was clear.  Now she sighed and moved slightly, as if with relief at my coming.  'I'm so glad.'  Her voice had a small weary lilt which suggested that somewhere beyond the confines of her present pain and drowsiness a new self-confidence was stirring.  'I wanted to thank you.'

      'It is Amaril you're in love with,' I said - rather, blurted out.  The remark came as a great surprise to me.  It was completely involuntary.  Suddenly a shutter seemed to roll back across my mind.  I realized that this new fact which I was enunciating was one that I had always known, but without being aware of the knowing!  Foolish as it was the distinction was a real one.  Amaril was like a playing card which had always been there, lying before me on the table, face downwards.  I had been aware of its existence but had never turned it over.  Nor, I should add, was there anything in my voice beyond genuine scientific surprise; it was without pain, and full of sympathy only.  Between us we had never used this dreadful word - this synonym for derangement or illness - and if I deliberately used it now it was to signify my recognition of the thing's autonomous nature.  It was rather like saying 'My poor child, you have got cancer!'

      After a moment's silence she said: 'Past tense now, alas!'  Her voice had a puzzled drawling quality.  'And I was giving you good marks for tact, thinking you had recognized him in my Syrian episode!  Had you really not?  Yes, Amaril turned me into a woman I suppose.  Oh, isn't it disgusting?  When will we all grow up?  No, but I've worn him out in my heart, you know.  It isn't as you imagine it.  I know he is not the man for me.  Nothing would have persuaded me to replace Semira.  I know this by the fact of having made love to him, been in love with him!  It's odd, but the experience prevented me from mistaking him for the other one, the once-for-aller!  Though who and where he is remains to discover.  I haven't really confronted the real problems yet, I feel.  They lie the other side of these mere episodes.  And yet, perverse as it is, it is nice to be close to him - even on the operating-table.  How is one to make clear a single truth about the human heart?'

      'Shall I put off my journey?'

      'But no.  I wouldn't wish it at all.  I shall need a little time to come to myself now that at last I am free from the horror.  That at least you have done for me - pushed me back into midstream again and driven off the dragon.  It's gone and will never come back.  Put your hand on my shoulder and squeeze, instead of a kiss.   No.  Don't change plans.  Now at last we can take things a bit easily.  Unhurriedly.  I shall be well cared for here as you know.  Later when your job is done we shall see, shall we?  Try and write.  I feel perhaps a pause might start you off.'

      'I will.'  But I knew I wouldn't.

      'Only one thing I want you to do.  Please visit the Mulid of El Scob tonight so that you can tell me about it; you see it is the first time since the war that they are allowing the customary lighting in that quartier.  It should be fun to see.  I don't want you to miss it.  Will you?'

      'Of course.'

      'Thank you, my dear.'

      I stood up and after a moment's pause said: 'Clea, what exactly was the horror?'

      But she had closed her eyes and was fading softly into sleep.  Her lips moved but I could not catch her answer.  There was the faintest trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

      A phrase of Pursewarden's came into my mind as I softly closed the door of the ward.  'The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.'

 

*    *    *    *    *

 

      It was already late when at last I managed to locate a gharry to take me back to the town.  At the flat I found a message to say that my departure had been put forward by six hours; the motor-launch would be leaving at midnight.  Hamid was there, standing quite still and patient, as if he already knew the contents of the message.  My luggage had been collected by an Army truck that afternoon.  There was nothing left to do except kill the time until twelve, and this I proposed to do in the fashion suggested by Clea: by visiting the Mulid of El Scob.  Hamid still stood before me, gravid with the weight of another parting.  'You no come back this time, sir,' he said, blinking his eye at me with sorrow.  I looked at the little man with emotion.  I remembered how proudly he had recounted the saving of this one eye.  It was because he had been the younger and uglier brother of the two.  His mother had put out his brother's two eyes in order to prevent him from being conscripted; but he, Hamid, being puny and ugly - he had escaped with one.  His brother was now a blind muezzin in Tanta.  But how rich he was, Hamid, with his one eye!  It represented a fortune to him in well-paid word for rich foreigners.

      'I come to you in London,' he said eagerly, hopefully.

      'Very well.  I'll write to you.'

      He was all dressed up for the Mulid in his best clothes - the crimson cloak and the red shoes of soft morocco leather; in his bosom he had a clean white handkerchief.  It was his evening off I remembered.  Pombal and I had saved up a sum of money to give him as a parting present.  He took the cheque between finger and thumb, inclining his head with gratitude.  But self-interest could not buoy him up against the pain of parting from us.  So he repeated 'I come to you in London,' to console himself; shaking hands with himself as he said the words.

      'Very well,' I said for the third time, though I could hardly see one-eyed Hamid in London.  'I will write.  Tonight I shall visit the Mulid of El Scob.'

      'Very good.'  I shook him by the shoulders and the familiarity made him bow his head.  A tear trickled out of his blind eye and off the end of his nose.

      'Goodbye ya Hamid,' I said, and walked down the stairs, leaving him standing quietly at the top, as if waiting for some signal from outer space.  Then suddenly he rushed after me, catching me at the front door, in order to thrust into my hand, as a parting present, his cherished picture of Melissa and myself walking down Rue Fuad on some forgotten afternoon.

 

*    *    *    *    *