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, they have chosen the nose of a soldier 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 finger-tips. 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 like 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 gate-crashed 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.