And he buried his face there among the dunes, covered by her quick hair.’ Then he was silent, staring at her with his clear eyes, his trembling lips closing for the first time about endearments which were now alight, now truly passionate. She shivered suddenly, aware that she would not escape him now, that she would have to submit to him fully.
‘Melissa’ he said triumphantly.
They enjoyed each other now, wisely and tenderly, like friends long sought for and found among the commonplace crowds which thronged the echoing city. And here was a Melissa he had planned to find — eyes closed, warm open breathing mouth, torn from sleep with a kiss by the rosy candlelight. ‘It is time to go.’ But she pressed nearer and nearer to his body, whimpering with weariness.
He gazed down fondly at her as she lay in the crook of his arm.
‘And the rest of your prophecy?’ he said gaily. ‘Rubbish, all rubbish’ she answered sleepily. ‘I can sometimes learn a character from a hand — but the future! I am not so clever.’ The dawn was breaking behind the window. On a sudden impulse he went to the bathroom and turned on the bathwater.
It flowed boiling hot, gushing into the bath with a swish of steam!
How typical of the Mount Vulture Hotel, to have hot bathwater at such an hour and at no other. Excited as a schoolboy he called her. ‘Melissa, come and soak the weariness out of your bones or I’ll never get you back to your home.’ He thought of ways and means of delivering the five hundred pounds to Darley in such a way as to disguise the source of the gift. He must never know that it came from a rival’s epitaph on a dead Copt! ‘Melissa’ he called again, but she was asleep.
He picked her up bodily and carried her into the bathroom.
Lying snugly in the warm bath, she woke up, uncurled from sleep like one of those marvellous Japanese paper—flowers which open in water. She paddled the warmth luxuriously over her shallow pectorals and glowed, her thighs beginning to turn pink. Pursewarden sat upon the bidet with one hand in the warm water and talked to her as she woke from sleep..’You mustn’t take too long’ he said, ‘or Darley will be angry.’
‘Darley! Bah! He was out with Justine again last night.’ She sat up and began to soap her breasts, breathing in the luxury of soap and water like someone tasting a rare wine. She pronounced her rival’s name with small cringing loathing that seemed out of character. Pursewarden was surprised. ‘Such people — the Hosnanis’ she said with contempt. ‘And poor Darley believes in them, in her. She is only using him. He is too good, too simple.’
‘Using him?’ She turned on the shower and revelling in the clouds of steam nodded a small pinched-up face at him. ‘I know all about them.’
‘What do you know?’ He felt inside himself the sudden stirring of a discomfort so pronounced that it had no name. She was about to overturn his world as one inadvertently knocks over an inkpot or a goldfishbowl. Smiling a loving smile all the time. Standing there in the clouds of steam like an angel emerging from heaven in some seventeenth-century engraving.
‘What do you know?’ he repeated.
Melissa examined the cavities in her teeth with a handmirror, her body still wet and glistening. ‘I’ll tell you. I used to be the mistress of a very important man, Cohen, very important and very rich.’ There was something pathetic about such boasting.
‘He was working with Nessim Hosnani and told me things. He also talked in his sleep. He is dead now. I think he was poisoned because he knew so much. He was helping to take arms into the Middle East, into Palestine, for Nessim Hosnani. Great quantities.
He used to say “Pour faire sauter les Anglais!” ’ She ripped out the words vindictively, and all of a sudden, after a moment’s thought added: ‘He used to do this.’ It was grotesque, her imitation of Cohen bunching up his fingers to kiss them and then waving them in a gesture as he said ‘Tout а toi, John Bull!’ Her face crumpled and screwed up into an imitation of the dead man’s malice.
‘Dress now’ said Pursewarden in a small voice. He went into the other room and stood for a moment gazing distractedly at the wall above the bookshelf. It was as if the whole city had crashed down about his ears.
‘That is why I don’t like the Hosnanis’ cried Melissa from the bathroom in a new, brassy fishwife’s voice. ‘They secretly hate the British.’
‘Dress’ he called sharply, as if he were speaking to a horse.
‘And get a move on.’ Suddenly chastened she dried herself and tiptoed out of the bathroom saying ‘I am ready immediately.’ Pursewarden stood quite still staring at the wall with a fixed, dazed expression. He might have fallen there from some other planet. He was so still that his body might have been a statue cast in some heavy metal.
Melissa shot small glances at him as she dressed. ‘What is it?’ she said. He did not answer. He was thinking furiously.
When she was dressed he took her arm and together they walked in silence down the staircase and into the street. The dawn was beginning to break. There were still street-lamps alight and they still cast shadows. She looked at his face from time to time, but it was expressionless. Punctually as they approached each light their shadows lengthened, grew narrower and more contorted, only to disappear into the half-light before renewing their shape. Pursewarden walked slowly, with a tired, deliberate trudge, still holding her arm. In each of these elongated capering shadows he saw now quite clearly the silhouette of the defeated Maskelyne.
At the corner by the square he stopped and with the same abstracted expression on his face said: ‘Tiens! I forgot. Here is the thousand I promised you.’ He kissed her upon the cheek and turned back towards the hotel without a word.
*******
IX
Mountolive was away on an official tour of the cottonginning plants in the Delta when the news was phoned through to him by Telford. Between incredulity and shock, he could hardly believe his ears. Telford spoke self-importantly in the curious slushy voice which his ill—fitting dentures conferred upon him; death was a matter of some importance in his trade. But the death of an enemy! He had to work hard to keep his tone sombre, grave, sympathetic, to keep the self-congratulation out of it. He spoke like a county coroner. ‘I thought you’d like to know, sir, so I took the liberty of interrupting your visit. Nimrod Pasha phoned me in the middle of the night and I went along. The police had already sealed up the place for the Parquet inquiry; Dr Balthazar was there. I had a look around while he issued the certificate of death. I was allowed to bring away a lot of personal papers belonging to the … the deceased.
Nothing of much interest. Manuscript of a novel. The whole business came as a complete surprise. He had been drinking very heavily — as usual, I’m afraid. Yes.’