We paid off the cab at the Cecil and walked up the winding deserted street towards her flat arm-in-arm, hearing our own slow steps magnified by the silence. In a bookshop window there were a few novels, one by Pursewarden. We stopped for a moment to peer into the darkened shop and then resumed our leisurely way to the flat. ‘You’ll come in for a moment?’ she said.
Here, too, the air of celebration was apparent, in the flowers and the small supper-table on which stood a champagne-bucket.
‘I did not know we’d stay to dine at the Auberge, and prepared to feed you here if necessary’ said Clea, dipping her fingers in the ice-water; she sighed with relief. ‘At least we can have a nightcap together.’ Here at least there was nothing to disorient or disfigure memory for everything was exactly as I remembered it; I had stepped back into this beloved room as one might step into some favourite painting. Here it all was, the crowded bookshelves, heavy drawingboards, small cottage piano, and the corner with the tennis racquet and fencing foils; on the writing desk, with its disorderly jumble of letters, drawings and bills, stood the candlesticks which she was now in the act of lighting. A bundle of paintings stood against the wall. I turned one or two round and stared at them curiously.
‘My God! You’ve gone abstract, Clea.’
‘I know! Balthazar hates them. It’s just a phase I expect, so don’t regard it as irrevocable or final. It’s a different way of mobilizing one’s feelings about paint. Do you loathe them?’
‘No, they are stronger I think.’
‘Hum. Candlelight flatters them with false chiaroscuro.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Come, sit down; I’ve poured us a drink.’ As if by common consent we sat facing each other on the carpet as we had so often done in the past, cross-legged like
‘Armenian tailors’, as she had once remarked. We toasted each other in the rosy light of the scarlet candles which stood unwinking in the still air defining with their ghostly radiance the smiling mouth and candid features of Clea. Here, too, at last, on this memorable spot on the faded carpet, we embraced each other with — how to say it? — a momentous smiling calm, as if the cup of language had silently overflowed into these eloquent kisses which replaced words like the rewards of silence itself, perfecting thought and gesture. They were like soft cloud-formations which had distilled themselves out of a novel innocence, the veritable ache of desirelessness. My steps had led me back again, I realized, remembering the night so long ago when we had slept dreamlessly in each other’s arms, to the locked door which had once refused me admission to her. Led me back once more to that point in time, that threshold, behind which the shade of Clea moved, smiling and irresponsible as a flower, after a huge arid detour in a desert of my own imaginings. I had not known then how to find the key to that door. Now of its own accord it was slowly opening.
Whereas the other door which had once given me access to Justine had now locked irrevocably. Did not Pursewarden say something once about ‘sliding-panels’? But he was talking of books, not of the human heart. In her face now there was neither guile nor premeditation mirrored, but only a sort of magnificent mischief which had captured the fine eyes, expressed itself in the firm and thoughtful way she drew my hands up inside her sleeves to offer herself to their embrace with the uxorious gesture of a woman offering her body to some priceless cloak. Or else to catch my hand, place it upon her heart and whisper ‘Feel! It has stopped beating!’ So we lingered, so we might have stayed, like rapt figures in some forgotten painting, unhurriedly savouring the happiness given to those who set out to enjoy each other without reservations or self-contempts, without the premeditated costumes of selfishness — the invented limitations of human love: but that suddenly the dark air of the night outside grew darker, swelled up with the ghastly tumescence of a sound which, like the frantic wing-beats of some prehistoric bird, swallowed the whole room, the candles, the figures. She shivered at the first terrible howl of the sirens but did not move; and all around us the city stirred to life like an ants’ nest. Those streets which had been so dark and silent now began to echo with the sound of feet as people made their way to the air-raid shelters, rustling like a gust of dry autumn leaves whirled by the wind. Snatches of sleepy conversation, screams, laughter, rose to the silent window of the little room. The street had filled as suddenly as a dry river-bed when the spring rains fall.
‘Clea, you should shelter.’ But she only pressed closer, shaking her head like someone drugged with sleep, or perhaps by the soft explosion of kisses which burst like bubbles of oxygen in the patient blood. I shook her softly, and she whispered: ‘I am too fastidious to die with a lot of people like an old rats’ nest. Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world.’ So it was that love-making itself became a kind of challenge to the whirlwind outside which beat and pounded like a thunderstorm of guns and sirens, igniting the pale skies of the city with the magnificence of its lightning—flashes. And kisses themselves became charged with the deliberate affirmation which can come only from the foreknowledge and presence of death. It would have been good to die at any moment then, for love and death had somewhere joined hands. It was an expression of her pride, too, to sleep there in the crook of my arm like a wild bird exhausted by its struggles with a limed twig, for all the world as if it were an ordinary summer might of peace. And lying awake at her side, listening to the infernal racket of gunfire and watching the stabbing and jumping of fight behind the blinds I remembered how once in the remote past she had reminded me of the limitations which love illuminated in us: saying something about its capacity being limited to an iron ration for each soul and adding gravely: ‘The love you feel for Melissa, the same love, is trying to work itself out through Justine.’ Would I, by extension, find this to be true also of Clea? I did not like to think so — for these fresh and spontaneous embraces were as pristine as invention, and not like ill-drawn copies of past actions. They were the very improvisations of the heart itself — or so I told myself as I lay there trying so hard to recapture the elements of the feelings I had once woven around those other faces. Yes, improvisations upon reality itself, and for once devoid of the bitter impulses of the will. We had sailed into this calm water completely without premeditation, all canvas crowded on; and for the first time it felt natural to be where I was, drifting into sleep with her calm body lying beside me. Even the long rolling cannonades which shook the houses so, even the hail of shards which swept the streets, could not disturb the dreaming silence we harvested together. And when we awoke to find everything silent once more she lit a single candle and we lay by its flickering light, looking at each other, and talking in whispers.
‘I am always so bad the first time, why is it?’
‘So am I.’
‘Are you afraid of me?’
‘No. Nor of myself.’
‘Did you ever imagine this?’
‘We must both have done. Otherwise it would not have happened.’
‘Hush! Listen.’ Rain was now falling in sheets as it so often did before dawn in Alexandria, chilling the air, washing down the stiffly clicking leaves of the palms in the Municipal Gardens, washing the iron grilles of the banks and the pavements. In the Arab town the earthen streets would be smelling like a freshly dug graveyard.
The flower-sellers would be putting out their stocks to catch the freshness. I remembered their cry of ‘Carnations, sweet as the breath of a girl!’ From the harbour the smells of tar, fish and briny nets flowing up along the deserted streets to meet the scentless pools of desert air which would later, with the first sunlight, enter the town from the east and dry its damp faзades.