How had all this come about? You would never be able to tell by watching that dark, graceful form with its untamed glances, the smile of the magnificent white teeth….). Yet one trite conversation can contain the germ of a whole life. Balthazar, for example, meeting Clea against a red brocade curtain, holding a glass of Pernod, could say. ‘Clea, I have something to tell you’; taking in as he spoke the warm gold of her hair and a skin honeyed almost to the tone of burnt sugar by sea-bathing in the warm spring sunshine.
‘What?’ Her candid eyes were as blue as corn—flowers and set in her head like precision-made objects of beauty — the life-work of a jeweller. ‘Speak, my dear.’ Black head of hair (he dyed it), lowered voice set in its customary sardonic croak, Balthazar said: ‘Your father came to see me. He is worried about an illicit relationship you are supposed to have formed with another woman. Wait — don’t speak, and don’t look hurt.’ For Clea looked now as if he were pressing upon a bruise, the sad grave mouth set in a childish expression, imploring no further penetration. ‘He says you are an innocent, a goose, and that Alexandria does not permit innocent people to….’
‘Please, Balthazar.’
‘I would not have spoken had I not been impressed by his genuine anguish — not about scandaclass="underline" who cares for gossip? But he was worried lest you should be hurt.’ In a small compressed voice, like some packaged thought squeezed to a hundredth of its size by machinery, Clea said:
‘I have not been alone with Justine for months now. Do you understand? It ended when the painting ended. If you wish us to be friends you will never refer to this subject again’ smiling a little tremulously, for in the same breath Justine came sailing down upon them, smiling warmly, radiantly. (It is quite possible to love those whom you most wound.) She passed, turning in the candlelight of the room like some great seabird, and came at last to where I was standing. ‘I cannot come tonight’ she whispered. ‘Nessim wants me to stay at home.’ I can feel still the uncomprehending weight of my disappointment at the words. ‘You must’ I muttered.
Should I have known that not ten minutes before she had said to Nessim, knowing he hated bridge: ‘Darling, can I go and play bridge with the Cervonis — do you need the car?’ It must have been one of those rare evenings when Pursewarden consented to meet her out in the desert — meetings to which she went unerringly, like a sleepwalker. Why? Why?
Balthazar at this moment is saying: ‘Your father said: “I cannot bear to watch it, and I do not know what to do. It is like watching a small child skipping near a powerful piece of unprotected machinery.” ’ Tears came into Clea’s eyes and slowly vanished again as she sipped her drink. ‘It is over’ she said, turning her back upon the subject and upon Balthazar in one and the same motion. She turned her sullen mouth now to the discussion of meaningless matters with Count Banubula, who bowed and swung as gallantly as Scobie’s green parrot ducking on its perch. She was pleased to see that her beauty had a direct, clearly discernible effect upon him, like a shower of golden arrows. Presently, Justine herself passed again, and in passing caught Clea’s wrist. ‘How is it?’ said Clea, in the manner of one who asks after a sick child. Justine gave the shadow of a grimace and whispered dramatically: ‘Oh, Clea — it is very bad. What a terrible mistake. Nessim is wonderful — I should never have done it. I am followed everywhere.’ They stared at each other sympathetically for a long moment. It was their first encounter for some time. (That afternoon, Pursewarden had written : ‘A few hasty and not entirely unloving words from my sickbed about this evening.’ He was not in bed but sitting at a cafe on the seafront, smiling as he wrote.) Messages spoken and unspoken, crossing and interlacing, carrying the currents of our lives, the fears, dissimulations, the griefs. Justine was speaking now about her marriage which still exhibited to the outer world a clearness of shape and context — the plaster cast of a perfection which I myself had envied when first I met them both. ‘The marriage of true minds’ I thought; but where is the ‘magnificent two-headed animal’ to be found? When she first became aware of the terrible jealousy of Nessim, the jealousy of the spiritually impotent man, she had been appalled and terrified. She had fallen by mistake into a trap. (All this, like the fever—chart of a striken patient, Clea watched, purely out of friendship, with no desire to renew the love she felt for this dispersed unself-comprehending Jewess.)
Justine put the matter to herself another way, a much more primitive way, by thinking: up to now she had always judged her men by their smell. This was the first time ever that she had neglected to consult the sense. And Nessim had the odourless purity of the desert airs, the desert in summer, unconfiding and dry. Pure. How she hated purity! Afterwards? Yes, she was revolted by the little gold cross which nestled in the hair on his chest.
He was a Copt — a Christian. This is the way women work in the privacy of their own minds. Yet out of shame at such thoughts she became doubly passionate and attentive to her husband, though even between kisses, in the depths of her mind, she longed only for the calm and peace of widowhood! Am I imagining this? I do not think so.
How had all this come about? To understand it is necessary to work backwards, through the great Interlinear which Balthazar has constructed around my manuscript, towards that point in time where the portrait which Clea was painting was interrupted by a kiss. It is strange to look at it now, the portrait, standing unfinished on the old-fashioned mantelpiece of the island house. ‘An idea had just come into her mind, but had not yet reached the lips.’ And then, softly, her lips fell where the painter’s wet brush should have fallen. Kisses and brush—strokes — I should be writing of poor Melissa!
How distasteful all this subject-matter is — what Pursewarden has called ‘the insipid kiss of familiars’; and how innocent! The black gloves she wore in the portrait left a small open space when they were buttoned up — the shape of a heart. And that innocent, ridiculous kiss only spoke admiration and pity for the things Justine was telling her about the loss of her child — the daughter which had been stolen from her while it was playing on the riverbank. ‘Her wrists, her small wrists. If you could have seen how beautiful and tame she was, a squirrel.’ In the hoarseness of the tone, in the sad eyes and the down-pointed mouth with a comma in each cheek. And holding out a hand with finger and thumb joined to describe the circuit of those small wrists. Clea took and kissed the heart in the black glove. She was really kissing the child, the mother. Out of this terrible sympathy her innocence projected the consuming shape of a sterile love. But I am going too fast. Moreover, how am I to make comprehensible scenes which I myself see only with such difficulty — these two women, the blonde and the bronze in a darkening studio at Saint Saba, among the rags and the paintpots and the warm gallery of portraits which lined the walls, Balthazar, Da Capo, even Nessim himself, Clea’s dearest friend? It is hard to compose them in a stable colour so that the outlines are not blurred.
Justine at this time … coming from nowhere, she had performed one trick regarded as clever by the provincials of Alexandria. She had married Arnauti, a foreigner, only to earn the contempt of society by letting him in the end divorce and abandon her.