‘Nothing. You must start living’ he said as the car began to draw away, and she felt as if she had received a smack across the mouth.
She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate which she drank with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain. No, somewhere she was truly a woman.
Nessim took the lift up to his office, and sitting down at his desk wrote upon a card the following words: ‘My dearest Clea, Justine has agreed to marry me. I could never do this if I thought it would qualify or interfere in any way with either her love for you or mine….’ Then, appalled by the thought that whatever he might write to Clea might sound mawkish, he tore the note up and folded his arms. After a long moment of thought he picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria’s number. ‘Da Capo’ he said quietly. ‘You remember my plans for marrying Justine? All is well.’ He replaced the receiver slowly, as if it weighed a ton, and sat staring at his own reflection in the polished desk.
*******
IV I t was now, having achieved the major task of persuasion, that his self-assurance fled and left him face to face with a sensation entirely new to him, namely an acute shyness, an acute unwillingness to face his mother directly, to confront her with his intentions. He himself was puzzled by it, for they had always been close together, their confidences linked by an affection too deep to need the interpretation of words. If he had ever been shy or awkward it was with his awkward brother, never with her. And now? It was not as if he even feared her disfavour — he knew she would fall in with his wishes as soon as they were spoken. What then inhibited him? He could not tell. Yet he flushed as he thought of her now, and passed the whole of that morning in restless automatic acts, picking up a novel only to lay it down, mixing a drink only to abandon it, starting to sketch and then abruptly dropping the charcoal to walk out into the garden of the great house, ill at ease. He had telephoned his office to say that he was indisposed and then, as always when he had told a lie, began to suffer in truth with an attack of indigestion.
Then he started to ask for the number of the old country house where Leila and Narouz lived, but changed his mind and asked the operator instead for the number of his garage. The car would be back, they told him, cleaned and greased by noon. He lay down and covered his face with his hands. Then he rang up Selim, his secretary, and told him to telephone to his brother and say that he was coming to Karm Abu Girg for the week-end. Heavens! what could be more normal? ‘You go on like a chambermaid who has got engaged’ he told himself hotly. Then for a moment he thought of taking someone with him to ease the strain of the meeting — Justine? Impossible. He picked up a novel of Pursewarden’s and came upon the phrase: ‘Love is like trench warfare — you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.’ The doorbell rang. Selim brought him some letters to sign and then went silently upstairs to pack his bag and briefcase. There were papers he must take for Narouz to see — papers about the lift machinery needed to drain and reclaim the desert which fringed the plantations. Business matters were a welcome drug.
The Hosnani fortunes were deployed in two directions, separated into two spheres of responsibility, and each brother had his own.
Nessim controlled the banking house and its ancillaries all over the Mediterranean, while Narouz lived the life of a Coptic squire, never stirring from Karm Abu Girg where the Hosnani lands marched with the fringe of the desert, gradually eating into it, expropriating it year by year, spreading their squares of cultivation — carob and melon and corn — and pumping out the salt which poisoned it.
‘The car is here’ said the hawk-faced secretary as he returned.
‘Am I to drive you, sir?’ Nessim shook his head and dismissed him quietly, before crossing the garden once more, chin in hand. He paused by the lily pond to study the fish — those expensive toys of the ancient Japanese Emperors, survivals from an age of luxury, which he had imported at such cost, only to find them gradually dying off of some unknown illness — homesickness, perhaps?
Pursewarden spent hours watching them. He said that they helped him to think about art!
The great silver car stood at the door with the ignition key in the dashboard. He got in thoughtfully and drove slowly across the town, examining its parks and squares and buildings with a serene eye, but deliberately dawdling, irresolutely, emptying his mind by an act of will every time the thought of his destination came upon him. When he reached the sea he turned at last down the shining Corniche in the sunlight to watch the smooth sea and cloudless air for a moment, the car almost at a standstill. Then suddenly he changed gear and began to travel along the seashore at a more resolute pace. He was going home.
Soon he turned inland, leaving the town with its palms crackling in the spring wind and turning towards the barren network of faults and dried-out lake-beds where the metalled road gave place to the brown earth tracks along embankments lined with black swamps and fringed by barbed reeds and a cross-hatching of sweetcorn plantations. The dust came up between his wheels and filled the air of the saloon, coating everything in a fine-grained pollen.
The windscreen became gradually snowed-up and he switched on the wipers to keep it clear.
Following little winding lanes which he knew by heart he came, after more than an hour, to the edge of a spit flanked by bluer water and left the car in the shadow of a tumbledown house, the remains perhaps of some ancient customs-shed built in the days when river traffic plied between Damietta and the Gulf: now drying up day by day, withering and cracking under the brazen Egyptian sky, forgotten by its keepers.
He locked the car carefully and followed a narrow path across a holding of poverty—stricken beanrows and dusty melons, fringed with ragged and noisy Indian corn, to come out upon a landingstage where an aged ferryman awaited him in a ramshackle boat.
At once he saw the horses waiting upon the other side, and the foreshortened figure of Narouz beside them. He threw up an excited arm in an awkward gesture of pleasure as he saw Nessim.
Nessim stepped into the boat with beating heart.
‘Narouz!’ The two brothers, so unlike in physique and looks, embraced with feeling which was qualified in Nessim by the silent agony of a shyness new to him.
The younger brother, shorter and more squarely built than Nessim, wore a blue French peasant’s blouse open at the throat and with the sleeves rolled back, exposing arms and hands of great power covered by curly dark hair. An old Italian cartridge bandolier hung down upon his haunches. The ends of his baggy Turkish trousers with an old-fashioned drawstring, were stuffed into crumpled old jackboots of soft leather. He ducked, excitedly, awkwardly, into his brother’s arms and out again, like a boxer from a clinch.
But when he raised his head to look at him, you saw at once what it was that had ruled Narouz’ life like a dark star. His upper lip was split literally from the spur of the nose — as if by some terrific punch: it was a hare-lip which had not been caught up and basted in time. It exposed the ends of a white tooth and ended in two little pink tongues of flesh in the centre of his upper lip which were always wet. His dark hair grew down low and curly, like a heifer’s, on to his brow. His eyes were splendid: of a blueness and innocence that made them almost like Clea’s: indeed his whole ugliness took splendour from them. He had grown a ragged and uneven moustache over his upper lip, as someone will train ivy over an ugly wall — but the scar showed through wherever the hair was thin: and his short, unsatisfactory beard too was a poor disguise: looked simply as if he had remained unshaven for a week. It had no shape of its own and confused the outlines of his taurine neck and high cheekbones. He had a curious hissing shy laugh which he always pointed downward into the ground to hide his lip. The whole sum of his movements was ungainly — arms and legs somewhat curved and hairy as a spider — but they gave off a sensation of overwhelming strength held rigidly under control. His voice was deep and thrilling and held something of the magic of a woman’s contralto.