‘A‘Ahundred times I’ve asked you not to use my razor’ said Pombal plaintively ‘and you do so again. You know I am afraid of syphilis. Who knows what spots, when you cut them, begin to leak?’ ‘Mon cher collègue’ said Pursewarden stiffly (he was shaving his lip), and with a grimace which was somewhat intended to express injured dignity, ‘what can you mean? I am British. Hein?’ He paused, and marking time with Pombal’s cut-throat declaimed solemnly: ‘The British who perfected the horseless carriage Are now working hard on the sexless marriage. Soon the only permissible communion Will be by agreement with one’s Trade union.’ ‘Your blood may be infected’ said his friend between grunts as he ministered to a broken suspender with one fat calf exposed upon the bidet. ‘You never know, after all.’ ‘I am a writer’ said Pursewarden with further and deeper dignity. ‘And therefore I do know. There is no blood in my veins. Plasma’ he said darkly, wiping his ear-tip, ‘that is what flows in my veins. How else would I do all the work I do? Think of it. On the Spectator I am Ubique, on the New Statesman I am Mens Sana. On the Daily Worker I sign myself as Corpore Sano. I am also Paralysis Agitans on The Times and Ejaculatio Praecox in New Verse. I am …’ But here his invention failed him. ‘I never see you working’ said Pombal. ‘Working little, I earn less. If my work earned more than one hundred pounds a year I should not be able to take refuge in being misunderstood.’ He gave a strangled sob. ‘Compris. You have been drinking. I saw the bottle on the hall table as I came in. Why so early?’ ‘I wished to be quite honest about it. It is your wine, after all. I wished to hide nothing. I have drunk a tot or so.’ ‘Celebration?’ ‘Yes. Tonight, my dear Georges, I am going to do something rather unworthy of myself. I have disposed of a dangerous enemy and advanced my own position by a large notch. In our service, this would be regarded as something to crow about. I am going to offer myself a dinner of self-congratuladon.’ ‘Who will pay it?’ ‘I will order, eat and pay for it myself.’ ‘That is not much good.’ Pursewarden made an impatient face in the mirror. ‘On the contrary’ he said. ‘A quiet evening is what I most need. I shall compose a few more fragments of my autobiography over the good oysters at Diamandakis.’ ‘What is the title?’ ‘Beating about the Bush. The opening words are “I first met Henry James in a brothel in Algiers. He had a naked houri on each knee.” ‘Henry James was a pussy, I think.’ Pursewarden turned the shower on full and stepped into it crying: ‘No more literary criticism from the French, please.’ Pombal drove a comb through his dark hair with a laborious impatience and then consulted his watch. ‘Merde’ he said, ‘I am going to be retarded again.’ Pursewarden gave a shriek of delight. They adventured freely in each other’s languages, rejoicing like schoolboys in the mistakes which cropped up among their conversations. Each blunder was greeted with a shout, was turned into a war-cry. Pursewarden hopped with pleasure and shouted happily above the hissing of the water: ‘Why not stay in and enjoy a nice little nocturnal emission on the short hairs?’ (Pombal had described a radio broadcast thus the day before and had not been allowed to forget it.) He made a round face now to express mock annoyance. ‘I did not say it’ he said. ‘You bloody well did.’ ‘I did not say “the short hairs” but the “short undulations”— des ondes courtes.’ ‘Equally dreadful. You Quai d’Orsay people shock me. Now my French may not be perfect, but I have never made a ——’ ‘If I begin with your mistakes — ha! ha!’ Pursewarden danced up and down in the bath, shouting ‘Nocturnal emissions on the short hairs’. Pombal threw a rolled towel at him and lumbered out of the bathroom before he could retaliate effectively. Their abusive conversation was continued while the Frenchman made some further adjustments to his dress in the bedroom mirror. ‘Will you go down to Etoile later for the floor-show?’ ‘I certainly will’ said Pursewarden. ‘I shall dance a Fox-Macabre with Darley’s girl-friend or Sveva. Several Fox-Macabres, in fact. Then, later on, like an explorer who has run out of pemmican, purely for body-warmth, I shall select someone and conduct her to Mount Vulture. There to sharpen my talons on her flesh.’ He made what he imagined to be the noise a vulture makes as it feeds upon flesh — a soft, throaty croaking. Pombal shuddered. ‘Monster’ he cried. ‘I go — good-bye.’ ‘Good-bye. Toujours la maladresse!’ ‘Toujours.’ It was their war-cry. Left alone, Pursewarden whistled softly as he dried himself in the torn bath-towel and completed his toilet. The irregularities in the water system of the Mount Vulture Hotel often drove him across the square to Pombal’s flat in search of a leisurely bath and a shave. From time to time too, when Pombal went on leave, he would actually rent the place and share it, somewhat uneasily, with Darley who lived a furtive life of his own in the far corner of it. It was good from time to time to escape from the isolation of his hotel-room, and the vast muddle of paper which was growing up around his next novel. To escape — always to escape…. The desire of a writer to be alone with himself — ‘the writer, most solitary of human animals’; ‘I am quoting from the great Purse-warden himself’ he told his reflection in the mirror as he wrestled with his tie. Tonight he would dine quietly, self-indulgently, alone! He had gracefully refused a halting dinner invitation from Errol which he knew would involve him in one of those gauche, haunting evenings spent in playing imbecile paper-games or bridge. ‘My God’ Pombal had said, ‘your compatriots’ methods of passing the time! Those rooms which they fill with their sense of guilt! To express one idea is to stop a dinner party dead in its tracks and provoke an awkwardness,a silence…. I try my best, but always feel I’ve put my foot in it. So I always automatically send flowers the next morning to my hostess…. What a nation you are! How intriguing for us French because how repellent is the way you live!’ Poor David Mountolive! Pursewarden thought of him with compassion and affection. What a price the career diplomat had to pay for the fruits of power! ‘His dreams must forever be awash with the memories of fatuities endured — deliberately endured in the name of what was most holy in the profession, namely the desire to please, the determination to captivate in order to influence. Well! It takes all sorts to unmake a world.’ Combing his hair back he found himself thinking of Maskelyne, who must at this moment be sitting in the Jerusalem express jogging stiffly, sedately down among the sand-dunes and orange-groves, sucking a long pipe; in a hot carriage, fly-tormented without and roasted within by the corporate pride of a tradition which was dying…. Why should it be allowed to die? Maskelyne, full of the failure, the ignominy of a new post which carried advancement with it. The final cruel thrust. (The idea gave him a twinge of remorse for he did not underestimate the character of the unself-seeking soldier.) Narrow, acid, desiccated as a human being, nevertheless the writer somewhere treasured him while the man condemned him. (Indeed, he had made extensive notes upon him — a fact which would certainly have surprised Maskelyne had he known.) His way of holding his pipe, of carrying his nose high, his reserves…. It was simply that he might want to use him one day. ‘Are real human beings becoming simply extended humours capable of use, and does this cut one off from them a bit? Yes. For observation throws down a field about the observed person or object. Yes. Makes the unconditional response more difficult — the response to the common ties, affections, love and so on. But this is not only the writer’s problem — it is everyone’s problem. Growing up means separation in the interests of a better, more lucid joining up…. Bah!’ He was able to console himself against his furtive sympathy with Maskelyne by recalling a few of the man’s stupidities. His arrogance! ‘My dear fellow, when you’ve been in “I” as long as I have you develop intuition. You can see things a mile off.’ The idea of anyone like Maskelyne developing intuition was delightful. Pursewarden gave a long crowing laugh and reached for his coat. He slipped lightly downstairs into the dusky street, counting his money and smiling. It was the best hour of the day in Alexandria — the streets turning slowly to the metallic blue of carbon paper but still giving off the heat of the sun. Not all the lights were on in the town, and the large mauve parcels of dusk moved here and there, blurring the outlines of everything, repainting the hard outlines of buildings and human beings in smoke. Sleepy cafés woke to the whine of mandolines which merged in the shrilling of heated tyres on the tarmac of streets now crowded with life, with white-robed figures and the scarlet dots of tarbushes. The window-boxes gave off a piercing smell of slaked earth and urine. The great limousines soared away from the Bourse with softly crying horns, like polished flights of special geese. To be half-blinded by the mauve dusk, to move lightly, brushing shoulders with the throng, at peace, in that dry inspiriting air … these were the rare moments of happiness upon which he stumbled by chance, by accident. The pavements still retained their heat just as water-melons did when you cut them open at dusk; a damp heat slowly leaking up through the thin soles of one’s shoes. The sea-winds were moving in to invest the upper town with their damp coolness, but as yet one only felt them spasmodically. One moved through the dry air, so full of static electricity (the crackle of the comb in his hair), as one might swim through a tepid summer sea full of creeping cold currents. He walked towards Baudrot slowly through little isolated patches of smell — a perfume shed by a passing woman, or the reek of jasmine from a dark archway — knowing that the damp sea air would soon blot them all out. It was the perfect moment for an apéritif in the half-light. The long wooden outer balconies, lined with potted plants which exhaled the twilight smell of watered earth, were crowded now with human beings, half melted by the mirage into fugitive cartoons of gestures swallowed as soon as made. The coloured awnings trembled faintly above the blue veils which shifted uneasily in the darkening alleys, like the very nerves of the lovers themselves who hovered here, busy on the assignations, their gestures twinkling like butterflies full of the evening promises of Alexandria. Soon the mist would vanish and the lights would blaze up on cutlery and white cloth, on ear-rings and flashing jewellery, on sleek oiled heads and smiles made brilliant by their darkness, brown skins slashed by white teeth. Then the cars would begin once more to slide down from the upper town with their elegant precarious freight of diners and dancers…. This was the best moment of the day. Sitting here, with his back against a wooden trellis, he could gaze sleepily into the open street, unrecognized and ungreeted. Even the figures at the next table were unrecognizable, the merest outlines of human beings. Their voices came lazily to him in the dusk, the mauve-veiled evening voices of Alexandrians uttering stockyard quotations or the lazy verses from Arabic love-poems — who could tell? How good the taste of Dubonnet with a zeste de citron, with its concrete memory of a Europe long-since abandoned yet living on unforgotten below the surface of this unsubstantial life in Alexander’s shabby capital! Tasting it he thought enviously of Pombal, of the farmhouse in Normandy to which his friend hoped one day to return heart-whole. How marvellous it would be to feel the same assured relations with his own country, the same certainty of return! But his gorge rose at the mere thought of it; and at the same time the pain and regret that it should be so. (She said: ‘I have read the books so slowly — not because I cannot read fast as yet in Braille; but because I wanted to surrender to the power of each word, even the cruelties and the weaknesses, to arrive at the grain of the thought.’) The grain! It was a phrase which rang in one’s ear like the whimper of a bullet which passes too close. He saw her — the marble whiteness of the sea-goddess’ face, hair combed back upon her shoulders, staring out across the park where the dead autumn leaves and branches flared and smoked; a Medusa among the snows, dressed in her old tartan shawl. The blind spent all day in that gloomy subterranean library with its pools of shadow and light, their fingers moving like ants across the perforated surfaces of books engraved for them by a machine. (‘I so much wanted to understand, but I could not.’) Good, this is where you break into a cold sweat; this is where you turn through three hundred and sixty-five degrees, a human earth, to bury your face in your pillow with a groan! (The lights were coming on now, the veils were being driven upwards into the night, evaporating. The faces of human beings….) He watched them intently, almost lustfully, as if to surprise their most inward intentions, their basic designs in moving here, idle as fireflies, walking in and out of the bars of yellow light; a finger atwinkle with rings, a flashing ear, a gold tooth set firmly in the middle of an amorous smile. ‘Waiter, kaman waked, another please.’ And the half-formulated thoughts began to float once more across his mind (innocent, purged by the darkness and the alcohol): thoughts which might later dress up, masquerade as verses…. Visitants from other lives. Yes, he would do another year — one more whole year, simply out of affection for Mountolive. He would make it a good one, too. Then a transfer — but he averted his mind from this, for it might result in disaster. Ceylon? Santos? Something about this Egypt, with its burning airless spaces and its unrealized vastness — the grotesque granite monuments to dead Pharaohs, the tombs which became cities — something in all this suffocated him. It was no place for memory — and the strident curt reality of the day-world was almost more than a human being could bear. Open sores, sex, perfumes, and money. They were crying the evening papers in a soup-language which was deeply thrilling — Greek, Arabic, French were the basic ingredients. The boys ran howling through the thoroughfares like winged messengers from the underworld, proclaiming … the fall of Byzantium? Their white robes were tucked up about their knees. They shouted plaintively, as if dying of hunger. He leaned from his wooden porch and bought an evening paper to read over his solitary meal. Reading at meals was another self-indulgence which he could not refuse himself. Then he walked quietly along the arcades and through the street of the cafés, past a mauve mosque (sky-floating), a library, a temple (grilled: ‘Here once lay the body of the great Alexander’); and so down the long curving inclines of the street which took one to the seashore. The cool currents were still nosing about hereabouts, tantalizing to the cheek. He suddenly collided with a figure in a mackintosh and belatedly recognized Darley. They exchanged confused pleasantries, weighed down by a mutual awkwardness. Their politenesses got them, so to speak, suddenly stuck to each other, suddenly stuck to the street as if it had turned to flypaper. Then at last Darley managed to break himself free and turn back down the dark street saying: ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you. I’m dead tired myself. Going home for a wash.’ Pursewarden stood still for a moment looking after him, deeply puzzled by his own confusion and smitten by the memory of the damp bedraggled towels which he had left lying about Pombal’s bathroom, and the rim of shaving-soap grey with hairs around the washbasin…. Poor Darley! But how was it that, liking and respecting the man, he could not feel natural in his presence? He at once took on a hearty, unnatural tone with him purely out of nervousness. This must seem rude and contemptuous. The brisk hearty tone of some country medico rallying a patient … damn! He must some time take him back to the hotel for a solitary drink and try to get to know him a little. And yet, he had tried to get to know him on several occasions on those winter walks together. He rationalized his dissatisfaction by saying to himself ‘But the poor bastard is still interested in literature.’ But his good humour returned when he reached the little Greek oyster-tavern by the sea whose walls were lined with butts and barrels of all sizes, and from whose kitchens came great gusts of smoke and smell of whitebait and octopus frying in olive oil. Here he sat, among the ragged boatmen and schooner-crews of the Levant, to eat his oysters and dip into the newspaper, while the evening began to compose itself comfortably around him, untroubled by thought or the demands of conversation with its wicked quotidian platitudes. Later he might be able to relate his ideas once more to the book which he was trying to complete so slowly, painfully, in these hard-won secret moments stolen from an empty professional life, stolen even from the circumstances which he built around himself by virtue of laziness, of gregariousness. (‘Care for a drink?’ — ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ How many evenings had been lost like this?) And the newspapers? He dwelt mostly upon the Faits Divers — those little oddities of human conduct which mirrored the true estate of man, which lived on behind the wordier abstractions, pleading for the comic and miraculous in lives made insensitive by drabness, by the authority of bald reason. Beside a banner headline which he would have to interpret in a draft despatch for Mountolive the next day — ARAB union APPEALS AGAIN — he could find the enduring human frailties in GREAT RELIGIOUS LEADER TRAPPED IN LIFT or LUNATIC BREAKS MONTE CARLO BANK which reflected the macabre unreason of fate and circumstance. Later, under the influence of the excellent food at the Coin de France he began to smoke his evening more enjoyably still — like a pipe of opium. The inner world with its tensions unwound its spools inside him, flowing out and away in lines of thought which flickered intermittently into his consciousness like morse. As if he had become a real receiving apparatus — these rare moments of good dictation! At ten he noted on the back of a letter from his bank a few of the gnomic phrases which belonged to his book. As ‘Ten. No attacks by the hippogriff this week. Some speeches for Old Parr?’ And then, below it, disjointedly, words which, condensing now in the mind like dew, might later be polished and refashioned into the armature of his characters’ acts. (a) With every advance from the known to the unknown, the mystery increases. (b) Here I am, walking about on two legs with a name — the whole intellectual history of Europe from Rabelais to de Sade. (c) Man will be happy when his Gods perfect themselves. (d) Even the Saint dies with all his imperfections on his head. (e) Such a one as might be above divine reproach, beneath human contempt. (f) Possession of a human heart — disease without remedy. (g) All great books are excursions into pity. (h) The yellow millet dream is everyman’s way. Later these oracular thoughts would be all brushed softly into the character of Old Parr, the sensualist Tiresias of his novel, though erupting thus, at haphazard, they offered no clue as to the order in which they would really be placed finally. He yawned. He was pleasantly tipsy after his second Armagnac. Outside the grey awnings, the city had once more assumed the true pigmentation of night. Black faces now melted into blackness; one saw apparently empty garments walking about, as in The Invisible Man. Red pill-boxes mounted upon cancelled faces, the darkness of darkness. Whistling softly, he paid his bill and walked lightly down to the Corniche again to where, at the end of a narrow street, the green bubble of the Etoile flared and beckoned; he dived into the narrow bottleneck staircase to emerge into an airless ballroom, half blinded now by the incandescent butcher’s light and pausing only to let Zoltan take his mackintosh away to the cloakroom. For once he was not irked by the fear of his unpaid drink-chits — for he had drawn a substantial advance upon his new salary. ‘Two new girls’ said the little waiter hoarsely in his ear, ‘both from Hungary.’ He licked his lips and grinned. He looked as if he had been fried very slowly in olive oil to a rich dark brown. The place was crowded, the floor-show nearly over. There were no familiar faces to be seen around, thank God. The lights went down, turned blue, black — and then with a shiver of tambourines and the roll of drums threw up the last performer into a blinding silver spot. Her sequins caught fire as she turned, blazing like a Viking ship, to jingle down the smelly corridor to the dressing-rooms. He had seldom spoken to Melissa since their initial meeting months before, and her visits to Pombal’s flat now rarely if ever coincided with his. Darley too was painstakingly secretive — perhaps from jealousy, or shame? Who could tell? They smiled and greeted one another in the street when their paths crossed, that was all. He watched her reflectively now as he drank a couple of whiskies and slowly felt the lights beginning to burn more brightly inside him, his feet respond to the dull sugared beat of the nigger jazz. He enjoyed dancing, enjoyed the comfortable shuffle of the four-beat bar, the rhythms that soaked into the floor under one’s toes. Should he dance? But he was too good a dancer to be adventurous, and holding Melissa in his arms thus he hardly bothered to do more than move softly, lightly round the floor, humming to himself the tune of Jamais de la vie. She smiled at him and seemed glad to see a familiar face from the outer world. He felt her narrow hand with its slender wrist resting upon his shoulder, fingers clutching his coat like the claw of a sparrow. ‘You are en forme’ she said. ‘I am en forme’ he replied. They exchanged the meaningless pleasantries suitable to the time and place. He was interested and attracted by her execrable French. Later she came across to his table and he stood her a couple of coupes de champagne — the statutory fee exacted by the management for private conversations. She was on duty that night, and each dance cost the dancer a fee; therefore this interlude won her gratitude, for her feet were hurting her. She talked gravely, chin on hand, and watching her he found her rather beautiful in an etiolated way. Her eyes were good — full of small timidities which recorded perhaps the shocks which too great an honesty exacts from life? But she looked, and clearly was, ill. He jotted down the words: ‘The soft bloom of phthisis.’ The whisky had improved his sulky good humour, and his few jests were rewarded by an unforced laughter which, to his surprise, he found delightful. He began to comprehend dimly what Darley must see in her — the gamine appeal of the city, of slenderness and neatness: the ready street-arab response to a hard world. Dancing again he said to her, but with drunken irony: ‘Melissa, comment vous défendez-vous contre la foule?’ Her response, fo............