Read Online The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell - Free Book Online

afraid to be light-headed or foolish with a man.’
    Being poor was also a deep bond. For the most part our excursions were the simple excursions that all provincials make in a sea-side town. The little tin tram bore us with the clicking of its wheels to the sand-beaches of Sidi Bishr, or we spent Shem El Nessim in the gardens of Nouzha, camped on the grass under the oleanders among some dozens of humble Egyptian families. The inconvenience of crowds brought us both distraction and great intimacy. By the rotting canal watching the children dive for coins in the ooze, or eating a fragment of water-melon from a stall we wandered among the other idlers of the city, anonymously happy. The very names of the tram stops echoed the poetry of these journeys: Chatby, Camp de César, Laurens, Mazarita, Glymenopoulos, Sidi Bishr.…
    Then there was the other side: coming back late at night to find her asleep with her red slippers kicked off and the little hashish-pipe beside her on the pillow… I would know that one of her depressions had set in. At such times there was nothing to be done with her; she would become pale, melancholy, exhausted-looking, and would be unable to rouse herself from her lethargy for days at a time. She talked much to herself, and would spend hours listening to the radio and yawning, or going negligently through a bundle of old film magazines. At such times when the cafard of the city seized her I was at my wits’ end to devise a means of rousing her. She would lie with far-seeing eyes like a sibyl, stroking my face and repeating over and over again: ‘If you knew how I have lived you would leave me. I am not the woman for you, for any man. I am exhausted. Your kindness is wasted.’ If I protested that it was not kindness but love she might say with a grimace: ‘If it were love you would poison me rather than let me go on like this.’ Then she would begin to cough with her uncollapsed lung and, unable to bear the sound, I would go for a walk in the dark Arab-smudged street, or visit the British Council library to consult reference books: and here, where the general impression of British culture suggested parsimony, indigence, intellectual strap-hanging — here I would pass the evening alone, glad of the studious rustle and babble around me.
    But there were other times too: those sun-tormented afternoons — ‘honey-sweating,’ as Pombal called them — when we lay together bemused by the silence, watching the yellow curtains breathing tenderly against the light — the quiet respirations of the wind off Mareotis which matched our own. Then she might rise and consult the clock after giving it a shake and listening to it intently: sit naked at the dressing-table to light a cigarette — looking so young and pretty, with her slender arm raised to show the cheap bracelet I had given her. (‘Yes, I am looking at myself, but it helps me to think about you.’) And turning aside from this fragile mirror-worship she would swiftly cross to the ugly scullery which was my only bath-room, and standing at the dirty iron sink would wash herself with deft swift movements, gasping at the coldness of the water, while I lay inhaling the warmth and sweetness of the pillow upon which her dark head had been resting: watching the long bereft Greek face, with its sane pointed nose and candid eyes, the satiny skin that is given only to the thymus-dominated, the mole upon her slender stalk of the neck. These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.

    Thinking of that summer when Pombal decided to let his flat to Pursewarden, much to my annoyance. I disliked this literary figure for the contrast he offered to his own work — poetry and prose of real grace. I did not know him well but he was