The Alexandria Quartet (132 page)

He burst out laughing once more, and gave himself three noiseless cheers, raising his cigar-hand ceremoniously at each cheer. Then he winked carefully at me and filled his glass once more, adding with an air of vagueness the coda: ‘Life only has its full meaning to those who co-opt death!' I could see that he was rather drunk by now, for the soothing effects of the hot shower had worn off and the desert-fatigue had begun to reassert itself.

‘And Pursewarden?' I said, divining the very moment at which to drop his name, like a hook, into the stream of our conversation.

‘Pursewarden!' he echoed on a different note, which combined a melancholy sadness and affection. ‘But my dear Darley, it was something like this that he was trying to tell me, in his own rather bloody way. And I? I still blush with shame when I think of the questions I asked him. And yet his answers, which seemed so bloody enigmatic then, make perfect sense to me
now
. Truth is double-bladed, you see. There is no way to express it in terms of language, this strange bifurcated medium with its basic duality! Language! What is the writer's struggle except a struggle to use a medium as predsely as possible, but knowing fully its basic imprecision? A hopeless task, but none the less rewarding for being hopeless. Because the task itself, the act of wrestling with an insoluble problem, grows the writer up! This was what the old bastard realized. You should read his letters to his wife. For all their brilliance how he whined and cringed, how despicably he presented himself — like some Dostoievskian character beset by some nasty compulsion neurosis! It is really staggering what a petty and trivial soul he reveals there.' This was an amazing insight into the tormented yet wholly complete being of the letters which I myself had just read!

‘Keats' I said, ‘for goodness' sake tell me. Are you writing a book about him?'

Keats drank slowly and thoughtfully and replaced his glass somewhat unsteadily before saying: ‘No.' He stroked his chin and fell silent.

‘They say you are writing something' I persisted. He shook his head obstinately and contemplated his glass with a blurred eye. ‘I wanted to' he admitted at last, slowly. ‘I did a long review of the novels once for a small mag. The next thing I got a letter from his wife.
She
wanted a book done. A big rawboned Irish girl, very hysterical and sluttish: handsome in a big way, I suppose. Always blowing her nose in an old envelope. Always in carpet slippers. I must say I felt for him. But I tumbled straight into a hornets' nest there. She
loathed
him, and there seemed to be plenty to loathe, I must say. She gave me a great deal of information, and simply masses of letters and manuscripts. Treasure trove all right. But, my dear chap, I couldn't use this sort of stuff. If for no other reason than that I respect his memory and his work. No. No. I fobbed her off. Told her she would never get such things published. She seemed to want to be publicly martyred in print just to get back at him — old Pursewarden! I couldn't do such a thing. Besides the material was quite hair-raising! I don't want to talk about it. Really, I would never repeat the truth to a soul.'

We sat looking thoughtfully, even watchfully at each other, for a long moment before I spoke again.

‘Have you ever met his sister, Liza?'

Keats shook his head slowly. ‘No. What was the point? I abandoned the project right away, so there was no need to try and hear her story. I know she has a lot of manuscript stuff, because the wife told me so. But.… She is here isn't she?' His lip curled with the faintest suggestion of disgust. ‘Truthfully I don't want to meet her. The bitter truth of the matter seems to me that the person old Pursewarden most loved — I mean purely spiritually — did not at all understand the state of his soul, so to speak, when he died: or even have the vaguest idea of the extent of his achievement. No, she was busy with a vulgar intrigue concerned with legalizing her relations with Mountolive. I suppose she feared that her marriage to a diplomat might be imperilled by a possible scandal. I may be wrong, but that is the impression I gathered. I believe she was going to try and get a whitewashing book written. But now, in a sense, I have my own Pursewarden, my own copy of him, if you like. It's enough for me. What do the details matter, and why should I meet his sister? It is his work and not his life which is necessary to us — which offers one of the many meanings of the word with four faces!'

I had an impulse to cry out ‘Unfair', but I restrained it. It is impossible in this world to arrange for full justice to be done to everyone. Keats's eyelids drooped. ‘Come' I said, calling for the bill, ‘It's time you went home and got some sleep.'

‘I do feel rather tired' he mumbled.

‘Avanti.'

There was an old horse-drawn gharry in a side-street which we were glad to find. Keats protested that his feet were beginning to hurt and his arm to pain him. He was in a pleasantly exhausted frame of mind, and slightly tipsy after his potations. He lay back in the smelly old cab and closed his eyes. ‘D'you know, Darley' he said indistinctly, ‘I meant to tell you but forgot. Don't be angry with me, old fellow-bondsman, will you. I know that you and Clea.… Yes, and I'm glad. But I have the most curious feeling that one day I am going to marry her. Really. Don't be silly about it. Of course I would never breathe a word, and it would happen years after this silly old war. But somewhere along the line I feel I'm bound to hitch up with her.'

‘Now what do you expect me to say?'

‘Well, there are a hundred courses open. Myself I would start yelling and screaming at once if you said such a thing to me. I'd knock your block off, push you out of the cab, anything. I'd punch me in the eye.'

The gharry drew up with a jolt outside the house. ‘Here we are' I said, and helped my companion down into the road. ‘I'm not as drunk as all that' he cried cheerfully, shaking off my help, ‘'tis but fatigue, dear friend.' And while I argued out the cost of the trip with the driver he went round and held a long private confabulation with the horse, stroking its nose. ‘I was giving it some maxims to live by' he explained as we wound our weary way up the staircase. ‘But the champagne had muddled up my quotation-box. What's that thing of Shakespeare's about the lover and the cuckold all compact, seeking the bubble reputation e'en in the cannon's mouth.' The last phrase he pronounced in the strange (man-sawing-wood) delivery of Churchill. ‘Or something about swimmers into cleanness leaping — a pre-fab in the eternal mind no less!'

‘You are murdering them both.'

‘Gosh I'm tired. And there seems to be no bombardment tonight.'

‘They are getting less frequent'

He collapsed on his bed fully dressed, slowly untying his suede desert boots and wriggling with his toes until they slid slowly off and plopped to the floor. ‘Did you ever see Pursewarden's little book called
Select Prayers for English Intellectuals?
It was funny. “Dear Jesus, please keep me as eighteenth century as possible — but without the c*******d.…”' He gave a sleepy chuckle, put his arms behind his head and started drifting into smiling sleep. As I turned out the light he sighed deeply and said: ‘Even the dead are overwhelming us all the time with kindnesses.'

I had a sudden picture of him as a small boy walking upon the very brink of precipitous cliffs to gather seabirds' eggs. One slip.…

But I was never to see him again.
Vale!

VI

Ten thirsty fingers of my blind Muse

Confer upon my face their sensual spelling

T
he lines ran through my head as I pressed the bell of the summer residence the following evening. In my hand I held the green leather suitcase which contained the private letters of Pursewarden — that brilliant sustained fusillade of words which still exploded in my memory like a firework display, scorching me. I had telephoned to Liza from my office in the morning to make the rendezvous. She opened the door and stood before me with a pale graven expression of expectancy. ‘Good' she whispered as I murmured my name, and ‘Come.' She turned and walked before me with a stiff upright expressive gait which reminded me of a child dressed up as Queen Elizabeth for a charade. She looked tired and strained, and yet in a curious way proud. The living-room was empty. Mountolive, I knew, had returned to Cairo that morning. Rather surprisingly, for it was late in the year, a log-fire burned in the chimney-piece. She took up her stand before it, arching her back to the warmth, and rubbing her hands as if she were chilled.

‘You have been quick, very quick' she said, almost sharply, almost with a hint of implied reproach in her tone. ‘But I am glad.' I had already told her by telephone the gist of my conversation with Keats about the non-existent book. ‘I am glad, because now we can decide something, finally. I couldn't sleep last night. I kept imagining you reading them, the letters. I kept imagining him writing them.'

‘They are marvellous. I have never read anything like them in my whole life.' I felt a note of chagrin in my own tones.

‘Yes' she said, and fetched a deep sigh. ‘And yet I was afraid you would think so;
afraid
because you would share David's opinion of them and advise me that they should be preserved
at all costs
. Yet
he
expressly told me to burn them.'

‘I know.'

‘Sit down, Darley. Tell me what you really think.'

I sat down, placing the little suitcase on the floor beside me, and said: ‘Liza, this is not a literary problem unless you choose to regard it as one. You need take nobody's advice. Naturally nobody who has read them could help but regret the loss.'

‘But Darley, if they had been yours, written to someone you … loved?'

‘I should feel relief to know that my instructions had been carried out. At least I presume that is what
he
would feel, wherever he might be now.'

She turned her lucid blind face to the mirror and appeared to explore her own reflection in it earnestly, resting the tips of her frilly fingers on the mantelpiece. ‘I am as superstitious as he was' she said at last. ‘But it is more than that. I was always obedient because I knew that he saw further than I and understood more than I did.'

This caged reflection gives her nothing back

That women drink like thirsty stags from mirrors

How very much of Pursewarden's poetry became crystal-clear and precise in the light of all this new knowledge! How it gathered consequence and poignance from the figure of Liza exploring her own blindness in the great mirror, her dark hair thrown back on her shoulders!

At last she turned back again, sighing once more, and I saw a look of tender pleading on her face, made the more haunting and expressive by the empty sockets of her eyes. She took a step forward and said: ‘Well, then, it is decided. Only tell me you will help me burn them. They are very many. It will take a little time.'

‘If you wish.'

‘Let us sit down beside the fire together.'

So we sat facing each other on the carpet and I placed the suitcase between us, pressing the lock so that the cover released itself and sprang up with a snap.

‘Yes' she said. ‘This is how it must be. I should have known all along that I must obey him.' Slowly, one by one I took up the pierced envelopes, unfolded each letter in turn and handed it to her to place upon the burning logs.

‘We used to sit like this as children with our playbox between us, before the fire, in the winter. So often, and always together. You would have to go back very far into the past to understand it all. And even then I wonder if you would understand. Two small children left alone in an old rambling farmhouse among the frozen lakes, among the mists and rains of Ireland. We had no resources except in each other. He converted my blindness into poetry, I saw with his brain, he with my eyes. So we invented a whole imperishable world of poetry together — better by far than the best of his books, and I have read them all with my fingers, they are all at the institute. Yes I read and re-read them looking for a clue to the guilt which had transformed everything. Nothing had affected us before, everything conspired to isolate us, keep us together. The death of our parents happened when we were almost too small to comprehend it. We lived in this ramshackle old farmhouse in the care of an eccentric and deaf old aunt who did the work, saw that we were fed, and left us to our own devices. There was only one book there, a Plutarch, which we knew by heart. Everything else he invented. This was how I became the strange mythological queen of his life, living in a vast palace of sighs — as he used to say. Sometimes it was Egypt, sometimes Peru, sometimes Byzantium. I suppose I must have known that really it was an old farmhouse kitchen, with shabby deal furniture and floors of red tile. At least when the floors had been washed with carbolic soap with its peculiar smell I
knew
, with half my mind, that it was a farmhouse floor, and not a palace with magnificent tessellated floors brilliant with snakes and eagles and pygmies. But at a word he brought me back to reality, as he called it. Later, when he started looking for justifications for our love instead of just simply being proud of it, he read me a quotation from a book. “In the African burial rites it is the sister who brings the dead king back to life. In Egypt as well as Peru the king, who was considered as God, took his sister to wife. But the motive was ritual and not sexual, for they symbolized the moon and the sun in their conjunction. The king marries his sister because he, as God the star, wandering on earth, is immortal and may therefore not propagate himself in the children of a strange woman, any more than he is allowed to die a natural death.” That is why he was pleased to come here to Egypt, because he felt, he said, an interior poetic link with Osiris and Isis, with Ptolemy and Arisinoë — the race of the sun and the moon!'