The veils had proved their undoing. Rounding a hairpin in the old London-Brighton road-race his father’s veil had been sucked into the front axle of the car they were driving. He had been dragged into the road, while his companion had careered on to smash headlong into a tree. ‘The only consolation is that that is just how he would have liked to go out. They were leading by quarter of a mile.’
I have always been very fond of ludicrous deaths and had great difficulty in containing my laughter as Scobie described this misadventure to me with portentous rotations of his glass eye. Yet as he talked and I listened to this, half my thoughts were running upon a parallel track, busy about the new job I was to undertake, assessing it in terms of the freedom it offered me. Later that night Justine was to meet me near Montaza — the great car purring like a moth in the palm-cooled dusk of the road. What would she say to it? She would be delighted of course to see me freed from the shackles of my present work. But a part of her would groan inwardly at the thought that this relief would only create for us further chances to consort, to drive home our untruth, to reveal ourselves more fully than ever to our judges. Here was another paradox of love; that the very thing which brought us closer together — the boustrophedon — would, had we mastered the virtues which it illustrated, have separated us forever — I mean in the selves which preyed upon each other’s infatuated images.
‘Meanwhile’ as Nessim was to say in those gentle tones so full of the shadowy sobriety which comes into the voice of those who have loved truly and failed to be loved in return, ‘meanwhile I was dwelling in the midst of a vertiginous excitement for which there was no relief except through an action the nature of which I could not discern. Tremendous bursts of self-confidence were succeeded by depressions so deep that it seemed I would never recover from them. With a vague feeling that I was preparing myself for a contest — as an athlete does — I began to take fencing lessons and learned to shoot with a pocket automatic. I studied the composition and effects of poisons from a manual of toxicology which I borrowed from Dr Fuad Bey.’ (I am inventing only the words.)
He had begun to harbour feelings which would not yield to analysis. The periods of intoxication were followed by others in which he felt, as if for the first time, the full weight of his loneliness: an inner agony of spirit for which, as yet, he could find no outward expression, either in paint or in action. He mused now incessantly upon his early years, full of a haunting sense of richness: his mother’s shadowy house among the palms and poinsettias of Aboukir: the waters pulling and slithering among the old fort’s emplacements, compiling the days of his early childhood in single condensed emotions born from visual memory. He clutched at these memories with a terror and clarity he had never experienced before. And all the time, behind the screen of nervous depression — for the incomplete action which he meditated lay within him like a coitus interruptus — there lived the germ of a wilful and uncontrolled exaltation. It was as if he were being egged on, to approach nearer and nearer … to what exactly? He could not tell; but here his ancient terror of madness stepped in and took possession of him, disturbing his physical balance, so that he suffered at times from attacks of vertigo which forced him to grope around himself like a blind man for something upon which to sit down — a chair or sofa. He would sit down, panting slightly and feeling the sweat beginning to start out on his forehead; but with relief that nothing of his interior struggle was visible to the casual onlooker. Now too he noticed that he involuntarily repeated phrases aloud to which his conscious mind refused to listen. ‘Good’ she heard him tell one of his mirrors, ‘so you are falling into a neurasthenia!’ And later as he was stepping out into the brilliant starlit air, dressed in his well-cut evening clothes Selim, at the wheel of the car, heard him add: ‘I think this Jewish fox has eaten my life.’
At times, too, he was sufficiently alarmed to seek, if not the help, at least the surcease of contact with other human beings: a doctor who left him with a phosphorous tonic and a regimen he did not follow. The sight of a column of marching Carmelites, tonsured like mandrils, crossing Nebi Daniel drove him to renew his lapsed friendship with Father Paul who in the past had seemed so profoundly happy a man, folded into his religion like a razor into its case. But now the kind of verbal consolations offered him by this lucky, happy, unimaginative brute only filled him with nausea.
One night he knelt down beside his bed — a thing he had not done since his twelfth year — and deliberately set himself to pray. He stayed there a long time, mentally spellbound, tongue-tied, with no words or thoughts shaping themselves in his mind. He was filled by some ghastly inhibition like a mental stroke. He stayed like this until he could stand it no longer — until he felt that he was on the point of suffocating. Then he jumped into bed and drew the sheets over his head murmuring broken fragments of oaths and involuntary pleadings which he did not recognize as emanating from any part of himself.
Outwardly however there were no signs of these struggles to be seen; his speech remained dry and measured despite the fever of the thoughts behind it. His doctor complimented him on his excellent reflexes and assured him that his urine was free from excess albumen. An occasional headache only proved him to be a victim of petit mal — or some other such customary disease of the rich and idle.
For his own part he was prepared to suffer thus as long as the suffering remained within the control of his consciousness. What terrified him only was the sensation of utter loneliness — a reality which he would never, he realized, be able to communicate either to his friends or to the doctors who might be called in to pronounce upon anomalies of behaviour which they would regard only as symptoms of disorder.
He tried feverishly to take up his painting again, but without result. Self-consciousness like a poison seemed to eat into the very paint, making it sluggish and dead. It was hard even to manipulate the brush with an invisible hand pulling at one’s sleeve the whole time, hindering, whispering, displacing all freedom and fluidity of movement.
Surrounded as he was by this menacing twilight of the feelings he turned once more, in a vain effort to restore his balance and composure, to the completion of the Summer Palace — as it was jokingly called; the little group of Arab huts and stables at Abousir. Long ago, in the course of a ride to Benghazi along the lonely shoreline, he had come upon a fold in the desert, less than a mile from the sea, where a fresh spring suddenly burst through the thick sand pelt and hobbled a little way down towards the desolate beaches before it was overtaken and smothered by the dunes. Here the Bedouin, overtaken by the involuntary hunger for greenness which lies at the heart of all desert-lovers, had planted a palm and a fig whose roots had taken a firm subterranean grip upon the sandstone from which the pure water ran. Resting with the horses in the shade of these young trees, Nessim’s eye had dwelt with wonder upon the distant view of the old Arab fort, and the long-drawn white scar of the empty beach where the waves pounded night and day. The dunes had folded themselves hereabouts into a long shapely valley which his imagination had already begun to people with clicking palm-trees and the green figs which, as always near running water, offer a shade so deep as to be like a wet cloth pressed to the skull. For a year he had allowed the spot to mature in his imagination, riding out frequently to study it in every kind of weather, until he had mastered its properties. He had not spoken of it to anyone, but in the back of his mind had lurked the idea of building a summer pleasure house for Justine — a miniature oasis where she could stable her three Arab thoroughbreds and pass the hottest season of the year in her favourite amusements, bathing and riding.