‘I’ve got to write to her,’ Nora said. ‘I’ve got to.’
‘No man knows it as I know it, I who am the god of darkness. Very well, but know the worst, then. What of Felix and his son Guido, that sick lamenting, fevered child? Death in the weather is a tonic to him. Like all the new young his sole provision for old age is hope of an early death. What spirits answer him who will never come to man’s estate? The poor shattered eagerness. So, I say, was Robin purposely unspun? Was Jenny a sitting bitch for fun? Who knows what knives hash her apart? Can’t you rest now, lay down the pen? Oh, papelero, have I not summed up my time! I shall rest myself some day by the brim of Saxon-les-Bains and drink it dry, or go to pieces in Hamburg at the gambling table, or end up like Madame de Staël—with an affinity for Germany. To all kinds of ends I’ll come. Ah yes, with a crupper of maiden’s hair to keep my soul in place, and in my vanguard a dove especially feathered to keep to my wind, as I ride that grim horse with ample glue in every hoof to post up my deeds when I’m dropped in and sealed with earth. In time everything is possible and in space everything forgivable; life is but the intermediary vice. There is eternity to blush in. Life laid end to end is what brings on flux in the clergy—can’t you rest now, put down the pen? Oh, the poor worms that never arrive! Some strangely connived angel pray for us! We shall not encompass it—the defunctive murmur in the cardiac nerve has given us all our gait. And Robin? I know where your mind is! She, the eternal momentary—Robin who was always the second person singular. Well,’ he said with violence, ‘lie weeping with a sword in your hand! Haven’t I eaten a book too? Like the angels and prophets? And wasn’t it a bitter book to eat? The archives of my case against the law, snatched up and out of the tale-telling files by my high important friend. And didn’t I eat a page and tear a page and stamp on others and flay some and toss some into the toilet for relief’s sake—then think of Jenny without a comma to eat, and Robin with nothing but a pet name—your pet name to sustain her; for pet names are a guard against loss, like primitive music. But does that sum her up? Is even the end of us an account? No, don’t answer, I know that even the memory has weight. Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds, and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.’
She said: ‘She is myself. What am I to do?’
‘Make birds’ nests with your teeth, that would be better,’ he said angrily, ‘like my English girl friend. The birds liked them so well that they stopped making their own (does that sound like any nest you have made for any bird, and so broken it of its fate?). In the spring they form a queue by her bedroom window and stand waiting their turn, holding on to their eggs as hard as they can until she gets around to them, strutting up and down on the ledge, the eyes in their feathers a quick shine and sting, whipped with impatience, like a man waiting at a toilet door for someone inside who had decided to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And then think of Robin who never could provide for her life except in you. Oh, well,’ he said under his breath, ‘ “happy are they whom privacy makes innocent."’
Nora turned around, and speaking in a voice that she tried to make steady said: ‘Once, when she was sleeping, I wanted her to die. Now, that would stop nothing.’
The doctor, nodding, straightened his tie with two fingers. ‘The number of our days is not check rein enough to look upon the death of our love. While living we knew her too well, and never understood, for then our next gesture permitted our next misunderstanding. But death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection. We shed tears of bankruptcy then. So it’s well she didn’t.’ He sighed. ‘You are still in trouble—I thought you had put yourself outside of it. I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off along with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.’
She said: ‘What will happen now, to me and to her?’
‘Nothing,’ the doctor answered, ‘as always. We all go down in battle, but we all come home.’
She said: ‘I can only find her again in my sleep or in her death; in both she has forgotten me.’
‘Listen,’ the doctor said, putting down his glass. ‘My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else’s mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can’t all be as safe as that.’
Nora got up nervously and began walking. ‘I’m so miserable, Matthew, I don’t know how to talk, and I’ve got to. I’ve got to talk to somebody. I can’t live this way.’ She pressed her hands together, and, without looking at the doctor, went on walking.
‘Have you any more port?’ he inquired, putting the empty bottle down. Mechanically, Nora brought him a second decanter. He took the stopper out, held it to his nose a moment, then poured himself a glass.
‘You are’, he said, testing the wine between his lower lip and teeth, ‘experiencing the inbreeding of pain. Most of us do not dare it. We wed a stranger, and so “solve” our problem. But when you inbreed with suffering (which is merely to say that you have caught every disease and so pardoned your flesh) you are destroyed back to your structure as an old master disappears beneath the knife of the scientist who would know how it was painted. Death I imagine will be pardoned by the same identification; we all carry about with us the house of death, the skeleton, but unlike the turtle our safety is inside, our danger out. Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward. Ah, to be able to hold on to suffering, but to let the spirit loose! And speaking of being destroyed, allow me to illustrate by telling you of one dark night in London, when I was hurrying along, my hands before me, praying I’d get home and into bed and wake up in the morning without finding my hands on my hips. So I started for London Bridge—all this was a long time ago, and I’d better be careful or one of these days I’ll tell a story that will give up my age.
‘Well, I went off under London Bridge and what should I see? A Tuppeny Upright! And do you know what a Tuppeny Upright might be? A Tuppeny is an old-time girl, and London Bridge is her last stand, as the last stand for a grue is Marseilles, if she doesn’t happen to have enough pocket money to get to Singapore. For tuppence, an upright is all anyone can expect. They used to walk along slowly, all ruffles and rags, with big terror hats on them, a pin stuck over the eye and slap up through the crown, half their shadows on the ground and the other half crawling along the wall beside them; ladies of the haute sewer taking their last stroll, sauntering on their last Rotten Row, going slowly along in the dark, holding up their badgered flounces, or standing still, silent and as indifferent as the dead, as if they were thinking of better days, or waiting for something that they had been promised when they were little girls; their poor damned dresses hiked up and falling away over the rump, all gathers and braid, like a Crusader’s mount, with all the trappings gone sideways with misery.’