‘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.