‘In the end’, Nora said, ‘they came to me, the girls Robin had driven frantic—to me, for comfort!’ She began to laugh. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘the women I’ve held upon my knees!’
‘Women’, the doctor said, ‘were born on the knees, that’s why I’ve never been able to do anything about them, I’m on my own so much of the time.’
‘Suddenly, I knew what all my life had been, Matthew, what I hoped Robin was—the secure torment. We can hope for nothing greater, except hope. If I asked her, crying, not to go out, she would go just the same, richer in her heart because I had touched it, as she was going down the stairs.’
‘Lions grow their manes and foxes their teeth on that bread,’ interpolated the doctor.
‘In the beginning, when I tried to stop her from drinking and staying out all night, and from being defiled, she would say—"Ah, I feel so pure and gay!” as if the ceasing of that abuse was her only happiness and peace of mind; and so I struggled with her as with the coils of my own most obvious heart, holding her by the hair, striking her against my knees, as some people in trouble strike their hands too softly; and as if it were a game, she raised and dropped her head against my lap, as a child bounces in a crib to enter excitement, even if it were someone gutted on a dagger. I thought I loved her for her sake, and I found it was for my own.’
‘I know,’ said the doctor, ‘there you were sitting up high and fine, with a rose-bush up your arse.’
She looked at him, then she smiled. ‘How should you know?’
‘I’m a lady in no need of insults,’ said the doctor. ‘I know.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You know what none of us know until we have died. You were dead in the beginning,’
The twilight was falling. About the street lamps there was a heavy mist. ‘Why don’t you rest now?’ asked the doctor. ‘Your body is coming to it, you are forty and the body has a politic too, and a life of its own that you like to think is yours. I heard a spirit mew once, but I knew it was a mystery eternally moving outward and on, and not my own.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘now.’ Suddenly, she began to cry, holding her hands. ‘Matthew,’ she said, ‘have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?’
For a moment he did not answer. Taking up the decanter, he held it to the light.
‘Robin can go anywhere, do anything,’ Nora continued, ‘because she forgets, and I nowhere, because I remember.’ She came towards him. Matthew,’ she said, ‘you think I have always been like this. Once I was remorseless, but this is another love—it goes everywhere, there is no place for it to stop—it rots me away. How could she tell me when she had nothing to tell that wasn’t evidence against herself?’
The doctor said, ‘You know as well as I do that we were born twelve, and brought up thirteen, and that some of us lived. My brother, whom I had not seen in four years, and loved the most of all, died, and who was it but me my mother wanted to talk to? Not those who had seen him last, but me who had seen him best, as if my memory of him were himself; and because you forget Robin the best, it’s to you she turns. She comes trembling, and defiant, and belligerent, all right —that you may give her back to herself again as you have forgotten her—you are the only one strong enough to have listened to the prosecution, your life; and to have built back the amazing defence, your heart!
‘The scalpel and the Scriptures have taught me that little I did not already know. And I was doing well enough’, he snapped, ‘until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes; and here I sit, as naked as only those things can be, whose houses have been torn away from them to make a holiday, and it my only skin—labouring to comfort you. Am I supposed to render up my paradise—that splendid acclimatation—for the comfort of weeping women and howling boys? Look at Felix now, what kind of a Jew is that? Screaming up against tradition like a bat against a window-pane, high-up over the town, his child a boy weeping “o’er graves of hope and pleasure gone".
‘Ah, yes—I love my neighbour. Like a rotten apple to a rotten apple’s breast affixed we go down together, nor is there a hesitation in that decay, for when I sense such, there I apply the breast the firmer, that he may rot as quickly as I, in which he stands in dire need or I miscalculate the cry. I, who am done sooner than any fruit! The heat of his suppuration has mingled his core with mine, and wrought my own to the zenith before its time. The encumbrance of myself I threw away long ago, that breast to breast I might go with my failing friends. And do they love me for it? They do not. So have I divorced myself, not only because I was born as ugly as God dared premeditate, but because with propinquity and knowledge of trouble I have damaged my own value. And death—have you thought of death? What risk do you take? Do you know which dies first, you or she? And which is the sorrier part, head or feet? I say, with that good Sir Don, the feet. Any man can look upon the head in death, but no man can look upon the feet. They are most awfully tipped up from the earth. I’ve thought of that also. Do you think, for Christ’s sweet sake,’ he shouted suddenly, ‘that I am so happy that you should cry down my neck? Do you think there is no lament in this world, but your own? Is there not a forbearing saint somewhere? Is there no bread that does not come proffered with bitter butter? I, as good a Catholic as they make, have embraced every confection of hope, and yet I know well, for all our outcry and struggle, we shall be for the next generation not the massive dung fallen from the dinosaur, but the little speck left of a humming-bird; so as well sing our Chi vuol la Zingarella (how women love it!) while I warble my Sonate au Crépuscule, throwing in der Erlkönig for good measure, not to mention Who is Sylvia? Who is anybody!
‘Oh,’ he cried. ‘A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart! But do I scream that an eagle has me by the balls or has dropped his oyster on my heart? Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my mind goes back, or holding my guts as if they were a coil of knives? Yet you are screaming, and drawing your lip and putting your hand out and turning round and round! Do I wail to the mountains of the trouble I have had in the valley, or to every stone of the way it broke my bones, or of every lie, how it went down into my belly and built a nest to hatch me to my death there? Isn’t everyone in the world peculiarly swung and me the craziest of the lot?—so that I come dragging and squealing, like a heifer on the way to slaughter, knowing his cries have only half a rod to go, protesting his death—as his death has only a rod to go to protest his screaming? Do you walk high Heaven without shoes? Are you the only person with a bare foot pressed down on a rake? Oh, you poor blind cow! Keep out of my feathers; you ruffle me the wrong way and flit about, stirring my misery! What end is sweet? Are the ends of the hair sweet when you come to number them?’
‘Listen,’ Nora said. ‘You’ve got to listen! She would come back to me after a night all over the city and lie down beside me and she would say, “I want to make everyone happy,” and her mouth was drawn down. “I want everyone to be gay, gay. Only you,” she said, holding me, “only you, you mustn’t be gay or happy, not like that, it’s not for you, only for everyone else in the world.” She knew she was driving me insane with misery and fright; only’, she went on, ‘she couldn’t do anything because she was a long way off and waiting to begin. It’s for that reason she hates everyone near her. It’s why she falls into everything, like someone in a dream. It’s why she wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way. A shadow was falling on her—mine—and it was driving her out of her wits.’