She began to walk again. ‘I have been loved’, she said, ‘by something strange, and it has forgotten me.’ Her eyes were fixed and she seemed to be talking to herself. ‘It was me made her hair stand on end, because I loved her. She turned bitter because I made her fate colossal. She wanted darkness in her mind—to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night; and I, I dashed it down. We will never have it out now,’ Nora said. ‘It’s too late. There is no last reckoning for those who have loved too long, so for me there is no end. Only I can’t, I can’t wait for ever!’ she said frantically. ‘I can’t live without my heart!
‘In the beginning, after Robin went away with Jenny to America, I searched for her in the ports. Not literally, in another way. Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the “forbidden", when we have not understood it all, as the pauper is the rudiment of a city, knowing something of the city, which the city, for its own destiny, wants to forget. So the lover must go against nature to find love. I sought Robin in Marseilles, in Tangier, in Naples, to understand her, to do away with my terror. I said to myself, I will do what she has done, I will love what she has loved, then I will find her again. At first it seemed that all I should have to do would be to become “debauched", to find the girls that she had loved; but I found that they were only little girls that she had forgotten. I haunted the cafés where Robin had lived her night-life; I drank with the men, I danced with the women, but all I knew was that others had slept with my lover and my child. For Robin is incest too, that is one of her powers. In her, past-time records, and past time is relative to us all. Yet not being the family she is more present than the family. A relative is in the foreground only when it is born, when it suffers and when it dies, unless it becomes one’s lover, then it must be everything, as Robin was; yet not as much as she, for she was like a relative found in another generation. I thought, “I will do something that she will never be able to forgive, then we can begin again as strangers.” But the sailor got no further than the hall. He said: “Mon dieu, il y a deux chevaux de bois dans la chambre à coucher.’’’’
‘Christ!’ muttered the doctor.
‘So’, Nora continued, ‘I left Paris. I went through the streets of Marseilles, the waterfront of Tangier, the basso porto of Naples. In the narrow streets of Naples, ivies and flowers were growing over the broken-down walls. Under enormous staircases, rising open to the streets, beggars lay sleeping beside images of St. Gennaro; girls going into the churches to pray were calling out to boys in the squares. In open door-ways night-lights were burning all day before gaudy prints of the Virgin. In one room that lay open to the alley, before a bed covered with a cheap heavy satin comforter, in the semi-darkness, a young girl sat on a chair, leaning over its back, one arm across it, the other hanging at her side, as if half of her slept; and half of her suffered. When she saw me she laughed, as children do, in embarrassment. Looking from her to the Madonna behind the candles, I knew that the image, to her, was what I had been to Robin, not a saint at all, but a fixed dismay, the space between the human and the holy head, the arena of the “indecent” eternal. At that moment I stood in the centre of eroticism and death, death that makes the dead smaller, as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained, and I knew in that bed Robin should have put me down. In that bed we would have forgotten our lives in the extremity of memory, moulted our parts, as figures in the wax works are moulted down to their story, so we would have broken-down to our love.’
The doctor stood up. He staggered as he reached for his hat and coat. He stood in confused and unhappy silence—he moved toward the door. Holding the knob in his hand he turned toward her. Then he went out.
The doctor, walking with his coat-collar up, entered theCafé de la Mairie du VIe. He stood at the bar and ordered a drink, looking at the people in the close, smoke-blue room, he said to himself, ‘Listen!’ Nora troubled him, the life of Nora and the lives of the people in his life. ‘The way of a man in a fog!’ he said. He hung his umbrella on the bar ledge. ‘To think is to be sick,’ he said to the barman. The barman nodded.
The people in the café waited for what the doctor would say, knowing that he was drunk and that he would talk; in great defaming sentences his betrayals came up; no one ever knew what was truth and what was not. ‘If you really want to know how hard a prize-fighter hits,’ he said, look-around, ‘you have got to walk into the circle of his fury and be carried out by the heels, not by the count.’
Someone laughed. The doctor turned slowly. ‘So safe as all that?’ he asked sarcastically; ‘so damned safe? Well, wait until you get in gaol and find yourself slapping the bottoms of your feet for misery.’
He put his hand out for his drink—muttering to himself: ‘Matthew, you have never been in time with any man’s life and you’ll never be remembered at all, God save the vacancy! The finest instrument goes wrong in time—that’s all, the instrument gets broken, and I must remember that when everyone is strange; it’s the instrument gone flat. Lapidary, engrave that on my stone when Matthew is all over and lost in a field.’ He looked around. ‘It’s the instrument, gentlemen, that has lost its G string, otherwise he’d be playing a fine tune; otherwise he’d still be passing his wind with the wind of the north—otherwise touching his billycock!’
‘Only the scorned and the ridiculous make good stories,’ he added angrily, seeing the habitues smiling, ‘so you can imagine when you’ll get told! Life is only long enough for one trade; try that one!’
An unfrocked priest, a stout pale man with woman’s hands, on which were many rings, a friend of the doctor’s, called him and asked him to have a drink. The doctor came, carefully bringing his umbrella and hat. The priest said: ‘I’ve always wanted to know whether you were ever really married or not.’
‘Should I know that?’ inquired the doctor. ‘I’ve said I was married and I gave the girl a name and had children by her, then, presto! I killed her off as lightly as the death of swans. And was I reproached for that story? I was. Because even your friends regret weeping for a myth, as if that were not practically the fate of all the tears in the world! What if the girl was the wife of my brother and the children my brother’s children? When I laid her down her limbs were as handsome and still as two May boughs from the cutting—did he do as much for her? I imagined about her in my heart as pure as a French print, a girl all of a little bosom and a bird cage, lying back down comfortable with the sea for a background and a rope of roses to hold her. Has any man’s wife been treated better than that? Who says she might not have been mine, and the children also? Who for that matter’, he said with violence, ‘says they are not mine? Is not a brother his brother also, the one blood cut up in lengths, one called Michael and the other Matthew? Except that people get befuddled seeing them walk in different directions? Who’s to say that I’m not my brother’s wife’s husband and that his children were not fathered in my lap? Is it not to his honour that he strikes me as myself? And when she died, did my weeping make his weeping less?’