The Spectator Bird Read Online Free PDF Page B

quizzing. “Ja,” I said. “Det er ret. What’s wrong with keeping a journal in Denmark?”
    She was still, and I went back to reading. But of course I didn’t. I could feel her over there ruminative, abstracted, and unsatisfied, and when I cast a look across, there she was, propped against the pillows, her book lowered onto her stomach, one arm restraining old Catarrh, her eyes on me and her face wearing the impenetrable expression that means she is thinking, estimating, remembering, uncovering discrepancies, drawing conclusions. She made a little embarrassed sort of smile and blinked her eyes. “Read it to me?” she said.
    She caught me by surprise. Normally she isn’t much interested in all these papers she keeps me working at. So long as I disappear after breakfast, she can feel that she has done her duty and propped me up so that I can hold my own against deterioration. But of course she would be interested in any diary I kept in Denmark, and of course, for related reasons, I was not eager to read it to her, at least not until I had gone through it myself.
    â€œIt isn’t anything,” I said. “You know—blah-blah. Up this morning betimes, and to the barber. Shave, thirty-five cents, newspaper, ten cents, miscellaneous, twenty-five cents.”
    She said in her soft Bryn Mawr whisper, “I was watching you while you read it.”
    â€œWhat?” I had heard her all right, but I have been trying for forty years to make her speak loud enough to be heard.
    â€œI was watching you while you read it,” she said in exactly the same voice.
    I abandoned that line. “Don’t be misled by my gales of laughter.”
    â€œIt matters to you,” she said; and then, in a tone almost accusatory, “You never told me you were keeping a journal then.”
    Which was true. Secret sin, furtive navel-picking. And unfair, I had to admit, even in the beginning. After all, Curtis was her son as well as mine, but it was my therapy that Danish trip was supposed to serve. The way I must have thought of it, she came along to look after me. And then that irruption of the irrational, that reversion into adolescence. We had never talked about it, we had only dropped it. Regret and guilt are selfish and secret emotions.
    â€œIt was a mistake,” I said. “It isn’t my kind of caper. It embarrasses me.”
    The look she was bending on me from the bed was troubled and troubling, steady, undisguised by any of the games we play. She wasn’t sparring, or joking, or half joking. “Joe,” she said, “why not aloud? Why not together?”
    Very uncomfortably I said, “It really isn’t anything. It’s mostly just what we did abroad. Our trip to the Paris of the North. Danish castles from Kronborg to Knuthenborg. There’s nothing else in it except some self-pity and some foolishness that I regret And anyway, it’s long gone now.”
    â€œAstrid and all that business?”
    â€œYes, some of that, I guess. I haven’t read it clear through.”
    â€œAnd us.”
    â€œUs? Yes, naturally.”
    â€œPlease? I think it might be good for us.”
    â€œOh, hell,” I said. “Here, the reason I dug it out, we got this today.”
    I scaled the postcard over onto the bed and she read it, taking a long time. She turned it over and studied the picture of Bregninge and then turned it back and read it again. “Oh dear,” she said after about five minutes. “It makes you want to cry.”
    I said nothing.
    â€œShe was such a nice woman,” Ruth said. “I liked her. I liked her as well as anybody I ever knew.”
    â€œI know. Or at least I thought so.”
    â€œI haven’t thought about her for a long time.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you give me the card before?”
    â€œI don’t know. I just wanted to, sort of, look it up.”
    You can live with someone a