Dürling or the Faithless Wife

He had now been stalking his beautiful Mile. O'Murphy, whose real name was Mrs. Meehawl O'Sullivan, for some six weeks, and she had appeared to be so amused at every stage of the hunt, so responsive, séduisante, even entraînante, that he could already foresee the kill over the next horizon. At their first encounter, during the Saint Patrick's Day cocktail party at the Dutch embassy, accompanied by a husband who had not a word to throw to a cat about anything except the scissors and shears that he manufactured somewhere in the west of Ireland, and who was obviously quite ill at ease and drank too much Irish whisky, what had attracted him to her was not only her splendid Courbet figure (whence his sudden nickname for her, La Morphée), or her copper-colored hair, her lime-green Irish eyes and her seemingly poreless skin but her calm, total and subdued elegance: the Balenciaga costume, the peacockskin gloves, the gleaming crocodile handbag, a glimpse of tiny, lace-edged lawn handkerchief and her dry, delicate scent. He had a grateful eye and nose for such things. It was, after all, part of his job. Their second meeting, two weeks later, at his own embassy had opened the doors. She came alone.

Now, at last, inside a week, perhaps less, there would be an end to all the probationary encounters that followed--mostly her inventions, at his persistent appeals--those wide-eyed fancy-meeting-you-heres at the zoo, at race meetings, afternoon cinemas, in art galleries, at more diplomatic parties (once he had said gaily to her, "The whole diplomacy of Europe seems to circle around our interest in each other"), those long drives over the Dublin mountains in his sports Renault, those titillating rural lunches, nose to nose, toe to toe (rural because she quickly educated him to see Dublin as a stock exchange for gossip, a casino of scandal), an end, which was rather a pity, to those charming unforeseen-foreseen, that is to say proposed but in the end just snatched, afternoon promenades champêtres under the budding leaves and closing skies of the Phoenix Park, with the first lights of the city springing up below them to mark the end of another boring day for him in Ailesbury Road, at the embassy, for her another possibly cozier but, he selfishly hoped, not much more exciting day in her swank boutique on Saint Stephen's Green. Little by little those intimate encounters, those murmured confessions had lifted acquaintance to friendship, self-mocking smiles over some tiny incident during their last meeting to eager anticipation of the next, an aimless tenderness twanging to appetite like an arrow. Or, at least, that was how he felt about it all. Any day now, even any hour, the slow countdown, slower than the slow movement of Mendelssohn's Concerto in E Minor, or the most swoony sequence from the Siegfried Idyl, or that floating spun-sugar balloon of Mahler's Song of the Earth, to the music of which on his gramophone he would imagine her smiling sidelong at him as she softly disrobed, and his ingenious playing with her, his teasing and warming of her moment by moment for the roaring, blazing take-off. To the moon!

Only one apprehension remained with him, not a real misgiving, something nearer to a recurring anxiety. It was that at the last moments, when her mind and her body ought to take leave of each other, she might take to her heels. It was a fear that flooded him whenever, with smiles too diffident to reassure him, she would once again mention that she was a Roman Catholic, or a Cat, a Papist or a Pape, a convent girl, and once she laughed that during her school days in the convent, she had actually been made an enfant de Marie. The words never ceased to startle him, dragging him back miserably to his first sexual frustration with his very pretty but unexpectedly proper cousin Berthe Ohnet during his lycée years in Nancy; a similar icy snub a few years later in Quebec; repeated still later by that smack on the face in Rio that almost became a public scandal; memories so painful that whenever an attractive woman nowadays mentioned religion, even in so simple a context as, "Thank God I didn't buy that hat, or frock, or stock, or mare," a red flag at once began to flutter in his belly.

Obsessed, every time she uttered one of those ominous words, he rushed for the reassurance of what he called The Sherbet Test, which meant observing the effect on her of some tentatively sexy joke, like the remark of the young princess on tasting her first sherbet: "Oh, how absolutely delicious! But what a pity it isn't a sin!" To his relief, she not only always laughed merrily at his stories but always capped them, indeed, at times so startling him by her coarseness that it only occurred to him quite late in their day that this might be her way of showing her distaste for his diaphanous indelicacies. He had once or twice observed that priests, peasants and children will roar with laughter at some scavenger joke and growl at even a veiled reference to a thigh. Was she a child of nature? Still, again and again, back would come those disturbing words. He could have understood them from a prude, but what on earth did she mean by them? Were they so many herbs to season her desire with pleasure in her naughtiness? Flicks of nasty puritan sensuality to whip her body over some last ditch of indecision? It was only when the final crisis came that he wondered if this might not all along have been her way of warning him that she was neither a light nor a lecherous woman, neither a flirt nor a flibbertigibbet, that in matters of the heart she was une femme très sérieuse.

He might have guessed at something like it much earlier. He knew almost from the first day that she was bien élevée, her father a judge of the Supreme Court, her uncle a monsignor at the Vatican, a worldly, sport-loving, learned, contriving priest who had persuaded her poppa to send her for a finishing year to Rome with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at the top of the Spanish Steps; chiefly, it later appeared, because the convent was near the centre hippique in the Borghese gardens and it was his right reverend's opinion that no Irish girl could possibly be said to have completed her education until she had learned enough about horses to ride to hounds. She had told him a lot, and most amusingly, about this uncle, who, when she had duly returned from Rome to Dublin, and whenever he came over for the hunting, always rode beside her. This attention had mightily flattered her until she discovered that she was being used as a cover for his uncontrollable passion for Lady Kinvara and Loughrea, then the master, some said the mistress, of the Clare-Galway hounds.

"How old were you then?" Ferdy asked, fascinated.

"I was at the university. Four blissful, idling years. But I got my degree. I was quick. And," she smiled, "good-looking. It helps, even with professors."

"But riding to hounds as a student?"

"Why not? In Ireland, everybody does. Children do. You could ride to hounds on a plow horse if you had nothing else. So long as you keep out of the way of real hunters. I only stopped after my marriage, when I had a miscarriage. And I swear that was only because I was thrown."

A monsignor who was sport-loving, worldly and contriving. He understood, and approved. It explained many things about her.

The only other ways in which her dash, beauty and gaiety puzzled and beguiled him were trivial. Timid she was not; she was game for any risk. But the coolness of her weather eye often surprised him.

"The Leopardstown Races? Oh, what a good idea, Ferdy! Let's meet there.... The Phoenix Park Races? No, not there. Too many doctors showing off their wives and their cars, trying to be noticed. And taking notice. Remember, a lot of my college friends married doctors.... No, not that cinema. It has become vogueish.... In fact, no cinema on the south side of the river. What we want is a good old flea-bitten picture house on the north side where they show nothing but Westerns and horrors and where the kids get in on Saturday mornings for thruppence.... Oh, and do, please, only ring the boutique in an emergency. Girls gossip."

Could she be calculating? For a second of jealous heat, he wondered if she could possibly have another lover. Cooling, he saw that if he had to keep a wary eye in his master's direction, she had to think of her bourgeois clientele. Besides, he was a bachelor, and would remain one. She had to manage her inexpressibly dull, if highly successful, old scissors-and-shears manufacturer, well past 50 and probably as suspicious as he was boring; so intensely, so exhaustingly boring that the only subject about which she could herself nearly become boring was her frequent complaints about his boringness. Once she was frightening, when she spat out that she had hated her husband ever since the first night of their marriage. He had taken her--it was odd how long, and how intensely, this memory had rankled--not, as he had promised, to Paris for their honeymoon but to his bloody scissors-and-shears factory in the wet wilds of northern Donegal. ("Just me, dear, ha-ha, to let 'em see, ha-ha, t'other half of me scissors.")

Ferdy had, of course, never asked her why she had married such a cretin; not after sizing up her house, her furniture, her pictures, her clothes, her boutique. Anyway, only another cretin would discourage any pretty woman from grumbling about her husband: (A) because such grumblings give a man a chance to show what a deeply sympathetic nature he has and (B) because the information incidentally supplied helps one arrange one's assignations in places and at times suitable to all concerned.

Adding it all up (he was a persistent adder-upper), only one problem had so far defeated him: that he was a foreigner and did not know what sort of women Irishwomen are. It was not as if he had not done his systematic best to find out, beginning with a course of reading through the novels of her country. A vain exercise. With the exception of the Molly Bloom of James Joyce, the Irish Novel had not only failed to present him with any fascinating woman but it had presented him with, in his sense of the word, no woman at all. Irish fiction was a lot of 19th Century connerie about half-savage Brueghelesque peasants, or urban petits fonctionnaires who invariably solved their frustrations by getting drunk on religion, patriotism or undiluted whisky, or by taking flight to England. Pastoral melodrama (Giono at his worst). Or pastoral humbuggery (Bazin at his most sentimental). Or, at its best, pastoral lyricism (Daudet and rose (continued on page 192)Faithless Wife (continued from page 178) water). As for Molly Bloom! He enjoyed the smell of every kissable pore of her voluptuous body without for one moment believing that she had ever existed. James Joyce in drag.

"But," he had finally implored his best friend in Ailesbury Road, Hamid Bey, the third secretary of the Turkish embassy, whose amorous secrets he willingly purchased with his own, "if it is too much to expect Ireland to produce a bevy of Manons, Mitsous, Gigis, Claudines, Kareninas, Oteros, Leahs, Sanseverinas, what about those great-thighed, vast-bottomed creatures dashing around the country on horseback like Diana followed by all her minions? Are they not interested in love? And, if so, why aren't there novels about them?"

His friend laughed a gelatinous laugh, like Turkish delight and replied in English in his laziest Noel Coward drawl, all the vowels frontal, as if he were talking through bubble gum, all his Rs either left out where they should be, as in deah or cleah, or inserted where they should not be, as in India-r or Iowa-r.

"My deah Ferdy, did not your deah fatheh or your deah momma-r eveh tell you that all Irish hohsewomen are in love with their hohses? And anyway, it is well known that the favorite pinup gihl of Ahland is a gelding."

"Naked?" Ferdinand asked coldly, and refused to believe him, remembering that his beloved had been a hohsewoman and satisfied that he was not a gelding. Instead, he approached the Italian ambassador at a cocktail party, given by the Indonesian embassy, to whisper to him about I'amore irlandese in his best stage-French manner, eyebrows lifted above fluttering eyelids, voice as hoarse as, he guessed, his excellency's mind would be on its creaking way back to memories of Gabin, Jouvet, Brasseur, Fernandel, Montand. It proved to be another futile exercise. His ex groaned as operatically as every Italian groans over such vital, and lethal, matters the Mafia, food, taxation and women, threw up his hands, made a face like a more than usually desiccated De Sica and sighed, "Les femmes d'Irlande? Mon pauvre gars! Elles sont d'une chasteté"--he paused and roared the adjective--"Formidable!"

Ferdinand had heard this yarn about feminine chastity in other countries and (with those two or three exceptions already mentioned) found it true only until one had established the precise local variation of the meaning of chastity. But how was he to discover the Irish variation? In the end, it was Celia herself who, unwittingly, revealed it to him and, in doing so, dispelled his last doubts about her susceptibility, inflammability and volatility--despite the very proper sisters of the Spanish Steps.

The revelation occurred one night in early May--her Meehawl being away in the west, presumably checking what she contemptuously called his Gaelic-squeaking scissors. Ferdy had driven her back to his flat for a nightcap after witnessing the prolonged death of Mimi in La Bohéme. She happened to quote to him Oscar Wilde's remark about the death of Little Nell that only a man with a heart of stone could fail to laugh at it; and in this vein they had continued for a while over the rolling brandy, seated side by side on his settee, his hand on her bare shoulder leading him to hope more and more fondly that this might be his horizon night, until, suddenly, she asked him a coldly probing question.

"Ferdy! Tell me exactly why we did not believe in the reality of Mimi's death."

His palm oscillated gently between her clavicle and her scapula.

"Because, my little cabbage, we were not expected to. Singing away like a lark? With her last breath? And no lungs? I am a Frenchman. I understand the nature of reality and can instruct you about it. Art, my dear Celia, is art because it is not reality. It does not copy or represent nature. It improves upon it. It embellishes it. This is the kernel of the classical French attitude to life. And," he beamed at her, "to love. We make of our wildest feelings of passion the gentle art of love."

He suddenly stopped fondling her shoulder and surveyed her with feelings of chagrin and admiration. The sight of her belied his words. Apart from dressing with taste and, he felt certain, undressing with even greater taste, she used no art at all. She was as innocent of make-up as a peasant girl of the Vosges. Had he completely misread her? Was she that miracle, a fully ripe peach brought into the center of the city some 20 years ago from a walled garden in the heart of the country, still warm from the sun, still glowing, downy, pristine, innocent as the dew? He felt her juice dribbling down the corner of his mouth. Was this the missing piece of her jigsaw? An ensealed innocence? If so, he had wasted six whole weeks. This siege could last six years.

"No, Ferdy!" she said crossly. "You have it all wrong. I'm talking about life, not about art. The first and last thought of any real Catholic girl on her deathbed would be to ask for a priest. She was facing her God."

Who at once pointed a finger at him through the chandelier? Within seconds they were discussing love among the English, Irish, French, Indians, Moslems, Italians, naturally the Papacy, Alexander the Sixth and incest, Savonarola and dirty pictures, Joan of Arc and martyrdom, death, sin, hell-fire, Cesare Borgia, who, she insisted, screamed for a priest to pray for him at the end.

"A lie," he snarled, "that some beastly priest told you in a sermon when you were a schoolgirl. Pray? I suppose," he challenged furiously, "you pray even against me."

Abashed, she shook her autumn-gold head at him, threw a kipper-eyed glance up to the chandelier, gave him a ravishingly penitential smile and sighed like an unmasked sinner.

"Ah, Ferdy! Ferdy! If you only knew the real truth about me! Me pray against you? I don't pray at all. You remember Mimi's song at the end of the first act? 'I do not always go to Mass, but I pray quite a bit to the good Lord.' Now, I hedge my bets in a very different way. I will not pray, because I refuse to go on my knees to anybody. Yet, there I go meekly trotting off to Mass every Sunday and holyday. And why? Because I am afraid not to, because it would be a mortal sin not to." She gripped his tensed hand, trilling her Rs over the threshold of her lower lip and tenderly umlauting her vowels. Dürling. Cöward. Li-er. "Amn't I the weak cöward, dürling? Amn't I the awful li-er? A crook entirely?"

Only a thin glint of streetlight peeping between his curtains witnessed the wild embrace of a man illuminated by an avowal so patently bogus as to be the transparent truth.

"You a liar?" he gasped, choking with laughter. "You a shivering coward? A double-faced hedger of bets? A deceiving crook? A wicked sinner? For the last five minutes you have been every single one of them by pretending to be them. What you really are is a woman full of cool, hardheaded discretion, which you would like to sell to me as a charming weakness. Full of dreams that you would like to disguise as wicked lies. Of common sense that it suits you to pass off as crookedness. Of worldly wisdom still moist from your mother's nipple that, if you thought you would get away with the deception, you would stoop to call a sin. My dearest Celia, your yashmak reveals by pretending to conceal. Your trick is to be perfection masquerading as villainy. I think it is enchanting."

For the first time, he saw her in a rage.

"But it is all true. I am a liar. I do go to Mass every Sunday. I do not pray. I am afraid of damnation. I----"

He silenced her with three fingers laid momentarily on her lips.

"Of course you go to Mass every Sunday. My father, a master tailor of Nancy, used to go to Mass every Sunday, (continued on page 218) Faithless Wife (continued from page 192) not once but three times, and always as conspicuously as possible. Why? Because he was a tailor. Just as you do because you run a boutique. You don't pray? Sensible woman. Why should you bother your Bon Dieu, if there is a Bon Dieu, with your pretty prattle about things that He knew all about a thousand million years before you were a twinkle in your mother's eye? My dearest and most perfect love, you have told me everything about Irishwomen that I need to know. None of you says what you think. Every one of you means what you don't say. None of you thinks about what she is going to do. But every one of you knows it to the last dot. You dream like opium eaters and your eyes are as calm as resting snow. You are all of you realists to your bare backsides. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, you will say this is true of all women, but it is not. It is not even true of French-women. They may be realists in lots of things. But in love, they are just as stupid as all the rest of us. But not Irishwomen! Or not, I swear it, if they are all like you. I'll prove it to you with a single question. Would you, like Mimi, live for the sake of love in a Paris garret?"

She gravely considered a proposition that sounded delightfully like a proposal.

"How warm would the garret be? Would I have to die of consumption? You remember how the poor bohemian poet had to burn his play to keep them all from being famished with the cold."

"Yes!" Ferdy laughed. "And as the fire died away, he said, 'I always knew that first act was too damned short.' But you are dodging my question."

"I suppose, dürling, any woman's answer to your question would depend on how much she was in love with whoever he was. Or wouldn't it?"

Between delight and fury he dragged her into his arms.

"You know perfectly well, you sweet slut, that what I am asking you is, Do you love me a lot or a little? A garretful or a palaceful? Which is it?"

Chuckling, she slid down low in the settee and smiled up at him between sleepy-cat eyelashes.

"And you, Ferdy, must know perfectly well that it is pointless to ask any woman silly questions like that. If some man I loved very much were to ask me, 'Do you love me, Celia?' I would naturally answer, 'No!' in order to make him love me more. And if it was some man I did not like at all, I would naturally say, 'Yes, I love you so much I think we ought to get married,' in order to cool him off. Which, Ferdy, do you want me to say to you?"

"Say," he whispered adoringly, "that you hate me beyond the ninth circle of Dante's hell."

She made a grave face.

"I'm afraid, Ferdy, the fact is I don't like you at all. Not at all! Not one least little bit at all, at all."

At which lying, laughing, enlacing and unlacing moment they kissed pneumatically and he knew that if all Irish-women were Celias, then the rest of mankind were mad ever to have admired women of any other race.

Their lovemaking was not as he had foredreamed it. She hurled her clothes to the four corners of the room, crying out, "And about time, too! Ferdy, what the hell have you been footling around for during the last six weeks?" Within five minutes she smashed him into bits. In her passion she was more like a lion than a lioness. There was nothing about her either titillating or erotic, indolent or indulgent, she was as wild, as animal, as unrestrained as a forest fire. When, panting beside her, he recovered enough breath to speak, he expressed his surprise that one so cool, so ladylike in public could be so different in private. She grunted peacefully and said in her muted brogue, "Ah, shure, dürling, everything changes in the beddaroom."

He woke at 3:25 in the morning with that clear bang so familiar to everybody who drinks too much after the chimes at midnight, rose to drink a print of cold water, lightly opened his curtains to survey the predawn May sky and, turning toward the bed, saw the pallid street lamp's light fall across her sleeping face, as calm, as soothed, as innocently sated as a baby filled with its mother's milk. He sat on the side of the bed looking down at her for a long time, overcome by the terrifying knowledge that he had, for the first time in his life, fallen in love.

The eastern clouds were growing as pink as petals while they drank the coffee he had quietly prepared. Over it he arranged in unnecessarily gasping whispers for their next meeting the following afternoon--"This afternoon!" he said joyously--at 3:25 o'clock, henceforth his Mystic Hour for Love, but only on the strict proviso that he would not count on her unless she had set three red geraniums in a row on the window sill of her boutique before three o'clock and that she, for her part, must divine a tragedy if the curtains of his flat were not looped high when she approached at 3:20 o'clock. He could, she knew, have more easily checked with her by telephone, but also knowing how romantically, voluptuously, erotically minded he was, she accepted with an indulgent amusement what he obviously considered ingenious devices for increasing the voltage of passion by the trappings of conspiracy. To herself she thought, "Poor boy! He's been reading too many books."

Between two P.M. and three P.M. that afternoon, she was entertained to see him pass her boutique three times in dark glasses. She cruelly made him pass a fourth time before, precisely at three o'clock, she gave him the pleasure of seeing two white hands with pink fingernails--not, wickedly, her own: her assistant's--emerge from under the net curtains of her window to arrange three small scarlet geraniums on the sill. He must have hastened perfervidly to the nearest florist to purchase the pink roses whose petals, when she rang his bell five cruel moments after his Mystic Hour, she found tessellating the silk sheets of his bed. His gramophone, muted by a bath towel, was murmuring Wagner. A joss stick in a brass bowl stank cloyingly. He had cast a pink-silk head scarf over the bedside lamp. His dressing-table mirror had been tilted so that from where they lay they could see themselves. Within five minutes he did not see, hear nor smell anything, tumbling, falling, hurling headlong to consciousness of her wild laughter at the image of her bottom mottled all over by his clinging rose petals. It cost him a brutal effort to laugh with her, at himself.

All that afternoon he talked only of flight, divorce and remarriage. To cool him, she encouraged him. He talked of it again and again every time they met. Loving him, she humored him. On the Wednesday of their third week as lovers, they met briefly and chastely, because her Meehawl was throwing a dinner at their house that evening for a few of his business colleagues previous to flying out to Manchester for a two-day convention of cutlers. Ferdy at once promised her to lay in a store of champagne, caviar, pâté de foie and brioches, so that they need not stir from their bed for the whole of those two days.

"Not even once?" she asked coarsely, and he made a moue of disapproval.

"You do not need to be all that realistic, Celia!"

Already by 3:15 that Thursday afternoon, he was shuffling nervously from window to window. By 3:25 he was muttering, "I hope she's not going to be late." He kept feeling the champagne to be sure it was not getting too cold. At 3:35 he moaned, "She is late!" At 3:40 he cried out in a jealous fury, glaring up and down the street, "The slut is betraying me!" At a quarter to four his bell rang, he leaped to the door. She faced him as coldly as a newly carved statue of Carrara marble. She repulsed his arms. She would not stir beyond his door mat. Her eyes were dilated.

"It is Meehawl!" she whispered.

"He has found us out?"

"It's the judgment of God on us both!"

The word smacked his face.

"He is dead?" he cried, hopefully brushing aside his fear and despair.

"A stroke."

She made a violent, downward swish with the side of her open palm.

"Une attaque? De paralysie?"

"He called at the boutique on his way to the plane. He said goodbye to me. He walked out to the taxi. I went into my office to prepare my vanity case and do peepee before I met you. The taxi driver ran in, shouting that he had fallen in a fit on the pavement. We drove him to ninety-six. That's Saint Vincent's. The hospital near the corner of the green. He is conscious. But he cannot speak. One side of him is paralyzed. He may not live."

She turned and went galloping down the stairs.

His immediate rebound was to roar curses on all the gods that never were. Why couldn't the old fool have his attack next week? His second thought was glorious. "He will die, we will get married." His third made him weep, "Poor little cabbage!" His fourth thought was, "The brioches I throw out, the rest into the fridge." His fifth, sixth and seventh were three Scotches while he rationally considered all her possible reactions to the brush of the dark angel's wing. Only time, he decided, would tell.

But when liars become the slaves of time, what can time do but lie like them? A vat, solid-looking enough for old wine; it leaks at every stave. A ship rigged for the wildest seas; it is rustbound to its bollards on the quay. She said firmly that nothing between them could change. He refuted her. Everything had changed, for the better. He rejoiced when the doctors said their patient was doomed. After two more weeks, she reported that the doctors were impressed by her husband's remarkable tenacity. He spoke of flight. She spoke of time. One night as she lay hot in his arms in his bed, he shouted triumphantly to the chandelier that when husbands are imprisoned, lovers are free. She demurred, saying that she could never spend a night with him in her own bed; not with a resident housekeeper upstairs. He tossed it aside. What matter where they slept? He would be happy sleeping with her in the Phoenix Park. She was furious. She pointed out that it was raining. "Am I a seal?" He proffered her champagne. She confessed the awful truth. This night was the last night they could be together.

"While he was dying, a few of his business pals used to call on him at the nursing home--the place all Dublin knows as ninety-six. Now that the old devil is refusing to die, they refuse to call on him anymore. I am his only faithful visitor. He so bores everybody. And with his paralyzed mouth, they don't know what the hell he is saying. Do you realize, Ferdy, what this means? He is riding me like a nightmare. He rang me four times the day before yesterday at the boutique. He rang again while I was here with you having a drink. He said whenever I go out I must leave a number where he can call me. The night before last, he rang me at three o'clock in the morning. Thank God I was back in my own bed and not here with you. He said he was lonely. Has terrible dreams. The nights are long. He is frightened. That if he gets another stroke, he will die. Dürling! I cannot spend a whole night with you again!"

Ferdy became Napoleon. He took command of the campaign. He accompanied her on her next visit to 96. This, he discovered, was a luxury (i.e., Victorian) nursing home in Lower Leeson Lane, where only cardinals died, only coal fires were in order, where everybody was presented with a menu from which to choose his lunch and dinner. The carpets were an inch thick. The only internal sound heard was the Mass bell tinkling along the corridors early every morning as the priest went from room to room with the Eucharist for the dying faithful. The Irish, Ferdy decided, know how to die. He, knowing no better, bore with him copies of Le Canard Enchainè and La Vie Parisienne. Celia deftly impounded them. "Do you want him to die of high blood pressure? Do you want the nuns to think he's a queer? A fellow who prefers women to drink?" Seated at one side of the bed, facing her seated at the other, he watched her, with her delicate lace-edged handkerchief (so disturbingly reminiscent of her lace-edged panties), wiping the unshaven chin of the dribbling half-idiot on the pillow. In an unconsumed rage, he lifted his eyebrows into his hair, surveyed the moving mass of clouds above Georgian Dublin, smoothened his already blackboard-smooth hair, gently touched the white carnation in his lapel, forced himself to listen calmly to the all-but-unintelligible sounds dribbling from the dribbling corner of the twisted mouth, and agonizingly asked himself by what unimaginably devious machinery, and for what indivinable purpose, the universe had been so arranged since the beginning of time that this bronzecapped, pastel-eyed, rosy-breasted, round-buttocked, exquisite flower of paradise sitting opposite him should, in the first place, have matched and mated with this slob between them, and then, or rather and then, or rather AND THEN make it so happen that he, Ferdinand Louis Jean-Honoré Clichy, of 9 bis Rue des Dominicains, Nancy, in the Department of Meurthe et Moselle, population 123,428, altitude 212 meters, should happen to discover her in remote Dublin and fall so utterly into her power that if he were required at that particular second to choose between becoming ambassador to the Court of Saint James for life and one night alone in bed with her, he would have at once replied, "Even for one hour!"

He gathered that the object on the pillow was addressing him.

"Oh, mosheer! Thacks be to the evercliving and cloving Gog I khav mosht devote clittle wife in all Khlistendom .... I'd be chlost without her .... Ah, mosheer! If you ever dehide to marry, marry an Irikhwoman .... Mosht fafeful cleatures in all exhishtench .... Would any Frenchwoman attend shoopid ole man chlike me the way Chelia doesh?"

Ferdy closed his eyes. She was tenderly dabbing the spittled corners of the distorted mouth. What happened next was that a sister took Celia out to the corridor for a few private words and that Ferdy at once leaned forward and whispered to the apparently immortal O'Sullivan, "Monsieur O'Sullivan, your wife does not look at all well. I fear she is wilting under the strain of your illness."

"Chlstrain!" the idiot said in astonishment. "What chlstrain? I khlsee no khlsignch of any chlstrain!"

Ferdy whispered with a gentle fierceness that when one is gravely ill, one may sometimes fail to observe the grave illness of others.

"We have to remember, monsieur, that if your clittle wife were to collapse under the chlstr ... under the strain of your illness, it would be very serious, for you!"

After that day, the only reason he agreed to accompany his love on these painful and piteous visits to 96 was that they always ended with O'Sullivan's begging him to take his poor clittle, cloving clittle, devote clittle pet of a wife to a movie for a relaxation and a rest, or for a drink in the Russell, or to the evening races in the park; whereupon they would both hasten, panting, to Ferdy's flat to make love swiftly, wildly and vindictively--swiftly because their time was limited, wildly because her Irish storms had by now become Oriental typhoons of rage, and he had simultaneously become cured of rose petals, Wagner, dim lights and pink champagne, and vindictively in order to declare and crush their humiliation at being subject to another man in another bed.

Inevitably, the afternoon came--it was now July--when Ferdy's pride and nerves cracked. He decided that enough was enough. They must escape to freedom. At once.

"Celia! If we have to fly to the end of the world! It won't really ruin my career. My master is most sympathetic. In fact, since I hinted to him that I am in love with a belle mariée, he does nothing but complain about his wife to me. And he can't leave her, his career depends on her, she is the daughter of a secretary of state for foreign affairs-- and rich. He tells me that at worst I would be moved off to some place like Los Angeles or Reykjavík. Celia! My beloved flower! We could be as happy as two puppies in a basket in Iceland."

She permitted a measure of Icelandic silence to create itself and then asked reflectively if it is ever warm in Iceland, at which he pounced with a loud "What do you mean? What are you asking? What is really in your mind?"

She said, "Nothing, dürling," for how could she dare say that whereas he could carry his job with him wherever he went, she, to be with him, would have to give up her lovely old, friendly old, silly old boutique on the green where her friends came to chat over morning coffee, where she met every rich tourist who visited Dublin, where she made nice money of her own, where she felt independent and free; just as she could never hope to make him understand why she simply could not just up and out and desert her husband.

"But there's nothing to hold you here! In his condition, you'd be sure to get custody of the children. Apart from the holidays, they could remain in school here the year round."

So he had been thinking it all out. She stroked his hairy chest.

"I know."

"The man, even at his best, you've acknowledged it yourself, over and over, is a fool. He is a muzhik. He is a bore."

"I know!" she groaned. "Who should better know what a crasher he is? He is a child. He hasn't had a new idea in his head for thirty years. There have been times when I've hated the smell of him. He reminds me of a hotel ashtray. Times when I've wished to God that a thief would break into the house some night and kill him. And," at which point she began to weep on his tummy, "I know now that there is only one thief who will come for him and he is so busy elsewhere that it will be years before he catches up with him. And then I think of the poor bastard in his hospital bed, unable to stir, scarcely able to talk, looking up at his ceiling, incontinent, practically a wet-and-dirty case, with no scissors, no golf, no friends, no nothing, except me. How can I desert him?"

Ferdy clasped his hands behind his head, stared up at heaven's pure ceiling and heard her weeping like the summer rain licking his windowpane. He created a long Irish silence. He heard the city whispering. Far away. Farther away. And then not at all.

"And to think," he said at last, "that I once called you a realist!"

She considered this. She, too, no longer heard the muttering of the city's traffic.

"This is how the world is made," she decided.

"I presume," he said briskly, "that you do realize that all Dublin knows that you are meanwhile betraying your beloved Meehawl with me?"

"I know that there's not one of those bitches who wouldn't give her left breast to be where I am at this moment."

They got out of bed and began to dress.

"And, also meanwhile, I presume you do not know that they have a snotty name for you?"

"What name?"--and she turned her bare back for the knife.

"They call you The Diplomatic Hack."

For five minutes, neither of them spoke.

While he was stuffing his shirt into his trousers and she, dressed fully except for her frock, was patting her penny-brown hair into place before his mirror, he said to her, "Furthermore, I suppose you do realize that whether I like it or not, I shall one day be shifted to some other city in some other country. What would you do then? For once in your life, tell me the plain truth! Just to bring you to the crunch. What would you do then?"

She turned, comb in hand, leaned her behind against his dressing table and looked him straight in the fly, which he was still zipping.

"Die," she said flatly.

"That," he said coldly, "is a manner of speech. Even so, would you consider it an adequate conclusion to a love that we have so often said is forever?"

They were now side by side in the mirror, she tending her brown hair, he his black, like any long-married couple. She smiled a little sadly.

"Forever? Dürling, does love know that lovely word? You love me. I know it. I love you. You know it. We will always know it. People die, but if you have ever loved them, they are never gone. Apples fall from the tree, but the tree never forgets its blossoms. But marriage is different. You remember the day he advised you that if you ever marry, you should marry an Irishwoman. Don't, Ferdy! If you do, she will stick to you forever. And you wouldn't really want that." She lifted her frock from the back of a chair and stepped into it. "Zip me up, dürling, will you? Even my awful husband. There must have been a time when I thought him attractive. We used to sail together. Play tennis together. He was very good at it. After all, I gave him two children. What's the date? They'll be home for the holidays soon. All I have left for him now is contempt and compassion. It is our bond."

Bewildered, he went to the window, buttoning his flowered waistcoat. He remembered from his café days as a student a ruffle of aphorisms about love and marriage. Marriage begins only when love ends. Love opens the door to marriage and quietly steals away. II faut toujours s'appuyer sur les principes de I'amour--ils finissent par en cèder. What would she say to that? Lean heavily on the principles of love-- they will always crumple in the end. Marriage bestows on love the tenderness due to a parting guest. Every affaire de coeur ends as a mariage de convenance. He turned to her, arranging his jacket, looking for his keys and his hat. She was peeking into her handbag, checking her purse for her keys and her lace handkerchief, gathering her gloves, giving a last glance at her hat. One of the things he liked about her was that she always wore a hat.

"You are not telling me the truth, Celia," he said, quietly. "Oh, I don't mean about loving me. I have no doubt about you on that score. But when you persuade yourself that you can't leave him because you feel compassion for him, that is just your self-excuse for continuing a marriage that has its evident advantages."

She smiled lovingly at him.

"Will you ring me tomorrow, dürling?"

"Of course."

"I love you very much, dürling."

"And I love you, too. Until tomorrow, then."

"Until tomorrow, dürling."

As usual, he let her go first.

• • •

That afternoon was some two years ago. Nine months after it, he was transferred to Brussels. As often as he could wangle special leave of absence, and she could get a relative to stay for a week with her bedridden husband, now back in his own house, they would fly to Paris or London to be together again. He would always ask solicitously after her husband's health, and she would always sigh and say his doctors had assured her that "he will live forever." Once, in Paris, passing a church, he, for some reason, asked her if she ever went to confession. She waved the question away with a laugh, but later that afternoon he returned to it pertinaciously.

"Yes. Once a year."

"Do you tell your priest about us?"

"I tell him that my husband is bedridden. That I am in love with another man. That we make love. And that I cannot give you up. As I can't, dürling."

"And what does he say to that?"

"They all say the same. That it is an impasse. Only one dear old Jesuit gave me a grain of hope. He said that if I liked, I could pray to God that my husband might die."

"And have you so prayed?"

"Dürling, why should I?" she asked gaily, as she stroked the curly hair between his two pink buttons. "As you once pointed out to me yourself, all this was foreknown millions of years ago."

He gazed at the ceiling. In her place, unbeliever though he was, he would, for love's sake, have prayed with passion. Not that she had said directly that she had not. Maybe she had. Two evasions in one sentence! It was all more than flesh and blood could bear. It was the Irish variation all over again: Never let your left ass know what your right ass is doing. He decided to give her one more twirl. When he got home, he wrote tenderly to her, "You are the love of my life!"

He could hear her passionate avowal. "And me, too, dürling!"

What she actually replied was, "Don't I know it?"

Six months later, he had maneuvered himself into the consular service and out of Europe, to Los Angeles. He there consoled his broken heart with a handsome creature named Rosie O'Connor. Quizzed about his partiality for the Irish, he could only flap his hands and say, "I don't know. They are awful liars. There isn't a grain of romance in them. And they are such faithless creatures."

He had not seen, heard nor smelled anything in those five minutes of passion.