This had consequences. The first came when I too took a trip to Dublin and went with Seán to a party given by Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne, at her former hunting lodge, Luggala. There, while chatting to an Englishman whom I had just met, I became aware of a gangly figure, loping towards us through contiguous rooms. It was Cronin who, abruptly and without a word, pulled the chair from under me. The Englishman, as taken aback as myself, helped me up. ‘Will I fight him?’ he asked seriously and, as he looked quite capable of flattening the weedy Tony, I was tempted to accept. But, as I couldn’t do that to Therese, I thanked the Englishman for the offer and refused. No doubt he was marvelling at the unremittingly ‘brutish behaviour’ of the native Irish, which was how the poet Edmund Spenser had described it centuries before.
A more long-term consequence was that Therese, after marrying Tony, took to drink to the detriment of her mental health. ‘She’s in and out of St Pat’s,’ old college friends would tell me sadly when I went back to Dublin.
*
Luggala parties were apt to generate mishaps, so mine at the hands of the brutish Cronin did not rouse much interest. I am unsure whether or not it was that same evening that guests’ attention focused on three young people who seemed to be pursuing and eluding each other like figures in a ballet. As they moved through the throng, a ripple of talk revealed that the man was the painter Lucian Freud, the dark woman was his wife, Kitty Epstein, and the red-haired one was our hostess’s neice, Lady Caroline Blackwood, with whom he was now in love.
If it was that evening when this encounter happened, Cronin’s assault on myself would have roused little attention.
*
Queuing once again outside the Students’ Lodging Bureau in Paris, I was warned by the rest of the queue not to count on having the use of a bathroom. All most landladies offered was access to a lavatory and a basin. For anything else you went with your sponge bag to the Bains et Douches which were available all over the city. Rome had had these, too, but struck me as also having better domestic plumbing. This, claimed a Florentine count, whom I knew later, was thanks to the US army having marched up the peninsula in ’43 and made itself comfortable as it did. Indeed, he ascribed Italian working-class cleanliness entirely to US tutelage. His own class, he told me, had learned hygiene from generations of English nannies, but, as the new invaders were technologically more advanced, local hangers-on soon were too. Having a fondness for well-scrubbed young workmen, he cared about this. ‘It’s an ill wind,’ as his nanny might have put it, ‘that blows nobody good.’
*
In Paris, meanwhile, reports of the French débâcle at Dien Bien Phu and of troubles rumbling in the Maghreb may have contributed to the prevailing shabbiness, bad temper and poor plumbing. The empire was cracking up. A pair of very young vicomtes, whom I had met some months before, had been laying late claims to its exotic romance, one by enrolling in the École des Langues Orientales, the other by volunteering to fight in Indo-China. Perhaps he died at Dien Bien Phu. Many did, and his good looks were tailor-made for a mourning card. On the day news of that defeat came through, as another young Frenchman drove me up the Champs Elysées, where flags were at half mast, I felt a feather touch of discomfort. Young women, in those pre-feminist times, could be emotionally exploitative, living at second-hand through men. Stendhal’s heroine in Le Rouge et le noir, who drives off with her guillotined lover’s head, is wickedly emblematic. It was the man’s head we wanted really: the seat of his mind and soul. Trained to think male minds superior, how could we not be head-hunters?
Eileen’s advice had always been to avoid depending on a man. Seán’s could be less clear, as when he let me know that he hoped I’d be the sort of woman he liked. Meaning whom? Elizabeth Bowen? Honor Tracy? Or had he someone new? Hurt on Eileen’s behalf, my hope was that he no longer saw anyone, and that no one would tell me if he did. But that proved too much to ask.
Shevawn Lynam, an Irishwoman based in Paris, was keen to know the latest Dublin gossip about a falling-out between Seán and Frank O’Connor. Was it true, she asked me, that when Frank and his wife arrived at Dún Laoghaire railway station with his mother’s body and found no hearse waiting, they phoned Seán, who selflessly left his desk and came to take charge? And that, later, when Frank’s marriage broke down and a woman he had lived with in London arrived to face a hostile Dublin, he asked Seán to look after her?
‘Frank himself was in the US just then,’ Shevawn recalled. ‘Teaching. It seems that when news came that he had met a third young woman over there, and married her without bothering to inform Seán, who was still trying to comfort the English one, the friendship foundered.’ She sighed. ‘Mind, your Dad’s in no position to judge him after his own carry-on with Honor Tracy.’
I pretended not to hear.
‘I’m not letting out secrets!’ Shevawn grew defensive. ‘They were seen together in Venice quite recently. In St Mark’s.’
Play acting, I thought with puritan distaste. In a church! ‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘Oh, come on! Anyone would think you were in love with him yourself.’
I hated her.
We stayed on good terms though. Or pretended to. Irish people often do that. Our country is – or was – so small that it was unsafe to fall out with people, since you were bound to run into them again and again.
*
Before I left home, Eileen had reproached Seán with failing to help keep me from going to the bad in Paris: a fear shared by my French professor, Louis Roche, who had no sooner congratulated me on winning the studentship than he warned me against succumbing to the enticements of Paris and the blandishments of men. The studentship, I should bear in mind, was funded by the state, so I owed it to Irish tax-payers to put it to good use.
Meanwhile Eileen’s reproaches had shaken Seán, who drew me into his study and spoke in a way he had not done before.
‘Your model,’ he told me, without a flicker of irony, ‘should be the poor Scottish crofter’s son who used to come down from the hills, carrying a sack of oats to keep him in porridge while he was at the university. He’d live on that until he went home again, while spending nothing and devouring his books.’
I was taken aback. ‘Do you mean literally?’ I asked. ‘Like the porridge?’
No smile. Seán was serious. ‘It’s a metaphor,’ he said lumpishly.
I was reminded of the Abruzzesi students and their depressing lives, but this sounded worse. Why, I wondered, did people think me so frivolous? Professor Roche, I remembered, had greeted my arrival for the oral exam with an audible aside to the outside examiner with whom he must have just shared a boozy lunch. ‘Voici Célimène!’ was what I heard him say.
Célimène? Célimène! The heartless coquette in Molière’s Misanthrope? Why was I being compared to her? There were far more coquettish students than I at UCD. And Roche liked them! Though he could and did play the misanthrope with brio, he was notoriously prone to melt when a girl with a tip-tilted nose who played the soubrette in college plays sang songs like Plaisir d’Amour. I, however, could neither play the soubrette nor sing anything, least of all Plaisir d’Amour. I felt hard-done-by and wondered if someone had been gossiping about me.
*
Although the studentship had been offered in French and Italian, no warnings, or indeed attention, came from the Italian department, whose few students, apart from Eithne and myself, consisted of some ‘blue nuns’, who would soon be off to nurse well-born invalids in Italy, plus a handsome member of the Hapsburg family called Claudia and a shy man called Pat who wore a tightly belted mac all year round but loosened up so effectively on stage that he was fast becoming a star of the UCD Dramatic Society.
The professor of Italian, meanwhile, rarely turned up to teach, but could be seen instead sitting for hours in the cafeteria, while we, if lucky, received instruction from some hastily summoned member of his staff, usually a tall, splendid-looking north Italian woman who referred regularly and, we chose to
think, wistfully, to ‘our patriotic time in Italy’.
(‘That,’ she would reminisce, ‘was when we used the voi instead of the lei, which is a Spanish import, and said autista, not chauffeur, which is of course French!’)
Taking ‘patriotic’ to mean Fascist, we guessed that UCD had got her cheap and was exploiting her, and that its patience with the absentee professor also had a political source. It was believed – and it may have been true – that in Ireland, as late as the Fifties, sinecures were bestowed in lieu of pensions on people who had been tortured in the Troubles or lost a relative in the nation’s service. Maybe our professor’s nerves had been so shattered that he couldn’t bring himself to confront us more than once a term.
While waiting at our desks to see if he would or wouldn’t put in an appearance, we used to elaborate this fable.
‘What kind of torture?’
Half credulously someone might then mention the yarn about the man who had been blown up with a bicycle pump in the Civil War.
‘Could that happen?’
‘People said so.’
‘What sort of people?’ I asked, and thought of the ones in Gougane who had advised Seán to stick a pitchfork in the hired mare’s belly. Perhaps that hadn’t been a joke after all but a primitive form of horse-doctoring?
‘Country people,’ the poet John Montague had told me once, ‘are different from Dubliners. For one thing they’re sexier.’
But this too could be a joke.
While wondering about this in Paris, a worry struck me. What if Shevawn gossiped about me? If anything got back to Professor Roche, might my money be cut off?
This was fanciful, as I was doing nothing gossip-worthy and knew hardly any men apart from three safe solitaries: Stephane, who was busily preparing to take a double degree in architecture and urban planning, the poet Richard Murphy, whom I knew from Dublin, and a Sardinian doctor, whom I sometimes ran into in one of the subsidised student restaurants and joined afterwards for coffee. This, if one had a cake as well and sat down rather than standing at the counter, could cost more than the meal. But then, students’ restaurants were apt to serve horse-meat, and a tea-shop cake could be delicious. Riccardo Braida was the Sardinian’s name and he was a mature student who claimed to have volunteered for the Italian Russian campaign as a form of near-suicide after an unhappy love affair. He was in Paris to take some top-up medical courses which would, he confided self-mockingly, allow him to call himself a specialist and charge high fees back in Sassari. Tall. Melancholy. Very proper. Thin as a pipe-cleaner or a Giacometti sculpture.
No less thin were the North African Arabs who, now that their countries were trying to break away from France, were routinely insulted in the Paris streets. Recognisably the wretched of the earth, their diffident presence provoked the words ‘sales bicots’ or ‘bougnoules’, which I now recalled hearing the Morandys use of similarly transient figures whom I began to think of as soul-brothers to my father’s generation of rebel Irishmen. Ideologically, I was on their side, but had been told that friendships with women wouldn’t figure in their mores, and that if I went with them they would despise me. For a while I risked giving English lessons to an Egyptian, who confirmed my fears and warned that for my own sake I should avoid his kind. We worked from an antique English grammar which he had brought from Egypt, containing an article about ‘new English writers’ which mentioned a ‘callow, immature young man called Oscar Wilde’. I coveted it.
On one of our last sessions he brought along a box of lacy jewellery and begged me to try it on. Was this a test or was I modelling a gift bought for someone back home? I didn’t ask but did what he wanted, and he apparently derived satisfaction from this for, when he had put it all back in its box, he told me, a little sadly, that I was a fille bien. I was getting bored with this. The vicomtes had said it, too.
*
I started an affair with a man who wouldn’t have known a fille bien if she had had the words branded on her. His sensuous eyebrows and olive-black eyes gave him a look of Caravaggio’s Bacchus. He claimed to be the son of a Spanish Republican mayor who had died a hero’s death, and he was in medical school, a Communist activist, who sang, played the guitar and the violin, and spent whole nights in my street checking on my comings and goings. Once he gate-crashed an official reception given for Bertolt Brecht by slipping in through the service entrance to see whether I had come with a man or, as I had said I would, with Sheila Murphy, a diplomat at our embassy. Never one to worry about detail, he joined us just as she and I were being introduced to Brecht. With admirable discretion, Sheila refrained from asking who he was.
Then one night in bed he burst out weeping and confessed that he was not Spanish and that his father had not died a hero’s death.
‘I’m a Jewish bastard from Algeria,’ he sobbed.
He had finally realised that I was, by now, a somewhat tarnished fille bien and was overcome. Apparently he had taken me for a call girl. Our two-year affair gave me some insight into the ways of liars. They are, I think, the antithesis of fiction writers in that they neither use their fiction to uncover a devious truth, nor worry greatly about being found out. Jean-Paul – that was my suspicious lover’s name – did not, for instance, take the trouble to borrow a dinner jacket when he crashed the reception where he was spying on me. Detail never bothered him, and if one lie failed to convince, he would hopefully try another. Perhaps lies were an attempt to reconcile the men who sheltered in his head? A puritan and a Stalinist (‘J’aime Stalin,’ he was saying ardently just weeks before the old monster died), he would go out on nights when we had no money and try to make some by cheating at poker with lorry drivers in Les Halles – or so he said. I never knew for sure. As a character, he lacked coherence but could have figured with panache in a metafictionist’s text. When I wrote a novel about those years in Paris, I didn’t use him at all but invented an affair with an Arab. I suppose I was rubbing him out – but then he had often done this to himself.
He interested me, though, and so did the real Arabs who lived in the Maison du Maroc, a men-only rooming house at the Cité Universitaire where he lived and where I sometimes illicitly spent the night. One inmate was suspected of being a spy for the French police. Another had a French girlfriend with whom I exchanged guarded smiles when the men talked politics. Jean-Paul was sure her lover meant to ditch her when he went back to Algeria. He shrugged when I questioned this, saying the break was inevitable – which, though depressing, was no more so than the outlook for the men’s own future. Algerians were growing more unpopular and at the Fête de l’Humanité I had witnessed a stand-off between a small group of these and members of the Party’s security service who wanted to eject them. Humanity, in the eyes of the Parti Communist Français, seemed not to include working-class Arabs. A year or so later, though, some Algerian Communists, among them a young officer called Maillot, broke ranks and deserted from the French army with a truckful of weapons. Maillot handed these over to the Algerian insurgents, only to be ambushed and murdered some weeks later. He was considered a traitor, just as Erskine Childers must have been back in 1914 when he had used his yacht to smuggle arms to the Irish Volunteers. There were other parallels between the Algerian événements and the Irish ‘Troubles’, among them the French refusal – it lasted until 1999 – to call what was happening a war.
Once or twice, when feeling out of sympathy with the comrades, I dropped in on a group of American writers who met in the Café Tournon, on the ground floor of what might have been the building where the great Joseph Roth had committed suicide in 1939. They, however, seemed to know no French, and I wasn’t in Paris to meet expats. Even the pimp who tried to chat me up in a café on the boulevard St Germain was more interesting, and his offer to fix me up with clients more entertaining.
‘The people you’re with are no use to you,’ he told me.
He was right. The people I was with when he made his suggestion were the Irish rugby team, with whom someone at the embassy
had arranged that I should spend the evening. The players knew no French, which left the pimp free to cajole me. Maybe I should have taken his phone number to give to the embassy for future use. He could surely arrange a livelier evening for visiting teams than I had. As it was, the team, tanked up, spilled out on to the pavement, linked arms and bowled down the boulevard singing a song about ‘the Muskerry sportsman, the bold Thady Quill’.
Unable to keep up in my high heels, I let them go. If they had duty-free whiskey in their rooms, I imagine they got drunker before falling asleep. Predictably perhaps, their match next day was a débâcle. Meanwhile, feeling less safe without them, I slunk around the block to avoid passing the café where the pimp operated, reflecting, as I did, that having the team to protect me could have been useful after all.
PARIS AND THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
Seán turned up a few times during my stay in Paris. I now had a room in the rue de Buci, though Jean-Paul kept his belongings elsewhere, and I was able to arrange for the two to meet, as if by chance, in some modest place like the Old Navy. Mindful of Seán’s sermon about poor crofters’ sons, I avoided better places during his visit. Even so, neither man relished the encounter, and later each marvelled at the other’s clothes. Jean-Paul, making an effort, had worn a three-piece suit in a dazzling royal blue, which Seán said afterwards belonged in a musical comedy, while Jean-Paul claimed that Seán’s handsome Herbie Johnson hat reminded him of a cowboy’s.
Richard Murphy’s reaction when Jean-Paul and I ran into him a little later in the Cité Universitaire implied that I had developed a taste for rough trade. He himself had now taken up with Patricia Avis, a pale, nervy, chain-smoking fellow poet who, like himself, was staying at the Maison Franco-Britannique.
‘She’s too complicated for you to understand,’ he told me. ‘Brilliant. Neurotic. And very, very complicated.’
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