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Catholic.
Otherwise, what’s the point of being a Catholic? My dear Ella, I speak as a
Catholic myself. I can’t agree, and I speak as a Catholic, very much so, that
marriage is final.’
    ‘How do
you work that out?’ says Ella. She is clever, and knows that any challenge to
the Catholic religion has to be absolutely worked out.
    But
Hurley, now helping himself, last man of the ten, to a second piece of
pheasant, has thought well on this subject. He himself has never married. Partly
because of his own temperament, partly because his beloved Chris Donovan, for
family and tax reasons, never wanted to be married. Hurley gives Ella the fruit
of his thoughts:
    ‘The
vows of marriage’, says he, ‘are mostly made under the influence of
love-passion. I am talking of modern marriages where the partners have been
free to choose for themselves. They are in love. I am not talking about
arranged marriages where the parents, the families, have combined to bring
about the union. Good. We have a love-match. Let me tell you’, says Hurley. ‘that
the vows of love-passion are like confessions obtained under torture. Erotic
love is a madness. Neither of the partners know what they are doing, saying.
They are in extremis. The vows of love-passion should at least be liable
to be discounted. That is why it is possible, and in fact imperative, for a
Catholic, who is supposed to belong to the most rational religion, to believe
in divorce between people who have been in love, the marriage vows being made
in a state of mental imbalance, which amorous love is. There is a reservation,
under Catholic laws of annulment, that allows for madness.
    ‘You
mean,’ says Ella, ‘you should be able to obtain a divorce on the grounds that
you were madly in love with the spouse?’
    ‘That’s
what I mean,’ says Hurley.
    ‘I
never heard that before,’ says Ella.
    He
nearly says, very pompously: ‘Ella, my dear girl, in this house you will hear a
great many things that you haven’t heard before.’ But he forbears to say it. He
says nothing, and leaves a little silence.
    She
then says, ‘Do you think arranged marriages most likely to succeed?’
    ‘Only
in some parts of the world. India. South America, maybe. With us, it’s all
finished. Arranged marriages only work where the parents know best. With us,
the parents know nothing.’
    ‘I
agree with you there,’ says Ella.
    The
menu could so easily have been hot salmon mousse, not cold, followed by that
thin-sliced duck, or lobster on a bed of cabbage with raspberry vinegar, which
were among the many ideas for food that Chris and Hurley had discussed over the
past weeks. This homely pheasant in preference to thin-sliced duck, their final
triumphant choice, is delicious. The pheasant was hung just right. Do all among
them appreciate it? Perhaps more than one might expect. ‘I’m glad your mother’s
back in London,’ Hurley says to William.
    ‘Yes,
she came a couple of days ago,’ William says.
    ‘She’s
busy about our flat,’ says Margaret. ‘It’s wonderful.’
    ‘Your
mother’s coming in after dinner,’ says Chris. ‘I spoke to Hilda on the phone
this afternoon. She said she’d look in after dinner.’
    ‘Good.’
    But
Hilda Damien will not come in after dinner. She is dying, now, as they speak.

 
     
     

     
     
     
    IT had been in September, while the young Damiens were still on their
honeymoon, that Chris Donovan had heard how the couple had met. She learned the
details from her old friend Hilda Damien who had come from Australia for the
wedding. Chris and Hurley had been in New York at the time, arranging a show
for Hurley at a very good gallery in Manhattan.
    Hilda
on the phone was announced by Charter-house, the name, believe it or not, of
the new young acquisition from the Top-One School of Butlers: ‘Yes, pass her to
me,’ said Chris, among her breakfast muddle of coffee-pot and toast-rack. She
was in bed. It was only nine-twenty in the morning.
    ‘Now I
ask