The last week would be forgotten. The break in our lives would be mended seamlessly. The scar would fade. Only if you looked very closely would you ever see it.

I know what you're thinking.

No, really, I do.

You're thinking, "She's gone mad."

Well, maybe I had. Maybe I was deranged with grief.

You're thinking, "Have some self-respect, Claire."

But I'd realized that my marriage mattered more to me than my self-re- spect. Self-respect doesn't keep you warm at night. Self-respect doesn't listen to you at the end of each day. Self-respect doesn't tell you that it would rather have sex with you than with Cindy Crawford.

I struggled out of bed, fighting my way through the acres of nightgown that my mother had insisted that I wear. When I fled London I had forgotten to pack a nightgown. And when my mother discovered this she tartly in- formed me that no one was sleeping naked under her roof. "What if there was a fire?" and "That might be how they do things in London, but you're not in London now." So I had a choice of wearing a pair of Dad's paisley pajamas or borrowing one of Mum's huge, Victorian, floorlength, high- collared, fleece-lined, flowery nighties. How the woman ever managed to get a man to impregnate her even once, never mind five times, while asso- ciating with such garments was beyond me. They could have dimmed the ardor of a fifteen-year-old Italian.

I had chosen the nightgown over Dad's pajamas because the huge quantities of fabric in the nightdress made me feel waiflike and skinny and cute. Whereas Dad's pajamas were alarmingly and depressingly snug.

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So keep your smart remarks about my nightgown to yourself. There was method to my madness (well, at least to that particular aspect of it). I happened to know what I was doing. Emaciated, that's how I felt. Skinny and floaty and girllike. It took me about ten minutes to get out of bed, and when I finally managed to stand on the floor, I nearly hung myself by standing on the back hem of the nightie, thereby pulling the front collar upward tightly and violently onto my throat in a vicelike grip.

I coughed and choked a good bit and Kate started to move and fret restlessly in her cot. "Oh, don't wake up, darling," I thought frantically. "Don't cry. There's no need. Everything's going to be all right. I'm going to get your daddy back. You'll see. You hold down the fort here."

And miraculously she settled and didn't wake up. I tiptoed out of the dark room and out into the landing. The huge nightgown swirled roomily around me in a pleasing manner as I went down the unlit stairs. The phone was downstairs in the hall. The only light was from the street lamp outside the house, which shone through the panes of frosted glass in the front door.

I started to dial the number of my apartment in London. There were a couple of clicks as the phone in Dublin connected with the phone in an empty apartment in a city four hundred miles away.

I let it ring. It might have been a hundred times. It might have been a thousand times.

It rang and rang, calling out to a cold dark empty apartment. I could imagine the phone, ringing and ringing, beside the smooth, unruffled, un- slept-in bed, shadows from the window thrown on it as the lights from the street streamed in through the open curtains. Open, because there was no one there to close them.

And still, I let it ring and ring. And slowly hope left me.

James wasn't answering.

Because James wasn't there.

James was in another apartment. In another bed.

With another woman.

I was crazy to think that I could have got him back just

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because I wanted him back. Temporary insanity had come a-calling and I had shouted "Come on in, the door is open." Luckily, Reality had come home unexpectedly and found Temporary Insanity roaming the corridors of my mind unchecked, going into rooms, opening cupboards, reading my letters, looking in my underwear drawer, that kind of thing. Reality had run and got Sanity. And after a tussle, they both had managed to throw out Temporary Insanity and slam the door in his face. Temporary Insanity now lay on the gravel in the driveway of my mind, panting and furious, shouting, "She invited me in, you know. She asked me in. She wanted me there."

Reality and Sanity were leaning out of an upstairs window, shouting, "Go on, get going. You're not wanted around here. If you're not gone in five minutes, we'll call the Emotions Police."

I suppose any psychiatrist worth his salt would have said that I was In Denial. That the shock of James's leaving me so suddenly was too great for me to assimilate.

I sat on the floor, in the cold, dark hall. After a long time I hung up the phone.

My heart, which had been beating frantically, returned to normal. My hands stopped shaking. My head stopped fantasizing.

I wouldn't be going back to London in the morning.

My life was here now. At least for the moment.

And although I felt as weary as a person a thousand years old, I felt that I would never be able to sleep again.

How I wished that we had a neurotic mother. One who kept sleeping pills and Valium and antidepressants by the crateload in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. As it was she acted as if we were prospective candidates for the Betty Ford Clinic if we asked for two aspirin for a sore throat/stomachache/broken leg/perforated duodenal ulcer. "Offer it up," she would say. "Think of Our Lord suffering on the cross." To which she might receive the reply, "Being nailed to a cross would be a day at the races compared to this earache."

This, of course, would reduce the chance, however slim, of extracting drugs from my mother. Blasphemy was high on her

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list of unforgivable things. As it was, the chances of procuring even an al- coholic drink were unpredictable. Neither of my parents drank very much. And they kept very little alcohol in the house. In my younger days, those halcyon days before I discovered what alcohol could do for me, we had a full, if eclectic, liquor cabinet.

Purest Polish vodka jostled shoulders with liter bottles of Malibu. Bottles of Hungarian Slibovitch behaved as if they had every right to stand next to a bottle of Southern Comfort. There was no cold war in our liquor cabinet.

You see, Dad was forever winning bottles of brandy or whiskey at golf. And Mum would occasionally win a bottle of sherry or some kind of girlie liqueur at bridge. People brought us presents of bottles of fancy drink when they went on vacation. Our next-door neighbor brought us back a bottle of ouzo from Cyprus.

Dad's secretary brought us the Slibovitch when she went on her vacation behind the Iron Curtain. (This was in 1979, and myself and my sisters all thought she was really daring and brave and questioned her at length on her return as to whether she had witnessed any violation of the human rights of the Hungarians.) Anna won a bottle of fluorescent yellow banana schnapps at the St. Vincent de Paul Christmas raffle. Someone else came by a stray bottle of apricot schnapps.