May We Borrow Your Husband? by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online Page B

asked.
    â€˜Leave Beauty?’ The question didn’t rate a reply. She ran her fingers through the long café-au-lait hair, but the dog made no motion with his tail as a common dog might have done. He gave a kind of grunt like an old man in a club who has been disturbed by the waiter. ‘All these laws of quarantine – why don’t your congressmen do something about them?’
    â€˜We call them MPs,’ the man said with what I thought was hidden dislike.
    â€˜I don’t care what you call them. They live in the Middle Ages. I can go to Paris, to Vienna, Venice – why, I could go to Moscow if I wanted, but I can’t go to London without leaving Beauty in a horrible prison. With all kinds of undesirable dogs.’
    â€˜I think he’d have,’ he hesitated with what I thought was admirable English courtesy as he weighed in the balance the correct term – cell? kennel? – ‘a room of his own.’
    â€˜Think of the diseases he might pick up.’ She lifted him from the window-sill as easily as she might have lifted a stole of fur and pressed him resolutely against her left breast; he didn’t even grunt. I had the sense of something completely possessed. A child at least would have rebelled . . . for a time. Poor child. I don’t know why I couldn’t pity the dog. Perhaps he was too beautiful.
    She said, ‘Poor Beauty’s thirsty.’
    â€˜I’ll get him some water,’ the man said.
    â€˜A half-bottle of Evian if you don’t mind. I don’t trust the tap-water.’
    It was then that I left them, because the cinema in the Place de Gaulle opened at nine.
    It was after eleven that I emerged again, and, since the night was fine, except for a cold wind off the Alps, I made a circuit from the Place and, as the ramparts would be too exposed, I took the narrow dirty streets off the Place Nationale – the Rue de Sade, the Rue des Bains. . . . The dustbins were all out and dogs had made ordure on the pavements and children had urinated in the gutters. A patch of white, which I first took to be a cat, moved stealthily along the house-fronts ahead of me, then paused, and as I approached snaked behind a dustbin. I stood amazed and watched. A pattern of light through the slats of a shutter striped the road in yellow tigerish bars and presently Beauty slid out again and looked at me with his pansy face and black expressionless eyes. I think he expected me to lift him up, and he showed his teeth in warning.
    â€˜Why, Beauty,’ I exclaimed. He gave his clubman grunt again and waited. Was he cautious because he found that I knew his name or did he recognize in my clothes and my smell that I belonged to the same class as the woman in the toque, that I was one who would disapprove of his nocturnal ramble? Suddenly he cocked an ear in the direction of the house on the ramparts; it was possible that he had heard a woman’s voice calling. Certainly he looked dubiously up at me as though he wanted to see whether I had heard it too, and perhaps because I made no move he considered he was safe. He began to undulate down the pavement with a purpose, like the feather boa in the cabaret act which floats around seeking a top-hat. I followed at a discreet distance.
    Was it memory or a keen sense of smell which affected him? Of all the dustbins in the mean street there was only one which had lost its cover – indescribable tendrils drooped over the top. Beauty – he ignored me as completely now as he would have ignored an inferior dog – stood on his hind legs with two delicately feathered paws holding the edge of the bin. He turned his head and looked at me, without expression, two pools of ink in which a soothsayer perhaps could have read an infinite series of predictions. He gave a scramble like an athlete raising himself on a parallel bar, and he was within the dustbin, and the feathered forepaws – I am sure I