The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (51 page)

The house in the background, the stucco façade with yellow shutters, three brick steps, and Venetian door, is called Les Anémones. It belongs to two spinsters, Miss Cooper and Miss Le Chaine. They let Walter live here,
rent-free, with the understanding that he pay the property taxes, which are small, and keep the garden alive and the roof in repair. Miss Cooper is headmistress of a school in England; Miss Le Chaine is her oldest friend. When Miss Cooper retires from her post fifteen years from now, she and Miss Le Chaine plan to come down to the Riviera and live in Les Anémones forever. Walter will then be sixty years of age and homeless. He supposes he ought to be doing something about it; he ought to start looking around for another place. He sees himself, aged sixty, Mrs. Wiggott’s permanent guest, pushing her in a Bath chair along the Promenade des Anglais at Nice. It is such a disgusting prospect that he hates Mrs. Wiggott because of the imaginary chair.

Walter knows that pushing a Bath chair would be small return for everything Mrs. Wiggott has done for him: It was Mrs. Wiggott who persuaded Miss Cooper and Miss Le Chaine there might be a revolution here—nothing to do with politics, just a wild upheaval of some kind. (Among Walter’s hostesses, chaos is expected from week to week, and in some seasons almost hourly.) With revolution a certain future, is it not wise to have someone like Walter in charge of one’s house? Someone who will die on the brick doorstep, if need be, in the interests of Miss Cooper and Miss Le Chaine? Having had a free house for many years, and
desiring
the arrangement to continue, Walter will feel he has something to defend. So runs Mrs. Wiggott’s reasoning, and it does sound sane. It sounded sane to the two ladies in England, luckily for him. He does not expect a revolution, because he does not expect anything; he would probably defend Les Anémones because he couldn’t imagine where else he might go. This house is a godsend, because Walter is hard up. In spite of the total appearance of the mosaic, he has to live very carefully indeed, never wanting anything beyond the moment. He has a pension from the last war, and he shares the income of a small trust fund with his sister, Eve, married and farming in South Africa. When anyone asks Walter why he has never married, he smiles and says he cannot support a wife. No argument there.

This picture belongs to the winter months. Summer is something else. In all seasons the sea is blocked from his view by a large hotel. From May to October, this hotel is festooned with drying bathing suits. Its kitchen sends the steam of tons of boiled potatoes over Walter’s hedge. His hostesses have fled the heat; his telephone is still. He lolls on a garden chair, rereading his boyhood books—the Kipling, the bound albums of
Chums
. He tries to give Angelo lessons in English literature, using his old schoolbooks, but Angelo
is silly, laughs; and if Walter persists in trying to teach him anything, he says he feels sick. Mme. Rossi carries ice up from the shop in a string bag. It is half melted when she arrives, and it leaves its trail along the path and over the terrace and through the house to the kitchen. In August, even she goes to the mountains, leaving Walter, Angelo, and the cat to get on as best they can. Walter wraps a sliver of ice in a handkerchief and presses the handkerchief to his wrists. He is deafened by cicadas and nauseated by the smell of jasmine. His skin does not sweat; most of his body is covered with puckered scars. Twenty years ago, he was badly burned. He reads, but does not quite know what he is reading. Fortunately, his old books were committed to memory years before.

At last the good weather fades, the crowds go away. The hotel closes its shutters. His hostesses return. They have survived the season in Scotland and Switzerland—somewhere rainy and cold. They are back now, in time for the winter rain. All at once Walter’s garden seems handsome, with the great fig tree over the terrace, and the Judas tree waiting for its late-winter flowering. After Christmas the iris will bloom, and Walter will show his tottering visitors around. “I put in the iris,” he explains, “but, of course, Miss Cooper shall have them when I go.” This sounds as though he means to die on the stroke of sixty, leaving the iris as a mauve-and-white memorial along the path. “Naughty Walter,” Mrs. Wiggott chides him. “Morbid boy.” Yet the only morbid remark he has ever made in her presence went unheard, or at least unanswered: “I wish it had been finished off for me in the last war.” That last war, recalled by fragments of shell dug up in Riviera gardens, was for many of his present friends the last commerce with life, if life means discomfort, bad news. They still see, without reading them, the slogans praising Mussolini, relics of the Italian occupation of the coast. Walter has a faded old
Viva
on the door to his garage. He thought he might paint over it one day, but Mrs. Wiggott asked him not to. Her third husband was a high-up Fascist, close to Mussolini. Twenty years ago, she wore a smart black uniform, tailored for her in Paris, and she had a jaunty tasseled hat. She was the first foreign woman to give her wedding ring to the great Italian gold collection; at least she says she was. But Walter has met two other women, one Belgian and one American, who claim the same thing.

He lay in a garden chair that summer—the summer he had not hanged himself, having arranged life exactly as he wanted it—unshaven, surviving, when a letter arrived that contained disagreeable news. His sister and brother-in-law
had sold their African farm, were flying to England, and intended to stop off and have a short holiday with him on the way. His eyes were bloodshot. He did not read the letter more than twice. He had loved his sister, but she had married a farmer, a Punch squire, blunt, ignorant, Anglo-Irish. Walter, who had the same mixture in his blood, liked to think that Frank Osborn had “the worst of both.” Frank was a countryman. He despised city life, yet the country got the better of him every time. In twelve years in Africa, he and Eve had started over twice. He attracted bad luck. Once, Eve wrote Walter asking if he would let some of the capital out of the trust whose income they shared. She and Frank wanted to buy new equipment, expand. They had two children now, a girl and a boy. She hinted that halving the income was no longer quite fair. Walter answered the letter without making any mention of her request, and was thankful to hear no more about it.

Now, dead center of summer, she was making a new claim: She was demanding a holiday. Walter saw pretty clearly what had happened. Although Frank and Eve had not yet been dispossessed in South Africa, they were leaving while the going was good. Eve wrote that no decent person could stand the situation down there, and Walter thought that might well be the truth, but only part of it; the rest of the truth was they had failed. They kept trying, which was possibly to their credit; but they had
failed
. Five days after the arrival of this letter came a second letter, giving the date of their arrival—August fifteenth.

On the fifteenth of August, Walter stood upon his terrace in an attitude of welcome. A little behind him was Angelo, excited as only an Italian can be by the idea of “family.” William of Orange sat on the doorstep, between two tubs, each holding an orange tree. Walter had not met the family at the airport, because there was not room for them all in the Singer, and because Eve had written a third letter, telling him not to meet them. The Osborns were to be looked after by a man from Cook’s, who was bringing to the airport a Citroën Frank had hired. In the Citroën they proposed to get from the airport to Walter, a distance of only thirty-odd miles, but through summer traffic and over unfamiliar roads. Walter thought of them hanging out the car windows, shouting questions. He knew there were two children, but pictured six. He thought of them lost, and the six children in tears.

Toward the end of the afternoon, when Walter had been pacing the terrace, or nervously listening, for the better part of the day, Angelo shouted that he heard children’s voices on the other side of the hedge. Walter instantly
took up a new position. He seemed to be protecting the house against the expected revolution. Then—there was no mistaking it—he heard car doors slammed, and the whole family calling out. He stared down the path to the gate, between the clumps of iris Angelo had cut back after the last flowering. The soil was dry and hard and clay. He was still thinking of that, of the terrible soil he had to contend with here, when Eve rushed at him. She was a giantess, around his neck almost before he saw her face. He had her damp cheek, her unsophisticated talcum smell. She was crying, but that was probably due to fatigue. She drew back and said to him, “You’re not a minute older, darling, except where you’ve gone gray.” What remarkable eyes she must have, Walter thought, and what gifts of second sight; for his hair was
slightly
gray, but only at the back. Eve was jolly and loud. It had been said in their childhood that she should have been a boy. Frank came along with a suitcase in each hand. He put the cases down. “Well, old Frank,” said Walter. Frank replied with astonishment, “Why, it’s Walter!”

The two children stared at their uncle and then at Angelo. They were not timid, but seemed to Walter without manners or charm. Eve had written that Mary, the elder, was the image of Walter in appearance and in character. He saw a girl of about eleven with lank yellow hair, and long feet in heavy sandals. Her face was brown, her lashes rabbit-white. The boy was half his sister’s size, and entirely Osborn; that is, he had his father’s round red face. He showed Walter a box he was holding. “There’s a hamster in it,” he said, and explained in a piping voice that he had bought it from a boy at the airport.

“They don’t waste any time when it comes to complicating life,” said Frank proudly.

Angelo stood by, smiling, waiting to be presented. Keeping Angelo as a friend and yet not a social friend was a great problem for Walter. Angelo lacked the sophistication required to make the change easily. Walter decided he would not introduce him, but the little Osborn boy suddenly turned to the valet and smiled. The two, Johnny and Angelo, seemed to be struck shy. Until then, Walter had always considered Angelo someone partly unreal, part of his personal mosaic. Once, Angelo had been a figure on the wall of a baroque church; from the wall he came toward Walter, with his hand out, cupped for coins. The church had been intended from its beginnings to blister and crack, to set off black hair, appraising black eyes. The four elements of Angelo’s childhood were southern baroque, malaria, idleness, and hunger. They were what he would go back to if Walter were to
tire of him, or if he should decide to leave. Now the wall of the church disappeared, and so did a pretty, wheedling boy. Angelo was seventeen, dumpy, nearly coarse. “Nothing fades faster than the beauty of a boy.” Angelo looked shrewd; he looked as if he might have a certain amount of common sense—that most defeating of qualities, that destroyer.

The family settled on the terrace, in the wicker chairs that belonged with the house, around the chipped garden table that was a loan from Mrs. Wiggott. They were sprawling, much at ease, like an old-fashioned
Chums
picture of colonials. They praised Angelo, who carried in the luggage and then gave them tea, and the children smiled at him, shyly still.

“They’ve fallen for him,” Eve said.

“What?” It seemed to Walter such an extraordinary way to talk. The children slid down from their chairs (without permission, the bachelor uncle observed) and followed Angelo around the side of the house.

“They don’t love
us
much at the moment,” Eve said. “We’ve taken them away from their home. They don’t think anything of the idea. They’ll get over it. But it’s natural for them to turn to someone else, don’t you think? Tell Angelo to watch himself with Mary. She’s a seething mass of feminine wiles. She’s always after something.”

“She doesn’t get anything out of
me,”
said Mary’s father.

“You don’t even notice when she does, that’s how clever she is,” said Eve.

“I told her I’d buy her something at the airport, because Johnny had the hamster,” said Frank. “She said she didn’t want anything.”

“She doesn’t want just anything you offer,” said Eve. “That’s where she’s wily. She thinks about what she wants and then she goes after it without saying anything. It’s a game. I tell you, she’s feminine. More power to her. I’m glad.”

“Angelo hasn’t much to worry about,” said Walter. “I don’t think she could get much out of him, because he hasn’t got anything. Although I do pay him; I’m a stickler about that. He has his food and lodging and clothes, and although many people would think that enough, I give him pocket money as well.” This had an effect he had not expected. His sister and brother-in-law stared as if he had said something puzzling and incomplete. Walter felt socially obliged to go on speaking. In the dry afternoon he inspected their tired faces. They had come thousands of miles by plane, and then driven here in an unknown car. They were still polite enough to listen and to talk. He remembered one of his most amusing stories, which Mrs. Wiggott frequently asked him to repeat. It was about how
he had sent Angelo and William of Orange to Calabria one summer so that Angelo could visit his people and William of Orange have a change of air. Halfway through the journey, Angelo had to give it up and come back to Les Anémones. William of Orange hadn’t stopped howling from the time the train started to move. “You understand,” said Walter, “he couldn’t leave William of Orange shut up in his basket. It seemed too cruel. William of Orange
wouldn’t
keep still, Angelo daren’t let him
out
, because he was in such a fury he would have attacked the other passengers. Also, William of Orange was being desperately sick. It was an Italian train, third class. You can imagine the counsel, the good advice! Angelo tried leaving the basket partly open, so that William of Orange could see what was going on but not jump out, but he only screamed all the more. Finally Angelo bundled up all his things, the presents he’d been taking his family and William of Orange in his basket, and he got down at some stop and simply took the next train going the other direction. I shall never forget how they arrived early in the morning, having traveled the whole night and walked from the …”