The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (66 page)

After the trial weekend Sarah wrote to her father, “I am in this interesting old one-room guesthouse that belongs to an elderly couple here. It is in their
garden. They only let reliable people stay in it.” She added, “Don’t worry, I’m working.” If she concealed information she did not exactly lie: She thought she
was
working. Instead of French civilization taught in airless classrooms she would study expatriates at first hand. She decided to record the trivia first—how visitors of any sort were a catastrophe, how a message from old friends staying at Nice brought Tim back from the telephone wearing the look of someone whose deepest feelings have been raked over.

“Come on, Tim, what was it?” his wife would call. “The who? What did they want? An invitation to their hotel? Damned cheek. More likely a lot of free drinks here, that’s what they want.” They lived next to gas fires with all the windows shut, yelling from room to room. Their kitchen was comfortable providing one imagined it was the depth of January in England and that sleet was battering at the garden. She wanted to record that Mr. Reeve said “heith” and “strenth” and that they used a baby language with each other—walkies, tummy, spend-a-penny. When Sarah said “cookie” it made them laugh; a minute later, feeding the dogs a chocolate cookie, Meg said, “Here, have a chockie bicky.” If Tim tried to explain anything, his wife interrupted with “Come on, get to Friday.” Nobody could remember the origin of the phrase; it served merely to rattle him.

Sarah meant to record this, but Professor Downcast’s useful language had left her. The only words in her head were so homespun and plain she was ashamed to set them down. The heat must have flattened her brain, she thought. The Reeves, who never lowered their voices for anyone, bawled one night that “old Roy was doting and indulgent” and “the wretched girl is in love.” That was the answer. She had already discovered that she could live twenty-four hours on end just with the idea that she was in love; she also knew that a man could think about love for a while but then he would start to think about something else. What if Roy never did? Sarah Cooper didn’t sound bad; Mrs. R. Cooper was better. But Sarah was not that foolish. She was looking ahead only because she and Roy had no past. She did say to him, “What do you do when you aren’t having a vacation?”

“You mean in winter? I go to Marbella. Sometimes Kenya. Where my friends are.”

“Don’t you work?”

“I did work. They retired me.”

“You’re too young to be retired. My father isn’t even retired. You should write your memoirs—all that colonial stuff.”

He laughed at her. She was never more endearing to him than when she was most serious; that was not her fault. She abandoned the future and rearranged their short history to suit herself. Every word was recollected later in primrose light. Did it rain every Sunday? Was there an invasion of red ants? She refused the memory. The Reeves’ garden incinerator, which was never cleaned out, set oily smoke to sit at their table like a third person. She drank her coffee unaware of this guest, seeing nothing but butterflies dancing over the lavender hedge. Sarah, who would not make her own bed at home, insisted now on washing everything by hand, though there was a laundry in the village. Love compelled her to buy enough food for a family of seven. The refrigerator was a wheezy old thing, and sometimes Roy got up and turned it off in the night because he could not sleep for its sighing. In the morning Sarah piled the incinerator with spoiled meat, cheese, and peaches, and went out at six o’clock to buy more and more. She was never so bathed in love as when she stood among a little crowd of villagers at a bus stop—the point of creation, it seemed—with her empty baskets; she desperately hoped to be taken for what the Reeves called “part of the local populace.” The market she liked was two villages over; the buses were tumbrels. She could easily have driven Roy’s car or had everything sent from shops, but she was inventing fidelities. Once, she saw Meg Reeve, wearing a floral cotton that compressed her figure and gave her a stylized dolphin shape, like an ornament on a fountain. On her head was a straw hat with a polka-dot ribbon. She found a place one down and across the aisle from Sarah, who shrank from her notice for fear of that deep voice letting the world know Sarah was not a peasant. Meg unfolded a paper that looked like a prescription; slid her glasses along her nose; held them with one finger. She always sat with her knees spread largely. In order not to have Meg’s thigh crushing his, her neighbor, a priest in a dirty cassock, had to squeeze against the window.

She doesn’t care, Sarah said to herself. She hasn’t even looked to see who is there. When she got down at the next village Meg was still rereading the scrap of paper, and the bus rattled on to Nice.

Sarah never mentioned having seen her; Meg was such a cranky, unpredictable old lady. One night she remarked, “Sarah’s going to have trouble landing Roy,” there, in front of him, on his own terrace. “He’ll never marry.” Roy was a bachelor owing to the fact he had too many rich friends, and because men were selfish.… Here Meg paused, conceding that this might sound wrong. No, it sounded right; Roy was a bachelor because of
the selfishness of men, and the looseness and availability of young women.

“True enough, they’ll do it for a ham sandwich,” said Tim, as if a supply of sandwiches had given him the pick of a beach any day.

His wife stared at him but changed her mind. She plucked at her fork and said, “When Tim’s gone—bless him—I shall have all my meals out. Why bother cooking?” She then looked at her plate as if she had seen a mouse on it.

“It’s all right, Meg,” said Roy. “Sarah favors the cooking of the underdeveloped countries. All our meals are raw and drowned in yogurt.” He said it so kindly Sarah had to laugh. For a time she had tried to make them all eat out of her aunt’s bowls, but the untreated wood became stained and Roy found it disgusting. The sight of Sarah scouring them out with ashes did not make him less squeamish. He was, in fact, surprisingly finicky for someone who had spent a lifetime around colonial prisons. A dead mosquito made him sick—even the mention of one.

“It is true that Roy has never lacked for pretty girls,” said Tim. “We should know, eh, Roy?” Roy and the Reeves talked quite a lot about his personal affairs, as if a barrier of discretion had long ago been breached. They were uncomfortable stories, a little harsh sometimes for Sarah’s taste. Roy now suddenly chose to tell about how he had met his future brother-in-law in a brothel in Hong Kong—by accident, of course. They became the best of friends and remained so, even after Roy’s engagement was broken off.

“Why’d she dump you?” Sarah said. “She found out?”

Her way of asking plain questions froze the others. They looked as if winter had swept over the little terrace and caught them. Then Roy took Sarah’s hand and said, “I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t gallant—I dumped the lady.”

“Old Roy probably thought, um, matrimony,” said Tim. “Eh, Meg?” This was because marriage was supposed to be splendid for Tim but somehow confining for his wife.

“She said I was venomous,” said Roy, looking at Sarah, who knew he was not.

“She surely didn’t mean venomous,” said Tim. “She meant something more like, moody.” Here he lapsed into a mood of his own, staring at the candles on the table, and Sarah remembered her shared vision of his unassuming gravestone; she said to Roy in an undertone, “Is anything wrong with him?”

“Wrong with him? Wrong with old Tim? Tim!” Roy called, as if he were out of sight instead of across the table. “When was the last time you ever had a day’s illness?”

“I was sick on a Channel crossing—I might have been ten,” said Tim.

“Nothing’s the matter with Tim, I can promise you that,” said his wife. “Never a headache, never a cold, no flu, no rheumatism, no gout, nothing.”

“Doesn’t feel the amount he drinks,” said Roy.

“Are you ever sick, Mrs. Reeve?” Sarah asked.

“Oh, poor Meg,” said Tim immediately. “You won’t get a word out of her. Never speaks of herself.”

“The ailments of old parties can’t possibly interest Sarah,” said Meg. “Here, Roy, give Sarah something to drink,” meaning that her own glass was empty. “My niece Lisbet will be here for a weekend. Now,
that’s
an interesting girl. She interviews people for jobs. She can see straight through them, mentally speaking. She had stiff training—had to see a trick cyclist for a year.”

“I abhor that subject,” said Roy. “No sensible prison governor ever allowed a trick cyclist anywhere near. The good were good and the bad were bad and everyone knew it.”

“Psycho-whatnot does not harm if the person is sound,” said Meg. “Lisbet just went week after week and had a jolly old giggle with the chap. The firm was paying.”

“A didactic analysis is a waste of time,” said Sarah, chilling them all once more.

“I didn’t say that or anything like it,” said Meg. “I said the firm was paying. But you’re a bit out of it, Roy,” turning to him and heaving her vast garments so Sarah was cut out. “Lisbet said it did help her. You wouldn’t believe the number of people she turns away, whatever their education. She can tell if they are likely to have asthma. She saves the firm thousands of pounds every year.”

“Lisbet can see when they’re queer,” said Tim.

“What the hell do you mean?” said Roy.

“What did she tell you?” said Meg, now extremely annoyed. “Come on, Tim, get to Friday.”

But Tim had gone back to contemplating his life on the Other Side, and they could obtain nothing further.

Sarah forgot all about Mrs. Reeve’s niece until Lisbet turned up, wearing
a poncho, black pants, and bracelets. She was about Roy’s age. All over her head was a froth of kinky yellow hair—a sort of Little Orphan Annie wig. She stared with small blue eyes and gave Sarah a boy’s handshake. She said, “So you’re the famous one!”

Sarah had come back from the market to find them all drinking beer in The Tunnel. Her shirt stuck to her back. She pulled it away and said, “Famous one what?” From the way Lisbet laughed she guessed she had been described as a famous comic turn. Roy handed Sarah a glass without looking at her. Roy and Tim were talking about how to keep Lisbet amused for the weekend. Everything was displayed—the night racing at Cagnes, the gambling, the smuggling from Italy, which bored Sarah but which even Roy did for amusement. “A picnic,” Sarah said, getting in something she liked. Also, it sounded cool. The Hayeses, those anxious tourists at her hotel in Nice, suddenly rose up in her mind offering advice. “There’s this chapel,” she said, feeling a spiky nostalgia, as if she were describing something from home. “Remember, Roy, I mentioned it? Nobody goes there.… You have to get the keys from a café in the village. You can picnic in the churchyard; it has a gate and a wall. There’s a river where we washed our hands. The book said it used to be a pagan place. It has these paintings now, of the Last Judgment, and Jesus, naturally, and one of Judas after he hung himself.”

“Hanged,” said Roy and Lisbet together.

“Hanged. Well, somebody had really seen a hanging—the one who painted it, I mean.”

“Have you?” said Roy, smiling.

“No, but I can imagine.”

“No,” he said, still smiling. “You can’t. All right, I’m for the picnic. Sunday, then. We’ll do Italy tomorrow.”

His guests got up to leave. Tim suddenly said, for no reason Sarah could see, “I’m glad I’m not young.”

As soon as the others were out of earshot Roy said, “God, what a cow! Planeloads of Lisbets used to come out to Asia looking for civil-service husbands. Now they fly to Majorca and sleep with the waiters.”

“Why do we have to be nice to her, if you feel like that?” said Sarah.

“Why don’t you know about these things without asking?” said Roy.

My father didn’t bring me up well, Sarah thought, and resolved to write and tell him so. Mr. Holmes would not have been nice to Lisbet and then called her a cow. He might have done one or the other, or neither. His
dilemma as a widower was insoluble; he could never be too nice for fear of someone’s taking it into her head that Sarah wanted a mother. Also, he was not violent about people, even those he had to eliminate. That was why he gave them comic names. “Perhaps you are right,” she said to Roy, without being any more specific. He cared for praise, however ambiguous; and so they had a perfect day, and a perfect night, but those were the last: In the morning, as Sarah stood on the table to tie one end of a clothesline to the plane tree, she slipped, had to jump, landed badly, and sprained her ankle. By noon the skin was purple and she had to cut off her canvas shoe. The foot needed to be bandaged, but not by Roy: The very sight of it made him sick. He could not bear a speck of dust anywhere, or a chipped cup. She remembered the wooden bowls, and how he’d had to leave the table once because they looked a little doubtful, not too clean. Lisbet was summoned. Kneeling, she wrapped Sarah’s foot and ankle in strips of a torn towel and fixed the strips with safety pins.

“It’ll do till I see a doctor,” Sarah said.

Lisbet looked up. How small her eyes were! “You don’t want a doctor for that, surely?”

“Yes, I do. I think it should be X-rayed,” Sarah said. “It hurts like anything.”

“Of course she doesn’t,” said Roy.

Getting well with the greatest possible amount of suffering, and with your bones left crooked, was part of their code. It seemed to Sarah an unreasonable code, but she did not want to seem like someone making a fuss. All the same, she said, “I feel sick.”

“Drink some brandy,” said Lisbet.

“Lie down,” said Roy. “We shan’t be long.” It would have been rude not to have taken Lisbet on the smuggling expedition just because Sarah couldn’t go.

In the late afternoon Meg Reeve strolled down to see how Sarah was managing. She found her standing on one foot hanging washing on a line. The sight of Sarah’s plaid slacks, bought on sale at Nice, caused Meg to remark, “My dear, are you a Scot? I’ve often wondered, seeing you wearing those.” Sarah let a beach towel of Roy’s fall to the ground.

“Damn, it’ll have to be washed again,” she said.

Meg had brought Roy’s mail. She put the letters on the table, facedown, as if Sarah were likely to go over the postmarks with a magnifying glass. The
dogs snuffled and snapped at the ghosts of animal-haters. “What clan?” said Meg.