The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (67 page)

“Clan? Oh, you’re still talking about my slacks. Clan
salade niçoise
, I guess.”

“Well, you must not wear tartan,” said Meg. “It is an insult to the family, d’you see? I’m surprised Roy hasn’t … Ticky! Blue! Naughty boys!”

“Oh, the dogs come down here and pee all over the terrace every day,” said Sarah.

“Roy used to give them chockie bits. They miss being spoiled. But now he hasn’t time for them, has he?”

“I don’t know. I can’t answer for him. He has time for what interests him.”

“Why do you hang your washing where you can see it?” said Meg. “Are you Italian?” Sarah made new plans; next time the Reeves were invited she would boil Ticky and Blue with a little sugar and suet and serve them up as pudding. I must look angelic at this moment, she thought.

She said, “No, I’m not Italian. I don’t think so.”

“There are things I could never bring myself to do,” said Meg. “Not in my walk of life.”

The sociologist snapped to attention. Easing her sore ankle, Sarah said, “Please, what is your walk of life, exactly?”

It was so dazzling, so magical, that Meg could not name it, but merely mouthed a word or two that Sarah was unable to lip-read. A gust of incinerator smoke stole between them and made them choke. “As for Tim,” said Meg, getting her breath again, “you, with all your transatlantic money, couldn’t buy what Tim has in his veins.”

Sarah limped indoors and somehow found the forgotten language. “Necessity for imparting status information,” she recorded, and added “erroneous” between “imparting” and “status.” She was still, in a way, half in love with Professor Downcast.

She discovered this was a conversation neither Roy nor Lisbet could credit. They unpacked their loot from Italy on the wobbly terrace table—plastic table mats, plastic roses, a mermaid paperweight, a bottle of apéritif that smelled like medicine, a Florentine stamp box … “Rubbish, garbage,” Sarah said in her mind. “But Roy is happy.” Also, he was drunk. So was Lisbet.

“Meg could not have said those things,” said Roy, large-eyed.

“Meg doesn’t always understand Sarah,” said Lisbet. “The accent.”

“Mrs. Reeve was doing the talking,” said Sarah.

“She wouldn’t have talked that way to an Englishwoman,” said Roy, swinging round to Sarah’s side.

“Wouldn’t have dared,” said Lisbet. She shouted, “Wouldn’t have dared to me!”

“As for Tim, well, Tim really is the real thing,” said Roy. “I mean to say that Tim really
is.”

“So
is my aunt,” said Lisbet, but Roy had disappeared behind the white net curtain, and they heard him fall on the bed. “He’s had rather a lot,” said Lisbet. Sarah felt anxiety for Roy, who had obviously had a lot of everything—perhaps of Lisbet too. And there was still the picnic next day, and no one had bought any food for it. Lisbet looked glowing and superb, as if she had been tramping in a clean wind instead of sitting crouched in a twilit bar somewhere on the Italian side. She should have been haggard and gray.

“Who was driving?” Sarah asked her.

“Took turns.”

“What did you talk about?” She was remembering his “God, what a cow!”

“Capital punishment, apartheid, miscegenation, and my personal problems with men. That I seem cold, but I’m not really.”

“Boys, boys, boys!” That was Meg Reeve calling her dogs. They rolled out of the lavender hedge like a pair of chewed tennis balls. They might well have been eavesdropping. Sarah gave a shiver, and Lisbet laughed and said, “Someone’s walking on your grave.”

The sunlight on the terrace next morning hurt Roy’s eyes; he made little flapping gestures, meaning Sarah was not to speak. “What were you drinking in Italy?” she said. He shook his head. Mutely, he took the dried laundry down and folded it. Probably, like Meg, he did not much care for the look of it. “I’ve made the picnic,” Sarah next offered. “No reason why I can’t come—we won’t be doing much walking.” She stood on one leg, like a stork. The picnic consisted of anything Sarah happened to find in the refrigerator. She included plums in brandy because she noticed a jar of them, and iced white wine in a thermos. At the last minute she packed olives, salted peanuts, and several pots of yogurt.

“Put those back,” said Roy.

“Why? Do you think they’ll melt?”

“Just do as I say, for once. Put them back.”

“Do you know what I think?” said Sarah after a moment. “I think we’re starting out on something my father would call The Ill-Fated Excursion.”

For the first time ever, she saw Roy looking angry. The vitality of the look made him younger, but not in a nice way. He became a young man, an ugly one. “Liz will have to drive,” he said. “I’ve got a blinding headache, and you can’t, not with
that.”
He could not bring himself to name her affliction. “How do you know about this place?” he said. “Who took you there?”

“I told you. Some Americans in my hotel. Haynes—no, Hayes.”

“Yes, I can imagine.” He looked at her sidelong and said, “Just who were you sleeping with when I collected you?”

She felt what it was like to blush—like a rash of needles and pins. He knew every second of her life, because she had told it to him that night on the beach. What made her blush was that she sensed he was only pretending to be jealous. It offended her. She said, “Let’s call the picnic off.”

“I don’t want to.”

She was not used to quarrels, only to tidal waves. She did not understand that they were quarreling now. She wondered again what he had been drinking over in Italy. Her ankle felt in a vise, but that was the least of it. They set off, all three together, and Lisbet drove straight up into the hills as if pursuing escaped prisoners. They shot past towns Sarah had visited with the Americans, who had been conscientious about churches; she saw, open-and-shut, views they had stopped to photograph. When she said, “Look,” nobody heard. She sat crumpled in the narrow backseat, with the picnic sliding all over as they rounded the mountain curves, quite often on the wrong side.

“That was the café, back there, where you get the key,” Sarah had to say twice—once very loudly. Lisbet braked so they were thrown forward and then reversed like a bullet ricocheting. “Sarah knows about this,” said Roy, as if it were a good thing to know about. That was encouraging. She gripped her ankle between her hands and set her foot down. She tested her weight and managed to walk and hop to the cool café, past the beaded curtain. She leaned on the marble counter; she had lost something. Was it her confidence? She wanted someone to come and take her home, but was too old to want that; she knew too many things. She said to the man standing behind the counter,
“J’ai mal,”
to explain why she did not take the keys from him and at once go out. His reaction was to a confession of sorrow and grief; he poured out something to drink. It was clear as water, terribly strong, and smelled of warm fruit. When she gestured to show him she had no money, he said,
“Ça va.”
He was kind; the Hayeses, such an inadequate substitute for peacocks, had been kind too. She said to herself, “How awful if I should cry.”

The slight inclination of Roy’s head when she handed the keys to him
meant he might be interested. She felt emboldened: “One’s for the chapel, the other’s the gate. There isn’t a watchman or anything. It’s too bad, because people write on the walls.”

“Which way?” Lisbet interrupted. She chased her prisoners another mile or so.

Sarah had told them no one ever came here, but they were forced to park behind a car with Swiss license plates. Next to the gate sat a large party of picnickers squeezed round a card table. There was only one man among them, and Sarah thought it must be a harem and the man had been allowed several wives for having been reasonable and Swiss until he was fifty. She started to tell this to Roy, but he had gone blank as a monument; she felt overtaken by her father’s humor, not her own. Roy gave the harem an empty look that reminded her of the prostitutes down in Nice, and now she knew what their faces had been saying. It was “I despise you.” The chapel was an icebox; and she saw Roy and Lisbet glance with some consternation at the life of Jesus spread around for anyone to see. They would certainly have described themselves as Christians, but they were embarrassed by Christ. They went straight to Judas, who was more reassuring. Hanged, disemboweled, his stomach and liver exposed to ravens, Judas gave up his soul. His soul was a small naked creature. Perceiving Satan, the creature held out its arms.

“Now,
that
man must have eaten Sarah’s cooking,” said Roy, and such were their difficulties that she was grateful to hear him say anything. But he added, “A risk many have taken, I imagine.” This was to Lisbet. Only Sarah knew what he meant. She fell back and pretended to be interested in a rack of postcards. The same person who trusted visitors not to write their names on paintings had left a coin box. Sarah had no money and did not want to ask Roy for any. She stole a reproduction of the Judas fresco and put it inside her shirt.

Roy and Lisbet ate some of the picnic. They sat where Sarah had sat with the Americans, but it was in no way the same. Of course, the season was later, the river lower, the grass drooping and dry. The shadows of clouds made them stare and comment, as if looking for something to say. Sarah was relieved when the two decided to climb up in the maquis, leaving her “to rest a bit”—this was Lisbet. “Watch out for snakes,” Sarah said, and got from Roy one blurred, anxious, puzzled look, the last straight look he ever gave her. She sat down and drank all the brandy out of the jar of plums. Roy had an attitude about people she had never heard of: Nothing must ever go wrong. An accident is degrading for the victim. She undid the toweling strips and looked at her bloated ankle and foot. Of course, it was ugly; but
it was part of a living body, not a corpse, and it hurt Sarah, not Roy. She tipped out the plums so the ants could have a party, drank some of the white wine, and, falling asleep, thought she was engaged in an endless and heated discussion with some person who was in the wrong.

She woke up cramped and thirsty on the backseat of the car. They were stopped in front of the café and must have been parked for some time, for they were in an oblique shadow of late afternoon. Roy was telling Lisbet a lie: He said he had been a magistrate and was writing his memoirs. Next he told her of hangings he’d seen. He said in his soft voice, “Don’t you think some people are better out of the way?” Sarah knew by heart the amber eyes and the pupils so small they seemed a mistake sometimes. She was not Sarah now but a prisoner impaled on a foreign language, seeing bright, light, foreign eyes offering something nobody wanted—death. “Flawed people, born rotten,” Roy went on.

“Oh, everyone thinks that now,” said Lisbet.

They were alike, with fortunes established in piracy. He liked executions; she broke people before they had a chance to break themselves. Lisbet stroked the back of her own neck. Sarah had noticed before that when Lisbet was feeling sure of herself she made certain her neck was in place. Neurotic habit, Sarah’s memory asked her to believe; but no, it was only the gesture of someone at ease in a situation she recognized. Tranquil as to her neck, Lisbet now made sure of her hair. She patted the bright steel wool that must have been a comfort to her mother some thirty-five—no, forty—years before.

I am jealous, Sarah said to herself. How unwelcome. Jealousy is only … the jealous person is the one keeping something back and so …

“Oh, keys, always keys,” said Roy, shaking them. He slammed out in a way that was surely rude to Lisbet. She rested her arm over the back of the seat and looked at Sarah. “You drank enough to stun a rhinoceros, little girl,” she said. “We had to take you out behind the chapel and make you be sick before we could let you in the car.” Sarah began to remember. She saw Roy’s face, a gray flash in a cracked old film about a catastrophe. Lisbet said, “Look, Sarah, how old are you? Aren’t you a bit out of your depth with Roy?” She might have said more, but a native spitefulness, or a native prudence, prevented her. She flew to Majorca the next day, as Roy had predicted, leaving everyone out of step.

Now Roy began hating; he hated the sea, the Reeves, the dogs, the blue of plumbago, the mention of Lisbet, and most of all he hated Sarah. The Reeves laughed and called it “old Roy being bloody-minded again,” but
Sarah was frightened. She had never known anyone who would simply refuse to speak, who would take no notice of a question. Meg said to her, “He misses that job of his. It came to nothing. He tried to give a lot of natives a sense of right and wrong, and then some Socialist let them vote.”

“Yes, he liked that job,” Sarah said slowly. “One day he’d watch a hanging, and the next he’d measure the exercise yard to see if it was up to standard.” She said suddenly and for no reason she knew, “I’ve disappointed him.”

Their meals were so silent that they could hear the swelling love songs from the Reeves’ television, and the Reeves’ voices bawling away at each other. Sarah’s throat would go tight. In daytime the terrace was like an oven now, and her ankle kept her from sleeping at night. Then Roy gave up eating and lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling. She still went on shopping, but now it took hours. Mornings, before leaving, she would place a bowl of coffee for him, like an offering; it was still there, at the bedside, cold and oily-looking now, when she came back. She covered a tray with leaves from the plane tree—enormous powdery leaves, the size of her two hands—and she put cheese on the leaves, and white cheese covered with pepper, a Camembert, a salty goat cheese he had liked. He did not touch any. Out of a sort of desperate sentiment, she kept the tray for days, picking chalky pieces off as the goat cheese grew harder and harder and became a fossil. He must have eaten sometimes; she thought of him gobbling scraps straight from the refrigerator when her back was turned. She wrote a letter to her father that of course she did not send. It said, “I’ve been having headaches lately. I wind a thread around a finger until the blood can’t get past and that starts a new pain. The headache is all down the back of my neck. I’m not sure what to do next. It will be terrible for you if I turn out to have a brain tumor. It will cost you a lot of money and you may lose your only child.”