The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (65 page)

This was new, for of course she had never
lived
with anyone. Well, why not? In her mind she told her father, After all, it was a bachelor you wanted for me. She abandoned her textbooks and packed instead four wooden bowls she had bought for her father’s sister and an out-of-print Matisse poster intended for Professor Downcast. Now it would be Roy’s. He came to fetch her that day in the car that was always parked somewhere in shade—it was a small open thing, a bachelor’s car. They rolled out of Nice with an escort of trucks and buses. She thought there should have been carnival floats spilling yellow roses. Until now, this was her most important decision, for it supposed a way of living, a style. She reflected on how no girl she knew had ever done quite this, and on what her father would say. He might not hear of it; at least not right away. Meanwhile, they made a triumphant passage through blank white suburbs. Their witnesses were souvenir shops, a village or two, a bright solitary supermarket, the walls and hedges of villas. Along one of these flowering barriers they came to a stop and got out of the car. The fence wire looked tense and new; the plumbago it supported leaned every way, as if its life had been spared but only barely. It was late evening. She heard the squeaky barking of small dogs, and glimpsed, through an iron gate, one of those stucco bungalows that seem to beget their own palm trees. They went straight past it, down four shallow garden steps, and came upon a low building that Sarah thought looked like an Indian lodge. It was half under a plane tree. Perhaps it was the tree, whose leaves were like plates, that made the house and its terrace seem microscopic. One table and four thin chairs was all the terrace would hold. A lavender hedge surrounded it.

“They call this place The Tunnel,” Roy said. She wondered if he was already regretting their adventure; if so, all he had to do was drive her back at once, or even let her down at a bus stop. But then he lit a candle on the table, which at once made everything dark, and she could see he was smiling as if
in wonder at himself. The Tunnel was a long windowless room with an arched whitewashed ceiling. In daytime the light must have come in from the door, which was protected by a soft white curtain of mosquito netting. He groped for a switch on the wall, and she saw there was next to no furniture. “It used to be a storage place for wine and olives,” he said. “The Reeves fixed it up. They let it to friends.”

“What are Reeves?”

“People—nice people. They live in the bungalow.”

She was now in this man’s house. She wondered about procedure: whether to unpack or wait until she was asked, and whether she had any domestic duties and was expected to cook. Concealed by a screen was a shower bath; the stove was in a cupboard. The lavatory, he told her, was behind the house in a garden shed. She would find it full of pictures of Labour leaders. The only Socialist the Reeves could bear was Hugh Dalton (Sarah had never heard of him, or most of the others, either), because Dalton had paid for the Queen’s wedding out of his own pocket when she was a slip of a girl without a bean of her own. Sarah said, “What did he want to do that for?” She saw, too late, that he meant to be funny.

He sat down on the bed and looked at her. “The Reeves versus Labour,” he said. “Why should you care? You weren’t even born.” She was used to hearing that every interesting thing had taken place before her birth. She had a deadly serious question waiting: “What shall I do if you feel remorseful?”

“If I am,” he said, “you’ll never know. That’s a promise.”

It was not remorse that overcame him but respectability: First thing next day, Sarah was taken to meet his friends, landlords, and neighbors, Tim and Meg Reeve. “I want them to like you,” he said. Wishing to be liked by total strangers was outside anything that mattered to Sarah; all the same, quickened by the new situation and its demands, she dressed and brushed her hair and took the path between the two cottages. The garden seemed a dry, cracked sort of place. The remains of daffodils lay in brown ribbons on the soil. She looked all round her, at an olive tree, and yesterday’s iron gate, and at the sky, which was fiercely azure. She was not as innocent as her father still hoped she might turn out to be, but not as experienced as Roy thought, either. There was a world of knowledge between last night and what had gone before. She wondered, already, if violent feelings were going to define the rest of her life, or simply limit it. Roy gathered her long hair in his hand
and turned her head around. They’d had other nights, or attempts at nights, but this was their first morning. Whatever he read on her face made him say, “You know, it won’t always be as lovely as this.” She nodded. Professor Downcast had a wife and children, and she was used to fair warnings. Roy could not guess how sturdy her emotions were. Her only antagonist had been her father, who had not touched her self-confidence. She accepted Roy’s caution as a tribute:
He
, at least, could see that Sarah was objective.

Roy rang the doorbell, which set off a gunburst of barking. The Reeves’ hall smelled of toast, carpets, and insect spray. She wanted southern houses to smell of jasmine. “Here, Roy,” someone called, and Roy led her by the hand into a small sitting room where two people, an old man and an old woman, sat in armchairs eating breakfast. The man removed a tray from his knees and stood up. He was gaunt and tall, and looked oddly starched, like a nurse coming on duty. “Jack Sprat could eat no fat” came to Sarah’s mind. Mrs. Reeve was—she supposed—obese. Sarah stared at her; she did not know how to be furtive. Was the poor woman ill? No, answered the judge who was part of Sarah too. Mrs. Reeve is just greedy. Look at the jam she’s shoveled on her plate.

“Well, this is Sarah Holmes,” said Roy, stroking her hair, as if he was proving at the outset there was to be no hypocrisy. “We’d adore coffee.”

“You’d better do something about it, then,” said the fat woman. “We’ve got tea here. You know where the kitchen is, Roy.” She had a deep voice, like a moo. “You, Sarah Holmes, sit down. Find a pew with no dog hair, if you can. Of course, if you’re going to be fussy, you won’t last long around
here—
eh, boys? You can make toast if you like. No, never mind. I’ll make it for you.”

It seemed to Sarah a pretty casual way for people their age to behave. Roy was older by a long start, but the Reeves were
old
. They seemed to find it natural to have Roy and Sarah drift over for breakfast after a night in the guesthouse. Mr. Reeve even asked quite kindly, “Did you sleep well? The plane tree draws mosquitoes, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll have that tree down yet,” said Mrs. Reeve. “Oh, I’ll have it down one of these days. I can promise you that.” She was dressed in a bathrobe that looked like a dark parachute. “We decided not to have eggs,” she said, as though Sarah had asked. “Have ’em later. You and Roy must come back for lunch. We’ll have a good old fry-up.” Here she attended to toast, which meant shaking and tapping an antique wire toaster set on the table before her. “When Tim’s gone—bless him—I shall never cook a meal again,” she
said. “Just bits and pieces on a tray for the boys and me.” The boys were dogs, Sarah guessed—two little yappers up on the sofa, the color of teddy-bear stuffing.

“I make a lot of work for Meg,” Mr. Reeve said to Sarah. “The breakfasts—breakfast every day, you know—and she is the one who looks after the Christmas cards. Marriage has been a bind for her. She did a marvelous job with evacuees in the war. And poor old Meg loathed kids, still does. You’ll never hear her say so. I’ve never known Meg to complain.”

Mrs. Reeve had not waited for her husband to die before starting her widow’s diet of tea and toast and jam and gin (the bottle was there, by the toaster, along with a can of orange juice). Sarah knew about this, for not only was her father a widower but they had often spent summers with a widowed aunt. The Reeves seemed like her father and her aunt grown elderly and distorted. Mrs. Reeve now unwrapped a chocolate bar, which caused a fit of snorting and jostling on the sofa. “No chockie bits for boys with bad manners,” she said, feeding them just the same. Yes, there she sat, a widow with two dogs for company. Mr. Reeve, delicately buttering and eating the toast meant for Sarah, murmured that when he
did
go he did not want poor Meg to have any fuss. He seemed to be planning his own modest gravestone; in a heightened moment of telepathy Sarah was sure she could see it too. To Sarah, the tall old man had already ceased to be. He was not Mr. Reeve, Roy’s friend and landlord, but an ectoplasmic impression of somebody like him, leaning forward, lips slightly parted, lifting a piece of toast that was caving in like a hammock with a weight of strawberry jam. Panic was in the room, but only Sarah felt it. She had been better off, safer, perhaps happier even, up in Grenoble, trying not to yawn over
“Tout m’afflige, et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire.”
What was she doing here, indoors, on this glowing day, with these two snivelly dogs and these gluttonous old persons? She turned swiftly, hearing Roy, and in her heart she said, in a quavering spoiled child’s voice, I want to go home. (How many outings had she ruined for her father. How many picnics, circuses, puppet shows, boat rides. From how many attempted holidays had he been fetched back with a telegram from whichever relation had been trying to hold Sarah down for a week. The strong brass chords of “I want my own life” had always been followed by this dismal piping.)

Roy poured their coffee into pottery mugs and his eyes met Sarah’s. His said, Yes, these are the Reeves. They don’t matter. I only want one thing, and that’s to get back to where we were a few hours ago.

So they were to be conspirators: She liked that.

The Reeves had now done with chewing, feeding, swallowing, and brushing crumbs, and began placing Sarah. Who was she? Sarah Holmes, a little transatlantic pickup, a student slumming round for a summer? What had she studied? Sociology, psychology, and some economics, she told them.

“Sounds Labour” was Mr. Reeve’s comment.

She simplified her story and mentioned the thesis. “Urban and Regional Studies of the Less Privileged in British Columbia,” as far as Mr. Reeve was concerned, contained only one reassuring word, and that was “British.” Being the youngest in the room, Sarah felt like the daughter of the house. She piled cups and plates on one of the trays and took them out to the kitchen. The Reeves were not the sort of people who would ever bother to whisper: She heard that she was “a little on the tall side” and that her proportions made Roy seem slight and small, “like a bloody dago.” Her hair was too long; the fringe on her forehead looked sparse and pasted down with soap. She also heard that she had a cast in one eye, which she did not believe.

“One can’t accuse her of oversmartness,” said Mrs. Reeve.

Roy, whose low voice had carrying qualities, said, “No, Meg. Sarah’s jeans are as faded, as baggy, as those brown corduroys of yours. However, owing to Sarah’s splendid and enviable shape, hers are not nearly so large across the beam end.” This provoked two laughs—a cackle from Jack Sprat and a long three-note moo from his wife.

“Well, Roy,” said Tim Reeve, “all I can say is, you amaze me. How do you bring it off?”

What about me? said Sarah to herself. How do
I
bring it off?

“At least she’s had sense enough not to come tramping around in high-heeled shoes, like some of our visitors,” said Mrs. Reeve—her last word for the moment.

Roy warned Sarah what lunch—the good old fry-up—would be. A large black pan the Reeves had brought to France from England when they emigrated because of taxes and Labour would be dragged out of the oven; its partner, a jam jar of bacon fat, stratified in a wide extent of suety whites, had its permanent place on top of the stove. The lowest, or Ur, line of fat marked the very first fry-up in France. A few spoonfuls of this grease, releasing blue smoke, received tomatoes, more bacon, eggs, sausages, cold boiled potatoes. To get the proper sausages they had to go to a shop that imported them, in Monte Carlo. This was no distance, but the Reeves’ car had been paid for by Tim, and he was mean about it. He belonged to a generation
that had been in awe of batteries: Each time the ignition was turned on, he thought the car’s lifeblood was seeping away. When he became too stingy with the car, then Meg would not let him look at television: The set was hers. She would push it on its wheeled table over bumpy rugs into their bedroom and put a chair against the door.

Roy was a sharp mimic and he took a slightly feminine pleasure in mocking his closest friends. Sarah lay on her elbow on the bed as she had lain on the beach and thought that if he was disloyal to the Reeves then he was all the more loyal to her. They had been told to come back for lunch around three; this long day was in itself like a whole summer. She said, “It sounds like a movie. Are they happy?”

“Oh, blissful,” he answered, surprised, and perhaps with a trace of reproval. It was as if he were very young and she had asked an intimate question about his father and mother.

The lunch Roy had described was exactly the meal they were given. She watched him stolidly eating eggs fried to a kind of plastic lace, and covering everything with mustard to damp out the taste of grease. When Meg opened the door to the kitchen she was followed by a blue haze. Tim noticed Sarah’s look—she had wondered if something was burning—and said, “Next time you’re here that’s where we’ll eat. It’s what we like. We like our kitchen.”

“Today we are honoring Sarah,” said Meg Reeve, as though baiting Roy.

“So you should,” he said. It was the only attempt at sparring; they were all much too fed and comfortable. Tim, who had been to Monte Carlo, had brought back another symbol of their roots, the Hovis loaf. They talked about his shopping, and the things they liked doing—gambling a little, smuggling from Italy for sport. One thing they never did was look at the Mediterranean. It was not an interesting sea. It had no tides. “I do hope you aren’t going to bother with it,” said Tim to Sarah. It seemed to be their private measure for a guest—that and coming round in the wrong clothes.

The temperature in full sun outside the sitting-room window was thirty-three degrees centigrade. “What does it mean?” said Sarah. Nobody knew. Tim said that 16°C. was the same thing as 61°F. but that nothing else corresponded. For instance, 33°C. could not possibly be 33°F. No, it felt like a lot more.