Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

His answer, again miles away from Sarah’s question, was that he knew where Sarah was staying and had twice followed her to the door of the hotel. He hadn’t dared to speak up.

“Well, it’s a good thing you finally did,” she said. “I was only waiting for a letter, and now I’m going back to Grenoble. I don’t like it here.”

“Don’t do that, don’t leave.” He had a quiet voice for a man, and he knew how to slide it under another level of sound and make himself plain. He broke off to order their meal. He seemed so at ease, so certain of other people and their reactions — at any moment he would say he was the ambassador of a place where nothing mattered but charm and freedom. Sarah was not used to cold wine at noon. She touched the misty decanter with her fingertips and wet her forehead with the drops. She wanted to ask his motives again but found he was questioning hers — laughing at Sarah, in fact. Who was she to frown and cross-examine, she who wandered around eating pizzas alone? She told him about Professor Downcast and her father — she had to, to explain what she was doing here — and even let him look at her father’s letter. Part of it said, “My poor Sarah, no one ever seems to interest you unless he is

no good at his job

small in stature; I wonder why?

‘Marxist-Leninist’ (since you sneer at ‘Communist’ and will not allow its use around the house)

married or just about to be

in debt to God and humanity.

I am not saying you should look for the opposite in every case, only for some person who doesn’t combine all these qualities at one time.”

“I’m your father’s man,” said Roy Cooper, and he might well have been, except for the problem of height. He was a bachelor, and certainly the opposite of a Marxist-Leninist: He was a former prison inspector whose career had been spent in an Asian colony. He had been retired early when the Empire faded out and the New Democracy that followed no longer required inspection. As for “debt to God and humanity,” he said he had his own religion, which made Sarah stare sharply at him, wondering if his idea of being funny was the same as her father’s. Their conversation suddenly became locked; an effort would be needed to pull it in two, almost a tug-of-war. I could stay a couple of days or so, she said to herself. She saw the south that day as she would see it finally, as if she had picked up an old dress and first wondered, then knew, how it could be changed to suit her.

They spent that night talking on a stony beach. Sarah half lay, propped on an elbow. He sat with his arms around his knees. Behind him, a party of boys had made a bonfire. By its light Sarah told him all her life, every season of it, and he listened with the silent attention that honored her newness. She had scarcely reached the end when a fresh day opened, streaky and white. She could see him clearly: Even unshaven and dying for sleep he was the ambassador from that easy place. She tossed a stone, a puppy asking for a game. He smiled, but still kept space between them, about the distance of the blue tablecloth.

They began meeting every day. They seemed to Sarah to be moving toward each other without ever quite touching; then she thought they were traveling in the same direction, but still apart. They could not turn back, for there was nothing to go back to. She felt a pause, a hesitation. The conversation began to unlock; once Sarah had told all her life she could not think of anything to say. One afternoon he came to the beach nearly two hours late. She sensed he had something to tell her, and waited to hear that he had a wife, or was engaged, or on drugs, or had no money. In the most casual voice imaginable he asked Sarah if she would spend the rest of her holiday with him. He had rented a place up behind Nice. She would know all his friends, quite openly; he did not want to let her in for anything squalid or mean. She could come for a weekend. If she hated it, no hard feelings. It was up to her.

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.