Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

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.

“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.”