Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

“You are building neatly,” she said to Mrs. Owens’s little boy. She said it with such positive approval that he stopped and stared at what he was doing, perplexed. “Where is your father?” she asked. She had been wondering this ever since Mrs. Owens’s arrival.

“Home,” said the child, with unnecessary pathos.

“And is he coming here?”

“No.” Dismissing her, he began piling sand. “Not ever.”

“How easily Americans divorce!” said Mrs. Parsters, walking on.

Mrs. Owens, who had heard all this, wondered if it was worth the bother of explaining that she was happily married. But she was a little overwhelmed by Mrs. Parsters. “It’s so hot” was all that she finally said as Mrs. Parsters approached.

Acknowledging this but refusing to be defeated by it, Mrs. Parsters looked up and down the pavilion. None of her own friends were about; she would have to settle for the Tuttlingens and Mrs. Owens. Mrs. Owens was young, anxious, and fluffy-haired. She lacked entirely the air of competence Mrs. Parsters expected — even demanded — of Americans. She looked, Mrs. Parsters thought, as if her husband had been in the habit of leaving her around in strange places. At some point, undoubtedly, he had forgotten to pick her up. Tuttlingen, running to fat at the waist, and with small red veins high on the cheekbones, was a doctor, a profession that had Mrs. Parsters’s complete approval. As for Frau Tuttlingen, the less said the better. A tart, thought Mrs. Parsters, without malice. There was no moral judgment involved; a fact was a fact.

Mrs. Owens and Frau Tuttlingen looked up as if her appearance were a heaven-sent diversion. Their conversation — what existed of it — had become hopelessly single-tracked. Dr. Tuttlingen was emigrating to the United States in the autumn, and wanted as much information as Mrs. Owens could provide. At the beginning, she had been pleased, racking her memory for production and population figures, eager to describe her country, its civil and social institutions. But that was not the kind of information Dr. Tuttlingen was after.

“How much do you get for a gram of gold in America?” he said, interrupting her.

“Goodness, I don’t know,” Mrs. Owens said, flustered.

“You mean you don’t know what you would get for, say, a plain un-worked link bracelet of twenty-two-karat gold, weighing, in all, fifty grams?” It was incredible that she, a citizen, should not know such things.

During these interrogations, Frau Tuttlingen, whose first name was Heidemarie, combed her long straw-colored hair and gazed, bored, out to sea. She was much younger than Dr. Tuttlingen. “America,” she sometimes remarked sadly, as if the name held for her a meaning unconnected with plain link bracelets and grams of gold. She would turn and look at Dr. Tuttlingen. It was a long look, full of reproach.

“As far as I am concerned, the Tuttlingens hold no mystery,” Mrs. Parsters had told Mrs. Owens one morning shortly after Mrs. Owens’s arrival. “Do you know why she gives him those long melting looks? It’s because they aren’t married, that’s why.” Mrs. Parsters, who had never bestowed on anyone, including the late Mr. Parsters, a look that could even remotely be called melting, had sniffed with scorn. “Look at that,” she had said, gesturing toward the sea. “Is that the behavior of a married couple?” It was morning; the water had not yet acquired its midday consistency of soup. Dr. Tuttlingen and Heidemarie stood ankle-deep. He held her by the waist and seemed to be saying, “Come, you see, it’s not dangerous at all!” When Dr. Tuttlingen was not about, Heidemarie managed to swim adequately by herself, even venturing out quite far. On that occasion, however, she squealed and flung her arms around his neck as a warm, salty ripple broke against them on its way to shore. Dr. Tuttlingen led her tenderly back to the beach. “Of course they’re not married,” said Mrs. Parsters. “It fairly shouts! Damned old goat! But age has nothing to do with it.”

Their suspect condition did not, it appeared, render them socially impossible. Mrs. Parsters had lived in this tiny English pocket of Spain much too long to be taken aback; over the years, any number of people had turned up in all manner of situations. Often she sat with the Tuttlingens, asking clever leading questions, trying to force them into an equivocal statement, while Mrs. Owens, who considered immorality sacred, blushed.

Mrs. Parsters now drew up a wicker chair and sat down facing Heidemarie. She inspected, as if from a height, the left side of the pavilion, where it was customary for the French tourists to gather. Usually, they chattered like agitated seagulls. They sat close to the railings, the better to harass their young, drank Spanish wine (shuddering and making faces and all but spitting it out), and spent an animated but refreshing holiday reading the Paris papers and comparing their weekly pension bills. But this afternoon the heat had felled them. Mrs. Parsters sniffed and said faintly, “Bus conductors.” She held the belief that everyone in France, male or female, earned a living driving some kind of vehicle. She had lived in Spain for twenty years, and during the Civil War had refused to be interned, evacuated, or deported, but after everything was over, she had made a brief foray over the Pyrenees, in search of tea and other comforts. Traffic in Spain was nearly at a halt, and she had returned with the impression that everything in France was racing about on wheels. Now, dismissing the French, who could only be put down to one of God’s most baffling whims, she turned her gaze to the right, where the English sat, working crossword puzzles. They were a come-lately lot, she thought, a frightening symptom of what her country had become while her back was turned.

“You might just order me a bottle of mineral water,” she said to Dr. Tuttlingen, and he did so at once.

It was unusual for Mrs. Parsters to favor them with a visit at this hour. Usually she spent the hour or so before lunch in a special corner of the pavilion, playing fierce bridge with a group of cronies, all of whom looked oddly alike. Their beach hats sat level with their eyebrows, and the smoke of their black-market cigarettes from Gibraltar made them squint as they contemplated their hands. Although they spoke of married sons and of nephews involved in distinguished London careers, their immediate affections were expended on yappy little beasts like Mrs. Parsters’s Bobby who prowled around the bridge table begging for the sugar lodged at the bottom of the gin-and-lime glasses. It was because of the dogs, newcomers were told, that these ladies lived in Spain. They had left England years before because of the climate, had prolonged their absence because of the war, of Labour, of the income tax; now, released from at least two of these excuses, they remembered their dogs and vowed never to return to the British Isles until the brutal six-month quarantine law was altered or removed. The ladies were not about this afternoon; they were organizing a bazaar — a periodic vestigial activity that served no purpose other than the perpetuation of a remembered rite and that bore no relation whatsoever to their life in Spain. Flowers would be donated, knitted mufflers offered and, astoundingly, sold.

Mrs. Parsters sipped her mineral water and sighed; this life, with its routine and quiet pleasures, would soon be behind her. She was attached to this English beachhead; here she had survived a husband, two dogs, and a war. But, as she said, she had been away too long. “It’s either go back now or never,” she had told Mrs. Owens. “If I wait until I’m really old, I shall be like those wretched Anglo-Indians who end their days poking miserably about some muddy country garden, complaining and catching bronchitis. Besides, I’ve seen too much here. I’ve seen too many friends come and go.” She did not mention the fact that her decision had been greatly facilitated by the death of a cousin who had left her a house and a small but useful income. Her chief problem in England, she had been told, would be finding a housemaid. Mrs. Parsters, anticipating this, had persuaded Carmen, her adolescent Spanish cook, to undertake the journey with her. Not only had Mrs. Parsters persuaded Carmen’s parents to let her go but she had wangled for her charge a passport and exit visa, had paid the necessary deposit to the Spanish government, and had guaranteed Carmen’s support to the satisfaction of Her Majesty’s immigration officials. That done, prepared to relax, Mrs. Parsters discovered that Carmen was wavering. Sometimes Carmen felt unable to part with her mother; again it was her fiancé. This morning, she had wept in the kitchen and said she could not leave Spain without three large pots of begonias she had raised from cuttings. Mrs. Parsters began to suspect that her spadework had been for nothing.