Mavis Gallant - The Cost of Living - Early and Uncollected Stories

Louise accepted the summing up, which was inadequate, like any other. Possibly she did not know how to talk to men — at least the men she had met here. Because she thought people always said what they meant and no more than they intended, her replies were disconcerting; she never understood that the real, the unmentioned, topic was implicit between men and women. I had often watched her and seen the pattern — obtuseness followed by visible surprise — which made her seem more than ever an English Miss. She said to the young man who had asked the question about her, and who now was led across to be presented, “Yes, that’s quite right. I don’t talk to men much, although I do listen. I haven’t any brothers and I went to Anglican convents.”

That was abrupt and Australian and spinsterish, if you like, but she had been married. She had been married at eighteen to Collie Tate. After a few months his regiment was sent to Malaya, and before she’d had very many letters from him he was taken prisoner and died. He must have been twenty. Louise seemed to have forgotten Collie, obliterating, in her faithlessness, not only his death but the fact that he had ever lived. She wore the two rings he had given her. They had rubbed her fingers until calluses formed. She was at ease with the rings and with the protective thickening around them, but she had forgotten him.

The young actor gravely pointed out that the name he was introduced to her by — Patrick something — was a stage name, and after Louise had sat down on a gilt chair he sat down at her feet. She had never seen anyone sitting on the floor in France, and that made her look at him. She probably looked at his hands; most women think a man’s character is shown in his hands. He was dressed like many of the students in the streets around our hotel, but her practical eye measured the cost and cut of the clothes, and she saw he was false-poor, pretending. There was something rootless and unclaimed in the way he dressed, the way he sprawled, and in his eagerness to explain himself; but for all that, he was French.

“You aren’t what I think of as an Australian,” he said, looking up at her. He must have learned to smile, and glance, and give his full attention, when he was still very young; perhaps he charmed his mother that way. “I didn’t know there were any attractive women there.”

“You might have met people from Sydney,” Louise said. “I’m from Melbourne.”

“Do the nice Australians come from Melbourne?”

“Yes, they do.”

He looked at her briefly and suspiciously. Surely anyone so guileless seeming must be full of guile? If he had asked, she would have told him that, tired of clichés, she met each question as it came up. She returned his look, as if glancing out of shadows. There must have been something between them then — a mouse squeak of knowledge. She was not a little girl freshly out of school, wishing she had a brother; she was thirty-eight, and had been widowed nineteen years.

They discovered they lived in the same hotel. He thought he must have seen her, he said, particularly when she spoke of the bicycle. He remembered seeing a bicycle, someone guiding it up and down. “Perhaps your sister,” he said, for she had told him about me. “Perhaps,” said serpent Louise. She thought that terribly funny of him, funny enough to repeat to me. Then she told him that she was certain she had heard his voice. Wasn’t he the person who had the room next to her sister? There was an actor in that room who read aloud — oh, admirably, said Louise. (He did read, and I had told her so; he read in the groaning, suffering French classical manner that is so excruciating to foreign ears.) He was that person, he said, delighted. They had recognized each other then; they had known each other for days. He said again that “Patrick” was a stage name. He was sorry he had taken it — I have forgotten why. He told her he was waiting for a visa so that he could join a repertory company that had gone to America. He had been tubercular once; there were scars, or shadows, on his lungs. That was why the visa was taking so long. He tumbled objects out of his pockets, as if everything had to be explained to her. He showed a letter from the embassy, telling him to wait, and a picture of a house in the Dordogne that belonged to his family, where he would live when he grew old. She looked at the stone house and the garden and the cherry trees, and her manner when she returned it to him was stiff and shy. She said nothing. He was young, but old enough to know what that sudden silence meant; and he woke up. When the consul’s widow came to see how they were getting on and if one of them wanted rescuing, they said together, “We live in the same hotel!” Had anything as marvelous ever happened in Paris, and could it ever happen again? The woman looked at Louise then and said, “I was wrong about you, was I? Discreet but sure — that’s how Anglo-Saxons catch their fish.”

It was enough to make Louise sit back in her chair. “What will people say?” has always been, to her, deeply real. In that light the gray wool dress she was wearing and the turquoise bracelets were cold as snow. She was a winter figure in the museum room. She was a thrifty widow; an abstemious traveler counting her comforts in shillings and pence. She was a blunt foreigner, not for an instant to be taken in. Her most profound belief about herself was that she was too honest to fall in love. She believed that men were basically faithless, and that women could not love more than once. She never forgave a friend who divorced. Having forgotten Collie, she thought she had never loved at all.

“Could you let me have some money?”

That was the first time Sylvie talked to Louise. Those were Sylvie’s first words, on the winter afternoon, on the dark stairs. The girl was around the bend of a landing, looking down. Louise stopped, propping the bicycle on the wall, and stared up. Sylvie leaned into the stairwell so that the dead light from the skylight was behind her; then she drew back, and there was a touch of winter light upon her, on the warm skin and inquisitive eyes.

I may say that giving money away to strangers was not the habit of my sister, our family, or the people we grew up with. Louise stood, in her tweed skirt, her arm aching with the weight of so many useful objects. The mention of money automatically evoked two columns of figures. In all financial matters, Louise was bound to the rows of numbers in her account books. These account books were wrapped in patent leather, and came from a certain shop in Melbourne; our father’s ledgers had never been bought in any other place. The columns were headed “Paid” and “Received,” in the old-fashioned way, but at the top of each page our father, and then Louise, crossed out the printed words and wrote “Necessary” and “Unnecessary.” When Louise was obliged to buy a Christmas or birthday present for anyone, she marked the amount she had spent under “Unnecessary.” I had never attached any significance to her doing this; she was closer to our parents than I, and that was how they had always reckoned. She guarded her books as jealously as a diary. What can be more intimate than a record of money and the way one spends it? Think of what Pepys has revealed. Nearly everything we know about Leonardo is summed up in his accounts.

“Well, I do need money,” said the girl, rather cheerfully. “Monsieur Rablis wants to put me out of my room again. Sometimes he makes me pay and sometimes he doesn’t. Oh, imagine being on top of the world on top of a pile of money!” This was not said plaintively but with an intense vitality that was like a third presence on the stairs. Her warmth and her energy communicated so easily that there was almost too much, and some fell away and had its own existence.