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

The days drew out a quarter-second at a time. Patrick, who had been away (though not to the house in the Dordogne; he did not tell us where he was), returned to a different climate. Louise and Sylvie had become friends. They were silly and giggly, and had a private language and special jokes. The most unexpected remarks sent them off into fits of laughter. At times they hardly dared meet each other’s eyes. It was maddening for anyone outside the society. I saw that Patrick was intrigued and then annoyed. The day he left (I mean, the day he left forever) he returned the books I’d lent him — Yeats, and the other poets — and he asked me what was happening between those two. I had never known him to be blunt. I gave him an explanation, but it was beside the truth. I could have said, “You don’t need her; you refused Australia; and now you’re going home.” Instead, I told him, “Louise likes looking after people. It doesn’t matter which one of us she looks after, does it? Sylvie isn’t worth less than you or me. She loves the stage as much as you do. She’d starve to pay for her lessons.”

“But Louise mustn’t take that seriously,” he said. “There are thousands of girls like Sylvie in Paris. They all have natural charm, and they don’t want to work. They imagine there’s no work to acting. Nothing about her acting is real. Everything is copied. Look at the way she holds her arms, and that quick turn of the head. She never stops posing, trying things out; but acting is something else.”

I took my books from him and put them on my table. I said, “This is between you and Sylvie. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

They were young and ambitious and frightened; and they were French, so that their learned behavior was all smoothness. There was no crevice where an emotion could hold. I was thinking about Louise. It is one thing to go away, but it is terrible to be left.

I wanted him to go away, or stop telling me about Sylvie and Louise, but he would continue and I had to hear him say, “The difference between Sylvie and me is that I work. I believe in work. Sylvie believes in one thing after the other. Now she believes in Louise, and one day she’ll turn on her.”

“Why should she turn on her?”

“Because Louise is good,” he said. This was the only occasion I remember when he had trouble saying what he meant. We stood face to face in my room, with the table and books between us. We had never been as near. Twice in that conversation he slipped from “ vous ” to “ toi ,” as if our tribal marks of incompetence gave us a right to intimacy. He stumbled over the words; stammered nearly. “She’s so kind,” he said. “She asks to be hurt.”

“It’s easy to be kind when you’re an heiress.”

“Aren’t you ?” I stared at him and he said, “Women like Louise make you think they can do anything, solve all your problems. Sylvie believes in magic. She believes in the good fairy, the endless wishes, the bottomless purse. I don’t believe in magic.” He had stopped groping. His actor’s voice was as fluid and persistent as the winter rain. “But Sylvie believes, and one day she’ll turn on Louise and hurt her.”

“What do you expect me to do?” I said. “You keep talking about hurting and being hurt. What do you think my life is like? It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Sylvie would leave Louise alone if you told her to,” he said. “She isn’t a clinger. She’s a tough little thing. She’s had to be.” There was the faintest coloration of class difference in his voice. I remembered that Louise had met him in a drawing room, even though he lived here, in the hotel, with Sylvie and me.

I said, “It’s not my affair.”

“Sylvie is good,” he said suddenly. That was all. He said “Sylvie,” but he must have meant “Louise.”

He left alone and went to the station alone. I was the only one to watch him go. Sylvie was out and Louise upstairs in her room. Unless I have dreamed it, it was then he told me he was ill. He was not going home after all but to a place in the mountains — near Grenoble, I think he said. That was why he had been away for a week; that was where he’d been. As he said those words, water rushed between us and we stood on opposite shores. He was sick, but I was well. We were both incompetent, but I was well. And I smiled and shook hands with him, and said goodbye.

In a book or a film one of us would have gone with him as far as the station. If he had disappeared in a country as big as Russia, one of us would have learned where he was. But he didn’t disappear; he went to a town a few hundred miles distant and we never saw him again. I remember the rain on the skylight over the stairs. Louise may have looked out of her window; I would rather not guess. She may have wanted to come down at the last minute; but he had refused Australia, which meant he had refused her, and so she kept away.

Later on that day, she did something foolish: she stood in the passage and watched as his room was turned out by a maid. I managed to get her to sit on a chair. That was where Sylvie found her. Sylvie had come in from the street. Rain stood on her hair in perfect drops. She knelt beside Louise and began chafing her hands. “Tell me what it is,” she said softly, looking up into her face. “How do you feel? What is it like? It must be something quite real.”

“Of course it’s real,” I said heartily. “Come on , old girl.”

Louise was clinging to Sylvie: she barely listened to me. “I feel as though I had no more blood,” she said.

“That feeling won’t last,” said the girl. “He couldn’t help leaving, could he? Think of how it would be if he had stayed beside you and been somewhere else — as good as miles and miles away.” But I knew it was not Patrick but Collie who had gone. It was Collie who vanished before everything was said, turning his back, stopping his ears. I was thirteen and they were the love of my life. Sylvie said, “I wish I could be you and you could be me, for just this one crisis. I have too much blood and it never stops moving — never.” She squeezed my sister’s hand so hard that when she took her fingers away the mark of them remained in white bands. “Do you know what you must do now?” she said. “You must make yourself wait. Try to expect something. That will get the blood going again.”

When I awoke the next day, I knew we were all three waiting. We waited for a letter, a telegram, a knock on the door. When Collie died, Louise went on writing letters. The letters began, “I can’t believe that you are dead,” which was chatty of her, not dramatic, and they went on giving innocent news. Mother and I found them and read them and tore them to shreds. We were afraid she would put them in the post and that they would be returned to her. Soon after Patrick had gone, Louise said to Sylvie, “I’ve forgotten what he was like.”

“Like an actor,” said Sylvie, with a funny little face. But I knew it was Collie Louise had meant.

Our relations became queer and strained. The final person, the judge, toward whom we were always turning for confirmation, was no longer there. Sylvie asked Louise outright for money now. If Patrick had been there to hear her, she might not have dared. Everything Louise replied touched off a storm. Louise seemed to be using a language every word of which offended Sylvie’s ears. Sylvie had courted her, but now it was Louise who haunted Sylvie, sat in her cupboard room, badgered her with bursts of questions and pleas for secrecy. She asked Sylvie never to talk about her, never to disclose — she did not say what. When I saw them quarreling together, aimless and bickering, whispering and bored, I thought that a cloistered convent must be like that: a house without men.