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

The running girl did not see anything, certainly not Lucie. She made for Jérôme; stopped; remembered her manners. It was Lucie who received her French coldness, her French handshake (a newborn white mouse was what it felt like). She said in delicate, musical English, “I am Nadine Besson, Madame Arrieu’s granddaughter. My grandmother regrets endlessly, but she had to be in Paris for a memorial service today. A Resistance thing. They are old and keep on dying. Your telegrams kept arriving but no telephone number. We called the residence of your ambassador, but the ambassador…” (suspicious but sorry) “…had never heard of you. As for the embassy, no one could be obtained except a young girl who did not speak any known language at all, but who seemed to be in charge. She — when she could be understood — had never heard of you either. You neglected to tell my grandmother where you would be staying in Paris. She leaves you a thousand apologies and she will be here tomorrow.”

Gilles at once detached himself from the Girards. They were peasants, he was only their cousin. “Someone slipped up on the arrangements,” he said. He looked at Lucie with great good humor and all but slapped her on the back.

It was Jérôme who had been in constant touch with Madame Arrieu, who had received her instructions, her map. He had been incapable of booking seats on a flight to Paris, but he had known with exactitude where and when he was expected for lunch on a Saturday in June. The old woman meanwhile was circling the motor car, looking for luggage. Gilles made a tally of the entire situation. He added up the mown hay (these people must keep rabbits), the rows of salvia indifferently bedded out, the sun-bleached curtains, the barefoot girl. The house might have done, but it needed Laure, Laure’s decorator, Laure’s ideas on landscaping. Houses like this one were often on the market and sold like groceries.

“I remember everything here,” said Jérôme.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” said Gilles. “I can leave you?” He continued his sums: the servant in carpet slippers. The granddaughter, a Latin Quarter leftover. Café student type. Probably sleeps with Arabs. My daughters play ping-pong with princesses. My wife knows the smartest people in Paris — dressmakers, the best hairdressers. Lucie looks like a farmer’s wife got up for church. Well, she asked for it; she wanted Jérôme. “I’ll pick you up on my way back to Paris on Monday,” he said. “Ten, eleven. Try to be ready.”

Both Girards looked at him. Lucie’s round daisy face had gone narrow, as dark as Jérôme’s. Gilles experienced a second of prophetic vision: under hostile pressure, felt equally, the Girards might grow to be alike. They could become savage, two wolves. One would need to speak softly to them, move cautiously, never make a move that might seem threatening. Having grasped this, having seen not only through layers of time but through walls of people, Gilles did not know if it was of any use to him. He did not know if understanding of people could be used, if the knowledge was good for anything, if it was even worth keeping in mind. “Does that plan suit you?” he said, which was not the kind of thing he usually said to anyone.

“Not the morning,” said Nadine. “My grandmother will want her visitors to stay to lunch. Come for them in the afternoon — say, around three o’clock.” Gilles was not included in that Monday lunch. Lucie noticed, Gilles noticed. As for Jérôme, he had taken the suitcase from the slippered old woman and was halfway to the house.

2

It would have been clear to the meanest intelligence that Nadine had no interest in the Girards. She had been ordered to entertain them. She was her grandmother’s victim and by extension theirs. She was disappointed because they had spoken French to her: she had been hoping to show off her English.

Lucie could not sit still. She wanted a way through to Nadine’s friendship, and the path she chose was to comment on everything she noticed in Henriette Arrieu’s drawing room. After mentioning the loose white slipcovers, a fireplace with a jar of peonies standing in the grate, a series of six English hunting prints on one wall, she picked up a photograph in a silver frame and said to Nadine, “Is that your father?”

“My grandfather.”

“He looks too young to be a grandfather.”

“He wasn’t a grandfather when the picture was taken. He wasn’t even a grandfather when he died. Edouard Arrieu.”

“Oh, yes. My husband always talked about him.”

Jérôme, sitting one armchair away, reading a paperback novel found on a table, did not contradict. Nor did he help Lucie out. She wondered if he really was reading: he had opened the book at random.

“My husband didn’t actually know your grandfather,” Lucie went on. “He must have been already dead when they met. No, I don’t mean that. I mean, when your grandmother met my husband. Only he wasn’t my husband then. He was here in the nineteen-fifties. Let me see — your grandfather was killed during the war, so that means…”

“…that they never met,” said Nadine. Her eyelids drooped. Annoyance? No, it was boredom. She was doing everything her grandmother had told her to do — she had offered the Girards drinks, shown Lucie to her room, she was making interesting conversation, or trying to, but all Lucie would discuss was the dead.

Lucie put the picture down. She was homesick. France was worse than any foreign country because the language was the same as her own. And yet it was not the same. It had a flat and glassy surface here. She felt better with her own people. That was where she came to life. Girls talked to each other at home — you didn’t feel this coldness, this hostility. Walking about the room, she stopped at a card table. “Would you like me to play Scrabble with you?” she said to Nadine.

“After dinner, if you want to,” said Nadine. She was remembering everything she had been told to do and say. “If you don’t object, we shall have our dinner in here instead of the dining room. My grandmother might be on the eight o’clock news. Also, Marcelle, that was Marcelle you saw —”

“With the mustache,” said Lucie. Jérôme stared, Nadine stared, and Lucie told herself, It was a mistake, but not a bad one.

Nadine’s voice became firm, her diction precise: “Marcelle believes that serving dinner on the card table makes less work. Actually, it makes more. But she is quite old now. I am not suggesting looking at the news because I want to avoid conversation or anything like that. But I think you would like to see the memorial service.”

Lucie said, “Is the memorial service for your father?”

“ Grand father,” said Nadine. “No, it isn’t for him. It is an association — people who were deported. My grandfather’s brother was deported to Buchenwald just because he was a relation. I never knew him either,” she said quickly, seeing a question growing on Lucie’s face. “My grandmother is invited to all those ceremonies.”

And so the card table, cleared of ashtrays and Scrabble, was moved across the room. Marcelle, of the mustache and the felt slippers, brought plates in on a tray, fought off Lucie’s attempts to help. Lucie felt herself to be a fluttering bird; even her words of help and protestation sounded like the piping of bird cries. Nadine looked at her; so did Jérôme. Lucie sat down and stared fixedly at the screen.

The most important piece of world news that night was a change in French methods of teaching grammar. A young man wearing a polka-dot tie was solemn about it, and at the same time rather excited: “Fourteen eminent persons will recycle…”

“What is recycle?” said Lucie.

“…the professors now teaching in lycées so that they can re-orient their instruction on the basis of structural linguistics.” It seemed to be true, for the young man now presented a living witness: “I am only about six weeks ahead of my students at the best of times,” said the witness. Lucie would have taken him to be a professor except that he had a squint and a sagging eyelid. A man of his academic stature could have afforded surgery. “Much of this is heresy to me, as a grammarian,” he said, “but I have also found it a bath in the fountain of youth.”