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

She parted new red curtains. A sunlit lawn had been unrolled for Jérôme. This day had a quicksilver surface. He thought for the first time in his life, “I could become another person,” and knew that the transformation could come by way of a woman. But a few minutes later, in a room now bright and resistant to secrets, before a fireplace filled with field flowers, she put a generation between them.

It was not dignified — worse, it was not sensible — to confide in a young, foreign man. She said, “Is this your first visit to someone’s house in France? I’m afraid we French are not hospitable.” That was it, that was all, except that for almost twenty years she had answered his letters.

When he knew she was there with all the sad old men of the Resistance, the remnants, the survivors, he looked away in fear of losing her.

“Which one is she?” cried Lucie. “Where?”

“Well, there,” said Nadine.

But all Lucie would have seen of the Resistance that night was its sad old men.

Nadine, eating a strawberry tart in her fingers, suddenly began speaking to Jérôme. Because he had smiled, she thought she knew him. He answered something — something concerning politics that Lucie did not try to follow. Well, then, said Nadine, Jérôme was not the Catholic reactionary her grandmother had prepared her for. She laughed as she said it, and Lucie saw that the pinpoint of attention he usually fixed on himself was directed towards Nadine. She watched and listened, cheek on hand. The fact was that Lucie was still hungry. She had just simply not been given enough to eat. Dessert had been cleared away. She dreamed of something more — say, a baked potato.

Jérôme and Nadine had dark eyes. It must be like looking at your own reflection on somebody’s sunglasses, she thought. Nadine was a child, a pretty girl, but cold and awkward. Cold with women, at least. Lucie was glad that Jérôme could talk to Nadine, but she did wish he had made a similar effort during the trip from Paris, so that cousin Gilles might have been left with a better impression. Still, if Jérôme considered Nadine’s giggles interesting, well, it was all to the good. Any contact he would accept was an opening to life. Lucie went to bed early in order to let them talk.

Hours after this she heard him tearing up every scrap of paper he could find, all but his passport. He always stopped short of real damage. Lucie lay in her bed, breathing as if she were far away, released. She supposed he had torn up Henriette Arrieu’s letter and her map. Her breath caught and changed rhythm. She opened her eyes. He sat on the edge of a snowy bed, with his back to her, playing with a lighter, watching the flame. But he would not set this strange house on fire. He was never that careless; he was conscious of danger and knew what it meant.

Late in the night she woke. He was smoking, walking around the room. She thought of the white organdy curtains and of the lighter, but she was not awake enough to speak, only to hear her own mind saying, No, no, he never does the worst thing.

3

Morning. A wind like the sea. Low sky. From the bathroom window Jérôme saw a view that overlapped his memory of it. The house stood on a rise of land below which trees clustered like sponges. Lucie was still sleeping, just as the forgotten girl had slept twenty years before. He shut the bedroom door with care. Long corridor. Waxed stairs, white curve to the wall. Yesterday’s ashtrays, yesterday’s glasses, pineapple-shaped ice-bucket filled with water, records on the floor. Nadine’s hair ribbon. He had played Scrabble with Nadine, using every language they knew, even Latin. Flies started up and circled the white morning air. He walked straight forward; one room led into another, and then he could not go any farther. The end was a small cold room containing a coal range covered over with last winter’s newspapers. He smelled coffee and toasted bread, remembered that other kitchen, crossed the same grassy courtyard and found that the sleeping castle was alive. The servants were roused from the dead, the princess awake and eating honey. Two old women looked up at him. One was Marcelle, the other a crony who might have been her twin. They sat at opposite ends of a scrubbed table plucking ducks. The radio between them played an old nostalgic Beatles song, out of the years before Lucie.

On the edge of the table, perched, braced with the toes of one foot, soaking a long piece of buttered crust in a bowl of coffee, was dark-eyed Nadine. She brushed her hair away from her face with the back of her hand, leaving the toast crust sticking out of the bowl like the handle of a spoon. “These two know it all,” she said. “They know what became of the Beatles. Has a survey been made about the effects of television on grandmothers?” He remained silent. He was like that sometimes. He might have been joyous beyond measuring, but who could have told? “Well, what are you looking at?” said Nadine, indulgently, like any woman.

He examined her bare feet, the white edge of her dressing gown, the black and white stones of the floor. “Good morning,” said Jérôme, and smiled. She was not entirely new to him. He had known girls like Nadine before, had seen the same scowl, the same bold eyes. But those girls had been shabbier. They had worn navy blue raincoats and they had chapped grubby hands. They lived on hard-boiled eggs and weak coffee. In those days an advertisement in the Métro informed them that the purpose of soap was to improve their smell. When he went to the room of a Nadine-student of twenty years ago he saw a cold water tap on the landing.

Nadine walked barefoot over the morning grass, carrying Jérôme’s breakfast tray to the dining room. He followed, just barely not treading on the ruffled edge of her gown. “I want to take a picture of you,” she said, before he could begin. She pulled the curtains open (her gestures as brutal as Gilles’) and showed him the other side of the house, yesterday’s side, with the scythed grass and espaliered apple trees. He came out to the terrace just as the sun broke through. Nadine had vanished. Behind him she called, “Jérôme!” and when he swung round she caught the expression she wanted, which was private, meant for one person at a time.

Lucie wanted to believe that Jérôme had been quiet because she needed to rest, but he was far more likely to have forgotten all about her. Unlike Jérôme, she had understood the geography of the house from the beginning. She slipped off her shoes and walked over the grass until she came to the gravel terrace and the dining-room window. Inside the room Nadine, Jérôme, Marcelle, and some other old servant stood each facing a different corner, like a tableau of the four seasons. Marcelle held an upraised broom.

“A rat got in,” said Nadine. She repeated yesterday’s white-mouse handshake, then slapped hopelessly at the curtains.

“Do these rats run up curtains?” Lucie was merely after knowledge, but Nadine gave her a long cold glance instead of a reply. A few minutes later, as Lucie sat eating her breakfast, she saw the rat. He came along the terrace and thrust his elderly face under the curtain. Without saying anything, Lucie got up and closed the glass doors.

Nadine looked dirty to Lucie. She reminded Lucie of girls she had known in her hospital years, girls who would not wash their underclothes because their mothers had always done it for them. Nadine’s sleeve grazed the honeypot. She smoked and sent ash flying. Women smokers are always making little private slums, said Lucie. She had to limit her disapproval to women, otherwise it implied a criticism of Jérôme.

“All our neutral descriptive words in French are masculine,” said Nadine, putting Jérôme at the heart of the timeless conspiracy.