Mavis Gallant - Overhead in a Balloon

“Can’t you shop for yourself?”

“It’s not done,” she said. “I mean, we don’t do things that way.”

“Who is we?” — for she still puzzled me.

“Besides, I’ve got no money.” This seemed a sensible explanation. I wondered why she had bothered to make another. “My mother teaches English to French recruits. Actually, she doesn’t know much, but she can make them read traffic signs.”

“You mean, ‘Stop’?”

“Well, there are other things — ‘No Entry.’ “ She looked troubled, as if she were not succeeding in the tranquil, sleepy conversation that is supposed to keep a victim’s mind off his wounds.

I had lost six front teeth in the accident. Through the gap, Juliette fed me the mess the English call custard. My right arm was fine, but I let her do it. She was grave, intent — a little girl playing. She might have been poking a spoon into a doll’s porcelain face. When I refused to swallow any more, she got a bottle of eau de cologne and a facecloth out of a satchel and carefully wiped my hands and wrists and around my neck — whatever whatever was bare and visible. I wondered if she would offer to comb my hair and cut my nails, but the nursing part of the game was over. She sat with her ankles crossed and her hands clasped, a good girl on a visit, and told me that her father, the colonel, was an outcast with a price on his head. From the care she took not to say where he was, I understood they had sent him to France, on a mission. Forgetting about secrets, she suddenly said she yearned to be smuggled into France, too, so that she could join him and they might blow up bridges together.

“I wanted to do that,” I said. “That’s why I came here. But I’m useless. I may come out of this with a scarred face, or a limp. I’d be at risk.”

“Oh, I know,” said Juliette. “The Germans would catch you and shoot you. They’d look for a secret agent all covered with scars. Oh, what a nuisance!”

Sweet Juliette. Her dark eyes held all the astonished eagerness of a child of twelve. I often think I should want to be back there, with a Juliette still virginal, untouched, saying encouraging things such as “all covered with scars,” but at the age I am now it would bore me.

She came to the hospital twice a week, then every day. Her mother was at work, and I felt the girl had time on her hands and was often lonely. She was with me when they took the last of the mask off. “Well?” I said. “Tell me the worst.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know how you were before.” She held up a pocket mirror. My nose was broken, all right, and I had thick, bruised cheekbones, like a Cossack. For someone who had never been to war, I was amazingly the image of an old soldier.

I left the hospital on crutches. There was no such thing as therapy — you got going or you did not. The organization found me a room on Baker Street, not far from where Juliette lived with her mother, as it turned out, and they gave me low-grade and harmless work to do. As my instructor had predicted, I was let nowhere near a typewriter, and once, I remember, someone even snatched a pencil sharpener away. Juliette used to come to the office, though she wasn’t supposed to, and sit by my desk as if it were a bed. She had got rid of the uniform, but her new clothes, chosen by her mother, were English and baggy, in the greys and mustards Englishwomen favoured. They seemed picked deliberately to make her creamy skin sallow, her slenderness gaunt. The mother was keeping her plain, I thought, perhaps to keep her out of trouble. Why didn’t Juliette rebel? She was eighteen by now, but forty years ago eighteen was young. I wondered why she hung around me, what she wanted. I thought I guessed, but I decided not to know. I didn’t want it said I had destroyed two items of French property — a motorcycle and a colonel’s child. It was here, in London, that I was starting to get the hang of French society. In our reduced world, everyone in it a symbol of native, inborn rank, Juliette stood higher than some random young man who had merely laid his life on the line. She had connections, simply by the nature of how things were ordered.

I asked her once if there was a way of getting a message to my mother, in Paris — just a word to say I was safe. She pretended not to hear but about a month later said, “No, it’s too dangerous. Besides, they don’t trust you.”

“Don’t trust me? Why not?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you?” I said.

“That’s different.”

Her mother was out most evenings. When Juliette was alone, I brought my rations around, and she cooked our supper. We drank — only because everybody did — replacing the whiskey in her mother’s precious Haig bottle with London tap water. Once, Juliette tried restoring the colour with cold tea, and there was hell to pay. When the news came from France that her father had been arrested and identified, she came straight to me.

“I’ll never see him again,” she said. “I haven’t even got a decent snapshot of him. My mother has them all. She’s got them in a suitcase. I feel sick. Feel my forehead. Feel my cheeks.” She took my hand. “Feel the back of my neck. Feel my throat,” she said, dragging my hand. We left the office and went to her flat and pulled the blackout curtain. The sun was shining on the other side of the street, where everything was bombed, but she didn’t want to see it.

“How do you know your mother’s not going to walk in?” I said. “She may want to be alone with you. She may want a quiet place to cry.”

Juliette shook her head. “We’re not like that. We don’t do those things.”

I think of the love and despair she sent out to me, the young shoots wild and blind, trusting me for support. She asked me to tell my most important secret, so that we would be bound. The most intimate thing I could say was that I was writing less poetry and had started a merciless novel about the French in London.

“I could tell you a lot,” said Juliette. “Heroes’ wives sleeping with other men.”

“It’s not that sort of novel,” I said. “In my novel, they’re all dead, but they don’t know it. Every character is in a special Hell, made to measure.”

“That’s not how it is,” she said. “We’re not dead or in Hell. We’re just here, waiting. We don’t know what Hell will be like. Nobody knows. And some of us are going to be together in Heaven.” She put her face against mine, saying this. It never occurred to me that she meant it, literally. I thought her Calvinism was just an organized form of disbelief. “Haven’t you got some better secret?” she said. I supposed that schoolgirls talked this way, pledging friendship, and I wondered what she was taking me for. “Well,” she said presently, “will you marry me anyway, even without a secret?”

Nobody coerced me into a life with Juliette. There were no tears, no threats, and I was not afraid of her mother. All I had to say was “I don’t know yet” or “We’ll see.” I think I wanted to get her out of her loneliness. When for all her shyness she asked if I loved her, I said I would never leave her, and I am sure we both thought it meant the same thing. A few days later she told her mother that we were engaged and that nothing would keep her from marrying me after the war, and, for the first time since she could remember, she saw her mother cry.

Instead of a ring I gave Juliette some of the Algerian soil. She thanked me but confessed she had no idea what to do with it. Should it be displayed in a saucer, on a low table? Should she seal it up in a labelled, dated envelope? Tactful from infancy, she offered the gift to her mother, her rival in grief.

Now that we were “engaged,” I began to see what the word covered for Juliette, and I had no qualms about smuggling her into my room — though never, of course, late at night. We took the mattress off the sagging daybed and put it on the floor, in front of the gas fire. Juliette would take her clothes off and tell me about her early years, though I didn’t always listen. Sometimes she talked about the life waiting for us in Paris, and the number of children we would have, and the names we would give them. I remember a Thomas and a Claire.