Mavis Gallant - Montreal Stories

Any likeness of purpose between Queen Jeanne and Lily must have escaped her, and I certainly did not try to sow one in her mind. From hints and attitudes, I had already discovered that she looked upon her mother as a classic case of pre-liberation womanhood, stumbling from man to man in search of the love and support no man can give, except when it suits him. In a way, it was true. In another, a man repeatedly flung out of a tower may lie for a long time hors de combat , of no help to anyone.

Carlotta did not expect conversation, except in the form of informative remarks or answers to questions. It made her a comfortable companion. She said, “What’s your book about?”

“It’s a guide to local landmarks.” I proposed to drive that morning to a Saracen fortress, restored a great number of times and now refurbished more or less as it may have looked in the seventeenth century. I asked Carlotta if she’d like that.

“Are there people living there?”

“I don’t think so. Not now.”

“Could we take Irma? She never goes anywhere.”

“Miss Baes has her art.”

She carried our breakfast dishes to the kitchen, rinsed them, helped me fasten the shutters — we were going to be out for much of the day — and found a hiding place for the telephone so ingenious that, later, she could not remember where it was. (Wrapped in a pajama top, under a pillow.)

We drove inland, on winding mountain roads. She may have felt homesick, for she began to talk about her mother and stepfather — what they liked and approved of, how they lived, where they went for holidays. I did not respond, not directly; there was no question of my discussing Lily with her child. However, by the time we reached the castle, some two hours later, I decided I could not go on behaving as though I had scarcely known her at all.

“The first time I ever came up here was with your mother,” I said. “We hadn’t been married long. Five weeks, I think.”

There was a parking lot for tourists, now. We left my rented Peugeot and started up an unpaved avenue, between lines of yellowing shade trees, chestnut and oak.

“She never mentioned any castles,” said Carlotta. “She just remembers a kind of shack, and a beach with a lot of seaweed.”

“The shack, as you call it, is my present house. The terrace used to be the kitchen floor.”

“Did you buy it because it reminded you of somebody? I mean, you wanted …” She paused. “Like, if you kept the house, this person might come back to it?”

“I bought it because it was unbelievably cheap. The only deal I’ve ever made in my life.”

She looked up, first at me, then at the faded leaves. “What’s wrong with the trees? It can’t be pollution. We’re practically on top of a mountain.”

“The European tree disease — virus and mystery.” Actually, it was as much as anyone knew.

“Who do they belong to?”

“The trees? I’ve never thought about it. The state, I suppose.”

“Which state?”

“France. You’re still in France.”

“I know that . Only France isn’t a state. It’s a country. Vermont is a state. Florida’s a state. They ought to be fined for not looking after their trees. The French, I mean.”

The castle, which we could now see clearly, had died long before, gutted by neglect. Then, restored, its spirit had been gutted, this time by the presence of tourists. Every stone in the tower and battlements had been quarried early in this century, when an American couple had bestowed imagination and money on a ruin. I wondered if I had a duty to inform Carlotta, for whom the whole of past time could be contained in a doll house, immeasurable periods crammed under a small roof. “It hasn’t the charm of the lovely places along the Loire,” I began, as though Carlotta might care; as if she knew where the Loire was. I was leading round to the tricky question of fakery; tricky because Carlotta was young. I wondered if, in dealing with the young, illusion wasn’t safer ground. “Here in the South, castles were really fortresses. When there was no more need for a fortress, it was allowed to crumble. Villagers hauled the stones away and stabled their goats in whatever remained.”

She took off her sunglasses, perhaps to make sure I was telling the truth. I had treated her to a two-hour drive over terrible roads, with the Mediterranean revealed in greens and grays rather than shades of sapphire as we climbed. She could have been at the beach, learning from Irma. She said, “Who built this one?”

I gave up on restorations and said, “The Saracens.”

“They should have paved their driveway. You could twist an ankle.”

“Your mother liked the view.” What else? “We came up by bus, I recall. We were too broke to rent a car.” I said this, I hope, not sentimentally. By no means did I ever wish to visit anything with Lily again.

Mrs. Benjamin Harrower: I still owned books with “Lily Burnet” on the flyleaf. Once, some twenty years ago, I had received a Christmas card signed “Ken and Lily Peel.” Peel was second consort, companion to Lily’s middle reign. He must have taken over some of the Christmas grind that year, using an old address book of Lily’s, so dazed and uninterested he no longer recognized “Steve Burnet” as a chapter heading in Lily’s life. I had examined his handwriting, which I was seeing for the first time. It was stingy and defensive, nothing like his face.

My mind, as a rule shut against Lily’s fortunes, let in remembered chitchat about the way Peel was supposed to have died. They say he got up on a dark winter morning, still drunk from the night before, stumbled, hit his head on a rocking chair, died at once. It is hard to die by falling on a chair. He must have died on his feet and keeled over. Harrower was edging his way out of Lily’s kingdom, too, if one could trust Carlotta’s register of events.

“Ben’s got this nonfunctioning spleen,” she had told me during the drive. “He’s a very sick man. His father made a lot of money, in scales, but Ben knew the whole personalenterprise thing was over, so he didn’t carry on the business.” I supposed I was hearing a new jargon, with “in scales” replacing “in spades.” Was that it? “No, Steve,” said Carlotta, giving me a firm, governessy look. “Scales. What you weigh yourself on. Anyway, he made a good banker. But his spleen was overmedicated, and it just ran down.”

“The man in Monaco,” I said, “the one who works in a bank. Is he an associate of Ben’s?”

“He reports to Ben,” she said, using the diffident tone reserved for a royal connection. I was surprised at how quickly she’d picked up a European mannerism. “It’s not really a bank, more an investment thing. Ben took early retirement so he could write a book about his experiences. Like, how he was born in the middle class and just stayed there. It’s a question of your own individual will power. I can’t explain it like he does. He’s very, very convincing. But now he’ll never write that book. He depends on my mother for everything. She has to keep track of what he eats and drinks — how many Martinis, at what time of day. He drinks Martinis. He’s that generation.”

So was I, but I did not want to engage a topic as intimate as age. Carlotta was fifteen, the product of some mindless flurry on the part of Lily before entering the peace of the menopause. During her Burnet epoch, she had avoided even conversation about having children. She was afraid any child of hers might take after her own parents, the one slit-eared, the other a destroy-the-heretics-and-let-God-sort-it-out Inquisitor.

Ben Harrower, his father in scales. From his tone of voice, I’d guessed a liberal clergyman with a working fireplace in his study. He’d bought the house in Vermont after Canada adopted the metric system, Carlotta said. He believed metric was an invention of the K.G.B. The minds of Russians could not adapt to miles, pounds, Fahrenheit temperature; for that reason, the Soviet Union was unlikely to invade the United States. “He could hardly believe it when China went metric,” said Carlotta. “Last winter he and Mummy went to England and the BBC was giving the temperature in Celsius. He was born over there, so you can imagine how he felt.” She was utterly free from malice or mockery, saying this; at such a remove from the Quales, even from me, that the distance could not be measured under any system.