Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

“All you had to do was squash it,” said Anne. She was tall, and still growing. She looked at him intently. The others seemed to concur — piggy Peggy (whom he had just interrupted) and Katharine and her friend Nanette Stein.

“Shut up,” said the cook’s little boy, but they turned to English now, putting a stop to Peggy’s recital, in creeping French, of a visit she had made three days before to the market at Vevey. She rushed into English too: “There was nothing Swiss in Vivey, you know, nothing but vigitables.” They were all sick of her. She was Anne’s guest, but Anne had left her once again for the whole morning. “Time went so fast when you were away,” Peggy went on calmly. “Goodness, it was half past ten before I knew when it was. I washed my green woolly and I wrote Mummy and Phyllis and I went for a lovely walk.” A barely perceptible collective sigh went round the table, a collective breath of boredom. “I went farther and farther, straight on and up and on. The road was so steep! I thought, What if I should slip and fall? What a long way it would be! And so I turned and came back. I saw a herd of lovely Jersey cows, each wearing a bill, and I thought, How lovely! The biggest cow had the biggest bill, and the smallest one had the smallest bill. They made heavenly music.”

“Bell?” said Nanette.

“Yes, bill,” said the crimson child. “I thought, Goodness, why haven’t I got a camera here?”

“I would have lent you a camera,” Nanette said. “For such an original photograph.”

Peggy’s flush now seemed merely gratitude that the subject had been taken up. “If they don’t move the cows, I could find them again easily.”

“Aren’t you afraid, going out alone among a herd?” said Nanette. She seemed subordinate, playing up to the others, and Ramsay wondered exactly what her role had been when the old man was alive.

“Not of cows, no, but actually as I went up and up I was thinking of that English lady who was waylaid and killed on a lonely road in Switzerland. It was near here.”

“Never in Switzerland,” said Nanette.

“And then there was that other one, a younger one. I remember it. You know, knocked down and bashed about. I’m sure it was here. I thought, Well, there’s no use hanging about here waiting for that.”

“Men do attack girls,” said Anne suddenly. The rest were uneasy, for now the ridiculous obsession had shifted from Peggy, who was a joke, to Anne, whom they were expected to take seriously. Peggy had touched an apprehension so deeply shared by the women that Ramsay felt himself in league with the cook’s child, and suspected of something. For some reason, confirmation that she had been in danger made Peggy cheerful. She passed around a trunk key found on the road half an hour away from the house. No one claimed it, and so she dropped the key back in the pocket of her blazer and went skipping out of the house and across the lawn, fat and maddening, with Anne behind her. The others sat smoking, watching the pair through the dining-room window.

“I hope her holiday is a success this time,” said Katharine gravely.

“It never will be,” said Nanette. “This is as successful as life can ever be for that girl — going to stay with a friend and talking twaddle.”

Katharine waited until she and Ramsay were alone. “I want to ask you something,” she said. “A great favor. Would you be nice to Nanette? Pay attention to her? She’s a lost, unhappy creature. She was a bright young pianist, though you wouldn’t know it now. Moser encouraged her. Do you notice how Anne ignores her? About two years ago Nanette began writing to Anne, who wasn’t quite thirteen. What could I do? Anne had often seen her here. But I didn’t understand why Nanette should write every day to a child half her age.” Moser was too old to be bothered. What Katharine had done, she said, was slip into her daughter’s room and find Nanette’s letters. Anne had gone out early. She found the letters easily; Anne had her father’s Swiss neatness. She saved programs, menus, anything to do with herself. There was a narcissism about Anne.…

“What happened?”

But Katharine would not be rushed. Her own upbringing, she said, had risen like a wave. She felt watched by her own mother, who would never have done such a thing. She almost put the letters back.

This, Ramsay thought, was a lie. Katharine had sat on her daughter’s bed, like her mother before her, like his mother pursuing his father, and read methodically, smoothing the pages on her knee. What Katharine saw, she said (holding up thumb and finger joined, to show with what distaste she had invaded Anne’s life, and how revolting the letters were), made her see that the correspondence must stop. She drove to Ascona to have a word with Nanette, who was discovered sharing a cottage with a gendarme Englishwoman. She described that too: the rage, the tears, the abject guilt. Katharine looked tolerant and sad.

“What’s Nanette doing here now?”

“But she’s a friend — an excellent person. Besides, Anne has outgrown her. I sent Anne to a school where her letters are surveyed. She needed English, and her manners wanted straightening out.”

Reflecting on Anne’s treatment of Peggy, he thought the school wanting. And he still did not see why Nanette should be here, in the house.

He started to write to someone back home, “Honest to God, the radar around here,” but tossed it in his basket. When it disappeared from the basket, he remembered something his father had said about women’s curiosity: “You can’t leave a thing around. They uncrumple everything.”

Nanette Stein was a slight woman of twenty-seven, with a small, squashed face and a fringe of curly hair that seemed to start up from the middle of her forehead. She watched Ramsay eating his breakfast, and asked fierce questions about the racial problem in America. She told him that when an African concert tour had been organized for her (and a lot of work it had been, Katharine put in, letting Ramsay know who had been the influence behind it), she had been asked to leave South Africa. She had been shunned by British women in Northern Rhodesia. She was proud of it. Music was a waste of time when you saw the condition of the world.

Katharine, shelling peas under a large hat, seemed grave and interested, and nodded without committing herself. Nanette had gone to Barcelona just to help a strike once. She had been arrested and conducted to the frontier. When she saw the mounted policemen, the horses, something in her, a revolt against injustice (she brought her fist down on the table, remembering), made her scream and curse and fling herself against them, pummelling the horses, swearing at the police.

“I know, they say you made a lot of noise,” said Katharine mildly.

Ramsay’s mind snapped off; he tuned them out. He could see how this would appeal to an extremely bright girl of twelve or thirteen. Katharine might have been wrong. Nanette had perhaps been proselytizing impersonally, politically.

“I decided never to touch a piano again,” said Nanette.

No one touched a piano here. He had expected it to be the house of music, but he heard only the very light quarrelling of women. The music room with its records and library of scores might have been surrounded with vines and brambles. Nothing had been added for years. When he asked Nanette to play for him one evening (his way of answering Katharine’s request to be nice to her), she fetched a tape recorder and they sat in the garden listening to her repeating one movement of a Haydn concerto. When she stumbled she said “Merde,” and that was the clearest part of the tape. He thanked her when she turned the machine off.