Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

Dr. Blackley came back looking positively cheerful. In those days men still liked soldiering. It made them feel young, if they needed to feel it, and it got them away from home. War made the break few men could make on their own. The doctor looked years younger, too, and very fit. His wife was not with him. She had survived everything, and the hardships she had undergone had completely restored her to health — which had made it easy for her husband to leave her. Actually, he had never gone back, except to wind up the matter.

“There are things about Georgina I respect and admire,” he said, as husbands will say from a distance. His war had been in Malta. He had come here, as soon as he could, to the shelled, gnawed, tarnished coast (as if he had not seen enough at Malta) to ask Netta to divorce Jack and to marry him, or live with him — anything she wanted, on any terms.

But she wanted nothing — at least, not from him.

“Well, one can’t defeat a memory,” he said. “I always thought it was mostly su-hex between the two of you.”

“So it was,” said Netta. “So far as I remember.”

“Everyone noticed. You would vanish at odd hours. Dishuppear.”

“Yes, we did.”

“You can’t live on memories,” he objected. “Though I respect you for being faithful, of course.”

“What you are talking about is something of which one has no specific memory,” said Netta. “Only of seasons. Places. Rooms. It is as abstract to remember as to read about. That is why it is boring in talk except as a joke, and boring in books except for poetry.”

“You never read poetry.”

“I do now.”

“I guessed that,” he said.

“That lack of memory is why people are unfaithful, as it is so curiously called. When I see closed shutters I know there are lovers behind them. That is how the memory works. The rest is just convention and small talk.”

“Why lovers? Why not someone sleeping off the wine he had for lunch?”

“No. Lovers.”

“A middle-aged man cutting his toenails in the bathtub,” he said with unexpected feeling. “Wearing bifocal lenses so that he can see his own feet.”

“No, lovers. Always.”

He said, “Have you missed him?”

“Missed who?”

“Who the bloody hell are we talking about?”

“The Italian commander billeted here. He was not a guest. He was here by force. I was not breaking a rule. Without him I’d have perished in every way. He may be home with his wife now. Or in that fortress near Turin where he sent other men. Or dead.” She looked at the doctor and said, “Well, what would you like me to do? Sit here and cry?”

“I can’t imagine you with a brute.”

“I never said that.”

“Do you miss him still?”

“The absence of Jack was like a cancer which I am sure has taken root, and of which I am bound to die,” said Netta.

“You’ll bu-hury us all,” he said, as doctors tell the condemned.

“I haven’t said I won’t.” She rose suddenly and straightened her skirt, as she used to do when hotel guests became pally. “Conversation over,” it meant.

“Don’t be too hard on Jack,” he said.

“I am hard on myself,” she replied.

After he had gone he sent her a parcel of books, printed on grayish paper, in warped wartime covers. All of the titles were, to Netta, unknown. There was Fireman Flower and The Horse’s Mouth and Four Quartets and The Stuff to Give the Troops and Better Than a Kick in the Pants and Put Out More Flags . A note added that the next package would contain Henry Green and Dylan Thomas. She guessed he would not want to be thanked, but she did so anyway. At the end of her letter was “Please remember, if you mind too much, that I said no to you once before.” Leaning on the bar, exactly as Jack used to, with a glass of the middle sister’s drink at hand, she opened Better Than a Kick in the Pants and read, “… two Fascists came in, one of them tall and thin and tough looking; the other smaller, with only one arm and an empty sleeve pinned up to his shoulder. Both of them were quite young and wore black shirts.”

Oh, thought Netta, I am the only one who knows all this. No one will ever realize how much I know of the truth, the truth, the truth, and she put her head on her hands, her elbows on the scarred bar, and let the first tears of her after-war run down her wrists.

The last to return was the one who should have been first. Jack wrote that he was coming down from the north as far as Nice by bus. It was a common way of travelling and much cheaper than by train. Netta guessed that he was mildly hard up and that he had saved nothing from his war job. The bus came in at six, at the foot of the Place Masséna. There was a deep-blue late-afternoon sky and pale sunlight. She could hear birds from the public gardens nearby. The Place was as she had always seen it, like an elegant drawing room with a blue ceiling. It was nearly empty. Jack looked out on this sunlighted, handsome space and said, “Well, I’ll just leave my stuff at the bus office, for the moment” — perhaps noticing that Netta had not invited him anywhere. He placed his ticket on the counter, and she saw that he had not come from far away: he must have been moving south by stages. He carried an aura of London pub life; he had been in London for weeks.

A frowning man hurrying to wind things up so he could have his first drink of the evening said, “The office, is closing and we don’t keep baggage here.”

“People used to be nice,” Jack said.

“Bus people?”

“Just people.”

She was hit by the sharp change in his accent. As for the way of speaking, which is something else again, he was like the heir to great estates back home after a Grand Tour. Perhaps the estates had run down in his absence. She slipped the frowning man a thousand francs, a new pastel-tinted bill, on which the face of a calm girl glowed like an opal. She said, “We shan’t be long.”

She set off over the Place, walking diagonally — Jack beside her, of course. He did not ask where they were headed, though he did make her smile by saying, “Did you bring a car?” expecting one of the hotel cars to be parked nearby, perhaps with a driver to open the door; perhaps with cold chicken and wine in a hamper, too. He said, “I’d forgotten about having to tip for every little thing.” He did not question his destination, which was no farther than a café at the far end of the square. What she felt at that instant was intense revulsion. She thought, I don’t want him, and pushed away some invisible flying thing — a bat or a blown paper. He looked at her with surprise. He must have been wondering if hardship had taught Netta to talk in her mind.

This is it, the freedom he was always offering me, she said to herself, smiling up at the beautiful sky.

They moved slowly along the nearly empty square, pausing only when some worn-out Peugeot or an old bicycle, finding no other target, made a swing in their direction. Safely on the pavement, they walked under the arches where partisans had been hanged. It seemed to Netta the bodies had been taken down only a day or so before. Jack, who knew about this way of dying from hearsay, chose a café table nearly under a poor lad’s bound, dangling feet.

“I had a woman next to me on the bus who kept a hedgehog all winter in a basketful of shavings,” he said. “He can drink milk out of a wineglass.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry about the, books you asked for. I was sick of books by then. I was sick of rhetoric and culture and patriotic crap.”

“I suppose it is all very different over there,” said Netta.

“God, yes.”

He seemed to expect her to ask questions, so she said, “What kind of clothes do they wear?”