Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

“What kind of wrong people?” She sat tense beside him until he said, “Why, like Eric Wilkinson, I should think,” and she laughed when his own laugh said she was meant to. He was nice to her; even later, when she thought she had reason to hate him, she would remember that Wilkinson had been nice. He drove beyond his destination — a block of flats that he waved at in passing and that Molly in a confused way supposed he owned. They stopped in the road behind Lou Mas; she thanked him fervently, and then, struck with something, sat staring at him: “Mr. Wilkinson,” she said. “Please — I am not allowed to be in cars with men alone. In case someone happened to see us, would you mind just coming and meeting my mother? Just so she can see who you are?”

“God bless my soul,” said Wilkinson, sincerely.

Once, Alec had believed that Barbara was not frightened by anything, and that this absence of fear was her principal weakness. It was true that she had begun drifting out of her old life now, as calmly as Alec drifted away from life altogether. Her mock phrase for each additional Lou Mas catastrophe had become “the usual daily developments.” The usual developments over seven rainy days had been the departure of the cook, who took with her all she could lay her hands on, and a French social-security fine that had come down hard on the remains of her marble block of money, reducing it to pebbles and dust. She had never filled out employer’s forms for the people she had hired, because she had not known she was supposed to and none of them had suggested it; for a number of reasons having to do with government offices and tax files, none of them had wanted even this modest income to be registered anywhere. As it turned out, the gardener had also been receiving unemployment benefits, which, unfairly, had increased the amount of the fine Barbara had to pay. Rivabella turned out to be just as grim and bossy as England — worse, even, for it kept up a camouflage of wine and sunshine and olive trees and of amiable southern idiots who, if sacked, thought nothing of informing on one.

She sat at the dining-room table, wearing around her shoulders a red cardigan Molly had outgrown. On the table were the Sunday papers Alec’s sister continued to send faithfully from England, and Alec’s lunch tray, exactly as she had taken it up to him except that everything on it was now cold. She glanced up and saw the two of them enter — one stricken and guilty-looking, the other male, confident, smiling. The recognition that leaped between Barbara and Wilkinson was the last thing that Wilkinson in his right mind should have wanted, and absolutely everything Barbara now desired and craved. Neither of them heard Molly saying, “Mummy, this is Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson wants to tell you how he came to drive me home.”

It happened at last that Alec had to be taken to the Rivabella hospital, where the local poor went when it was not feasible to let them die at home. Eric Wilkinson, new family friend, drove his car as far as it could go along a winding track, after which they placed Alec on a stretcher; and Wilkinson, Mr. Cranefield, Will, and the doctor carried him the rest of the way. A soft April rain was falling, from which they protected Alec as they could. In the rain the doctor wept unnoticed. The others were silent and absorbed. The hospital stood near the graveyard — shamefully near, Wilkinson finally remarked, to Mr. Cranefield. Will could see the cemetery from his father’s new window, though to do so he had to lean out, as he’d imagined passengers doing and having their heads cut off in the train game long ago. A concession was made to Alec’s status as owner of a large villa, and he was given a private room. It was not a real sickroom but the place where the staff went to eat and drink when they took time off. They cleared away the plates and empty wine bottles and swept up most of the crumbs and wheeled a bed in.

The building was small for a hospital, large for a house. It had been the winter home of a Moscow family, none of whom had come back after 1917. Alec lay flat and still. Under a drift of soot on the ceiling he could make out a wreath of nasturtiums and a bluebird with a ribbon in its beak.

At the window, Will said to Mr. Cranefield, “We can see Lou Mas from here, and even your peacocks.”

Mr. Cranefield fretted, “They shouldn’t be in the rain.”

Alec’s neighbors came to visit. Mrs. Massie, not caring who heard her (one of the children did), said to someone she met on the hospital staircase, “Alec is a gentleman and always will be, but Barbara … Barbara.” She took a rise of the curved marble stairs at a time. “If the boys were girls they’d be sluts. As it is, they are ruffians. Their old cook saw one of them stoning a cat to death. And now there is Wilkinson. Wilkinson.” She moved on alone, repeating his name.

Everyone was saying “Wilkinson” now. Along with “Wilkinson” they said “Barbara.” You would think that having been married to one man who was leaving her with nothing, leaving her dependent on family charity, she would have looked around, been more careful, picked a reliable kind of person. “A foreigner, say,” said Major Lamprey’s mother, who had not cared for Malta. Italians love children, even other people’s. She might have chosen — you know — one of the cheerful sort, with a clean shirt and a clean white handkerchief, proprietor of a linen shop. The shop would have kept Barbara out of mischief.

No one could blame Wilkinson, who had his reasons. Also, he had said all those British-sounding lines in films, which in a way made him all right. Barbara had probably said she was Irish once too often. “What can you expect?” said Mrs. Massie. “Think how they were in the war. They keep order when there is someone to bully them. Otherwise …” The worst she had to say about Wilkinson was that he was preparing to flash on as the colonel of a regiment in a film about desert warfare; it had been made in the hilly country up behind Monte Carlo.

“Not a grain of sand up there,” said Major Lamprey. He said he wondered what foreigners thought they meant by “desert.”

“A colonel!” said Mrs. Massie.

“Why not?” said Mr. Cranefield.

“They must think he looks it,” said Major Lamprey. “Gets a fiver a day, I’m told, and an extra fiver when he speaks his line. He says, ‘Don’t underestimate Rommel.’ For a fiver I’d say it,” though he would rather have died.

The conversation veered to Wilkinson’s favor. Wilkinson was merry; told irresistible stories about directors, unmalicious ones about film stars; repeated comic anecdotes concerning underlings who addressed him as “Guy.” “I wonder who they can be?” said Mrs. Massie. “It takes a Wilkinson to find them.” Mr. Cranefield was more indulgent; he had to be. A sardonic turn of mind would have been resented by E. C. Arden’s readers. The blond-headed pair on his desk stood for a world of triumphant love, with which his readers felt easy kinship. The fair couple, though competent in any domain, whether restoring a toppling kingdom or taming a tiger, lived on the same plane as all human creatures except England’s enemies. They raised the level of existence — raised it, and flattened it.

Mr. Cranefield — as is often and incorrectly said of children — lived in a world of his own, too, in which he kept everyone’s identity clear. He did not confuse St. Damian with an Ethiopian, or Wilkinson with Raffles, or Barbara with a slut. This was partly out of the habit of neatness and partly because he could not make up his mind to live openly in the world he wanted, which was a homosexual one. He said about Wilkinson and Barbara and the blazing scandal at Lou Mas, “I am sure there is no harm in it. Barbara has too much to manage alone, and it is probably better for the children to have a man about the place.”