Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

To Mr. Cranefield they looked like imitations of English children — loud, humorless, dutiful, clear. “James couldn’t come with us tonight,” said Molly. “He was quite ill, for some reason. He brought his dinner up.” All three spoke the high thin English of expatriate children who, unknowingly, mimic their mothers. The light bulb hanging crooked left Alec’s face in shadow. When the children had kissed Alec and departed Mr. Cranefield could hear them taking the hospital stair headlong, at a gallop. The children were young and alive, and Alec was forty-something and nearly always sleeping. Unequal chances, Mr. Cranefield thought. They can’t really beat their breasts about it. When Mrs. Massie was present, she never failed to say, “Your father is tired,” though nobody knew if Alec was tired or not.

The neighbors pitied the children. Meaning only kindness Mr. Cranefield reminded Molly that one day she would type Mrs. Massie said something more about helping in the garden. That was how everyone saw them now — grubbing, digging lending a hand. They had become Wilkinson’s second-hand kin but without his panache, his ease in adversity. They were Alec’s offspring: stiff. Humiliated, they overheard and garnered for memory: “We’ve asked Wilkinson to come over and cook up a curry. He’s hours in the kitchen, but I must say it’s worth every penny.” “We might get Wilkinson to drive us to Rome. He doesn’t charge all that much, and he’s such good company.” Always Wilkinson, never Eric, though that was what Barbara had called him from their first meeting. To the children he was, and remained, “Mr. Wilkinson,” friend of both parents, occasional guest in the house.

The rains of their third southern spring were still driving hard against the villa when Barbara’s engineer brother wrote to say they were letting Lou Mas. Everything dripped wet as she stood near a window, with bougainvillea soaked and wild-looking on one side of the pane and steam forming on the other, to read this letter. The new tenants were a family of planters who had been forced to leave Malaya; it had a connection with political events, but Barbara’s life was so full now that she never looked at the papers. They would be coming there in June, which gave Barbara plenty of time to find another home. He — her brother — had thought of giving her the Lou Mas cottage, but he wondered if it would suit her, inasmuch as it lacked electric light, running water, an indoor lavatory, most of its windows, and part of its roof. This was not to say it could not be fixed up for the Webbs in the future, when Lou Mas had started paying for itself. Half the rent obtained would be turned over to Barbara. She would have to look hard, he said, before finding brothers who were so considerate of a married sister. She and the children were not likely to suffer from the change, which might even turn out to their moral advantage. Barbara supposed this meant that Desmond — the richest, the best-educated, the most easily flabbergasted of her brothers — was still mulling over the description of Lou Mas Ron must have taken back.

With Wilkinson helping, the Webbs moved to the far side of the hospital, on a north-facing slope, away from the sea. Here the houses were tall and thin with narrow windows, set in gardens of raked gravel. Their neighbors included the mayor, the more prosperous shopkeepers, and the coach of the local football team. Barbara was enchanted to find industrial activity she had not suspected — a thriving ceramics factory that produced figurines of monks whose heads were mustard pots, dogs holding thermometers in their paws, and the patron saint of Rivabella wearing armor of pink, orange, mauve, or white. These were purchased by tourists who had trudged up to the town in the hope of seeing early Renaissance frescoes.

Barbara had never missed a day with Alec, not even the day of the move. She held his limp hand and told him stories. When he was not stunned by drugs, or too far lost in his past, he seemed to be listening. Sometimes he pressed her fingers. He seldom spoke more than a word at a time. Barbara described to him the pleasures of moving, and how pretty the houses were on the north side, with their gardens growing gnomes and shells and tinted bottles. Why make fun of such people, she asked his still face. They probably knew, by instinct, how to get the best out of life. She meant every word, for she was profoundly in love and knew that Wilkinson would never leave her except for a greater claim. She combed Alec’s hair and bathed him; Wilkinson came whenever he could to shave Alec and cut his nails and help Barbara change the bed-sheets; for it was not the custom of the hospital staff to do any of this.

Sometimes Alec whispered, “Diana,” who might have been either his sister or Mrs. Massie. Barbara tried to remember her old prophetic dreams, from that time when, as compensation for absence of passion, she had been granted second sight. In none had she ever seen herself bending over a dying man, listening to him call her by another woman’s name.

They lived, now, in four dark rooms stuffed with furniture, some of it useful. Upstairs resided the widow of the founder of the ceramics factory. She had been bought out at a loss at the end of the war, and disapproved of the new line of production, especially the monks. She never interfered, never asked questions — simply came down once a month to collect her rent, which was required in cash. She did tell the children that she had never seen the inside of an English villa, but did not seem to think her exclusion was a slight; she took her bearings from a very small span of the French middle-class compass.

Barbara and Wilkinson made jokes about the French widow-lady, but the children did not. To replace their lopped English roots they had grown the sensitive antennae essential to wanderers. They could have drawn the social staircase of Rivabella on a blackboard, and knew how low a step, now, had been assigned to them. Barbara would not have cared. Wherever she stood now seemed to suit her. On her way home from the hospital she saw two men, foreigners, stop and stare and exchange remarks about her. She could not understand the language they spoke, but she saw they had been struck by her beauty. One of them seemed to be asking the other, “Who can she be?” In their new home she took the only bedroom — an imposing matrimonial chamber. When Wilkinson was in residence he shared it as a matter of course. The boys slept on a pull-out sofa in the dining room, and Molly had a couch in a glassed-in verandah. The verandah contained their landlady’s rubber plants, which Molly scrupulously tended. The boys had stopped quarrelling. They would never argue or ever say much to each other again. Alec’s children seemed to have been collected under one roof by chance, like strays, or refugees. Their narrow faces, their gray eyes, their thinness and dryness, were similar, but not alike; a stranger would not necessarily have known they were of the same father and mother. The boys still wore second-hand clothes sent from England; this was their only connection with English life.

On market days Molly often saw their old housemaid or the laundress. They asked for news of Alec, which made Molly feel cold and shy. She was dressed very like them now, in a cotton frock and roped-soled shoes from a market stall. “Style is all you need to bring it off,” Barbara had assured her, but she had none, at least not that kind. It was Molly who chose what the family would eat, who looked at prices and kept accounts and counted her change. Barbara was entirely busy with Alec at the hospital, and with Wilkinson at home. With love, she had lost her craving for nursery breakfasts. She sat at table smoking, watching Wilkinson telling stories. When Wilkinson was there, he did much of the cooking. Molly was grateful for that.