Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

Mrs. Unwin still smiled sometimes, but not as she had in August. She showed a death grin now. When she was excited her skin became a mottled brick-and-white. Carmela had never seen Mrs. Unwin as smiling and as dappled as the afternoon Miss Barnes and Miss Lewis came to tea. Actually, Miss Barnes had called to see about having still more of her late father’s poems printed.

“Carmela! Tea!” cried Mrs. Unwin.

Having been often told not to touch the good china, Carmela brought their tea in pottery mugs, already poured in the kitchen.

“Stupid!” said Mrs. Unwin.

“That is something of an insult,” Miss Lewis remarked.

“Carmela knows I am more bark than bite,” said Mrs. Unwin, with another of her smiles — a twitchy grimace.

But Miss Lewis went on, “You have been down here long enough to know the things one can and can’t say to them.”

Mrs. Unwin’s face, no longer mottled, had gone the solid shade the English called Egyptian red. Carmela saw the room through Mrs. Unwin’s eyes: it seemed to move and crawl, with its copper bowl, and novels from England, and faded cretonne-covered chairs, and stained wallpaper. All these dead things seemed to be on the move, because of the way Miss Lewis had spoken to Mrs. Unwin. Mrs. Unwin smiled unceasingly, with her upper lip drawn back.

Miss Barnes, in a wheelchair because she had sprained a knee, reached across and patted her companion’s hand. “Charlotte is ever so bolshie,” she remarked, taking on a voice and an accent that were obviously meant to make a joke of it. Her eyes went smoothly around the room, but all she chose to see or to speak of was the copper bowl, with dahlias in it this time.

“From the Marchesa. Such a pet. Always popping in with flowers!” Mrs. Unwin cried.

“Frances is a dear,” said Miss Barnes.

“Ask Mr. Unwin to join us, Carmela,” said Mrs. Unwin, trembling a little. After that she referred to the Marchesa as “Frances.”

The pity was that this visit was spoiled by the arrival of the new clergyman. It was his first official parish call. He could not have been less welcome. He was a young man with a complexion as changeable as Mrs. Unwin’s. He settled unshyly into one of the faded armchairs and said he had been busy clearing empty bottles out of the rectory. Not gin bottles, as they would have been in England, but green bottles with a sediment of red wine, like red dust. The whole place was a shambles, he added, though without complaining; no, it was as if this were a joke they were all young enough to share.

In the general shock Miss Barnes took over: Ted — Dr. Edward Stonehouse, rather — had been repatriated at the expense of his flock, with nothing left for doing up the rectory. He had already cost them a sum — the flock had twice sent him on a cure up to the mountains for his asthma. Everyone had loved Ted; no one was likely to care about the asthma or the anything else of those who came after. Miss Barnes made that plain.

“He left a fair library,” said the young man, after a silence. “Though rather dirty.”

“I should never have thought that of Hymns Ancient and Modern” said bolshie Miss Lewis.

“Dusty, I meant,” said the clergyman vaguely. At a signal from Mrs. Unwin, Carmela, whose hands were steady, poured the clergyman’s tea. “The changes I shall make won’t cost any money,” he said, pursuing some thought of his own. He came to and scanned their stunned faces. “Why, I was thinking of the notice outside, ‘Evensong Every Day at Noon.’ ”

“Why change it?” said Miss Barnes in her wheelchair. “I admit it was an innovation of poor old Dr. Stonehouse’s, but we are so used to it now.”

“And was Evensong every day at noon?”

“No,” said Miss Barnes, “because that is an hour when most people are beginning to think about lunch.”

“More bread and butter, Carmela,” said Mrs. Unwin.

Returning, Carmela walked into “The other thing I thought I might … do something about” — as if he were avoiding the word “change” — “is the church clock.”

“The clock was a gift,” said Miss Barnes, losing her firmness, looking to the others for support. “The money was collected. It was inaugurated by the Duke of Connaught.”

“Surely not Connaught,” murmured the clergyman, sounding to Carmela not quarrelsome but pleasantly determined. He might have been teasing them; or else he thought the entire conversation was a tease. Carmela peeped sideways at the strange man who did not realize how very serious they all were.

“My father was present,” said Miss Barnes. “There is a plaque.”

“Yes, I have seen it,” he said. “No mention of Connaught. It may have been an oversight” — finally responding to the blinks and frowns of Miss Barnes’s companion, Miss Lewis. “All I had hoped to alter was … I had thought I might have the time put right.”

“What is wrong with the time?” said Mrs. Unwin, letting Miss Barnes have a rest.

“It is slow.”

“It has always been slow,” said Miss Barnes. “If you will look more carefully than you looked at the plaque, you will see a rectangle of cardboard upon which your predecessor printed in large capital letters the word ‘SLOW’; he placed it beneath the clock. In this way the clock, which has historical associations for some of us — my father was at its inauguration — in this way the works of the clock need not be tampered with.”

“Perhaps I might be permitted to alter the sign and add the word ‘slow’ in Italian.” He still thought this was a game, Carmela could see. She stood nearby, keeping an eye on the plate of bread and butter and listening for the twins, who would be waking at any moment from their afternoon sleep.

“No Italian would be bothered looking at an English church clock,” said Miss Barnes. “And none of us has ever missed a train. Mr. Dunn — let me give you some advice. Do not become involved with anything. We are a flock in need of a shepherd; nothing more.”

“Right!” screamed Mrs. Unwin, white-and-brick-mottled again. “For God’s sake, Padre … no involvement!”

The clergyman looked as though he had been blindfolded and turned about in a game and suddenly had the blindfold whipped off. Mr. Unwin had not spoken until now. He said deliberately, “I hope you are not a scholar, Padre. Your predecessor was, and his sermons were a great bore.”

“Stonehouse a scholar?” said Mr. Dunn.

“Yes, I’m sorry to say. I might have brought my wife back to the fold, so to speak, but his sermons were tiresome — all about the Hebrews and the Greeks.”

The clergyman caught Carmela staring at him, and noticed her. He smiled. The smile fixed his face in her memory for all time. It was not to her an attractive face — it was too fair-skinned for a man’s; it had color that came and ebbed too easily. “Perhaps there won’t be time for the Greeks and the Hebrews now,” he said gently. “We are at war, aren’t we?”

“We?” said Miss Barnes.

“Nonsense, Padre,” said Mrs. Unwin briskly. “Read the newspapers.”

“England,” said the clergyman, and stopped.

Mr. Unwin was the calmest man in the world, but he could be as wild-looking as his wife sometimes. At the word “England” he got up out of his chair and went to fetch the Union Jack on a metal standard that stood out in the hall, leaning into a corner. The staff was too long to go through the door upright; Mr. Unwin advanced as if he were attacking someone with a long spear. “Well, Padre, what about this?” he said. The clergyman stared as if he had never seen any flag before, ever; as if it were a new kind of leaf, or pudding, or perhaps a skeleton. “Will the flag have to be dipped at the church door on Armistice Day?” said Mr. Unwin. “It can’t be got through the door without being dipped. I have had the honor of carrying this flag for the British Legion at memorial services. But I shall no longer carry a flag that needs to be lowered now that England is at war. For I do agree with you, Padre, on that one matter. I agree that England is at war, rightly or wrongly. The lintel of the church door must be raised. You do see that? Your predecessor refused to have the door changed. I can’t think why. It is worthless as architecture.”