Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“The French lady is a good friend,” Pritchard said, “but Anglo-Saxons are not nuancé enough for her, she says. The French are patriots down to the last bedsheet. Besides, her husband is arriving tomorrow.”

“I think I’d really rather stick to my plan,” Constance said formally. She stood up. “Are we ready to go?”

He looked at her quietly for a moment. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Sometimes it’s impossible to keep from saying that.”

“Please,” she said. “Please, I do have to go now.”

“Of course,” he said. He stood up and left some money on the table. “Whatever you say.”

They walked the hundred yards to their hotel in silence. It was completely dark now, and very cold, and their breath crystallized in little clouds before their mouths as they walked.

“I’ll put your skis away,” he said, at the door of the hotel.

“Thank you,” she said in a low voice.

“Good night. And write a nice letter,” he said.

“I’ll try,” she said. She turned and went into the hotel.

In her room, she took off her boots but didn’t bother changing her clothes. She lay down on her bed, without putting on the lights, and stared at the dark ceiling, thinking, Nobody ever told me the English were like that.

* * *

“Dearest,” she wrote. “Forgive me for not writing, but the weather has been glorious and for a little while I’ve just devoted myself to making turns and handling deep snow.… There’s a young man here, an Englishman,” she wrote conscientiously, “who’s been very nice, who has been good enough to act as an instructor, and even if I say it myself, I’m really getting pretty good. He was in the R.A.F. and his father went down with the Hood and his mother was killed in a bombing—”

She stopped. No, she thought, it sounds tricky. As though I’m hiding something, and putting in the poor, dead, patriotic family as artful window dressing. She crumpled the letter and threw it in the wastebasket. She took out another sheet of paper. “Dearest,” she wrote.

There was a knock on the door, and she called “ Ja .”

The door opened and Pritchard came in. She looked up in surprise. In all the three weeks, he’d never come to her room. She stood up, embarrassed. She was in her stocking feet, and the room was littered with the debris of the afternoon’s skiing—boots standing near the window, sweaters thrown over a chair, gloves drying on the radiator, and her parka hanging near the bathroom door, with a little trickle of melting snow running down from the collar. The radio was on, and an American band was playing “Bali Ha’i” from an Armed Forces station in Germany.

Pritchard, standing in front of the open door, smiled at her. “Ah,” he said, “some corner of a foreign room that is forever Vassar.”

Constance turned the radio off. “I’m sorry,” she said, waving vaguely and conscious that her hair was not combed. “Everything’s such a mess.”

Pritchard went over to the bureau and peered at Mark’s picture, which was standing there in a leather frame. “The receiver of letters?” he asked.

“The receiver of letters.” There was an open box of Kleenex on the bureau, and an eyelash curler, and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, and Constance felt guilty to be presenting Mark so frivolously.

“He’s very handsome.” Pritchard squinted at the photograph.

“Yes,” Constance said. She found her moccasins and put them on, and felt a little less embarrassed.

“He looks serious.” Pritchard moved the Kleenex to get a better view.

“He is serious,” said Constance. In all the three weeks that she had been skiing with Pritchard, she had said hardly anything about Mark. They had talked about almost everything else, but somehow, by a tacit agreement, they had avoided Mark. They had skied together every afternoon and had talked a great deal about the necessity of leaning forward at all times, and about falling relaxed, and about Pritchard’s time in public school in England, and about his father, and about the London theatre and American novelists, and they had talked gravely about what it was like to be twenty and what it was like to be thirty, and they had talked about Christmastime in New York and what football weekends were like at Princeton, and they had even had a rather sharp discussion on the nature of courage when Constance lost her nerve in the middle of a steep trail late one afternoon, with the sun going down and the mountain deserted. But they had never talked about Mark.

Pritchard turned away from the picture. “You didn’t have to shoe yourself for me,” he said, indicating her moccasins. “One of the nicest things about skiing is taking those damned heavy boots off and walking around on a warm floor in wool socks.”

“I’m engaged in a constant struggle not to be sloppy,” Constance said.

They stood there, facing each other in silence for a moment. “Oh,” Constance said. “Sit down.”

“Thank you,” Pritchard said formally. He seated himself in the one easy chair. “I just came by for a minute. To say goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” Constance repeated stupidly. “Where’re you going?”

“Home. Or at least to England. I thought I’d like to leave you my address,” Pritchard said.

“Of course.”

He reached over and picked up a piece of paper and her pen and wrote for a moment. “It’s just a hotel,” he said. “Until I find a place of my own.” He put the paper down on the desk but kept the pen in his hand, playing with it. “Give you somebody else to write to,” he said. “The English receiver of letters.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You can tell me what the snow’s like,” he said, “and how many times you came down the mountain in one day and who got drunk at the bar the night before.”

“Isn’t this sudden?” Constance asked. Somehow, after the first few days, it had never occurred to her that Pritchard might leave. He had been there when she arrived and he seemed to belong there so thoroughly, to be so much a part of the furniture of the place, that it was hard to conceive of being there without him.

“Not so sudden,” Pritchard said. He stood up. “I wanted to say goodbye in private,” he said. She wondered if he was going to kiss her. In all the three weeks, he hadn’t as much as held her hand, and the only times he had touched her had been when he was helping her up after a particularly bad fall. But he made no move. He stood there, smiling curiously, playing with the pen, unusually untalka-tive, as though waiting for her to say something. “Well,” he said, “will I see you later?”

“Yes,” she said.

“We’ll have a farewell dinner. They have veal on the menu, but I’ll see if we can’t get something better, in honor of the occasion.” He put the pen down carefully on the desk. “Until later,” he said, and went out, closing the door behind him.

Constance stared at the closed door. Everybody goes away, she thought. Unreasonably, she felt angry. She knew it was foolish, like a child protesting the end of a birthday party, but she couldn’t help feeling that way. She looked around the room. It seemed cluttered and untidy to her, like the room of a silly and careless schoolgirl. She shook her head impatiently and began to put things in place. She put the boots out in the hall and hung the parka in the closet and carried the box of Kleenex into the bathroom and gave the half bar of chocolate to the chambermaid. She straightened the coverlet of the bed and cleaned the ashtray and, on a sudden impulse, dropped the eyelash curler into the wastebasket. It’s too piddling, she thought, to worry about curling your eyelashes.

Pritchard ordered a bottle of Burgundy with dinner, because Swiss wine, he said, was too thin to say farewell on. They didn’t talk much during dinner. It was as though he had already departed a little. Once or twice, Constance almost started to tell him how grateful she was for his patience with her on the hills, but somehow it never came out, and the dinner became more and more uncomfortable for both of them. Pritchard ordered brandy with the coffee, and she drank it, although it gave her heartburn. The three-piece band began to play for the evening’s dancing while they were drinking their brandy, and then it was too noisy to talk.