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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In stories of astonishing compression and insight, Mavis Gallant wrote of characters severed from their home, exiles disconnected from each other and from themselves. Tracing the fault lines of the post-war world in the intimate lives of her characters, she could conjure an entire worldview in a telling gesture or passing comment.This new volume, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley, collects the finest work from across Gallant's career. Here are stories of young men returning from wartime internment to changed families, snobbish social climbers haunted by the words of their downtrodden colleagues, and children peering through glass at the secrets and infidelities of their parents. Complex, moving and painfully true, they secure her position among the world's great short story writers.
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Seitenzahl: 481
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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‘The irrefutable master of the short story in English. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer. She is the standard’
FRAN LEBOWITZ
‘One of the most brilliant story writers in the language, who deserves to be read as widely as her fellow Canadian Alice Munro’
NEW YORKER
‘Gallant’s work reminds you to think more deeply about the people you deal with… She reminds us of how fathomless we are, how there is always more to know’
PETER ORNER
‘[Gallant’s stories] are so much richer, so much denser than so many novels… Her body of work is unique and profound’
JHUMPA LAHIRI
THE LATEHOMECOMER
ESSENTIAL STORIES
MAVIS GALLANT
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY TESSA HADLEY
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
Contents
Introduction
Mavis Gallant mostly didn’t keep her reviews; even when they were kind, she too often felt they were “off the target”. But there was one review in ElPais,when she was first translated into Spanish, which she liked and kept. The reviewer said that when Gallant came to Western Europe after the war, no one knew who she was and she didn’t know anyone—she had lived as anonymously as possible with an exercise book, a notebook and a pencil. She was like Kafka’s invisible woman, the reviewer went on, and the invisible woman took note of everything that Europeans thought was of no importance. Now people saw that these things were indeed important.
This seems to describe wonderfully well both Gallant’s history as a writer, and the mood and form of her stories. To begin with, there’s the uprootedness, and the not-quite-belonging, whose origins she traces very early in her own life. She was born in 1922 and grew up in Montreal, Canada, the only child of restless, attractive, heedless parents; similar figures haunt a number of her stories, like the couple who “drank old-fashioneds and danced to gramophone records out on the lawn” in summer in “The Doctor”. For reasons she’s not wholly able to fathom, although they were both English-speakers and nonbelievers, they thought it a good idea to send their small daughter, aged four, to board at a French convent school run by nuns, “where Jansenist discipline still had a foot on the neck of the twentieth century”. In one of her stories, when a child explains that Satan approached her—“furry dark skin, claws, red eyes, the lot”—and made her cross the street in front of a car, she realizes 8suddenly that her parents don’t believe in Satan, or in most of what she’s being taught at school. The writing instinct may begin in such jolts to apprehension, the registering of deep dissonance between two cultural systems—unbolting the door, as she puts it, “between perception and imagination”. Two contradictory ways of seeing can coexist in the same world; best to test everything you’re told.
Gallant’s adored, glamorous father, a thwarted painter, died of kidney disease when she was just ten; they told her he’d gone to England, and she waited for him to return until, aged thirteen, she began to doubt, and set about uncovering the truth. Her mother remarried and Gallant was packed off to one school after another in Canada and America, where she didn’t thrive. She returned eventually to Montreal: in actuality first, to work as a reporter on the MontrealStandard, and then forever afterwards, in some of her best stories. Aged twenty-seven, she writes, she was “becoming exactly what I did not want to be: a journalist who wrote fiction along some margin of spare time”. She also dreaded finding she had “a vocation without the competence to sustain it”; her father had not lived long enough to discover whether or not he could actually paint well, and had made his living in a firm selling furniture. That anxiety never left her, it fuelled her: she was one of those writers driven by doubt to be good, to be better. Certain superstitions accompany that fear of being merely shoddy or ordinary: don’t let the scaffolding show, allow the story to stand by itself. Don’t waste space, don’t state the obvious, don’t say anything twice.
She’d had a couple of stories in a Canadian literary review, but now she set herself a test, and decided to send three to the NewYorker,one after another: one acceptance would be good enough. If she couldn’t live on writing she would “destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook, and live some other way”. The second story was taken, the third she sent from Paris, where she would eventually settle for life: a youthful wartime marriage in Canada didn’t last long, 9and she never had children. Her vocation, and the need to write anonymously, where no one knew who she was and she didn’t know anyone, sent her to Europe. “I still do not know,” she wrote, “what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.” In her diaries she recorded months of semi-starvation in Madrid in 1952, while she waited to see whether the NewYorkerwould take any more stories. In fact they already had, and a crooked literary agent had pocketed the money; she found this out eventually by a lucky chance. “The sensation of disgust was curious, as if a colony of flies were stuck to me… The first thing I bought was good white bread.” Her relationship with the NewYorker,and with its fiction editor William Maxwell, would be fundamental. One hundred and sixteen stories, the lion’s share of her work, appeared in the magazine.
Gallant did publish two novels—GreenWater,GreenSkyin 1959, and A Fairly Good Time in 1970—and for years she toiled on a book about Dreyfus which she eventually shelved, but it’s for her short stories that she will be remembered. A certain density of reference, perfectly in proportion in a short story, can feel overfreighted and mannered across a longer distance. Her imagination works in pieces of broken-off intensity; life reveals itself to her in signs, snatches of speech, fragments of memory. “The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer still) a freeze frame…” Sometimes she runs together “suites of connected stories”, as Brandon Taylor calls them, which suit her vision exactly; these don’t pretend to join the pieces of a life into a single shape, but place them side by side like discontinuous phases of experience, each with its own centre, its own sharp point—rather like an actual life, in fact. The invisible woman is an archaeologist assembling small shards of material evidence into partial shapes, and an anthropologist hungry with curiosity—setting one way of seeing alongside another, making both strange. Her stories compose 10a meticulous record of Europe in the aftermath of war, and then in the Cold War, as well as the lost world of the Canadian past. Each of the tribes she describes—French Canadians and English Canadians, German ex-prisoners-of-war, Jewish survivors, French bureaucrats, French novelists, French tax inspectors, Swiss moralists, intellectual exiles from behind the Iron Curtain—has its own tokens of exchange, its own ideology, its sacred images, its taboos, its secret dreams, its obscure shames. Each tribe gives the others very little thought; Gallant writes at the intersection of their worlds. She took note of everything that seemed of little importance.
Everyone is interesting in her fiction. Gallant’s protagonists may not be particularly sympathetic, they may be dense or narrow or just feeble, yet they’re all felt and conveyed with the same even-handedness, the same keen appetite. Stella, in the story “In Italy”—a foolish nice girl, a “compound of middle-class virtues” and married to a cynical sophisticate more than twice her age—tries to keep warm over the stove in their rented Italian villa, reading copies of Woman’sOwnand TheLadywhich her mother sends from England. “I thought it would be fun,” she says mournfully about her marriage. Lightweight snob Peter Frazier in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”, trying and failing to profiteer in post-war Europe, is demoralized by his new colleague and Canadian compatriot Agnes—she’s from such a different background to his, so solemn and so striving. He feels “as you feel the approach of a storm, the charge of moral certainty round her, the belief in work, the faith in undertakings… ashes in the mouth”. The French-Canadian doctor who makes such a fuss of Linnet Muir, presenting her with a sentimental picture, won’t help her when she runs away from school; to the child’s disappointment he sides with her parents’ adult authority.
But the stories strike surprises out of these individuals: for a moment they can see more than they know, become more than themselves. Peter Frazier can’t forget what Agnes told him about 11watching the ice wagon in the mornings when she was a child; the doctor turns out to be a poet in his private life. Poor Madame Carette in “1933”, a stickler for perfect manners, widowed at twenty-seven and forced to move to a smaller flat, weeps for her own wicked thoughts with her elbows on the table, to the dismay of her little daughters. Selfish Lena, in her eponymous story, ruined another woman’s life but is magnificent in her extreme old age. These moments, when her protagonists are momentarily lifted out of their frames, aren’t redemptive or anything so grandiose. Nor are they moments of love, exactly, although there may be true closeness and comradeship in the stories—between Peter Frazier and his wife, for example, or between the Carette sisters and their mother, or between the widowed grandmother in “Irina” and her new man-friend. Irina’s tenderness toward her grandson is exquisite too. The most piercing apprehensions, however, can’t be shared. Gallant’s characters don’t live all alone, but their perception is necessarily solitary: except that everything’s noted and kept on their behalf by her narrator, with her compendious interest and her art.
Her interest, but not her identification—not even when Gallant is clearly telling something like her own story. She reports on Linnet Muir’s childhood and youth in Canada in the first person, but as coolly as if they had happened to somebody else. The quirks and oddity of her history are for adding to the oddity of all those others. Gallant doesn’t belong to any obvious tradition of women’s writing: her protagonists are as likely as not to be men, and we’re not much invited to identify with them—we are to watch them, rather. Her narrative approach and writing temperament feel almost opposite to those of her compatriot Alice Munro, who was ten years younger, and from such a different Canada. In a Munro story we’re often submerged in the reality of one moment after another; in a Gallant story we seem to be told about events after the fact, across some distance of time. Both writers can, of course, do the other thing as well. 12
Munro builds out her stories warily, doubtfully, from a subjective root—and that hesitant awareness is usually, though not always, a woman’s. Gallant’s positioning in her stories is authoritative, as if she offered objective information; her writing loves to know things, she relishes the most arcane fragments. We’re informed in “The Moslem Wife”, for instance, that the “most trustworthy shipping agents in 1860 are the Montale brothers, converts to the Anglican Church, possessors of a British laissez-passerto Malta and Egypt”. But what is a British laissez-passerto Malta and Egypt, and why does it matter? We don’t need to know, we can half-guess: we only need Gallant to know on our behalf—she builds our trust out of her expertise. Forain the publisher is familiar, from attending the funerals of Central and Eastern European writers, with “all the Polish churches of Paris, the Hungarian mission, the synagogues on the Rue Copernic and the Rue de la Victoire, and the mock chapel of the crematorium at Père Lachaise cemetery”; we believe in his familiarity, and it becomes ours.
There’s a great tradition, in fiction in English, of this kind of narration, staking its claim through an insider’s dense information and know-how: Kipling is master of it, and so are Ford Madox Ford and Penelope Fitzgerald. It’s not that Munro wouldn’t be interested in those details: both writers were interested in everything. But Munro’s women are sceptical of their men’s worldly know-how even as they’re attracted to it; they read the world out of some other centre. In the opaque compression of Gallant’s prose, in her eschewing of lyrical flow, and in her shapes so elegantly knotted, she seems to assert the knowing authority Munro disclaims. Gallant’s self-doubt is antecedent to the achievement of her stories, and doesn’t show up on their surface. It’s a nice twist of cultural fate that these fellow Canadians, two of the last century’s greatest short-story writers in English, should read as so marvellously unlike.
Gallant’s stories map out in forensic detail her worlds, and her considerable stretch of history: mid-century Canada, then post-war 13Europe, then Europe post 1968. Her diaries of the évènements, published as ParisNotebooks,are a nuanced and complex record of heady days. She is an instinctively political writer, not partisan but a moralist, charting the shadowy black comedy of the intricacies of allegiance, ideology, history, action. “Even the name he had given his daughter was a sign of his sensitivity to the times. Nobody wanted to hear the pagan, Old Germanic names anymore—Sigrun and Brunhilde and Sieglinde.” Reality is replayed and reinvented as farce in the collective imagination; her stories unpick with irony the political faux-narratives which override the mystery and subtlety of actual experience. In one story, not included here, a boy whose German-Jewish family was murdered in the camps finds work after the war playing victims in French films about the Nazis.
“The Latehomecomer” is especially poignant, painful: Thomas returns to Berlin having spent years after the war as a prisoner in France, through a series of bureaucratic errors. His mother meets him at the station and turns out to be remarried now to a boor, in a flat whose previous tenants left in a hurry; she has a new gesture, too, of hiding her mouth with her hand, ashamed of having lost her front teeth. When she tells Thomas to wish on the new moon, he wishes he were “a few hours younger, in the corridor of a packed train, clutching the top of the open window, my heart hammering as I strained to find the one beloved face”. If Gallant isn’t lyrical exactly, her flights of language can be breathtaking. But this story’s fine emotional positioning couldn’t work if its tone was merely outrage, or denunciation. That would be too sentimental in the face of what has happened to Thomas, the huge deception—not really his poor helpless mother’s, but the brutal impersonal state’s, and the world’s—and his loss of everything. Gallant is a great comic writer, though, and finds absurdity in the darkest places. His mother’s neighbour asks him what he was paid as a prisoner. “I had 14often wondered what the first question would be once I was home. Now I had it.”
She’s good, too, at skewering ponderous public conscientiousness. “Irina” is the elderly widow of a great man, a Swiss writer, Nobel prize winner—the last “of a Tolstoyan line of moral lightning rods… prophet, dissuader, despairingly opposed to evil, crack-voiced after having made so many pronouncements”. Perhaps, if we could imagine a Swiss Solzhenitsyn, that might help? The comedy isn’t broad, the man wasn’t a fraud, but Gallant makes us feel the chilly shadow he’s cast; there’s an egotism in such austere probity and certainty. A cracked-voice puritan righteousness is thin nourishment finally, can’t encompass life’s joy or its uncertainty: Irina writes wistfully in a letter to her grown-up son about her childhood, when “mistakes were allowed”. Even now, she confesses, “whatever she saw and thought and attempted was still fluid and vague. The shape of a table against afternoon light still held a mystery, awaited a final explanation”. Gallant isn’t obviously a feminist writer, and yet how eloquent Irina’s account is, to her little grandson, of how women have been short-changed in their relationships, from generation to generation. “You see, in those days women had nothing of their own. They were like brown paper parcels tied with string. They were handed like parcels from their fathers to their husbands. To make the parcel look attractive it was decked with curls and piano lessons, and rings and gold coins and banknotes and shares. After appraising all the decoration, the new owner would undo the knots.”
On every page of all Gallant’s collections there are such sumptuous sentences: the intelligence so forceful and distinctively hers, the perception so original, the phrasing so economical and elegant, the words gorgeous in their solidity, comedy and tragedy tangled inseparably together. It was very difficult to make a selection from so many stories; she’s not a writer who repeats herself. Some with very particular contemporary reference—to 1980s French politics, 15say—have become more difficult to decipher over time; and Gallant is so wary of being obvious that just occasionally her point can seem too obscure, too hard-won. I’ve tried to choose a representative mix of European and Canadian material, and also to cover a good stretch of her forty-four-year writing life; her first NewYorkerstory was published in 1951 and her last in 1995. She died in 2014: she had “lived in writing”, she said, “like a spoonful of water in a river”. I have broken up two of the suites of stories, only because of lack of space: there are two more about the Carette sisters, three more about Linnet Muir—and perhaps “The Wedding Ring” belongs with those too. I put in the whole of “Édouard, Juliette, Lena” because its ambition and achievement seem to me enormous, expressed through the detail of these three private lives. Taking note of the small things that seem of no importance, Gallant traces in them the large shapes of our history.
tessa hadley 16
In Italy
“The joke of it is,” Henry kept saying, “the joke is that there’s nothing to leave, nothing at all. No money. Not in any direction. I used up most of the capital years ago. What’s left will nicely do my lifetime.”
Beaming, expectant, he waited for his wife to share the joke. Stella didn’t think it as funny as all that. It was a fine thing to be told, at this stage, that there was no money, that your innocent little child sleeping upstairs had nothing to look forward to but a lifetime of work. She had just been bathing the innocent child. Usually, her evening task consisted only of kissing it good night, for the Mannings were fortunate in their Italian servants, who were efficient, loyal, and cheap.
“They don’t let Stella lift a finger,” Henry always told visitors. “Where can you get that kind of loyalty nowadays, and at such little cost? Not in England, I can tell you.”
There had been two babies in the bath. The boy was Stella’s; in the midst of less cheerful thoughts, it was still a matter of comfort that she had produced the only boy in the Manning family, the heir. The other baby, a girl, was, Stella supposed, her grandchild. That is, she was Henry’s grandchild. It was too much, really, to be expected to consider oneself a grandmother at twenty-six. Stella pulled down her cardigan sleeves, brushing at the wet spots where the babies had splashed. In the presence of Henry’s grown daughter, she had been grave and devoted, had knelt on the cold bathroom floor, as if no 18one, not even the most cheap and loyal of Italian servants, could take a mother’s place.
Peggy, the daughter, had lounged in the doorway, not offering to help. She looked amused. “Doesn’t Max Beerbohm live near here?” she said. “I expect everyone asks that.”
“We know no one of that name,” said Stella, soberly. “Henry says he came to Italy to meet Italians.”
“I see,” said Peggy. She shifted from one bony leg to the other, started to say something, changed her mind. She turned the talk to Henry. “How like the poor old boy to think he can go native,” she said. “Actually, he chose this part of the coast because it was full of English. They must be doddering, most of them. It must be ghastly for you, at your age.”
All Stella retained from this was the feeling that Henry had been criticized. She no more liked having him referred to as “the old boy” than she enjoyed Peggy’s repeated references to Stella’s youth. She was only ten months younger than her stepdaughter, but Peggy made it sound years. Of course, Peggy looked older, always would. She said of herself, as if the idea pleased her, that she had been born old. The features that were attractive in Henry had been dismayingly caricatured in his child. Peggy was too tall, too thin, her teeth were too large and white. Slumped in the doorway, she looked like a cynical horse.
There were so many things one could retort to Peggy, replies at once cutting and polite; the trouble was, Stella never thought of them in time. Now, embroiled in an unaccustomed labor (dressing her son for the night), she could not give her mind to anything else. She held the baby on her lap, struggling with him and with garments that seemed to have no openings or fastenings.
“Why don’t you put it down on something, the infant, I mean,” said Peggy. “You’ll never manage that way. He’s too lively and fat. And mine should be out of the bath. She’ll catch pneumonia in this 19room.” She beckoned to Stella’s nurse, who, hovering in the passage, had been waiting to pounce.
“My little boy doesn’t feel the cold,” said Stella, unable to make this sound convincing. She dreaded her own baths here. The bathroom had been converted from something—a ballroom, she often thought. A chandelier in the form of glass roses dropped from the ceiling. The upper half of the walls was brown, except where paint had flaked away to reveal an undercoat of muddy blue. The bathroom grieved Stella more than any other part of the house. She knew that a proper bathroom should be small, steamy, draftless, and pale green, but try to convince Henry! The villa was only a rental, and even if they lived in it the rest of their lives, nothing would induce him to put a penny into repairs.
“Be sure that the nursery is warm,” said Stella, surrendering the baby to its nurse with exaggerated care, as if it were an egg. “Mrs. Burleigh is worried about the cold.”
But it was hopeless. No room could be kept warm. The rest of the house was of a piece with the bathroom, in style and in temperature. The ceilings were blistered and stained with damp; the furnishings ran to beaded lampshades and oil paintings of Calabrian maidens holding baskets of fruit. The marble staircase—a showpiece, Henry said—was a funnel of icy air. There was no heating, other than a fireplace in the dining room and a tiny open stove in the library. Over this stove, much of the year, Stella sat, crouched, reading Ladyand Woman’sOwn, which her mother sent regularly from England.
Henry never seemed to notice the cold. He spent the mornings in bed writing letters, slept after lunch until five, drank until dinner, and then played bridge with the tattered remnants of the English colony, relics of the golden period called “before the war.” “Why don’t you do something—knit, for instance,” he would tell Stella. “Sitting still slows the blood. That’s why you’re always shivering and complaining.” 20
“Knitting isn’t exercise,” she would say, but after delivering an order or an opinion Henry always stopped paying attention.
Stella might have found some reason to move around if Henry hadn’t had such definite ideas about getting value for money. She would have enjoyed housework, might even have done a little cooking, but they had inherited a family of servants along with the house. Their wages seemed so low, by English standards, that Henry felt offended and out-of-pocket if his wife so much as emptied an ashtray. Patient, he repeated that this was Italy. Italy explained their whole way of life: it explained the absence of heating and of something to do. It explained the wisteria trellis outside, placed so that no sun could enter the ground-floor rooms. During the summer, when the sudden heat rendered the trellis useful, it was Henry’s custom to sublet the house, complete with staff, and move his family to a small flat in London. The flat was borrowed. Henry always managed that.
Although she spent much of the year abroad pining for England and reading English recipes, Stella was a country girl, alarmed and depressed by London. Her summers were nearly as lonely as her long Italian winters, for Henry, having settled her in London with a kindly injunction to go and look at shops, spent his holiday running around England visiting old cronies. He and Stella always returned to Italy after a stay of exactly three months less one day, so that Henry would not be subject to income tax.
“I’ve organized life for a delightful old age,” Henry often said, with a gesture that included his young wife.
At times, a disconcerting thought crept into Stella’s waking dreams: Henry was thirty years older than she, and might, presumably, die thirty years sooner. She would be free then, but perhaps too old to enjoy it. He might die a little earlier. He took frightfully good care of himself, with all that rest and those mornings in bed; but then he drank a lot. Did drink prolong or diminish life? Doctors were against it, but Stella knew of several old parties, particularly down here, who 21flourished on a bottle of brandy a day. A compound of middle-class virtues, she was thoroughly ashamed of this thought. Questioned about her life abroad, she was enthusiastic, praising servants she could neither understand nor direct, food that made her bilious, and a race of people (“so charming and childlike”) who seemed to her dangerous and dishonest. Many people in England envied her; it was agreeable to be envied, even for a form of life that didn’t exist. Peggy, she knew, envied her more than anyone in the world.
“It’s wasted,” Peggy had said at Stella’s wedding, and Stella had overheard her. “That poor little thing in Italy? She’ll be bored and lonely and miserable. It’s like giving a fragile and costly toy to a child who would rather have a hammer and bricks.” Stella had been too rushed and excited that day to pay much attention, but she had recorded for future scrutiny that Peggy was a mean, jealous girl.
“We adore Italy,” said Stella now, playing her sad, tattered card. What were some of the arguments Henry used? “Servants are so loyal,” she said. “Where can you get that loyalty nowadays?”
“I don’t know what you mean by loyalty now,” said Peggy. “You are much too young to remember loyalty then.”
Stella looked depressed. No one ever answered Henry that way. She began, “I only meant—” But if you had to make excuses, where was the triumph?
“I know what you meant,” said Peggy, softer. “Only don’t catch that awful servant thing from Henry. He’s gone sour and grasping, I think. He used to be quite different, when he still believed the world was made for people of his sort. But don’t you get that way. There’s no reason for it, and you’re much too young. It will make you unfit for life anywhere but here, a foreigner in a foreign country with just a shade more money than the natives.”
Peggy spoke with a downward drop at the end of each sentence, as if there could be no possible challenge. She was so sure of herself, and yet so plain. That was class, Stella thought, unhappy. She 22remembered something else she had heard Peggy say: “She’s a nice little creature, but so bloody genteel.” In Stella’s milieu, one did not say “bloody,” and one spoke of one’s parents with respect. Stella had thought: They’re worse than we are. It was the first acknowledgment she had made to the difference between Henry and herself (other than a secret surprise that he had chosen her) and it was also her first criticism. Since then, she had acknowledged it more and more, and, each time, felt a little stronger. She permitted Henry to correct some of the expressions she used—“Christ, Stella,” was his usual educative remark—but, inwardly, she had developed a comforting phrase. We may be common, she would think, but we’re really much nicer. She felt, in a confused way, that she was morally right where Henry was wrong in any number of instances, and that her being right was solidly based on being, as Peggy had said, so bloody genteel. But it was slow going, and, at this moment, standing in the untidy bathroom with a wet towel in her hand, she looked so downcast, so uncertain, that Peggy said, as nicely as she could, “Hadn’t you better go down and cope with Henry? He’s out on the terrace having far too many drinks. Besides, Nigel bores him. It’s better if one of us is there.”
Nigel was Peggy’s husband, a plump young man in a blazer.
It was offensive, being ordered about in one’s own home this way, having Henry referred to as a grasping old man, almost a drunk. Once again, she failed to think of the correct crushing remark. Nor was there time to worry about it. Stella was anxious to get Henry alone, to place him on her side, if she could, in the tug of war with his daughter. She didn’t want to turn him against his own flesh and blood; in Stella’s world, that kind of action was said not to bring happiness. She simply wanted him to acknowledge her, in front of the others, mistress of the house and mother of the heir. It seemed simple enough; a casual word would do it, she thought—even a look of pride.
23She sped down the stairs and found Henry alone on the dining-room terrace. He was drinking the whiskey Nigel had brought from England and looking with admiration at the giant cacti in the garden. Stella wondered how he could bear to so much as glance in their direction. The garden was another of her grievances. Instead of grass, it grew gravel, raked into geometric patterns by the cook’s son, who appeared to have no other occupation. There were the big cactus plants—on which tradesmen scratched their initials to while away the moments between the delivering of bread and the receiving of change—a few irises, and the inevitable geraniums. The first year of her marriage, Stella had rushed at the garden with enthusiasm. Part of her vision of herself as a bride, and a lady, had been in a floppy hat with cutting scissors and dewy, long-stemmed roses. She had planted seeds from England, and bedded out dozens of tender little plants, and buried dozens of bulbs. Nothing had come of it. The seeds rotted in the ground, the bulbs were devoured by rats, the little plants shrivelled and died. She bought GardeninginHappyLandsand discovered that the palm trees were taking all the good from the soil. Cut the palms, she had ordered. She had not been married to Henry long enough then to be out of the notion of herself as a spoiled young thing, cherished and capricious. The cook’s son, to whom she had given the order, went straight to Henry. Henry lost his temper. It appeared that the cutting down of a palm was such a complicated undertaking that only a half-wit would have considered it. The trunks would neither burn nor sink. It was illegal to throw them into the sea, because they floated among the fishing nets. They had to be sliced down into bits, hauled away, and dumped on a mountainside somewhere in the back country. It was all very expensive, too; that was the part that seemed to bother Henry most.
“I wanted to make a garden,” Stella had said, too numb from his shouting to mention palms again. “Other people have gardens here.” She had never been shouted at in her life. Her family, self-made, 24and with self-made rules of gentility, considered it impolite to call from room to room.
“Other people have gardeners,” Henry had said, dropping his tone. “Or, they spend all their time and all of their income trying to create a bit of England on the Mediterranean. You must try to adapt, Stella dear.”
She had adapted. GardeninginHappyLandshad been donated to the British Library, and nearly forgotten; but she still could not look at the gravel, or the palms, or the hideous cacti, without regret.
Nigel had gone to change, Henry said, but changing was only an excuse to go away and restore his shattered composure.
“I told him I’d made my will entirely in favor of the boy,” he told Stella, chuckling. “Only there won’t be anything to leave. They can worry and stew until I’m dead. Then they’ll see the joke.”
Henry had begun hinting at this, his latest piece of humor, a fortnight before, with the arrival of Peggy’s letter announcing her visit. Relations between Henry and his daughter had been cool since his marriage. It was no secret that Peggy had never expected him to marry again. She had wanted to keep house for her father and live in Italy. Three months after Stella’s wedding, Peggy had married Nigel. (No one ever said that Nigel had married her.) Henry had not been in the least sentimental about Peggy’s letter, which Stella considered a proper gesture of reconciliation. Nigel and Peggy were coming about money, he said, cheerful. They wanted to find out about his will, and were hoping he would make over some of his capital to them now. Nigel was fed up with the English climate and with English taxation. However, if they were counting on him to settle their future, they had better forget it. Henry still had a few surprises up his sleeve.
“Thank God for my sense of humor,” he said now.
“Henry,” said Stella bravely, “I don’t think this is funny, and I must know if it’s really true.” 25
“It’s enormously true and enormously funny.” He was tight and looked quite devilish, with his long face, and the thinning hair plastered flat on his skull.
“Not to me,” said Stella. She tried again: “You might think of your own innocent child.”
“She’s quite old enough to think for herself,” Henry said.
“Not that child—my child,” Stella almost screamed.
“By the time he grows up, the State will be taking care of everyone,” Henry said. “I intend to enjoy my old age. Those who come after me can bloody well cope. And stop shrieking. They’ll hear.”
“What does it matter if they hear?” said Stella. “They think I’m common, anyway. Peggy called me that at our very own wedding. My mother heard her. A common little baggage, my mother heard Peggy say.”
Henry’s answer was scarcely consoling. He said, “Peggy was drunk. She didn’t draw a sober breath from the time I announced my intentions. She read the engagement notice in the Times, poor girl.”
“Oh, why did you marry me?” Stella wailed.
Henry took her in his arms. That was why he had married her. It was all very well, but Stella hadn’t married in order to be buried in an Italian seaside town. And now, having had a son, having put all their noses out of joint by producing an heir, to be told there was no money!
It had not been Stella’s ambition to marry money. She had cherished a great reverence for family and background, and she believed, deeply, in happiness, comfort, and endless romance. In Henry she thought she had found all these things; middle-aged, father of a daughter Stella’s age, he was still a catch. She hadn’t married money; the trouble was that during their courtship Henry had seduced her with talk of money. He talked stocks, shares, and Rhodesian Electric. He talked South Africa, and how it was the only sound place left for investment in the world. He spoke of the family trust and of how 26he had broken it years before, and what a good life this had given him. Stella had turned to him her round kitten face, with the faintly stupid kitten eyes, and had listened entranced, picturing Henry with the trust in his hands, breaking it in two.
“I don’t believe in all this living on tiny incomes, keeping things intact for the sake of grown children who can earn their own way,” he had said. “The next generation won’t have anything in any event, the way the world is heading. There won’t be anything but drudgery and dreariness. I intend to enjoy myself now. I have enjoyed myself. I can seriously say that I do not regret one moment of my life.”
Stella had found his predictions about the future only mildly alarming. He was clever and experienced, and such people often frighten one without meaning to. She was glad he intended to enjoy life, and she intended to enjoy it with him. She hadn’t dreamed that it would come down to living in an unheated villa in the damp Italian winter. When he continued to speak contemptuously of the next generation and its wretched lot, she had taken it for granted that he meant Peggy, and Peggy’s child—never her own.
Nigel and Peggy came onto the terrace, ostentatiously letting the dining-room door slam in order to announce their presence.
“How noisy you are,” Henry said to Peggy. “But you always were. I remember—” He poured himself a drink, frowning, presumably remembering. “Stella, I fancy, was a quiet little girl.” Something had put her frighteningly out of temper. She paced about the terrace pulling dead leaves off the potted geraniums.
“Oh, damn,” she said suddenly, for no reason.
They dined on the terrace, under a light buried in moths.
“How delicious,” Peggy said. “Look at the lights on the sea. Those are the fishing boats, Nigel. It’s the first sign of good weather.”
“I think it’s much more comfortable to eat indoors, even if you don’t see the boats,” Stella said sadly. “Sometimes we sit out here bundled in our overcoats. Henry thinks we must eat out just because 27it’s Italy. So we do it all winter. Then, when it gets warm, there are ants in the bread.”
“I suppose there is some stage between too cold and too warm when you enjoy it,” Peggy said.
Stella looked at the gravy congealing on her plate and said, “We adore Italy, of course. It’s just the question of eating in or out.”
“One dreams of it in England,” said Nigel. It was the first time he had opened his mouth except to eat or drink. “We think of how lucky you are to be here.”
“My people never went in for it at home,” said Stella, suddenly broken under Henry’s jokes, and homesickness. “Although we had a lovely garden. We had lovely things—grass. You can’t grow grass here. I tried it. I tried primroses and things.”
“This extraordinary habit the English have of taking bits of England everywhere they go,” said Peggy, jabbing at her plate. Nigel started to say something—something nice, one felt by his expression—and Peggy said, “Shut up, Nigel.”
Soon after dinner Stella disappeared. It was some time before any of them noticed, and then it was Peggy who went to look. Stella was in the garden, sitting on a bench between two tree-sized cacti.
“You’re not crying, are you?”
“Yes, I am. At least, I was. I’m all right now. I wish I were going home instead of you,” Stella said. “I’d give anything. Do you know that there are rats in the palms? Big ones. They jump from tree to tree. Sometimes at night I can even hear them on the roof.”
Peggy sat down on a stone. The moon had risen and was so bright it threw their shadows. “They’ve gone indoors,” she said. “Henry’s quite tight. I suppose that’s one of the problems.”
Stella sniffled, hiccuping. “It isn’t just that. It’s that you don’t like me.”
“Don’t be silly,” Peggy said. “Anyway, why should you care? 28You’ve got what you wanted.” Stella was silent. “I’m not angry with you,” Peggy went on. “But I’m so angry with Henry that I can hardly speak to him. As for Nigel, he came upstairs in such a state that I thought we should have to take the next train home. We’re furious with Henry and with his cheap, stupid little games. Henry’s spent all his money. He spent his father’s, my mother’s, and mine. No one has complained and no one has minded. But why should he talk to Nigel of wills and of inheritance when we all know that he has nothing in the world but you?”
“Me?” said Stella. Astonishment dried her tears. She peered, puffy-eyed, through the moonlight. “I haven’t anything.”
“Then that was Henry’s mistake,” said Peggy calmly. “Or, perhaps it was your youth he wanted. As for you, what did you want, Stella? Did you think he was rich? Hadn’t anyone else proposed to you—someone your own age?”
“There was a nice man in chemicals,” said Stella. “We would have lived in Japan. There was another one, a boy in my father’s business, a boy my father had trained.”
“Why in the name of God didn’t you choose one of them?”
Stella looked at her sodden handkerchief. “When Henry asked me to marry him, my mother said, ‘It’s better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave.’ And then, it seemed different. I thought it would be fun.”
“Oh, Stella.”
The lights of the fishing boats blinked and bobbed out at sea. They could hear the fishermen thumping the sides of the boats and shouting in order to wake up the fish.
“I should have been you, and you should have been me,” Peggy said. “I love Italy, and I can cope with Henry. He was a good parent, before he went sour. You should have married Nigel—or a Nigel.”
The crushing immorality of this blanked out Stella’s power of speech. It had been suggested that she ought to marry her 29stepdaughter’s husband—something like that. There was something good about being shocked. It placed her. It reaffirmed her sense of being morally right where Henry and his kind were morally wrong. She thought: I am Henry’s wife, and I am the mistress of this house.
“I mean,” said Peggy, “that sometimes people get dropped in the wrong pockets by mistake.”
“Well,” said Stella, “that is life. That’s the way things are. You don’t get dropped, you choose. And then you have to stick to it, that’s all. At least, that’s what I think.”
“Poor little Stella,” Peggy said.
The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street
Now that they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, “Everybody else did well in the international thing except us.”
“You have to be crooked,” he tells her.
“Or smart. Pity we weren’t.”
It is Sunday morning. They sit in the kitchen, drinking their coffee, slowly, remembering the past. They say the names of people as if they were magic. Peter thinks, Agnes Brusen, but there are hundreds of other names. As a private married joke, Peter and Sheilah wear the silk dressing gowns they bought in Hong Kong. Each thinks the other a peacock, rather splendid, but they pretend the dressing gowns are silly and worn in fun.
Peter and Sheilah and their two daughters, Sandra and Jennifer, are visiting Peter’s unmarried sister, Lucille. They have been Lucille’s guests seventeen weeks, ever since they returned to Toronto from the Far East. Their big old steamer trunk blocks a corner of the kitchen, making a problem of the refrigerator door; but even Lucille says the trunk may as well stay where it is, for the present. The Fraziers’ future is so unsettled; everything is still in the air.
Lucille has given her bedroom to her two nieces, and sleeps on a camp cot in the hall. The parents have the living-room divan. They have no privileges here; they sleep after Lucille has seen the last television show that interests her. In the hall closet their clothes are 31crushed by winter overcoats. They know they are being judged for the first time. Sandra and Jennifer are waiting for Sheilah and Peter to decide. They are waiting to learn where these exotic parents will fly to next. What sort of climate will Sheilah consider? What job will Peter consent to accept? When the parents are ready, the children will make a decision of their own. It is just possible that Sandra and Jennifer will choose to stay with their aunt.
The peacock parents are watched by wrens. Lucille and her nieces are much the same—sandy-colored, proudly plain. Neither of the girls has the father’s insouciance or the mother’s appearance—her height, her carriage, her thick hair and sky-blue eyes. The children are more cautious than their parents; more Canadian. When they saw their aunt’s apartment they had been away from Canada nine years, ever since they were two and four; and Jennifer, the elder, said, “Well, now we’re home.” Her voice is nasal and flat. Where did she learn that voice? And why should this be home? Peter’s answer to anything about his mystifying children is, “It must be in the blood.”
On Sunday morning Lucille takes her nieces to church. It seems to be the only condition she imposes on her relations: The children must be decent. The girls go willingly, with their new hats and purses and gloves and coral bracelets and strings of pearls. The parents, ramshackle, sleepy, dim in the brain because it is Sunday, sit down to their coffee and privacy and talk of the past.
“We weren’t crooked,” says Peter. “We weren’t even smart.”
Sheilah’s head bobs up; she is no drowner. It is wrong to say they have nothing to show for time. Sheilah has the Balenciaga. It is a black afternoon dress, stiff and boned at the waist, long for the fashions of now, but neither Sheilah nor Peter would change a thread. The Balenciaga is their talisman, their treasure; and after they remember it they touch hands and think that the years are not behind them but hazy and marvelous and still to be lived. 32
The first place they went to was Paris. In the early fifties the pick of the international jobs was there. Peter had inherited the last scrap of money he knew he was ever likely to see, and it was enough to get them over: Sheilah and Peter and the babies and the steamer trunk. To their joy and astonishment they had money in the bank. They said to each other, “It should last a year.” Peter was fastidious about the new job; he hadn’t come all this distance to accept just anything. In Paris he met Hugh Taylor, who was earning enough smuggling gasoline to keep his wife in Paris and a girl in Rome. That impressed Peter, because he remembered Taylor as a sour scholarship student without the slightest talent for life. Taylor had a job, of course. He hadn’t said to himself, I’ll go over to Europe and smuggle gasoline. It gave Peter an idea; he saw the shape of things. First you catch your fish. Later, at an international party, he met Johnny Hertzberg, who told him Germany was the place. Hertzberg said that anyone who came out of Germany broke now was too stupid to be here, and deserved to be back home at a desk. Peter nodded, as if he had already thought of that. He began to think about Germany. Paris was fine for a holiday, but it had been picked clean. Yes, Germany. His money was running low. He thought about Germany quite a lot.
That winter was moist and delicate; so fragile that they daren’t speak of it now. There seemed to be plenty of everything and plenty of time. They were living the dream of a marriage, the fabric uncut, nothing slashed or spoiled. All winter they spent their money, and went to parties, and talked about Peter’s future job. It lasted four months. They spent their money, lived in the future, and were never as happy again.
After four months they were suddenly moved away from Paris, but not to Germany—to Geneva. Peter thinks it was because of the incident at the Trudeau wedding at the Ritz. Paul Trudeau was a French Canadian Peter had known at school and in the Navy. 33Trudeau had turned into a snob, proud of his career and his Paris connections. He tried to make the difference felt, but Peter thought the difference was only for strangers. At the wedding reception Peter lay down on the floor and said he was dead. He held a white azalea in a brass pot on his chest, and sang, “Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea.” Sheilah bent over him and said, “Peter, darling, get up. Pete, listen, every single person who can do something for you is in this room. If you love me, you’ll get up.”
“I do love you,” he said, ready to engage in a serious conversation. “She’s so beautiful,” he told a second face. “She’s nearly as tall as I am. She was a model in London. I met her over in London in the war. I met her there in the war.” He lay on his back with the azalea on his chest, explaining their history. A waiter took the brass pot away, and after Peter had been hauled to his feet he knocked the waiter down. Trudeau’s bride, who was freshly out of an Ursuline convent, became hysterical; and even though Paul Trudeau and Peter were old acquaintances, Trudeau never spoke to him again. Peter says now that French Canadians always have that bit of spite. He says Trudeau asked the embassy to interfere. Luckily, back home there were still a few people to whom the name “Frazier” meant something, and it was to these people that Peter appealed. He wrote letters saying that a French-Canadian combine was preventing his getting a decent job, and could anything be done? No one answered directly, but it was clear that what they settled for was exile to Geneva: a season of meditation and remorse, as he explained to Sheilah, and it was managed tactfully, through Lucille. Lucille wrote that a friend of hers, May Fergus, now a secretary in Geneva, had heard about a job. The job was filing pictures in the information service of an international agency in the Palais des Nations. The pay was so-so, but Lucille thought Peter must be getting fed up doing nothing.
Peter often asks his sister now who put her up to it—what important person told her to write that letter suggesting Peter go to Geneva? 34
“Nobody,” says Lucille. “I mean, nobody in the way you mean. I really did have this girl friend working there, and I knew you must be running through your money pretty fast in Paris.”
“It must have been somebody pretty high up,” Peter says. He looks at his sister admiringly, as he has often looked at his wife.
Peter’s wife had loved him in Paris. Whatever she wanted in marriage she found that winter, there. In Geneva, where Peter was a file clerk and they lived in a furnished flat, she pretended they were in Paris and life was still the same. Often, when the children were at supper, she changed as though she and Peter were dining out. She wore the Balenciaga, and put candles on the card table where she and Peter ate their meal. The neckline of the dress was soiled with makeup. Peter remembers her dabbing on the makeup with a wet sponge. He remembers her in the kitchen, in the soiled Balenciaga, patting on the makeup with a filthy sponge. Behind her, at the kitchen table, Sandra and Jennifer, in buttonless pajamas and bunny slippers, ate their supper of marmalade sandwiches and milk. When the children were asleep, the parents dined solemnly, ritually, Sheilah sitting straight as a queen.
It was a mysterious period of exile, and he had to wait for signs, or signals, to know when he was free to leave. He never saw the job any other way. He forgot he had applied for it. He thought he had been sent to Geneva because of a misdemeanor and had to wait to be released. Nobody pressed him at work. His immediate boss had resigned, and he was alone for months in a room with two desks. He read the HeraldTribune,and tried to discover how things were here—how the others ran their lives on the pay they were officially getting. But it was a closed conspiracy. He was not dealing with adventurers now but civil servants waiting for pension day. No one ever answered his questions. They pretended to think his questions were a form of wit. His only solace in exile was the few happy 35weekends he had in the late spring and early summer. He had met another old acquaintance, Mike Burleigh. Mike was a serious liberal who had married a serious heiress. The Burleighs had two guest lists. The first was composed of stuffy people they felt obliged to entertain, while the second was made up of their real friends, the friends they wanted. The real friends strove hard to become stuffy and dull and thus achieve the first guest list, but few succeeded. Peter went on the first list straightaway. Possibly Mike didn’t understand, at the beginning, why Peter was pretending to be a file clerk. Peter had such an air—he might have been sent by a universal inspector to see how things in Geneva were being run.
Every Friday in May and June and part of July, the Fraziers rented a sky-blue Fiat and drove forty miles east of Geneva to the Burleighs’ summer house. They brought the children, a suitcase, the children’s tattered picture books, and a token bottle of gin. This, in memory, is a period of water and water birds; swans, roses, and singing birds. The children were small and still belonged to them. If they remember too much, their mouths water, their stomachs hurt. Peter says, “It was fine while it lasted.” Enough. While it lasted Sheilah and Madge Burleigh were close. They abandoned their husbands and spent long summer afternoons comparing their mothers and praising each other’s skin and hair. To Madge, and not to Peter, Sheilah opened her Liverpool childhood with the words “rat poor.” Peter heard about it later, from Mike. The women’s friendship seemed to Peter a bad beginning. He trusted women but not with each other. It lasted ten weeks. One Sunday, Madge said she needed the two bedrooms the Fraziers usually occupied for a party of sociologists from Pakistan, and that was the end. In November, the Fraziers heard that the summer house had been closed, and that the Burleighs were in Geneva, in their winter flat; they gave no sign. There was no help for it, and no appeal.
Now Peter began firing letters to anyone who had ever known his late father. He was living in a mild yellow autumn. Why does he 36
