The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (11 page)

Another thing happened about that time: Mrs. Unwin paid Carmela the first installment of her wages.

Mrs. Unwin said that the doves in the Marchesa’s garden made more noise than was required of birds. By seven in the morning, the sky was heavy and held the afternoon’s thundershower. Carmela, rushing outside to bring in washing dried on the line, felt on her face a breeze that was like warm water. She moved through heat and housework that seemed like a long dream. Someone had placed an order with Mr. Unwin to have poems printed. Mrs. Unwin parted the curtains in her bedroom and in spite of her headaches, which nearly blinded her, stitched one hundred and fifty booklets by hand. One Friday, after shopping in the French market, Carmela went to see a marvel she had been told about—two rows of plane trees whose branches met to form a tunnel. The trunks of these trees turned out to be thick and awkward-looking; they blocked Carmela’s view of shops from one sidewalk to the next. Like most trees, they simply stood in the way of anything interesting. She mentioned this to Mrs. Unwin, who walked to and fro in the kitchen, drinking out of a teacup, with a straw sun hat on her head.

“Where there are no trees there are no nightingales,” said Mrs. Unwin. “When I am feeling well I like to hear them.”

“What, those things that make a noise at night?”

“Not noise but song,” said Mrs. Unwin, cradling her teacup.

“Every creature has its moment,” said Carmela.

“What a prim creature
you
are,” cried Mrs. Unwin, flinging her head back, showing her teeth. Carmela was glad she had made her laugh, but she resolved to be more careful than ever: This was as far as an exchange between them need ever go.

Because of what Dr. Chaffee had said, the Unwins rented an apartment in a village away from the coast for the month of August. They squeezed into the car with the twins and Carmela and much luggage, drove past the road
leading to the Nervia Valley, and climbed back into hills Carmela had never seen.

“Weren’t you born around here,” said Mrs. Unwin, without desiring an answer.

Carmela, who thought she knew all Mrs. Unwin’s voices now, did not reply, but Mr. Unwin said, “You know perfectly well it was that other road.” It seemed to matter to him that his wife should have made a mistake.

The twins were shared by Mrs. Unwin and Carmela. Both of them wanted to sit on Carmela’s lap. Mrs. Unwin was not at all jealous; some serious matters she found extremely comic. The girls slept, and when they woke and began to fret, Mr. Unwin stopped the car so they could both be moved to the back with Carmela. There was scarcely room even for her, small though Dr. Chaffee had said she was, for the back was piled with bedsheets and blankets and even saucepans. After four hours they came to a village that had grass everywhere, and wooden houses that were painted a soft brown. Their summer flat was half a house, with a long carved balcony, and mats instead of carpets, and red curtains on brass rings. It contained an exciting smell of varnish and fresh soap. The Unwins piled all the luggage in a heap on the floor and unpacked nothing to start with but a kettle and teapot and three pottery mugs. Carmela heard Mr. Unwin talking to the owner of this house in his strange nasal Italian and mentioning her, Carmela, as “the young lady who would be in charge.” They drank tea meanwhile, Mrs. Unwin sitting on a bare mattress stuffed with horsehair, Carmela standing with her back to a wall. Mrs. Unwin talked to her as she had never done before and would never again. She still seemed to Carmela very large and ugly, but her face was smooth and she kept her voice low, and Carmela thought that perhaps she was not so old after all. She said, “If there is a war, we may not be able to get money out of England, such as there is. We shall never leave Italy. I have faith in the Movement. The Italians know they can trust us. The Germans are, well, as they have always been, and I’m afraid we British have made no effort to meet them halfway. Dr. Chaffee tells me you are as reliable as an adult, Carmela. I am going to believe him. I would like you to teach the twins the alphabet. Will you do that? Don’t forget that the English alphabet has a W. Somewhere near the end. Teach them Italian poems and songs. Dr. Chaffee thinks I should have as few worries as possible just now. There will be a course of treatment at the clinic. Baths. Wet sheets. I suppose I must believe in magic.” She went on like this, perched on the edge of the bare mattress, staring out over her tea mug, all
knees and elbows, and Carmela did not move or answer or even sip her tea. She wanted to make the bed and put the twins in it, because they had missed their afternoon sleep—unless one counted the fitful dozing in the automobile. Mrs. Unwin said, “I had expected a better south than this one. First we went to Amalfi. I had left my son in England. A little boy. When I was allowed to visit him he said, ‘How do you do?’ No one would speak to me. We came back to Italy. The moonlight glittered on his eyes. Before the twins came. ‘Do not think, but feel,’ he said to me. Or the opposite. But it was only being tied again—this time with poverty, and the chatter of ill-bred people. No escape from it—marriage, childbirth, patriotism, the dark. The same circle—baptism, confirmation, prayers for the dead. Or else, silence.”

From the doorway Mr. Unwin said, “
Ellen.”
He came along with a walk Carmela had not seen before, slightly shambling. “What is in the cup?” he said.

She smiled at him and said, “Tea.”

He took it, sniffed it. “So it is.” He helped her up.

Unpacking, making beds, Carmela experienced a soft, exultant happiness. The Unwins were going back home early the next morning. Mr. Unwin gave Carmela a handful of money—pulled it out of his wallet without counting—and said, “That has got to last you, eh?” with an upward lift that denied this was an order. The money was more than she had ever been trusted with on the coast and actually more than she had seen at any one time. She put the twins to sleep with nightgowns round their pillows (she and Mrs. Unwin between them had forgotten to pack cases) and then shared the Unwins’ picnic supper. New people in a new place, they told Carmela to go to bed without bothering about the dishes.

She was pulled out of a deep sleep by a thunderstorm. Her heart squeezed tight in uncontrollable terror. Through the beating of horses’ hooves she heard Mr. Unwin speaking quietly. When the storm stopped, the house was perfectly still. She became prey to a hawkmoth and a mosquito. She pulled the sheet up over her head as she had against ghosts, and fell asleep and had the sea dream. She woke up still hearing a thin mosquito song nearby. Along the wall was a white ladder of slatted light that she took to be the light of morning. In her half-sleep she rose and unclasped the shutters and, looking out, saw a track of moon over the village as on the sea, and one pale street lamp, and a cat curled up on the road. The cat, wakened by being seen by Carmela, walked off lashing its tail. She had the true feeling that she was in a real place. She did not dream the sea dream again.

The next thing Carmela heard was the twins bouncing a ball and stumbling after it, still in their nightclothes. The Unwins, up even earlier, had made breakfast. They greeted Carmela as if she were one of their own. The storm had swept the sky clean. Oh, such happiness! Never before, never again. Soon after breakfast they went away, having plotted first with Carmela to distract the twins. In the late afternoon a mist came down so thick and low that Carmela, who had never seen anything like it before, thought it must be the smoke of trees on fire.

Without any warning, the Unwins drove up from the coast one Saturday with Mrs. Unwin’s son, Douglas, who lived in England. He was taller even than the Unwins, and had a long face, dark straight hair, and horn-rimmed spectacles. With him was a girl he thought he might marry. “Don’t be such a fool,” Carmela heard Mrs. Unwin telling Douglas in the kitchen. No one suspected how much Carmela now understood. The girl had a reddish sunburn on her cheeks and nose. Her hair was cut rather like Carmela’s, but held with metal grips. She unpacked a flimsy embroidery pattern and a large canvas and began stabbing at it with a flat needle. She was making a cushion. Carmela did not care for the colors, which were dark greens and browns. The girl shifted her gaze from the pattern to the canvas, back and forth. Her sunburn made her too cross to speak. Douglas told his mother she wasn’t always quite so unfriendly. Carmela thought that to be as large and as ugly as these people was to be cursed.

They all crowded into the flat for one night. Mrs. Unwin went over Carmela’s accounts, but did not ask how much money she had been given in the first place. The next day the parents departed, leaving Douglas and his irritable girl, whom Carmela had been told to call “Miss Hermione”—but of course she could not pronounce it. Miss Hermione took the Unwins’ bedroom, Douglas was given Carmela’s, and Carmela slept on a cot next to the twins. Every night, Miss Hermione said “No, I said no” to Douglas and slammed her door. Carmela supposed she sat behind the door embroidering. She also ate things she had brought in her suitcase. Carmela, who made Miss Hermione’s bed every day, discovered chocolate crumbs. One night, when Miss Hermione had retired and was eating stale chocolate and embroidering a cushion, Douglas came into the kitchen where Carmela was washing up at the stone sink.

“Like some help?” he said. She knew no English, of course; did not even turn. He leaned against the drainboard, where she had to see him. He folded
his arms and looked at Carmela. Then he began to whistle through his teeth as people do when they are bored, and then he must have reached up and tapped the lightbulb that hung on a cord. It was only the gesture of someone bored again, but the rocking shadows and the tall ugly boy whistling were like Carmela’s sea dream. She dropped her little string dishmop and ran out. She thought she heard herself screaming. “Oh, don’t pretend!” he called after her, as mysterious as his mother had once seemed.

He
was
bored; he said so the next day. There was not a thing to do here except stare out at mountains. He went downstairs to where the owner of the house lived, and together they listened to bad news over the radio. He could not understand much of the Italian, but sometimes they caught the BBC broadcasts, and when Douglas did understand something it made the situation seem worse.

“Oh, let’s leave, then, for God’s sake,” Miss Hermione said, folding her canvas neatly twice.

Douglas pressed his hands to his head, for all the world like his mother. He said, “I don’t want to be caught up in it.”

“Military life won’t hurt you,” Miss Hermione answered. Without embroidery to keep her hands busy, she kept shifting and changing position; now she had her hands clasped round a knee, and she swung a long foot and played at pointing her toes.

The day they went off, there was a loud windstorm. They paid the landlord to drive them as far as a bus station; Carmela never saw them again. Miss Hermione left a green hair ribbon behind. Carmela kept it for years.

As soon as these two had vanished, the wind dropped. Carmela and the twins climbed a little way out of the village and sat in deep grass. The sky held one small creamy cloud. At eye level were lacy grasses and, behind them, blue-black mountains. She tried to teach the twins the alphabet, but she was not certain where to put the W, and the girls were silly and would not listen; she did teach them songs.

I
n September she slipped back to a life she was sure of. She had taken its color. The sea was greener than anything except Mrs. Unwin’s emerald, bluer than her sapphire, more transparent than blue, white, transparent glass. Wading with a twin at each hand, she saw their six feet underwater
like sea creatures. The sun became as white as a stone; something stung in its heat, like fine, hard, invisible rain. War was somewhere, but not in Italy. Besides, something much more important than a war had taken place. It was this: A new English clergyman had arrived. Now that England was at war he did not know if he should stay. He told someone, who told the Unwins, that he would remain as long as he had a flock to protect. The Unwins, who were agnostics, wondered how to address him. His name was Dunn, but that was not the point. He was not the vicar, only a substitute. They had called his predecessor “Ted,” straight out, but they did not propose to call Mr. Dunn “Horace.” They decided to make it “Padre.” “Padre” was not solemn, and marked an ironic distance they meant to keep with the Church; and it was not rude, either.

Carmela understood that the Unwins’ relations with the rest of the foreign colony were endlessly complicated. There were two layers of English, like sea shelves. Near the bottom was a shelf of hotelkeepers, dentists, people who dealt in fruit and in wine—not for amusement but for a living. Nearer the light dwelt the American Marchesa, and people like Miss Barnes and her companion, Miss Lewis. These two lived in mean rooms almost in the attic of a hotel whose owner did not ask them to pay very much, because Miss Barnes was considered someone important—it was her father who had founded village schools and made a present of them to the Italian government. Between the two shelves the Unwins floated, bumping against the one or the other as social currents flung them upward or let them sink. Still lower than any of the English were Russians, Austrians, or Hungarians, rich and poor alike, whose preoccupation was said to be gaining British passports for their children. As passports could be had by marriage—or so the belief ran—the British colony kept a grip on its sons. Mrs. Unwin was heard by Carmela to remark that Hermione had this to be said for her—she was English to the core.

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.