The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant Read Free Book Online Page B

meanwhile was listening to Sandra telling about her English forebearsand her English education. “I had many years of undeniably excellent schooling,” she said. “Mitten Todd.”
    “What’s that?” said Jack.
    “It’s near Bristol. I met excellent girls from Italy, Spain. I took
him
there to visit,” she said, generously including the American. “I said, ‘Get a yellow necktie.’ He went straight out and bought one. I wore a little Schiaparelli. Bought in Geneva but still a real … A yellow jacket over a gray … Well, we arrived at my excellent old school, and even though the day was drizzly I said, ‘Put the top of the car back.’ He did so at once, and then he understood. The interior of the car harmonized perfectly with the yellow and gray.” The twins were orphaned. Iris was like a mother.
    “When Mummy died we didn’t know where to put all the Chippendale,” said Sandra. “Iris took a lot of it.”
    Netta thought, She is so silly. How can he respond? The girl’s dimples and freckles and soft little hands were nothing Netta could have ever described: She had never in her life thought a word like “pretty.” People were beautiful or they were not. Her happiness had always been great enough to allow for despair. She knew that some people thought Jack was happy and she was not.
    “And what made you marry your young cousin?” the old man boomed at Netta. Perhaps his background allowed him to ask impertinent questions; he must have been doing so nearly forever. He stroked his cat; he was confident. He was spokesman for a roomful of wondering people.
    “Jack was a moody child and I promised his mother I would look after him,” said Netta. In her hopelessly un-English way she believed she had said something funny.
    At eleven o’clock the hotel car expected to fetch the Rosses was nowhere. They trudged home by moonlight. For the last hour of the evening Jack had been skewered on virile conversations, first with Iris, then with Sandra, to whom Netta had already given “Chippendale” as a private name. It proved that Iris was right about concentrating on men and their ticking—Jack even thought Sandra rather pretty.
    “Prettier than me?” said Netta, without the faintest idea what she meant, but aware she had said something stupid.
    “Not so attractive,” said Jack. His slight limp returned straight out of childhood.
She
had caused his accident.
    “But she’s not always clear,” said Netta. “Mitten Todd, for example.”
    “Who’re you talking about?”
    “Who are
you?”
    “Iris, of course.”
    As if they had suddenly quarreled they fell silent. In silence they entered their room and prepared for bed. Jack poured a whiskey, walked on the clothes he had dropped, carried his drink to the bathroom. Through the half-shut door he called suddenly, “Why did you say that asinine thing about promising to look after me?”
    “It seemed so unlikely, I thought they’d laugh.” She had a glimpse of herself in the mirrors picking up his shed clothes.
    He said, “Well, is it true?”
    She was quiet for such a long time that he came to see if she was still in the room. She said, “No, your mother never said that or anything like it.”
    “We shouldn’t have gone to Roquebrune,” said Jack. “I think those bloody people are going to be a nuisance. Iris wants her father to stay here, with the cat, while she goes to England for a month. How do we get out of that?”
    “By saying no.”
    “I’m rotten at no.”
    “I told you not to be too pally with women,” she said, as a joke again, but jokes were her way of having floods of tears.
    Before this had a chance to heal, Iris’s father moved in, bringing his cat in a basket. He looked at his room and said, “Medium large.” He looked at his bed and said, “Reasonably long.” He was, in short, daft about measurements. When he took books out of the reading room, he was apt to return them with “This volume contains about 70,000 words”