Free The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant Page A

as a tragic girl who had disliked her governess.
    Dr. Blackley came back looking positively cheerful. In those days men still liked soldiering. It made them feel young, if they needed to feel it, and it got them away from home. War made the break few men could make on their own. The doctor looked years younger, too, and very fit. His wife was not with him. She had survived everything, and the hardships she had undergone had completely restored her to health—which had made it easy for her husband to leave her. Actually, he had never gone back, except to wind up the matter.
    “There are things about Georgina I respect and admire,” he said, as husbands will say from a distance. His war had been in Malta. He had come here, as soon as he could, to the shelled, gnawed, tarnished coast (as if hehad not seen enough at Malta) to ask Netta to divorce Jack and to marry him, or live with him—anything she wanted, on any terms.
    But she wanted nothing—at least, not from him.
    “Well, one can’t defeat a memory,” he said. “I always thought it was mostly su-hex between the two of you.”
    “So it was,” said Netta. “So far as I remember.”
    “Everyone noticed. You would vanish at odd hours. Dis-huppear.”
    “Yes, we did.”
    “You can’t live on memories,” he objected. “Though I respect you for being faithful, of course.”
    “What you are talking about is something of which one has no specific memory,” said Netta. “Only of seasons. Places. Rooms. It is as abstract to remember as to read about. That is why it is boring in talk except as a joke, and boring in books except for poetry.”
    “You never read poetry.”
    “I do now.”
    “I guessed that,” he said.
    “That lack of memory is why people are unfaithful, as it is so curiously called. When I see closed shutters I know there are lovers behind them. That is how the memory works. The rest is just convention and small talk.”
    “Why lovers? Why not someone sleeping off the wine he had for lunch?”
    “No. Lovers.”
    “A middle-aged man cutting his toenails in the bathtub,” he said with unexpected feeling. “Wearing bifocal lenses so that he can see his own feet.”
    “No, lovers. Always.”
    He said, “Have you missed him?”
    “Missed who?”
    “Who the bloody hell are we talking about?”
    “The Italian commander billeted here. He was not a guest. He was here by force. I was not breaking a rule. Without him I’d have perished in every way. He may be home with his wife now. Or in that fortress near Turin where he sent other men. Or dead.” She looked at the doctor and said, “Well, what would you like me to do? Sit here and cry?”
    “I can’t imagine you with a brute.”
    “I never said that.”
    “Do you miss him still?”
    “The absence of Jack was like a cancer which I am sure has taken root, and of which I am bound to die,” said Netta.
    “You’ll bu-hury us all,” he said, as doctors tell the condemned.
    “I haven’t said I won’t.” She rose suddenly and straightened her skirt, as she used to do when hotel guests became pally. “Conversation over,” it meant.
    “Don’t be too hard on Jack,” he said.
    “I am hard on myself,” she replied.
    After he had gone he sent her a parcel of books, printed on grayish paper, in warped wartime covers. All of the titles were, to Netta, unknown. There was
Fireman Flower
and
The Horse’s Mouth
and
Four Quartets
and
The Stuff to Give the Troops
and
Better Than a Kick in the Pants
and
Put Out More Flags
. A note added that the next package would contain Henry Green and Dylan Thomas. She guessed he would not want to be thanked, but she did so anyway. At the end of her letter was “Please remember, if you mind too much, that I said no to you once before.” Leaning on the bar, exactly as Jack used to, with a glass of the middle sister’s drink at hand, she opened
Better Than a Kick in the Pants
and read, “… two Fascists came in, one of them tall and thin and tough