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

looking; the other smaller, with only one arm and an empty sleeve pinned up to his shoulder. Both of them were quite young and wore black shirts.”
    Oh, thought Netta, I am the only one who knows all this. No one will ever realize how much I know of the truth, the truth, the truth, and she put her head on her hands, her elbows on the scarred bar, and let the first tears of her after-war run down her wrists.
    The last to return was the one who should have been first. Jack wrote that he was coming down from the north as far as Nice by bus. It was a common way of traveling and much cheaper than by train. Netta guessed that he was mildly hard up and that he had saved nothing from his war job. The bus came in at six, at the foot of the Place Masséna. There was a deep blue late-afternoon sky and pale sunlight. She could hear birds from the public gardens nearby. The Place was as she had always seen it, like an elegant drawing room with a blue ceiling. It was nearly empty. Jack looked out on this sun-lighted, handsome space and said, “Well, I’ll just leave my stuff at the bus office, for the moment”—perhaps noticing that Netta had not invited him anywhere. He placed his ticket on the counter, and she saw that he had not come from far away: he must have been moving south by stages. He carried an aura of London pub life; he had been in London for weeks.
    A frowning man hurrying to wind things up so he could have his first drink of the evening said, “The office is closing and we don’t keep baggage here.”
    “People used to be nice,” Jack said.
    “Bus people?”
    “Just people.”
    She was hit by the sharp change in his accent. As for the way of speaking, which is something else again, he was like the heir to great estates back home after a Grand Tour. Perhaps the estates had run down in his absence. She slipped the frowning man a thousand francs, a new pastel-tinted bill, on which the face of a calm girl glowed like an opal. She said, “We shan’t be long.”
    She set off over the Place, walking diagonally—Jack beside her, of course. He did not ask where they were headed, though he did make her smile by saying, “Did you bring a car?” expecting one of the hotel cars to be parked nearby, perhaps with a driver to open the door; perhaps with cold chicken and wine in a hamper, too. He said, “I’d forgotten about having to tip for every little thing.” He did not question his destination, which was no farther than a café at the far end of the square. What she felt at that instant was intense revulsion. She thought, I don’t want him, and pushed away some invisible flying thing—a bat or a blown paper. He looked at her with surprise. He must have been wondering if hardship had taught Netta to talk in her mind.
    This
is it, the freedom he was always offering me, she said to herself, smiling up at the beautiful sky.
    They moved slowly along the nearly empty square, pausing only when some worn-out Peugeot or an old bicycle, finding no other target, made a swing in their direction. Safely on the pavement, they walked under the arches where partisans had been hanged. It seemed to Netta the bodies had been taken down only a day or so before. Jack, who knew about this way of dying from hearsay, chose a café table nearly under a poor lad’s bound, dangling feet.
    “I had a woman next to me on the bus who kept a hedgehog all winter in a basketful of shavings,” he said. “He can drink milk out of a wineglass.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry about the books you asked for. I was sick of books by then. I was sick of rhetoric and culture and patriotic crap.”
    “I suppose it is all very different over there,” said Netta.
    “God, yes.”
    He seemed to expect her to ask questions, so she said, “What kind of clothes do they wear?”
    “They wear quite a lot of plaids and tartans. They eat at peculiar hours. You’ll see them eating strawberries and cream just when you’re thinking of having a drink.”
    She