The Cost of Living (41 page)

“Oh,
damn
!” Bea darts into the room. Roy kneels, staring at the screen. A woman lies on a large old-fashioned bed, surrounded by weeping children. Bea says, “The goddam mother's died. Roy shouldn't be looking at that.”

Roy will speak now that Bea is here: “It's sad.”

She raises her hand. “You know you're only supposed to watch the kids' programs.” Her hand changes direction. She snaps off the sound.

Verna, looking as unhappy as Malcolm has ever seen any woman in his life, trails after Bea. In snatches, sometimes drowned in Ruth's bath water, he hears from sad Verna that it is depressing to live in rooms where half the furniture is gone. It reduces the feeling of stability. Tomorrow we'll be gone from here. No one will miss us. There will be homes for twelve hundred people now on a waiting list. As if a rich country could not house its people any other way. They will pay half the rents we are paying now. The landlords will paint and clean as they never had to for us. I'm not sad to be leaving.

A door is slammed. Behind the door, Verna whispers. Leonard's story is being retold.

Malcolm stood up as Bea came into the room. He said, “Don't come to Belgium.” A blind movement of Roy at his feet drew his attention. “All right,” he said. “I know you're there. Where do
you
want to go? Who do you want to go with, I mean?”

The child formed “Her” with his lips.

“You're sure? It beats me, but we won't discuss it now.”

As if looking for help, Bea turned to the screen. Silently, washed by a driving rain (a defect of transmission), the President of the Republic's long bald head floated up the steps of a war memorial. The frames shot up wildly, spinning, like a window shade. Bea stood staring at the mute news, which seemed to be about stalled cars and middle-aged faces. Roy looked at his mother. His brow was furrowed, like an old man's.

I should have told Leonard, Malcolm thought: The real meaning of Pichipoi is being alone. It means each of us flung separately—Roy, Ruth, Bea—into a room without windows. It can't be done. It can't be permitted, I mean. No jumping off the train. I nearly made it, he said to himself. And then what?

“No,” he said aloud.

A sigh escaped the child, as if he knew the denial was an affirmation, that it meant “Yes, I am still here, we are all of us together.”

Breathing again, the child began his mindless sorting of old pictures and Christmas cards.

“Well, Roy,” said Malcolm, as if answering some comment, “half the people in the world don't even get as far as I did just now.”

That was the end of it—the end of the incident. It turned into a happy evening, one of their last in France.

1968

H
E SUPPOSED
he had always been something of a sermonizer, but it was not really a failing; he had a mountain of information on many subjects, and silence worried him over and above the fear of being a bore. He had enjoyed, in particular, the education of his little girl. Even when she seemed blank and inattentive he went on with what he was saying. He thought it wrong of her to show so plainly she was sick to death of his voice; she ought to have learned a few of the social dishonesties by now.

They were in a warm climate, driving down to the sea. He must have been talking for hours. He said, “If indefinite time can be explained at all, it means there is
another
world somewhere, exactly like ours in every way.”

“No, you're wrong,” she said, finally answering him—high and irritable and clear. “To make it another world you'd have to change something. The ashtray in the dashboard could be red instead of silver. That would be enough to make another world. Otherwise it's just the same place.”

This was her grandmother's training, he thought. She had been turned into a porcupine. Tears came to his eyes; none of it had been his fault.

“Who do you think tells the truth?” he said. “Your grandmother?”

“What do you mean?”

“Which of us do you like best? That must be what I meant.”

“To tell you the God's truth,” said the child, in a coarse voice he was not accustomed to hearing, “I'm not dying about either one of you.”

In a rush of warm air the rest of her words were lost. She bent and picked up something that had been creeping on the floor—a reptile he could not identify. It was part lizard, or snake, or armadillo, the size of a kitten, and repulsive to see; but as the girl had made a pet of the thing—seemed attached to it, in fact—he said nothing.

He had lost her words, but he understood their meaning. “You don't want me to bring you up, is that it?”

“Yes. I said that.”

“And your grandmother?”

“That's finished, too.” Her voice was empty of anything except extreme conviction. She was a small girl, delicate of feature, but she wore, habitually, an expression so set and so humorless that her father felt weak and dispersed beside her—as if age and authority and second thoughts had, instead of welding his personality, pulled it to shreds.

I wonder, the man thought, if she
can
be mine? She had none of the qualities he recognized in himself, and for which he had been loved: warmth, tenacity, a sense of justice. Perhaps his desire to educate covered a profound unease, but he had never deserted the weak, never betrayed a friend. He was flooded with a great grievance all at once, as if he had been laughed at, his kindness solicited, his charity betrayed, for the sake of someone to whom he owed nothing. Perhaps, he thought—and this was even darker—perhaps she is not her mother's; for where were her qualities? Charm over shyness; gaiety over anxiousness; camouflage, dissimulation, myth-making to make life easier—myths explain the dark corners of life. Not even those! The child was the bottom of a pool from which both their characters had been drained away. She had nothing, except obstinacy, which he did not admire, and shallow judgment. Of course she was shallow; she had proved it: she did not love her father.

“If you do not love me,” he wanted to say, “you will never care about anyone,” but he felt so much pain at the possibility of not being loved that he added quickly, “I forgive you.” Instantly the pain receded.

“Look here,” he said. “How old are you, exactly?”

“Six and a half,” said the child, without surprise.

“That would be it, that would be the right age,” he said. She could be ours. With that, the pain returned.

He could not remember what they had been saying during much of the drive, but he must have been using the wrong language, or, worse, have allowed the insertion of silence. Everything had been a mistake. The child sat, perfectly self-contained, protected by an innocence that transformed her feelings and made them neutral. We must make a joke of this, her father thought, or the pain will make me so hideous, so disfigured, that she will be frightened of me. He opened his mouth, meaning to describe, objectively, what anguish was like, giving as examples the dupe on his way to be sacrificed, the runner overtaken by a tank, the loathed bearer of a disease, but he said instead, “I can't understand you,” in a reasonable voice. “I was interested in you, I never neglected you. If you'd had more experience, you'd know when you were well off. You just don't know what other men can be like.”

As if pleased with the effect she had produced, the child played with the monster's collar and bell. He heard the bell tinkle, and saw a flash of her small hands. She had not warned him, or prepared him, or even asked his advice. He could have stopped driving, flung himself down, appealed in the name of their past; but he had heard in his own last words a deliberate whine, which rendered any plea disgraceful.

He was dealing with a
child
, he suddenly recalled; it was not a father's business to plead for justice but to dispense it. Pride, yes, pride was important, but he was not to give up his role. He resumed reasonableness; he said, “I suppose you find me tiresome, sometimes.”

“Yes, I did,” said the child. “That was one of the things.”

He was in the little girl's past, and she was so young that the past was removed from life. This is my fault, he said to himself. I've let her believe she was grown up; I have been too respectful. She thinks her life is her own; she doesn't know that she can't plan and think and provide for herself. He said, jokingly, as if they had been playing a game all along, “All right, who do you want to live with?,” thinking she would laugh at the question, but instead she said at once, “With Mr. Mountford.”

“Mountford? Are you sure that's the person you mean? You've hardly met him.”

“I know,” said the child, “but he's so much richer, and he has such lovely conversation.”

It was further proof of shallowness, but also of her dismal innocence: If Mountford had been capable of saying one civil word to the child, it was only because he knew the little brat would not be in his house longer than an hour; she would eat her cake and drink her milk and be led away. He was the totality of everything the child's father despised; at the very sight of Mountford, his scorn for amateurs—amateur painters, actors, singers, poets, playwrights—rose and choked him. Any exchange was out of the question; they could not have discussed a crossword puzzle. Obviously, he could not translate such feelings into a child's language, while words such as “hypocrisy,” “coldness,” “greed” would convey nothing except a tone of adult spitefulness. She smiled to herself, perhaps remembering a “lovely conversation” in which she had mistaken a fatuous compliment for a promise. What did she mean by “richer,” he wondered. It couldn't be money; not at that age. Meanwhile he saw Mountford clearly, with his slack mouth and light eyes. He did not seem like a man but like a discontented woman.

“All right,” he said. “I'll take you to his house. We'll see if he can keep you. Remember,” he added needlessly, “it was your decision.”

Now he had relinquished her; they had put each other in the past. He wanted to say, “I didn't mean it,” but she was beyond taking the slightest notice of anything he meant, or said, or did, or was. He went on, “You must do as you are told, for the last time. You are to stay in the car while I speak to Mr. Mountford.” She seemed astonished, perhaps at her own power; and, after a brief gesture that might have been rebellious, sat quite still.

I was not the one who pushed things to the limit, he said to himself, as he walked up to Mountford's door. Did I abdicate? Let go too soon? It seemed settled in her mind; what else could I have done? Beside him trotted the monster with its collar and bell. She had thrust it out of the car, slyly, and sent it along to be her witness, to see if her father lied, later, about his conversation with Mountford. As though I would lie to the child, he said to himself, in despair at this new misunderstanding. But when the door was opened for him he stepped aside and let the creature scuttle through.

Mountford was dressed in his waffly felt gardening hat; a battered cream-colored corduroy jacket; dark-green hairy shirt with a hairy tie, woven for a Cottage Industry shop; trousers perpetually kneeling; shoes to which clay from a dreary promenade accrued.

How can I allow this child to live in a house where there are no flowers, no paintings, no books, and (this seemed the most miserly of all deprivations) no cigarettes? He knew there would be no musical instrument, and no records—it was a theory of Mountford's that right-thinking people went to concerts. If you lived in a provincial part of the world, in a resort, a watering place where you had to depend on military tunes played in the casino garden, then you did without. When you have heard an opera once in your life, it is up to you to remember it; it saves time, and any amount of money. The child's father supposed Mountford had said all of this to him once. He found he had a store of information concerning Mountford; how he felt about climates, sonnets, the sea, other people, the passage of time, the importance of pleasure; he possessed this knowledge, condensed, like a summary he had been given to read. He knew that Mountford went into the kitchen to see if his cook was using too much olive oil. Perhaps this was only gossip—but no, Mountford now held the bottle of oil up to the light of the kitchen window.

“You don't need all those ingredients for a simple
poulet chasseur
,” Mountford said to the cook. “White wine, bouillon, brandy, butter, oil, flour, tomatoes, tarragon, chervil, shallots, salt and pepper…ridiculous. You can use a bouillon cube,” he said, putting the bottle down. “Vinegar instead of wine. Cooking fat. No one will ever know. Go easy, now,” he said, in his jovial way. “Go easy with the brandy and the flour. You know how things are… You can stay for lunch,” he said, turning to the child's father, “but you understand I can't keep her. I scarcely know her. She's more of a stranger, if you know what I mean. We've had a few words together, nothing more. Tell her she has made a mistake, I don't know her and that's that.”

That much is settled, the man thought. She will not live in a house where she can hear “No one will ever know.” She will not he infected by meanness. As for himself, he had come out of it well. He had not bullied, or shown authority, or imposed a decision. He had not even suggested a course! She had been given free choice all the way.

“If I were you,” said Mountford as they went into the front part of the house, “I would just give her to old Bertha in the kitchen.”

“It isn't a matter of
giving
her away,” he said. “I'm not giving her.”

“Well, old Bertha would be one solution. We ought to repopulate those empty peasant areas—fill them with new stock, good blood.”

“Not with
my
child,” he said. He knew exactly how he ought to murder Mountford. He saw the place between his eyes, and his own hand flat, like a plate skimming. Mountford's eyes would start, fall out nearly, while the skin around them went black as ink. That was the way to show Mountford what he thought of him. He saw the kitchen again, the large stove, and the hag who must be old Bertha. Mountford, untouched, was still pink of face and smiling.