Home Truths by Mavis Gallant Page A

thing, a bachelor’s car. They rolled out of Nice with an escort of trucks and buses. She thought there should have been carnival floats spilling yellow roses. Until now, this was her most important decision, for it supposed a way of living, a style. She reflected on how no girl she knew had ever done quite this, and on what her father would say. He might not hear of it; at least not right away. Meanwhile, they made a triumphant passage through blank white suburbs. Their witnesses were souvenir shops, a village or two, a bright solitary supermarket, the walls and hedges of villas. Along one of these flowering barriers they came to a stop and got out of the car. The fence wire looked tense and new; the plumbago it supported leaned every way, as if its life had been spared but only barely. It was late evening. She heard the squeaky barking of small dogs, and glimpsed, through an iron gate, one of those stucco bungalows that seem to beget their own palm trees. They went straight past it, down four shallow garden steps, and came upon a low building thatSarah thought looked like an Indian lodge. It was half under a plane tree. Perhaps it was the tree, whose leaves were like plates, that made the house and its terrace seem microscopic. One table and four thin chairs was all the terrace would hold. A lavender hedge surrounded it.
    “They call this place The Tunnel,” Roy said. She wondered if he was already regretting their adventure; if so, all he had to do was drive her back at once, or even let her down at a bus stop. But then he lit a candle on the table, which at once made everything dark, and she could see he was smiling as if in wonder at himself. The Tunnel was a long windowless room with an arched whitewashed ceiling. In daytime the light must have come in from the door, which was protected by a soft white curtain of mosquito netting. He groped for a switch on the wall, and she saw there was next to no furniture. “It used to be a storage place for wine and olives,” he said. “The Reeves fixed it up. They let it to friends.”
    “What are Reeves?”
    “People – nice people. They live in the bungalow.”
    She was now in this man’s house. She wondered about procedure: whether to unpack or wait until she was asked, and whether she had any domestic duties and was expected to cook. Concealed by a screen was a shower bath; the stove was in a cupboard. The lavatory, he told her, was behind the house in a garden shed. She would find it full of pictures of Labour leaders. The only Socialist the Reeves could bear was Hugh Dalton (Sarah had never heard of him, or most of the others, either), because Dalton had paid for the Queen’s wedding out of his own pocket when she was a slip of a girl without a bean of her own. Sarah said, “What did he want to do that for?” She saw, too late, that he meant to be funny.
    He sat down on the bed and looked at her. “The Reeves versus Labour,” he said. “Why should you care? You weren’t even born.” She was used to hearing that every interesting thing had taken place before her birth. She had a deadly serious question waiting: “What shall I do if you feel remorseful?”
    “If I am,” he said, “you’ll never know. That’s a promise.”
    I t was not remorse that overcame him but respectability: first thing next day, Sarah was taken to meet his friends, landlords, and neighbors, Tim and Meg Reeve. “I want them to like you,” he said. Wishing to be liked by total strangers was outside anything that mattered to Sarah; all the same, quickened by the new situation and its demands, she dressed and brushed her hair and took the path between the two cottages. The garden seemed a dry, cracked sort of place. The remains of daffodils lay in brown ribbons on the soil. She looked all round her, at an olive tree, and yesterday’s iron gate, and at the sky, which was fiercely azure. She was not as innocent as her father still hoped she might turn out to be, but not as experienced