Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [51]
Forain was just inside the doors, accepting murmured sympathy and handshakes. He was not usurping a family role but trying to make up for the absence of Halina. Perhaps she would stride in late, as at her mother’s funeral, driving home some private grudge. He had on a long cashmere overcoat, the only black garment he owned. A friend had left it to him. More exactly, the friend, aware that he was to die very soon, had told Forain to collect it at the tailor’s. It had been fitted, finished, paid for, never worn. Forain knew there was a mean joke abroad about his wearing dead men’s clothes. It also applied to his professional life: he was supposed to have said he preferred the backlist of any dead writer to the stress and tension of trying to deal with a live one.
His hair and shoes felt damp. The hand he gave to be shaken must have chilled all those it touched. He was squarely in the path of one of those church drafts that become gales anywhere close to a door. He wondered if Halina had been put off coming because of some firm remarks of his, the day before (he had defended Tremski against the charge of shouting in restaurants), or even had decided it was undignified to pretend she cared for a second how Tremski was dispatched; but at the last minute she turned up, with her French husband – a reporter of French political affairs on a weekly – and a daughter of fourteen in jacket and jeans. These two had not been able to read a word of Tremski’s until Forain had published a novel in translation about six years before. Tremski believed they had never looked at it – to be fair, the girl was only eight at the time – or any of the books that had followed; although the girl clipped and saved reviews. It was remarkable, Tremski had said, the way literate people, reasonably well travelled and educated, comfortably off, could live adequate lives without wanting to know what had gone before or happened elsewhere. Even the husband, the political journalist, was like that: a few names, a date looked up, a notion of geography satisfied him.
Forain could tell Tremski minded. He had wanted Halina to think well of him at least on one count, his life’s work. She was the daughter of a former Army officer who had died – like Barbara, like Tremski – in a foreign city. She considered herself, no less than her father, the victim of a selfish adventure. She also believed she was made of better stuff than Tremski, by descent and status, and that was harder to take. In Tremski’s own view, comparisons were not up for debate.
For the moment, the three were behaving well. It was as much as Forain expected from anybody. He had given up measuring social conduct, except where it ran its course in fiction. His firm made a specialty of translating and publishing work from Eastern and Central Europe; it kept him at a remove. Halina seemed tamed now, even thanked him for standing in and welcoming all those strangers. She had a story to explain why she was late, but it was farfetched, and Forain forgot it immediately. The delay most likely had been caused by a knockdown argument over the jacket and jeans. Halina was a cold skirmisher, narrow in scope but heavily principled. She wore a fur-and-leather coat, a pale gray hat with a brim, and a scarf – authentic Hermès? Taiwan fake? Forain could have told by rubbing the silk between his fingers, but it was a wild idea, and he kept his distance.
The girl had about her a look of Barbara: for that reason, no other, Forain found her appealing. Blaise ought to sit with the family, she said – using his first name, the way young people did now. A front pew had been kept just for the three of them. There was plenty of room. Forain thought that Halina might begin to wrangle,