Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant Page A

extra noise.” She paused, wondering if the Colonel was hard of hearing. “I hate whispering. It’s more bothersome than something loud. It’s like that hissing you get on stereo sometimes, like water running.”
    “Water running?” said the Colonel, not deafly but patiently.
    “I mean the people behind us.”
    “A mother explaining to a child,” he said, without looking.
    Amabel turned, pretending she was only lifting her long, soft hair away from her neck. She saw a little girl, wearing a white hair ribbon the size of a melon, leaning against, and somehow folded into, a seal-shaped mother. The two shared a pear, bite for bite. Everyone around them was feeding, in fact. It’s a zoo, Amabel thought. On the far side of the Colonel, two girls munched on chocolates. They unwrapped each slowly, and dropped the paper back in the box. Amabel sighed and said, “Are they happy? Cheap entertainment isn’t everything. Once you’ve seen
Swan Lake
a hundred times, what is there to do here?”
    Mrs. Plummer slapped at her bangles and said, “We were told when we were in Morocco that children with filthy eye diseases and begging their food were perfectly happy.”
    “Well, at least they have the sun in those places,” said Amabel. She had asked the unanswerable only because she herself was so unhappy. It was true that she had left her husband—it was not the other way around—but he had done nothing to keep her. She had imagined pouring all this out todead Catherine’s mother, who had always been so kind on school holidays because Amabel’s parents were divorced; who had invited her to Italy once, and another time to Morocco. Why else had Amabel come all this way at Christmastime, if not to be adopted? She had fancied herself curled at the foot of Mrs. Plummer’s bed, Mrs. Plummer with a gray braid down on one shoulder, her reading spectacles held between finger and thumb, her book—one of the thick accounts of somebody’s life at Cambridge, the reading of the elderly—slipping off the counterpane as she became more and more engrossed in Amabel’s story. She had seen Mrs. Plummer handing her a deep blue leather case stamped with dead Catherine’s initials. The lid, held back by Mrs. Plummer, was lined with sky-blue moire; the case contained Catherine’s first coral bracelet, her gold sleeper rings, her first locket, her chains and charm bracelets, a string of pearls, her childless godmother’s engagement ring.… “I have no one to leave these to, and Catherine was so fond of you,” said a fantastic Mrs. Plummer.
    None of it could happen, of course: From a chance phrase Amabel learned that the Plummers had given everything belonging to Catherine to the gardener’s children of that house in Italy where Catherine caught spinal meningitis and died. Moreover, Amabel never saw so much as the wallpaper of Mrs. Plummer’s bedroom. When she hinted at her troubles, said something about a wasted life, Mrs. Plummer cut her off with, “Most lives are wasted. All are shortchanged. A few are tragic.”
    The Plummers lived in a dark, drab, high-ceilinged flat. They had somehow escaped the foreigners’ compound, but their isolation was deeper, as though they were embedded in a large block of ice. Amabel had been put in a new hotel, to which the Colonel conducted her each night astonishingly early. They ate their dinner at a nursery hour, and as soon as Amabel had drunk the last of the decaffeinated coffee thePlummers served, the Colonel guided her over the pavement to where his Rover was waiting and freezing, then drove her along streets nearly empty of traffic, but where lights signaled and were obeyed, so that it was like driving in a dream. The sidewalks were dark with crowds. She wiped the mist away from the window with her glove, and saw people dragging Christmas trees along—not for Christmas, for the New Year, Colonel Plummer told her. When he left her in the hotel lobby it was barely half past eight. She felt as