Wishart has summer plans. They remind me of Walter’s widow-soaked season in “An Unmarried Man’s Summer”. Here, however, Bonnie is a divorcee.

“Like many spiteful, snobbish, fussy men, or a certain type of murderer, Wishart chose his friends among middle-aged solitary women.”

It’s not just for effect, this comment: there is something darker in Wishart’s nature. No, he’s not a murderer, but it’s possible that spending substantial amount of time with him could provoke a homicidal episode. Ask Bonnie.

In other years, apparently, their summer holidays ended with Bonnie and Wishart fighting and going their separate ways in a huff which was barely mended before the following summer. This season begins well enough, but the strain begins to show when Wishart’s next destination falls through.

The next woman in line delays her invitation to Venice and Wishart is forced to stay longer with Bonnie (and admit, both to her and to himself, that he was not as deeply desirable a companion as he may have pretended). Now he is no longer there with Bonnie by choice, now she must admit that he is the kind of man one might put off: neither party is content.

“He looked with real suspicion now at the sand, probably treacherous with broken bottles, and at the sea, which, though blue and sparkling, was probably full of germs. Even the sky was violated; across the face of it an airplane was writing the name of a drink.”

Their relationship is not romantic, however. Bonnie’s daughter, Flor, jokes that her parents are Catholics, “so they don’t believe in their own divorce”. Bonnie’s romantic energy is directed towards encouraging Flor’s efforts. Wishart’s attendance barely supports the possibility that some man, some time, may have an interest in Bonnie, but she is always on the lookout for a gentleman. Looking past Wishart, that is.

“But what did Wishart know about men? He was a woman-haunter, woman’s best friend. She put on her sunglasses in order to hide her exasperation with him, because he was a man but not the right person.”

Wishart sneers at romance and holds women in contempt generally. “If he let his thoughts move without restraint into the world of women, he discovered an area dimly lighted and faintly disgusting, like a kitchen in a slum. It was a world of migraines, miscarriages, disorder, and tears.”

Both Bonnie and Wishart are disillusioned. Inwardly, each itemizes the qualities in the other which are lamentable, distasteful, and disgusting. It feels both intensely personal and wholly removed from this relationship: together, they despise what they claim they do not want and, instead, despise one another.

Young Flor, however, still has her dreams, even if she has moved to a lower-level flat this summer, down in the grit with her new beau.

“Lacking an emotional country, it might be possible to consider another person one’s home. She pressed her face against his unmoving arm, accepting everything imperfect, as one accepts a faulty but beloved country, or the language in which one’s thoughts are formed. It was the most dangerous of ideas, this ‘Only you can save me,’ but her need to think it was so overwhelming that she wondered if this was what men, in the past, had been trying to say when they had talked to her about love.”

For Mavis Gallant, a woman in exile, the idea of home is central to this story which is not, in the end, about men and women at all. The dialogue and the scenic creations are entertaining and engaging, but the core relationship is between Bonnie and Flor. It is cast against the backdrop of summer in Cannes, but it is an ongoing drama of lonely and relentless interdependence between two rootless women, neither of whom knows her own self well enough to enjoy her own solitude.

“This was July. The summer, a fruit already emptied by wasps, still hung on its tree.”

Note: This is part of a series of posts on Mavis Gallant’s stories, as I read through her short fiction. This is the twenty-seventh story in Going Ashore. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story; I would love the company. Next week’s story: “On With the New in France”.