Overhead in a Balloon Read Online Free PDF

approve of any other. He said, rather coldly, “Have you been in this country long?”
    “Around fifty years.”
    “Then you should know some French.”
    “I don’t speak it if I don’t have to. I never liked it.”
    He put down his cup, engulfed by a wave of second-generation distress. She was his first foreign widow. Most painters, whatever their origins, had sense enough to marry French-women – unrivalled with creditors, thrifty hoarders of bits of real estate, endowed with relations in country places where one could decamp in times of need and war.
    “Perhaps, where you come from –” he began.
    “Saskatchewan.”
    His tea had gone cold. Tannic scum had collected on its surface. She said, “This idea of yours, this show – what was it you called it? The hospitality of your gallery? I just want to say don’t count on me. Don’t count on me for anything. I don’t mind showing you what I’ve got. But not today. The studio hasn’t been dusted or heated for years, and even the light isn’t working.”
    In Speck’s experience, this was about average for a first attempt. Before making for civilization he stopped at a florist’s in the shopping centre and ordered two dozen roses to bedelivered to Mme. Cruche. While these were lifted, dripping, from a plastic pail, he jotted down a warm message on his card, crossing out the engraved “Dr. Sandor Speck.” His title, earned by a thesis on French neo-Humanism and its ups and downs, created some confusion in Paris, where it was taken to mean that Speck could cure slipped discs and gastric ulcers. Still, he felt that it gave a grip to his name, and it was his only link with all the freethinking, agnostic Specks, who, though they had not been able to claim affinity by right of birth with Voltaire and Descartes, had probably been wise and intelligent and quite often known as “Dr.”
    As soon as he got back to the gallery, he had Walter look up Saskatchewan in an atlas. Its austere oblong shape turned his heart to ice. Walter said that it was one of the right-angled territories that so frequently contain oil. Oil seemed to Speck to improve the oblong. He saw a Chirico chessboard sliding off towards a horizon where the lights of derricks twinkled and blinked.
    H e let a week go by before calling Lydia Cruche.
    “I won’t be able to show you those roses of yours,” she said. “They died right off.”
    He took the hint and arrived with a spray of pale-green orchids imported from Brazil. Settled upon the faded sofa, which was apparently destined to be his place, he congratulated his hostess on the discovery of oil in her native plain.
    “I haven’t seen or heard of the place since Trotsky left the Soviet Union,” she said. “If there is oil, I’d sooner not know about it. Oil is God’s curse.” The iron silence that followed this seemed to press on Speck’s lungs. “That’s a bad coughyou’ve got there, Doctor,” she said. “Men never look after those things. Who looks after you?”
    “I look after myself,” said Speck.
    “Where’s your wife? Where’d she run off to?”
    Not even “Are you married?” He saw his hostess as a tough little pagan figure, with a goddess’s gift for reading men’s lives. He had a quick vision of himself clasping her knees and sobbing out the betrayal of his marriage, though he continued to sit upright, crumbling walnut cake so that he would not have to eat it.
    “My wife,” he said, “insofar as I can still be said to have one, has gone to live in a warm climate.”
    “She run off alone? Women don’t often do that. They haven’t got that kind of nerve.”
    Stepping carefully, for he did not wish to sound like a stage cuckold or a male fool, Speck described in the lightest possible manner how Henriette had followed her lover, a teacher of literature, to a depressed part of French-speaking Africa where the inhabitants were suffering from a shortage of Racine. Unable to halt once he had started, he tore on