The Spanish Virgin Read online

  The Spanish Virgin

  And Other Stories

  By

  V. S. Pritchett

  To Evelyn

  Contents

  The Spanish Virgin

  Tragedy in a Greek Theatre

  The White Rabbit

  Fishy

  The Corsican Inn

  The Petrol Dump

  The Haunted Room

  Rain in the Sierra

  The Sack of Lights

  The Cuckoo Clock

  The Gnats

  A Note on the Author

  The Spanish Virgin

  I

  At five o’clock in the afternoon the official scraped across the sorting office to his stool, blew a funnel of violet smoke from the wet cigarette-end that was stuck to the corner of his lower lip, and then threw open the guichet of the Poste Restante. He stared, through the firm, smiling woman who for days now had been the first to call, to the pretty girl who accompanied her.

  “Have you any letters for Mrs. Lance?” asked the woman in quick but imperfect Spanish.

  He slowly took down the letters from their pigeon-holes without taking his eyes off the girl and then perfunctorily went through the pile, pausing to glance again at her.

  “Nothing,” he said, as though the woman’s question had been utterly absurd.

  “Mrs. Lance the name was,” repeated the woman.

  He shook his head firmly.

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  The two went out talking in English loudly, knowing they would not be understood. He stared at the girl, from the tips of her high heels, the sheen of her silk stockings, the straight stalk of her back to the gay hat which seemed to have alighted on the top of her head like a butterfly.

  “Ay yai yai,” he sighed, fidgeting on his stool as they disappeared into the street; and began, with melancholy, to bite the nails on his thick, yellow fingers. He blew another funnel of smoke which aimed for the doorway and there hopelessly diffused.

  “This is a disaster, Crystal,” said Mrs. Lance.

  “Poor Mummy!”

  Crystal’s voice tinkled like a bell, not like a real bell with its shrillness, tinnyness, or starved metallic ring, but like the sweetened bells of a golden sleigh in a ballet. Disaster? The dreadful, dramatic, thrilling word. In Rosario, when she was only three, daddy coming in and saying, “The drought has ruined everything. Disaster …” Yet the sky had been marvellously blue in Rosario. In Egypt, “Great dam disaster, hundreds drowned.” There was a solid swirling of bearded water, with scores of brown heads like cocoanuts dotted over it. And now mummy was saying it was a disaster, that she had not heard from Uncle Tom about some money. They were in a disaster! She was in a disaster!

  “He is a devil not to send the money, Crystal!” Mrs. Lance said. “If that is all we are to expect from the relations when we get to London, Heaven help us. I’ve done what I can. I told that beastly oily manager creature so when he asked again about the bill. I said, ‘Do you think we want to stay in this beastly hole for the rest of our lives? Full of Americans too, and everyone spitting.’ But I expect we shall have to. The Bank can’t do anything. Pleasant prospect, eh?”

  “But, Mummy,” Crystal was trying very hard to believe this true, “I am sure we could do something.…”

  “Oh yes, Crystal, oh yes! I have no doubt we can steal or walk or fly. I am sure we can do something quite easily.”

  “But I could do something, surely.…”

  “Unquestionably. You could probably swim home,” said Mrs. Lance.

  Mrs. Lance was a slight and militant figure. She was severely and mannishly dressed. Between her daughter and herself there was little physical resemblance beyond the pride of their lips; but while in the daughter pride budded at the lips and had not formed in her body or her thoughts, with the mother it encased her frame like the bark of a lithe tree. Pride was in her gestures of indifference, the caustic scorn of her voice, the disdainful droop at the corners of her thin mouth. She was a woman of about forty-six years of age, a widow, and Crystal was her only daughter. Mrs. Lance’s hair was straight and black and glossy, with one narrow seam of grey in it. Her skin was the colour of straw. She had a small, aquiline nose, and high cheek-bones which, because of the tightness of her skin, seemed to thrust her widely set eyes forward. They, too, with their curious molten-silver deadness, in which the pupils were no more than broken pastel flecks, seemed to be stretched by the angularity of the skull. She was always sending smiles like indolent flicks of a whip across her face, that seemed to finish with a twirl and a snap when she spoke. Her voice had an affected drawl that was calculating rather than tired. She was frank, bitter, snobbish and courageous. She controlled a jealous temper and adopted towards her daughter an attitude of affectionate contempt. She liked making enemies.

  In the last few weeks, since Mrs. Lance’s reckless decision to leave the boat at Gibraltar and travel overland had ended in this anticlimax in Seville, she and Crystal had become well-known pictures in the streets of the city, in the Cathedral, the gardens; and the bulging eyes of the Andalusians, who scraped like listless, long-nosed planets about the streets, yawning, sighing, or humming to themselves, would suddenly awaken to a diamond brilliance.

  “Ay, la mariposa!” they would cry out if Crystal were walking alone. And would follow her a dozen yards with an ardour that burned out quickly. She seemed to be unhuman; not a fairy from wild and delicate hills, but an artificial creature stepping out of the Cinderella coach in a pantomime. Her presence was a glitter of light that threw shadows of grotesqueness upon all other people. One fancied that bells tinkled as her feet tapped down the streets; when she spoke each speech was a little soprano rapture, seductive and enquiring; each word seemed to have wings of its own.

  She was only twenty in those days, ingenuous, fearing to displease. Her body was frail and her head seemed at first too doll-like, too large and wise for it. Her hair was a light abundant auburn which she wore thickly coiled over her ears, and this gave her a deceptive primness. Her skin was pale and her cheeks had the flush of a tinctured porcelain. Her colouring was a perfume rather than a branching of blood in her veins. Her deep blue eyes sometimes were set with a pride and stubbornness but more often they invited and danced, laughed and dreamed. She went about with a pretty, determined air, humming like a bee in a timeless world of her own with an idle belief in the goodness and happiness of everyone. And this world was a miniature of the exotic, extravagant, sensational and sentimental world which her mother’s gay and spiteful talk had evoked over and over again.

  “Ay, la mariposa!”—the butterfly. Crystal herself was something of a cry, an exclamation. In her vivid, gauzy dresses, with her big, blue bow in her hair, poised almost on tiptoe in her very high-heeled shoes, she was like some elaborate butterfly and had something of its brief, intricate lordliness.

  The day was blue and still hot. It was the same dense blueness of yesterday and to-day and forever; the sky a dome of ceramic. One walked listlessly through the white-walled streets. The whiteness of the houses was the rough whiteness of an Arab’s robes; the barred windows were impassive, spectacled eyes, the houses had the remote gravity of an Arab’s face. There were at once an Arab sweetness, a Christian roughness, a gypsy fatalism in the air. In the Plaza, into which mother and daughter walked, the fronds of the palm-trees gleamed like bunches of grotesque metals. Men lay asleep against the shaded walls, waiters snored in the empty cafés, cab drivers slept under the striped awnings of their cabs. Even the old woman who shouted lottery tickets for that mañana of fortune which never came, was silent, and the only movements in the vivid square occurred outside the hotel where the English tourists were getting out of the hotel bus and were making jokes about the high
Andalusian hats they had bought. From the top of the Giralda, Seville was nothing but a heap of pink and white earthenware raked together in a trembling circle of green plain.

  “I can’t bear the sight of that place,” said Mrs. Lance as they approached the hotel. So they walked once round the Plaza, and at the top a tallish young man who was fanning his face with a newspaper came across the street to greet them. He gave the impression of thickness and heat. The perspiration shone on his stout, red skin and trickled through the cropped, fair hair above his ears. His features were large and clumsy, his thick lips were parted for some seconds before he spoke. His eyes were as big as blue alleys and earnest. In every way there seemed too much of him—too much flesh on his jaw, too many thistle-like hairs on his large hands, too much yellow moustache for his short upper lip. He was the kind of man who could never look cool. He was English. He had met the Lances on the boat a day out of Alexandria and he had attached himself to them at Gibraltar. They had escaped him at Ronda, but here, in Seville, they had found him again, staying at the same hotel. When the disaster had occurred, Mrs. Lance, who had been slightly irritated by his attentions to Crystal, suddenly changed her mind, had become very friendly and had placed him entirely under her spell by telling him one evening the history of her life. For she needed an ally, though it meant that Crystal had a suitor, and even there Mrs. Lance had nothing to fear. She knew she was very much more interesting than Crystal, and she was soon able to do what she liked with the young man by talking about herself, describing her past life to him, insisting upon the childishness and innocent foolishness of Crystal, thanking him for the protection of his friendship and flattering him by contrasting the honourable behaviour of Englishman with the slyness of all foreigners. From that moment he had not concealed his opinion that she was a brave and skilful woman who was sacrificing everything for her daughter, and that Crystal was something so rare and beautiful that it must be protected with the most pitying, platonic affection, like an innocent child. Any stronger emotion was reduced to confusion by Mrs. Lance’s confidences, and his feelings for Crystal had finally resolved themselves into a wistful regard, a thin wreath of smoke curling up from a damp and muddled bonfire, as she recounted the unhappy state of her affairs.

  “I feel …” Mrs. Lance had said—and the sight of Crystal was sufficient to dismiss his suspicions—“that Crystal and I can tell you everything. What a God-send it is in a country like this.”

  “You are like one of our family?” Crystal had added on her puzzling note of interrogation.

  “Ah, Alec!” exclaimed Mrs. Lance, making his name sparkle on her lips, putting her head on one side and almost closing her eyes as she gave him her hand. The little fine lines of pleasure that played round her mouth made her quite feline. He looked at Crystal with hungry adoration and then sharply gave Mrs. Lance an anxious, propitiating smile.

  “You are steaming,” said Crystal.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” he laughed and threw away a cigarette.

  “But you were steaming, Alec!” Crystal insisted.

  He mopped his brow and enquired:

  “Have you heard anything yet?”

  “Not a thing,” answered Mrs. Lance wearily.

  “Nothing,” said Crystal, appealing to him with her saint-like eyes.

  “But, but, but you must …” protested Alec Ferguson.

  “It is pretty desperate,” said Mrs. Lance, in her steadfast, man-to-man voice.

  “Have they said anything more to you, I mean … at …” he hardly liked to mention the word, for they had made him hate the place too, “at the … hotel?”

  “I think I thoroughly frightened that nasty little toad of a man in the office.”

  “Good for you!” exclaimed Alec loudly.

  “Mummy was awful,” said Crystal proudly. “Just like she used to be to the Gippies.”

  “I am not a fool,” said Mrs. Lance with a dogged, quiet laugh. “I had a good deal of practice with my husband.”

  “He was dreadful to poor Mummy,” put in Crystal. “He would not let her go to parties or do anything. She had only me.”

  She walked on slightly in front of Ferguson, who did not know how he prevented his arm from wavering behind her. She was a slender peak of candle-flame that he was protecting from the wind. The way she said ‘me’ on a rising note in her voice!

  “What do you think you will do?” he enquired.

  “I don’t know, I haven’t the faintest idea. I have never been in this position before,” drawled Mrs. Lance, turning her full, martyred face towards him.

  Ferguson took a deep breath, and looking at Mrs. Lance, and wishing he had the courage to utter his cry to Crystal instead, said vehemently:

  “Well, for my sake”—he was running short of breath—“I … hope hope your money never comes, and then you won’t have to go away.”

  For Alec Ferguson had come to Seville permanently for an English engineering company. The two women smiled at each other, and then reflected their gratitude upon him.

  When they got back to the hotel they saw their Spanish friend, the Marquès de Palominas, sitting in the patio.

  “The Marquès!” exclaimed Crystal. “I adore him, Alec, don’t you? Isn’t he lovely? He is so gallant! But Mrs. Marquès she is too hard on him, I think?”

  Mrs. Lance and Ferguson exchanged amused confidential glances. He felt that he belonged to Mrs. Lance in moments like this. She treated him like a son, and he went away with awe and gratitude.

  The Marquès was sitting in the patio of the hotel. He rose and sought chairs for them, chattering, protesting, waving compliments about from one to the other, as if he had streamers in his fingers. He was a stout dignified little man, black and yellow, and with a deep, dry, booming voice. His eyes were tragic and dead and sunken into trembling brown triangular sockets. His nose was small and sharp, and when he spoke his skin, which had been dried up and wrinkled by the sun, was pulled into scores of lines and wrinkles like a web that is suddenly shaken and stretched. His harsh and polite voice seemed to pass over a rough tongue out of a coarse furry body and smelled of scent and cigars. He owned a considerable estate of vines and olive groves near Baeza. He travelled every year to San Sebastian, and once had been to London. He was shrewd, affable, and obstinate and easily excited. He would rise late, talk to his wife at breakfast, go out and buy a paper, have his shoes cleaned in the Plaza, sit in cafés, eat an enormous lunch, sleep for two or three hours and then sit in the patio of the hotel without a thought in his head, waiting for his wife to come down.

  “What I liked most in England,” he was saying to Mrs. Lance and Crystal, for nothing pleased him more than to speak to foreigners, and it was so rarely that one found any who could speak Spanish. “What I liked most was the quilts. Lovely, thick, warm, down quilts, light as clouds. Ah!” he blew a kiss into the air. “They were divine! So warm! So cosy! I could stay in bed all day long.”

  “I love them too,” cried Crystal.

  “You are ridiculous,” said Mrs. Lance proudly.

  “Ah ha,” he said, tapping Crystal on the knee. “You understand, eh? That is worth Peekadeely and Bookinghom Pollars! Every thing!” He was still laughing when his wife came down.

  She was slightly taller than he, as pale as flour. She dressed in black. She was large and black and white and swollen, and though she sighed a great deal of air out of her body, she did not get smaller. She spoke very formally in a very high voice that shook her chins as if they were a toppling pile of saucers. She was very devout and came to Seville every Easter to see the religious ceremonies, and she did not like foreigners because they were usually not Roman Catholics. Although she seemed drowsy and obese she was nervous and suspicious, and her small black eyes were very observant.

  “Here in Spain we are all Christians,” she lost no opportunity of saying. And she looked with great disapproval at Mrs. Lance’s clothes, and on Crystal, with guarded suspicion of her prettiness.

  “And her mother allows
her to go about the streets alone like that!”

  The next day, shortly after Crystal had left the hotel with a note for a certain Madame Mathieu, whose acquaintance her mother had made in Cairo, the Marquès sent for a carriage and went out for his daily drive. It was late in the afternoon when the heat declines and the cool air is not unpleasantly soured by the odour of bodies and wine. The Marquès lay back in his carriage at an angle of forty degrees because the seat was too narrow for him to sit comfortably. He sat, with his large head wagging lifelessly from side to side as the vehicle bumped over the cobbles, a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He nodded to the priests, who were more numerous now that Holy Week was upon the city, stared incredulously at the tourists, and wiped his brow when the sunlight caught him as his carriage drew into the wider streets. He had taken his hat off and he was borne through the streets like a great, half-smoked cigar on an ash-tray.

  When the carriage turned into the glare of the Plaza San Fernando, he got out and had his boots cleaned. His manner was still remote, his mind absent. He gave the boot-black his pennies without knowing he did it and came back to his carriage and drove across the Plaza. There the carriage was obliged to wait to let two crowded yellow trams cross into the narrow streets. It was then that he saw Crystal waiting, and Crystal saw him. His eyes suddenly danced in his head, his mind returned to his body; he was the cigar relit. He jumped from the carriage and gravely kissed her hand.

  “I am waiting for a tram,” she said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Madame Mathieu.”

  “And who is she to deserve such a visitor? Where does she live? I will take you.”

  Crystal became very prim and said:

  “I am sure you … are not going that …”

  “I put myself at your feet. I am going anywhere that you are going.”

  “Thank you,” said Crystal, very self-possessed. “That will be very nice for me.” And got in.

  The carriage drove quickly from the tangle of streets, among the hooting taxis, and the people who passed washed up to the carriage and twinkled past it like spray. She could not always hear what the Marquès said, but she sat smiling and laughing very low and merrily with pleasure. The Marquès was informative and gallant.