The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  Crystal went to bed. Her mother wandered into the room and out of it, undressing very slowly and smoking a cigarette. After a last look at the mirror she turned out the light, let up the blind and got into her own bed at the other end of the room. When the darkness rushed like invisible water over her and laved her white face, Crystal’s suspicions returned. She lay awake for hours wrestling with her agony, struggling with her thoughts, which coiled and multiplied ceaselessly about her head like the snakes of Medusa’s hair. She lay listening to her mother’s breathing, but there was no sign that her mother, in whom the guilt must lie, was awake. She heard belated taxis rattling in tinny gusts in the hollow streets, and could see through the window the dry sunken glow of the sky. A clock struck three, but the silence flowed in again over the sound. Then her mother stirred. Crystal listened to the beating of her heart, and was terrified to hear her own voice call:

  “Mummy.”

  There was no sound, but the silence in the room had deepened, as though the air had been sucked from beneath it by some listener. Again:

  “Are you awake, Mummy?”

  Mrs. Lance moved. Then she said very distinctly and clearly, as though she too had been awake for hours:

  “What is it?”

  “Mummy … I am dreadfully worried about us. Are you borrowing money from Mr. Trellis?”

  There was a very long silence, and then Mrs. Lance said:

  “It must be three o’clock. Go to sleep, Crystal.”

  “But, Mummy—”

  “Go to sleep, child. There is nothing to worry about.”

  “Then you are!” exclaimed Crystal clearly. “Oh, how awful!” She turned over and sobbed into the pillow. Mrs. Lance sat up in her bed, fingered the switch, and light jumped into the room like a man in blinding mail.

  “For Heaven’s sake, Crystal. You will drive me mad.”

  Her face was yellow in the light, her hair disordered, her cheeks seemed swollen and quivering.

  “What are you doing, child? You go mooning about, poisoning everything. What is the matter with you? I wish to Heaven you would get your precious job, live with your nasty little actor, do something,” she ranted. “Where would we be if I had to depend on you? There was at least peace in the house before you came back. Oh, how I wish to Heaven I’d left you to make a mess of your life. I was a fool to expect gratitude. When I think of the way in which I was treated at your age!”

  Crystal lay silent. The light was hurting her eyes, with its shrillness and glare. Her head was burning and aching.

  “Can’t you say something?”

  Crystal made no answer. Mrs. Lance lay down in her bed.

  “Oh, my heavens,” she groaned.

  They did not speak any more. After long, unnatural hours, the church clock struck four.

  “I must get some sleep,” said Mrs. Lance at last. She reached for the switch and the darkness jumped back out of the corners again.

  Crystal found Mr. Geelong outside Fingest’s the next day at eleven o’clock. Her eyes were shadowed and sharpened. She was nervous and excited.

  “Dear, dear,” she posed for him. “It is dreadful.”

  They walked out of Charing Cross Road, across Trafalgar Square and over to St. James’s Park. He questioned her and some muddled, mysterious story came from her. A muscular bank of white cumulus lolled like the body of a man across the tree-tops, pressing them down, and bands of sparrows twittered on the lawn.

  “O trees, trees,” she cried. “I adore them.”

  “Here,” said Mr. Geelong, indicating a green chair. “They charge you twopence, but on the long ones you always get a lot of nurses and babies. It’s a public park and yet they charge you twopence.”

  “I love them,” she said. “That is what I ought to have done. I ought to have married someone and had a lot of babies. But I have wasted all my time.”

  “We all have to learn,” he began to lecture.

  He could not think what she was laughing at.

  He examined her and, dissatisfied, went on:

  “It is in your own hands. What you do is in your own hands.”

  “Oh dear; it is, I suppose. But don’t tell me so.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “Oh, if people could only stop telling me true things. Oh, what can I do? I can’t go.”

  Through the trees came the sound of the encircling traffic. “Listen, it’s like bees humming,” she said.

  “You are always listening to something else,” he said.

  He began to admonish her, to advise her, and then, seeing she was not listening, to praise her. He patted her on the hand and she squeezed his hand gratefully.

  “Let’s go and have lunch,” he said. “Everything will be all right. I believe you are very brave.”

  “Oh no.”

  “But you are.”

  It occurred to him that what he had said was true.

  “You are very brave!” he exclaimed.

  “I have a plan for you, something you can do. Come along, let’s have lunch.” He was so happy about his plan that at lunch he talked all the time about himself, walking up and down his life like a schoolmaster.

  “You may have wondered about me. These other people in the profession are a hungry, cringing lot. They quarrel like chickens over a worm, they’re all fighting each other. Just like chickens over a worm.”

  “They have to.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “I don’t. I tell you that if I hadn’t a little money of my own I wouldn’t bother about it. Nobody respects you unless you say ‘No’.”

  “Ah, but life is yes, yes, yes, all the time,” Crystal said.

  “That is where you are wrong,” he said.

  “There is no yes, yes about it. You haven’t got to do what people ask you. I have been thinking about you a great deal lately, and wondering what the best solution would be, and I have found it.”

  “Oh, wonders! Do tell me. Is this the plan?”

  He looked with patient disapprobation at her excitement and said, “I think you had better marry me.”

  She could not hold her laughter.

  “No,” she cried. “No. But how nice and kind it is of you.”

  “I have a little freehold property …” he went on.

  “But, Mr. Geelong, it is awfully sweet and nice and thoughtful of you, but …”

  “Why not? What is your reason? I am a gentleman. I have thought it all out very thoroughly, and I can’t see any objection.” He was genuinely surprised by her mockery.

  “Oh, but remember no one respects you unless you say ‘No’,” she quoted.

  “This is quite different,” he said solemnly.

  “It was a difficult decision to make, and I have weighed it carefully. There are disadvantages. There is for instance the question of your mother.”

  Crystal blushed very deeply.

  “Oh, there is always something. She is always there, like a thorn in the cushion.”

  “In the flesh,” he corrected. “She won’t be if I marry you. It is in your hands.”

  “I don’t believe in love any more,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, not wishing to insist on that point, “suppose we leave it at this to-day. It is better to be cautious. And you are so inclined to rush romantically into things. Always rushing.”

  They parted. That evening a large blue and white spotted silk handkerchief arrived for Crystal by the post. “I remember”, a note on the package read, “you admired this, but this is not the same one.”

  Puzzling over the note put Crystal in a very good humour, but her mother was silent and preoccupied. They scarcely spoke.

  “How hard it is to be wise,” Crystal thought. But nothing was said. Crystal was unaware of the hours. In the morning she walked all the way to Cambridge Circus, thinking as she passed along the purposeful crowd, “It is better to be wise, and then I would be as happy as everyone else. When you are married you do not think of anything, because everything is settled. That must be
a great relief.”

  Mr. Geelong persisted, and one morning she agreed that it would be a funny thing if after all she did marry him, but how could she face Mummy?

  “I propose to tell her,” said Mr. Geelong.

  “In fact I have been rather worried, very worried and uncomfortable that I did not first mention the matter to your mother before speaking to you. You know I do not like to feel …”

  “Oh, please,” said Crystal in alarm. “Afterwards, afterwards would be much better.”

  He tried to oppose this, but she began to tangle him up in an endless thread of reasons and explanations, and against his will he was caught in a net of compromises. They could get married at a registry office in spite of the fact that the Bishop was a very good friend of a friend of his. But no! At a registry office that would be better.

  “You see,” said Crystal, “it would be just as if nothing had happened.”

  “The tenants are leaving my house this month. I let it every summer furnished. It would be economical, and we could go there, down by the sea.”

  “Oh, the sea,” And then she remembered a night at Mineanchor and her mother. “No,” she said, it would be better if they just got married, and she went back to live with her mother, and then make the break gradually. “Not the sea. I hate it. It is full of disasters. And Mummy is dreadful when she is in a temper. She once fired a pistol at Daddy.”

  “A pistol? I’d have the law on her if she fired a pistol at me.”

  “Yes, but that was a long time ago,” Crystal hurriedly said. “We could make the break gradually until …”

  “Until when?” he asked in bewilderment,

  “Well, we might get a job together.”

  “Well, we’ll see about it,” he said. “It is no good forcing things.”

  He was becoming as secretive as herself.

  The next day they discussed the marriage, and she refused to have anything to do with it.

  “It isn’t,” she explained politely, “that I don’t like you. If I married anyone I would marry you, because you are older than me. But I shall never marry anyone.”

  “Crystal,” he warned her, “you will probably find you have to marry Mr. Trellis as things are going. You very probably will. I can see it.”

  “Oh dear, why are there so many people to marry,” she cried. “It would be easier if there was only one. You know?”

  “But there is only one,” he said slyly, then became stern. “All right,” he said, “I understand. I have interfered. I will withdraw. I see I have caused you anxiety, but it was quite from disinterested motives. Entirely disinterested, I assure you. I unreservedly withdraw.”

  Crystal was very depressed when she left him. She had this superstitious regard for him, and she could not bear to think she was losing him. If she could have him, and yet not have him. If she could have everyone from the Marquès and all the dear people onward.

  So it happened that Crystal came back and spent a very difficult morning persuading him that, without wishing to be impolite, she felt she ought to marry him. They were married at a registry office one morning, went to a cinema in the afternoon and dined together in the evening. His eyes were gay, as if all the blue figures in a ledger had jumped out of their columns to dance. He ordered a bottle of Chianti, but Crystal could scarcely eat or drink anything. One moment she was very hot and the next very cold. She looked at his hair and the lines on his face, and when she thought “My husband”, “Mrs. Geelong”, she wanted to run out into the street and scream. She was longing to get home and cry. At last, very solemnly, he took her home. She wished he would not come with her, the street seemed to be made of iron. She stood talking with him in the doorway of a tobacconist’s for twenty minutes, but when he said, “I think you must go in now, because it has been a very busy day”, she softened, caught him by both forearms and kissed him. She smelt the scent he had put on his coat in honour of the marriage. He was very startled, and his hat was awry, but he kissed her and said:

  “To-morrow at eleven, dear.”

  “Perhaps there will be something,” she cried.

  He was very moved, and waved his newspaper to her as she went in at the front door.

  Once in the flat she wondered if she would throw herself out of the window, but her mother was reading something out of the paper, and she had to pretend to listen. She went to bed and became feverish, and stayed in bed for three days. She wished never to get up again, never to see the sky, the streets, the people. All the time during those three days the words ‘freehold property, freehold property’ tapped this way and that way across the top of her head like the toes of a chorus. On the fourth day she was much better and got up. Curiosity stirred her. She must see him. She must hear what he had been thinking. Her mother said derisively:

  “I suppose I shall have to be dragging you out of Mr. Geelong’s arms next. He has telephoned three times for you.”

  A wave of secret delight and anxiety unsteadied Crystal, and she thought, “He’s very good for me. I must go and see him.”

  A fortnight passed as though nothing had happened. Mrs. Lance walked indolently, dreaming about the flat. The two women watched each other, but scarcely spoke. Sometimes each had the light of secret triumph and stealthiness in her eyes. There were long periods of content—warm, recondite and feline, broken by times of furtiveness and worry. Crystal and her mother sat on the edges of their chairs listening for the telephone bell outside in the hall. Sometimes their lips parted and their eyes blinked as though they were about to speak, each with all her heart, but the invisible, still-born thoughts fell like empty balls of paper between them, unspoken. It was a strange situation; for it never entered Crystal’s head that her mother was Mr. Trellis’ mistress; and Mrs. Lance, confused in the dream of her own life, could never have imagined that Crystal would marry Mr. Geelong, whatever else she might do.

  Tragedy in a Greek Theatre

  Those who used to go to Sicily for the winter will remember old William Bantock, the artist, who had such a delightful studio on the cliff at A—. From his window you could see the widening floor of the Straits of Messina lain to the sky. It was a pretty studio. There was a heaped deluge of purple bougainvillea pouring from its roof; a vine trellised over its porch. All will remember old William Bantock with his fat thumb angled over his palette, his head as bald and ripe and shiny as a cheese; and his corpulent, windy way of talking. He was a bachelor and he lived alone.

  You will remember edging round his studio, looking at the innumerable panels and little sketches of Etna and the Greek Theatre. Volcano, theatre; volcano, theatre; one after the other almost like picture postcards. I wonder how many thousand studies of Etna and the Greek Theatre he painted in his lifetime, and how many thousand he sold to the tourists. Somebody once asked him. Old William became suddenly very testy, and gruffly steered the fellow out of the room.

  The studio was a longish room with a window looking on to the Straits. This window must have been added at a later date. And at one end of the studio was a door leading into another room. No one was allowed to go into that room. It became a mystery. Those people with a flair for other people’s private sorrows used to discuss the room. And old William himself added to the mystery by lying so carelessly when you asked him about it. To you he would say, “Oh, that is my study.” To you, “Oh, that? My bathroom.” To another, “Bedroom.” Some would catch him unawares, and he would stutter, “Oh, that’s my … it has.… Oh, lumber room, old junk, nothing! It’s empty.”

  After his death, with no one left to prevent them knowing the mystery, people’s curiosity dropped. The proprietor of the Volcano Hotel, who had been old William’s landlord, went with me one day to the studio and we opened the door of the mystery room. It was empty. That is, there was no furniture in it. Nothing except a dozen large canvases leaning against the wall, cobwebbed and sooty. And on an easel was another large canvas, half finished, and with evidence of recent paint. It was the usual thing of Etna and the Theat
re. The sky was very black and dead-looking. Some vague forms were sketched in it. You could not say what they were. We pulled out the other canvases and banged them on the floor to shake out the cobwebs. The same subject again. Did he never paint anything different? A big spider rolled out like a bead.

  The room was very warm. The air was stagnant, tepid. We tried to push open the skylight, but the rod had rusted, and sifted down red dust into our eyes as we looked up, poking away. The air of the room was flat and stale. There were one or two dead flies upside down on the floor. It was as though the thoughts Old William had left there in his lifetime were still present; as though his breath were still there, vapid, thick on the amber air. I was depressed. I felt we had intruded on the scene of a suspected tragedy, the tragedy I had half sensed during his lifetime. And when the proprietor pulled out his pipe and struck a match to light it, I cried out, irritated, “For goodness’ sake don’t do that.” He was startled; and was not sure of himself for days after.

  We found an anthology of Greek translations, torn, and a gape of tea stained on it. Ten pages only were cut. I found a roll of water-colours. These were rough, rapid things. I bought them afterwards. I still have them. He was not a great artist, but there was a flash of greatness in those water-colours: he must have once had the fire. I told the proprietor this one day, and he brightened at the compliment to his late tenant. He said firmly, but not immodestly, “He owed his success to me. I made him.” From that moment I began to piece together William Bantock’s story.

  If you have been going to A— as long as I have, and if you have been as hard up as I have been, you will have known John Puigi, the proprietor of the Volcano Hotel; his was the cheapest hotel in the place. Clean but modest. John Puigi was an English-looking man. His mother had been an English governess, and his father a minute Sicilian functionary. John was a deliberate, plodding fellow, with an Italian readiness for seeing things and an English thoroughness and patience in carrying them out. He had been head waiter in a big hotel in Naples; the undermanager at a place in Palermo. Finally, many years ago, he had started on his own at A—, where there was a growing winter season. The English came every year with their red necks, and high, clean collars; and John got his share of their custom.