The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  “What a pity you didn’t continue,” said Crystal.

  Mrs. Lance warmed with remembered resentment.

  “Oh, my dear child, they wouldn’t let me. He hadn’t any money. Not that marrying money did me any good. I often think how much I should like my mother to be alive now to see the mess she made of my life.”

  “But I meant the stage,” said Crystal, fearing to stir up once more the tale of her mother’s woes—“continue with the stage, I meant.”

  “Well, I was thought rather a beauty,” Mrs. Lance said.

  “Oh think,” cried Crystal rapturously, “think how glorious it would have been for you, and you would have had lots of friends and success and money, and you would have taken me about with you everywhere you went.”

  “I should have done nothing of the sort,” said Mrs. Lance. But it was Mrs. Lance’s relations who helped decide the question in Crystal’s favour by their ridicule and opposition. After that episode at Uncle Laurence’s they said, “My dear, Crystal is quite impossible. Please please, don’t let her go near the theatre, it would be fatal.”

  “Oh, their minds are like workbaskets,” Mrs. Lance cried. “I have always shocked them, Crystal.” And snatched all the credit for the scandal. For the decision in Crystal’s favour had been taken almost unconsciously from that moment.

  In the past eighteen months of struggle in London Crystal’s spirit had become independent. She knew that her eyes and her speech and her gestures had a pretty power; and that her mother was alarmed, but pretending that she was unchanged. Her mother had insisted on staying with her in the north of London when she had been playing for the first time, had come round to the theatre every night and had sat in her dressing-room; and since that time, as often as she could, Mrs. Lance would accompany Crystal on her dreary and hopeless visits to the theatrical agents and managers. She insisted on knowing all Crystal’s friends, and finding out all about them and she would frequently ask them to come round to the room near Fitzroy Square.

  She would pretend to Crystal that she did not really wish them to come round.

  “They are such contemptible little people, darling,” she would say in the voice of the martyred gentlewoman. This deceived Crystal, for she would say anxiously:

  “Mummy, I know it is dreadful for you. One has to be so careful what one says to them. They are so sensitive and if they think for a moment you are …cutting them, then they are dreadful to you. They are so vain and suspicious.”

  Mrs. Lance had at first been afraid and jealous of the new Crystal, but her overmastering desire was for the return of her wealth. She could not admit the fact that she had ever ceased to be wealthy. Her talk was again an increasing pageant of rich islands and continents in which she had luxuriously lived, galloped horses, won absurd wagers, and despised everybody. She stood in the room like a rapier thrust into the floor, quivering and shining. The air seemed vibrant when she was there. The light that came through the lofty windows of the old house revived when it had penetrated the glass and had bound itself on the arms of the few chairs, the edge of the tall blue screen by the door, in the rim of the circular table, as if it were changed by her into tangible bands of metal. She would tell blunt and exaggerated stories of her life to Crystal’s stage acquaintances. She would say, and her voice had the idle swagger of a whip:

  “It is a question of luck. I have had some damnably good luck and now it’s damnably bad. I was once told by a fortune teller I should be very wealthy, lose every penny and then”—looking affectionately and meaningly at Crystal—“win the whole lot back.”

  This was the new situation which Mrs. Lance was creating. The past was hers; the future was Crystal’s, and through Crystal her rescue from this squalid poverty must come. In the meantime, until Crystal succeeded, Mrs. Lance almost unconsciously put her daughter to that usage into which she had stealthily and amusedly slipped in Seville; Crystal made friends and brought them to the house where her mother, unknown to her, would borrow money from them. Crystal’s beauty was becoming her mother’s capital. As the months went by and Mrs. Lance’s circle of creditors became inevitably wider, so she became more unscrupulous. There would be periods of depression in which she would tell Crystal they might as well put their heads in the gas oven, followed by periods of excitement in which she would be sending urgent messages for loans, managing to persuade an impatient friend or relation to lend her another couple of pounds and then:

  “I will settle up the whole amount with you at the end of the month when my money comes.”

  Mrs. Lance would not admit to herself that she was using Crystal in this way, and she did not confide in her.…Soon, she argued to herself, something will happen; we must get over the difficulties of the present as best we can and hope we shall soon be able to forget all about them.

  There was one friend from whom Mrs. Lance never borrowed, and he was a certain Mr. Adolphe Trellis, whose two boys she was coaching. And she did not borrow from him because she had deep ambitions. Mrs. Lance had been introduced to him by Aunt Hilda, who was the only member of the family who lived in London.

  Adolphe Trellis was a man of about Mrs. Lance’s own age and an architect by profession. He dressed well, but there was a finicky old-maidishness about his clothes. His head was distinguished, his forehead was high, cutting into his thinning grey hair. His complexion was sallow. Under grey, bushy eyebrows that were carefully brushed upwards at the ends, were large, solemn, indulgent eyes. He was in the habit of letting his head fall over loosely to one side and looking mockingly at the speaker, affecting to be shocked. The prominent teeth under the weak drooping moustache gave him at once a hungry and horrified appearance. He spoke slowly, as if the right words were sparse; as they passed over his lips they were sweetened and made humid. He seemed to lick his words first, as if testing their flavour. He was cultivated and grave. He walked with short, sharp steps like a woman’s. He enjoyed Mrs. Lance immensely; she made him clownish.

  “Ah, Mrs. Spitfire,” he used to say to her.

  “The Wicked Uncle,” she would retort.

  And then he would roll his eyes and look at Crystal and say in a rasping voice:

  “I shall strangle my two children in the tower.”

  Crystal would laugh because she had heard him say this so often, and wondered if he knew how silly he was to play at wicked uncles with her mother. Before Crystal, Mrs. Lance and Mr. Trellis behaved and talked with absurd exaggeration. They would boast about their past lives and profess great ruthlessness and cynicism. It was as if the votaries of two infallible and indivisible catholic faiths had met in the same thoroughfare with images, banners, vestments and candles, and were taking pleasure in passing and repassing each other in defiance. Mrs. Lance admired him; not only had he relations but foreign relations. He could pointedly utter the names of governors and ambassadors. There was the little story of what the Duke had said at the time of the historic elopement. He could refer with simple ardour to the day when his aunt, Maria Cristina, had fled from Portugal and received the tears of an exiled queen upon her shoulders. How widely he opened his eyes so that the whites appeared like two dramatic coronets over the royal word.

  Adolphe Trellis was a man who assiduously prepared the impression that he took life like the communion, with a reverent sip and a doubtful chuckle; by formal obligation of up-bringing, subscribing to a ritual in which he did not believe. He enjoyed scandalous stories about his friends and even invented them, dropping his voice to the tone of peculiar clarity and mock horror when he spoke.

  “Ah, ha! I have a little poison to pour into your ears.” Mrs. Lance pretended to be mocking and severe too, but inwardly she was fascinated and delighted. Crystal began to laugh one afternoon when he was in the middle of one of his stories.

  “Crystal, my dear child, what is the matter with you? She is ridiculous, Mr. Trellis. She has got the giggles.”

  Mrs. Lance was very angry because, although she monopolized the conversation, she would encourage M
r. Trellis to visit them in the hope that he might be attracted to Crystal. Her mind was always scheming for some escape from her difficulties, and the prospect of Crystal marrying Mr. Trellis seemed as good as any of the many other solutions which passed into her mind, eddied there a little while and then floated away.

  “What on earth is the matter with you, Crystal?”

  “I was thinking Mr. Trellis is just like the Marquès.”

  “Ah, I have heard about that wicked Marquès.”

  Crystal clapped her hands.

  “That is what I shall call you. What a wonderful name! We must call him that, Mummy. The wicked Marquès. But,” added Crystal tactlessly, “there is no Marquèsa!”

  Mrs. Lance looked pleadingly at Mr. Trellis, who lolled his head to one side, and widening his eyes with intent to terrify, snubbed her delicately.

  “Ah, so there was a Marquèsa?”

  Crystal blushed, and was very afraid of Mr. Trellis after this. When he had gone, Mrs. Lance was very angry.

  “You must be careful, Crystal. You mustn’t say these things.”

  “How dreadful that he has a wife. Oh, why do people have these skeletons?” said Crystal, shaking her head in a droll way, and knowing her mother would forget her anger and laugh.

  Mrs. Lance did laugh affectionately.

  “How do you know she is a skeleton? As a matter of fact, he is well rid of her.” Mrs. Lance sat down sighing into a basket chair by the side of the gas fire.

  “He has a lot of money, Crystal,” she said.

  “It is a pity you couldn’t be his skeleton, and then everything would be wonderful.”

  “Crystal, you wicked child. What an idea!” Mrs. Lance blushed with anger. “You must learn to control yourself.”

  She walked up and down the room.

  “My dear child,” she said at last sarcastically. “I thought you had eyes in your head. I thought you had a gleam of intelligence. I should have thought you would have understood why Mr. Trellis comes to see us. At any rate, if you had had to bear the brunt of this last two years, as I have, you would see it. How much longer are we going to remain in this state? I am sick to death of this hand-to-mouth poverty, misery. You will jolly well have to get a job or a husband pretty quickly, or we might just as well throw ourselves into the river.”

  “But, Mummy, I can’t marry Mr. Trellis. He has got a wife. Besides, he is going bald.”

  “Don’t be disgusting, Crystal. He is doing nothing of the sort. Of course you could marry Mr. Trellis. You’re such an absurd child that you would need a man much older than yourself. He could divorce his wife.”

  “But she won’t divorce him.”

  “Oh, Crystal, do for one moment at least try and be sensible, and stop finding more difficulties. Goodness, life is bad enough as it is, without making more obstacles.” Mrs. Lance was exasperated. She was sewing a fur collar which she had taken from one of her own coats onto one of Crystal’s.

  “You might at least have a little gratitude. I wasn’t even asked whether I would like to marry your father, and, as far as I can see,” she added, her silver eyes gleaming derisively, “Mr. Trellis is not likely to ask you.”

  Crystal hid her deep thoughts by saying with evasive laughter:

  “And, Mummy, think how jealous poor Aunt Hilda would be! I am sure she is pining for Mr. Trellis!”

  “My dear child, she has been pining all her life.”

  Crystal had always been afraid of her mother, and to the many persons of whom she was afraid, she was always very affectionate. Open quarrels and high words exhausted her. Her real thoughts were hidden under a glittering mesh of little compliments, kindnesses, flatteries and devious explanations.

  Month after month of failure drifted by. One day opened into another like the endless turnings of the streets.

  “Window, door, window, door.

  Everyone like the one before.”

  Frequently Crystal was hungry, for in the intervals between Mr. Trellis’ or Aunt Hilda’s invitations to dinner, she and her mother ate meagrely.

  “Call again next week, Miss Lance,” the agents’ secretaries would say glibly from the security of the gloomy little back stairs offices off Shaftesbury Avenue and the Strand. The walls of these offices were lined with hundreds of glossy photographs, shining with a forced and ogling archness: two large chocolate eyes, a row of false teeth and the routine smile stencilled around them. “Yours sincerely, Bobby Finch.” “Sincerely yours, Pamela Paignton.” “The Demon Prince, 1921-1923.” Harry Blacker would be booking girls for “The Shampoo Millions.” There would be the usual group of girls leaning against the walls and doorways of the offices. Some newcomers would attach themselves to the end of the queue and whisper out of breath, furtively:

  “What’s he doing? Is there any news?”

  Others would pass into the office, very thin and scented under their fur coats.

  “I’ve come to get my contract.”

  “Mr. Blacker isn’t seeing anybody.”

  “But he has just this moment phoned me. Just send in my card.”

  But these bluffing tactics were no more successful than the timid. A faint, thick, humming noise would come from the office behind the frosted glass as though a huge, obscene blue-bottle were circling round and round the room. After a long time everyone would start to see the office door open, and crane their heads to see a stout, bald man lying in an armchair reading a paper in a pungent mist of violet cigar-smoke.

  Crystal was afraid of offending any of the girls. She would lend them small sums of money, and they would even ask her to lend them some articles of jewellery “to bring them luck”. Crystal would worry for days about some of their preposterous demands. She went about with a noisy, chalk-faced girl whose mouth opened like a long curved red wound in her face, and the girl advised her to “cut it out and fasten yourself onto one of those rich Colonials. If you think you’re going to get a job by walking about all pure and la-di-da like a bloody shepherdess you’ve got it all wrong.” She had a wild ball of fuzzy yellow hair which was blown up on end like a crowded bunch of mimosa, and her eyebrows were two faint and simple scars. Her voice was hard and metalled.

  “Christ! You’re a damn fool, Crystal. You go round telling everyone if you hear of anything, and they take the job from you. Keep it to yourself. Look after number one. That’s my motto. God! I believe if you had someone to sleep with you, you’d be offering him round like a piece of cake at a vicar’s tea-party. You do ma-ake me tir-ed, you do. What’s it matter if they’re bald and flabby? They’re the ones that have the money.”

  “That’s what Mummy thinks, I suppose,” Crystal reflected simply, “about Mr. Trellis.” She pretended to tell her mother this story as a cynical joke, hoping it would have its effect; but, underneath, the vague hostility she felt towards her mother was growing into a determined anger. She could not confide in her mother now, and she longed for someone to whom she could talk about her troubles.

  This need became overwhelming when one day she was walking down Greek Street she heard the most humiliating news. Her informant was a certain Mr. Albert Geelong, a dapper, middle-aged actor of the old school who had been a frequent visitor to their room. He had a sharp pink and bony face, and his lips were habitually pursed in a very deprecating fashion. He had the air of a family solicitor who knows a lot of secrets, a judicial toothy way of biting off his words one by one which brought unexpected folds and lines into action, and set his whole face in motion. He held himself very erect; to preserve his dignity rarely smiled, and would change his umbrella from one arm to the other with a grand wide gesture, bow and wheel his hat in the air. He was always boasting casually of the people in society he had known, was full of little insinuations about their fortunes and their marriages, what Johnny B— had told him at Le Touquet, and had made a point of cultivating Crystal because she was a lady, and would attempt to protect her from the advances of others.

  “If you ask me what is wrong with the stage
to-day”—he was never asked, but he would always make an opportunity of uttering this opinion to others in Crystal’s presence— “I can only quote Disraeli’s remarks about the two Englands. The crying need of the profession is Ladies and Gentlemen. One has only to look around one …”

  He was very surprised to meet Crystal. He took off his bowler hat with a wide, semi-circular gesture. He looked at her keenly.

  “Hullo, m’dear. Did you get it?”

  “What did I get?”

  “The contract. Did you get it?”

  “What are you talking about?” Crystal pretended he was very funny. “You’re being … silly with me,” she pointed her toes and laughed.

  “Good heavens, Crystal! Didn’t your mother give you my message. I rang you up last Friday about a part in ‘Dandelions’, and asked her to tell you at once.”

  “No, she didn’t tell me anything about it. Are you sure you rang up? Or perhaps you forgot all about it.” Crystal was incredulous.

  “I did ring her, my dear. I asked for you, but she said you were out. Three o’clock on Friday afternoon.”

  “But I wasn’t.”

  “She said you were.”

  “Oh, Mr. Geelong, you must be mistaken.”

  “Miss Lance,” declared Mr. Geelong, sticking out chin and throwing back his head, “always remember, that before I am an actor”—he paused—“I am a gentleman.”

  “But Mummy couldn’t …”

  “Well, Crystal, this is serious. Let us go and have some coffee. We must discuss this, or I shall have it on my conscience.”

  Crystal went with him, perplexed and suspicious. They went into a shop and ordered coffee. While they waited Geelong said:

  “She didn’t give you the message? Why? Doesn’t she want you to get a job?”

  “Of course she does.”

  “Oh,” said Geelong. “Now look here, Crystal. I want to be a friend to you.”

  “Why of course.…”

  “Well, now listen to me. I am a gentleman—I hope. I had the honour of your confidence. I have had the honour of being your mother’s guest. Now,” he said, smacking the table rapidly with his fingers, “why does she tell me not to ring you up any more, as she does not think it desirable? Why? Can you tell me?”