‘Ssst!’ With a venomous hiss, Widow Mangada was at the foot of the stairs. In a tirade of exaggerated wavings and whispers, she announced that the Spaniards were all sleeping and ordered Mark and Sally to be more considerate.
‘Whew!’ Mark exclaimed as they were safe on the beach. ‘What a change of tone.’
It developed that the Spaniards were going to eat at one of the town hotels. Sally stood over the petrol stove that night, stirring tuna in a thick cream sauce and listening warily for the light, almost inaudible tread of the Widow. She had grown to dread those footsteps. Outside of their bedroom, now, she felt vulnerable as a sniping target in enemy territory.
After she had turned off the petrol stove, she heard the fire still burning in the chimney. Leaning down, she blew to extinguish it. With a loud pouf, a long leaping tongue of flame forked up at her. Startled, Sally jumped back. Aiming for my eyes, she thought uneasily as she rubbed away the tears from the stinging smoke.
While she was letting the water run freely over her cooking dishes, the Widow darted in, crossed to the sink, and put the cork in to stop the drain. ‘You mustn’t waste water here,’ she lectured Sally. ‘It is very precious.’
Sally waited until the Widow was out of the kitchen, removed the plug, and turned the water on full force with a rich sense of illicit extravagance.
*
The next morning, Sally woke to hear the Widow’s voice in the hall. From her unusually flustered, apologetic tones, Sally gathered something was wrong. Curious, she tiptoed to the door. As if developing symptoms of the Widow’s tactics like a contagious disease, she stooped to peer out from the keyhole. Giggling, then, she poked Mark awake.
‘Guess what,’ she informed him. ‘The five of them are all queued up around the bathroom and the Widow’s in her bathrobe, lugging up great pitchers of water. The doctor’s in there shaving now.’
The water machine had broken down completely. ‘From overwork,’ Mark hazarded. ‘Her whole fancy house is probably tottering over a pit of quicksand.’
When Sally went downstairs to draw water from the well for their coffee, she found the Widow in the hall, swathed in a soiled yellow satin wrapper, wet-mopping the stone tiles. In the frank morning light, her face appeared haggard, and slightly green; her eyebrows were not yet pencilled on, and her mouth hung loose and froggish without lipstick.
‘Ah!’ the Widow sputtered, leaning on her mop and speaking in hoarse, fretful tones. ‘This morning I go to town to look for a maid. I am not used to this. At home in Alicante I had three maids….’
Sally murmured sympathetically. With dignity, the Widow stretched to her full height, her chin not reaching far above the mop handle. ‘When I go out to town,’ her look blurred beyond Sally, lost in some luminous far vision, ‘I am a grande dame. I do not work when the front door is open, for the people to see. You understand? But,’ the Widow fixed Sally with a stern, proud glare, ‘when the door is shut,’ she shrugged her shoulders and spread her hands comprehensively, ‘I do everything. Everything.’
The Widow sailed home from town that morning with a black-clad maid in her wake. She supervised imperiously for an hour, while the maid swept, scrubbed and dusted. Then the maid returned to town.
‘It is very difficult’, the Widow confided to Sally, with the air of a born duchess fallen upon hard times, ‘to find a maid in Villaviento. They are so expensive in the summer. They get paid too much by the hotels. If you have a maid nowadays, you must be very careful of her feelings.’
The Widow rallied enough to mimick the tender treatment a maid must have. She nodded, minced about, grinned sugarily. ‘If she breaks your priceless crystal vase, you must laugh and say: “Ah, do not trouble yourself over it mademoiselle.”’
Sally smiled. The Widow was always complaining about expense; how much of her moaning was an act, Sally couldn’t truly tell.
That morning, from the balcony, Sally and Mark watched Widow Mangada fussing about with repairmen, a gardener, and three native workers with a donkey cart who began to remove all the stones and rubble choking her unused driveway.
‘I suppose it’s a sign of aristocracy here’, Mark said, ‘having a team of men constantly slaving for you. And a donkey or two.’
‘She’s so desperate about keeping up her royal front in Villaviento,’ Sally said.
‘Royal front,’ Mark snorted. ‘It’s rank humbug. She may have taught Spanish to the governor’s wife in Gibraltar but I haven’t been able to corner her for one of her promised lessons yet.’
‘Wait till she gets the house settled down,’ Sally soothed. She still hasn’t found anyone to rent the front room, and it’s probably bothering her.’
‘I’m sure she can’t rent it because of the balcony being shut off. No doubt she’s furious with herself for letting us win her best selling point.’
‘She knows she would have lost us if she didn’t give in,’ Sally reminded.
Mark shook his head. ‘She’ll try to fox us yet.’
‘I don’t see how,’ Sally said. ‘If we just keep to ourselves.’
*
As Sally was dreamily peeling the potatoes for lunch, Widow Mangada entered the kitchen. She pounced on the potato in Sally’s hand and took up the knife. ‘Now this is the way you should peel a potato!’ she instructed Sally patronizingly, making the brown skin fly off in one continuous corkscrew strip. Sally sighed. More and more she resented the Widow’s little meddling forays into the kitchen. The Widow even rearranged her cupboard on the sly, mixing the onions in the egg dish to free another bowl for her own sodden dabs of cold, fishy pottage which she left lying about on her shelves for days.
As the Widow plucked up another potato, Sally realized she was using even more flowery oratory than usual. ‘… Every other summer, of course,’ the Widow was saying, ‘I’ve rented the house out to one family. Complete. For twenty, thirty thousand pesetas. But’, the knife flew, stripping the potato bare, ‘this summer for the first time I stay here to rent rooms. Only it proves impossible.’
Sally felt a chill of foreboding. She waited. ‘The government,’ Widow Mangada smiled up ingratiatingly with a helpless shrug at Sally, all the while continuing to skin the potato by some deft sleight of hand, ‘the government forces us to fill every room. And today the Alcade, the Mayor of Villaviento, tells me I must rent the house entire since I cannot fill all the rooms.’
Sally caught her breath and took her first clear look at the Widow. The ornate painted mask cracked in a wolfish grin. Eyes exposed a black, bottomless pool into which a stone had vanished, ring after surface ring rippling outward.
Leaving the Widow holding the scraped white potato, open-mouthed, in the middle of a sentence, Sally turned and ran. Her breath caught tight in her chest, she burst in on Mark.
‘Oh, stop her,’ she cried, throwing herself on the bed. There was the sound of quick, tapping footsteps following her up the stairs. ‘Stop that woman,’ Sally begged, almost hysterical now. ‘She’s going to evict us.’
‘Señora,’ the Widow was calling in dulcet tones outside the door. Sally heard the cockroach rustle in the cupboard, the spider knitting hexes across the well.
Mark opened the door a crack and looked down at Widow Mangada. ‘Well?’ he said.
Widow Mangada practised her charms. With beseeching eyes, she gazed up at Mark, crooning: ‘Ah, Señor. The Señora is so excitable. She does not even listen to what I am going to say. Men are …’ she fumbled prettily, ‘… so much more practical than young girls about such things.’
Mark beckoned to Sally, who was eying them broodingly from the bed. ‘Come on back to the kitchen and finish getting lunch.’ he said. ‘We’ll talk about it there.’
In the kitchen, the Widow spoke beguilingly to Mark while Sally tended the fried potatoes, still shaken, ashamed of letting her defences down in front of the Widow.
‘Now of course,’ the Widow was assuring Mark in mellifluous tones, ‘I do not want you and the Señora to go. I do no
t look for anybody to rent the whole house. But,’ she shrugged with wheedling philosophy, ‘if the Alcade sends someone, what am I to do?’
‘Ask her how much notice she’ll give us?’ Sally demanded Mark sulkily in English. She refused to speak Spanish to the Widow now, retreating as if for protection to the language the Widow did not understand and putting Mark between them as interpreter.
‘How much notice?’ Mark asked the Widow. She looked surprised at Mark for bringing up such apparently trifling concerns. ‘Ah, two days, three days …’ she drawled finally, as if conceding a great favour.
Sally was aghast. ‘And where do we go then?’ she stormed at Mark. ‘Into the streets?’ She felt sick at the thought of packing up and moving again, furious at the Widow’s sly weathercock shifts.
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ Mark closed the subject. Silenced for the time being, the Widow retreated.
‘If she thinks’, Sally raged over lunch, ‘that we’re going to live here at her convenience, paying her until she finds someone else, so she won’t lose a peseta…. And using the government as an excuse for her own sweet whims….’
‘Take it easy,’ Mark placated. ‘She’s crooked as a crab, that’s all. Face up to it.’
They decided to go house-hunting around Villaviento early that evening without telling the Widow until they were actually moving out.
*
That night, over supper on the balcony, Sally exulted: ‘We’ve bought a house. A whole house. I’ll have my own kitchen. And my own snarls of straw for the dishes.’
‘Oh, our new landlady’s probably having a fiesta right now at the way we let her jump the rent.’ Mark was characteristically reserved, but even he couldn’t hide his pleasure. They were paying almost a thousand pesetas less for a quiet house in the native quarter than they were spending for Widow Mangada’s cramped noisy room. And they were moving in the next morning.
Mark and Sally lingered over the wine, toasting their success, relaxing easily and fully for the first time since they had arrived at Widow Mangada’s.
Sally laughed happily as they finished the bottle of wine. ‘It’s like being freed from a jinx,’ she said.
While Mark was helping Sally wash up the dishes, the Widow tripped blithely into the kitchen. ‘Ah,’ she chirruped with a bright new-minted smile, ‘and did you have a nice walk? I do hope’, she raced on, ‘you won’t trouble yourselves over what the Alcade said.’ She gave them a cajoling look. ‘We’ll have such a nice summer. Probably no one will even ask about the house. Now, if you were Spanish …’ she tossed Mark an arch glance, ‘you wouldn’t dream of being so serious about such a little thing….’
‘I think we should tell you’, Mark said without preamble, overriding Sally’s motions to silence, ‘that we’ve found a new place. With a summer contract. And we’re moving out tomorrow.’
Sally forgave Mark for springing the surprise a day early. Widow Mangada’s jaw dropped. Her face flushed an ugly purple.
‘What?’ her voice shrilled up a scale, incredulous. She began trembling, as if shaken in the teeth of a high wind. ‘After all I’ve done for you! After I gave you the balcony….’ Her voice frayed to a coarse squawk.
‘Our room’s too small to live in without the balcony and you know it,’ Sally inserted truthfully.
Widow Mangada flew at her like a maddened wasp, brandishing a furious finger in Sally’s face. ‘It’s you, you!’ the Widow accused spitefully, shedding all pretense of decorum. ‘Always complaining. The room’s too small! This and that! Your husband never complains….’
The Widow veered in a last desperate bid to flatter Mark.
‘I ask my wife to manage household affairs,’ he cut the Widow off firmly. ‘I’m ready to stand behind everything she’s said.’
‘Well!’ the Widow fumed, outraged. ‘After all my consideration, my generosity, my frankness….’ She paused, breathless.
Then, her flair for rhetoric returning, she began to gather up the ragged shreds of ceremony. ‘As you wish,’ she managed at last with a wobbly smile; the yellow teeth gleamed. ‘You say you leave tomorrow?’ she asked, the metallic light of the adding machine already back in her eye. She turned on her heel. The front door slammed behind her.
Late that night, the front gate screaked open. Mark and Sally could hear the Widow muttering from the lower hall. She began to mount the stairs, grumbling loudly and incoherently all the while. Sally drew the sheet up over her head, fully believing some immediate judgment was at hand. Savagely, the Widow stamped across the upstairs hall, through the vast, empty front room and onto the balcony, spitting out curses and unintelligible snarls. Sally could see her squat, lumpish shape silhouetted in the moonlight, busy about the balcony railing.
‘She’s ripping down the rental sign,’ Mark whispered.
Bearing the sign as if it were a severed human head, the Widow stormed downstairs.
*
The next morning, as Sally boiled mounds of potatoes and eggs for a picnic lunch to take to their new home, pleasantly conscious she was using up much of the Widow’s petrol, Widow Mangada appeared in the kitchen. Her mood of the night before had altered completely. She was bland as butter.
‘I met the woman who owns the place you’re moving to last night,’ she informed Sally. ‘She told me exactly what you’re paying for the summer.’ The Widow pronounced the sum with something akin to reverence. ‘Is that correct?’
‘Yes,’ Sally said a bit shortly. She resented Widow Mangada’s finding out such details. Yet she was aware that the Widow could not accuse them of being cheated: she herself was charging them more for so much less.
‘It’s a beautiful big house,’ Sally could not resist adding. She lifted the hard-boiled eggs from the steaming kettle.
The Widow made a little wry face. ‘I wouldn’t know. I never walk up to that part of town. So far from the beach and all.’ The house was a mere ten minutes from the sea.
‘Mark and I love to walk,’ Sally replied sweetly.
‘I told the woman’, the Widow went on, fiddling with the lace collar of her dress, ‘that you and your husband were very nice. I said of course you would have stayed on with me for the summer if I hadn’t been forced suddenly by the Alcade to rent the house as a whole to one family.’
Sally was silent, letting the fib hang fire in empty air.
‘We will still be good friends,’ the Widow proclaimed then, with a magnanimous smile. ‘Anything you need, you just come over and ask me. Haven’t I taught you all about Spanish cooking?’ She teetered on tiptoe and peered almost pleadingly into Sally’s face.
Before they left, the widow had enthusiastically made an appointment for an English lesson from Mark at her home the following afternoon.
‘I want to know everything. Everything!’ she repeated, accompanying them to the door, her black saucer-eyes brimming with a thirst for scholarship.
*
Mark and Sally woke the next morning in their spacious new house to hear a thin jangle of bells as a herd of black goats went stepping delicately up the street on their way to pasture. A strong, freakish wind was blowing out of the low hills. At market, the old banana vendor claimed Villaviento hadn’t seen a wind like this for eighty years.
The day grew bleak, curded over with clouds. Sally tried to read in the unhealthy yellow light, waiting for Mark to return from his afternoon English lesson with Widow Mangada.
The wind howled about the house, raising eddies of dust and rattling the window frames. Scraps of paper and torn grape leaves swatted against the panes. Some storm was brewing.
Mark was back twenty minutes after he’d left. ‘She’s vanished,’ he said, tramping in and brushing the dust off his jacket. ‘There’s a German family living there now. She must have skipped back to Alicante the minute we left yesterday morning.’
Rain began to splatter down in large drops on the dusty pavement outside.
‘Do you suppose she honestly had all those university degrees??
?? Sally asked. ‘And a brilliant doctor husband?’
‘Maybe,’ Mark said. ‘Or maybe she’s just a clever quack.’
‘Or a weird sister.’
‘Who’s to tell?’
The wind screeched around the corners of the house, whirling this way and that, blinding the windowpanes with rain out of the labyrinth of those dark, malignant hills.
Stone Boy with Dolphin
Because Bamber banged into her bike in Market Hill, spilling oranges, figs, and a paper packet of pink-frosted cakes, and gave her the invitation to make up for it all, Dody Ventura decided to go to the party. Under the striped canvas awnings of the fruit stall she balanced her rust-encrusted Raleigh and let Bamber scramble for the oranges. He wore his monkish red beard barbed and scraggy. Summer sandals buckled over his cotton socks although the February air burned blue and cold.
‘You’re coming, aren’t you?’ Albino eyes fixed hers. Pale, bony hands rolled the bright tang-skinned oranges into her wicker bike-basket. ‘Unfortunately,’ Bamber restored the packet of cakes, ‘a bit mashed.’
Dody glanced, evasive, down Great St Mary’s Passage, lined with its parked bikes, wheels upon wheels. The stone facade of King’s and the pinnacles of the chapel stood elaborate, frosty, against a thin watercolor-blue sky. On such hinges fate turned.
‘Who’ll be there?’ Dody parried. She felt her fingers crisped, empty in the cold. Fallen into disuse, into desuetude, I freeze.
Bamber spread his big hands into chalk webs covering the people universe. ‘Everybody. All the literary boys. You know them?’
‘No.’ But Dody read them. Mick. Leonard. Especially Leonard. She didn’t know him, but she knew him by heart. With him, when he was up from London, with Larson and the boys, Adele lunched. Only two American girls at Cambridge and Adele would have to nip Leonard in the bud. Hardly bud: bloom it was, full-bloom and mid-career. Not room for the two of us, Dody told Adele the day Adele returned the books she had borrowed, all newly underlined and noted in the margins. ‘But you underline,’ Adele justified sweetly, her face guileless in its cup of sheened blonde hair. ‘I beat my own brats,’ Dody said, ‘you wipe your handmarks off.’ For some reason, at the game of queening, Adele won: adorably, all innocent surprise. Dody retreated with a taste of lemons into her green sanctum at Arden with her stone facsimile of Verrocchio’s boy. To dust, to worship: vocation enough.