The Painted Lady: A moving story about family loyalty, friendship and first love

by Ursula Bloom

  For a whole hour the priest and her husband talked, whilst Yolanda tried to creep to the door to listen to what was being said. She thought that, if she could hear a little, it would be a wise and cunning thing to do, but was furtive, or she was alarmed that the priest might catch her. Yolanda suspected the priest and was afraid of him.

  She never knew what passed between them, but ultimately she was called into the kitchen, told that her husband had agreed to everything, and that the priest was making all the right arrangements. She looked at John in surprise, but his eyes were sullen and they told her nothing.

  Yolanda and John were remarried with the sanction of her Church; it was agreed that the children of her union would be of that denomination, and the priest appeared to be satisfied. Almost at once, she knew that she was pregnant.

  ‘I hope it is a boy,’ said John, ‘men want sons to come after them.’

  ‘It will be a boy,’ she promised.

  After all, Mamma had had boys. Antonio, Luigi, and Giovanni, also several others that had died, and Yolanda believed that sons ran in the family. As a tasteful compliment, they would call the boy after her deceased father, write and tell Mamma, and get her down here for the baptism, after which the quarrel would be at an end, for, since her marriage, Yolanda had made no contact with her own people at all.

  When the child was born it was a girl. Yolanda tried to swallow her personal disappointment (she had been so certain of having a boy); she could hardly believe that this had happened to her.

  ‘We will call her Ginni after Mamma,’ she said.

  John was standing at the end of the bed, and staring at her with quiet steely eyes. ‘No,’ he told her, ‘my mother’s name was Madeline, we will call this girl Madeline too; there has always been Madelines in my family.’

  Yolanda liked the name. ‘Ginni next time?’ she suggested.

  ‘Perhaps.’ But again he was vague. There was much about him that his wife did not understand, and she was beginning to realise it. She was used to the warmth of full-blooded people who responded quickly to impulses, but John could go very quiet, so that she was never sure of what he might be thinking. If she worked herself into a passion, it did not appear to distress him, he did not argue but would take down his old coat from the peg by the door, and go out to the garden to work with the cabbage plants and the round fat onions which reminded her of home; there he would toil until the storm had passed, and Yolanda had almost forgotten what it was about.

  So the child, baptised by the priest, was called Madeline. She was dark as her mother, with no trace of her English father, and the priest took special care of her religious training. She was two years old when the priest made it his business to enquire why she had no brother and sister, and Yolanda, sulkily red, twisted her apron uneasily. Things were not right between her and her husband, she said at last.

  The marriage was a failure. It had been the spontaneous burst of a spring romance, and had died, unable to withstand the exigencies of life. John had taken exception to the priest’s visits, and could not bring himself to forgive them. His people had lived on this soil for many years, and he declared that he was breeding no papist children to follow him. The one child had been conceived before he had realised all the difficulties, and now Yolanda knew that it was all over, for a dream had died. How right the village had been in its insistent denouncement of foreign women and everything entailed by marriage with them.

  ‘I hate you,’ she said to her husband, when at last she realised what had happened.

  John said nothing. He took down his coat from the peg by the door, and went out into the garden to dig.

  Madeline grew up in the spreading cottage with the flower garden flowing round it. She learnt to toddle along the hard trodden path, with the stonecrop spiking up it, and the grey seed pods of the red elms blown about it in May. To her the cottage was a palace, the garden was Elysium; it was her own and exquisite. At first she knew but two people, Mamma, Dad.

  Mamma was fiercely loving, or quickly protesting. She kissed and slapped in the same moment, having no half moods, no twilight, but always bright moon or dark night. Afraid of her, Madeline still loved her, even more because she feared her; this was all part of the incongruous contradiction of childhood.

  She respected her father, regarding him as being a strangely aloof creature, of whom she was afraid in a different way. Her father would not hurt her. Although her mamma was always threatening that she would tell him things, and that he would punish her severely, he had never yet raised a hand against Madeline, but her mother was over-speedy to smack her.

  She was five when she first met her father as a being rather than a shadow. Mamma had gone to Confession and he had come home from work early, with a violent headache from the sun. He sprawled on the uncomfortable sofa (a bulging cast-out from a big house), its springs broken, and its cushions lumpy, with two or three different patterns draping it in a motley of coloured rags. He lay there with his eyes shut, and the child looked at him curiously. Although she herself was often ailing with youthful complaints, it seemed quite wrong that the human bulwarks of the house should be laid low. He wore cream-coloured cotton trousers, tied round the knees with twine, and his heavy boots smelled of the fields. His braces were plain leather cutting into his shirt, and his Adam’s apple worked as it bulged over the single brass stud which held the collarless band together.

  Madeline stood staring at him, knowing that she was aware of him in a new way. She took down the tea-pot, the tea already in it, ready for her mother’s return. On the stove the kettle throbbed, and steam issued from it; laboriously the child filled the tea-pot, and set it on the hob to strengthen. She had done this before for Mamma, and was proud that she knew how; pouring it out, she brought it to her father.

  ‘I made this for you,’ she explained gently, ‘it will help you to get better.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I made it for you, it’ll help your headache.’

  He stirred, opening his eyes, and she saw how heavy with pain they were. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a cup of tea, it’ll help you,’ and she pushed it closer to him. He put out a hand; suddenly she knew that he could not see it, so that she guided his fingers and closed them on the handle. ‘There!’ she said triumphantly.

  He drank slowly, in sips at first, then in gulps, finishing to leave a dark smudge of tea-leaves up the side of the cup. ‘More?’ he said.

  Three times Madeline filled it, and three times he emptied it, then lay back, but now his eyes were open, and he was looking up at the ceiling with the cobwebby cross-beams and the herb bundles thrust over the big nails that had been put there to accommodate them for drying.

  Presently he said, ‘You’re a good girl, Maddy. You’re a very good girl.’ She felt shy, not knowing what to say, and mutely she took his hand. ‘You and me’m going to be friends,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to be a boy, but now I’m glad that you’m a girl. Funny, ’ent it?’

  Her mother returning, Madeline did not draw close to her father again, for, in a small child’s world, there is little room save for the woman who has borne it. But there was that day, in early summer (perhaps it was a year later, she could never remember), when she had to take her father’s dinner to him in the fields. It was a hot sweet day, and as she walked she kicked the dust into little runnels, pretending that it was sand. The men were working in the top fields, and she waited by the hedge with the dinner for him to come to her. The dying hawthorn smelt like country wine, and the blackbirds chattered whilst the thrush sang his song, caught by his own echo.

  Presently her father came, and side by side they squatted in the hedge, whilst he opened the big red handkerchief and began to munch. There was a stone jorum of beer beside him; he drank from the wide top, and Madeline watched him, fascinated, until she grew tired. Suddenly she saw that a butterfly was on the grass beside her, a gay splotch of colour.

  ‘Oh look, what’s that?’ she asked.
>
  He looked. ‘It’s a painted lady,’ he said.

  It was queer that she should remember those words through all the years to come; a painted lady, something lovely to look at, basking in the sunshine, seeking only beauty and warmth, seeking and finding.

  Seeing that she did not understand, her father said, ‘That’s the name of them butterflies. Painted ladies. I don’ think much of them. I likes the little blue ones better nor’m.’

  ‘I love the little blue ones.’

  They sat on, she hugging her knees. One day she’d know more about this man, and she realised, even then, that he could mean a great deal to her. For the time being, Mamma washed and dressed her, scolded, petted, and directed her religious education and routine. But this reserved man, whom as yet she hardly knew, was going to mean more to her in the long run, and she loved him differently, but more, definitely more.

  He finished drinking from the jorum, wiping it by cupping his hand on it, and then smearing the back across his wet lips.

  Suddenly she said, ‘I love you,’ because she wanted him to know it.

  ‘Of course you’m do. I’m your dad.’

  It had fallen flat! Madeline was disappointed to think that he had not appreciated the depth of that love, yet she accepted his words phlegmatically. ‘I must be going home,’ she said.

  She was eight.

  She went to school and helped in the home after lessons were done, for Mamma had dogmatic ideas about a girl child being helpful. The cottage was isolated from the rest of the village; as yet Madeline had no standards by which to compare the work demanded of her with other children. She accepted it as she had accepted the kissings and scoldings, expecting nothing else, for this was life.

  At the village school the other children stared at her, as though she was in some way queer.

  ‘She’s Italian,’ said they.

  ‘She’s a Roman Catholic,’ said others.

  It was wrong to be an Italian, and wicked to be a Roman Catholic, she discovered. Once she asked the priest about it, and his answer, though kind, was mystifying. ‘The meek suffer long, and are reviled,’ he said. Madeline did not know what it meant, but believed that she had to go on forgiving her enemies, and after a time the other children growing tired of teasing her, ignored her. The mistress found her quick at her lessons, amiable and obedient, and she liked the lovely little face with the large intelligent eyes and warm colouring.

  ‘Teacher’s pet!’ said Madeline’s enemies, and laughed at her.

  Gradually the life of the village enveloped her. She shared the children’s fascinated fear of Mrs. Dawes, the mad woman, who lived on the green. She was haunted by Mrs. Dawes’ nutcracker face, the eyes alert and as an enquiring magpie’s. Mrs. Dawes would come out, kicking off her shoes, and dance to the children, who stood in amazed clusters. She would beckon to them with a crooked finger, yellow as the breast of a plucked hen, inviting them inside with blandishments. Perhaps that was her most terrifying mood. The big boys teased her, making catcalls over her fence, then running off on long legs, so that the little ones (who couldn’t run so fast) were pounced on by Mrs. Dawes, and Madeline (being a little one) was terrified.

  Or there was mild old Tom Hibbert, driving the cows down the lane with their warm smell of milk and russet hide; sometimes he let the children help him. The farmer, in his milk-float, who often gave them a lift, or Harry Harries, who would let them peep over the stable door at the bull in his stall, his great head lowered and his eyes with their mottled whites, and stupid short-sightedness, peering out into the light of the stable yard beyond.

  All these were part of the pattern of living, the men and women of the village, the children in the paved school yard, teasing the mad woman, helping old Tom with the cows, or getting Harry to let you look at the bull.

  In contrast to this, there was something that was just sheer beauty, a game that Madeline played with herself in the meadow beyond the garden. She would always love that meadow with its May and June scents, its flowery fecundity, and the sun darting through it like a shuttle of gold silk. Whenever she thought of it, the sun shone on it; next to Mamma and Dad, and of course her Church (only differently), she loved the sun most of all!

  She was eleven years old when she saw Fred Arnold looking at her. He was one of the big boys, who, having left school, had been set to the plough. He wore man’s boots, and cord breeches, and to her he was a man; now, because she was maturing young, she found herself grown wonderingly interested in him. She saw him looking at her that dreadful day when her sky clouded, the day when she was going to the vicarage. At the vicarage lived Miss Sheila, the vicar’s only daughter, but little older than Madeline. Sheila had golden hair and blue eyes and had the traditional face of an angel, like the ones in Madeline’s copy of The Garden of the Soul given to her by Mamma for her first Communion. Madeline had secretly admired Miss Sheila for a long time, but of course from a distance, because their lives lay apart. Yesterday, however, the vicar’s wife had come to visit the school during the needlework lesson, and Miss Sheila had been with her, wearing a white muslin hat and a pale-blue frock, which had set Madeline’s heart agog with innocent envy. Whilst her mother was talking to the teacher, Miss Sheila had slipped into the classroom, stopping beside Madeline’s work to admire.

  ‘I hate sewing,’ said Miss Sheila, ‘all my stitches are cat ones; you know, long ones.’

  ‘Oh yes, miss,’ said Madeline, and held up the petticoat that she was hemming for inspection. Miss Sheila looked at it.

  ‘Oh, I could never do that,’ she said, and then, ‘How dark your hair is!’

  ‘My mother is Italian,’ said Madeline reluctantly, because she knew how her companions felt about it.

  ‘How lovely!’

  ‘Is it, miss?’ and then, ‘You’re very fair.’ She did not need words in which to express her own keen admiration, for she would have given anything in the world to possess just such golden hair, and eyelids fringed with pale honey-coloured lashes. ‘You look like a lily-of-the-valley, miss,’ she added in a sudden burst of confidence.

  ‘They’re my favourite flowers,’ said Miss Sheila.

  That was the point that Madeline remembered, and on this particular day she went to the shady corner of the old garden, where the lilies-of-the-valley grew, their perfume mixing with the sandy scent of the light earth. She gathered the flowers carefully, with a surround of glazed green leaves, the cream bells clustering together in their heart. Then she held them tightly in her small hot hand and took them up to the vicarage. She did not know how she was going to give them to Miss Sheila, but she felt that she would manage it somehow or other. The maroon-painted gate, sagging on its hinges, was ajar; inside there were evergreens like gloomy walls, with dark recesses, and a wide trodden-in gravel path, curling round to a stable yard. Madeline, swallowing her shyness, stepped inside, glancing at the periwinkles and the roses of Sharon whose thick foliage fell over the tiled edge to the path in such profusion. The sunlight spattered the stable yard like a bright picture, and as she stared she saw that Miss Sheila was there, watering a ragged piece of garden from a tin watering-pot. The tin watering-pot had a violently coloured picture of Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and Prince Eddie on it. It was most attractive. Love for Miss Sheila, the pleasantness of the garden and the watering-pot overcame her, and she held out her flowers mutely.

  ‘Oh, how lovely!’ said Miss Sheila. ‘Did you bring them for me? How sweet!’ and she buried her small freckled nose in the bunch.

  ‘You said that you liked them, miss.’

  ‘So I do, I love them. They’re my favourite flowers. Oh, I do think it was so nice of you! Now come and help me with my garden.’

  In an instant there they were working side by side; they went to and fro to the pump to fill the watering-pot, they planted Virginia stock and nemophila, raking the earth carefully over the seeds. They chatted with the inconsistent chatter of two children comparing notes. They imagined a w
orld in which they had sisters, hordes of them (for both were very lonely), and they went on chattering oblivious of the fact that time was flying, and presently into the stable yard pedalled the vicar, a mild little man, pink like a York ham, with a large blond moustache and receding hair. He was definitely low church, abhorred candles and ritual as being part of the papist plague, and therefore threatening to a Protestant community. Bicycling in at his gate, he was appalled to see his daughter busily gardening with the only Catholic child in the parish, as though they were bosom friends. He dismounted angrily, wheeled the bicycle into the stable (where no horse had housed itself for years) and, propping it against the manger, came out again, saying ‘Tst, tst, tst’ under his breath.

  ‘Sheila?’ he called sharply.

  ‘Yes, Daddy?’

  ‘Come here.’

  She came obediently, unaware of having committed an offence. ‘Yes, Daddy?’

  ‘What on earth are you doing playing with that Robinson child? Don’t you know that she’s a Catholic?’

  Sheila only knew of the Catholics as being heretics, burnt at the stake in Queen Elizabeth’s good old days (she had a fascinating picture of one enduring it in her history book), and they should be burnt now according to her father. She had found nothing evil in Madeline. ‘But she’s nice!’ she said.

  ‘Get rid of her at once,’ commanded her father, ‘at once, I said,’ and he walked indignantly past the pump to the back door, where he had heard one of the maids giggling with the postman, which had to be corrected. He was not the sort of man to stand any nonsense of that kind.

  For Sheila the bottom had dropped out of her world as she came back to Madeline. ‘Father says you’re to go home. It’s beastly of him, it isn’t fair, and it’s all because you’re a Catholic.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ said Madeline, and she began to wonder if it was really such a good thing to be a Catholic as the priest insisted. It certainly made life very difficult.

  ‘I love you,’ said Sheila. ‘Let’s be friends, real friends; when we grow up, I mean?’