Lies for Love

CHAPTER ONE-1

CHAPTER ONE“Timothy, stop kicking Lucy and eat up your porridge,” Carmela said.

“I won’t!”

Timothy was a fat, ugly boy nearly seven years of age and in Carmela’s opinion quite uncontrollable.

To prove his defiance he gave his sister Lucy another kick and she started to cry.

“Stop that at once, do you hear?” Carmela said sharply, thinking as she spoke it would have little effect.

She was right.

Timothy picked up his bowl of porridge and deliberately turned it upside-down on the table-cloth.

At the same time the baby in the cot awakened by the noise Lucy was making started to cry too.

Carmela thought helplessly there was really nothing she could do about them.

It was almost to be expected, she thought as she had thought many times since she came to the Vicarage that the Vicar’s children should be the worst behaved and most unmanageable of any in the village.

Because she felt she could do nothing with Timothy, and Lucy would cry whatever happened, she went to the cot to pick up the baby and rock him in her arms.

As she was doing so the door opened and the Vicar’s wife put her head round it to say:

“Can’t you keep those children quiet? You know the Vicar’s trying to write his sermon for tomorrow.”

“I am sorry, Mrs. Cooper,” Carmela apologised.

The Vicar’s wife did not wait for her answer, but merely shut the door so sharply that it sounded suspiciously like a slam.

Timothy waited until his mother had gone, then shouted above the noise his sister was making:

“I want my egg!”

“You can have it after you have eaten your porridge,” Carmela replied.

She knew as she spoke she was fighting a losing battle.

Sure enough while she was away from the table Timothy seized an egg-cup next to the ones intended for his sister and Carmela, and knocking off the top of the egg, started to eat it eagerly.

Carmela felt despairingly there was nothing she could do with him.

Ever since she had come to the Vicarage to look after the children she had known that however clever she might be, she could not control Timothy.

His parents must have discovered this almost as soon as he was born. They had given in to him on every occasion and allowed him to have his own way with the result that like a cuckoo in the nest he pushed the other children aside, and invariably got what he wanted.

Sometimes when she went to bed at night too tired to sleep, Carmela thought she could not face the years ahead spent in looking after children like Timothy and knowing that she was capable of making little or no impact on them.

After her father died there had been the necessity of finding herself employment of some sort, and when Mrs. Cooper suggested that she came to the Vicarage it had seemed the easy solution to her problem.

At least she told herself she would be staying amongst people she knew and who did not make her afraid.

She faced her position bravely and admitted she was afraid of being alone, afraid of going out into an alien, hostile world, and most of all, afraid of being incompetent.

That her father had always found her very intelligent was quite a different thing from being able to earn money by using her brain.

Her father had tried to do so by selling his pictures which unfortunately had not proved at all saleable.

Just occasionally he received what seemed to Carmela and her mother a large sum for the portrait of some local dignitary, but the pictures he really enjoyed doing were on the whole “too beautiful to be sold”.

That was how her mother had once described them and they had all laughed, but Carmela had known exactly what she meant and why her father’s pictures did not appeal to the ordinary purchaser.

But to her the manner in which he painted the mist rising over the stream at dawn, or a sunset behind the distant hills, was so lovely that she felt as if when she looked at them they carried her into a mystical world which only she and her father realised existed.

It was the same world she had known as a child when he had told her stories of fairies and goblins, of elves and nymphs, and showed her the mushroom rings in the fields where the ‘little people’ had danced the night before.

It was a world of wonder and of beauty and to Carmela very real, but it was not really something one could express on canvas. Peregrine Lyndon’s beautiful pictures therefore stayed in the art dealer’s shop until he sent them back as unsalable.

Her mother had died first and there was very little money coming into the small house where they lived on the edge of the village.

This was because the only way Carmela’s father could assuage his grief was by painting the pictures that appealed to him, and he gave up suggesting to the fat Aldermen in the market town five miles away, and the local Squires, that they should have their portraits painted.

Because her father was so handsome and what in the village they called a ‘perfect gentleman’, it was locally considered a compliment to be painted by him.

Unfortunately however, few people in Huntingdon were willing to pay for such luxuries and Peregrine Lyndon’s commissions were few and far between.

The house became filled with the pictures he liked painting, and after her mother’s death Carmela would ask her father when the day was over, what work he had done, and find as often as not that because it dissatisfied him he had cleaned it off and started again.

“I always think of your mother,” he would say, “when I see the sun rising above the horizon.”

In consequence he expected his picture to be perfection and he would paint the same scene over and over again and still not be satisfied with the result.

Only by taking the canvases away from him after two or three attempts could Carmela keep the pictures she liked best from being destroyed. She had to hide them in her bedroom to look at them when she was alone.

When her father died last winter having caught pneumonia through sitting out in the bitter cold and frost to paint the stars, she had discovered as soon as she could take in what had happened that all she possessed in the world were her father’s pictures which nobody wanted and the few pounds which was all she could get by selling the contents of the house.

The house itself was only rented and although what they paid was very little she knew that she could not find even that without earning it.

It was when she was in the depths of despair over losing her father whom she had dearly loved that Mrs. Cooper’s suggestion that she might work at the Vicarage had seemed like a glimmer of light in the darkness.

It was only when she had moved in to the ugly house and was confronted by the Vicar’s extremely plain children that she realised to what misery she had committed herself.

But she could think of nothing else she could do, and at least the Vicarage would provide a roof over her head and food to eat that she did not have to pay for.

With some embarrassment Mrs. Cooper had suggested she should pay her £10 a year for her labours, and as Carmela had no idea if that was generous or not she had accepted the offer thankfully.

Now she thought, as she had a dozen times already, that she would rather starve than go on trying to cope with children whose only response to anything she said was to be rude and obstructive.

Carmela had always thought that anyone with any intelligence should be able to communicate with other human beings however primitive or difficult they might be.

She had often talked with her father of the way missionaries travelled in countries inhabited by savage tribes and somehow gained their confidence even though in many cases they could not speak their language.

“Men and women should be able to communicate with each other in the same way as animals do,” Peregrine Lyndon had said.

He therefore believed there must be people somewhere in the world who would understand what he was trying to say on canvas because it was something which came both from his mind and heart.

“I think the truth is that you are in advance of your time, Papa,” Carmela told him. “Artists at the moment want to portray exactly what they see. In the past there have been men like Botticelli and Michelangelo who have painted with their imagination, and that is what you are trying to do.”

“I am honoured by the company in which you include me,” her father smiled. “But you are right. I want to put down what I think and feel rather than what I actually see with my eyes, and as long as you and I understand why should we worry about anybody else?”

“Why indeed?” Carmela replied.

However, imagination did not pay the butcher, the baker, the grocer, and their landlord would not accept ‘imaginary’ money.

The baby stopped crying to fall asleep and Carmela laid him down very gently in his cot. At the moment he was comparatively good, but already she felt that soon he would grow up to be like his brother and sister.

As she turned towards the table Lucy gave a little scream.

“Timothy’s eating my egg! Stop him, Miss Lyndon. He’s eating my egg!”

It was true, Carmela saw. Timothy, having eaten his own egg had now taken the brown one which was set on one side for Lucy.

This too he was eating as quickly as he could, defying her with his small pig-like eyes to stop him.

“Never mind, Lucy,” Carmela said to the small girl, “you can have my egg.”

“I want mine, it’s brown!” Lucy expostulated fiercely. “I hate Timothy, I hate him! He’s always taking my things!”

Carmela looked at Timothy and thought she hated him too.

In front of him on the table the porridge was oozing out from the bowl which had cracked when he turned it over. The empty egg-shell from the first egg had fallen out of the egg-cup, and the yoke from the second egg was spilling onto the table-cloth because of the haste in which he was eating it.

It was also spattered on his white shirt which Carmela had spent a long time yesterday washing and pressing. She did not say anything, but merely put her egg in front of Lucy, took the top off it, and put a clean spoon in her hand.

“I want a brown egg - a brown one!” Lucy shrieked. “I don’t like white ones!”

“They taste exactly the same inside.” Carmela tried to console her.

“You’re a liar!” Timothy said rudely.

“That’s right! You’re a liar!” Lucy echoed forgetting her anger with her brother and glad to have an ally against a common enemy. “Brown eggs taste different from white ones! I want a brown egg!”

Carmela gave a sigh and sat down at the table.

She filled her cup with the cheap rather unpleasant tasting tea which was all that was provided at the Vicarage, and cut herself a slice of bread from a loaf which had been stale yesterday.

Lucy was still screaming for a brown egg, when suddenly, getting into a worse tantrum than she was in already, she hit the egg in front of her with the back of her hand.

It shot across the table and smashed against the teapot.

The yoke scattered in all directions and Carmela received a large portion of it on her hand.

She opened her lips to reprove Lucy and suddenly thought the whole thing was too much for her.

She felt the tears come into her eyes and as she did so the door behind her opened.

She stiffened expecting to hear Mrs. Cooper’s querulous voice demanding that she should keep the children quiet, or else the Vicar shouting at them, which always made things worse.

Then when she was aware that somebody had come into the room but had not spoken, she turned her head.

Then she stared in astonishment.

Standing in the doorway, making the untidy room that was used as a nursery look even more unpleasant than it usually did, was a Vision of loveliness.