Telling tales of wives and mothers

Fabric figure of Mrs Emma Micawber holding the twins, DH772.12 © Charles Dickens Museum. Donated to the Charles Dickens Museum in memory of Geoffrey Malcolm Millard-Thompson, by his family.

These stories have been written by Rosa Chalfen and local community groups - Mosaic LGBT Young Person’s Trust and St Luke’s Community Centre. This project has been funded by the University of Hertfordshire Coproduction Award.

Two Portraits

II

Her eyes are fixed on the edge of the brocade curtain where brown light trickles in. Now she understands stillness, how to relax into it, how to spread it to each corner of her body.

There is the faint rustle of crepe when she moves. She can feel the soft touch of it on her back and arms. The dress is a chrysalis. She is shedding now the skin of death, and her new body is visible through the dark gossamer.

He has been buried almost a year. Still she cannot forget the dank sour smell of his sweat, the emaciated press of his hipbone under the skin’s surface, like the black shadow of a tadpole moving underwater. The mess of their bedroom-turned-sanitorium. She remembers seeing her own blurred reflection in the mirror and not knowing the wan face that looked back at her.

Then those strange days afterwards when the world opened up, and she felt its raw touch again. She rediscovered the pleasure of colour, the deep texture of oil paint. She felt rooted in her body, whereas for months it had felt like a distant object, floating somewhere across the room.

She was still in mourning when V came to the house. He was so familiar to her—his sallow artist’s face, clenched red hair, the pale stocky body that recalled the smell of turpentine in his attic studio. But standing there, amongst the terrible relics of Charlie’s illness, he seemed suddenly like a stranger. He stammered the words out as if some force compelled him. She turned him down, as she would turn down the others, and the shock that slid over his face was almost comic.

Then Carlo.

Carlo who was a painter’s dream, all mouth and eyes. Carlo with his strange pictures, so precise that they might have been stills from real life. She wanted to take off the backs of the canvases and examine their mechanics.

They have been secretly married these many months.

Now she cranes over her shoulder to look at the painter. He meets her gaze and smiles. They have known each other for a long time. When she came to the studio weeks ago, she told him not to paint her as he did last time, like a doll. She wanted something dark, with stained cheeks and scrappy hair, with the soft sag of skin. She wanted it strange and real.

By Rosa Chalfen