Copyright © Carmel Bird 2004. All rights reserved.
The legacy of Rita Marquand
The first Rita Marquand oil painting I ever saw was at a
garage sale on
the sloping lawn of a huge old house in Launceston a couple of
years
ago. Ever since I was a girl at art school I have been collecting
the
works of lesser known and unknown Australian women painters. The
collection
is now quite extensive. Rita’s picture was on a smallish piece of
plywood,
framed in an elaborate chipped gilt frame – two young girls in
filmy white
dresses playing among yellow grass. The grass is alive with subtle
colours,
the girls caught in a moment of intimate laughter. It was titled
and signed
on the back in red pen – “The Deedees” Rita Marquand, Fatima,
1927. I
bought the painting in 2000 for two dollars from a man who said it
had been
done by a distant relative of his late wife. This is a typical
story from my files
– the discovery of a new “unknown” woman painter who sets me
off on a
journey into the poignant past. There was so much talent, passion,
beauty
locked away in the lives of women before the liberation of the
seventies came
along and gave girls the chance to show what they are made of.
This journey led me from Launceston to Devonport, to Blackwood
Creek,
to
called “
way, I was able to collect five other pictures that had somehow
been preserved
– one was a glowing image of a blindfolded angel standing
sorrowfully beside a burnt-out gum tree. There was a strangeness to
Rita’s
work that fascinated me, a strangeness that I do not often
encounter in the
paintings of my unknown women, most of whom paint fairly simple
landscapes,
gardens, houses. I get pictures from op shops and skips and cellars
and attics – and sometimes from kitchen shelves where they have
been for
two or three generations.
By the time I tracked Rita down to “
only in her paintings but also in the story of the lives of the two
girls in The
Deedees. With her large family and a
small farm to manage, it is a miracle Rita
ever put brush to canvas. But this is something I have discovered
about my
women painters, they kept their sanity by snatching moments of
creative
passion from the hours of duty and family responsibility.
I discovered that Dymphna and Dolores were sisters, born at “
a small rural town in the
story of what happened to them. I have taken the liberties of a
storyteller
at times, trying to imagine how people must have felt, how they
must
have thought about things. Some of the material I found in small
diaries
that Dymphna kept over the years. These were often illustrated,
showing that
Dymphna had inherited her mother’s talent. However, I never saw a
finished
work by Dymphna. Between the pages of the diaries I found old
letters and
cards from Dolores to Dymphna, and one pale blue love letter to
Dolores
from a man called Geoffrey (My
Sweetest Angel, Dolly…). The girls had two
older brothers, a baby sister and baby brother, Sissy and Jo-Jo.
The place was
described as a dairy farm but, in fact, it was a small property
where the Marquands
kept some cows, grew some apples and kept their heads above water.
Everyone on the farm – Rita, her husband Paul, and all the
children – worked
really hard: up before daybreak, finishing long after dark. I sat
in Rita’s old
kitchen, at the table where she had made the bread for the family,
and I listened
to Margaret, the young wife of another Jo-Jo, Rita’s grandson.
Her baby
crawled around on the wooden floor where Dymphna and Dolores must
have crawled. Born in 2005, he is the only descendent so far of
Rita and Paul
in this generation. The older boys died in the Second World War and
Sissy
never had children. Margaret and Jo-Jo were amazed that anybody
would be
interested in Rita’s paintings.
Dymphna was named for an aunt
who was named for the patron saint of
the mentally ill (or, as they said in the thirties, the insane).
Dolores was
named for the very sad aspect of the Virgin Mary. The names turned
out to
be, I am sorry to say, prophetic. The two girls were known as the
Deedees.
They were inseparable. Dolores (Dolly) was 18 months older than
Dymphna.
Dolly was very bright and pretty, with softly curling brown hair,
and
Dymphna (Dimples) had, as it happened, a dinky little dimpled
smile, and
hair “as straight as a packet of candles”. When in the bath,
with her stringy
hair wet and stuck across her forehead in strands and down her back
in
damp ribbons, her mother said she was a dying duck in a
thunderstorm.
Apart from their connection with the painting, the lives of Dymphna
and
Dolores are now of a certain historic interest as they illuminate a
past that
exercises a fascination in the present. Television is larded with
programs
where innocent people are forced to relive the lives and times of
girls like the
Deedees, struggling with the lack of conditioner for their hair,
eating bread
and dripping (which is the fat that is saved in the baking dish
after meat has
been roasted). These programs generally emphasise the terrible
difficulties of
past lives. What I will tell you about the early lives of the
Deedees will probably
seem impossibly romantic, with a hint of paradise, in spite of what
I
have said about their being up before dawn.
So, on the Marquands’ dairy farm they blossomed. In the spring,
apple
trees, plums and almonds, too, turned the hillside into a frothy
springtime
snow leading down to the river. Note what I said about paradise.
Snow, they
always called it snow, as they ran, children on legs like elves’
legs, across the
long grass where the red sorrel grew, wild and rough underfoot,
knee-high,
and they rolled over and over down the hill. Over and over and
over. And
then, in the summer, they picked the plums for jam and bottling and
harvested
the almonds to stir into the dark damp Christmas cakes and the
pobbly puddings that hung for months in their calico cloths in the
dairy. The
girls pelted like the wind, the wind in their hair and in their
eyes, danced
down the hillside, falling and rolling, tumbling under the almond
trees,
pastel cotton dresses made by their mother at
pants rude and visible, bare feet hot and lovely, and they lay
there, the
dappled shadows of the leaves flittering across their faces, faces
flushed and
glowing. Laughter twittering up into the blossom trees, coin spots
of sunlight
glimmering across them. Well, was it paradise or wasn’t it? This
is what
Rita captured in The
Deedees.
The future was wonderful then. The Deedees were living and laughing
–
with potatoes and sausages to eat and milk to drink – and fruit
– while
around them was the Depression. They were in the Depression but
they did
not know it. They knew a copper full of boiling sheets seething in
soap,
sheets rinsed in blue from the bluebag, flapping on the clothes
line in the sun.
Running in and out diving through the flapping sheets, that were
sewn
down the middle with a heavy seam because they had been split and
“turned” to make them last longer. Their beds were high –
tall maple ends
with curved edges and a raised wreath of leaves like a medallion in
the
centre. These were grand old beds from their mother’s old home.
They called
them the American beds, I am not sure why, but maybe they
associated them
with faraway luxury. They gleamed golden by candlelight. When I
came to
“
the varnish was now dulled. Achild had written her name on one of
the bedheads
– “Sissy Marquand slept here” – and somebody had tried to
clean it
off. But the room, now a guest room, was, Margaret said, much as it
had been
when the Deedees lived there in the thirties.
Above Dymphna’s bed was the traditional picture of the Immaculate
Heart. If you are looking for sentimental horror, this is it –
the sweetly peachy
smiling woman (sad) with her greenish blue cloak and her crown of
rosebuds.
But then, in her hands, surrounded by a wreath of thorny roses is
her
heart, which radiates pink and gold light and is surmounted by a
hot red
flickering flame. This picture would not have been seen as strange
by the
children. It was the normal image to hang above a bed, but if you
think about
it, it is really most peculiar.
Then, on the wall, over Dolores’s bed, hung what I thought was a
print
of a work of art – Madonna
of the Goldfinch by Tiepolo. But, lucky for me,
Margaret drew my attention to it, saying, “Rita did that. She
used to copy
things, apparently. I think it’s so ugly, but we keep it because
Rita did it. It’s
not original – we haven’t got any originals – but I suppose
it has sentimental
value, you know, because she did it.” This is not the only
masterpiece I have
found reproduced by one of my women – Georgia James used to do
excellent
copies of Goya – but it added an exciting new dimension to Rita,
in my
opinion.
Now, I would rather like to rush
ahead and tell you what eventually happened
to Dymphna and Dolores but, in fact, the pictures over their
childhood beds are relevant to the outcome in a strange way, and so
I must
pause here to think about them. Life, I find, can sometimes be
infused with
prophecies or at least shadows and foreshadows. And I need to dwell
for a
moment on the “Madonna of the Goldfinch” by Rita Marquand,
which
hangs in the wall of memory above Dolores Marquand’s old American
bed.
The child Jesus holds the goldfinch firmly in his left hand, tight,
a bundle of
taffeta bluish feathers with a bobbing scarlet head. The Holy Child
is naked
– a striking feature of the picture being the deep red bloody
highlights on the
mouth of the mother, her collar and sleeve, the head of the bird.
The mother
gazes downward, the child looks straight at the world, at the
viewer, his
deep blue eyes still, knowing, sad. Startling and sickening is the
bruised red
luscious cherry of the baby’s lips, as if he had sucked on
berries or fresh
game. The flesh of the mother and child appears to be not so much
alive as
on the point of corruption. These observations are mine. Similar
thoughts
just might have crossed the minds of the Deedees, although I doubt
it. Yet it
is my understanding that the effects of the images above the beds
entered the
girls’ deep imaginations.
Rita told them that long long ago, at the time of the Crucifixion,
a
goldfinch took a thorn from the crown-borne-crown of Jesus, and the
blood
from the holy brow went splashing out and landed on the head of the
bird.
Hence the little bird’s scarlet head. Privately, the Deedees
liked to puzzle
over that story – if the goldfinch didn’t get its red head
until it pulled the
thorn out of the crown on the dark day of the Crucifixion, how was
it
the baby Jesus was holding a goldfinch with a bright red head? Ours
not to
reason why, Rita counselled.
Apparently, there are about 600 known paintings of Madonna and
child
with goldfinch. I don’t wish to burden you with a lot of academic
detail,
but I think it is worth knowing that in 1952, a writer named
Jacques Schnier
published an essay entitled “The Symbolic Bird in Medieval and
Renaissance
Art” and in that essay he says that the goldfinch signifies the
mother herself,
the mother is the lost object over which the child desires control.
The
goldfinch also signifies fertility and is associated with Lucina,
ancient
goddess of childbirth.
These somewhat heavy little
messages hanging above the American beds
at “
Deedees. I need here to draw attention to the matters of sex before
marriage,
unplanned pregnancy and abortion – matters that naturally give
rise in the
modern mind to the question of contraception. Safe contraception
was not
dreamed of until the sixties and would not even then have been
possible for
the Catholic Deedees. You can see that to get pregnant before
marriage in this
family at that time was to go to hell in a handbasket, and you feel
the
problem looming, dangling like the pictures over the American beds.
Who is
going to get pregnant, and what is she going to do next?
Well, it was Dolores, the cheerful one with the very sad name. To
the
delight of the proud family, Dolores went off to
College. She was to live at the Sacred Heart Hostel, safe and sound
with
the nuns, the curfew and the Catholic faith. Her mother made her
skirts,
coats, blouses, dresses. All afternoon and well into the night the
sewing
machine would be going k-chick-k-chick-k-chick. Dolores would flit
about
and try things on and her mother, with pins in her mouth, would
say, “Stand
still” and “Hold up your arm” and “Stop wriggling”.
Auntie Bee knitted
jumpers and cardigans for Dolly. Sitting by the fire or under the
holly hedge
her needles singing away tik-woo-tik-woo-tik. Hot-water-bottle
covers. Two
brown suitcases filled and folded and fluffed up with everything
including
a new silver compact with face powder. She took a small framed
picture of
Our Lady of Perpetual Succour and also the painting her mother did
in the
orchard, The Deedees.
When she was in
started smoking and drinking and dancing with all kinds of young
men. And
some not so young. To start with, she was back at the hostel by 10,
but then
she discovered how to climb in the laundry window after
bribed another girl to sign her in at 10. She got up on a stage and
sang in the
After-Dinner Conservatory. She was incredibly pretty and popular.
She was on the downward slide. Lying in bed during the holidays,
she
would tell Dymphna about some of the things she did, and Dymphna
was
amazed and fascinated and frightened for her sister’s immortal
soul. She
would wonder how safe it was to ride in cars with men you hardly
knew.
Dymphna had heard of at least two girls who had been killed when a
car ran
into a tree and, of course, there lurked, just below the surface,
the terror of
pregnancy. Girls would sometimes disappear for a few months, gone
to stay
with relatives on the mainland, and then they would come back and
stay at
home with their families and never marry, scarred for life.
Dolores was kissing and hugging and driving fast into the
countryside.
At night, she would cuddle in dark cars beside the river. “But
you have to be
a virgin dressed in white and pure when you get married,” Dymphna
said,
and Dolores said, “Maybe you do.” She looked at her sister
sideways from
under her hair and she smiled her little winking crooked pink
cherry-cherub
smile. It was a naughty smile, a smile that Dymphna somehow linked
with
the smile in a story the nuns had told them – a girl smiles at a
man who
beckons her to a doorway, and in the doorway he takes her hand, and
he
rings the bell and the door opens and they go in and are never seen
again
because it was the doorway to hell.
Then, one day, Dolores told Dymphna she had a real sweetheart,
Geoffrey.
“Why don’t you tell Mum and bring him home then?”
“He’s a Baptist.”
“Have you been to confession?”
“No.”
The answer came swift and defiant, and Dymphna knew there and then
that the writing was on the wall and that the whole thing was out
of control.
To be involved with a Protestant was worse than having sex and
getting
pregnant. Geoffrey was going to be a lawyer and he was not a very
good
Baptist, smoking and drinking and dancing as he did. Dolores
planned to get
him to convert. Surely he would see reason. If his own family’s
religion mattered
so little to him, why couldn’t he become a Catholic? But when she
lay
in his arms on the grass by the river, none of this mattered, and
her wicked
heart sang for joy and her blood simmered with a hot excitement
that sent
her conscience off to sleep.
In the window of a smart
amazing, so desirable, so drenched in beauty that she did not pay
for textbooks
but bought the thing instead. It was a dress. I think this was
maybe the
real beginning of the end, spending the textbook money on the dress
to go to
the Winter Garden Dance with Geoffrey. When Dolores told Dymphna
about
the dress Dymphna knew in her heart of hearts that the bell of the
doorway
to hell was ringing.
Dymphna’s head was spinning and her heart was beating fast with
excitement and desire at the thought of the dress and the dance and
the
money and the man and the non-existent textbooks. This was the true
beginning
of the locked-up things that Dymphna could never tell anybody, the
source of the guilt that was going to poison her life. Catholic
girl meets
Baptist boy – Juliet and Romeo – until something fatal and
inevitable and
blindingly terrible occurs, like when a plane flies into a mountain
and
explodes, killing all on board. Dymphna held the black box, held it
in her
shadowed and sorrowful heart, and it stilled her blood, stopped
her thoughts, right there in the bedroom of the dairy farm in the
lovely valley
of the Huon.
It was Dymphna who gave up on life at that point, Dymphna who
stopped eating, stopped talking. Not altogether, but she did what
they
called “going into herself” and she became a joyless wraith out
of the reach
of her family and friends. People naturally thought she was
considering
entering the convent and, in fact, she did feel drawn to that life
but (and
this is so sad and deeply ironic) she knew that she could not,
simply
because she would have to confess to all she knew, in due course,
about her
sister, and that was impossible. Somehow she could hold her
knowledge
back from everyday confession, but if she entered the convent,
everything
would have to come spilling out. She would have to spew toads of
truth in
the dark box of the confessional, and Dolores would never forgive
her.
Nobody would forgive her. Would God forgive her? God was supposed
to
do that, but who can divine the depths of reasoning of the mind of
God? So
what it amounts to is that while Dolores was going to hell, Dymphna
was
beginning to go, quite simply, mad. The poor Marquands and their
two
lovely daughters who both ended up so tragically. Margaret was very
frank
about this – she had no problem telling a perfect stranger that
Dymphna had gone mad.
Dolores would tell her sister
about the things she did with Geoffrey,
sometimes in letters, and Dymphna loved getting the cards and
letters,
the photographs of picnics and warm days at the beach. The secret
thrilling
wicked sinful parts of the letters were in secret little envelopes
inside the
leaves of the main letter. Here is a letter from Dolly – and she
would read out
the main letter at the family dinner table, driving the evil deeper
and deeper
into her own heart as she read, knowing she was lying. Dolores went
to lectures
and wrote essays and played the piano in concerts at the hostel.
She
described in the secret letters the marvellous miraculous dress she
had
bought with the textbook money. Dymphna wondered if she would ever
see
this dress.
She did see it. When her mother went to
things back home. It was lying in the suitcase, on top of
everything, the last
thing Rita had put in. It was wrapped in white tissue paper and
Dymphna
saw it slide out of its parcel. It slithered onto the white
counterpane,
underneath Rita’s picture of Jesus and his mother and the
goldfinch. For
some reason, Rita had left the picture of The Deedees at the hostel
in
They were accustomed enough to deaths in the family – two dead
babies,
grandparents, an uncle in
from this world, a fish disappearing in an ancient Mongolian
stream. But
they were not prepared for Dolores, the lovely wild sister. Dolores
had come
home on the train from town and had died in a fevered pool of blood
in the
bedroom. There had never been a death like this one in this family.
Dymphna
was in a trance of shock, all the details of the sin and the crime
flooding into
her brain and heart, blocking reason, dashing reality into shards
of broken
clay.
In the 1930s, sex before marriage, unplanned pregnancy and abortion
were highly risky enterprises. Pregnancy was OK in marriage, indeed
required, but the other pregnancies were sins, and abortion was, of
course,
also a crime. If you saw the movie Vera Drake you would know
all about that.
The bedroom curtains, white linen backed with sunlight and
flittered
with shadows, were drawn against the day, and Dolores lay there
dead in the
half-dark.
“Dymphna,” Rita said, in a firm, cold, steady voice, “get
your father, then
call the priest and the doctor.”
“Call the priest and the doctor,” she said, in that firm, cold,
steady voice.
That was the order in which she placed them – first the priest
and then the
doctor. And that was the way she designated them. Not Father Gayle
and
Doctor Rush, but the priest and the doctor. First of all, Dymphna
got her
father from the deep shadows in the pungent darkness of the milking
shed.
Between the telephone calls to the priest and the doctor and the
inky
arrival of those specialists in mortality, Rita sent her living
daughter to the
linen press for clean sheets, to the laundry for water and soap and
towels. It
was a secret now between the mother and daughter, a secret spelling
the
death of Dolores and its meaning. It was already a dark bond and a
smudge
of dirty ice between them. What would the doctor make of it? He
would
know what had happened for sure. But Dr Rush was a Catholic doctor.
Would he describe the matter as being the result of a
“miscarriage”? Death
the result of excessive loss of blood. Is that what he would do? To
save the
Catholic honour of the family. Well, in fact, he could only half
save it, since
Dolores was not married. Wasn’t he bound by law to report the
truth? Truth.
To discover the name of the person in town who had done this to
Dolores,
who had opened her up (ripped her open?) and let the baby out and
sent
her home to die? Wasn’t it his duty to see that a judge would
send those
people, that person, that woman, that witch – to prison? To save
other girls
150
The legacy of Rita Marquand
from the fate of this glittering fanciful unmarried Dolores who
could not
believe that this was happening? Dymphna wondered what her mother
was
thinking of saying to Father Gayle. Perhaps, she thought, my lies
have killed
my sister, lies that hid the truth she shared with me. The truth
that Dolly
shared with me like secrets in the white and yellow bedroom long
ago, so
long ago in the giggling twilight of summer childhood. Perhaps the
lies
have killed her after all.
“Just lend me 10 pounds,”
Dolores said, “and when I come home it will
be all over and nobody will know any different.” But Dymphna knew
it wasn’t going to work like that – they would never get away
with it. Ten
pounds from her bankbook was a great big sum of money. Dolores sold
a