Until the Colours Fade (28 page)

‘It’s a hard life and he ought to know it. Can a boy of thirteen, who’s read some of Marryat’s books and a few of Kingston’s boys’ adventures, know what to expect?’

‘I’ll talk to him.’

‘He’s been completely sheltered. If he had been to a public school or seen something of the world, I might feel differently.’

They walked on again in silence until they reached the
clearing
. Sir James sat down on his chair and rested his chin on a hand. Then he sat up straight and met her eyes.

‘Am I honestly to tell the boy not to enter the service, which I am sure offers the finest career a man can follow? Charles was a Volunteer of the First Class at Humphrey’s age and I wept when his ship sailed; but I would not have prevented him for all the world.’ He stared at the ground and then said quietly:

‘If you wish me to, I will try to discourage him.’ She came up to him and kissed him on the cheek. He felt the moisture of tears, but could not bring himself to say anything to condone what she had made him promise.

‘Thank you. Thank you. I know you think me weak; but I know him; he is not like Charles or you. He is…’

‘Your son; and you cannot live his life for him.’ He was about to add more when he thought of his own failure with
Magnus
and fell silent. Instead he said: ‘Charles will be made post-captain in a month or two and would have been
entitled
to nominate the boy as a cadet. He could have sailed with Charles.’

‘When you were alone, you had your work. I am not so
fortunate
. And soon you will be gone.’ Helen expected this confession of dependence to draw him out, but instead he asked with a hint of self-mocking regret:

‘Do you really think you will find it hard to supply that loss?’

‘Do I seem so insincere to you?’ she asked with real pain.

‘You will spend time in London, and then soon enough you will find that women with your looks are rarely allowed to be lonely, even should they wish to be.’

‘Would you rather I did not miss you?’ she murmured.

‘Everybody is flattered to be missed.’

‘You know very well I did not mean what I said as flattery.’ Her voice was a mixture of indignation and sadness. He said nothing for over a minute and then moved tentatively towards her, his eyes filled with tenderness.

‘If you really mean that … marry me, Helen.’

She had anticipated the moment for two months, and yet now that it had come, she was shocked to silence.

‘What have I to offer you?’ she whispered.

‘Yourself. What more can any of us give? Can I provide
line-of-battle
ships and diplomatic missions for your amusement? These things are only hindrances since they will take me from you.’

‘I am no great hostess with influence and cachet.’

‘And for that reason I value you the more.’ He paused and took her hands. ‘If you wish to refuse me, do so honestly without
any pretence that you are unworthy of me.’

‘I shall write with my answer.’

‘In ten days I shall be gone.’ He picked up his sketch book and sighed. ‘Had you never thought that I might ask you?’ She nodded and blushed. ‘But now you must have time?’ He brushed a fly from his face. ‘A short delay never softens a rejection, but by anticipation increases the blow when it falls.’

Helen’s confusion was complete. An hour before, it seemed, she would have accepted him at once. But an hour before she had not known that he would be leaving the country so soon, nor guessed the nature of his response to Humphrey’s intention. She bowed her head and said in a low voice:

‘I am not keeping you waiting because of any thought that it is more delicate and decorous not to consent at once. I do not know.’

They walked from the woods in silence and took a narrow path along the side of the lake. Before turning towards the house, he stopped, and looking out across the sparkling water, said, almost as if speaking to himself:

‘In the past when I thought about marriage, I usually laughed at myself as a fine example of that tendency in middle-aged men to make themselves ridiculous.’ Helen said nothing as she stared down at their reflections in the water, rippling and dissolving in the gentle breeze. ‘I was governed, I suppose, by the suspicion that others would think me too old for love. I thought this a true estimate, until my visits here.’ He turned to her and went on earnestly with no trace of his former reflective tone. ‘You see I am lucky enough not to feel obliged to marry for any reason other than affection; and with you on those grounds I have no doubt.’

‘And yet,’ she replied quietly, ‘you know that I am not so lucky.’

‘Yes. And I know too that there are many richer and younger men, who might bring you far greater benefit.’ He smiled at her tenderly. ‘Love is rarely so overwhelming as to obliterate all other considerations; I would feel suspicious of any love that
professed
to do so – especially any love for a man of my years.’

She stood twisting the strings of her bonnet, lost in thought. Whenever she had imagined him speaking about marriage, she had always thought in terms of what
she
would say; but he had said most and had changed the basis of discussion in a way she had not anticipated. She had never thought that her main
preoccupation
would be with absolute honesty. Yet though she was
tempted, she found herself unable to make easy answers.

‘I feel fondness and affection for you … but if love alone is to be your reason … I fear we are not suited.’

‘Affection may become more than that.’

‘And if it does not?’

He shrugged his shoulders and flicked some pebbles into the water with his cane.

‘There will still be affection – rather that than an early
passion
fading to disillusion and indifference.’

‘And affection is enough?’

‘True affection, certainly.’

‘True?’

‘A desire to be with somebody when they’re away, to help them when they suffer, to defend their causes and share their
aspirations
. An understanding that does not fear openness. Loyalty, trust.’ He raised his hands. ‘The meaning’s clear enough to me.’

They crossed the lawn, walking towards the box hedges and the central pond. Slight flecks of spray from the fountain wetted them as they passed. Near the garden door a maid was beating a carpet and laughing with a young under-gardener, planting out dahlias in the bed beneath the dining-room windows. Perched on a bough of blossoming syringa, a blackbird was singing. Helen deliberately noted these things in an attempt to remain calm and detached, but she could not control her mounting excitement. She would accept; she knew that now. So why not say? She had been honest and told him she did not love him and he had
understood
her perfectly. He knew that convenience was part of her reason and accepted that too. Had she not been disappointed and miserable when he had said nothing? She tried to think of the doubts that had distressed her before his visit to London, but could not think clearly. Instead the clear notes of the blackbird and the trumpet-shaped flowers of the weigela by the door filled her with happiness. She thought it strange that she had found no pleasure in the flower-carpeted beech woods, until she
remembered
that then he had not yet made his proposal. How stupid of me. And then inexplicably there were tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat. Inside she took him by the arm and led him to the nearest sitting room. Standing in the centre of the room, she held out her hands to him and murmured:

‘I accept.’

He took her hands and drew her slowly towards him and held her. They parted without kissing, and running a finger down the
line of her cheek, as a blind man might to verify a shape, he brushed away a tear. Outside, the maid was still beating the
carpet
and the blackbird continued his song.

While he had been involved in gunnery trials at Shoeburyness on the Thames Estuary, Charles Crawford had been offered a new command by the Admiralty: to be captain of the
Scylla,
an eighty-gun three-decker at present berthed across the river at Sheerness Dockyard, where work to convert her from a sailing ship to a screw-assisted vessel was about to start.

The day on which Charles visited the dockyard to see his ship for the first time ought to have been among the happiest of his life. The Captain Superintendent and Master Shipwright showed him over all the five building-slips and explained every detail of the plans for
Scylla
’s
conversion: the manner in which her upper deck would be removed and how she would be strengthened astern and amidships to receive her new 700
horsepower
engines. Her launch, he was assured, would be in three months and after that, the machinery would be installed in half that time, while she was in one of the dry-docks. Her final fitting out with masts, yards and standing rigging was expected to be finished by October. But none of this information, nor even thoughts of his father’s appointment to Constantinople, relieved his depression. Two days earlier Sir James had written
emotionally
informing him that Helen Goodchild had accepted and in a year would be the new Lady Crawford.

At the head of one of the slips a completed frigate was standing ready for her launch the following day. Under the shadow of her towering hull, Charles imagined the keel-blocks being taken out, and finally the dog-shores, the two remaining balks of timber holding her in position, being knocked aside by the falling weights, and the ship going off slowly with steady and stately momentum, entering the water quietly with a whisper of swell at her bows, her length gradually lessening and receding. In three months the
Scylla,
his
ship, would slide forwards to the cheers of the dockyard workers and the strains of a marine band. Yet he felt no lump in the throat, none of the stirrings of emotion which even the imagination of such scenes usually engendered in him.

It was late afternoon when he parted with the dockyard
officers
and walked down to the entrance of the Medway and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria where a cutter was waiting to
take him back across the estuary. The light was silvery and mackerel clouds drifted eastwards across the sky. Below him four men-of-war were moored in line, their anchor chains hanging motionless and vertical. The slack of the tide, he thought dully. Looking at the ships he could imagine the slight drowsy lapping of ripples which would be audible on their decks. In a few hours, darkness, and their riding lights would cast long reflections on the black unruffled water.

Attuned by habit to every sight and sound of the sea, Charles took in each detail mechanically; his cheek registered the soft feather-like touch of the faint easterly breeze, his ears the slight clink of the anchor cables at the hawse-pipes, his eyes, as he walked onto the jetty, the distant smudge of the Essex coast across the estuary; its channels all known to him by name: Queen’s Channel, Prince’s Channel, Four Fathom Channel. A dreary landscape of low shores and shining mudflats, but one in which he knew the positions of each buoy and lightship from the faint undulations of the land. But no associations of sea or river helped Charles to forget that Helen would marry his father – perhaps bear children to delight his old age; new affections coming between him and his first family.

Sir James had written to Charles asking him to visit Helen during his time in Turkey; his letter forcing on his son the bitter memory of his last meeting with Helen, at the bridge near Hanley Park, and of his failure there to speak truthfully. That was the hardest burden to bear: the knowledge that a few words might have saved him. A few words, only that. Charles seemed to hear Magnus’s mocking voice merge with the slight movement of water around the piers of the jetty: ‘I hope you get the widow….’ His father’s words: ‘Marriage like shipbuilding is at best an experimental science.’

He looked down at the smooth planks and the occasional gleam of water seen between them. From the river the clear tinkling of six bells from the anchored ships.

One thought vied with Charles’s self-reproach and the acid of his disappointment – if his sacrifice turned out to have been for nothing, and she betrayed his father, or made him unhappy, he, Charles, would make her pay dearly for it. The vow gave him a vestige of comfort as he stepped into the cutter and her crew peaked their oars in salute.

Tom Strickland finished his scrappy supper of cheese and cold mutton and walked across the studio to a table by the model’s dais. The light was no longer bright enough to work by so he cleaned his brushes and later ground a fresh supply of vermilion and chrome yellow on a stone slab for use the following day. Then after he had mixed these crude pigments with oil and poured them into bladders, he sat down wearily in a misshapen armchair by the unlit stove and closed his eyes.

Since his return to London from Rigton Bridge, Tom had worked hard but had not achieved as much as he would have liked. In France he had been particularly impressed by the work of two artists: Daumier and Millet – the first for his simple but dramatic contrasts of light and shade, the second for his stark paintings of working people, which combined a forceful, almost crude, application of paint with muted colour and great delicacy of line. Yet faced with the now fashionable Pre-Raphaelite use of flat bright colours and meticulous detail, Tom knew that work influenced by such originals would be received with hostility and indifference. Nevertheless he had completed one large canvas of the strikers being escorted to the train and had started a smaller one of mill girls leaving work, based on a sketch. Even if
exhibited
, he did not expect either of these to sell. Art, for most buyers, was something apart from life and not a direct outcome of its everyday events. Few were prepared to hang any modern
subjects
on their walls, unless they were sentimental, humorous, or pointed a positive moral. With these requirements in mind, Tom had recently executed a medieval subject of a knight clutching his jaws, entitled
Toothache
in
the
Middle
Ages
– commissioned appropriately by a prosperous dentist – and had begun work on an epic historical painting:
Caesar
going
to
the
Capitol
on
The
Ides
of
March
for the Academy Exhibition. The thought of the weeks of niggling labour ahead of him on this one canvas sometimes kept Tom awake at night wondering whether he would ever have the energy to finish it. At such times he longed for a lucrative portrait commission to save him from such
drudgery
.

The evening was warm and fine but Tom did not want to go
out, nor did he feel tired enough to sleep. He was irritated that Magnus had not yet returned from Portsmouth where he had spent the past two days. Tom had not questioned him about the purpose of his visit, but supposed it would be to gather material for an article about any naval preparations afoot as a result of the Turkish crisis. During the past weeks Tom had been
surprised
and relieved by the ease with which Magnus had adapted to his new life and by his apparent unconcern over rejections. To date out often articles, Crawford had only sold three: two to the
Pall
Mall
Gazette
and one to
Reynolds’s
Weekly
News.

When Magnus burst into the darkened studio shortly before ten, he found Tom reading by the light of a smoking lamp. He threw down his portmanteau and sat down on a stool with a bulky brown-paper parcel on his knee.

‘Tonight it has to be,’ he exclaimed darkly, tearing open the paper and taking out a snuff-brown coat that might once have been pale grey; a shirt without cuffs followed, then a battered billy-cock hat, and finally a greasy moleskin waistcoat fastened with twine in lieu of buttons. Holding these garments at arms’ length, he sniffed cautiously and then dropped them rapidly. ‘Had to try five rag shops before I bought these.’

Knowing that Magnus had been putting off spending a night in the Lambeth Workhouse ever since he had promised the editor of the
Pall
Mall
Gazette
an article on the subject ten days earlier, Tom was not astonished by his friend’s
purchases
.

‘Don’t you feel too tired after the journey?’ he asked.

‘Certainly not. Doctors are always recommending sea air to restore vital energies.’ Magnus smiled and then bent down and picked up a second parcel identical to the first. With a dawning perception of what was to come, Tom shook his head emphatically, but Magnus still threw it to him.

‘You’re the journalist,’ laughed Tom, tossing it back.

‘And you’re the artist,’ replied Magnus.

‘I didn’t go to the sea.’

‘I can’t help that. This piece has to be illustrated. If the
editor
’s pleased, he’ll publish it as a separate pamphlet as well as in the
Gazette.
Unless you come I lose half the fee.’

Tom looked at Magnus sceptically.

‘Is this true?’

‘As holy writ,’ replied Magnus; his face a parody of injured innocence.

Tom watched Magnus put his hands into the coal scuttle and
gingerly start to rub coal dust onto his face, doing his best to avoid touching the scar on his forehead.

‘You,’ said Tom, with slow emphasis, ‘are a low, scheming, two-faced, devious …’ Magnus coughed apologetically as Tom searched vainly for the right word.

‘I knew you’d try to argue me out of it if I told you sooner.’

‘I’m not coming.’

While Tom started to clear the supper table, Magnus put on the hat and pulled down the brim.

‘Please, yer worship,’ he croaked, extending a hand like a beggar.

‘No.’

Magnus shuffled closer, stooping like a hunchback.

‘For mercy’s sake, sir, will you not give an old soldier a chance?’

 Magnus’s wheedling voice and blackened face under the drooping brim of his hat was too much for Tom. Laughing, in spite of his real irritation, he ripped open the parcel and started pulling out the clothes.

‘I once spent a night in a casual ward,’ he remarked grimly.

‘Excellent,’ returned Magnus, pretending not to notice his tone. ‘You’ll know what to say.’

*

By the time they reached the Kennington Road, the workhouse doors had been locked and Tom thought there was an even chance that they would be turned away. The walk had been bad enough in itself. Although Magnus had been amused that
well-dressed
passers-by had invariably stepped out of their way, Tom had found the experience humiliating. He had been too close to real poverty in the past to enjoy this demonstration of the disgust and alarm with which respectable people viewed the destitute.

Magnus glanced speculatively at the large black knocker on the door.

‘Well?’

Tom made a face and then looked down at the pavement.

‘Keep your mouth shut or they’ll know you’re a gentleman.’

‘Would they set on me?’

‘They might.’

Magnus grinned at him.

‘How many supervisors will there be?’

‘The relieving officer and two or three porters.’

Magnus laughed aloud.

‘Three unarmed men to control fifty tramps … they can’t be
so very fierce.’

Magnus grasped the knocker and banged hard. Several
minutes
later a porter let them in, grumbling that they were too late for their bread and gruel but would have to bath at once and then sleep in the shed. After a clerk had written down their fictitious names and trades – they had previously agreed to say that they were out-of-work engravers to explain the softness of their hands – they were asked which workhouse they had come from and where they intended to go the next day when they were turned out. Tom gave prepared answers to these questions and they were led along a corridor lit by naked gas jets and across an open yard to a small room containing three baths. The water was the colour of mutton broth; the air reeked of feet. They exchanged glances; Magnus apparently unmoved, Tom angry and
nauseated
.

‘Take yer clothes orf,’ snarled the porter.

‘I’ll wash my feet,’ muttered Tom.

‘No bath, no bed,’ announced the porter. He was a stocky
red-faced
man with a bulging neck squeezed into a starched collar stained with a yellow tidemark of sweat. Since entry to the casual ward was denied to those with even a single coin in their pockets, bribery was out of the question. Magnus shrugged his shoulders and undressed quickly; then without even momentary hesitation he climbed into one of the baths and lay back calmly. Tom
followed
his example sullenly.

As soon as they were immersed, the porter tied up their clothes and threw down two numbered metal tickets.

‘Hand ’em over when yer call for yer clothes tomorro’. Put ’em under yer ’eads or they’ll get stole.’ Then he tossed down a couple of blankets and two striped blue nightshirts on the wet floor. ‘The shed’s over the yard.’

When the porter had gone, they realised that they had not been given towels and would have to use their blankets to dry themselves.

‘There’s something strangely relaxing about being ordered about by fools,’ murmured Magnus, putting on his nightshirt.

‘Damn you,’ moaned Tom, whose nightshirt was soaking.

The shed was a large room open at one end, the gap being hung with a mildewed canvas curtain. The shock of seeing so many cadaverous half-starved men in so small a place affected Tom far less than the suffocating stench which filled his nostrils: tobacco smoke, rancid sweat and excrement, laced with a faint tinge of decay, sweet and pervasive. The walls were furred with
damp and the floor was so dirty that Tom at first thought it was earth, until he saw the line between two flagstones. In the
half-darkness
he could make out the recumbent figures of between fifty and sixty men and boys lying jammed up against each other on narrow sacking bags scantily stuffed with hay and straw. A drunk was singing in a corner and several men were smoking pipes which they had somehow smuggled past the porter. A
furious
argument was raging near the centre of the room, ignored by everybody except the participants, both apparently in their
sixties
or seventies. Half the inmates seemed unbelievably to be asleep. Looking around him Tom felt no emotion; pity,
compassion
, even anger, all obliterated by the smell. When the
arguing
and talking died down, Tom noticed an extraordinary variety of coughs, ranging from short dry barks to prolonged bubbling wheezes. Magnus had dragged two of the straw-filled bags over to the open side of the shed, where Tom sank down beside him. Without moving, Magnus murmured:

‘D’you think our piece will make any difference?’

‘You saw how people looked at us in the street.’

Magnus nodded and then sighed.

‘You’re right … and I laughed about it.’

But though the memory disturbed them both, neither was able to maintain a consistent mood for long. Almost as Magnus finished speaking, a massive stevedore, one of the only
healthy-looking
men in the room, jumped up roaring because somebody had stolen his tobacco tin while he had been asleep. Two boys were tossing it to each other, leaping out of reach as he rushed at them, falling over sleeping men, who woke cursing. Eventually the tin was returned and the shed settled again, until the next outburst. The scene was sad but at times disconcertingly funny. As a church clock struck eleven, Tom realised that they were going to have to spend the next seven hours in the shed. He looked at Magnus despairingly and sank back onto his sacking. After a few moments, Magnus propped himself on an elbow.

‘Want to know what I did in Portsmouth?’

‘No.’

‘I went on your behalf.’ Tom shut his eyes. ‘I saw my father before he sailed. Filial devotion you may think.’ Magnus smiled to himself. ‘He’s going to marry Helen Goodchild.’ Tom sat up abruptly, several bits of straw sticking in his hair. ‘Good God, you’re actually listening.’ Magnus’s eyes were shining. ‘I
persuaded
him to commission you to paint her portrait.’

‘Thank you,’ breathed Tom in a stifled whisper.

‘Aren’t you pleased?’

‘Yes … yes. It’s what I wanted … you know that.’

A drunk had started to sing what he could remember of a music-hall song: ‘I’d like to be a swell a-roaming down Pall Mall.’ Tom faced Magnus.

‘Do you mind?’ he asked after a pause.

‘Mind him marrying?’

‘She’s only your age.’

‘Oh that.’ Magnus pursed his lips and stared up at the
discoloured
ceiling. ‘It’s just a transaction, Tom. She gets relief from Goodchild’s debts, father gets her, and I get nothing.’ He folded his arms across his chest. ‘You’re not surprised, are you? Women sell themselves every day – from duchesses to whores only the price differs.’

The drunk’s voice quavered on punctuated by fits of
coughing
. Tom knew that he had no reason to admire Lady
Goodchild
, she had treated him badly, and her dignity on the night of her husband’s death now appeared to have owed more to
indifference
than courage; and yet he could not deny an
oppressive
feeling of disillusion. He remembered her receiving him in the Red Drawing Room and could hardly, in his present
surroundings
, believe that their meeting had been real. Her beauty too – no more than a facade concealing emptiness. Her grace, poise and wit, merely the servants of self-interest. But why should that concern me? he asked himself savagely. He would be well paid. Even so, the memories he had of her on that
election
evening still pained him. The thought that she should be marrying again solely for security, when even the contents of a single small room at Hanley Park would have kept her a world removed from the poverty of the men around him, seemed an outrage. From duchesses to whores. He turned and suddenly took in how disheartened Magnus was at his reaction. Tom felt ashamed. The man had gone to Portsmouth for him, probably without any personal desire to see his father; had succeeded in getting him a commission he had dearly wanted. But had he thanked him warmly? Expressed real gratitude? Nothing of the sort. Instead he had wallowed in self-indulgent revulsion that beautiful women could be as selfish and unscrupulous as any other people, and as prone to waste their lives for no good reason. He touched Magnus’s shoulder gently.