Until the Colours Fade

by Tim Jeal

  ‘Strange, isn’t it? One day an unemployed flag-officer and the next a glorified naval attaché. With my experience in the area, I’d have had to have been half-imbecile for them to have found no use for me.’

  She shook her head and smiled sadly.

  ‘You needn’t be so modest. I’m not a complete fool.’

  ‘All right; I’m going to preserve the peace single-handed and if necessary win the war if there is one.’

  Helen pursed her lips and turned away in mock exasperation. As they walked back in the direction of their clearing, she said in a low anxious voice:

  ‘Humphrey’s been talking about joining the navy.’

  Sir James raised an eyebrow slightly and nodded.

  ‘But now there may be a war, you want to put him off?’

  ‘If he was your only son…?’

  ‘I should encourage him.’

  ‘Even if he might be killed?’ she whispered, amazed by his reply.

  ‘The Russians won’t risk a general action with a combined French and British fleet.’

  ‘How can anybody be sure of that? The Turks fought a fleet from three nations at Navarino. You know very well how many men died there.’

  ‘The Russians will stay in Kronstadt and Sebastopol. The Turks had to fight at Navarino.’

  ‘Their fleet might be caught at sea.’

  ‘Then he would be present at a great victory.’

  ‘Or die at one,’ she cried, refusing to accept his certainty.

  ‘So I must try to dissuade him,’ he said with a sigh.

  Helen looked away. She had not expected him to take up so rigid a position and she was shaken by it. She had supposed that he would realise that without Humphrey she would be quite alone. How could any woman who had lost her father in a naval battle welcome the possibility of an only son suffering the same fate? The thought made her sick with fear. She said urgently:

  ‘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 en
ough 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.

  22

  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.

  23

  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.’